The Kingdom by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

them would try to take advantage of me, but my character would overcome them.
    All this she gathered by prodding the palm of my right hand and tracing her crimson fingernails on the lines I got from rowing a skiff in Cape Cod Bay.
    "Do you see anything there about Northern Ireland?"
    "Distant lands certainly. One of them might be Ulster."
    "Do I survive in the end?"
    "Oh, yes. You lead a healthy life. You are not a smoker, for example."
    "Gave up a year ago. Pipe. I used to inhale it. I miss it sometimes like a dead friend."
    "You have many friends," Olandah said, perhaps mishearing me. "But you tend to keep away from them. You keep yourself to yourself. You are very independent."
    "Self-employed," I said. "One last query. Where am I going to sleep tonight?"
    She stopped looking at my hand. She looked at my nose and said, "Not at home."
    "What town—can you give me a hint?"
    "I give character readings," Olandah said. "I don't give tourist information."
    This cost me £7, which was about a pound more than it would have cost me to stay at a guest house, with bed and breakfast. Still, I was grateful for her encouragement and glad to have been reassured that I was going to survive.
    Another sign in Broadstairs said, "Seven miles out to sea from this point lay the dreaded Goodwin Sands—the great ship swallower—considered by a great many seafarers to be the most dangerous stretch of water in the world." There were countless stories about the disasters and wrecks on the Goodwins. "Their ingurgitating property is such, that a vessel of the largest size, driven upon them, would in a few days be swallowed up and seen no more." What was not so well known was that at the turn of the century, at low water, the sands became very firm and cricket matches were played on them.
    I passed the bundled-up old people on their benches, and the families with picnic baskets and balloons, the day-trippers waiting at the JUGS OF TEA FOR THE BEACH sign, and I walked out of Broadstairs and through a gate to a narrow park dedicated to the memory of George VI. The land was higher here, and on this sea cliff were magpies and dog-owners and kite-flyers. Down below were the original thirty-nine steps, leading to the sea.
    On the other side of this park was Ramsgate.
    The man on the train to Margate, Mr. Mould, had seemed to me to be boasting when he told me he was going to Ramsgate. Anyway, these towns on the Kent coast a few hours from London were either described as Cockneyfied or not very Cockneyfied—the less of it the better, people said, since London influence on the coast was always seen as contamination. The coast represented an escape from every terrestrial ill. The worst was metropolitan oppression, and London was the epitome of that. When Baedeker described Ramsgate as "a somewhat less Cockneyfied edition of Margate," it intended praise. That was in 1906, but even today such places were still measured by London, because London was the future and it was also pretty poisonous. When a coastal place was too big or too noisy or full of traffic—when it was inconvenient or ugly or it smelled—people said, "Just like London," in a helpless way, because now they were beside the sea and they couldn't go any farther.
    Ramsgate was larger than but just as ugly as Margate, with a swimming pool on the Front that looked like a Roman ruin painted blue. It was the Marine Bathing Pool, which had been neglected and now lay vandalized and full of smashed chairs and broken glass. "The Council are at present discussing future development," the sign beside it said, but one could not read that without thinking of dynamite.
    I had been hurrying. My hamstrings ached. I asked a man in a flat cap where the railway station was. He was grateful to me for asking directions and offered me three different routes; the station was some distance away.
    His name was Len Shottery. He said, "Are you walking it?"
    I said yes.
    "It's much too far to walk," he