Coasting (10 page)

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 English 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:

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.

The scene is the quay at Peel, or Port Erin, or Laxey. A fisherman has just unloaded from his boat a shallow bucket full of crabs. All round the edge of the bucket the crabs are showing their claws and trying to scramble out. A comeover approaches the fisherman and tells him that he ought to get a bigger, taller bucket or he’ll lose half his crabs.

“Nay,” the fisherman says. “Them’s all right. Them’s Manx crabs. As soon as one gets his leg cocked over the edge of bucket, t’others all gang together and drag him down again.”

The story always ended in a wheezy burst of self-congratulatory laughter. To tell it at all was to demonstrate that you were a cynical Manx realist. It was a fine and flexible story. You could use it indiscriminately against Manxmen who talked about leaving the Island and going
Across, against comeovers, against anyone who got ideas above his station, against anyone vain and ambitious enough to pursue an ideal of excellence which wasn’t recognized by the Island. The story in itself constituted a first-class argument for staying put and saying nowt. Either that, or be thought pretentious by the gang and get dragged back into the bucket. The tellers of the story always happily identified themselves with the gang.

It was a comeover who told me that she disliked the Manx because they were so “provincial.” She was quite wrong. The Manx were not in the least provincial; they were profoundly insular—and the distinction is essential.
Provincial
is Flaubert’s rancorous little market towns aping last year’s Paris manner and last year’s Paris fashion; it is Chekhov’s rusticated sisters sighing for Moscow. The Manx aped no one else and they sighed for nowhere. Because visibility on the Irish Sea is usually rather poor, on nine days out of ten the Manx could see no other land except their own, and they managed to behave as if the outside world were an intermittent mirage, no more than the hallucination of Mount Skiddaw on a clear day.

Propped up against the quay wall at Port St. Mary in my boat, with the tide out and another night falling, it was easy to become infected by the air of resentfulness, belittlement and claustrophobia that clung to the Island like its fogs. The floor yawned at a treacherous angle under my feet. T. E. Brown and Canon Stenning (“The pre-history of the Island may be summarised in brief …”) kept on sliding away across the saloon table. The oil lamps, tilting in their gimbals, were starting to blacken the ceiling of my tipsy room. Every sixty seconds the siren of Langness Lighthouse let off two long farts in the mist. I felt trapped like a crab in a bucket.

It was difficult to keep awake in the darkened wheelhouse with the pinpoint of light monotonously picking out the same old numbers. I catnapped for minutes at a time, then snapped awake in panic, expecting to see the rusty plates
and rivets of a cargo ship looming intimately overhead. But the sea stayed empty except for its charted ration of distant flashing lights. The mountainous coast of Wales showed faintly to the east—a ragged, blacker stain on a black satin sky.

The wind started at about 2
A.M
. First it was a friendly wind, blowing from behind me out of the northwest. It felt like a Force 3 on Admiral Beaufort’s scale:

Yawning, I pottered out on deck to pull up sails. An hour later, I was pulling them down again because the boat was lurching, surging, corkscrewing before the wind. Clipped into a safety harness, I crouched in the bow with stray ropes flailing round my ears, trying to gather in the recalcitrant, banging mass of polyester. Fighting off a flock of angry swans is no fun at the best of times, and the bow of a small boat in a gathering sea is a horrible place to have to do it. It plummets under you, ten or fifteen feet at a time; you go down with it, but your stomach stays up somewhere over your head, and the swans keep on coming.

It was too dark to see the shape of the sea; all that was visible were the streaks of phosphorescent white, arrowing away from the boat like lightning forks. The wind, I reckoned, must be close to a Force 7 now:

The only sail I left up was the little triangular mizzen over the wheelhouse. Working like a rigid keel stuck up into the wind, it helped to steady the swoops and rolls as I plugged on under engine.

Though the wind was blowing from behind, the tide was coming from in front, and the boat was making dismally slow progress over the ground. For an hour I watched the
light on Bardsey Island, which seemed to have got stuck in the port shrouds, as the waves grew steadily bigger and more tightly packed. Inch by inch, the light shifted until it passed the shrouds and drew level with the wheelhouse.

The dawn was gray and rainy. The sea was steep and fiercely corrugated, although the waves were not nearly so high as I had imagined them to be in the dark. When the boat struck them, one could feel its oak frame jar and recoil as if it had hit a ridge of concrete. Two miles off, the plump and rain-swept figure of Bardsey Island was wearing an unseasonable white skirt of spray.