chapter Twenty-Seven
I HAD BIG PLANS FOR THE MORNING: I WAS GOING TO GO TO THE BANK, buy some plastic vomit, have a look at the local art gallery, perhaps take another stroll along the lovely River Ness, but I woke late and had no time to do anything but fumble my way into clothes, check out of the hotel and waddle in a sweat to the station. Beyond Inverness trains run infrequently - just three times a day to Thurso and Wick - so I couldn't afford to be late.
As it happened, the train was waiting, humming quietly, and left right on time. We slid out of Inverness against a backdrop of round mountains and the cold flatness of the Beauly Firth. The train was soon rattling along at a fair old clip. There were more passengers this time, and there was a trolley service again - all credit to BR -but no-one wanted anything from it because the other passengers were almost all pensioners and they had brought their own provisions.
I bought a tandoori chicken sandwich and a coffee. How far things have come. I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine. And anyway you couldn't buy one because the buffet car was nearly always closed. And now here I was sitting eating a tandoori chicken sandwich and drinking a creditable cup of coffee brought to me in my seat by a friendly and presentable young man on a two-carriage train across the Highlands.
Here's an interesting statistic for you, which is kind of boring but must be taken in. Rail infrastructure spending per person per year in Europe is £20 in Belgium and Germany, £3I in France, more than £-50 m Switzerland, and in Britain a slightly less than munificent £5- Britain spends less per capita on rail improvements than any other country in the European Union except Greece and Ireland. Even Portugal spends more. And the thing is, despite this paucity of support you actually have an excellent train service in this country, all things considered. Trains are now much cleaner than they used to be and staff generally more patient and helpful. Ticket people always say please and thank you, bless them, and you can eat the food.
So I ate my tandoori chicken sandwich and drank my cup of coffee with pleasure and gratification, and passed the time between nibbles watching a white-haired couple at a table across the way delving among their travelling fare, setting out little plastic boxes of pork pies and hard-boiled eggs, lifting out flasks, unscrewing lids, finding little salt and pepper shakers. It's amazing, isn't it, how you can give a couple of old people a canvas holdall, an assortment of Tupperware containers and a Thermos flask and they can amuse . themselves for hours. They worked away with well-ordered precision and total silence, as if they had been preparing for this event for years. When the food was laid out, they ate for four minutes with great delicacy, then spent most of the rest of the morning quietly packing everything away. They looked very happy.
They reminded me in an odd but heartwarming way of my mother, as she is something of a Tupperware devotee herself. She doesn't picnic on trains, since there are no passenger trains in her part of the country any more, but she does like to put stray items of food in plastic containers of various sizes and file them away in the fridge. It's an odd thing about mothers generally, I believe. As soon as you leave home they merrily throw away everything that you cherished through childhood and adolescence - your valuable collection of baseball cards, a complete set of Playboys from 1966-75, your high-school yearbooks - but give them half a peach or a spoonful of leftover peas and they will put it in a Tupperware container at the back of the fridge and treasure it more or less for ever.
And so the long ride to Thurso passed. We rattled on through an increasingly remote and barren landscape, treeless and cold, with heather clinging to the hillsides like lichen on rock and thinly scattered with sheep that took fright and scampered off when the train passed. Now and then we passed through winding valleysspeckled with farms that looked romantic and pretty from a distance, but bleak and comfortless up close. Mostly they were smallholdings with lots of rusted tin everywhere - tin sheds, tin hen huts, tin fences - looking rickety and weatherbattered. We were entering one of those weird zones, always a sign of remoteness from the known world, where nothing is ever thrown away. Every farmyard was cluttered with piles of cast-offs, as if the owner thought that one day he might need 132 half-rotted fenceposts, a ton of broken bricks and the shell of a 1964 Ford Zodiac.
Two hours after leaving Inverness, we came to a place called Golspie. It was a good-sized town with big council estates and winding streets of those grey pebbledash bungalows that seem to have been modelled on public toilets and for which they have a strange fondness in Scotland, but no sign of factories or workplaces. What, I wondered, do all the people in all those houses do for a living in a place like Golspie? Then came Brora, another good-sized community, with a seafront but no harbour, as far as I could see, and no factories. What do they do in these little places in the middle of nowhere?
After that, the landscape became quite empty, with neither farmhouses nor field animals. We rode for a seeming eternity through a great Scottish void, full of miles of nothingness, until, in the middle of this great emptiness, we came to a place called Forsinard, with two houses, a railway station and an inexplicably large hotel. What a strange lost world this was. And then at long last we arrived in Thurso, the northernmost town on the British mainland, the end of the line in every sense of the word. I stepped from the little station on slightly unsteady legs and set off down the long main street towards the centre.
I had no idea what to expect, but my initial impressions were favourable. It seemed a tidy, well-ordered place, comfortable rather than showy, considerably larger than I had expected, and with several small hotels. I took a room in the Pentland Hotel, which seemed a nice enough place in a deathly quiet, end-of-the-world sort of way. I accepted a key from the pleasant receptionist, conveyed my things to a distant room reached through spooky, winding corridors, then went out to have a look around.
The big event in Thurso, according to civic records, was in 1834 when Sir John Sinclair, a local worthy, coined the term 'statistics' in the town, though things have calmed down pretty considerably since. When he wasn't contriving neologisms, Sinclair also extensively rebuilt the town, endowing it with a splendid library in cautiously baroque style and a small square with a little park in the middle. Around the square today stands a modest district of small, useful, friendly looking shops - chemists and butchers, a wine merchant, a ladies' boutique or two, a scattering of banks, lots of hair salons (why is there always an abundance of hair salons in little out-of-the-way communities?) - pretty well everything, in short you would hope to find in a model community. There was a small' old-fashioned Woolworth's, but apart from that and the banks, nearly everything else appeared to be locally owned, which gave Thurso a nice, homey feel. It had the air of a real, self-contained community. I liked it very much.
I pottered about for a bit among the shopping streets, then followed some back lanes down to the waterfront, where there was a lonely fish warehouse marooned in an acre of empty car park and a vast empty beach with thunderous crashing waves. The air was fresh and vigorously abundant in the blowy way of the seaside, and the world was bathed in an ethereal northern light that gave the sea a curious luminescence - indeed, gave everything an odd, faint bluish cast - that intensified my sense of being a long way from home.
At the far end of the beach there stood a spectral tower, a fragment of old castle, and I set off to investigate. A rocky stream stood between me and it, so I had to backtrack to a footbridge some distance from the beach, then pick my way along a muddy path liberally strewn with litter. The castle tower was derelict, its lower windows and door openings bricked over. A notice beside it announced that the coastal path was closed because of soil erosion. I stood for a long time by this little headland gazing out to sea, then turned to face the town and wondered what to do next.
Thurso was to be my home for the next three days and I wasn't at all sure how I was going to fill such an expanse of empty time. Between the smell of sea air and the sense of utter remoteness, I had a moment of quiet panic at finding myself alone here at the top of the earth, where there was no-one to talk to and the most exciting diversion was an old bricked-up tower. I wandered back into town the way I had come and, for want of anything better to do, had another pottering look in the shop windows. And then, outside a greengrocer's, it happened - something that sooner or later always happens to me on a long trip away from home. It is a moment I dread.I started asking myself unanswerable questions.
Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I've seen it in others often. Some solitary travellers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think no-one else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering for an uncomfortably long period before finally departing. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhoea. I ask private, internal questions - scores and scores of them - for which I cannot supply answers. And so as I stood by a greengrocer's in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? and I knew that the process had started.
It's not a bad question, as these things go. I mean to say, why do they call it a grapefruit? I don't know about you, but if someone presented me with an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, the size of a cannonball and tasted sour I don't believe I would think: Well, you know, it rather puts me in mind of a grape.
The trouble is that once these things start there is no stopping them. A couple of doors away was a shop that sold jumpers and I thought: Why do the British call them jumpers? I've actually been wondering this for years, off and on, usually in lonely places like Thurso, and I would sincerely like to know. Do they make you want to jump? Do you think to yourself when you put one on in the morning: Now not only shall I be warm all day, no small consideration in a nation where central heating still cannot be assumed, but if I should be required to do some jumping I shall be suitably attired.
And so it went on. I proceeded through the streets under a meteor shower of interrogations. Why do they call them milk floats? They don't float at all. Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that our nose is running'} (Mine slides.) Who ate the first oyster and how on earth did anyone ever figure out that ambergris would make an excellent fixative for perfumes?
When this happens, I know from years of experience, it takes a special distraction to shock the mind from this solitary torment,He fortunately Thurso had one. On a side-street, as I was just beginning to wonder why we say we are head over heels when we rehappy when in fact our head normally is over our heels, I happened on an extraordinary little establishment called the Fountain Restaurant, which offered three complete but different menus - a Chinese menu, an Indian menu and a 'European' menu. Thurso evidently couldn't maintain three separate restaurants, so it had one restaurant offering three kinds of cuisines.
Immediately taken with this concept, I went in and was shown to a table by a pretty young lady who left me with a menu that ran to many pages. It was apparent from the title page that all three kinds of meals were cooked by a single Scottish chef, so I pored through the entries hoping to find 'sweet-and-sour oatcakes' or 'haggis vindaloo', but the dishes were strictly conventional. I opted for Chinese, then sat back and enjoyed a state of blissful mindlessness.
When it came, the food tasted, I have to say, like a Chinese meal cooked by a Scottish chef - which is not to say that it wasn't good. It was just curiously unlike any Chinese meal I had ever had. The more I ate it the more I liked it. At least it was different, and that, by this stage of the trip, was all I craved.
When I emerged, I felt much better. Lacking anything better to do, I strolled back down to the vicinity of the fish warehouse to take the evening air. As I stood there in the darkness, listening to the pounding surf and gazing contentedly at the great starry dome of sky above me, I thought, Who decided that Hereford and Worcester would make a zippy name for a county? and I knew then that it was time for bed.
In the morning, I was roused early by my alarm clock and rose reluctantly, for I was having my favourite dream - the one where I own a large, remote island, not unlike those off this section of Scottish coast, to which I invite carefully selected people, like the guy who invented the Christmas tree lights that go out when one bulb blows, the person in charge of escalator maintenance at Heathrow Airport, nearly anyone who has ever written a user's manual for a personal computer, and of course John Selwyn Gummer, let them loose with a very small amount of survival rations, and then go out with braying dogs and mercilessly hunt them down - but then I remembered that I had a big, exciting day in front of me. I was going to John O'Groats. I had been hearing about John O'Groats for years, but I had notthe faintest idea of what it would be like. It seemed exotic beyond words and I ached to see it. So I breakfasted in a spirit of keenness at the Pentland Hotel, the only person in the dining room, and then repaired at the stroke of nine to William Dunnet's, the local Ford dealer, where I had arranged by phone some days earlier to hire a car for the day, since there was no other way to get to John O'Groats at this time of year.
It took the man in the showroom a moment to recall the arrangement. 'Ah, you're the chap from down south,' he said, remembering, which threw me a little. It isn't often you hear Yorkshire referred to as down south.
'Isn't every place down south from here?' I asked.
'Yes. Why, yes, I suppose it is,' he said as if I had stumbled on a rare profundity.
He was a friendly fellow - everyone in Thurso is friendly - and while he scratched away at the voluminous paperwork that would put me in charge of two tons of dangerous metal, we chatted amiably about life in this remote outpost of civilization. He told me it took sixteen hours to drive to London, not that anyone much ever did. For most people, Inverness, four hours to the south by car, was the southern limit of the known world.
It seemed like months since I had had a conversation, and I babbled away at him with questions. What did people in Thurso do for a living? How did the castle come to be derelict? Where did they go if they wanted to buy a sofa, see a movie, have a Chinese meal not cooked by a Scotsman or otherwise experience something beyond the modest range of pleasures available locally?
Thus I learned that the local economy was underpinned by the Dounreay nuclear reactor down the road, that the castle had once been a thing of well-maintained beauty but had been allowed to fall into decrepitude by an eccentric owner, that Inverness was the seat of all forms of excitement. I must have betrayed a flutter of astonishment at this because he smiled and said drily, 'Well, it has a Marks 8c Spencer.'
Then he took me outside, sat me in the driver's seat of a Ford Thesaurus (or something; I'm not very good at car names), gave me a quick rundown on all the many moveable stalks and dashboard buttons, and then stood by with a kind of nervous frozen smile while I activated controls that made the seatback jettison away from my back, the boot pop open and the windscreen wipers go into monsoon mode. And then, with a worrisome grinding of gears and several jerky movements, I blazed a trail from the car park by a novel and lavishly bumpy route and took to the road.
Moments later, for such is Thurso's diminutive size, I was out on the open highway and cruising with a light heart towards John O'Groats. It was an arrestingly empty landscape, with nothing much but fields of billowy winter-bleached grass running down to a choppy sea and the hazy Orkneys beyond, but the feeling of spaciousness was exhilarating and for the first time in years I felt comparatively safe behind a wheel. There was absolutely nothing to crash into.
You really are on the edge of a great deal of emptiness when you ' reach the far north of Scotland. Only 27,000 people live in the whole of Caithness - roughly the population of Haywards Heath or Eastleigh in an area considerably larger than most English counties. More than half of that population is accounted for by just two towns, Thurso and Wick, and none of it by John O'Groats since John O'Groats isn't a community at all but just a place to stop and buy postcards and ice-creams.
It is named for Jan de Groot, a Dutchman who ran a ferry service from there to somewhere else (Amsterdam if he had any sense) in the fifteenth century. He charged 4d a trip apparently, and they will tell you in these parts that that sum became known ever after as a groat, but alas it is a pathetic fiction. It is more probable that Groot was named Groat after the money rather than it for he. But anyway who gives a shit?
Today John O'Groats consists of a capacious car park, a little harbour, a lonely white hotel, a couple of ice-cream kiosks and three or four shops selling postcards, sweaters and videos by a singer named Tommy Scott. I thought there was supposed to be a famous finger-sign telling you how far it was to Sydney and Los Angeles, but I couldn't find it; perhaps they take it in out of season so that people like me don't carry it off as a souvenir. Only one of the shops was open. I went in and was surprised to find that there were three middle-aged ladies working there, which seemed a bit excessive as I was obviously the only tourist for 400 miles. The ladies were exceedingly cheerful and chipper and greeted me warmly with those wonderful Highland accents - so clinically precise and yet so dulcet. I unfolded some jumpers so that they would have something to do after I left, watched open-mouthed a demo video for Tommy Scott singing perky Scottish tunes on various blowy headlands (I'm saying nothing), bought some postcards, had a lingering cup of coffee, chatted with the ladies about the weather, then stepped out into thegusty car park and realized that I had about exhausted the possibilities presented by John O'Groats.
I wandered around above the harbour, peered with hooded hands into the windows of the little museum, which was closed till spring, looked appreciatively at the view across the Pentland Firth to Stroma and the Old Man of Hoy, and then wandered back to the car. You probably know this already, but John O'Groats is not the northernmost point of the Scottish mainland. That distinction belongs to a spot called Dunnet Head, five or six miles away down a nearby single-lane road, so I went there now. Dunnet Head offers even less to the world in the way of diversions than John O'Groats, but it has a handsome unmanned lighthouse and sensational sea views, and a nice sense of being a long way from anywhere.
I stood on the gusty eminence gazing at the view for a long time, waiting for some profundity to steal over me, since this was the end of the line, as far as I was going. Part of me longed to catch a ferry to the outward islands, to follow the scattered outcrops of stone all the way up to distant Shetland, but I was out of time and anyway there didn't seem a great deal of need. Whatever its bleak and airy charms, Shetland would still be just another piece of Britain, with the same shops, the same television programmes, the same people in the same Marks & Spencer cardigans. I didn't find this depressing at all - rather the contrary - but I didn't feel any pressing need to see it just now. It would still be there next time.
I had one more port of call in my hired Ford. Six or seven miles south of Thurso lies the village of Halkirk, now forgotten but famous during the Second World War as a deeply, deeply unpopular posting for British soldiers on account of its remoteness and the reputed unfriendliness of the locals. The soldiers sang a charming little refrain that went
This f*cking town's a f*cking cuss No f*cking trams, no f*cking bus, Nobody cares for f*cking us In f*cking Halkirk No f*cking sport, no f*cking games. No f*cking fun. The f*cking dames Won't even give their f*cking names In f*cking Halkirk and carries on in a similarly affectionate spirit for another ten stanzas. (In answer to the obvious question, I'd looked earlier and, no it wasn't one of Tommy Scott's standards.) So I went to Halkirk now, along the lonely B874. Well, there was nothing much to Halkirk - just a couple of streets on a road to nowhere, with a butcher's, a builder's merchants, two pubs, a little grocery, and a village hall with a war memorial. There was no sign that Halkirk had ever been more than a dreary little interruption to the general emptiness around it, but the memorial contained the names of sixty-three dead from the First World War (nine of them named Sinclair and five named Sutherland) and eighteen from the Second World War.
You could see for miles across grassy plains from the edges of the village, but there was no sign anywhere of tumbledown army barracks. In fact, there was no sign that there had ever been anything in this district but endless grassy plains. I went into the grocery in investigative mood. It was the strangest grocery - a large shed-like room, barely lit and nearly empty except for a couple of .racks of metal shelves near the door. These, too, were nearly empty but for a few scattered packets of odds and ends. There was a man on the till and an old guy ahead of me making some small purchase, so I asked them about the army camp.
'Oh, aye,' said the proprietor. 'Big POW camp. We had fourteen thousand Germans here at the end of the war. There's a book here all about it.' To my small astonishment, given the meagreness of the other stocks, he had a stack of picture books by the till called Caithness in the War or something like that and he handed me one to examine. It was full of the usual pictures of bombed-out houses and pubs with people standing around scratching their heads in consternation or looking at the camera with those idiot grins that people in disaster pictures always wear, as if they're thinking, Well, at least we'll be in Picture Post. I didn't find any pictures of soldiers looking bored in Halkirk, and there wasn't any mention of the village in the index. The book was ambitiously priced at £15.95.
'Lovely book,' said the proprietor encouragingly. 'Good value.'
'We had fourteen thousand Germans here during the war,' said the old boy in a deaf bellow.
I couldn't think of a tactful way of asking about Halkirk's dire reputation. 'It must have been pretty lonely for the British soldiers, I bet,' I suggested speculatively.
'Oh, no, I don't think so,' disagreed the man. 'There's Thurso justdown the road, you see, and Wick if you fancy a change. There was dancing back then,' he added a trifle ambiguously, then nodded at the book in my hands. 'Good value, that.'
'Is there anything left of the old base?'
'Well, the buildings are gone, of course, but if you go out the back way' - he gestured in the appropriate direction - 'you can still see the foundations.' He was silent for a moment and then he said, 'So will you be having the book?'
'Oh - well, I might come back for it,' I lied and handed it back.
'It's good value,' said the man.
'Fourteen thousand Germans there was,' called the older man as I left.
I had another look around the surrounding countryside on foot, and then drove around for a bit in the car, but I couldn't find any sign of a prison camp, and gradually it dawned on me that it hardly mattered, so in the end I drove back to Thurso and returned the car to the Ford dealer, to the frank surprise of the friendly fellow since it was only a little after two in the afternoon.
'Are you sure there isn't anywhere else you want to go?' he said. 'It seems a shame when you've hired the car for the day.'
'Where else could I go?' I asked.
He thought for a minute. 'Well, nowhere really.' He looked a little downcast.
'It's all right,' I said, 'I've seen plenty,' and I meant it in the broadest sense.