I heard gunfire and saw that a red flag had been raised to indicate danger, and the waves lapped near the base of the chalk cliffs. So I walked on the meadow above. The sun dissolved and then a heavy shower of rain swept toward me across the fields and drenched me. The sun came out a few minutes later and steamed me dry. I had not visited Deal Castle or Walmer Castle; I wasn't sightseeing — at least not that kind of sight. This was what I had come for — rain and sun and green meadows along the coast. And I wanted to take trains. The clay-colored water rose and fell with a noise of bursting, and the gulls above it hung in the air like kites.
As soon as I had left Deal I saw a low flat cloud, iron-gray and then blue, across the Channel, like a stubborn fogbank. The closer I got to Dover, the more clearly it was defined, now like a long battleship and now like a flotilla and now like an offshore island. I walked on and saw it was a series of headlands. It was France, looking like Brewster across Cape Cod Bay.
Ahead on the path a person was coming toward me, down a hill four hundred yards away; but whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell. Some minutes later I saw her scarf and her skirt, and for more minutes on those long slopes we strode toward each other under the big sky. We were the only people visible in the landscape — there was no one behind either of us. She was a real walker — arms swinging, flat shoes, no dog, no map. It was lovely, too: blue sky above, the sun in the southeast, and a cloudburst hanging like a broken bag in the west. I watched this woman, this fairly old woman, in her warm scarf and heavy coat, a bunch of flowers in her hand — I watched her come on, and I thought: I am not going to say hello until she does.
She did not look at me. She drew level and didn't notice me. There was no other human being in sight on the coast; only a fishing boat out there like a black flatiron. Hetta Poumphrey — I could see that was the woman's name — was striding, lifting the hem of her coat with her knees. Now she was a fraction past me, and still stony-faced.
"Morning!" I said.
"Oh." She twisted her head at me. "Good morning!"
She gave me a good smile, because I had spoken first. But if I hadn't, we would have passed each other, Hetta and I, in that clifftop meadow — not another soul around — five feet apart, in the vibrant silence that was taken for safety here, without a word.
***
The whiteness of the Dover cliffs, the soft blaze of bright chalk, was a bearable beautiful glare — white can seem immaculate in nature. Dover was a harbor town in a narrow valley, with bluffs on either side, and on those bluffs were a castle and a citadel. You looked up in Dover and saw battlements and fortifications. I walked along the east cliff just under the castle, and down Marine Parade to the Esplanade. It was a highly mechanized and busy harbor, cars and trucks lining up to take the ferry to France. A French flavor had crept into the town. Dover had something of a Continental tang — the atmosphere in the streets, the faces of the strollers, the merchandise in the shops, the language on some signs. I had not known how unusual a thing this was, for the English made no concessions at all to other nationalities. They were neither hostile nor friendly. In any case, talk or chat was not in itself a friendly gesture in England, as it was in the United States. Speaking to strangers was regarded as challenging in England; it meant entering a minefield of verbal and social distinctions. Better to remain silent, even on z path through a meadow with no one else around. The English were tolerant in the sense that they were willing to turn a blind eye to almost anything that might embarrass them. They were humane, but they were also shy. After nine hundred years they still did not have strong views about the French, which surprised me, because after eleven years I thought of the French as the most unprincipled people in Europe. In Dover the English had adopted a different posture. They were courting the foreigners in Dover; the town had a slightly garlicky flavor, almost a hybrid feel — it was a small cultural muddle. But the Dover cliffs contained this aberration. It was like being at the bottom of a quarry. None of this cosmopolitan atmosphere would ever seep out.
It was only seven miles from Dover to Folkestone, but the railway line had the magnificence that all lines do when they run beside the sea. It was not just the sight of cliffs and the sea breezes; it was also the engineering, all the iron embedded in rock, and the inevitable tunnel, the roar of engines and the crashing of waves, the surf just below the tracks, the flecks of salt water on the train windows that faced the sea. The noise was greater because of the cliffs; and the light was stranger — land shadows on one side of the train, the luminous sea on the other; and the track was never straight, but always swinging around the bays and coves. It was man's best machine traversing earth's best feature — the train tracking in the narrow angle between vertical rock and horizontal water.
Above the racing train was Shakespeare Cliff, named from a passage in King Lear ("There is a cliff, whose high and bending head / Looks fearfully in the confined deep"). We went past various futile holes that represented efforts to build a Channel tunnel to France. It was a very old scheme, and even at the turn of the century there was a long shaft and a tunnel excavated for seven thousand feet under the Channel. The latest attempt to tunnel to France was abandoned in the 1970s. I wanted to ask someone on the train about this Channel tunnel. I changed my seat and sat opposite a harmless-looking man who was reading the full page of Falklands news in the Daily Telegraph. Was it around here, I asked, that the Channel tunnel was started?
He said yes — hardly yes, just nodded.
I said it seemed such a good idea, I could not understand why it had been abandoned.
"No money," the man said, a little crossly. He was Wing Commander R. G. H. Wraggett (Ret'd). "This isn't a rich country. We can't do things like that anymore. The Japanese have all the money now, and the Germans and these Arabs."
I was going to say that the Japanese had just this year dug a thirty-six-mile tunnel under the Tsugaru Straits, from Honshu to Hokkaido. But if I had said, "Courage can make you prosperous," he would have replied, "Nips!" The English hated the Japanese for being rich overachievers, for being guiltless racists, for eating raw fish, for working like dogs, and for torturing their prisoners during the war. "They despised us for surrendering in Singapore. They thought we should have done the decent thing — cut our bowels out and committed mass suicide." So I didn't mention the Japanese tunnel and I didn't say that the Channel tunnel seemed to me one of the most important engineering works of our century. Britain's future might depend on it. But the effort had collapsed.
Wing Commander Wraggett said, "We've got to learn how to tighten our belts."
His "we" meant everyone else, of course.
He returned to his paper. I changed my seat again and saw that we were arriving in Folkestone. I thought: To talk to that man I had to go back to the person I was eleven years ago, when it seemed all right to ask a stranger here a serious question. But how could I take this trip with my mouth shut? On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me feel invisible.