Test Signal

by Nathan Connolly (Dead Ink)

  What I was learning confirmed what everyone already knew about this town: that they have always let houses fall into the sea and there’s no reason why our era should be any different. Still, there is an almost determined lack of concern among the people in Withernsea. A crocodile could be eating them alive from the feet and they’d still be insisting that everything was fine, even as their heads disappeared down its throat. They’re not fools, they know the truth: they’d just rather not think about it. It’s unfair of me to expect people to look around at everything they know and love, then admit that none of it is permanent and everything is doomed. It’s much easier for them to consider lost undersea villages while they watch in real time as the buildings crumble into the waters. But for me, with the luxury of distance, it’s frustrating. Especially as the very tangible indication of what is about to happen to Withernsea is already taking place in the village of Skipsea, a couple of miles down the road.

  Make your way past the picturesque houses and over to the sands, and Skipsea becomes a post-apocalyptic land of ill-fated buildings and roads to nowhere. What remains of the former main road now fringes the cliff edge like a string of tattered bunting. The sea is drilling through the clay, revealing layers of peat and post-glacial forests in the cliff face on its way to consuming the few remaining houses in its path. And its appearance sings of all the things that are to come in Withernsea, exposing the fallacy of any comforting idea that someone will step in and do something. To the south of Withernsea, beyond the sea wall and rock armour, an embayment has already begun, one that will not stop until it hits cretaceous chalk. To get to that, Withernsea first has to fall.

  Working my way through my research materials, I occasionally found myself thinking of the old shelter in Hull station for the 76 bus to Withernsea. For many years it bore a piece of graffiti, scrawled in black marker: ‘GOD HATES WITHERNSEA’. Catching this bus home from college, I’d occasionally wonder how it would feel to be one of those religious people who viewed natural disasters as visceral evidence of God’s fury at decadent human behaviour. To be the sort of person who’d watch their grandparents’ house teetering on the edge of a cliff and think, ‘Woah, what has Nan been up to?’

  After all, it’s local legend that God has form in this part of the country. Like with Ravenser Odd, a place I’d come across while reading up on the history of lost towns. It began as a sand bed that rose from the mouth of the Humber during the twelfth century, and soon after was established as a renegade port and a vile pirate haven, aggressively leeching business from Grimsby and Hull for around a hundred years. It was believed to have so angered God that he destroyed it with a storm known as Grote Mandrenke, the low Saxon for ‘Great Drowning of Men’, remodelling the region entirely and killing 25,000 people in the process.

  When my mother joined a mature burlesque troupe and began a post-retirement career touring the clubs, I let this concern about a capricious, conservative God get the better of me, and phoned her up.

  ‘You should sell up,’ I told her again, this time insistent. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said airily. ‘We’ll be dead before the house falls into the sea.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

  ‘No, we’ll be dead. Why would that make you feel better?’

  ‘I feel like we’ve got a little off topic.’

  ‘Ooh, I’ve not had a Topic for years. Do you think they still sell them?’

  ‘You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So, I changed tack and brought up Ravenser Odd, at which point she brightened up.

  ‘Oh, I was in a play about that once,’ she said, referencing a production from her time in a Withernsea amateur dramatics group. ‘I played a groyne.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  Her responses would become less flippant in the late 2000s, when it became clear that several houses in south Withernsea were in imminent danger, including her own home. A committee was formed, the local MP petitioned, and my parents added their voices to the campaign.

  ‘Something needs to be done!’ they yelled at protest meetings, along with their neighbours, all engaged with a pressing issue and no longer believing in fine. It may have taken two thousand years, but it seemed that finally, erosion had become an overnight success. Emboldened by her place at the heart of a movement, my mother collared her MP about the issue at one of his street surgeries, then phoned to tell me all about it, still salty with outrage.

  ‘He said that if you buy a property at the seaside, you should expect that it’ll fall into the sea at some point. Then he said that there’s no money for sea defences and I just need to “get used to it”. Anyway, your sister complained about it on Facebook and tagged him, so we’ll see what happens.’

  What happened was that she received a letter from her MP, apologising for his tone, but the line remained the same: there was no money for Withernsea. Get used to it. Instead, protesters were fended off with terms like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘inevitable environmental change’. Words that are of no comfort when you’re faced with the prospect of paying the mortgage on a home that is lying on the beach, more closely resembling a dropped pie than a four-bed semi with well-appointed gardens.

  After their protests refused to die down and the MP’s thoughts moved to those of re-election, a new response emerged. ‘The council is looking into funding for sea defences,’ and word got out that an EU grant had been secured. The pressure group dissipated, and all was calm again. But I had little faith in the notion of this funding; it was a mantra I’d heard many times throughout the years, as plans were made then unmade. Money has rarely been available for declining towns like Withernsea, so instead the people are offered hope. This has meant, in short, that the people there are in a long-term abusive relationship with the concept of sea defences.

  Trawling social media for contemporary accounts of people affected by the lack of sea defences, I discovered Angela, who lives at the Golden Sands chalet park, just over the road from my parents. Each day she tweets images of her chalet and its accompanying view. There are shots of a double rainbow, dramatic sunsets, but also, most alarmingly, of her chalet resting on the lip of the cliffs, ready to fall at any moment. It was Holbeck Hall minus the press attention. So, I sent her a message, asking if she’d mind me paying her a visit. She agreed, and when I pulled into the car park a few days later and almost drove off the edge of the cliff while backing into a space, I knew I had come to the right person.

  I tapped on the door of Angela’s chalet and introduced myself. ‘Hello,’ she replied, shaking my hand, and with the same breath announced, ‘Next door’s just been condemned.’

  I looked to my left and saw a cooker and a number of boxes waiting to be placed on a van. It looked fine, just like all the other remaining chalets. The problem lay in what was behind it. Or rather, what had been behind it but had just fallen into the sea, making the chalet too precarious to survive and destined for demolition.

  Angela invited me into her home, a neatly ordered space the approximate size of a one-car garage, and into the small area that functioned as her living room. We sat on opposite sides of the building but were still close enough that we could have played patty cake, each of us perched on a section of a modular sofa. She began telling me about her life, and I learned that before she’d moved to Golden Sands she’d worked for English Heritage, portraying a sixth-century medicine woman and using mocked-up dog turds to form amulets that would ward off diarrhoea. Now she lives off her savings and spends her days blending hearty soups, wandering the quiet southern end of Withernsea and embracing the risks of her existence.

  ‘Two things you need to know about me are that I hate heights and I can’t swim,’ she said. ‘I had reoccurring nightmares about falling off a cliff. So, this is a way of confronting that. It seems odd, but I’ve never been happier. I like being on the edge. People ask me why I don’t move over there,’ she said, gesturing to the safer chalets on the other
side of the site’s access road. ‘But it wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t have all this behind me.’ She meant the view, the lack of anything else behind her, rather than the peril. ‘Lying in bed, I like to think that no one in the world has their head closer to the sea than I do.’ To most people this would seem like madness, and Angela knows it, but she has an acute awareness of the small details of her environment, the ones that indicate big changes. Each day she walks the coastline, looking out for hairline cracks or subtle tilts in the cliff edge, knowing the signs of a forthcoming collapse. This is her second chalet, the first having been lost to the sea during the previous winter. The park has lost many homes, and when she took me on a tour of the site, she pointed out a number of heaped, overgrown rectangular patches of weeds next to the edge, where now-demolished homes once stood.

  ‘I call them “chalet graves”,’ she said, smiling sheepishly. ‘That’s a bit dark, I know.’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘I never really got to visit mine. When my first place went, I thought it’d at least live on as a patch of plants, but, well …’ she said, pointing at an area several metres out to sea, to an absence. ‘It’s there now.’

  We walked down to the place where the chunk of land had fallen away behind next door’s chalet, taking some of the perimeter fence with it. When Angela first moved to Golden Sands, she’d calculated how long she could live there by eking out her savings, based on the published statistics for average coastal erosion. She had been told to expect to lose two metres a year, so did the maths and it all checked out. But there is a chaos at play here and government statistics couldn’t necessarily be treated as gospel. The section that disappeared next door had easily been two metres deep and five metres wide.

  I took a photograph of this area just as two men appeared at the cliff edge and began heaving the fence back onto land. They looked our way. Not wanting to cause a scene, Angela ducked from sight behind her chalet. One of the men called out to me.

  ‘Are you a journalist?’

  ‘No,’ I said, heading over to him. ‘I’m a fascinated local.’ He relaxed and we got chatting. I learned that he was the owner of Golden Sands, so I asked him about the future of his site, which now consists of a dozen or so chalets.

  ‘I’m hoping to save it,’ he said. ‘And they’re talking about putting sea defences around the edge here.’ He pointed around the base of the cliffs. A muddy soup of sea and clay was sloshing around against it. ‘But that could be next autumn, so who knows what’ll be left.’

  I watched as the men shifted the fence into position along the newly formed cliff edge, then said goodbye to Angela. Later, heading home to type up my notes, she sent me a message telling me that the section the men had just repaired had fallen into the sea too, making the rate of erosion now faster than I can type.

  The proposed sea defences won’t be an extension of the robust concrete sea wall that currently protects most of Withernsea, but will consist of riprap, a rock wall made from chunks of granite, each the approximate size and shape of an industrial washing machine. This is not a new tactic. Over the years, the occasional ship would arrive from Norway bearing a number of these blocks, which were then arranged as a rough wall in front of the cliffs. And each time the sea has looked at these blocks, laughed and thrown them about like hacky sacks. It’s a temporary measure akin to shielding yourself from a shotgun blast by holding up a paper plate. They will never be enough; they only ensure that catastrophic erosion will always be both news and history for this place.

  I spoke to James, who runs Withernsea lighthouse, home to an RNLI museum and a memorial to Kay Kendall, a Withernsea-born actor who starred in the film Genevieve and became Rex Harrison’s third wife before dying of leukaemia in 1959. James has lived in it for the last decade and was, I’d been told, the man to talk to when it came to Withernsea’s fate. We sat at a table in the lighthouse cafe, a map of Yorkshire laid out before us. ‘How far inland would you need to move to be safe?’ I asked him.

  ‘Here!’ he said, bringing his hand down on the map like a karate chop, slicing off not only the Holderness coast and Hull but most of East Yorkshire. ‘All this is built on boulder clay, left over from the Ice Age. The rock doesn’t start until you get here,’ he said, his hand wafting in the general direction of York, sixty miles inland.

  Later, I phoned my mother to tell her that all of her notions of environmental certainty were built on a lie.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said wearily. ‘Will I have time to go to the shops?’

  ‘Why aren’t you taking this seriously?’ ‘Because we’re getting new sea defences.’ ‘You’re messing with me, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘… fucking hell.’

  Some geologists now say that they expect sudden, violent landslides of the type that destroyed Holbeck

  Hall to occur along this coast every few years, confirming what people have known for generations: that these cliffs are a conveyor belt, rolling villages and towns into the sea and ensuring that the inhabitants will always be familiar with the rumble of buildings losing their battle to remain on land. As much as the locals cling on to the notion that it will never happen to them, Withernsea is as inevitably doomed as the lost places that went before it. But like those places, Withernsea could birth new legends. New bullshit. And in years to come, people might say that, if you listen closely past the roar of the cold waves, you can sometimes hear the ghost of a fretful man pleading with his parents to ‘Move inland!’ while he struggles to outrun the ground, always slipping away beneath his feet.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book was a collaborative effort and it relied from the very start on the shared vision of a number of organisations. New Writing North, C&W Literary Agency, Bloomsbury Publishing and Dead Ink all came together to deliver the book that you have in your hands today. Not an easy feat when we were all working under lockdown!

  Will Mackie of New Writing North was a huge help in delivering this project and putting this book together. Without him I’m sure chaos would have reigned, and it was his thorough knowledge of northern writers and their work that made this book as full of variety as it is. He is truly a champion of the North.

  Sara Helen Binney of Bloomsbury Publishing was a great source of advice throughout, who was able to keep things moving and translate between independent small publishing and big Bloomsbury publishing. Her assistance in editing this book was invaluable and I think it was her support that kept everyone calm – at least it was for me! Thank you also to Paul Baggaley at Bloomsbury who enthusiastically partnered with us on this book and got the wheels moving. From the start he understood what Test Signal was about and believed in its purpose.

  Sara Helen and Will Mackie were joined by myself, as well as Lucy Luck and Emma Finn from C&W Literary Agency, to make up the judging panel for the open submissions. We all brought interesting insights to our discussions, and I know that we all had favourites who didn’t make it. In the end, I think we are all proud of the final selection and are expecting great things from them in the future.

  Laura and Jordan at Dead Ink, as well as Dan Coxon out there freelancing, were all key members of the team who made this book. They are also the more competent and talented members of the team who I could never survive without. Thank you also to Amelia, who always keeps me going and also tells me when to stop.

  Speaking of key components to the success of this book, I must mention all of the Kickstarter backers who are listed overleaf. They quite literally got this thing going and I hope all of you are pleased with the work that we have done.

  We received a great deal of submissions to the open call for Test Signal, so a degree of thanks is owed to everyone who sent in their work. If we didn’t already know that writing was alive and well in the North, then we certainly did after reading all of their work. There was more talent than could ever be included in one book.

  In the end, the biggest thanks must go to the North of En
gland itself for always being an inspiration, and investing in all of us a sense of ambition.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Andrew Michael Hurley’s first novel, The Loney, was originally published in 2014 by Tartarus Press and then John Murray a year later, after which it won the 2015 Costa First Novel Award and the 2016 British Book Industry awards for Debut Novel and Book of the Year. Devil’s Day was published in 2017 and went on to jointly win the 2018 Royal Society of Literature Encore Award for best second novel. Starve Acre, published in 2019, was adapted for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. The author lives in Lancashire and teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Writing School.

  Amy Stewart is a freelance copywriter by day, writer of feminist speculative fiction by night. She has an MA in Creative Writing from York St John University and is currently studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield, looking at carnivalesque women and the modern circus. Amy’s work can be found in Undivided Magazine and Ellipsis Zine, and she also received a Highly Commended Award in the 2019 Bridport Prize for her short story ‘Wolf Women’. She’s most often found ambling around the Yorkshire countryside with her partner, Phil, and rescue dog, Wolfie. Twitter: @AStewartWriter. Instagram: Amystewartwriter

  Melissa Wan was awarded the inaugural Crowdfunded BAME Writers’ Scholarship to study Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her story ‘The Husband and the Wife Go to the Seaside’ was published by Bluemoose Books (2018) and reprinted in Salt’s Best British Short Stories. She was 2019’s Northern Word Factory Apprentice, mentored by Carys Davies, and currently lives in Manchester, where she is completing a collection of stories. melissawan.com