by Roger Deakin
The romantic Jaywickians built their own wooden jetty and had a lifeboat called ‘Beryl’. They had been promised 1,600 hours of annual sunshine in the promotional literature when they first moved in, and they meant to enjoy it. There had even been a Jaywick beach chalet at the 1935 Ideal Home Exhibition. But in the east-coast floods of 1953, Jaywick suddenly looked like Bangladesh. Five hundred had to be rescued by boat from their vulnerable homes, and thirty-five died.
I had lingered in the water to see the last of the sun, and was considerably chilled when I swam back up my Sunbeam Avenue into the warm shallows and slid out on to the rocks to get dry. Despite some natural east-coast turbulence, the sea had been clear. Towelling myself vigorously, I reflected that the Blackwater and the Colne are both listed as Class One rivers by the Environment Agency, and that their estuary waters would need good care too, flowing over some of the most highly-prized oyster beds in the world. Half a dozen Colchesters can set you back twelve or fifteen pounds in Wheelers, Bentleys or Bibendum. But then I looked again at Bradwell, shut down yet again because of some cracked pipe or faulty duct, and wondered.
Sauntering along the beach, I tried to imagine the exact spot where I caught my first fish. The sand shelves gently, so the inanimate plaice would have slid ashore easily enough. For all I know, it was already gutted and filleted too. Further up, there were scars of driftwood fires, horse manure where they tether the beach ponies, and a dense ribbon of dry seaweed, oyster-shells, plastic bottles and oily blue nylon rope. It added to the general air of unselfconsciousness I liked so much about the place. So many seaside towns have joined in the mania for tidy beaches, it made a welcome change. Seaweed and flotsam can actually be really useful, forming the nuclei of future sand-dunes as beach sandstorms pile up round them, and homes for the sandhoppers and other delicacies that form the diet of so many shoreline birds like sandpipers and dunlin.
Rows of wooden pegs danced on the washing lines along the sea wall and on the scuffed sands above the high-water line as I strolled back along the miniature promenade. Someone had just painted a final coat of pungent orange on Why Worry, and Happy Returns was for sale. A black cat chased mosquitoes on the beach. All along the seafront was an ice-cream feast of pinks, creams, oranges and blues, as though the houses were in pyjamas. No one drew their curtains, in fact no one seemed to mind very much about anything. Everything in Jaywick looked outwards and pretty well the only things to look in would be the sea and the weather. Porches and planked verandas were jumbled with windsurfers, fibreglass boats, deckchairs and picnic tables. The whole place had the far-off feeling of my childhood. It looked absurdly insubstantial, as though it might just float away one day on the face of the rising North Sea.
28
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Kent, 18 September
MY FIRST SIGHT of the Medway on my journey out of Essex into Kent next morning was from a great height, crossing the bridge that speeds the M2 towards Dover and France. The river sparkled from beneath a blanket of mist hastily thrown back by a burst of early sunshine, and the boats riding at anchor looked like Pooh-sticks on the mightiness of the river. I went to Chatham, where I browsed round the magnificent half-deserted, half-asleep dockyard, and climbed into the whispering roof-beams of a gigantic wood-framed, mud-bottomed, dry-dock shed, clinker-built in clapboarding and whitewashed like a Shaker barn. Then on alongside the river to Gillingham and down Water Lane to a boatyard behind the gasometers.
‘Denis is on board. Just give him a shout,’ said a man cradling an outboard motor. A hatch cover went up and Denis waved from the deck of the Doris, a handsome wooden fishing yawl moored near the quay with a plume of dense coal smoke rising from her stove chimney. He came over in the dinghy to fetch me. Denis had the bearded, philosophical look of a seafarer, and twinkling eyes. On board, we had a cup of tea together in the cabin by the bubbling stove, and planned the course we would take across the Medway to Hoo Salt Marsh Island and the Folly Fort.
Denis, who has spent his entire life on boats in and out of the Medway, had generously agreed to escort me in his rowing boat. I was glad of it because, to tell the truth, I was really quite nervous about this swim. This was my first big industrial river, running right through the heart of the most densely populated part of Kent; some 400,000 people live in the Medway towns of Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham. I was scared of the pollution mostly; there were rumours of Hepatitis B, polio and bacteria in such rivers. But there would also be strong currents out in the deep shipping channel, not to mention ships. Hoo Salt Marsh Island is a mile long and lies nearly a mile across the river towards the north bank. At its eastern end lies a ruined naval fort, one of two built in the river in 1860 to defend Chatham Dockyard and our navy from invasion. My plan was to swim across to the island on the last forty-five minutes of the rising tide and visit Steve, an artist camping in Folly Fort, and working on the island.
My Jaywick dip had taught me that there was too much of a chill in the late September water for a long swim in the skin alone. I donned the wetsuit on board the Doris, and we set off in the dinghy for Gillingham Strand past banks of eel grass submerging in the rising tide. The sun was now eclipsed by the leaden cloud that reached right down to the long black horizontal line of the marsh and the river. As I waded in down the shingle bank, a melancholy north-westerly began to sweep towards us across the mud-green river.
I struck out for the first objective, a green boat bobbing at a mooring a few hundred yards out, and swallowed my first mouthful of brackish Medway water. My breaststroke was made awkward by the waves, cutting at me diagonally from the left and catching me unawares just as I was breathing in. This was exactly the sort of thing that had kept me awake at night. Snorting and spitting out the unpalatable draughts or trying to hold my head in the air only broke up the rhythm of my swimming even more, so I either had to learn to love Medway water or, almost too embarrassing to contemplate, abandon the swim. Denis called out the course from the boat: ‘Go for the orange buoy, then the green one.’ I passed the last of the moored boats, a beautiful forty-four-foot Whitstable yawl, and a pair of antique West Country luggers whose rigging rapped a tattoo against their masts in the breeze. I now kept my eye on a pair of distant pylons at a point just to one side of the Kingsnorth power station chimney, the one vertical feature in the horizontal world before me.
The river was the colour of verdigris, the island was still a blur, and so far there had been no big ships or tugs to worry about. We were carrying a canvas harness on a length of rope just in case I should need to be towed at speed out of the path of anything. I became conscious of the giddy depth of the river as I reached the fairway, the main shipping channel. The tide seized me as I swam out past the line of boats, like a thermal lifting a glider, and I instinctively lengthened my stroke to swim with as much power and economy as I could summon.
We had set off at a quarter to two, and high tide was at half-past two, so I was being carried upriver, which on the whole is a better thing than to be carried out to sea. Halfway across, we realised that neither Denis nor I had a watch, so we had no idea how close we were running to the turn of the tide. I just kept on gazing at the power station chimney, with the island and the fort now coming into focus in the foreground, and swimming somewhat crabwise across the current. Curious things happen in the mouths of rivers as they reach the sea. The fresh river-water runs out over the top of the sea-water, which in turn slides in underneath it as the tide rises, because it is denser and heavier. Curious things were also happening in my own mouth; from now on ‘Medway’ would for ever mean the taste of khaki water.
Sometimes Denis rowed ahead of me, sometimes to one side, and sometimes behind. Both of us had settled into the zen of rhythm by now. His great-grandfather had been the last man to live on Hoo Salt Marsh Island. It belonged to the dockyard and has always been used as a dumping ground for the dredgings from the river. Denis’s great-grandpa was the keeper of the island, and kept an eye on the moored lighters and
machinery out there. The coastguards often met him as he loomed out of the fog in the early morning, rowing his two daughters to school in Gillingham. In the end, his single-storey house was buried under the mud they dredged and tipped on the island. The family bred black rabbits, and set some free. The local poachers still bag the occasional descendant with a patch of black in its coat. There are foxes there too, living on rats and rabbits, or crabs from the foreshore.
Until 1858, two years before the fort was built, the floating prison hulks familiar to readers of Great Expectations were moored in the deep water of the estuary along here. They were crudely converted decommissioned naval vessels where prisoners were consigned to await transportation to Australia. Although Dickens locates the hulks in the Thames Estuary in his novel, they were in fact in the Medway. He was certainly familiar with the prison ships and the Medway marshes from his own childhood in Chatham, where he lived between the ages of four and ten. He returned, too, in 1854, to live by this river, six years before he published Great Expectations. The imaginative landscape of the book is surely the one in which I was now literally immersed; I might well have been following the same course as Magwitch when he dived from his floating Alcatraz and escaped. Once on the Hoo Salt Marshes he could have made his way across the muddy creeks at low tide and ended up on shore in the churchyard at Hoo village for the dramatic meeting with Pip that begins the story. Of course, Magwitch could never really have swum the distance fully dressed, in freezing water, with the heavy prison iron locked on his leg.
The river in the lee of the island was calmer and the swimming easier as Denis called out from the boat that he could now see the grass quite clearly, and Steve appeared like Prospero coming along the shore to meet us. I swam in through a confusion of submerged timbers and slimy wooden stakes standing up from the water, which I afterwards discovered once constituted a landing-stage. We landed on a strip of shingle beach and I climbed out, steadying myself on the boat, trying to find my land legs again, looking back at the infinite, gunmetal-grey line of the other shore.
I walked up through a squat forest of elder, bramble and a wilding pear tree to the fort with Steve, while Denis went back across the river, having arranged to return later and ferry me back. I was feeling quite as ravenous as Magwitch in the graveyard and had experienced several mirages of cups of tea on the way over, probably as a reaction to swallowing several gallons of the dubious Medway. So I was delighted to find that Steve had a driftwood fire crackling in one of the fort’s original fireplaces and a kettle on the hob. We had entered via an overgrown earthwork rampart and across a plank, set like a token drawbridge over a puddle, then through a massive creaking fortified doorway with a six-foot iron bar for a latch (which Steve secured at night). We then crept in darkness through an arched brick tunnel (the gunpowder magazine) and up a stone staircase winding through a buddleia bush on to the circular upper gallery, in one bay of which Steve had set out his camp. He lives and works here for days at a time.
I was wide-eyed with astonishment at this building, a massive eleven-sided polygon built of granite, brick, steel and wood to house eleven nine-inch rifled guns, each weighing twelve tons. Its walls were of four-and-a-half-foot granite blocks bedded on lead-plate joints, and each artillery bay had its own fireplace and looked out through a casemate, where the deafening gun would have been, to views of the river, marshes, Kingsnorth power station or Darnet Fort, an identical twin built at the same time on another island three-quarters-of-a-mile away. A steel boom could be slung between the two forts across the shipping channel as an additional defence for Chatham Dockyard. The navy were understandably anxious to avoid a repeat of the successful raid on Chatham and the English fleet by the Dutch in the previous century. This is one of the most impressive historic buildings in England, and certainly one of the most neglected.
Steve’s canvases were propped up around the walls or hung from a washing line like dried cod. They were a kind of collaboration between the man and the river. When we had finished our lunch and I had changed, we set off over the marsh to explore the island and see some of his work in progress. The tide was by now receding to reveal a number of canvases pegged out on the shore or in the mud channels that wind through the marsh. The action of the tide had drawn the subtle pigments of the mud across the spreadeagled canvas in beautiful striated sweeps of greys, browns and black that looked uncannily like the very landscape in which we stood. Steve would dry the canvases, take them back in Denis’s boat to his studio in Chatham Dockyard, and add to the river’s painting himself, using his own pigments made from the mud, natural materials and found objects of the island. One of his greens, for example, would be made from verdigris scraped from copper nails and other boat scrap found on the shore. He was working towards an installation work, to be called ‘Time and Tide’, in which he would hang a canvas in each of the eleven casemates of the nearby Darnet Fort and bring people over to see it by boat.
We walked along the eastern shore past the wooden hulks of several scuttled trawlers, sunken concrete lighters and a tramp steamer, the Moonlit Water. She had belonged to a drug-runner who had abandoned her and disappeared. The island has been a rubbish tip and a dump for the river dredgers for centuries, and its shores are a mass of Roman pottery shards, coins, old bottles and bones. Denis had shown me when we landed how the shingle is full of sea coal, a barnacled legacy of the estuary’s industrial past. He collects it to burn on his stove. Steve has a ready supply of fresh tomatoes from a self-seeded forest of them growing wild on the dumped rubbish and mud of the island. Along the north shore we even found a broken burial urn and the tide-washed cremated bones of a Roman, recently revealed by the constant erosion of the oozing mudbanks.
I returned to the Gillingham shore with Denis, leaving Steve on his island. As we retraced the course of my swim, I pondered what he had told me as we stood over the Roman bones; that I was by no means the first to have made this crossing. In the year 43, the Emperor Claudius had sent an invading army of 35,000 men under the command of Aulus Plautius to land on the Kent coast and subdue the Britons. When they reached the Medway, they were confronted by 60,000 Britons on the far bank under the command of Caractacus and Togodumnus. At that time the estuary was fordable at low tide, but the Britons had sabotaged the ford by digging deep channels. Aulus had with him a regiment of Batavians, members of a German tribe living on an island in the mouth of the Rhine, who were renowned as swimmers. At high tide, just before dawn on the third day of a tense standoff, Aulus sent the 3,000 Batavians swimming silently across the water with their weapons tied on their backs. They took the sleeping Britons by surprise and ran straight to the lines of chariot-ponies, ruthlessly disabling several thousand of them. Meanwhile, two battalions of the Ninth Regiment crossed the river on an assortment of rafts, inflated wineskins and captured coracles, to be followed later by the elephants and camels they had brought with them. The defending forces were put to flight and the amphibious regiment marched on to the Thames, which they also swam, since the Britons had not by then perfected the ultimate deterrent to river swimmers, pollution.
29
CHANNEL SWIMMING
Kent, 19 September
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I took my first steps into the nearest thing in England to a desert: Dungeness. The sea has dumped millions upon millions of pebbles here in a gigantic raised beach that juts out into the sea beyond the Romney Marshes like Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. In aerial photographs, you can see how the pebbles are arranged in whorls reminiscent of the 600 species of wild flowers that are found on this unpromising terrain. Somehow or other, nearly one-third of all the flowering plants in Britain grow naturally here, and it is for a garden, Derek Jarman’s, that Dungeness is now known as much as for its nuclear power station. The whole thing is a living organism, like Blakeney Point, Orford Ness, or Chesil Bank, and it is constantly changing shape, growing out into the sea.
On my way across Kent, after the high-sided scrap lorries, animal sanctuaries and lay
-by mobile cafés of the arterial roads through Maidstone and Ashford, I had driven through the misty wastes of Romney Marsh, a landscape out of time. Three miles away, I had passed a farmer on an old grey Ferguson tractor followed by a gang of women harvesting potatoes and leeks by hand, much as the Land Girls did. The dykes all had quaint names, like Jury’s Gap Sewer, and wandered aimlessly about the flatness as though they were lost. My road, too, looped absent-mindedly along the courses of past and present waterways until I eventually arrived at the first few pebbles of the Denge Beach. I parked the car at the edge of this spartan wilderness and set off to hike across its scrubby undulations and stone-dunes for two-and-a-half miles to the Britannia, a pub at the uttermost extremity of Dungeness, under the lighthouse. I sat talking to the landlord and drinking tea, wondering if the sea-fret would ever clear. It hid the horizon and removed all sense of perspective in this outback, with its isolated fishing huts and wooden bungalows planted at random on the pebbles. An empty No. 12 bus from Dymchurch bumped along the concrete road and stopped opposite, where the Grand Hotel once stood, then moved off again after five minutes, still empty. The few figures in this landscape moved deliberately, slowed by the shingle.
The mist showed no signs of lifting, but I thought I would go down to the shore anyway. The fishermen’s creosoted huts were named after their boats: Oasis, Seapatch, Celebrity. Sunshine had melted the tar off their roofs, and sparrows and starlings strutted along the ridges, puffing themselves up against the mist. House martins gathered impatiently on the telegraph wires over an old railway coach that was once Queen Victoria’s, now somebody’s home.
