Free The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux

Hastings flattened into St. Leonards-on-Sea, Rooney said, "This is as far as I go. It's all geriatrics from here to Land's End!"
    St. Leonards was dull and colorless, full of low, forbidding houses in which plants with dusty leaves were arranged in waist-high windows. It began to rain hard, and though St. Leonards was slightly improved by the blur of the downpour, I did not linger there, but instead took the coastal train two stops to Bexhill-on-Sea. When I got to Bexhill I realized that St. Leonards had been seedy.
    "Like all the larger English watering-places, it is simply a little London
super mare.
" What Henry James wrote of Hastings and St. Leonards was truer now of Bexhill-on-Sea. "With their long, warm seafront and their multitude of small cheap comforts and conveniences, [they] offer a kind of résumé of middle-class English civilization and of advantages of which it would ill become an American to make light."
    A résumé of middle-class English civilization was a High Street lined with shops selling sensible practical merchandise—plain food and brown clothes; not many restaurants but plenty of tea shops; a busy bus route; semidetached houses, with hedges and pebbledash façades; a park bench every twenty yards; a bowling green; a severe seafront—no fun fair visible, and few public houses; and a large elderly population of shuffling Tories.
    And there was the De La Warr Pavilion, where, on the various decks and verandas, the very old people sat in chairs with blankets in their laps staring out to sea, like people on a cruise, resting between meals. They drank tea, rattling their china cups on trembling saucers. They read the latest Falklands news without blinking: they had been through two world wars and may well have been in this very place when Adolf Hitler stood gloating at them through binoculars from the heights of the French coast.
    If Bexhill-on-Sea was a résumé of one English class, the De La Warr Pavilion—moored there on the seafront like an ocean liner—was a résumé of Bexhill-on-Sea. Its lounges smelled of sickness and liniment, it echoed with lilting organ music, its tea-drinkers looked anguished; and yet it was a good warm place where I could sit comfortably (I rented a deck chair) and write up the diary I had neglected since before Hastings. I bought a cup of tea, like the others, and a chocolate biscuit; I stared at the sea and, writing my diary, I felt eighty years old but very safe and dry. It seemed clear to me that once an English person had reached Bexhill-on-Sea, he had no intention of going any farther. This was, so to speak, the edge of the cliff. That was why the town was filled with dull comforts and warm rooms and large windows and busy churches. No one raised his voice here. There was no need. It was a monotonous drone of voices, an unvarying buzz of sibilant whispers. Nothing was urgent. People came here and admitted they were old and spent the rest of their lives looking after each other. On the English coast, the geriatric communities like Bexhill were almost Utopian in the way the oldies cooperated in the struggle against aging.
    Far from making light of Bexhill, as Henry James feared Americans might be prone to do in a watering place of this kind, I felt I was taking it too seriously. I wandered around the Pavilion and saw that there was an entertainment every day—a show, a band concert, a ballet, or an exhibition. That day there was an Antiques Fair, and that night the East Sussex Keep Fit Rally, and the next day the Sussex Opera and Ballet Society Weekend. And I had just missed the Warbleton and Buxted Band on the De La Warr Terrace ("deckchairs 30 pence").
    I struck up a conversation with one Albert Crapstone, a deaf retired gent who had come here from Tunbridge Wells to die. He had a
Daily Express
on his lap, full of Falklands action. We talked about this, and then he said, "You're a Yank," and stiffened.
    "And you came in, late as