Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  The first is Dunwich, which 850 years ago was one of the largest and most prosperous ports in England. But it was built on shifting sands and collapsing cliffs. Our lives are all like that, I suppose, but Dunwich’s case was a bit extreme. In 1286 that deadly North Sea combination – a stormy nor’easter and a spring tide – destroyed much of the town, but, even more disastrously in economic terms, the spit washed across the harbour mouth and blocked the entrance. The trade moved elsewhere and, with the cliffs eroding at the rate of a yard a year, Dunwich slowly tumbled into the sea, though it infamously maintained two MPs until the 1832 Reform Act.

  There are at least a dozen churches under the sea, their bells (so it is said) giving out ghostly peals on blowy nights, the last of them, All Saints, finally going under in 1919. Dunwich now has a beach with a café (looking sensibly impermanent), a few cottages, a pub and a fascinating museum. The whole place panders to my obsessive fears, though it took me until 2009 before I finally got there and indulged them. The man in the museum told me that day that he expected the sea would claim the building in seventy years’ time.

  I mentioned this to Jane Hamilton, the museum’s education officer, who was in charge the day I returned: ‘On that reckoning, you’ve got sixty-seven years left.’ Not necessarily, she said, because Dunwich disappears in fits and starts. ‘That figure was based on a council seventy-five-year line that put the sea just on the far side of the museum. In fact there hasn’t been much erosion the last few years.’

  But how do you get the building insured? Not a problem, she said. ‘The insurance companies are only bothered about what’s going to happen in any given year. They don’t care about seventy years’ time. It’s the same when you take out dog insurance. They’re very happy to take your money until the dog’s nine or ten.’ In actuarial terms, indeed, Dunwich’s life expectancy is considerably better than my own, never mind my dog’s.

  An hour south and the coast had a very different feel. I was standing by the Spa Pavilion in Felixstowe. The tulips were blooming and the place seemed as sleepy and Edwardian and unchanging as Budleigh Salterton. But past the pier, there was an extraordinary sight: a line of giant cranes, looking like the invaders in War of the Worlds.

  Felixstowe is Britain’s biggest port. Ask that as a quiz question and hardly anyone outside Suffolk or the shipping business would have a clue. Yet it handles twice as many containers as its nearest rival, Southampton, and is the only UK port in the global top fifty – 6,000 containers coming in or out every day. Shanghai would have 60,000, but still. ‘Felixstowe,’ says the port’s corporate affairs officer, Paul Davey, ‘is better known in China than it is in the UK.’

  This story is Dunwich in reverse. Felixstowe only acquired a port in 1875 and for decades it was insignificant, pottering around with a bit of agricultural trade. It was so small that when the Attlee government introduced the National Dock Labour Scheme in 1947 Felixstowe was too trivial to qualify. Which turned out to be crucial.

  Until then, dockers had been employed on a brutally casual basis, standing outside desperately trying to catch the foreman’s eye. No work, no pay, like a struggling actor. The reform completely reversed the balance of power and ultimately the unions negotiated lifetime job security. When containerisation came in around 1966, cutting freight costs considerably, they saw it as a threat, as indeed it was: one container ship could replace nine conventional cargo ships. But the dockers had the muscle to keep the containers out. Felixstowe’s owners, exempt from the scheme, saw their opportunity. And to their own tiny workforce, it meant more jobs, not fewer. ‘I think the Port of London had 50,000 dockers at one time,’ said Davey. ‘Now it’s about 500. We had fifty, now it’s 2,500.’

  Felixstowe had other advantages. As Britain’s trade moved first towards Europe and then to Asia, it had geography on its side: ships flitting between the big European ports – Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg – could easily fit in Felixstowe. And, unlike the old big-city ports, it had room to expand: specifically on to a stretch of marshland reluctantly bought by Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s as a makeweight when it was buying some nearby farms. Since then, this port has paid for a great deal of the port Trinity dons enjoy at high table.

  The docks are a mile and a world away from the Spa Pavilion and the tulips: it is a vast and private place, with lorries piling out day and night on to the A14, and fifty-eight train movements a day, with a new rail terminal being built. It has its own fire, ambulance and statutory police service. Along the shoreline the containers are stacked up to nine-high in the different-coloured liveries of the major freight companies: from the air, they must look like a child’s building blocks. Recently, the port of Ningbao in China asked Felixstowe for a twinning arrangement. ‘We didn’t know too much about Ningbao,’ said Davey. ‘Turns out it’s got a population of six and a half million. Felixstowe’s 30,000.’

  I was intrigued by the notion of the handful of third-world sailors who crew those behemoths coming ashore for their brief visit to Felixstowe and hastily ravishing the womenfolk before heading off to Hamburg or wherever to repeat the exercise the next night.

  ‘Where do they go?’ I asked Davey. ‘The fleshpots of Felixstowe?’

  ‘They’re too tired. Anyway, there are no fleshpots in Felixstowe.’

  The past and present sometimes blend just as successfully but more attractively. Just north of Dunwich is Southwold: ‘one of the happiest and most picturesque seaside-towns in England’.

  Pevsner wrote that more than half a century ago and it is, if anything, even more true now. One theory is that Southwold and Aldeburgh owe their modern success to the closure of their railways, thus making them more exclusive for the car-owning middle class. Sebald, who arrived on foot, was especially taken with the Sailors’ Reading Room, a building too much like a Victorian schoolroom to attract the other German migrant Pevsner. It was open, according to The Rings of Saturn, from seven in the morning to midnight but ‘almost always deserted but for one or two of the surviving fishermen and seafarers sitting in silence in the armchairs’.

  The opening hours had certainly shortened when I arrived, and there was not much to read, just that rusting old hulk of a newspaper, the Daily Express, and the Ipswich morning paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, which – like the reading room itself – is a remarkable survivor. A new sign on the table read: ‘The Sunday newspapers have been discontinued as they do not seem to get read.’

  Mostly the reading room is a quaint museum, the wood-panelled wall filled with figureheads and photos and scale models of old ships like the beach yawl Bittern (which I hope had a froghorn) and the steamer Southwold Belle. There is a members-only back room with a snooker table. Three old boys – all genuine longshore fishermen, I think – were reading the papers companionably and far from silently. ‘Place next door to Buffy Baggott’s,’ said one (I’m sure that’s what he said). ‘Fifteen hundred a calendar month. Bit steep!’

  Southwold has fine pubs and Adnams Beer, whose brewery has moved only from the town centre to the outskirts. But there is something even more special: Southwold Pier, rebuilt at the turn of this century.

  Bypass the bog-standard amusement arcade at the pier entrance, ignore even the improbably alluring pier restaurant (cod with chorizo, butterbean, herb cassoulet and curly kale) and walk down to the Under the Pier Show, an amusement arcade appealing even to people who hate amusement arcades (my wife). It was created by an inventor called Tim Hunkin and comprises a collection of homemade slot machines and what I suppose you might call rides, mixing Heath Robinson engineering, postmodern irony and a large dollop of genius. My special favourite – beating even Whack a Banker (‘You lost … So it’s business as usual’) is Micro-Break (‘the fast, efficient holiday’), a wonderful pastiche of the travel industry as it caters to people stupid enough to go further than Southwold.

  It is then necessary to leave just before the hour or half-hour to go outside and see Hunkin’s towering achievement, the water clock,
which culminates in … but no, you have to see it.

  When I told Suffolk friends I was going to Lowestoft, they responded rather like my mum when I told her I was heading to a war zone. Its reputation is Southwold in reverse: having failed to make much impact on the sun-and-sea market, the family market, the youth market, the elderly market, the dirty weekend market, the clean weekend market, the stag party market, the hen party market and the day trip market, the town is reckoned to have done well with the cider-and-meths drinkers’ market.

  But my destination was not the town itself. The aim was to touch England and the UK’s most easterly point: 52°28’ N, 1°45’ E. Lowestoft Ness.

  There was no visible sign on Whaploade Road, the main coastal route out of town. Instead I parked near quite a pretty cricket ground-cum-park and a caravan site that might have been attractively positioned had the concrete sea wall not rendered the sea invisible. Thinking I needed to head back south, I walked along the wall for the thick end of a mile into a wind coming straight from the South Pole that, in defiance of geography, appeared to have skipped the tropics altogether. Later I realised that, precisely because this was such an easterly outpost, the wind was carrying all the cold of the North Sea straight into my face. A kindly dog walker said I was on the right track, pointing to a tower that looked like some sort of landmark.

  To landward now was the Bird’s Eye factory; to seaward was a sign saying ‘Beach closed due to sharp spikes and concrete blocks’. The wall opened out into a longer platform, like the deck of an aircraft carrier. Were the place a fraction more attractive, everything would have been covered in graffiti, but no vandal would be desperate enough to come here. The landmark turned out to be some kind of chimney belonging to an old sewage works, with a rusting metal seat attached for the benefit of tourists on which it seemed unlikely that any human buttocks had ever rested. I was alone except for a single birdwatcher.

  On the ground at the easternmost point itself was something called the Euroscope – i.e. it was paid for by European funds – showing the compass points of more welcoming tourist resorts like Dogger Bank and the Indefatigable Gas Field. To the south-west was a wind turbine, said to be the UK’s tallest (certainly the most easterly) and an ancient gasometer.

  The correct route, I later discovered, was to have turned right at Atlas Autos and then left into Gasworks Road, past the barbed wire with the plastic bags hanging from it. Much later, I discovered the Ness Point website, written by someone aware that the ‘tourist offer’ is not necessarily all it might be. ‘Currently all there is for a tourist to see apart from the wonderful sea views is the Euroscope which some people have called “a thing on the floor”.’ The site also says: ‘These are very exiting times for both Lowestoft and Ness Point.’ Honest, it said exiting. Tim Hunkin is not the only ironist in these parts.

  The birdwatcher said there had been some changes: ‘The sewage outflow used to be just over there,’ he said, pointing at the waves. ‘But they moved it now.’

  ‘So that’s an improvement, anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Not really. You used to get all the gulls coming to feed on the sewage, especially the rare ones. It’s not nearly so good now.’

  And not an avocet or bittern in sight.

  April 2012

  In 2014 the Ness Point website was still reporting ‘exiting times’: no mention of anything happening.

  14. Mayday! Mayday!

  OXFORDSHIRE

  In my niece’s house in North Hinksey, I put the alarm on for 4.30. Scared of sleeping through it, I thus hardly slept at all. I tiptoed out at 5 and could have walked into town had the rain not been absolutely bombarding. So I drove, a triumph of hope over experience even at that time of the morning. Oxford sets complex intellectual challenges so that entrance is barred to all but the most intelligent aspirants. This applies to motorists as well as students.

  I came up with wrong answers on the Botley Road, then on the complex one-way system, the dead ends and the D.Phil.-level parking regulations, and still ended up dumping the car illegally and having to hail a cab to get as far as was feasible down the High.

  As 6 a.m. approached, the streets were already full, and noisy. Some people were coming out of nightclubs (on a Tuesday!), some were in evening dress, or remnants of it. Virtually all of them were young; many of them were drunk; most of them, one imagines, were students residing in the ancient colleges, both because it was hard to get there otherwise at such an hour and because of the elevated nature of their discourse: ‘Come on, you guys’ … ‘Pretty fucking awesome’ … ‘And she was, like, paralytic in KFC, y’know’ …

  By now, the rain had eased to a light drizzle. I fought my way on to Magdalen Bridge, where it was just possible to see ghostly figures moving below the pinnacles of Magdalen College’s great tower. On the stroke of 6, in keeping with ancient tradition, they began the May morning carol:

  Te Deum Patrem colimus,

  Te laudibus prosequimur…

  Something like that, anyway. The chief recipient of the Hymnus Eucharisticus, the rising sun, was having a very long lie-in. It was also difficult for the audience on the bridge to hear because the pre-6 a.m. hubbub had stilled only a fraction. As the hymn turned to madrigals, conversation grew louder and the choir, 144 feet above us, was having trouble competing, even with amplifiers.

  Finally, the bells rang out and everyone drifted away. A few years ago, it was customary – young gentlemen, high spirits, drink taken – to mark May Day in Oxford by jumping into the Cherwell. In 2005, with river levels unusually low, forty of them got hurt (‘Barmpots today, rulers tomorrow,’ said the Sun) and for several years police closed the bridge for the duration.

  By 2012 the authorities had relented a little. But it was impossible even to see the river, never mind jump in it. It was protected by three lines of security fences and one line of unsmiling guards. There was also, puzzlingly, a line of green flags, the universal indicator of safe bathing. Hardly anyone was confused: only three people tried to beat the system, according to the Oxford Mail, and none of them made it. The whole occasion was a bit joyless somehow, and I trudged off to buy a coffee and pastry to wake and cheer myself up.

  In the coffee shop, a young man – merry even for May – came over and pleaded: ‘May Day hug, May Day hug’. So that’s why it’s the international distress call, I thought. ‘A bit early in the morning,’ I grumped. Within moments I repented, thinking my reply was just a bit over-English and stuffy. It made no difference. By then he had given me my hug anyway.

  Seventeen days later, on a more clement morning, at a less trying hour, a smaller, more decorous gathering collected outside what is regarded as the city church, St Michael’s at the North Gate, on Cornmarket Street at the far end of the High. It was Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter, and the city rector, Bob Wilkes, was to lead all-comers on a tour of the city, to beat the bounds of his parish.

  This is an English rite of spring at least as deeply rooted as May Day. A few villages across the country still organise a nice country walk, touching markers in the field margins and hedgerows. In Oxford, there being a shortage of hedgerows, it works a little differently: the marker stones are in all kinds of weird places. About seventy of us gathered and were handed canes more normally used these days for tying sweet peas or runner beans. Bob Wilkes’ departing cry was: ‘To Boots!’

  And so he led us on the merriest dance: two hours, twenty-nine stones, each of which he would chalk and we would whack with the cry: ‘Mark! Mark! Mark!’ This exercise pre-dates mapping: the parish was the fount of authority in most people’s lives, and it was important for everyone to know where its writ began and ended. It was especially important for the elders to impress this on the young, and sometimes they would impress it extra hard by whacking their heads against the stones.

  ‘Nobody’s supposed to tell you this,’ one of the priests on the walk murmured to me, ‘but the real reason was that illegitimate children were a charge on the parish. The yo
ung men had to be told where the boundaries were to make sure that, when they played, they played away so that someone else would pay for the consequences.’

  Actually, everyone told me that: the churchmen love the story. And it is always a thrill to feel a connection with the reality of ancient lives. In this parish the ceremony dates back at least to 1428, but the rector thinks it is probably far older. It certainly felt more authentic than May Day.

  After Boots, Bob led us into the Clarendon Centre and to Zara’s basement, where the stone was at the back of the shoe racks. Then a sudden change of scene, and it was into the garden of St Peter’s College, where the stone was half-entangled in vine (pause here for orange juice and bikkies and three cheers for the college for their kindness).

  Then under St Peter’s wisteria-covered pergola, back out into the streets. Stone 8 was lost in the cellar of O’Neill’s Irish bar, which was decreed too dingy to enter, so we decided any old stone would do and whacked that. Past the Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera, into Brasenose College (coffee and pastries, three more cheers). The only other church still observing the custom, the university church of St Mary the Virgin, had got to Brasenose first – the boundaries meet there. Had we coincided, we might have had to stage a rapper dance with our canes.

  Then to the Vincent’s Club bike shed, and Marks & Spencer, where four of the city parishes meet, a point marked by a cross on the floor just by the tights, leggings and bikinis. ‘Marks! Marks! Marks!’ suggested Bob, who was a most genial host. There is of course no more appropriate place for a delegation from this church to visit than an even greater temple which is also dedicated to St Michael.