Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, "We shouldn't be doing this!" In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.
It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass and iron canopies of the shopfronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer ("Excursions to the Isle of Man") moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments— Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. "We're going to have a loovely boom competition," a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge—by touching them—which one's bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy—one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men's bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.
I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.
"It's a nice moon," Miss Maltby said.
"Aye," Miss Thorn said. "It is."
"But that's not what we saw earlier this evening."
"No. That was the sun."
Miss Maltby said, "You told me it was the moon."
"It was all that mist, you see," Miss Thorn said. "But I know now it was the sun."
The town was dominated by two silver-gray headlands of swollen limestone, Great and Little Orme. From Llandudno's pier head on a clear day it was possible to see the Lancashire coast, and from West Parade on the other side (where Lewis Carroll stayed with the Liddell family and wrote part of Alice), Bangor and the shore of Anglesey were greenishly apparent across Conway Bay.
***
There were two Indians in my railway compartment, trying to open a briefcase. It had a combination lock, and they had the combination, but still they could not open it. They quarreled a little, taking turns sighing at the stubborn lock, and then one said, "You would be so kind?" I took the briefcase into my lap and spanked it and it popped open. It contained some combs, a bottle of hair oil, a blue diary, a Bengali movie magazine, and a plastic pouch that was zippered shut. While one Indian removed a comb from the briefcase, the other Indian picked up a valise and left the train, muttering.
The remaining Indian combed his hair and said he had never seen the muttering one before in his life. They had met over the briefcase.
This Indian, Mr. Amin, said, "I am in catering business." He smiled and added, "That is to say, catering and restaurantooring."
He owned a curry shop in Bangor.
"I like Bangor and I am liking Vales," he said. "And the Vellish I am speaking as vell."
"Say something in Welsh," I suggested.
"I can say some few words for you," Mr. Amin said. "You are helping me with my briefcase and making me so happy. I am thinking, and that other man, too, perhaps ve are not unlocking my case! And—vhat you vanted?"
"Welsh," I said.
He straightened his head and in a clacking voice said, "Bore da. Good marning. Croeso. Velcome. Diolch yn fawr. Oh, thank you very much. Nos da. Good evening. Cymru am byth. Vales forever."
I said, "Are you going to stay in Bangor forever?"
"Who knows about forever?"
"Let's say five years."
He said, "Yes."
"How many Bangladeshis are there in Bangor?"
"Not more than eight."
"Do you have a mosque?"
"No," he said. "But sometimes ve use a certain floor in the Student Union building."
"Do you have a mullah?"
He said, "Ven five or six pray, vun can be mullah."
I asked, "How many children do you have?"
"Questions! Questions!" He seemed short of breath; his face was a tight fit; he probably took me for the tax man.
"Sorry, Mr. Amin. I have two children. Boys."
He relaxed and looked envious. "You are lucky. I have three girls, and then I try again, and then I just get a boy last year."
We entered a tunnel—silence—and then emerged, and Bangor lay before us, big and gray. Mr. Amin gathered his briefcase and paper bags and made ready to get off the train.
I said, "You could have settled anywhere in Britain, Mr. Amin. Why did you choose to settle in Bangor?"
He said, "Because it reminds me of my town in Bangladesh. Bangor is just very like Sylhet."
Was Sylhet severe and monotonous like this? Perhaps so. In any case, Indians had often told me how Cheltenham reminded them of certain towns in the Punjab, and Scotland was reminiscent of Simla, and after the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown he took himself to Eastbourne, claiming that it somewhat resembled his fragrant but decrepit sultanate in the Indian Ocean.
I stayed on the train and crossed the Menai Strait to Anglesey. The island was flat, as if it had detached itself from the mainland and become waterlogged. Its meadows were no more than gentle swells, and small houses and broken cottages lay scattered at great distances. It possessed the haunted look that Cornwall had, its rocks like ruins, its stillness like suspense. It had been the Druids' last outpost, and it looked it. In such a flat grassy place it was possible to see that there was nothing threatening, and yet this apparent openness was itself eerie and suggested invisible dangers. It was the sound of the wind, the pale light, the flat shadows on the low ground.
The first station was the famous but unsayable Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch ("St. Mary's Church in a hollow by the white hazel close to the rapid whirlpool by the red cave of St. Tysilio"). It is usually called Llanfair P.G., but the full name appeared on the station signboard, which was fifteen feet long. There was nothing else of interest at the station or in the town, and indeed it was indistinguishable from the other twenty-two places called Llanfair (St. Mary's) in Wales. I was told that the long name had been concocted by the village tailor a century ago so that the place would seem singular, much as Cross Keys, Pennsylvania, had been officially renamed Intercourse.
The stations and villages along the route to Holyhead looked worn down and depressing. It was as if all the millions of lonely Irish people who traveled this way—this was the principal route to Ireland—had devoured the landscape with their eyes, looked upon it with such hunger that there was little of it left to take hold of and examine. It sometimes seemed that way to me in Britain, in the busiest places, as if a castle's ramparts or a hillside or a village—supposedly so picturesque—had been eroded by two thousand years of admiring scrutiny, the penetration of people's eyes. No wonder they now stood on the shore and looked out to sea.
Bodorgan Station was empty, and nearby was an empty hotel; Ty Croes was one ruined cottage; and then the land grew stonier and harsher and looked the sort of place where only Druids could be happy—wind-flattened grass and pitted rocks, a few throaty crows and flocks of barking seagulls.
After the village of Valley there was a causeway to Holy Island. We passed a large factory, Anglesey Aluminium, and slowed as we approached the town of Holyhead.