by Roger Deakin
Thirty feet below the raised beach, down a steep bank of pebbles, this stretch of the English Channel looked calm but a long way off, like water at the bottom of a well. I clattered down several tiers of stones and, quite alone in the mist, dived out into deep water. There were no shallows here. No horizon either, just the enveloping greyness, and the mesmeric, searching glint of the lighthouse overhead. As I swam out, I felt dwarfed by the immensity of the beach behind me, the great depth of the quiet water as it lapped at the steep shelf of submerged shingle. If I felt out of my depth and further than far out, it was because I was swimming off the end of a natural pier; the sensation you get when you bathe off a sailing boat far out to sea. It led me to a deeper feeling for Keats’s lines, in his sonnet ‘Bright Star’: ‘The moving waters at their priestlike task/ Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.’
It is only by swimming in deep water that you really sense the motion of the tides as a cosmic event, as one with the moon and stars. This was indeed some of the purest bathing to be had anywhere on the south coast, and I was busy wallowing in its freshness, laving my limbs and, I hoped, not polluting it with too much Medway mud. The sea was cool, but I soon grew used to it and breaststroked round in wide circles, conscious of the longshore currents that I knew must flow around the outcrop that has wrecked so many ships. After a wetsuit swim the day before, swimming-costume nakedness was blissful, my pale hands showing in sharp focus through the clear water before me. How ironic that a few hundred yards away a nuclear power station should be cooling its eternal fever in such crystal waters like some fated monster of the Odyssey. The thought sent me swimming back inshore towards the daunting wall of shingle and my solitary rucksack perched above the tideline. Everything here was larger than life, except me and my rucksack. The dim shape of the latest of the Dungeness lighthouses loomed above the scene. This is the fifth one to be built at the point since 1615 because the shingle keeps accumulating and pushing the beach further out, leaving the beacons misleadingly far inland.
Glowing inwardly after the swim, I explored the upper beach and discovered comfort food: smoked cod’s roe and extra big kippers in Jim’s Smokehouse at Pearl Cottage, just along from Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. He told me that in springtime carloads of Greeks come down from London to pick the tender young shoots of the seakale. It used to be enjoyed as a delicacy by the locals, who would kick up the shingle round the plants to blanch the leaves. Now this is one of the few wild colonies of a plant that was once common on our shifting coasts. Jim showed me his garden, a vigorous Manhattan skyline of seeding mullein and other native flowers, plagued by earwigs. His ponds were all wired over to protect the goldfish from herons, and another was full of common frog tadpoles, which he releases as adults on the marsh to compensate for the recent dominance of the vociferous bullfrog around Dungeness. Like the wild boar which roam other parts of Kent, they have been introduced.
Jim’s garden had no fences. It just melted into the wider natural garden that is Denge Beach. This is the local way of things, but Jim pointed sadly to a neighbouring property that had recently changed hands and been fenced. The meanness of it amongst all these free-thinking desert gardeners with their undefined patches shading into the wilderness was striking. ‘If there’s one thing that gets me really titty,’ said Jim, ‘it’s fences.’ Fishing communities, especially net-fishing people, are essentially communal. Most of the work is shared and co-operative. There is trust and interdependence. So who would need fences?
Jim’s friend still goes fishing for a living in the last wooden boat in Dungeness. There is something profoundly sad about the place that Derek Jarman must have felt and expressed in his garden full of relics of the fishing industry. Prospect Cottage, where Jarman and Keith Collins lived, is a simple, black clapboard fisherman’s house with yellow windows and doors and matching burglar alarm. A set of yellow oilskins hung, motionless, on the washing line that day. The cottage is a place of pilgrimage for Jarmanites, the film buffs and gardeners who turn up from all over the world to admire the highly original natural garden, often without an appointment. The place is so unassuming, and so obviously a retreat, that I decided it should be left in peace, and skirted it well to the west along the abandoned narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway line that used to bring holidaymakers out here and is still used occasionally by steam enthusiasts.
Trudging through the pebbles past clumps of plantains, seakale, sage, toadflax, yarrow, yellow lady’s bedstraw and dwarf broom, I reached another set of narrow-gauge rails that led from the concrete roadway down the beachhead. Lying about in the shingle were some small rusting wagons that were used to run the catch up to a waiting lorry on the first stage of its journey to Billingsgate. The ruins of our fishing industry lay everywhere. The entire beach was an industrial graveyard of derelict huts, rusty anchors, makeshift boat winches with taxi engines and gearboxes, hopelessly tangled nets, oil tanks leaking on to whelk shells, the dented torso of a tank engine, a deserted net-drying tower, a sunken bulldozer drowned in shingle, and dormant Dormobiles. The shabby grey mass of the half-spent nuclear power station in the background looked perfectly in keeping with all this dereliction. Every now and again through the fog came the garbled monotones of announcements over its tannoy.
Fourteen full-time fishing-boats still work out of Dungeness, but the nature of the fishing has changed dramatically since the decline of the herring and mackerel, and a scattered pile of parched, lanky wooden stakes was the last remnant of a great tradition of net fishing off the shore from Dungeness along to Greatstone-on-Sea. The kettlenet-fishing along these sands was dominated by certain families: the Southerdens, the Tarts and the Gilletts. Each family had its stands, areas of shore 900 yards long and 210 yards wide, where they set up their nets on tall wooden poles like those you see in Kentish hop-fields. Each stand would have about ninety wooden poles sixteen feet long, dug three feet into the sand. The fishermen would go out on the sands with a horse and cart at low tide and hang the netting on the poles like cricket nets. The configuration of the nets was a huge trap, which ensnared whole shoals of fish in the ‘kettle’, a circle of net in the centre, which sometimes boiled with panicking fish when the tide receded.
About eight men would stand by on shore with the horse and cart as the tide went out. When there was still three feet of water in the kettle, they would wade into the sea in their oilskins with hand nets and shovel the live fish into the cart. Others would go round the standing nets filling baskets with the gasping fish that had been left hanging by the gills. Sometimes there were just too many of the creatures to be gathered before the tide exposed the sand, and the nets would be lifted to let them escape. In the event of a bumper catch, the fishermen would put a number of baskets on top of a pole and hoist it up on the sea wall. Lookouts with telescopes were posted back in town at Romney, and they would send out the appropriate number of relief horses and carts to bring in the fish. Mackerel was the main catch, and they would be packed by the women and sent up to Billingsgate by the evening train from Lydd. They sold the smaller sprats and mackerel locally and kept the herrings for smoking as bloaters or kippers. This kind of fishing had its heyday in the early part of the century, but Ed Gillett and his brothers carried on until 1953.
I decided to drive round to Camber Sands, eight miles down the coast, for a late lunch, as the sea mist was beginning to clear to reveal a gloriously mild and sunny afternoon. By two o’clock I was seated outside the Kit Kat Café on the seafront in my shorts. The first thing I saw as I stared out upon the vast expanse of gleaming sand was an old man with a metal detector and a trowel. He was clutching his headphones excitedly, as though receiving news of a lottery win. He burrowed feverishly into a tiny fraction of the billions of silicon grains that constitute Camber Sands, but found nothing worth keeping.
At the first bite of my sandwich, I heard sand echoing through my jaw like tinnitus. The sea breeze was blowing it off the dunes towards the café. Here we all were at the
tail end of September on a Friday afternoon enjoying an Indian summer holiday. There must have been two hundred people on the beach, yet it is so enormous it looked empty. They were mostly local Kentish mums and children seizing the chance sunny afternoon. I seemed to be the only person lacking a dog, and the only man without a bunch of keys dangling from my belt. What with the dogs and the keys, it looked and sounded like a Securicor outing. Kent appeared to favour little dogs: cairn terriers, poodles, dachshunds, the occasional Jack Russell.
As the tide receded, Camber was all sand-pools, lagoons and impromptu sand rivers snaking to the tideline. At the café, all the mums sat out at white plastic tables smoking cigarettes that lasted about fifteen seconds in the breeze. The group at the nearest table had put their trainers on it to weigh down their napkins. Mine had already disappeared in a small tornado. A crocodile of little blonde girls in black wellingtons, shepherded by an older sister also in black wellies, stood out as reassuringly old-fashioned amongst all the Nikes and Oasis T-shirts. There must have been at least a dozen kites aloft. A tough-looking youth made straight towards me with a Dobermann, yanking its lead every four paces and shouting, ‘Come ’ere!’ Looking down, I realised I was posted right beside a Tupperware container labelled ‘Dog Water’. I had come here expecting to find some peace, and was struck by the complexity of the soundtrack – the shouting men, the frantic barking of a tethered Labrador, the roar of the Gaggia espresso machine inside the café, the whine of a nosediving Peter Powell stunt kite, and the steady, seductive whisper of the distant sea.
I took off my shoes and set out for a two-and-a-half-hour barefoot hike along the shoreline, paddling most of the way ankle- to knee-deep in the receding tide. As if unsure of the immense freedom before them, most people seemed to stay within range of the café, and I had gone only a few hundred yards when I found myself entirely alone. The Battle of Britain had been fought in the skies reflected on the gleaming, lugwormed flats. I thought of the wounded planes that limped back over the Channel, only to nosedive into these sands in desperate attempts to crash-land, twisting their steel propellers like the petals of giant daisies. I had found some of the old aircraft engines and propellers rescued from this beach leant up against a hut on Romney Marsh like wilted crucifixes; monuments to their unknown pilots and crew.
Choosing a low tumulus of drier sand, I changed into my swimming trunks and left my rucksack and shoes there to wade out and investigate what looked from a distance like a half-submerged tank, but turned out to be a wrecked steel fishing trawler. The beach at this point is four or five hundred yards wide, and at low tide you have to wade through yards more shallows before reaching water deep enough for swimming. The sea, brown with churned sand, was marginally warmer than at Dungeness, but still cold. I waded in up to my waist and swam out to inspect the rusting hulk. It was festooned with ragged seaweed and pimpled all over with barnacles. A solitary cormorant perched atop the bridge, and white-capped waves broke over the sandbar that must have grounded the boat.
I swam beyond it into the open sea. When I turned back towards land I spotted two construction workers who had been operating a pile-driver on the sea defences hurrying down the beach towards me. As I swam back towards them, they hesitated, then turned and walked away again when I emerged from the sea and returned to my towel and clothes. I was embarrassed to realise they thought I was doing the same as John Stonehouse, or the fictional Reginald Perrin: leaving a pile of clothes behind and disappearing for good. I went up to where they were resuming work to apologise and thank them. I had guessed right, although they had also worried about my swimming in the riptides out there and the remoteness of the spot, and besides, they said, they were curious.
Stonehouse’s story is amongst the best and worst of modern sleaze. The Labour MP for Walsall disappeared on 22 November 1974, a month or so before Lord Lucan, and the two lives became strangely connected. Stonehouse was reported missing, feared drowned, in the waters off Miami, where he had gone on a dubious business trip to try and save various ailing banking enterprises from imminent collapse. He had last been seen going swimming, and his clothes had been found by police at the beach. Stories began to appear in the papers that he had been murdered by the Mafia, and a mysteriously empty ‘concrete overcoat’ was discovered on Miami Beach. He was said to have been part of a Czech spy-ring, and it was confirmed that Harold Wilson, with his ready sense of humour, had had Stonehouse’s telephone tapped while he was Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. The MP’s wife, Barbara, said he was in the habit of swimming far out to sea on his own, and she was convinced he was drowned.
Then, just before Christmas, Stonehouse was arrested in Australia by the Melbourne police, travelling on two passports in the names of Markam and Muldoon, who turned out to be two of his deceased Walsall constituents. Using Markham’s passport, and living as Muldoon in a flat in the suburbs, Stonehouse had been in the habit of visiting the main Melbourne post office to check its poste restante for mail.
Meanwhile, another tall, distinguished-looking Englishman with black hair and money worries had also disappeared. Every police force in the world had been alerted to keep an eye open for Lucan, especially in Australia. The Melbourne police simply did what any police force would do in the circumstances: they staked out the poste restante desk at the post office. When a tall, distinguished-looking Brylcreemed English smoothie strolled in, they couldn’t believe their luck. They arrested him. Down at the station, Markham/Muldoon/Lucan/Stonehouse found himself in some difficulty. Faced with explaining a passport in one false name and a flat in another, Stonehouse’s predicament was pure Kafka. Only by confessing he was the fugitive MP could he convince the police he was not Lord Lucan.
The wreck was marked by a totem pole, and three more deathly cormorants had returned to perch symmetrically on it, two on each side of the triangular ‘Danger’ sign and one on top. If these birds looked wizened, it was because they probably were; they can live to be as old as fifty. As sunset arrived, and low tide, I was joined on the great deserted beach by two figures, the first apparently carrying a double bed into the sea, the second digging lugworms with a tiny-bladed spade with the rapidity of a bird. ‘They move like lightning,’ he told me. ‘You need skill.’ I asked him what he fished for, and he said he didn’t fish at all himself. He preferred the challenge of lugworm hunting, and gave them away to his friends. The double bed turned out to be an enormous shrimping net with which its owner hoovered the sandy bottom, pausing after each flurry of passes to empty it into a plastic washing-up bowl, pick out any shrimps, and pop them over his shoulder into a plastic bucket strapped to his back. He was joined by a second shrimper, also accoutred like a one-man band, who appeared from nowhere and kept a respectful distance.
Across the glistening sands, small questing Lowry figures now began springing up everywhere, curious to see what the low tide had deposited on the beach. On its big blank canvas someone had etched a beautiful looping line with a stick. I picked up a hunk of solid mahogany, almost petrified by the salt-water and worn smooth by the sand. It sat dense and cold in my hands, nearly black as coal and flecked with ginger from iron salts in the mud or sand it must have been buried in. Perhaps it had been part of a breakwater or a pier. Carrying it two or three miles in my rucksack before drying it slowly in my workshop back in Suffolk somehow gave it more weight in other ways. Such driftwood survivors are signs of hope. I turned it into a lamp for a friend who loves to write late at night, adrift in a sea of papers; a small desk lighthouse to help steer her course.
The ribbed sand was hard work on the feet, like walking on a tin roof for miles on end. I came back towards the Kit Kat past a row of beach houses nestling in the dunes, several of them empty or derelict. One clapboarded bungalow caught my eye, with a wood-shingle roof, bay window, and french windows facing the beach. Its garden was boarded up and overgrown with yellow sea poppies, sea cabbage and sea pinks, the local seaside weeds. I stepped through a gap and looked in through a hole in the
boarded french window. The scene was like Miss Havisham’s. The place must have been abandoned for thirty years, but when I parted the curtains there were tennis rackets laid out on the table, and an open cupboard door revealed early mark-one Marmite and Robertson’s marmalade jars. Next door but one, the influence of Derek Jarman had spread along the coast and there was a full-scale Jarmanite garden complete with pebble cairns, massive balks of sea-bashed timber standing on end like megaliths; various oddments of rusting iron, bits of boat, fat, tarry lengths of hawser laid out like serpents, and the wild plants of this shore in pebble bunkers. Its playful spirit perfectly suited the atmosphere of this limitless desert playground. On a summer’s day you wouldn’t be surprised to meet Saint-Exupéry and the Little Prince stepping out of a light plane in a mirage over the hot sands.
30
WATER LEVELS
Somerset, 14 October
BOB’S BIKE WAS leant against the gate. I saw his bent figure on the far side of the orchard gathering windfall cider apples into sacks. As I approached the door of the wooden shed, a flurry of sparrows flew out of the cider press. Over the winter, Bob was going to sweep the dust off the wooden trays and oil the massive corkscrew shafts of the press to get it going again. During the war, the farm’s cider shed had been an unofficial pub dispensing Dutch courage to the Spitfire pilots from the aerodrome across the fields. Cider and bread and butter was all they served. Bob said he always lets the apples fall before he harvests them. These were Kingston Blacks, just what he wanted for a chap down the road in Dowlish Wake. Nineteen sacks would fill a barrel.
The fine spell of October weather had enticed me west again, into the watery Somerset Levels, where some friends have one of the small, traditional farm orchards that were once common all over the county. People hurry past the Levels on the motorways, hardly registering the flat meadows, serried pollard willows, ancient church towers, osier beds, oozing marshland, small orchards, winding rivers, and cows. It is still a medieval landscape. They call it ‘the land of shaking trees’ because they float on a fenland raft of peat, so when a heavy load passes down the road, everything moves.
