Holyhead was one of a number of British towns that seemed to be dying—blackening like an extremity with gangrene. It was too far, too barren, too still. It had gone to sleep and would die without waking. The ferry business—boats to the Irish port of Dun Laoghaire—was so bad, they were advertising free liters of whiskey for anyone who made the trip. But the ferries remained empty: no one had any money here. In Anglesey, where the local accent was not Welsh but rather a jaw-twisting Birmingham neigh, I was told that the unemployment rate was 30 percent. It was a meaningless statistic—most statistics struck me as sounding frivolous and hastily invented—but the fact remained that people in Holyhead were visibly idle. They did not work, nor did they do much else but sit and stare. The tennis courts and football fields were empty, the bowling greens were empty—no sports. There was little drinking, because no one could afford it; no movies.
"I sleep late and watch TV," a man named Gower told me. He had been on the dole for five years and was only thirty-two.
The streets were empty. I walked through the town and felt a sense of despair, because I could not imagine that things would ever improve here. No one I met believed that the future would be any brighter, and a number of them said casually that they had thought of emigrating. Whenever British people spoke of emigration, they mentioned North America first—Europe was just as bad as Britain, they said, and Australia was too far.
The younger ones had some hope. I deliberately sought out youths in Anglesey and asked them what their plans were. One thirteen-year-old told me he wanted to be a plasterer—I guessed that his father was a plasterer, but I was wrong. A fourteen-year-old told me he wanted to join the Royal Navy, and another's ambition was to be a carpenter. They hated school, and perhaps they were right to hate it; what job would school prepare them for? A sixteen-year-old told me that he was about to take an exam, and then he wanted to go to college. What would he study?
"Catering," he said. His name was Brian Craster.
I asked him if he meant cooking—being a chef.
"Yeah," he said in his neighing accent, "it's a two-year course."
"Then you get a job."
"If there's one going. There's not much work around here. Just British Rail or the Tinto factory"—Rio Tinto Zinc ran Anglesey Aluminium—"but they've started to lay people off."
"Do you do any cooking now, Brian?"
"A bit," he said. "I can make cakes. Shepherd's pie and that."
"Where do you want to be a chef?"
"Maybe London. Maybe get a job at the Savoy."
None of the youths I met in Holyhead had ever been to London. Brian Craster wanted to go, but he seemed a little fearful, and that made him sound defiant.
It was all Council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their hands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers.
I walked through most of the western part of Holy Island, around South Stack, and then back to the harbor. In a bus shelter overlooking New Harbour I saw a poem written in black ink.
Now it is 1984.
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Come quickly to the camp
You'll look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't worry—it's only a shower
For your clothes—here's a pretty flower
DIE
on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg already hatched
You will croak you little clown
When you mess with President Brown!
As I stood copying this into my small notebook, a middle-aged couple approached the bus shelter. They were Owen and Esther Smallbone from the Council estate just west of Holyhead. They had a small flat, for which they paid £16 a week. Owen Smallbone had been an accounts clerk at the harbor and had taken a leave of absence for medical reasons—a bad back—but when he recovered sufficiently to return to his job, there was no job, and he had been on the dole ever since—four years. Esther sometimes earned a little money looking after the children of working mothers—the Smallbones had no children of their own—but there was not much child-minding these days, because the mothers were being laid off, weren't they? They were always the first to go. Recently, Owen's back had begun again to bother him, which was why they were taking the bus. They were on the way to the General Post Office on Boston Street to purchase a Television Broadcast Receiving Licence (Including Colour)—"apparatus for wireless telegraphy." They rented a Sony Trinitron eighteen inch for £12 a month. The license for watching it would cost £46.
They were very suspicious of me. I wondered why, and then I saw the reason. I had put my notebook away, but I was still holding my pen. So I had probably written that crazy poem, or if not the poem, then perhaps I had drawn the picture of the penis, or else set down my telephone number with the message Ring Roger for a good time, guys, or—and this was the most likely—I was the one going around Holyhead scribbling FREE WALES and FWA, one of the arsonists. My knapsack told a story.
The Smallbones glanced at my pen. They were very annoyed—they were decent people, but even decent people could not find work these days. They were law-abiding—masses of people never bothered to buy a TV license and didn't give a tinker's curse when the television-detector van parked in Mostyn Close and trained its radar on the flats, fully aware that people inside the flats were watching "Championship Darts" or "The Dukes of Hazzard" without a license. And the Smallbones respected public property: they hated graffiti, and these on the wall of the bus shelter had been written by perverts, lunatics, and fanatics. Sometimes it made them ashamed to be Welsh. Sometimes they felt like just jacking it in and going to Nova Scotia like the Davises, but that was years ago, and who wanted to hire a man with a bad back?
Ten minutes passed. The bus did not come. I waited a few more minutes and then decided to walk. The Smallbones were still waiting, and after I had gone they examined the walls of the bus shelter, trying to determine which scribbles were mine.
I returned to Llandudno Junction for the third time and then to Llandudno. Now I noticed that there were seagulls on the platform of Llandudno Station, thirty or forty of them, waiting the way pigeons waited at Waterloo.
At last I decided to leave Wales. I took another train to Llandudno Junction. Today was Friday, and the train was full of people returning to their homes in industrial Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Some had been farther afield than Rhos-on-Sea and Colwyn Bay.
"The people crowded round us," Janet Hosegood said. She was a librarian in Runcorn. She loved to travel. She had spent last year's Easter vacation on a group tour of three Chinese cities, Canton, Suchow, and Shanghai, as she was telling old Mr. Bolus, who had never been east of Mablethorpe.
Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"
"They'd never seen eyes like ours," Miss Hosegood said. She was fifty-one and loved country walks. Spinster, she wrote when marital status was asked for. She hated the abbreviation "Ms."—"Miss!" she usually said, showing her teeth.
Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"
"In Channah," Miss Hosegood said.
"Ee?"
"People's Repooblic," Miss Hosegood said.
"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.
"'cause their eyes are slanty-like," Miss Hosegood said.
"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.
"Six 'oondred and fifty pound it cost us, all in," Miss Hosegood said.
But Mr. Bolus had been distracted from this talk of China by the bulldozers outside Colwyn Bay, preparing to build something. It can only be something awful, he thought, for here there was mile after mile of shallys and villas and caravans and tents, facing the Irish Sea.