The train was a hand-me-down, or more properly another retiree: it had served its time on the London Underground and been taken out of service, and now it was in active retirement, plying back and forth from Ryde to Shanklin. It was from the thirties; it had that look, very plain and rather dark and full of handles and belts for straphangers; and it was rattly and had a London smell of cigarettes and brake dust. But it was still very serviceable. There were eighty girls in my car, heading for Sandown, a school outing from Hampshire: they were small fat-faced girls, flushed from shouting, with damp hair and steamy glasses. They had been yelling all the way across Spithead on the ferry. They were being watched with disapproval by exhausted-looking holiday people, the arriving couples on their way to Ventnor, and by middle-aged men carrying handbags. It hardly mattered that we were crossing the Isle of Wight. This train might have been going from Clapham to Waterloo on the Northern Line in London, the passengers were so shabby and unenthusiastic. The schoolgirls were schoolgirls. The English could appear to bring no joy at all to a vacation, and so they looked appropriate here on this old Underground train.
But now the metropolitan train was in the sticks, crossing fields that were bounded by low woods, and at the foot of a high down was Brading ("a decayed town," the guidebook said). There were real hills and real valleys near Sandown—who would have thought this small island could contain the best kind of English landscape? Shanklin was a large and breezy town, built on sloping streets. It was the last stop. I bought an apple and a sandwich—my usual lunch—and took them down to the beach to eat. The beach was some distance below the town. It was sunny enough today for me to sit on the sand and, like the elderly people on the benches behind me, and the old folks on the Esplanade, read the Falklands news in the paper. These days it was bombing missions and aerial dogfights, just the sort of thing to gladden the hearts of the army veterans on the park benches of Shanklin.
There were deep rural valleys all the way to Ventnor. I had decided to treat the Isle of Wight in the same way as England, and to make my way around the island's coast. Ventnor was an English resort in an Italian setting, the town tucked into bluffs and straggling along terraces and drooping from ledges. The way it cascaded from cliffs was Italian, and the balconies were Italian, and the tall windows, too.
I kept looking for the wilder, woodier stretches of coast or smaller settlements, but all I saw were piled-up towns and congested harbors and, on remote clifftops, sprawling hotels and stairways hacked into the seawall. The Isle of Wight's southern coast was entirely high cliffs, so it had been civilized with stairs. But this built-upon coast was interesting, and whatever else one could say about the appalling traffic, it was also interesting, as the shallys in Hove were, and the people staring seaward from their cars, and the gatherings of old folks in their seaside settlements.
"The roads here are horrible," Alf Doggett said. He had come down from London, Hither Green actually— Ivver Grain was what he said—and had expected Ventnor to be different. "It's a blooming disgrace."
Rose Doggett wondered whether they wouldn't have been better off in Cornwall. She had liked Newquay, on that one visit.
"You can't move here. It's all buses. They're fifty years behind the times," Alf said. "You don't think it's serious."
I had been smiling. I cultivated complainers.
I said, "No, no, I do think it's serious! Please go on."
"And there's the caravans," Rose said.
"Don't mention caravans," Alf said, and tapped his chest. "Me blood pressure."
We were on a bench, on one of the Ventnor ledges, facing down at the surfy beach. Because of its position in the steep notch, Ventnor seemed both smaller and cozier than sprawling Shanklin. But the Doggets, Alf and Rose, had become glum, talking about the traffic. And now they were talking about "the mainland," as if we were far at sea and not twenty minutes by ferry to Portsmouth.
The Thackwoods were on an adjacent bench, sharing a Mars bar, as they had done most afternoons since retiring to Ventnor from Bolton in Lancashire four years ago. I had seen Mr. Thackwood—Herbert—prick up his ears at Alf's "blooming disgrace." He knew we were talking about traffic. Anyway, it was the usual topic.
"It's the Council," Mr. Thackwood said.
Alf Doggett uncrossed his legs and smiled at Mr. Thackwood, who did not smile back. He was not being unfriendly; he was merely preparing to say "I've had it up to here," and he could not do that smiling.
"The Council's stupid," Mr. Thackwood said.
The Doggetts nodded. Alf said, "I couldn't agree more."
"I used to roon a big one—bigger than this blewdy Council, I can tell you," Mr. Thackwood said. "They don't know what they're doing."
"They're flipping useless," Alf said.
Mr. Thackwood said, "They don't give a booger."
Now Marion Thackwood spoke to Rose Doggett, confidentially, woman to woman. She said, "They don't give a ding."
They settled down to a long pleasant afternoon of complaining, and I was sure a friendship would emerge from it, and then there would be tea at the Doggetts' and Scrabble at the Thackwoods', Marion would encourage Rose to join the Women's Institute, and Alf and Herbert would take the coach into Ryde to watch football. At Christmas, there might be a glass of sherry for the Thackwoods when the Doggetts had them over to meet their son Ted and his wife and the two grandchildren, Keith and Amanda, and then they'd all look at Ventnor and say, "It's not half bad here, really. Bit of sunshine, no frost. And it's snowing in London!"
That was how I left them—making friends and tearing into the County Council. And I thought: This is better than castles.
I went via St. Catherine's—more English cottages, another Italian setting—and across the cliffs to Blackgang.
Blackgang was associated with smugglers—few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or moon-cussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality, and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. The Smugglers' Inn was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast. Smuggling was fun, smuggling was blameless, smuggling was British.
There was a Fantasy Theme Park at Blackgang, with statues and murals and tableaux of smuggling; there were books about it and signs showing the way to smugglers' caves, and, of course, there were inns and public houses associated with this activity.
"Look, Ron," Penny Battley said. She was on a Blue Sky Tour from Yorkshire. "Smooglers."
The statues depicted cutthroats in black eyepatches, with tattoos on their arms, carrying casks of brandy.
Daniel Defoe was near here in 1724. He wrote, "I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling, and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End to Cornwall." A hundred years later, Richard Ayton, in A Journey Around Great Britain, wrote how he would fall into conversation with men on the coast and then, after talking about fishing, they "reverted with pride to those days when a little honest smuggling cheered a man's heart ... with a drop of unadulterated gin. 'But these are cruel times,' they observed, 'and the Lord only knows what we shall be obliged to give up next.'"