13

JOURNEY TO PARADISE

When we are lords at last of earth and sea and the spell of
the wild shall have retreated to the stars, the charm of coasts will
remain, the ancient charm of land and sea in relationship. It is
a thing inexcusable even by villas, even in a world imagined as edged
along the whole of its coast-lines by promenade, villa-fringed. And,
indeed, wild coast, now so rapidly diminishing, was, for the majority,
until the present century, until the coming of motors, even in England
almost unknown. There was the ocean, across which brave people ven-
tured for diversion or for business. And there was the seaside, cer-
tain known strands, frequented in the proper season. The interspaces
were legendary, matter for travellers' tales. And a visit to even
the best known and most easily accessible resort was an enterprise
fraught with so many perils that every book of household management
offered a little homily on the subject of sea air - a substance only
less redoubtable than night air - and a discourse on the dangers of
bathing. To the end of my days, though I have shed more of this lore
than I can recall, I shall know just how long one should acclimatise
before venturing into the water, how long to remain therein, the best
restoratives to take on emergence, and the number of minutes that may
safely be spent on resting before the sharp walk that is essential
to survival from the ordeal.

From our earliest years my sisters and I were familiar with

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every detail of the ritual, discussed, no doubt, each summer in advance by our parents and nurses, and serving, I fancy, with them no less than with ourselves only as an enhancement of the coming adventure. It is certain that once we had arrived they were immediately forgotten. Bathing, which began on the first morning, I remember as an exciting and tiresome interruption of entrancements, of building and dyke-making, shell gathering, shrimping, wading or mere ecstatic pottering about to the movement of sea and sky and cliffs. It was exciting because that quaint Quaker invention, the bathing-machine, rattled across the sands at a tremendous pace, and it was happiness, while being unrobed, to stand on the bench in the dark enclosure and watch through the tiny square of window the outside brilliance racing by. Bathing was tiresome because the hands of the huge bathing-women who stood about in the shallows and cut short private enterprise by dipping us one by one turn and turn about beneath the advancing waves were large and red and very hard. The interruption over we immediately followed our own devices, though I remember that there were, if no restoratives, at least buns, incomparable brown sun-hot new buns, to allay the worst pangs of a most ferocious hunger.

To this day when in London I prepare for a swift rush to the coast I know that I am going, not casually to the sea, but marvellously to the seaside; the seaside that is one place and has no name. The place that was seaside to me in my childhood, being in South Devon,

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had a rich and lovely name, a name that my father, with a touch of
jocular patronage, used to speak in the West Country fashion, and my
childish condemnation of his pose was in reality a resentment of any
naming of my heaven. I know now how unjust I was, that the young man,
ancient to me, who doughtily, summer after summer, carried his off-
spring the long day's journey to the far west, took refuge in the
local speech because he, too, was shy of naming the unnamable. He,
too, was going to the seaside. And I can appreciate, knowing that
although seaside is one and indescribable, there are shores and shores,
the excellence of his choice. For though to-day I love the pale and
narrow sea that tumbles heavily upon the Sussex coast, the fresh
little sea dancing in the east wind off Norfolk, the green Atlantic
rollers that break against the Cornish cliffs, and many another
stretch of our island waters, each one brings between-whiles the
nostalgia of my own seaside, of the fine, fine shingles of the Devon
beaches, the recurrent sound of them under the tide, the infinitely
refreshing hiss and wash as they are lifted and dragged backwards by
the waves, and the echoes of this sound in the red caves and tunnels.
For years I knew no other coast. Did not know that there were cliff-
less beaches of grey pebble, pallid in unbroken sunlight, and waves
that retired soundlessly over sands of muddy grey. The first sight
of such pebbles and such sands seemed heartbreak.

And I have seen Devon triumph, seen her cost a lifetime of other
coasts.

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My seaside is no longer the seaside that I knew. But the pier
and promenade that have usurped the places of the old stone jetty
and the sea-wall have not changed the sound of the sea in the coves
nor dimmed the beauty of the innumerable shells washed up there.
A handful of shingle still yields cowries, the small tooled shapes
that were nuggets in dross to my eager hands, minutely heavy, sea-
wet and pinky brown in their fine ribbings along the spine, paling
to where the lips curl inwards, ivory white.

But it was not of these things that I thought when into endless
summer, into a garden whose boundaries were as yet unknown, there
came the news of the great journey, but rather of the dazzling spaces
of sunlit salty air above the little town and of the way sound echoed
through it fresh and free. Morning sounds, the blithe barking of a
dog upon the shore, the shrill high voice of the fishwife announcing
my incomparable seaside breakfast, and later the sounds of donkeys
trotting and of people hurrying to the beach on silent rubbered feet
to laughter and the clinking of little buckets. The air above the
small town behind the cliffs held always some echoes, and this for
me was its deepest charm, haunting me while I conned over with my
sisters the joys to come. Nothing could fully banish its enchantment,
neither the childish squabblings that at home could fill the universe
with darkness, nor the first misery of scorched legs nor even the
recurrent tragedy of bedtime. And though each day I was lost in the

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joy of the strong red cliffs, the happy wash and ripple of the waves,
the shapes and colours of the lovely things to be seen and handled in
rock pools, my best bliss came down upon me away from the shore. All
that made seaside was fused and distilled within the dazzling air
above the open space where our house stood in the mainway of the town-
let, a wide road divided by narrow ribbons of green lawn that ran each
side of a stone-rimmed torrent broken every few yards by a steeply
gushing fall. I felt both pity and contempt for these tame sweet
waters. Yet it was in passing over the little bridge that spanned
their gentle rush to the sea, in hearing the plash and murmur of
their cascades go up into the sky, that I tasted the deepest of my
joy.

Early on a summer morning we would start from the outskirts of
our little town. Unfamiliar shadow under the home gables and strange
quiet in park and market-place, I remember no family, no incident of
departure, only the sense of known things passing away, and then, it
seemed at once, the being roused from sleep in the midst of the fear-
ful adventure of Paddington. I knew not then that Paddington was the
aristocrat of the London termini with proud traditions and a leisurely
staff. To me it was inferno; chaos with but one refuge, perhaps
undiscoverable, the seaside train. The regulation Paddington train
with its well-hung coaches panelled in ivory and brown, rolling smooth-
ly westwards at the bidding of a decorously low-voiced bell-toned
whistle, was, I thought, a vehicle kept in state for its glorious

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mission. Paddington has changed but little. The many buffets, the automatic machines and other modernities crowding the platforms accommodate themselves to its atmosphere. The staff, including the smallest newspaper boy, is still courtly. And the turn of the wheel that is bringing back mahogany and repp has restored to the Great Western rolling stock its Victorian garb of chocolate and cream to delight the eyes of survivors.

Paddington and piled luggage, and my family suddenly present. My mother, in sprigged muslin and dustcloak and small round hat tilted nosewards from piled hair, disquietingly anxious and dependent. My sisters in sprigged cotton and reefers, their flushed faces framed by monstrous "zulu" hats, kept for the seaside and most miserable in the wearing, with a poke that hih the sky and was brought plastering down over the ears by means of a tight bridle of elastic, cutting, when new, unmercifully across beneath the chin. A torment now banished for ever. It had its compensations. You could, for instance, at unobserved moments, by the simple device of working the elastic to the tip of your chin, become a mounted policeman - a painful process causing the coarse straw to scrape the tender parts of your hot ears, and dangerous unless you preserved a policemanlike immobility.

Usually you did not, and the elastic slid and leapt, to come, with a cutting sting, tightly to rest under your nose.

My father on these occasions was less tranquil than the terminus,

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though quite as stately. Circumstances were exacting. All of us, in-
cluding my mother and the servants, reduced to eager and not always mute
helplessness, were pendant upon his omniscience, excited, frightened,
and, but for him, lost utterly. His to carry us through not only without
help, but hampered by the humiliating necessity of parting with some of
the finer shades of the composure inseparable from the bearing of the
travelling English gentleman. This bearing was his by nature and by the
grace of an almost religious cultivation. But the travelling English
gentleman of his day clothed his composure in frieze and deerstalker,
and though on these holiday flittings high summer seems always to have
blazed, my father, whenever exposed to the vulgar gaze, bore these ar-
ticles upon his tall and slender form. The long frieze, it is true,
hung open, revealing the cool silky alpaca that lay beneath. But the
weather and the occasion tyrannised. Useless to deny it - the English
gentleman was flustered. Small wonder that my mother, goddess omnipo-
tent, became almost one of ourselves, shared our torment: the cer-
tainty that the train would elude us. Small wonder, indeed, that
my father shepherded the forlorn group into a waiting-room and for-
bade the opening of its door until he should reappear. To this day
the inside of a waiting-room recalls to me that fearful interval.
Its terrifying length, the pictures of disaster that filled the small
space so closely surrounded by large suggestive sounds. And its end
was not the least of its fearfulness. The door would open quickly,
not upon a stranger or a porter, but upon the dreaded form of my

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father, upon his voice, urgent. It was now or never. And the pil-
grimage that ended in the security of our reserved carriage was made
always in the certainty that this time it was to be never, that we
alone amongst the small throng of travellers were doomed by some
miracle to miss our heaven.

Once we were safely in the charm descended. Joy was secure.
My mother, tearful with relief, would take up her two-fold task of
sympathy with our happiness and the protection of my father from dis-
turbance. There was, however, an interval of licence lasting from
the moment he stood up to free himself from his outer garments until
he was ensconced, having for a while unbent to share our celebrations,
sideways in his corner with his Times.

But the act of keeping comparatively still brought its own re-
wards. One could hear the faithful rumbling of the wheels, set now
to hymn tunes sung quickly, and now, while the train sped rocking,
and the telegraph wires, running together, refused to be counted, to
a song of its own, the wordless, exultant beating, it seemed, of life
itself. And the great events of the day came in the silence of life
between memory and anticipation, blossomed in pictures upon the air
vibrating to the song of the train. And suddenly there would be
Basingstoke. Just a name, standing for a moment on its board on a
platform and presently gone. Always for me it was the remotest point
of our journey through unknown worlds, and always it filled me with

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a longing to escape the life I knew. I would look at the faces
about me averted towards the platform, and wonder if they too knew
where we were - on the borderland of what strange enchantment...
After we had passed I suffered loss, as if something of me, alighting
there, had been caught up into a state of being that knew no more of
seaside and of home.

Quite different was far-away Exeter, "Xturr, Xturr," the porters
would say conversationally. In high, fresh air. The first breath of
the air that stood above the little seaside town. And these porters,
because they breathed it, were different from other porters. Belong-
ing to the world of seaside, they looked happy and serene, as if,
though always there, they knew quite well where they were. But these
happy porters stood in the distance at the end of the long day. The
sound of the wheels would begin to tell of the long, long hours, and
presently, unawares, I was wakening from deep sleep to see the brown
hamper open for lunch, to feel older by a long day past, and blissful,
waking up after a party, to find another party just begun.

By the time far Exeter was reached we children were knowingly
weary. And Exeter, with its message of the sea's nearness, was
trial - the last trial of the day; a repetition in miniature of the
agonies of Paddington. Like Paddington it was large, and, though
comparatively mild and gentle, still important and awe-inspiring.
To my childish imagination it was purely in a spirit of respect for

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its manner and its size that the train waited so long there. It was
at Exeter, too, that the sternest of my grandmothers joined us. She
was to the smaller of us little more than an apparition. Once at
the seaside she disappeared, doubtless preferring the quiet of inde-
pendent lodgings to the turmoil of our enchanted house. I cannot
remember that she took any part in our life by the shore. Only from
time to time came the reminder that somewhere in the bright scene
Grannie was abiding. It was the only solemn thought that touched
me during the length of our stay. And the conviction - arising in
my mind if for long enough I stood staring at the cascading waters
beyond our door - that I was, in the opinion of everyone but this
laughing stream, a very naughty girl - was cheerful compared to any
reflection on Grannie's sojourning. The first intimation of her com-
ing was the departure of my father into the unknown. Once more we
were left to anxious helplessness, to the certainty of disaster.
Relief would come at last with the sound of Grannie's voice - the
high, staccato, wavering voice of deafness and old age, crazing my
childish nerves with the imagined horror of a soundless world, chil-
ling me with the fear that the train, having stood so long, would
move on while she was being got in. There she would stand, black-
robed and towering between her black-robed maid and one of ours, my
father behind, and my mother, all anxious helpfulness, inside the
carriage door.

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But when at last she was arranged within there was compensation for this large, dark presence with its terribly chanting voice. When the speechless greetings were over and my parents had communicated with her by means of repeated shoutings into the mouthpiece of the long tube hanging, a sinuous black garland, across the carriage, she would, before finally folding her hands to sit with eyes contemplative upon each of us in turn, extract and distribute - acid-drops. The real lemon-drops, that vanished with the application of modern chemistry to lollipops. They were strong. They contained the pure juice of the lemon and the cane, were satisfyingly sweet and acidly refreshing. They were also a noble size, square and thick and with deep bevelled edges. They lasted. But they were slippery. And if, their first charm exhausted, the return of weariness brought a sudden collapse, they slipped and lodged, four-square, half way down, and the end of the journey was sharp pangs, pangs lessening and ending at last in forgetfulness, till lifting arms were there, and the window and the sea where the train tunnels its way in and out of the red cliffs along its edge. A strange, forbidding sea, ghostly in fading light, as in the morning things had been ghostly. An eternity, a child's whole day with unfamiliar lateness added, had gone to the making of a journey that now takes a few hours. But the days to come were perhaps the richer for the joys and agonies of that tremendous preliminary.

FORTNIGHTLY.

March '28.