by Tom Fort
CHANNEL
SHORE
Also by Tom Fort
Against the Flow
Downstream
Under the Weather
The Book of Eels
The Grass Is Greener
The Far from Compleat Angler
The A303
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2015 by Tom Fort
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Tom Fort to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All photographs © Jason Hawkes
Map © Colin Midson
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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-2972-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-2974-2
The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.
Typeset in the UK by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To local historians, past, present and future
CONTENTS
Preface
1. Dover Port
2. A Mere Ditch
3. Dungie
4. Concrete King
5. Empress of Watering Holes
6. Stand Up for Peacehaven
7. Prawns Ancient and Modern
8. Bugger Bognor?
9. Did Jesus Come to Hayling Island?
10. Wight
11. Peace and Love
12. Savage Coast
13. Black Oil, White Nothe
14. Half-Cock
15. Keeping the Riffraff Out
16. Gulls and Grockles
17. Mine Goot People
18. Coots and Crabs
19. Points, Heads and Tails
20. Hue and Cry
21. Two Looes
22. Skull of Doom
23. The Trail of the Sea Monster
24. Gabbro and Serpentine
25. Lizard Tales
26. Legends of Mount’s Bay
27. A Different Place
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
PREFACE
A July day, and I am in a deckchair under an umbrella on the beach at Bournemouth, near the pier. It is hot, but English hot, not Mediterranean or Aegean; a tolerable, friendly heat. The sky is blue, brushed by high cirrus, the sea pale-blue topaz. The golden sand which runs for miles is parcelled out evenly between low wooden breakwaters.
Everyone is here: the old, in invalid chairs or sunk in deckchairs beneath faded sunhats, toddlers tottering across the sand in disposable nappies sagging with sea water, girls with stomach piercings glinting against nut-brown skin, lads with bony chests in long trunks larking around in inflatables, children on body boards making the best of amiable waves. I watch a dark-skinned woman, fully dressed with just her hands, feet and head showing, dive and twist in the water. She comes out grinning, squeezing the water from her long black hair. In front of us a Polish couple are tenderly intent on their child. A dozen languages mingle over the sand.
Elsewhere the world is tearing itself apart in the normal way. But here the offshore breeze is suffused with the contentment of those lucky enough to be alive and relishing the perfection of an English summer’s day at the seaside.
A generation ago they told us the seaside holiday was dying and would soon pass away like Empire Day and the Morris Traveller and tinned apricots with evaporated milk and other curious relics. Cheap air travel, package holidays, guaranteed sun, sand and blood-warm sea – that was what the British holidaymaker wanted; not shabby amusement arcades, moth-eaten donkeys, rancid fish-and-chips, hatchet-faced boarding-house landladies, a wind-whipped sea the colour of breeze blocks and colder than the Mr Whippy squirming from stainless steel spouts in the ice-cream stalls.
But the seaside holiday clung obstinately to life. People realised that when the sun shone – which it tended to do more often and more potently than when I was a little boy, shivering in my shorts at Middleton-on-Sea – our beaches could hold their own against those of the Côte this and the Costa that. They were free, open to anyone, easy to get to. The sea was bracing rather than freezing, and although there might be jellyfish, they were not huge and red with terrifying bunches of tentacles, and the water did not spawn banks of bright-green algal jelly. And some of our seaside towns had charms of their own and had learned to please.
I love to be beside the sea, and to be in it, not too deep. But being out on it in anything other than a proper ferryboat or a flat calm makes me tense. I do not like the currents, the depths, the way fierce tides invade at the gallop. Waves with foaming crests make me nervous.
We used to have holidays on a small island on the west coast of Scotland. It was in the mouth of a long sea loch and was consequently swept by vigorous tidal currents, as well as being subject to the normal boisterous weather of those parts. On one occasion we set off down the loch for a picnic. The wind picked up and the water became choppy. At my suggestion we decided to turn back, into the wind and the waves. My sister, sitting in the bow, reported water coming through the planks as well as over the prow. I gripped the handle of the outboard as if the future of the human race depended on it, and we made it back to the bay in front of the house. Looking out half an hour later I observed that the boat had vanished at its mooring, leaving only the painter attached to the buoy as evidence that it had ever existed.
On another occasion I went with one of my brothers to the mainland to get lobsters. Fortunately we were piloted by one of the island’s permanent inhabitants, who did it all the time. While we were engaged with the crustacea the wind turned into the east and gathered strength considerably, so that by the time we set off back to the island the waves were charging ahead of us in long, implacable lines, the breaking crests flattened and whipped into the air by the wind. ‘This is exhilarating,’ my brother shouted as we rode one wave and then the next. I felt ill with fear.
I am a landsman. My nervousness of the sea is not something I am proud of, but it’s best to accept these limitations. It followed that when I came to write this Channel story it would be from a land-based perspective, of one looking out to sea with feet planted on firm rock, or sand or earth. The idea for it was not mine, but came from a film-maker, Harry Marshall of Icon Films, who wanted to make a sequence of programmes about the Channel and what it means to us, and thought I might make a suitable presenter. The project was eventually aborted – the deep thinkers at the BBC decided it would tread ground sacred to the long-running Coast. But by then I had been thoroughly seduced by the prospect of a personal exploration of that strip of land beside the waterway that, more than any other, has formed our sense of who we are.
So I went alone, free from the tyranny of filming, from Kent to Cornwall – down Channel. I was curious to know what it was about our Channel shore that was so special and indispensable; that drew some people and held them and called them back even when they had taken themselves off somewhere else. It was pretty straightforward to work out why some – like myself – chose to take their holidays beside the sea. More interesting,
to my way of thinking, were those who chose to live within sight and sound and smell of the Channel shore: some born to it, many others pulled that way later in their lives by an insistent force.
As I made my way south-west over the course of the summer of 2013, I came to appreciate the nature of that force as I never had while just on holiday. Those who take their week or fortnight by the sea, or flit to and from their holiday homes, scrape the surface. If the weather is kind, they are happy; if not, they return home resentful, as if somehow they had been misled or let down. For those who live there, the whole point is the bad weather with the good, the richness of variation, the endless change in mood and colour and texture. They tend to be not so interested in the blatant pleasures of the summer season. They wait for the transients to depart to reclaim their kingdom.
I tried, as far as my circumstances permitted, to experience something of the Channel out of season. I was in Bournemouth in January, Torquay and Eastbourne in February, Penzance in March. But the main part of my exploration was undertaken over May, June and July 2013, by bicycle. I pedalled in stages, at no great speed, from St Margaret’s Bay in Kent to Land’s End – a total distance, taking in diversions, backtrackings, circuitous inland detours and so forth, of 675 miles. I was lucky, in that it was a fine summer after two dismal ones, which made for generally comfortable cycling, at least until I reached the strenuous hills of Devon and Cornwall. Much more important, the sunshine showed the places I went through and lingered in to advantage, and put their people in good humour, and me in good humour.
The cycling was a means to an end. This is not a two-wheeled epic of lung-bursting ascents (though there were times when I thought my lungs might burst) and hair-raising descents (though there were times when my hair would have stood on end if I had that kind of hair). Being on a bicycle is a good way to see, breathe, stop, talk, contemplate – quick enough to make a longish journey manageable, slow enough to absorb it properly.
So I pedalled and freewheeled and sometimes pushed. I stopped to look and to accost strangers and ask them why they liked to be beside the sea. I followed trails that made me curious – some were dead ends, some led somewhere, some gave me answers.
I do not live by the sea or anywhere near it, and at my time of life I am disinclined ever to move again. But having finished this journey, having breathed the air and watched the waves and listened to and felt the rhythms of the sea that beats against our English Channel shore, I can see the point in a way that I never did before.
1
DOVER PORT
There is no fuss, no fanfare, nothing to tell anyone that this is where our most familiar and important waterway begins and ends. The invisible line between the North Sea and the English Channel touches shore in Kent at Leathercote Point. There is a memorial on the clifftop there which honours the part played by the Dover Patrol during the 1914–18 war in protecting the passage of troops and supplies to and from France. But the inscriptions do not mention that this is where the Channel is born.
That is the way with water. The boundaries between seas are necessarily unseen and self-evidently fluid. The International Hydrographic Organization has determined that the eastern limit of the Channel extends from Leathercote Point in Kent to the defunct Walde lighthouse just east of Calais. The currents flow and the waves sweep across it as easily as the ships and yachts. Who marks the imaginary divide, or pauses to wonder when, exactly, they are no longer in the North Sea but the Channel, or the other way round?
In contrast, the facing coasts of England and France proclaim the separation between the two countries. The Channel is twenty miles wide at the Straits of Dover, and in clear weather each coastline is easily visible from the other. But their proximity serves to define their separateness rather than obscure it.
In large part the story of the Channel has been determined by these two geographical imperatives: the fixed opposition of the seaboards of England and France, and the unfettered waterway between, opening to the North Sea one way and the Atlantic the other. The destinies of both nations have been shaped to a remarkable degree by these unalterable forces and the interaction between them.
There used to be a hotel beside the beach at St Margaret’s Bay, which is the easternmost (and northernmost) settlement on the English side of the Channel. It was built in the 1880s and was called the Lanzarote, presumably a marketing ploy to suggest a climate comparable with that of the Canary Islands many hundreds of miles away to the south. The charms of the bay were celebrated by Charles George Harper in The Kentish Coast, one of the many travelogues churned out by this energetic journalist in the immediate pre-First World War period.
‘The spirit of the place is elusive and refuses to be captured and written down and printed,’ he wrote down and had printed in 1914. ‘Those who want to be amused – that great desideratum of the brainless and uncultivated – will not come to St Margaret’s Bay. I do not think a motor car has ever been down here, which is so much to the good.’
The Lanzarote was subsequently renamed, more prosaically but aptly, the Bay Hotel. In the 1930s it was joined at the eastern end of the bay by a cluster of smart white beach houses. During the 1939–45 war the Army annexed the whole place for training, as a result of which the hotel and the Excelsior Tearooms and various bungalows nearby were wrecked and shattered by gunfire, and had to be demolished. But the smart houses, although damaged, were salvageable, and in 1945 the playwright Noël Coward took a lease on the last one.
It was called White Cliffs. ‘I don’t think I can fail to be happy here,’ he said. The house was squeezed onto a ledge between the sea and the foot of the chalk cliff. There was just enough room for the chickens required to provide Coward’s daily breakfast egg, but not for a garden. Then, as now, cliff falls were a hazard and after the appalling later winter of 1947 he spent £2000 (£70,000 in today’s money) having the chalk above the house shored up.
Coward treasured the seclusion and peace, the view of the grey shingle beach and the water, the noise of the sea lapping or beating at the wall below his bedroom window. Although his heyday as a dramatist was by then over, he was busy on a host of projects. He was also enormously rich, and willing and able to entertain with a lavishness that was exceptional at that austere time. Among the stars who came to White Cliffs to feast and frolic were Spencer Tracy and his lover, the famously hale and hearty Katharine Hepburn, who amused the locals by swimming in the sea every day whatever the weather.
To protect his privacy Coward arranged for his mother, his secretary Cole Lesley and his friend, the thriller writer Eric Ambler, to take the leases on the houses closest to his. Even so, the attractions of St Margaret’s Bay became, in his view, its undoing. The road brought cars and the cars brought trippers to gawp at Coward and his glamorous guests. He complained that the beach was ‘crowded with noisy hoi polloi’. In 1951 he was told he could return to Goldenhurst, his house in Romney Marsh, which the Army had requisitioned during the hostilities.
The many – the English translation of hoi polloi – continue to descend on the bay in force at holiday time, filling the car park and crowding the stony beach. But I came midweek in early April and it was very quiet, just me and my bike and a few dog walkers and a girl who’d opened up the tea kiosk at an opportune moment. There was no wind at all. The sea was flat calm, bathed in a milky haze that made it impossible to see any distance out to sea or to tell where sea ended and sky began.
The girl at the kiosk who made my tea lived in Dover. She liked the job. ‘It calms you down being here,’ she said. ‘Just looking out at the sea helps when you’re stressed. Course it’s heaving in the season but a day like today is perfect.’
I wandered along to look at Coward’s house. It was empty and silent, the pale yellow shutters closed. It looked in good order, as if it had survived the ravages of sea and storm pretty well, but the house next door was showing signs of wear and tear, its plasterwork stained and its metal window frames spotted with rust. The cliff behind seem
ed menacingly close.
Coward had the lease of White Cliffs transferred to his friend Ian Fleming, who with his lover and later wife, Ann Rothermere, had been a frequent guest. Fleming’s gift to St Margaret’s Bay was to set much of the action of his third James Bond story, Moonraker, there and thereabouts.
A few years ago, when on holiday in Italy, I came upon a paperback copy of Moonraker, and was curious enough to reread it. An early passage sets the tone. Bond is bowling along the Deal road on his way to engineer the downfall of the card cheat and closet Nazi, Sir Hugo Drax. A Special Branch officer, Gala Brand, has been assigned to help him, and as he steers the Aston Martin Bond ponders her career notes – ‘distinguishing marks: mole on upper curvature of right breast’ – and lets his mind roam.
A later sunbathing session, presumably involving close investigation of the mole, is interrupted by a cliff fall triggered by one of Drax’s murderous henchmen. Bond and Gala Brand make it to the Granville Hotel above the beach at St Margaret’s – later demolished and replaced by a block of smart apartments – for a hot bath and ‘rest’, followed by ‘delicious fried soles and Welsh rarebit’.
The story ends with the rocket intended by Sir Hugo to blow up Buckingham Palace being ingeniously redirected into the Channel to destroy the Russian submarine in which Drax and his evil entourage are fleeing. To Bond’s irritation, Miss Brand declines his offer to accompany him to France for further exploration of her distinguishing marks, so that she can go and marry her policeman fiancé. Bond consoles himself with the knowledge that by deploying his amazing sexual magnetism to thaw her oh-so-English frigidity, he has eased the path to shared marital bliss.
The book has the whiff of uncollected food waste about it. Fleming’s way with Bond’s women is comically voyeuristic – ‘the wrap-over bodice just showed the swell of her breasts which were as splendid as Bond had guessed from the measurements on her record sheet.’ The story itself, energised by a rabid hatred of Germans focussed on the ridiculous caricature villain Drax, is vintage Bulldog Drummond, redeemed only somewhat by Fleming’s evident affection for the Kent coastline and the bay where he made his home for a while.
