Coasting Page 7

  Brown told his Future Manx Poet:

  Come, some soon, or else we slide

  To lawlessness, or deep-sea English soundings,

  Absorbent, final, in the tide

  Of Empire lost, from homely old surroundings,

  Familiar, swept …

  In another poem, he saw “the coming age/Lost in the empire’s mass.” England was Man’s mortal enemy, an imperial monster in whose maw everything that was Manx would be crushed and consumed; in this respect, Brown was standing shoulder to shoulder with all the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Indian, American and African writers who have struggled against England’s stifling colonial weight.

  Yet there was a false note somewhere in Brown’s protestations. For one thing, he wasn’t himself a “roughish” sort of chap: he took a degree at Oxford, then spent a lifetime teaching at an English public school, Clifton College, where my own grandfather must have been one of his pupils in the early 1890s. I felt cheated at finding this out. Who was this comfortably off, expensively educated man, living in a very handsome Georgian quarter of Bristol, to shove my Englishness in my face and make me feel guilty for not being a weasel-browed Manx fisherman?

  The Manx themselves loved Brown, though. He was still quoted, and not just by secondhand booksellers. Whenever I mentioned his name and said I’d been reading him, I was met by another torrent of dialect lines. I heard everyone’s favorite bits—of “Betsy Lee,” “Tommy Big-Eyes,” “The Doctor,” “The Manx Witch,” “Kitty of the Sherragh Vane,” “Mary Quayle” and “Job the White.” People could recite whole pages at a time. They stood in pubs and in their front rooms, and even in the heartily philistine setting of the Isle of Man Yacht Club: they put their hands in their pockets if they were men, or clasped them in front of their waists if they were women, they stuck their chests out, and then they started. They produced swathes and reams and yards and bolts of Brown, with his hop-hoppity-hop meter and the rhymes chiming like a concatenation of two-tone doorbells.

  Thursday—that’s yesterday—Nicky Freel

  Brings the captain’s yacht from Peel,

  And anchors her inside the bay;

  And there she was lyin’ the whole of the day.

  At six o’clock this evenin’

  This young pesson isn’ in—

  Nither’s the Captain—can’t be found—

  And then, wherever she was bound,

  This yacht they’re callin’ the Waterwitch

  Is off to sea with every stitch—

  And a woman aboord.—Well, it’s nathral rather,

  And, puttin’ two and two together,

  It isn’ cuttin’ it very fine

  To think this woman is Ellen Quine—

  I had T. E. Brown coming out of my ears. He was a national institution. The Bristol schoolmaster had managed to find a voice which embodied all of Man’s insular pride and all its insular sense of grievance and slight. Listening to his verse, with its nostalgia for old days and folk ways, its foursquare localness, its constant undercurrent of xenophobia, I thought that T. E. Brown, who had won the hearts of the Isle of Man in the 1880s, might be just the poet for Britain at large in the late twentieth century.

  The sea was black, shiny, creased, like the bombazine of a Victorian mourning frock. There was no further news of the South Stack. At least, there was no further news of the lost boat, but I was being continually reminded of it by the single flash, every ten seconds, of the South Stack lighthouse, ten miles away to the east. At this distance it was tricky to pick out—no more vivid than the flaring of a match seen across a valley on a clear night. I was trying to take regular compass bearings on it, and kept on losing it in the crowd of starlights on the water.

  There were other lights too. At night the sea always seems more populous than it does by day. As your eyes get used to the darkness, you see that you’re not nearly so alone as you thought. Trawlers, hard at work under the horizon, show as a sparky ignis fatuus of reds and greens. Trinity House puts on its great free firework show of lightships, buoys and lighthouses, every one chattering in the dark in its own code. Counting off the seconds—a-hundred-and-one; a-hundred-and-two; a-hundred-and-three—you figure out who they are. The quick double wink every ten seconds is the Skerries; the lazy brushstroke of light painting itself on the water every ten seconds is Point Lynas; the quintuple blip-blip-blip-blip-blip, fast as morse, every fifteen seconds, is Bardsey Island. When you’re alone at sea in the nightmare hours, these marvels are as profoundly comforting as the nursery rushlight burning on the table beside the child’s cot.

  At eleven o’clock I watched the Holyhead–Dublin ferry pass astern of me; a complete floating city, eerily sweeping across the horizon at twenty knots, making the sea around it blaze. I thought I could hear jazz bands playing, corks popping, the late-night crowd whooping it up; but that must have been a sea delusion, since the ship was at least seven miles off.

  My own navigation lamps were all cunningly shielded from me, to avoid blinding the helmsman, and the only visible thing on Gosfield Maid was a weak pinprick of light shining on the compass heading. Numbers were sluggishly stirring in their bowl of paraffin: 185 … 190 … 180 … 185. As long as the boat was kept pointing in a roughly southerly direction, the course was fine by me. I left it in the charge of the autopilot and went downstairs to make a supper of tinned soup, cheap claret and a loaf of fresh Manx bread.

  I lit the oil lamps in the saloon and stood blinking in the sudden flood of light, the momentary oddity of finding one’s old books and pictures, the unanswered letters from the Inland Revenue, yesterday’s paper with its half-done crossword down here, literally in the sea. Up on deck, or in the wheelhouse, a boat seems a perfectly reasonable sort of vehicle for moving around the world in; it is when you go below that you feel its improbable frailty—a whole household and economy sustained, high over the seabed, on a skin of water. As foundations for homes go, inch-thick planks of larch, held on by nails, with hanks of oakum hammered into the cracks between them, have little reassuring solidity about them. And the sea is so noisily close-to. Even in a dead calm, it mutters into the wood at one’s ear, like an anonymous caller on a telephone.

  You awake? What are you wearing? Let me guess, now, if you’ve got a nightie on.

  But everything’s in place: the books on their shelves, the pictures on the walls, the sheepskin rug on the floor. The floating room smells of potpourri, tobacco smoke and lavender furniture polish. It’s all right.

  I turned on the radio. It was the cocoa-and-biscuits hour on the BBC, an actor reading A Book at Bedtime—something about an Indian guru in suburban Sussex sometime in the 1920s.… I didn’t listen very closely, but the actor’s plummy bedtime voice was soothing. On the early-evening news there had been a mention, fairly low down in the bulletin, of an “air and sea search for a trawler reported missing in the Irish Sea”; but by the midnight news the item had been dropped. London journalists evidently didn’t think missing trawlers worth mentioning more than once.

  The chief business of Man had always been smuggling. An offshore island with a lot of rock, a few small plots of fertile soil, some thin veins of lead and tin in the hills and a modest annual harvest of shellfish and herrings has one resource left to exploit—its own insularity. The tax differentials between the island and the mainland were infinitely more profitable to the islanders than lobster potting or digging holes in the ground. The Manx fishing boats ferried illicit cargoes of tea and brandy and every other dutiable luxury over the forty sea miles to England.

  The economy of the Island still worked on exactly the same principle, even if the means was less romantic than the one-gun luggers on moonlit nights, with cloaked men on the beach guiding them in with storm lanterns. Income tax on the Island was a flat 20 percent; income tax on the mainland was—I cannot bear to spell out the figures of income tax on the mainland. So the Manx were busy making money out of the difference, just as they had used to make money out of the two-and-sixpenny English du
ty on tea.

  They trawled for English millionaires. They also fished, more easily and profitably, for Englishmen with company pensions and tidy nest eggs who wanted to hang on to as much as they could of their ten and fifteen thousands a year. Athol Street in Douglas—a hundred yards or so of seaside stucco and a bad place in a wind—was a smugglers’ cove of tin-pot banks, off-the-peg companies, avoidance schemes and useful dodges. It was Stepmar country: the source of innumerable good wheezes … loans, investments, savings and pension plans, all done on the cheap, all, in the smugglers’ favorite smooth phrase, “tax-advantageous.”

  The smugglers themselves looked the way chartered accountants do everywhere: they wore colored golf socks and thick spectacles, they went to the barbers’ once a fortnight, and were shyly boastful about their handicaps after hours in the bar of the Admiral House on the promenade. Athol Street was the Douglas version of Wall Street and the City, though its brevity, its louche offshore tackiness, its cracked plaster and its pervading smell of cotton candy and fish and chips, gave it a more amiable air than the forbidding financial centers of London and New York.

  Athol Street was the economic base on which a gimcrack cultural superstructure had been erected. The trouble was that for the exiles there was not a great deal to actually do on the Isle of Man. Having husbanded their precious money, they were faced with the question of what on earth to spend the stuff on. They went in for house extensions and kept a more or less permanent retinue of Manx builders, as their Edwardian villas sprouted glass gazebos, indoor swimming pools, solar panels, covered patios, brick courtyards, ornamental arches and empty guest quarters. They went to see the Grumbleweeds at the Gaiety Theatre, followed by dinner at Boncompte’s (which was pronounced, with insular distrust of foreign ways, “Buncumpty’s”). They wrote letters (such long letters!), they phoned long distance, they trained roses and they made Wills.

  At the Isle of Man Yacht Club at Sunday lunchtime I met a desolate architect who had made his killing on the mainland and come to the Island five years before.

  “It’s not worth the candle,” he said. “I tell you this …” He took a long preparatory swill from his double-Scotch-and-a-splash; a determined monologuist fueling up for a good story. “You should be here in the winter. You can count yourself lucky if you ever see daylight, then. It’s the foggiest, windiest, rainiest place in the universe. No social life. Nothing. In the week, the only person I ever get to talk to is the wife, and she stopped listening long ago. You know what she does? She spends half her life writing off for catalogues of kitchenware … mixers and whiskers and food processors and stuff like that … then she spends the other half reading the bloody things. Reading catalogues! She’s probably doing it now. They come by every post. The kitchen’s jammed solid with machinery. She never uses it. And she goes on sending away for these catalogues; reads them aloud, too, right down to the voltage specifications. If you ever want the Which guide to food processors, I’m your man. What’s in that glass?”

  He sucked over his miseries like a man chewing green olives and spitting out the stones.

  “Don’t talk to me about the locals. They’re as tight as clams. In five years I’ve never been inside a Manxman’s house except to settle a bill.”

  “Why don’t you go back to England?”

  “What’s the point? Sooner of later the Socialists will get in, and then where will you be? Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

  Finally he played his trump. “You know the best thing about this island? What I look forward to most every week?” He waited, staring me down.

  “No.”

  “This,” he said with an elated glower. He took in the yachtsmen and their wives, the comfortable jokes from which he was excluded, the burgees pinned up around the bar, the cups and ship models, the antique chart of the Irish Sea. “It’s a twenty-mile drive. Takes an hour—more if there’s a fog, and you’re lucky if you don’t run over a sheep on the way. High spot of the week. Sunday drinks at the Yacht Club. And I don’t even sail. What do you make of that? Not much, and nor do I.”

  It seemed needless to point out that he appeared to be perfectly content in his misery. He was beaming with the pleasure of it. I could imagine the sort of buildings he designed—gloomy towers in which he stacked people in their cells like bees.

  “Look at that fog,” he said happily. “By this evening you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face. You’ll probably be here for the winter. You’ll hate it. But just think of the tax you’ll save. What’s in that glass?”

  Life in exile revolved around the island charities. There were funds for blindness, heart disease, leukemia, cancer, cystic fibrosis, arthritis, muscular dystrophy, mental handicap, physical handicap, and several afflictions that were quite new to me. Every fund produced its own dinners, dances and concerts—a dizzy Season, which ran from September to March and whirled gaily from disease to disease. I was given a ticket for a dinner and fashion show at the Castle Mona Hotel in aid of cirrhosis, or piles, or manic depression, or emphysema—even at the time I was unclear about what it was that we had all come to support in our dinner jackets and ball gowns, with the hotel driveway packed solid with smart cars.

  We ate prawn cocktails, then limp chicken croquettes and frozen peas. Our voices were English, with not a Manx accent in the room except for the waitresses who were going round saying “French-fries or sauté?”. We talked about house prices, and how it was a bad time to sell up; about plumbers, and how good ones were in terribly short supply; about the spread of osmosis in the hulls of fiberglass yachts.

  Here I saw my chance. I suggested that a new charity be established called the Osmosis Fund. Every year there could be an Osmosis Day, with collecting boxes on every corner … vast amounts of money could be raised … huge dinners could be had … Hardly anyone would know what Osmosis was, but everyone hearing the name would be sure that it was contagious and fatal. It would be the ideal island charity.

  One woman did laugh, but she stopped when she realized that her encouraging giggle was turning her into an object of severe attention by her neighbors. I concentrated on the remains of my potatoes, having failed to make my mark on Society.

  After dinner everyone trailed through into the Ballroom for the fashion show. There were balloon glasses of brandy for the men and sweet liqueurs for the ladies. The Governor of the Island, a retired admiral, passed through us, nodding, as if he were still on his flagship at a Sunday parade. There was a long hiccup in the fashion arrangements; we were deep into our second brandies, and the conversation was taking some desperate turns, before at last a few women began to walk round the room in a ring, wearing cashmere, frozen smiles and crêpe de Chine. After each solitary circuit of the floor, there was a burst of clapping. The applause was not so much for the dresses as for the audacity of someone’s wife or someone’s daughter as she braved the public eye. The amateur models were being jolly good sports.

  “Doesn’t Cynthia look marvelous.”

  “Yes, and she’s got such nice feet.”

  “Oh, now, that I do like.”

  “Of course, Margot has the shoulders for it.”

  I was out of my depth at the charity dinner and fashion show. Picking my way barefoot, my socks stuck into the pockets of my dinner jacket, my shoes tied round my neck, down a quayside ladder slippery with seaweed to the boat, I hoped that no real Manxmen were around to witness this ignominious descent from exiledom.

  Between the exiles and the islanders there was a line which was only a little more indefinite and less exclusive than a color bar, and the islanders kept this line vigilantly guarded and patrolled. The ideal way of sustaining the line would have been by speaking in Manx, a Celtic language which had died early in the nineteenth century. Condemned to speaking in English, like the exiles, the islanders had to make do with their curious and impossible-to-imitate accent, together with a handful of phrases designed to underscore the ineradicable difference between themselves and their En
glish houseguests. They called the exiles “comeovers.” The place from which the comeovers had come was never named directly: England was “Across,” while the Isle of Man was always spoken of simply as “The Island,” as if there were no other.

  In insular eyes, there was no more vicious trait than to “get above yourself”; and the comeovers had all got above themselves with a vengeance. The Manx saw it as their moral duty to cut the comeovers down to size. Their fancy architecture was ridiculed by the Manxmen who were even now putting it up for them.

  “ ‘I want a pergola,’ he says. I says, ‘Well, you can have your purr-goal-ah, then, but don’t blame me when bloody thing comes crashing down in first wee gale of wind.’ ”

  On a famous racehorse owner:

  “He likes his self—I’ll say that for him.”

  On a famous novelist:

  “He’s got a fair bit of cheek to him.”

  On a self-made industrialist:

  “He’s an uppity little bugger and all.”

  Comeovers. Comeuppances. The Manx attitude toward the English, on whom they unwillingly depended as a client state, was neatly put in T. E. Brown’s “Job the White,” where Job, speaking of English women, might just as well have been talking about men too:

  Aw, drat the lot! these English swells,

  Women they’re not, nor nither gels,

  But stuck-up Madams, and their airs and their cranks—

  Women! Women! Give me the Manx!

  All grasp of hard reality, all common sense, all serious knowledge worth the knowing (about winds and weather, the migratory patterns of the scallop and who was related to whom and how) resided with the Manx. When they came to define their own national identity, though, they did so in entirely negative terms. What was so wonderful about being Manx? The Manx did not get above themselves.

  In a fortnight of knocking about bars on the Island, I heard the same story three times. Each time it was told slightly differently and set in a different location, but in essence it was the same—a cogent, and depressing, statement of what it means to be an islander.