‘But surely you don’t have foot and mouth here! This is an island!’ the girl cried. She could have made the same complaint anywhere in Britain, it seemed to me.
‘Can I walk there?’ I asked about the Needles.
She looked at me for a long moment, assessing and bemused, she herself no spring chicken. ‘It is six miles. There’s a bus,’ she said.
The bus made a two- or three-hour circuit of the entire island. Theoretically, I should be able get off near the Needles, reminisce moodily for, say, half an hour or longer if the fine weather held, and then return to Yarmouth on a bus coming from the opposite way. I was pretty sure no more than two coastal buses were needed to service this island for retired gentlefolk, well-bred ramblers and mainland tourists who brought cars, bikes and buses of their own. At worst, I would have to wait an hour or so to pick up the same bus I had arrived on, and rejoin it for a round trip of the Isle of Wight, returning at last to Yarmouth from the other side. Browsing the bookshelf in the tourist office, while I pondered my choices, I realised with a start of recollection that the old and infamous Parkhurst Prison was on the Isle of Wight.
‘1954: When we sailed past a pretty island, the Isle of Wight, white rocks stood like armed soldiers in the sea and a few people waved to us from high up on cliffs. And here we are! Here we are! We landed in Southampton! Southampton! I have seen liners sail into New York from Southampton. We didn’t see much of it, just the docks and cranes of a working waterfront. The dashing Tony was waiting and hustled us on a train to London. From here on in, he told us, we will be travelling by bus: he called it “a coach”. A coach! And four! I feel like Cinderella. Everything is English! Men in vests! Little houses with chimneys and no TV aerials!’
It never entered your young mind, did it, that the pretty island gliding by as we made for Southampton was an Alcatraz of chilly climes? Or that just beyond our vision was justice, replete with her miscarriages, making all men equal in suffering as they had not been in wickedness. You were so young! You had periodic pimples; specks were forever flying into your wide eyes; you regularly hit your funny bone as children do, sending vibrations to your fingertips; and you believed; you believed so many things. You believed there was love enough to go round, you believed good prevailed in the human heart and must triumph over evil in the last reel; you believed greed was an aberration, and the English were ever so well bred skinny people in vests they called ‘waistcoats’. Home is reality for the young; everywhere else they believe to be a set for make-believe so you could not yet believe in crimes or punishments except those of your homeland; no sirens portended misfortune or tragedy as far as you could believe, except they were American. What one believes, young Irma, is what one prefers to think: that’s what belief is – an extension of hope, and hope against hope. To know, on the other hand, is to have no preference, no choice. You knew so little then, young I. But you were keen to learn, I’ll give you that. And now? Now, my old darling, we know a thing or two. Now we know better.
In imitation of the what-the-hell way I used to up and go in my youth, I had made no hotel reservations on the Isle of Wight nor planned how long I’d stay. I packed my toothbrush and wore my hiking boots, and basking in the back of my mind was a dreamy open fire and a single-malt whisky after a day, perhaps two, spent strolling in the country to the sound of birdsong. Plastic in credit and a bank balance generally in the black have taken youthful what-the-hell out of travel and replaced it with a more mature and affluent version: faced with the complications of using the Isle of Wight bus system to get me to and from the Needles, I rang a local taxi company – what the hell? The driver kept me waiting outside the tourist office. He arrived at last, an unsmiling, affectedly busy man in his early fifties I guessed. Too big for the job, too broad and tall to spend his day comfortably in a car, he was solidly built in layers of compacted frustration and irritability: a smoker perhaps, not permitted by his employers to smoke at work? But no, it was evident in the brisk way he motioned me into the front seat this was no man to be bothered by the petty rules of overlords; more likely he was a once-prosperous self-employed businessman forced by adversity to drive a cab. Every third minicab in England is driven by one such. Would I be able to persuade a tough customer like this to wait quietly in the car some distance away while I stood in the shadow of the remembered rocks and all by myself tried to recollect myself?
The Isle of Wight was in much greater peril of infection than the tourist office had led me to believe. Among many closed roads was the one down to the coast and the Needles. ‘Bloody typical!’ the driver muttered when we were stopped by a red tape stretched across our road.
‘Bloody typical!’ he said again, though in all my decades in England there had only once before been such an outbreak, and it was typical of nothing.
When I told him in a burst of chronic loony loquacity that I was on a quest for memories, not only did he drive me to a vantage point atop a cliff, whence he said I could see the Needles, he even stayed behind in the car, I assumed to smoke a cigarette. I stepped alone into an old-fashioned amusement park for children overlooking Alum Bay. Not a child or grown-up was in sight. Salt-stung vacancy, cartoon artwork on empty stalls, and merry-go-round horses stalled in mid-leap conjured charm out of the air and stirred memories of childhood encounters with sleeping magic.
A few steps to the summit of the encircling cliffs and finally, there they were again: the Needles, dental white and small below me in the greenish water, as if seen from a low-flying plane. I waited for a moment, trying to recall the thrill of that sight all those years ago from the deck of the Castel Felice; instead I found myself wondering: wondering if someone had happened to be standing right there in that very place at 9 a.m. on 8 July 1954 – an English girl of eighteen, perhaps, whose dreams were travelling the opposite way. Had she by chance looked out to sea at the very moment our toy ship was sailing past, bound for Southampton? Was she one of the figures we saw waving at us on board? I wondered if the telescope put in that place for tourists swallowed her halfpenny as it did my twenty-pence piece and delivered no view but the very same big black ‘O’ it gave me. Soon she boarded her own Castel Felice and crossed the Atlantic to a whole New World. And in New York the young English rose met and fell in love with a dark American boy who grew up to become a shrink, say, or a book reviewer and professor of Russian Literature at City College of New York. After two children, now grown with children of their own, and thirty-three indigestible Seders with her alien in-laws, and the menopause, and years of increasing, wasteful fury, she divorced him. I don’t blame her. It is precisely what I would have done in her place. He then married a secretary he’d been canoodling sporadically, or maybe a nurse. Clever old philanderers usually choose a nurse or secretary as their final helpmeet: to help them meet their makers and leave no mess behind.
The ashtray was clean when I returned to the car and there was no smell of smoke; the driver sat precisely as I had left him, sullen and massive behind the wheel. His introspective anger was too heavy to penetrate in any customary way; uncharacteristically, I never discovered his age, political affiliations, or even his name. Certainly in charge, every inch the driver, he said he had something for me to see, and before I could tell him I’d really rather not he’d turned off on to a bumpier road. En route he complained bitterly about the shortage of tourists, and the lack of civic concern shown by aged residents who had retired to his native island and who didn’t give a damn what happened to it. A dilapidated fence appeared in the middle of nowhere beside our road; when he pulled to a stop in front of its gate the scrunching of our tyres sounded of dereliction and breakage. He did not bother to lock the door and I left my small overnight case on the front seat. When he led me through a space where the gate was off its hinges, I was dismayed to see a large sign claiming the area for ‘Warner’s’. I would have preferred the cause of his dark anger not to derive from an American company. In spite of coiled barbed