She said, "Do you want a reading?"
I said yes. She took my hand loosely, as if weighing it to bite. She said I was far from home—had my knapsack and muddy shoes given her a clue? She said I was doing a very difficult thing, but if she was referring to traveling around Britain, perhaps she knew something I didn't, because I had not foreseen any difficulties. She said I was sensitive and artistic: perhaps a painter? "Couldn't draw a rabbit," I said. She said I was successful but that I tried to hide it. I was often in the company of strangers. Some of them would try to take advantage of me, but my character would overcome them.
All this she gathered by prodding the palm of my right hand and tracing her crimson fingernails on the lines I got from rowing a skiff in Cape Cod Bay.
"Do you see anything there about Northern Ireland?"
"Distant lands certainly. One of them might be Ulster."
"Do I survive in the end?"
"Oh, yes. You lead a healthy life. You are not a smoker, for example."
"Gave up a year ago. Pipe. I used to inhale it. I miss it sometimes like a dead friend."
"You have many friends," Olandah said, perhaps mishearing me. "But you tend to keep away from them. You keep yourself to yourself. You are very independent."
"Self-employed," I said. "One last query. Where am I going to sleep tonight?"
She stopped looking at my hand. She looked at my nose and said, "Not at home."
"What town—can you give me a hint?"
"I give character readings," Olandah said. "I don't give tourist information."
This cost me £7, which was about a pound more than it would have cost me to stay at a guest house, with bed and breakfast. Still, I was grateful for her encouragement and glad to have been reassured that I was going to survive.
Another sign in Broadstairs said, "Seven miles out to sea from this point lay the dreaded Goodwin Sands—the great ship swallower—considered by a great many seafarers to be the most dangerous stretch of water in the world." There were countless stories about the disasters and wrecks on the Goodwins. "Their ingurgitating property is such, that a vessel of the largest size, driven upon them, would in a few days be swallowed up and seen no more." What was not so well known was that at the turn of the century, at low water, the sands became very firm and cricket matches were played on them.
I passed the bundled-up old people on their benches, and the families with picnic baskets and balloons, the day-trippers waiting at the JUGS OF TEA FOR THE BEACH sign, and I walked out of Broadstairs and through a gate to a narrow park dedicated to the memory of George VI. The land was higher here, and on this sea cliff were magpies and dog-owners and kite-flyers. Down below were the original thirty-nine steps, leading to the sea.
On the other side of this park was Ramsgate.
The man on the train to Margate, Mr. Mould, had seemed to me to be boasting when he told me he was going to Ramsgate. Anyway, these towns on the Kent coast a few hours from London were either described as Cockneyfied or not very Cockneyfied—the less of it the better, people said, since London influence on the coast was always seen as contamination. The coast represented an escape from every terrestrial ill. The worst was metropolitan oppression, and London was the epitome of that. When Baedeker described Ramsgate as "a somewhat less Cockneyfied edition of Margate," it intended praise. That was in 1906, but even today such places were still measured by London, because London was the future and it was also pretty poisonous. When a coastal place was too big or too noisy or full of traffic—when it was inconvenient or ugly or it smelled—people said, "Just like London," in a helpless way, because now they were beside the sea and they couldn't go any farther.
Ramsgate was larger than but just as ugly as Margate, with a swimming pool on the Front that looked like a Roman ruin painted blue. It was the Marine Bathing Pool, which had been neglected and now lay vandalized and full of smashed chairs and broken glass. "The Council are at present discussing future development," the sign beside it said, but one could not read that without thinking of dynamite.
I had been hurrying. My hamstrings ached. I asked a man in a flat cap where the railway station was. He was grateful to me for asking directions and offered me three different routes; the station was some distance away.
His name was Len Shottery. He said, "Are you walking it?"
I said yes.
"It's much too far to walk," he said. "Get in—I'll drive you."
Mr. Shottery climbed into the cab of his Department of Public Works truck. He had been out all day, putting out plastic cones to reroute traffic for tomorrow's ditch-digging. He said he was a Londoner. "I came down here five years ago and haven't been back once." He was about fifty years old and he said this with the air of a man who has fled to the South Pacific.
"Watch them trains," Mr. Shottery said. "They're not very clever on a holiday."
I took the train nine miles to Sandwich and walked around the town. It was hardly bigger than Sandwich, Massachusetts, but it was a lovely place surrounded by flat green fields. It had survived and was still pretty and old-fangled, because in the course of eight hundred years this coastal town had slipped inland and was no longer a great port. It had just closed up, and now it was preserved, two miles from the sea, in its own rich silt. "Queen Elizabeth visited the town in 1572, and the house is occupied in Strand Street," and there I saw a man with a frightened face walking a tottering dog.
My idea was to walk to Deal, which was only five miles away. German prisoners of war had built the Sandwich-to-Deal road and cycle path, in 1946, before they were repatriated from their prison camp at Eythome. I wanted to hike this road, but my legs ached from my hurrying, so I took an evening train.
I arrived in Deal in a glarey sunset. It was very quiet here, very empty, and I liked it for smelling of fish and seaweed. Everyone had gone home—into the house or back to London. The seafront was just rope and hauled-up fishing dinghies, and the wind was blowing along the stony shingly shore. Now the sea and the sky were blue. I sat down. The sun was like a carbuncle. I decided to stay.
At no point in three months of travel did I have a reservation in advance at a hotel or a guest house. I wanted to come and go as I pleased and not be held to specific places and dates. I thought: If I can't get a room, I'll move on to another place and look—but that was never necessary. I never found a hotel that was full, though I found many that were completely empty. I was never turned away. Some of the hotel-owners or guest house proprietors were embarrassed by their empty rooms. Some said it was too early in the season. "We'll be packed in June," they said in May. But in June they said, "Things are quiet now, but it'll be a madhouse in July, when the school holidays start." In July they said, "In August we're always fully booked." But the season deepened, and they were nearly always empty. Some of the owners said that people had stopped traveling in Britain—they went to Spain when they went at all. Some said, "It's this recession. It's a worldwide problem." Some people said, "We're not a rich country anymore. We're poor"; but that attitude made me wary, because those were the people who always overcharged me.
My method for finding a place to stay was to walk up and down the streets and look for a clean or well-shaped building that had a view of the sea. I avoided the new hotel (too expensive) or the place in which I heard music playing (too noisy) or the damp tumbledown inn with the swaybacked roof that was usually buried in a back lane (stinks and hard beds). The tall semi-hotel I found in Deal after roaming around for twenty minutes looked all right—it had lovely windows—but after I gained entrance I saw it was no good. It smelled of bacon and beer, and it was run by a fat dirty woman named Mrs. Sneath, who smoked in my face.