Free The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux Page B

outside Eastbourne, not far from Beachy Head. Mountain climbers often practiced climbing the sheer wall of Beachy Head, and it was also a favorite spot for suicides—thirty in the past two years. There was a valley just west of where I was staying in which ardent socialists had settled and become landowners and country squires. They were union men or politicians who, after a career of howling at the rich, had been awarded knighthoods and appointed to directorships and had become well-to-do themselves. They lived in manor houses or on large farms, and some, amazingly, still espoused views that were in contradiction to the way they lived. It was a curious combination of secrecy, hypocrisy, and the sort of muddle that enabled an Englishman to hold two opposing views in his head. And it demonstrated that the best way to become a baron or an earl or a knight of the Garter was to spend half a lifetime singing "The Red Flag" and becoming a conspicuous irritation to the Establishment. It was an easy transition from any smoke-filled room of whining conspirators to a seat in the House of Lords. The English aristocracy had nearly always been recruited from the ranks of flatterers, cutthroats, boyfriends, political pirates, and people of very conceited ambition. So it was not so strange that this blue valley on the coast of East Sussex was populated by wine-bibbing lords who had formerly been Marxist union men named Jones and Brown.
    I set off for Brighton on foot, starting at Birling Gap. The tide was high, so I could not walk along the beach. I was not sorry about this. I was spared the possibility of being embayed or of having the cliffs fall down and brain me—they were very crumbly cliffs. I walked in bright sunshine across the Seven Sisters to Seaford. The turf on these seven bluffs was very spongy and green. There were sheep in the meadows that lay parallel to this high part of the coast. Their bells clunked as they jerked their heads up to look at me. And there were gulls on the cliffs. Gulls squawk, but they also bark, scream, shriek, yap, whimper, and crow. Sometimes, roosting, they whine. I also heard them mew like cats. They are stupid hungry birds, and there was a common species on the British coast that had heads so black and hooded that they looked like hangmen.
    There were rabbits on the Seven Sisters. They were small cute creatures. They had burrowed into the seventh sister, eaten much of her grass, and in this way had loosened the whole bluff by allowing the rain and erosion to take hold. The little creatures hippity-hopped all over the bluff, and they were in the process of destroying one of the most beautiful cliffs on the coast—the bunnies had just about brought it down.
    I came to the Cuckmere River. That was a problem. The South Downs Way detours around it; there was no way of getting across the wide wet estuary. I walked along the east bank of the Cuckmere River, past World War Two pillboxes and gun emplacements, and herons and swans. Then over the bridge and across Seaford Head to Seaford proper, which was a nice town, once full of prep schools. Most of the schools were now closed, and Seaford was regarded as something of a backwater, overshadowed by Newhaven on the green River Ouse. Virginia Woolf had drowned herself a few miles upstream in 1941.
    I walked on, through Newhaven and up the bluff to Peacehaven, until it started to rain. Peacehaven was solid with bungalows on little plots with just room enough in front for a garden gnome and a square yard of crazy paving. I caught a bus here. It swayed on the high cliff road, past the open space that marks the Zero Meridian, past Telescombe Cliffs, where, under a sky of yapping gulls, all the sewage of Brighton and Hove empties into the English Channel. And then into Rottingdean.
    In Rottingdean "in 1882 there had been but one daily bus from Brighton, which took forty minutes," Rudyard Kipling wrote in his autobiography,
Something of Myself.
"And when a