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The Old Country I woke up late on Thursday, ready for another trip. At dinner the night before, I had asked Lynne what she considered the prettiest place within a day of Edinburgh. She thought for a moment. "It's got to be around St. Andrews. That's the most beautiful country up there." So after a shower and breakfast, I walked down to Waverley to go to St. Andrews. I had already decided that my Scotrail train pass was a bit of overkill. Sixty pounds worth of train travel was a lot more than I could ever hope to use in two months, let alone two weeks. I hadn't even used it yet (it seemed grandiose to use a £60 pass for a £2.50 trip) and figured I could get my travel agent to cash the pass in when I got home. I stood before the schedule board at Waverley, twisting my maps to and fro, and decided that a train leaving in a few minutes for Kirkcaldy, in Fifeshire, would be the best first step on a trip to St. Andrews. Kirkcaldy was just across the firth from Edinburgh -- in fact you could see it from Calton Hill -- and while my map showed no train tracks from there to St. Andrews, I figured I could catch a bus. We pulled out of Waverley and chugged along the banks of the Forth, past the airport where I had arrived in Edinburgh only four days before. (Has it only been four days?) We crossed the river on the Firth of Forth Bridge, one of the marvels of 19th century engineering. A great humpbacked mass of iron, it soared high above the old ferry towns of South Queensferry on the south bank and North Queensferry on the north, spanning the river at an uncomfortably high 200 feet. As long as the Golden Gate Bridge and built on piers dug deep under the fast-moving Forth, the bridge had claimed a horrendous number of lives while it was being built. Its tubular girders, studded with big rusting rivets and looking very Victorian in their coat of brown paint, flashed by as we rattled over in a gathering fog. About a mile to the west, the Firth highway bridge, completed in 1964, was long and thin and had all the charm of a mobile home. Next to the great Gothic railroad bridge, it looked like shit. At one of the stops before Kirkcaldy, I saw a family waiting for another train, the parents in tweed sweaters trying to restrain their three raincoated kids while their classic English Boxer sat by and watched. They looked the personification of Empire, the Huxleys among the flame trees. On arriving in Kirkcaldy and stepping down from the rickety elevated platform, I found myself in a quiet little suburban street, the tops of the big shade trees lost in the low ominous clouds. It was the first moment of my trip that I think I really realized down inside, not just intellectually, that I wasn't in Kansas anymore, so to speak. Down the narrow sidewalks, I passed small tidy houses, surrounded by the meticulous detail of British life -- gardens, wrought figurines, carvings and moldings and endless tiny crafted things, all on a miniscule, crowded scale --the houses full of people leading lives I probably couldn't begin to imagine, on this side street in a tiny backwater of a crumbling nation. What do these people do? Who are they? I had had the same alien feeling before, walking the streets of Port Clinton, Ohio one summer's afternoon, or shopping on Saturday night on the main street of Phillipi, West Virginia. Perhaps it's the usual reaction of city folks encountering small-town life. I clutched my bag tighter and walked towards no place in particular. I had figured that the train station and the bus station would be close together, but I didn't see any buses. Smelling the sea, I headed downhill towards the center of town. It was cold and foggy out, but the high street, which curved along the beach overlooking the firth, was filled with people, walking as aimlessly as I was. Every other storefront seemed to be a Woolworth's or a Boot's (the big drugstore, or "chemists," chain in Britain), and everybody stopped and window-shopped and moved on. The number of people wandering about was far out of proportion to the population of the town, which was around 10,000. I felt like an extra stuck in a film crowd scene. After I got home, I read The Kingdom by the Sea by travel author Paul Theroux. In his walk around the British coast in 1982, he had noted the same thing about Kirkcaldy, that it was a town of inveterate walkers, milling up and down the high street at all hours for no particular reason. Kirkcaldy was a hideously depressed area, with an unemployment rate approaching 40%, and Theroux saw the people as stranded in the ruins of British socialism, pacing back and forth in their cage and waiting to bite the hand that could no longer feed them. The Kirkcaldians may indeed be trapped -- God knows I couldn't find the bus station anywhere. I had to pee badly and wandered with the crowds, unable to find any kind of restaurant or bar. Finally, way down at the western end of the hight street, where the town gave itself up to sand dunes and the steely river, I found a small pub. It was only 10.30, but I knocked on the door and a disheveled young fellow took pity on me and let me use the facilities. I came out and asked if he could possibly see his way clear to give a poor traveller a wee lager before opening time. "Nae, I canna do that," he answered. "But can I offer ye a juice until we open? On the house." So I sipped a grapefruit juice and we talked. He said he hadn't met many Americans, even though they were easy to find "if yer inclined to look for 'em." Like all the Scots I'd met, he was nuts for Dallas and Dynasty (which they all pronounced "Dinisty") and gave me a blow-by-blow of Bobby Ewing's death the night before. It sounded a lot more interesting in his retelling than it probably was at the time. He was also a big Tom Sharpe fan and we talked about his favorites of Sharpe's books. He wanted to visit the US sometime -- Texas or Colorado, predictably. As the church bell up the road chimed 11.00, he drew me a Tennant's and placed it before me with reverence. Thanks, lad. Refreshed, I headed back up the high street and stopped into a chemist's and bought two more books: Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, the story of Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper;" and Mary, Queen of Scots by Lady Antonia Fraser. Drawn by the smell of the open sea (which was only 10 miles down the firth), I hopped the low seawall and stood on the beach of Kirkcaldy. It was a flat white beach, with no signs of any people ever having been there. The contrast between the white, unmarked beach and the centuries-old jumble of the town was startling. Bright green moss grew on washed-up logs and the seawall itself. Out in the channel, a freighter headed for Leith, and on the very edge of the horizon, two British frigates circled each other at the entrance to the North Sea. Edinburgh and its hills were barely visible to the south. In the waters before me, the Kaiser's surrendered fleet had been scuttled in 1919, 10 battleships, 17 cruisers, 50 torpedo boats and 102 submarines sent to the bottom by their skeleton crews on a prearranged signal, as the British looked on in disbelief. The beach was cold and wet and windy, and I decided I was hungry. For an hour I prowled the streets just like the residents, from one end of the high street to the other and up side streets, but I could not find a restaurant anywhere. No restaurants at all? I was mystified. The pub I had visited before only had pub snacks, and I was in the mood for something more substantial. What the hell can you say about a town where nobody works and apparently nobody eats? Finally, nearing the train station again, I found the bus station. The next bus to St. Andrews wasn't for another three hours. The hell with this. Waiting for the train back to Edinburgh, I ate a few chocolate bars from the newsvendor and stared blankly down the tracks for 45 minutes until the train arrived. Crossing the Firth of Forth Bridge, I dozed off and was awakened with a jolt as we pulled into Waverley. I read in my room until dinner and ate at a Greek restaurant I had spotted the day before in the Royal Mile. It wasn't the best, but it wasn't bad, either. The sun came out as I headed down Cowgate towards Candlemaker Row, the site of the Greyfriers Bobby statue. Greyfriers Bobby was a Cairn terrier who belonged to a man who lived in Candlemaker Row in the mid 19th century. Bobby accompanied him everywhere, the classic faithful dog. When the man died, Bobby followed the funeral procession to the cemetery at Greyfriers Abbey and stayed at the grave for days, whimpering disconsolately. He eventually returned home, but every day for the next nine years, he left the house early, trotted over to Greyfriers and sat at his master's grave until dark. His devotion made him the most famous citizen of Edinburgh, and when he finally died, 10,000 people accompanied him to his own grave next to his master. The citizens, who just years before couldn't come up with the money to finish the Scottish War Memorial on Calton Hill, immediately pledged money for a statue of Bobby to be placed near his master's house. The statue of Bobby, with eerily human eyes, is on a six-foot pillar in front of a pub, called, not surprisingly, Greyfriers Bobby's Bar. It looked more like a Border terrier than a Cairn. I took a number of pictures for a friend of mine who owned a Cairn terrier, feeling too touristy for words. I thought of going over to the pub for a quick one, but too many Americans were swarming over it. I took a cab back to the Arden and read some more. I had finished the third Sharpe book and started Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son. On the whole, it had been a fairly wasted day, except that, as always in Scotland, the sounds were fascinating. The telephones with their double chirps, the Gestapo ambulance sirens, the complete sexiness of women with Scottish accents. I wished I brought a tape recorder with me. This was my next to last night in Edinburgh. I made a few desultory stacks in preparation for packing up and slept the sleep of the dead. Between all the walking and my lack of a schedule, I was sleeping the best sleeps of my life.
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