It was here, on the Solent, that Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar," but in the morning it was hard to imagine "Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me!" and the poet recommending his soul to Heaven. The sun was sparkling on the water behind the yachts tipping toward Yarmouth—a Force Eight was blowing, and I could see the collapsed Hurst Castle to the west, jutting on a spit of land from Hampshire, its arches like a set of broken dentures. There was a lovely lighthouse beside it, a white pawn on the water.
In this way I left the Isle of Wight and sailed on the ferry to Lymington, with its clusters of masts and the grass growing around the harbor. It reminded me of a Cape Cod town, a village on the sea, like Barnstable or Sandwich. It had a little round harbor, and the train went right down to the pier, where the ferry docked.
Traveling to Brockenhurst from Lymington—only five of us boarded this little train: its days were numbered, surely—I thought how easy it was for me to travel around Britain. When the path ran out there were trains or buses, and they left on time. This reflection was prompted by the arrival of the train immediately after the ferry docked in this fairly insignificant place. Money was easy—I could use personal checks or get money at any bank, even in a village such as Lymington. People were generally efficient and helpful, and some were friendly; everyone spoke English; I was never in danger; it was impossible for me to get lost. Was it any wonder that England was the most widely explored country on earth? In a sense, nothing was unknown in England—it was just variously interpreted.
But I knew that I needed this ease—the language, the money, the safety—because it was the subtlest culture on earth to explain. The English found foreigners funny because foreigners weren't English, and because it was impossible for anyone to become English. To an American, this attitude was itself funny and puzzling. But even after eleven years of groping for explanations, I was still groping, and on the coast I was in unfamiliar places. What a relief that everything worked so well and I was never afraid!
We were at the edge of the New Forest, and the heather and gorse and its flatness gave it the look of a moor. The wild ponies were not much higher than the new ferns ("Adders and lizards are not uncommon"). At Brockenhurst, a convenient railway junction because it was in the middle of nowhere, I changed for the Bournemouth train. The train did not hurtle toward Bournemouth, but rather dawdled pleasantly—at the pretty village of Sway, with an old-style railway platform that, in this spring heat, looked like a setting for the opening of a story by Saki; at Hinton Admiral, which sounded like the name of a butterfly or a dahlia, and was as lovely as its name; at Christchurch, after crossing the broad pastures and wheatfields; and Pokesdown, which was densely settled, a suburb of Bournemouth, the next stop. I got out at Central Station and walked to the Front.
The chines, or ridges, of Bournemouth supported row upon row of hotels and guest houses. Bournemouth's good weather—the best in Britain—had turned it into a resort, with pretty parks and ugly buildings, bistros and discos. It looked like a country town that became a city too quickly, but though it wore its newness awkwardly, it had enough parks and promenades to justify its reputation for being a stroller's city. It was, heart and soul, a seaside resort, and so inevitably full of shufflers and people staring and vaguely smiling. And all those hotels—thousands, it seemed, on the toast-colored crumbling cliffs. It did not have the tone of Eastbourne, which it resembled in some ways, but it was undeniably prosperous. It was crowded, and yet its heights and the winding streets of its hills made it bearable. Viewed from West Cliff it looked the epitome of a south coast resort, occupying about fifteen miles of shoreline. Bournemouth was also famous for its golf courses. Golf was a coastal sport, not to say passion, but that was not so surprising, since "links" was an old word that described the kind of sandy and turfy seashore we associate with a golf course.
People sat silently in cars, eating bananas, chewing sandwiches, and reading the gutter press: argies lose two! was the headline today—two planes or two ships. All the headlines exulted when Argentina suffered casualties, but British losses were somewhat understated, and most of the time it was reported in the language of British sports reporting. It was sunny but windy on the Front at Bournemouth, and people were variously dressed. I saw Ivy in her old overcoat and gloves and woolly scarf walking past Susan, supine in her bikini. Russell was a black boy with red hair and four earrings in each ear and a futile and obscure tattoo on his dusky arm; he was shadowing Kim, fifteen years old, with Billy very clearly tattooed on the side of her neck. The retired and the unemployed, the very old and the very young—Bournemouth had them in common with all the other seaside places I had seen. Middle-aged people wearing knapsacks were rather rare, which was perhaps the reason I received so many stares.
I lingered at the shallys to look inside and examine the furnishings (here a toaster, there a potted plant). It was too windy to read the newspaper outside. Most of the shally people were drinking tea, and some were sunbathing with all their clothes on, their hands stuck in their pockets and their faces pinched at the glaring sun.
I walked along West Cliff and down a zigzag path to the Promenade. I was not quite sure where I was headed, but this was the right direction—west: I had been going west for weeks. I walked past Alum Chine, where Stevenson wrote "Dr. Jekyll" (Bournemouth was the most literary place, with the ghosts of Henry James, Paul Verlaine, Tess Darbeyfield, Mary Shelley, and a half a dozen others haunting its chines) and then, looking west, and seeing the two standing rocks on the headland across the bay, called Old Harry and Old Harry's Wife, I decided to walk to Swanage, about fourteen miles along the coast.
My map showed a ferry at a place called Sandbanks, the entrance to Poole Harbour. I wondered whether it was running—the season had not started—so, not wishing to waste my time, I asked a man on the Promenade.
"I don't know about any ferry," he said.
He was an old man and had gray skin and he looked fireproof. His name was Desmond Bowles, and I expected him to be deaf. But his hearing was very good. He wore a black overcoat.
"What are those boys doing?" he demanded.
They were windsurfing, I explained.
"All they do is fall down," he said.
One of the pleasures of the coast was watching windsurfers teetering and falling into the cold water, and trying to climb back and falling again. This sport was all useless struggle.
"I've just walked from Pokesdown—"
That was seven miles away.
"—and I'm eighty-six years old," Mr. Bowles said.
"What time did you leave Pokesdown?"
"I don't know."
"Will you walk it again?"
"No," Mr. Bowles said. But he kept walking. He walked stiffly, without pleasure. His feet were huge, he wore old shiny bulging shoes, and his hat was crushed in his hand. He swung the hat for balance and faced forward, panting at the Promenade. "You can walk faster than me—go on, don't let me hold you up."
But I wanted to talk to him: eighty-six and he had just walked from Pokesdown! I asked him why.
"I was a stationmaster there, you see. Pokesdown and Boscombe—those were my stations. I was sitting in my house—I've got a bungalow over there"—he pointed to the cliff—"and I said to myself, 'I want to see them again.' I took the train to Pokesdown and when I saw it was going to be sunny I reckoned I'd walk back. I retired from the railways twenty-five years ago. My father was in the railways. He was transferred from London to Portsmouth, and of course I went with him. I was just a boy. It was 1902."