Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  These days Kentish rebelliousness generally takes the form of writing to the papers or, at worst not voting Tory, rather than heading for the capital, capturing the courtiers, beheading them and displaying their heads on pikes, kissing each other – which is how Cade’s men added insult to fatal injury. The last great Kentish outrage was probably in 1913, when the suffragettes burned down the Tunbridge Wells cricket pavilion. I do like to imagine the meeting where that idea was cooked up: ‘Sisters! I have a plan that will shake the male establishment to its very foundations!’

  Despite the suffragettes’ best efforts, cricket lives on at Tunbridge Wells, and the annual festival is one of the few of these events left on the county circuit. In Kent – perhaps even more than Yorkshire – cricket remains the one great expression of the county’s identity. In the old days the fixture list would move in a steady eastward direction from Blackheath and Gravesend in May towards Dover and Folkestone in August. Now even Kent play almost all their home matches in one place, where the signs at the city boundary proclaim ‘Canterbury – World heritage site and home of Kent County Cricket’, as though the two were directly connected.

  There are Kentishmen, born west of the River Medway, and men of Kent, born to the east. The division hardly ranks alongside Sunnis and Shias and is not a staple of conversation, even on the cricket grounds, though I heard a story of two missionaries bickering about the subject in the Solomon Islands, to the bemusement of the locals. It is somewhat confusing, since the Medway wanders around more than most rivers and in the upper reaches flows south-north, north-south and all sorts. In Tonbridge it flows in several channels at once. The Medway is a practical modern division too, since to the east commuting to London becomes a decidedly optimistic enterprise: the railways of Kent have always been notorious, a situation only marginally alleviated by the new fast trains into St Pancras. And man of Kent is more emphatic, implying someone truly belonging to the county. Kentish sounds altogether more half-hearted. There is an Association of Kentish Men and Men of Kent, with eighteen branches that do good works and are open also to Fair Maids of Kent and Kentish Maids, and no doubt Unfair Maids, Fair Unmaids and indeed anyone else with the slightest Kent connection.

  Tunbridge Wells is famously the capital of the Kentish letter-writing habit that Lambert Le Roux so admired: ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ was reputedly invented by the local paper, the Kent and Sussex Courier, in the 1930s as a means of publishing phoney letters when the real ones ran short.

  As a spa, the town was never much cop: the waters, despite tasting nasty, were quickly shown to be useless. But it discovered its niche as a retirement village for old colonials and their widows. I find Tunbridge Wells handsome and soothing. I love the acid-soil gardens too: this is a place that rests on its rhododendrons as well as its laurels.

  On the face of it, Tunbridge Wells is everything you would expect it to be: one of the most imposing buildings in town is a neo-Georgian pile on London Road. A particularly fine post office, perhaps? It turns out to be the bridge club. And the main church is named not after a saint but ‘King Charles the Martyr’, built in the 1670s, shortly after the Stuart restoration. Which seems to fit with Lambert Le Roux’s view of Kent, and our own. But, even in Tunbridge Wells, not everything is as obvious as it seems.

  The two slopes that lead to the Pantiles, the now unpantiled shopping centre, are called Mount Sion and Mount Ephraim, names that reek of Puritan influence. And in the 1930s King Charles the Martyr was an improbable stronghold of Low Church thinking. Lord Clonmore, in his wonderfully eccentric 1935 Shell Guide to Kent, says that ‘Tunbridge Wells may be considered a fair rival to Tennessee’. Well, lordy, lordy.

  What Tunbridge Wells now represents is an idealised version of one aspect of England. And the same can be said of Kent as a whole. Travellers were always entranced: ‘plantations and husbandrie in such admirable order, as infinitely delighted me’ – John Evelyn; ‘very little land which cannot, with propriety, be called good’ – William Cobbett.

  Especially if they had just returned from exile, glimpsed the white cliffs and then …

  On, on! Through meadows managed like a garden,

  A paradise of hops and high production;

  … after years of travel by a bard in

  Countries of greater heat but lesser suction. –

  Byron, not quite on top form

  There is a historic reason for Kent’s well-cultivated look. Before the Conquest, the default method of inheritance in Kent was not primogeniture but gavelkind, whereby the land was divided between all the male heirs. Thus Kent had relatively small farms, all nourished and loved, with very few wild places. (There was a third form of inheritance: borough English, whereby the youngest son copped the lot. Possessing two elder brothers, I regret the rarity of this system.) Gavelkind went together with comparative prosperity, self-reliance and the touchiness that produced all the rebellions. Along with good soil and a relatively benign summer climate, it also produced the place that to this day fancies itself as the Garden of England. ‘Kent, Sir,’ said Mr Jingle in Pickwick Papers. ‘Apples, cherries, hops and women.’

  Hops were Kent’s most distinctive product, and the source of the most distinctive visitors: the hoppers – the families who came down en masse on special trains from London for the end-of-August harvest to pick all day, earn a little money, drink till chucking-out time, snore through the night in huts and generally scare the bourgeoisie witless. In 1934, so Dr S. Nicol Galbraith, medical officer for south-west Kent, told the Observer, two officials actually slept in one of the huts to experience the conditions. There had been no fatalities on any of the 314 hop gardens in his area, he reported, and no complaints from the pickers. ‘Nevertheless,’ he added, ‘everyone concerned, especially the officials, will heave a sigh of relief when the lively Londoners pack up and return to town.’ What a wealth of Kentish euphemism is in that word ‘lively’. Disgusted would have phrased it differently.

  The hoppers’ holidays disappeared after the war, partly through their own increased prosperity, partly through mechanisation, and then through the decline of English ale, which meant that continental high-yielding hops replaced the old Kent varieties like Goldings and Fuggles (first propagated by one Richard Fuggle). So the hop gardens dwindled and the oast houses were converted into bijou cottages. Of late the rise of the microbreweries has led to a small-scale recovery. But the lively Londoners have long since been replaced by a few passing Ukrainians.

  The apple industry’s story is not dissimilar. The National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, near Faversham, has 2,300 different types of apple: all the supermarkets in Britain would sell about ten types. Things reached rock bottom in the 1970s and 80s, when the French Golden Delicious took over, there were grants to grub up old orchards, and the industry and the apples both rotted. But here again there has been a stabilisation: a small-scale trend towards farmers’ markets and diversity and localism. Yet the supermarkets’ control of the distribution chain has grown only tighter and they want apples that look pretty and stay that way. James Smith, a fifth-generation farmer at Linton, near Maidstone, told me he was experimenting with a yellowy new apple called Opal that he hopes the supermarkets might bite on, because it actually tastes nice.

  And then there are cherries, another variation on the same theme. The Kent countryside used to be dominated by great cherry trees, supposedly fifty, sixty feet high. But the size of the trees made picking uneconomic and, in wet summers, the fruit would split before anyone could get to it. Turkey and Spain – cheaper labour, better weather – cleaned up. Nearly all the old orchards vanished. And then there was a little pushback. A new rootstock from Germany allowed for dwarf trees, and polytunnels made the crop more reliable.

  As a young man Mike Austen, a retired farmer now working as a guide at Brogdale, used to climb up a ladder with sixty ‘stales’, or rungs – eight inches between each of them – to pick the cherries in his father’s orchard with a basket tied to either his
waist or the ladder.

  ‘Was it terrifying?’

  ‘Only when the wind blew.’

  In a good year (which 2012 was not) Kent cherries are unquestionably the best in the world. And, as a cherry-holic, I became obsessed, as -holics of all kinds do. The mission was to find a surviving orchard with sixty-foot trees. Sources suggested there might be one by the A2 east of Sittingbourne. And just outside Teynham I did find an ancient orchard, full of cherries ripening towards crimson, on ancient gnarled trees with ancient ladders, broad at the bottom, propped up against them. But they had been well pruned and I doubt if any tree can have been above thirty-five feet.

  Over the road was an oast house converted into a white clapboarded cottage that looked as scrumptious as the cherries. Outside was a pinky-gold rose in full cry; its very feminine fragrance wafted through the summer morning, mingling with the hint of diesel fumes from the A2. A Kentish scent. Or scent of Kent. Whichever.

  Which brings us, to complete the Jingle-list, to women. I had glimpsed a wonderful specimen on the train to Tunbridge Wells: raven hair, Renoir complexion, lips like, well, cherry – perhaps with an under-taste of hops and apple. Her male companion was talking to her in low, anxious tones.

  Then finally she spoke, loudly: ‘I’m not fuckin’ puttin’ up with this any more. I’ve fuckin’ had enough. Fuck it.’ She alighted at High Brooms Station. Maybe Kentish women now have to comply with supermarket standards and are grown for looks rather than taste.

  Canterbury was rammed solid with tourists, mostly French schoolchildren. The French famously never used to leave the country; now their children are ubiquitous, to no obvious purpose. The cathedral is tucked away behind a pay-wall, literally: reluctant to enforce payment for entry to a place of worship, Canterbury’s solution is to place the moneychangers outside the temple and make people pay just to enter the precincts. Since this is not a very visible cathedral, the effect is to render it so irrelevant that the city is more about Fenwicks, Debenhams and M&S than Augustine, Becket and Chaucer.

  Kent is the only county with two ancient-foundation cathedrals. Rochester is a midget in comparison, in terms of both size and grandeur, but it is a lot more beckoning. It stands above the high street, which is now given over to the local author in a manner that makes Stratford look restrained by comparison. There was the Dickens House Wine Emporium, the Dickens Café, Peggotty’s Parlour, Pips of Rochester, Expectations (a pub), Sweet Expectations, Mrs Bumbles, Little Dorrit Revival (ethnic clothing and gifts), Copperfields Antiques and A Taste of Two Cities (Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine).

  The traffic has been diverted since Dickens’s day, and the little bits of modern infilling are discreet, so it’s all very pleasant, though after a while Dickens’s ubiquity becomes overwhelming. I fancied that Nat West might be a Thames-side cut-throat (rather appropriate, on reflection) in Our Mutual Friend and Pizza Express some Italian showman in Nicholas Nickleby.

  Inland Kent is full of likeable towns, many of them filled with crocodiles of blazered, well-mannered children (I was very taken by Faversham), and often outrageously beautiful villages like Chiddingstone, which boasts the oldest shop in the country, which has certainly existed since 1593 and still has some Tudor counters to prove it.

  The owner, Sallie Stevens, had been trying to sell it for some time. But though one deal had fallen through, she was unperturbed – ‘They messed about. I’m in no hurry’ – and clearly addicted to the place. Sallie was a perky, welcoming chatelaine, who served tea and was happy to let visitors nose round. ‘In its way Chiddingstone is perfect,’ said Pevsner, and it’s hard to argue, with the castle, seat of the Streatfeilds, shop, pub and school in a line of beauty across from the church. But Sallie’s shop is not quite a village store in the traditional sense. The window is full of local jewellery and paintings of cats, with just a small stock of emergency provisions at the back: cans of beans and nappies and toilet paper and teabags, plus two freezers offering ready meals for one or two. A ready meal for two, in my experience, means barely enough for one. Perhaps life in Chiddingstone is sadder than it appears.

  Eventually I realised there were indeed two Kents, though not those separated by the Medway. The real difference is between the inland and the long, three-sided coastline. By the sea, beautiful is not the word that springs to mind. Dickensian, maybe – but not in the sense of Peggotty’s Parlour. The coast is a necklace of poverty, as one local put it, round an exquisite neck.

  North-east Kent is dominated by three islands: Grain, Sheppey and Thanet, all now physically connected to the mainland yet somehow disconnected, unworldly, spoken of, if at all, by people elsewhere in Kent – men of, fair maids of and ish-men – with a slight shudder. In the middle is Sheppey, full of prisons, old people’s homes and caravan sites, and it is not clear which of those might be regarded as the worst in which to end up.

  Thanet is dominated by Margate, a shattered seaside resort with shops called Tatters, Scrag Bag and Bling Bling Bling!, though God knows this is not a place which ought to be attempting irony. The sea-front is dominated by an ugly new art gallery, the Turner Contemporary, which won great plaudits for an eponymous exhibition when it opened in 2011. I saw no sign of the regeneration it promised. I did see an exhibition by Tracey Emin, who was brought up in Margate. It mainly comprised daubs of naked women in vaguely masturbatory poses. The other visitors were nearly all over eighty or under ten, and looked confused. One elderly gent was at the reception desk, asking plaintively: ‘What happened to that exhibition about the Queen? I wanted to see that.’

  North of the Medway towns lies the Isle of Grain. On the opening page of Great Expectations Pip talks about ‘five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle’. In so far as any work of fiction can be rooted in a real place, there can be little doubt that this one starts in the graveyard at Cooling, next to the marshes, themselves bordered by the ‘low leaden line’ of the Thames estuary, and that it was here that Pip was confronted by Magwitch and the cheery, well-remembered greeting: ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat.’

  Dickens himself came out here for larky picnics from his home at Gad’s Hill and, as one American guest recalled, once set a tablecloth on a flat gravestone and emptied the hamper on to it. And here, surrounding the tombs of Micheal (sic) and Jane Comport, are thirteen heartbreakingly small lozenges – to my eyes more like torpedoes or curiously shaped fish – of tiny Comports and closely related Bakers, who died aged between one month and seventeen months between 1771 and 1854, six years before the opening chapter of the novel was serialised. Given that there are thirteen graves here and only five in the book, this must be a rare case of a novelist, especially one who was a journalist by training and instinct, taking reality and understating it for dramatic purposes.

  But this entire corner of Kent feels stranger than fiction. It was no day for picnics when I went to Cooling: I arrived in one of the cloudbursts that characterised the summer of 2012, so intense that the narrow lane to Allhallows and Allhallows-on-Sea started to flood and I hastily turned round for fear I would be stranded for ever in the marshes and forced to threaten children for food, like Magwitch. I returned later, on a morning of wan sunshine, and made it to Allhallows-on-Sea, walking along the deserted shingle, piled high with cockle shells.

  This, according to Ian Jack of the Guardian, is ‘the Ozymandias of seaside resorts’, destined in the 1930s to have ‘5,000 houses, several hotels, a zoo and Britain’s largest swimming pool, with a wave-making machine’. Then the war came. Instead it acquired a few houses, mainly occupied by exiled Cockneys, a caravan park and a fine view of the Grain oil-fired power station. And soon, in the dreams of Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, it is due to have an even more spectacular view of London’s next airport, to be built out in the estu
ary, to blight the lives of much of Kent and Essex while relieving the pressure on the eardrums of Johnson’s own voters.

  The coastline perks up after it reaches the eastern edge of Kent. Broadstairs is the star turn. Though it was a Tuesday in term time, the sands were packed when I was there (in contrast to deserted Margate), mainly with school parties. One was from an Islington primary, one of whose teachers complained that it was a poor choice for the annual outing: ‘There’s nothing to do here.’ Nearby was a smaller group, from a local private school, in smart blue polo shirts and shorts. These children knew exactly what to do, and were using their spades to bury each other. Behind us was yet another Dickens shrine, Betsey Trotwood’s House. Having overdosed on Dickens, I asked the lady at the tourist information booth if she could direct me to the boyhood home of Edward Heath. ‘That’s a first,’ she said.

  The prosperous bit of coast stretches as far as St Margaret’s. Then comes Dover, which shares with London and Edinburgh the honour of having its own name in French. It is only by going to Dover that one can understand the appeal of Canterbury. Cruise liners dock here, for heaven’s sake. Sensible operators get the passengers out fast, preferably with the coach curtains drawn, up to Dover Castle, the White Cliffs and beyond. In Dover, Poundland has a bigger branch than Marks & Spencer.

  There is a seafront, which can be accessed from town by a dingy subway marked ‘Seafront and Factory Outlet’. It is dominated by a large block of neo-Stalinist council flats and what might be a defunct hotel, a multistorey car park or an office block belonging to an extremely secret branch of British intelligence. One can only conclude that MI7, or whoever is in the blacked-out block, had determined that to protect the nation’s security it is necessary to make England’s front line so repulsive that any enemy would take one look and conclude the country was not worth fighting for.