Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  I returned there for a day, and there it was, a lumpy stretch of mud sloping down to the Thames Estuary opposite Canvey Island, with Kingsnorth power station a mile to the right, and another power station to the left, as if a power station salesman had convinced the local council that their beauty can only be appreciated if they’re kept as a pair. And there are chalets and the sort of outdoor pool that looks as if it would be freezing even in a heatwave, and a bar from which a steward emerged as I was walking nearby and shouted, ‘We’re SHUT!’

  But it was strangely, disconcertingly beautiful. Hundreds of seagulls bobbled about looking like litter, and a family on a walk through the marshy grass kept shouting at their teenage son for lagging behind. It was blustery, as it should be, and made me feel that in genuine countryside there should always be a power station and a view of industrial Essex. Like one of those landscapes by artists at the start of the industrial era, in which the barley fields were flanked by a mill in the background, Allhallows seems to make a statement that this is genuine countryside, not the twee, unblemished meadows that appear in framed prints in charity shops, the pastoral equivalent of a model who’s been photoshopped to create the perfect figure.

  Kent is forever punctuating its ‘garden-ness’ with its industrial, poor and urban side, as if it’s embarrassed to be thought of as cute. Round the corner from Sandwich, where the Open golf championship is sometimes held, is the debris of Kent’s coal-fields. These were opened in the 1920s, the four pits attracting unemployed miners from across the country, many of whom had been blacklisted for militancy during the 1926 General Strike. So you can dreamily gambol across an orchard, turn into a dainty lane past a blacksmith, and suddenly find a bloody great rusting black winding wheel above a dilapidated depot, grass reaching its broken windows.

  Even more startling are the villages that housed the miners. Between the sort of towns that get called ‘picturesque’, with names like Tenterden and Nonington, from where you could probably be exiled for being caught going to bed without wearing a blazer, are settlements such as Aylesham, which was attached to the pit at Snowdown. Aylesham is a series of classic semi-detached houses like a council estate from the 1950s, the sort that get covered by lights in the shape of reindeer at Christmas. At one end of the village is a statue of some miners, and there’s a welfare club with bingo and forty-year-old couples who sing ‘Quando Quando Quando’ as double-acts with names like Melons and Cream.

  Even when you’ve been there many times, you’re still amazed that it’s there. Mining villages, even ex-ones, aren’t supposed to be in Kent. They’re supposed to be in Yorkshire and South Wales and Newcastle, not a mile and a half from a village where the mayoress writes to Ann Widdecombe to ask if she’ll speak at the Townswomen’s Guild.

  But there’s also something about Kent that makes it a definable county. I was brought up eighteen miles from central London and eight miles from Essex, but rarely went to either before I was sixteen, whereas Maidstone, Folkestone and Margate, while much further away, were part of my patch. There was BBC Invicta radio. There were words that only made sense in Kent, such as ‘chore’ for stealing and, ahead of its time, ‘chavvy’ for a mate, that came from the Romany influence in the area. (This must also account for Gipsy Tart, a sickly pudding made from evaporated milk and brown sugar, served once a week at school, that no one outside Kent has ever heard of.) And there was the county cricket team, that won a trophy practically every year between 1970 and 1978, and the grounds were always packed and expectant. Everyone in Kent supported the cricket team, creating a bond from Swanley to Dover and making us distinct from shitty pointless places like Surrey and Essex.

  I go to a match at the Canterbury ground once a year, partly because it’s the only place I can still go where I’m half the average age. Rows of the retired sit with blankets on knees, the men occasionally peering into their Tupperware to investigate the rolls oozing with Branston pickle packed by their resigned wives. Limping stewards wobble by the members’ bar, causing their blazers to bobble up and down, revealing curious lumps on their necks. One group of retired spectators told me about the lifetime season ticket, available to over-sixty-fives, saying, ‘It costs the same as seven annual season tickets. So basically, Mark, it’s a gamble.’

  At five o’clock one of them left, with an hour’s play still to go. ‘I always leave at five,’ he said, ‘because my wife has her bath around now, so when I get home I can share her water.’

  My annual Canterbury pilgrimage is an essential part of my calendar. I can inhale the yeasty whiff of the Shepherd Neame beer tent, walk between the fold-out canvas chairs, around the military-green BBC Radio Kent van and the old man in a tiny wooden hut selling scorecards and Daily Telegraphs, savour the applause so sparse you can make out each individual’s clap, and the air of pride that the spectators exude in dedicating so much time to the sheer unnecessariness of the modern County Championship.

  Because a day at the cricket is a quirk of time. There are six hours of play, plus lunch, plus tea, so there really is no rush. Even the way people greet each other pays homage to this lack of urgency. Instead of the normal ‘Hello, Jack, how you keeping?’ delivered with a standard beat of quaver quaver crotchet crotchet crotchet quaver quaver, they’ll sigh, nod, take a breather from the exertion of sighing and nodding, then manage an elongated ‘Jaaaaack—, you keeping well?’ which, written as a musical score, would show a semibrève followed by three pages of rests.

  And Kent is so close to France. ‘Oo, there it is,’ my parents would say about France when you could see it clearly from the beach, but it would never occur to them that it might be fun to go there, any more than they’d think we might go to the sun because we could see that. Now the proximity to Europe provides thousands of jobs, and day trips to Calais for cheap shopping at the complex of warehouses and malls built at the end of the tunnel. It was during the days of Napoleon that the first plans for a tunnel were drawn up, when maybe the world’s finest engineers would gasp, ‘Consider it, my good and learned friends, that there may come a day when folk from Faversham shall pack cases of screwtop bottles of Amstel for their barbecue in their boot for to save themselves fifteen quid.’

  The mentality of Kent is shaped by this geography. From Dover downwards along the coast are Martello towers, mini-fortresses built as stations from which to fire on Napoleon’s invading navy. And in 1940 Kent was twenty-one miles from the edge of the empire of the Third Reich, the Spitfires that fought off Hitler’s Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain doing so over towns such as Folkestone and Greatstone.

  So one of Kent’s best-selling beers is called Spitfire, and Kent’s limited-overs cricket team is called the Spitfires, and a randomly selected copy of the Folkestone Herald from October 2009 contained three articles with ‘Spitfire’ in the headline, although Kent can hardly claim credit for the success of the battle on account of having been underneath it.

  But in other ways there isn’t enough made of the county’s place in history. Folkestone’s museum consists of one room above the library with some of the customary old axes, and barely a mention of the impact of war. In any case, when I was there two girls were shouting at each other, ‘You fucking did fancy him!’, ‘I fucking never!’ next to a stuffed otter, so it was hard to concentrate.

  Folkestone also seems to be stuffed with tattoo shops, the way other towns have cafés. Maybe they’re instead of cafés, and after a morning’s shopping the people of the town meet up with a friend for a relaxing chat and a snake round the ankle. There’s a harbour from which you can buy cockles from a variety of fish stalls, an intriguing view of a viaduct, and a tiny station with a ramp to a road that leads gently to a giant Lidl that takes thirty minutes to walk round and makes you lose all sense of where you’re facing or where the sea is, so if anyone does ever invade us they’ll get no further than the Folkestone Lidl before all their regiments collide with each other and walk back into the harbour, asking, ‘How can we be this side of Dixons again?
’ as they’re taken prisoner.

  Along the coast is upmarket Hythe and the magnificence of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway. I first went on this when I was eight, during a day trip to Greatstone, and now I must have been on it twenty times. Maybe that’s because you need to be an adult to fully appreciate its beauty. The journey starts as any miniature steam-railway experience would be expected to, with a slightly-too-enthusiastic volunteer of sixty in full railway uniform and cap, who you know could get a discussion on child abuse round to the gauge settings on the 1934 Great Western Line to Taunton, selling you an old cardboard ticket, slightly rough to the touch, that makes anyone of a certain age think, ‘Ah, that’s when tickets were tickets.’

  You have a proper cup of tea in the proper station café that sells purple cakes with a green sweet on the top, then squeeze into the little wooden cabins, wait for a magnificent climate-changing cloud of steam and the dramatic throaty whistle, and chug-chug away.

  At this point anyone unfamiliar with this railway would expect it to toodle through a village or two and pass some ducks, on the way to the seaside to be greeted by jolly tubby men dressed as elves. But this is Kent, remember. So it leaves Hythe and enters Romney Marsh, where you peep and chundle through miles of desolate wasteland. On your right are endless miles of neglected fields full of long shabby grass, punctuated by hundreds of electricity pylons that seem to have disobediently fallen out of line to create maximum random disorder.

  And on your left are everyone’s back gardens. You’re so close you feel you can lean out and dip your fingers in the paddling pools. But everyone waves at you, as if you’re toddlers in a fairground teacup. This is impressive, as eight of these trains go by every day, and have done since 1936. So the owners of these houses must have to wave and wave and wave – perhaps it’s a condition of the leases. But they do it with such enthusiasm it feels as if they’re genuinely thrilled and slightly surprised to see you pass by the bottom of their garden in a miniature railway carriage. You find yourself waving back, despite being in your fifties, to other people in their fifties, wondering whether if you didn’t you’d break a spell and everyone on the train would turn into a lizard.

  As you trundle past more gardens and pylons and the sort of craggy fields where you expect a boy’s dog to discover a corpse, you get a sensation alien to the modern traveller, that the purpose of this journey is the journey. The train is used by people as the only public means of getting between Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch, but its ludicrous nature literally makes you laugh. At some point, as you pass a particular garden or pylon, you will just start laughing. In its seventy years I can’t imagine there has ever been someone sat on the train going, ‘OH BLOODY TYPICAL – what are we slowing down for NOW?’ Or, ‘Hello Trudy, I’m going to be late for my 10.15. This fucking thing should be at Dymchurch by now, and we’re not even at bloody Littlestone.’

  But the miniature railway did have more urgent demands placed on it when the area became the first line of defence against the Germans. The cheerfully tatty sand dunes of Littlestone were covered in scaffolding from where gunners would try to shoot down doodlebugs, and the trains were armoured as protection against German rockets. That sounds so exciting I think I’d have gone on it every day, steam blowing over the armour as we passed the gardens, from which the families would all pop up and wave from their Anderson shelters.

  The train was used to secretly carry supplies to Greatstone in preparation for the Normandy landings. Most exciting of all, in 1942 a Luftwaffe pilot crashed right next to the train, just as it belched out a huge cloud of steam that killed him stone dead. You’d like to think that when the letter arrived home saying, ‘We regret to announce Herr Schröder was killed by the steam from the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway,’ even his own family had the decency to snigger.

  After the train passes Dymchurch, things get more eerie. The marshland becomes pebbly, the houses more spread out, then you see in the distance the compellingly spooky Soviet-looking gunge machine that is Dungeness power station. You never see anyone go in or out, you just hear it belch with a booming baritone horn once a minute, as if it’s a giant snoring robotic alien. Eventually you’re past all the gardens, and chugging across a plain of pebbles towards this beast. Right next to it are two lighthouses, which may be in case the power station eats the one nearest to it. Nothing else is in sight except for pylons and rusty abandoned boats.

  The power station is the end of the line. Of course it is. So here you are in this twee little carriage with a chirpy railway enthusiast blowing a whistle, and you’re cranking your way towards the most frightening-looking building in Europe, like plummeting into a volcano in a pedalo. Yet its ugliness is seductive, almost beautiful, like a hunchback. And it’s not just the power station, it’s that expanse of pebbles, way back past the beach and inland, and then dozens of random dwellings plonked on the pebbles higgledy-piggledy, so their addresses must be ‘along from the power station and right a bit and past a rusty barrel and along a bit’.

  The most famous of these is called Prospect Cottage, and belonged to the film director Derek Jarman. If anyone famous was going to live there it would be him, and probably not Amanda Holden. The cottage is surrounded by rusty wire and cable that’s been bent into shapes and shoved in among the pebbles, and the whole area is wonderfully unsettling. I’ve never been to Dungeness with anyone who hasn’t said, despite all they’d heard about it, that it isn’t more disconcerting than they’d anticipated.

  So it’s right that it sits at the very end, of the miniature railway and of Kent. There is nowhere to go after that. I could in theory sneak round the back of the power station and traipse across miles of pebbles past a military base towards Camber, but I doubt anyone’s ever tried that and lived. Instead I bask in the weirdness, the permanent twilight, the lack of bearings, and reconnect with what I love about Kent: it’s – unsettling. Something’s going on underneath, but what is it? It’s like a brilliantly disturbing play, or an East European brandy that leaves a lasting, unidentifiable, strangely industrial tang, or a bedroom painted entirely bright purple. It’s probably wrong, but it’s certainly not bland. You’re not sure what you feel, but you know you’re alive.

  Bristol

  The difficulty for poor Bristol is, no matter how well it maintains its waterways and pretty Victorian ships, and displays its bridge and its association with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it’s hard to skirt round the embarrassment that the modern city was built on slavery.

  It tries its best to ignore it. In 1996 it held a Festival of the Sea, but made no mention of the slave issue at all. This must have made for some entertaining exchanges between inquisitive tourists and the guides, such as, ‘So where did these ships go then?’

  ‘Well they went to Africa, and then across the Atlantic.’

  ‘What did they take?’

  ‘Oh, this and that, but the main thing is, isn’t that mast a beauty?’

  The ‘Visit Bristol’ tourist website mentions all the glory of the city and the sea, while slavery passes it by. But there is a section called ‘Bristol History’. Amidst the prose is one sentence that refers to the issue. It goes: ‘Bristol’s strong links with the ocean, and its key role in the profitable trades of slavery and tobacco, inevitably led to the city’s involvement with piracy, and Britain’s most famous pirate, Blackbeard, was allegedly born in the city.’

  It might be fascinating to see whoever wrote that delivering a lecture at a conference on the history of black people and the slave trade, as they say, ‘I found the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s lecture on the long-term impact of slavery most informative, and thank you for that, Jesse. But I feel the main thing is that slavery led to piracy, and Blackbeard, which is rather jolly. So everyone join in, “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, fifteen men on a dead man’s chest …”’

  As well as Blackbeard, Bristol also provided 2,000 ships for the slave trade. When William Wilberforce’s first Bill to abolish slavery was defeated, the be
lls rang out across the city in celebration. In 2006 a debate was held across the city about whether Bristol should formally apologise. I’m not sure what good this would do, two hundred years late, and it might seem slightly awkward if the local mayor was to go to Jamaica, get off the plane and say, ‘Well, er, sorry about all that, you know, chains and that. Anyway, er, take it from me, it won’t happen again. Well, er, hope that clears things up, bye.’

  Even so, in a poll by HTV over 90 per cent of those who responded said they thought an apology ought to be offered, which suggests that Bristol’s population isn’t quite as coy about the past as its tourist industry.

  Maybe the issue leads more people in Bristol to display a feeling for their history than in other towns, because when I performed there the audience was meticulous in correcting anything they considered below PhD standard. For example, it seemed odd to me that the city had a series of canals, given that it was already blessed with a river, a sea and a major international port. I imagined these poor Irishmen in the early nineteenth century digging and sweating for sixteen hours a day to build the canal, then finishing it, leaning on their shovels and saying, ‘Years of backbreaking toil, but at last we’ve brought a means for water to flow through this city.’ Then turning round and going, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake, there’s a fucking great river, we’re fucking eejits.’

  But I was corrected almost as soon as I’d begun. ‘Oh no,’ said a concerned man in the second row. ‘Oh no, Mark, it’s not a canal.’

  ‘But it’s called the canal, and there are signs all over the city imploring everyone to go on a ride up the canal, so if I was Sherlock Holmes I might be forgiven for thinking, “Hmmm, the clues suggest there’s a canal,”’ I told him. Then the whole room started. ‘It’s called a canal, but it’s actually a “new cut”,’ said several people, while everyone else nodded.