Coasting (29 page)

They’d fooled me, but on second look I saw they couldn’t possibly have been either carved of wood or more than a few years old. Having caught Rye out red-handed in the possession of a pair of GRP cherubim, I wasn’t going to be so easily taken in again. I regarded it with a policeman’s mistrustful eye and saw fiberglass cherry blossom, fiberglass cobblestones, toppling facades of fiberglass Tudor, all protected from the sea by a dinky fiberglass castle.

At the bottom of Mermaid Street, I found my suspicions gratifyingly confirmed. Housed in a disused timber warehouse
there was the Rye Town Model, a perfect scale replica of the place, beam for beam and eave for eave, with a
son et lumière
show to clue the visitor in on the town’s history. It was an enthralling piece of artifice in its way, though I was wrong about the materials used in its construction: the houses were made of polystyrene, the cobbled streets of enameled tapioca.

It was also redundant, for Rye itself was a model town: this was a model of a model, a picture within a picture, the second step of an infinite regression. At the end you’d need a spectroscope to examine what was happening, and all you’d see would be zillions of tiny subatomic tourists swarming out of tiny subatomic buses and congealing round a particle of half-timbered antimatter.

Rye had found that there was a profit to be made out of its own dereliction. The town had been in decline for so long that the picturesque business of slowly crumbling on its hill had become its only form of conspicuous activity. It was crumbling when Defoe visited it in the 1720s, and had crumbled a bit more when Henry James, living in Lamb House, wrote in 1901 of the “small romance of Rye” with “its old browns that turn to red and old reds which turn to purple.” “These tones of evening,” James wrote, “are now pretty much all that Rye has left to give.”

Rye had spun its evening out to such a length that dawn was now showing on its horizon. In 1982, there was a little light industry on the unvisited fringes of the town, a little commercial fishing, a little shipping going in and out of its harbor—and for the first time in several hundred years Rye was in business on a grand scale. Its very failure as a town had emerged as a marketable commodity for which there was an apparently unlimited international demand. Stagnation and decay, smartly painted and packaged, were selling like hot cakes.

Looking at the Rye Town Model, I thought how horribly well it might be made to work as a representation of Britain at large. Britain too was in a state of industrial decline. Its
manufacturing machinery was antique. The country’s best hope lay, according to the government, in making a rapid shift from “high tech” through “low tech” to no tech at all. Making things in Britain was too expensive and cumbersome a process now. The “service industry” was the coming thing.

Seen in this light, Rye was a solution of sorts to a national problem; it was in the vanguard of industry. Rye was nothing but services, with jobs for waiters, salesclerks, ticket sellers, P.R. men, holiday home leasers, hoteliers, coach drivers, tour guides. Its manufactures were most prominently represented by pottery which might as easily have been thrown in a camp of Ancient Britons and by derivative little watercolors clipped into spray-gilt plastic frames. Not much tech there.

The Rye Town Model showed how you could turn almost anything that didn’t work into a museum piece. Its most startling application came up during the miners’ strike of 1984, in a parliamentary debate on pit closures. One Conservative member saw no problem: it was easy, he said—just close the unproductive pits and reopen them as museums. Redundant miners could be retrained as tour guides and conduct coach parties down the shafts, through the tunnels and round the exhausted coal faces. It struck me as a weird vision. The miners, presumably, would have their faces artfully blacked with greasepaint, wear Davy lamps and carry canaries around in cages. Intrigued by the Swiftian simplicity of this proposal, I rang the National Coal Board to ask them if they were taking it seriously.

The press officer was huffy. There was, he said, nothing at all original in that idea; the N.C.B. had been doing it for years. There were four closed pits now functioning as “living museums”—two in South Wales, one in Stoke-on-Trent and one in Northumberland. Yes, certainly they were planning more.

His irritably matter-of-fact tone (of course the Coal Board is involved in the tourist industry—didn’t you know
that
?) pointed up a truth about tourism which the British were doing their best to ignore. Depending on their point of view, they saw the tourists either as disfiguring scar tissue
on an otherwise healthy body or as a happy extra, like marzipan and icing on a cake. The tourists were neither of these things. They were as central, as organic to our period as the steel and cotton mills of the eighteenth century. Like the mills, they were beginning to change everyone’s pattern of life and alter the basic fabric of the country.

In 1982, nearly thirteen million foreign tourists descended on Britain, and their numbers were climbing by a steady million a year. There were nineteen million households in the country, so by 1989 one might expect to see a foreign tourist for every single dwelling in the land. There would be no council flat without a quiet American, no suburban semi without a shutter-happy Japanese. Streams of buses would shunt them from Anne Hathaway’s Cottage to ruined car factories in Dagenham and Oxford, to defunct coal mines, closed-down universities, deserted high-rise buildings … as far as I could see, there was no logical end to the possible merrying of England on the Rye Town model.

This marketing of a whole country as a historical facade is being ingeniously managed by the P.R. industry. The posters issued by the British Tourist Authority neatly state the terms of sale. For every major client there is a different Britain on offer. The poster designed for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states shows what looks like a vastly intricate mosque, and it took me several seconds to work out that it is actually a picture of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. Below this there are two twinned images: one of a Daimler illegally parked in Knightsbridge outside Harrods, the other of a woman bargaining with a smiling shopkeeper over a counter laden with goodies. In Arabic, Britain is a Moslem country with a famously well-stocked souk.

A poster designed for exhibition in Europe and the United States takes an altogether different line. Beneath an improbably cloudless sky, a dozen friendly Britons, young and old, are taking refreshment on the greensward outside a thatched and timbered pub. They hold tankards of mild ale, and are simultaneously playing skittles and helping themselves to generous slices from a great cartwheel of
cheese. A space has been left in the front of the picture for the tourist to perch on the dry-stone wall and join in this rustic fun.

Both posters make an important splash of what the Tourist Authority calls “Britain’s scenery.” The word is deadly accurate. The green and rolling hills, the packhorse bridges spanning silver brooks, are theatrical decorations, painted hangings to charm the eye. When people step out from behind the scenery, they are by definition actors, performing a play for the tourists’ entertainment.
Britain
goes into italic type because it is the title of a jovial masque. The
dramatis personae
of
Britain
are types and humors—figures like the genial Mine Host, the Old Salt, the Apple-Cheeked Old Lady At The Village Shop, the Country Squire and a complete fairy-story set of Princes, Queens, Princesses, Duchesses and Dukes.

It is, as Plato argued when he banned the profession from his Republic, a dangerous thing to treat people as actors because they tend to lose any secure sense of their own authenticity. The British had noticed this clearly enough in other people’s countries, had seen the Costa Brava, Majorca, the Cyclades all “hopelessly spoiled” by mass tourism, with sweet old fishermen and colorful
taverna
keepers transformed, almost overnight, into fast-talking sharpies and masters of the quick buck. They were slower to see that Britain itself was spoiled in exactly the same way by exactly the same process.

It showed on people’s faces—the cold glaze of boredom at the prospect of dealing with yet another bloody stranger.

“Excuse me, but can you tell me which way—”

“I’m not an information bureau, mate.”

The English were now walking through their parts with frank resentment. They were tired to death of being polite, of smiling while their pictures were taken, of answering damn-fool questions, of being peered at and poked and condescended to in their roles as Friendly Natives. They were friendly no longer. In these pretty towns on the south coast, they carried rudeness to the point of open challenge. They took their revenge on the tourists by marking up their
bills and serving them with a dismissive I’m-as-good-as-you-are slamming down of plates on tables.

“Can I have the bill, please?”

“When I’m ready.”

They advertised their snappishness at being so intruded on by strangers with a forest of surly, prohibitive notices, erected at every opportunity, in gardens, shops, pubs, fields, parks. No Children, No Pets, No Picnics, No Credit, No Photographs, No Beachwear, No Coaches, No Loitering, No Bare Feet, No Games, No Transistors, No Fishing, No Change Given, No
Dice!

A few hundred yards from Strand Quay I found a pub to which no tourists were ever drawn. It stood on the edge of the 1950s housing development where the working class of Rye lived in convenient exile from their old, unsanitary and now hugely valuable cottages in the center of town. It didn’t have a single oak beam, or a horse brass, or a yard of ale. A Space Invaders machine chattered to itself in a corner. The dart board, enclosed in an old tractor tire, was leaking its stuffing like a crippled sofa. At the bar three elderly men were mooning silently over their beer. They looked up as I opened the door, then looked quickly back inside their glasses. I was a trespasser.

“Bloody tourists,” I said, trying to ingratiate myself with the company. “You can’t move up there for the tourists.”

“Ur.”

“I thought I was in Tokyo.”

“Ur.” Then, warily, “What
you
here for, then?”

“Business,” I said determinedly. “I work with boats.”

“Ur.”

There was a silence of several minutes before the man sitting nearest to me finally turned his narrow face aside from his glass. He was wearing a very old suit and a set of very new teeth. “Them buggers,” he said. “Japs. It’s all bloody Japs now. And French. We got French up there. Froggie bastards. And Eyeties and Yanks. All the fuckin’ nations. They’ve even got Russians up there—
Russians!”

“Someone must be making a packet,” I said.

“Not me, worse luck. Not me.”

“I bet there’s a few rich buggers creaming it off in Rye.”

“Ur.”

On the next pint he unbuttoned. He’d just turned eighty. His name was Les. He was alone. His wife had died, he’d fallen out with his daughter. His father had died young of a fit of hiccups (“It were terrible—the noise”).

“I were born fifty years too late,” he said, and laughed, a miserable, wheezy, confidential, graveyard laugh.

He never went up the Mint or the High Street now, he said. He couldn’t recognize the town as he had known it. “Them antiquey shops and tea shops—they’re like yo-yos. Here today, gone tomorrow. I won’t go there.”

“What was there before the tourists came?”

“Butchers,” he said warmly. “They had a lot of butchers up there. With these what-d’you-callums—these
carcasses—
hanging up on hooks. Whole sides of meat. Pigs. Cows. Mutton. You’d smell ’em a mile off, the butchers up there.
Yur
. There was blood on the floor of them, used to run out into the street, down the cobbles.”

He was remembering Rye as it had once been with his nose. There were the wood and coal yards … the gasworks (he dwelt fondly on the gasworks) … the steam trawlers tied up to the quay.

“It was all
Captain
then. Captain this, Captain that. There were Captain Smith … Captain Shore … they was all captains then.”

It was a nostalgia for life itself, this reminiscent savoring of the farty smell of the gasworks, the taste of coal-fired steam, the reek of butchered flesh. “They bombed the gasworks in the bloody war,” Les said, “and then the bloody tourists come.”

I asked him if he remembered Mr. James in Lamb House. “Yur,” he said. “He had a girl in to do his typing for him. In the Garden House there. I’d hear the typing when I were walking past. She were fast at it, too. All clickety click, you never heard her stop. They bloody bombed the Garden House in the war and all.”

“And Mr. James himself?”

“He did books.” It was evidently an activity that Les had
little time for—not a proper art like high-speed typing. “It’s a pity old Burgess Noakes is dead, you could have had a proper talk with him.”

“Who?”

“Burgess Noakes?” Les stared at me as if he’d revealed an astounding gap in my knowledge. “Burgess Noakes. He were Mr. James’s batman. He was a wonderful bloke, Burgess Noakes was. Tell a story? He’d make you laugh. Went all over the bloody world. Seen every bloody thing. He went to
Umurrica
. Umurrica. New York … all them places, Burgess Noakes was there. He took Mr. James with him to Umurrica too.”

Sitting out in the cockpit of
Sussex Rowan
, Nick O’Brien gave me a lesson in the use of the sextant. I practiced plucking the sun out of the sky and planting it on rooftops, since there was no true horizon on which to rest it. It was a neat conjuring trick, all done by mirrors, and I liked the illusion of being able to tamper freely with the structure of the universe. Up till now I had treated my own sextant as an amusing toy; under Nick’s tuition, I sweated through the mathematics of position-finding, rooting out the sun’s Greenwich Hour Angle and Declination from the tables in the almanac. After half an hour I reckoned that I could probably take a competent Noon Sight; at the end of two hours I was fuddled by the intricacies of Azimuth Angle Z and whether intercepts were Towards or Away.