We passed a tumbledown farm, a small wood-frame factory, a row of poplars, some sheep. Now I understood why the Welsh had taken to Patagonia. I saw more farms, small and poor, but rural poverty always looked to me more bearable than the forms that poverty took in a city. Poverty brought people low and pushed them into the past. In the countryside this merely meant farming in a cruder way; poor city people had to go still farther back and become scavengers in order to survive.
Newport rose up on the left, a power station and the rolling mills and furnaces of the doomed Llanwern Steelworks. The Victorian housefronts looked slightly foppish, with multicolored bricks and stripes. Sometimes Wales looked like another country, and at other times it seemed like an earlier version of England—upright and antique and dusty and churchgoing, with all the color schemes wrong.
There were preparations afoot in Cardiff for the Pope's visit—he was due in three days. An altar had been erected and a "mass site" prepared up at Pontcanna Park in Llandaf, near the old cathedral ("Cromwell's soldiers used the nave as a tavern and post office, and the font as a pig trough, and burnt the cathedral's books at a formal ceremony at Cardiff Castle"). No Pope had ever visited Wales.
In Cardiff, on Queen Street, Mrs. Prichard said, "So the Pope's staying with you, Doris?"
"Yes? Oh, well, never mind," Doris said. "I'll make him comfortable."
"He'll want looking after," Mrs. Prichard went on, still not smiling. "He's got a healthy appetite, that one, all the traveling."
"I'll tell the milkman to leave me an extra pint," Doris said. "The Pope's stopping upstairs, I'll say."
"You'll want more than an extra pint of milk! I should buy some gammon and cabbage. He's Polish, Doris."
As soon as I saw it, I wanted to leave Cardiff. In any case, it was seldom my intention to linger in the large cities. In Britain they were cavernous and intimidating, like the fortresses they had once been. They seemed to have heavy eyebrows. They were not for walkers. They were full of indoor miseries that made me impatient. Their buildings were blackened and their people wary of my questions. I never got lost in the countryside, but these cities could make me feel as if I were drowning. It could take a day or two to find out how to leave these places. They were always encumbered with ruins. Cardiff was no place for a pedestrian like me.
My remedy, walking to Barry Island, did not work. It was a peninsula, but even so it was unreachable on foot. There were no paths here, only the mazy roads of South Glamorgan, packed solid with houses. In Grangetown I thought: They really do look like towns from years ago, living on in old-fashioned, semirespectable decrepitude. I walked on to Cogan, an awful-looking place. Wales was visibly poorer than England but much better-natured.
At Cadoxton I found a railway station and went the rest of the way on the branch line, sitting behind the driver. There were signs painted on the slates of house roofs: they were meant to be seen from the train. The letters were two feet high, GOD IS LOVE, one said, and another one, CHRIST DIED FOR THE UNGODLY. We passed several acres of rusty locomotives—a sort of graveyard for steam engines—and then came to Barry Island. Half of it was a Butlin's camp, and the rest was a small seafront with severe amusements.
I sat on the front, near a stall selling whelks and jellied eels, listening to the flap of the Butlin's flags and wondering what to do next. There were no hotels in this place! It was for day-trippers—miners mostly, who rode out of the valleys for one frantic day. But now miners earned good salaries and were able to go farther afield. So Barry Island had its holiday camp and its deserted arcades. I made a note: Not much like Weston-super-Mare —because Weston-super-Mare was twelve miles away, across the bay.
I studied my map and decided to go to Llanelli. My train took me past Bridgend and Port Talbot and Neath. The landscape was industrial and yet was motionless and might have been dead. It was also a pebbledash wilderness of two-story houses, great chains and terraces of them, arranged on narrow streets, striping the hills. It was nineteenth-century order, the workers' barracks, with rougher hills one range away—the Vale of Glamorgan and then into West Glamorgan. I changed trains in Swansea. Swansea was a vast cankered valley of sorrowful houses and gray churches and shut-down factories. I thought: No wonder the Welsh are religious! In South Wales, industry had burned and cleared the landscape and stacked it with sooty buildings. But most of the industries had failed—or looked moribund—and you could not look out the train window without thinking of gangrene.
Llanelli had looked promising on the map. It was in the southwest corner of Dyffed, on the estuary of the Loughor River. I walked from the station to the docks. The town was musty-smelling and dull and made of decayed bricks. My map had misled me. I wanted to leave, but first I wanted to buy a guidebook to Wales in order to avoid such mistakes in the future.
I passed a store with textbooks in the window. Dead flies lay on their sides on the book covers; they had not been swatted, but had simply starved; they seemed asleep. There were shelves in this bookstore, but not many books. There was no salesperson. A husky voice came from behind a beaded curtain.
"In here."
I went in. A man was whispering into a telephone. He paid no attention to me. There were plenty of books in here. On the covers were pictures of naked people. The room smelled of cheap paper and ink. The magazines were in cellophane wrappers. They showed breasts and rubber underwear, and there were children on some of them—the titles suggested that the naked tots were violated inside. No guidebooks here, but as this pornography shop was Welsh, the door had a bell that went bing-bong! in a cheery way as I left.
Welsh politeness was soft-hearted and smiling. Even Llanelli's Skinheads were well behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets and bleached hair and earrings or green hair and T-shirts saying Anarchy! —even they seemed sweet-natured. And how amazing that the millions of Welsh, who shared about a dozen surnames, were the opposite of anonymous. They were conspicuous individuals and at a personal level tried hard to please. "You're a gentleman!" one man would cry to another, greeting him on the street.
At Jenkins the Bakers ("Every bite—pure delight") I saw a strawberry tart with clotted cream on top. Were they fresh strawberries?
"Oh, yes, fresh this morning," Mrs. Jenkins said.
I asked for one.
"But they're thirty pence, darling," Mrs. Jenkins said, warning me and not moving. She expected me to tell her to forget it. She was on my side in the most humane way, and gave me a commiserating smile, as if to say, It's a shocking amount of money for a strawberry tart!
When I bought two, she seemed surprised. It must have been my knapsack and my vagabond demeanor. I went around the corner and stuffed them into my mouth.
"Good morning—I mean, good evening!" Mr. Maddocks the stationmaster said at Llanelli Station. "I knew I'd get it right in the end. It's patience you want!"
The rest of the people on the platform were speaking Welsh, but on seeing the train draw in—perhaps it was the excitement—they lapsed into English.
This was the 16:28 to Tenby. We slid out of Llanelli, past the tiny cottages and the brick houses. The average price of these houses was £15,000 and quite a few cost less than £10,000. I got this information from the Llanelli Star. On another page some automobiles were being advertised for £7000.