The Essex dissenters declined to recognize temporal aristocracies, preferring to elect themselves as a spiritual aristocracy in their own right. They were indeed a peculiar people, living at an oblique angle to the rest of England, so far out on the country’s watery margin that they had almost run away to sea.
Their architecture and religion were distinctively homemade. In the Dengie Marshes, people did things for themselves without benefit of clergy or the landed ruling class. The place was a hive of tiny, tax-free private enterprises. Up every lane there was a brick bungalow with a notice nailed to a tree, advertising the spare-time products of the industrious householder: BIRD TABLES FROM £7.50—LACE BEDSPREADS—KOI CARP—POTTERY—LOGS SAWN TO ORDER—POND LINERS—HONEY—GOATS MILK—PEDLAR DOLLS—ROTTED MUSHROOM COMPOST—EGGS LAID WHILE YOU WAIT—TOMS GLADS AND CUES—REPLACEMENT WINDSCREENS—DWARF LOP RABBITS—MAGGOTS—SWEET CORN—TERRIER MEAL—HORSE PELLETS—KARATE LESSONS—HAIRCUT, SIR?—GOLDEN LABRADOR PUPPIES READY SOON—CLAY PIGEONS—CREAM TEAS, WELDING & RESPRAYS—BABY BUNNIES—PULLETS EGGS BY THE TRAY—PORK SAUSAGES AND SHOE REPAIRS—CONCRETE TUBS FOR SALE. In every garden shed, someone was knocking together something salable out of bits of junk. Under every glass cloche, something was ripening in the sun to raise another bob or two. At weekends, the local artists held their exhibitions at roadsides, hawking pictures of Thames barges at sunset to passing art collectors in their cars.
It seemed the right landscape for me. Somewhere between breeding dwarf lop rabbits and the manufacture of bird tables, there had to be a space for my shingle. BOOKS WRITTEN WHILE YOU WAIT. The rosy village postmistress (who also ran a sideline in soft-core videos) asked me, “You do poetry, don’t you?,” as if trading in literature were a perfectly respectable occupation for an incoming marshlander. Encouraged by all the other bungalow industries in the neighborhood, I settled into the cottage and began to write.
But it was hard to believe that I was now living in the same country that I was trying to describe. The face of England in my typescript had a thin, hurt and sullen look; the face of the England that I could see from the window was fat—a landscape of amazing plenty. The billowing sea waves of growing corn went on for miles. When the combine harvesters moved in, they worked all night, stealing across the marshes in isolated pools of brightness like illuminated trawlers. There was a week of stubble burning when the sky turned inky and the whole peninsula blazed under a low canopy of smoke. Still smoldering, the fields were plowed to take the next crop. Corn, cauliflowers, potatoes, cabbages, oilseed rape—each field was a conjuror’s hat from which the farmer produced a stream of harvests in a season. Low-flying aircraft bombed the crops with vitamins and tonics, and the lanes were blocked by the great yellow machines that went growling across country, reaping, threshing, digging, seeding and yanking vegetables up by the roots.
I scratched away at a bare page and added my few hundred words a day to the produce of the marshes, while I could see my neighbor harvesting enough cereal to feed a city. Language seemed a very stony medium compared with his moist chocolate soil. He plowed and reaped, then plowed and reaped again; my pile of manuscript rose by a quarter of an inch, got stuck, and struggled up a further millimeter or two, as if it were rooted in shale.
It kept on being contradicted by the view from the window. Everyone was in work here, the industrial technology was the latest thing from the United States and no one wore that troubled, inward English look which seemed to be passed on from character to character in my typed pages. I prowled through the villages, searching for signs of recession. No luck. Everyone I saw looked irredeemably sunny. It was true that the local butcher had killed himself in the spring, but even this suicide was oddly tinged with the general prosperity of the place. The trouble was, I learned in the pub, he bought himself this catamaran, bloody great thing, a forty-footer, fell behind with the payments and wouldn’t get rid of the boat. Plus, there was a bit of the usual how’s-your-father with the wife. The story of the boating butcher overreaching himself was one of success-gone-askew; more a Floridian than an English suicide.
It was easy to see what had led the butcher on to his unaffordable yacht. In the tarmac parks of the American-style country clubs of Burnham and Cold Norton, the Jaguars lay nose to nose with the Daimlers and the 300SL Mercedeses. Fleets of scarlet powerboats slashed the Blackwater with their wakes, and the marina at Bradwell was stacked solid with Chris-Crafts and Princesses. People here were fast and flash; they had fun, and they enjoyed letting other people see the color of their money.
We took to going to a restaurant in Burnham where this guiltless style of splashing out had been codified into a ritual order: the table for eight, the steak and champagne, the torpedolike cigars, each with its long warhead of ash, the bold talk of dodges, steals and wheezes. The men talked in rapid Cockney, hurrying over their consonants and economizing on grammar as if they were composing telegrams. Phoned Friday—all tied up—no problem—bloody giveaway—innit? This innit?, pronounced as a triumphant rhetorical question at the end of every other statement, made its way round the restaurant, going from table to table, a sort of vernacular Amen, designed to ratify and strengthen any wish or assertion.
The women at these tables all appeared to be modeling themselves on famous vamps in 1940s movies. They went in for platinum hair, rouge, mascara, monogrammed cigarettes and skirts with slits to the tops of their thighs. While the men talked property and killings, the women dropped brand names like Hong Kong, Antigua, the Seychelles and Pierre Cardin.
All the loudest voices in this part of Essex were London-bred. On the farms, the accent was still local, but the new people of the marshes were made-good exiles from Bow, West Ham, Hackney and Stratford. The bungalow owners had come out for the fresh air, the bit of garden, the shed to potter in; but they were the poor relations of the East End barons who lived in houses like The Old Rectory, Dogget’s Farm and The Cedars. The area, which was blessedly free of the traditional kind of rural aristocracy, was dotted with the country seats of successful London hoods. There were gangsterish cars behind the rhododendrons and Rottweiler dogs behind picket fences. I started to keep a count of the number of times that I spotted the newspaper formula of “Ronnie————(47), company director, of————, Essex,” and filled in the blanks with these pink, well-dressed, well-exercised men, riding on horseback or burning up the lanes in their white Mercedeses.
Twice during the summer we were awakened in the small hours by a single-engined plane coming in to land in a nearby field. Standing at the darkened window, we could see someone out there, lighting up a grass track with a pair of torches. As the plane taxied along the strip, the hacking noise of its engine was abruptly cut. There were no further lights or sounds, and in the morning there wasn’t a trace of the plane. It was probably only a farming neighbor returning from a joyride, but we enjoyed the illusion, at least, that we’d been secret witnesses to some piece of gangland skullduggery. It neatly fitted the landscape. The Cessna’s engine, killed on touchdown, made exactly the right sound for easy money on the move. The second time it happened, I made the mistake of mentioning it in the pub and was told sharply that it was best not to get too nosy about things one saw at night around the Dengie Marshes.
There was something infectious in this general air of license and rich pickings. In the autumn, pheasant and partridge took sanctuary in our garden, which was an isolated spinney in several hundred acres of open fields. Birds are hopeless at holding their drink, and I had to be restrained from baiting the lawn with seed soaked in whisky, an idea so foreign to me in the ordinary way that I blamed it entirely on the landscape.
I went on writing into the winter, at one with the home lacemakers, carpenters, potters and weavers. Soon after the first frost, the pheasants and partridges were shot. I thought it was my typewriter to begin with, but it resolved into the flat echoless popping of gunfire. The plowed ridges of the frozen fields glinted like wires in the sun as the beaters and guns fanned across the
marshes. The drifting specks in my vision were dead birds falling out of the sky. The following dogs left jet-trails of white breath behind them as they sprinted to pick up the corpses.
Above this small and brilliant war, there was a tantalizing rim of sea. The masts and deckworks of two coasters showed over the line of the seawall, moving almost imperceptibly from left to right, more slowly, even, than words.
People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey’s end, the full stop at the end of the trek. When North Americans reached the Pacific, there was nothing to do except build the end-of-the-world state of California. For people who live on islands, especially on small islands, the sea is always the beginning. It’s the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home. It’s what you have to cross, even if you do it by plane, whenever you want to strike out and make a break for it. Islanders also know how the sea goes on and on, in a continuous loop of shoreline and life, without a terminus. Knocking about from port to port, you keep on going past the port you originally started out from. In that regard at least, coasting is a lot more lifelike than those epic journeys which reduce the world to a magnificent straight line of conquest; and the coaster’s chronic itch, to be moving on only in order to get nearer home, his never-quite-knowing whether he’s returning or running away, are more real, in a daily way, than the exotic compulsions of the serious travelers who voyage intrepidly from A to Z.
It is laughable, this business of moving around a small quarter of the world in one’s own boat. It is maddeningly slow, frightening, strange, dull, uncomfortable, lovely, in-convenient, revelatory and undignified—all in the right proportions. It teaches you about a world you’d never guessed at when you were on land, and makes you obsessively alert to distinctions invisible to the people you’ve left behind there. It turns you into a creature of luck and weather. It shortens your horizon and makes you live by the minute and the hour. It grants you a floating detachment (sometimes serene and sometimes appalled) from the land on the beam. But it is the silliest possible way of getting to Brighton, if getting to Brighton was ever the point of the thing.
I had thought that I might well cure this coaster’s itch by writing about it, but the condition seems to have worsened, if anything, during the writing. All through this iron winter, I’ve been steadily adding to the roll of mint Admiralty charts. The sextant, adjusted for index error, is back in its oak case on the boat: we’ll need the sextant for this next leg of the voyage.
Gosfield Maid has been repainted, her seams recaulked, her decks sanded down to raw teak, her masts stripped and varnished, her patches of rot replaced by fillets of fresh wood. Afloat again, with books back in the shelves, paraffin in the lamps, charcoal in the stove, the boat’s ready to continue, now with two on board. Die, Dismal Fog. Very soon now, we’ll be able to let go the ropes and submit ourselves to that life of voluntary displacement from the world which answers, more closely than anything I know, to everyone’s infantile dreams of floating. Stepping buoyantly off the top stair or from the ledge of the bedroom window and slowly easing the deadweight of the boat away from the dockside result in the same magical suspension of the ordinary rules of reality; and when you do eventually touch ground again, the world itself has been subtly altered by your secret flight.
The cottage has been let for the spring and summer, the lists have been ticked off, the bags more or less packed. We’re waiting for these ferocious weather systems to settle their differences, for the isobars to drift apart and for the wind to ease and veer into the west. There was another dusting of dry snow on the grass this morning, and the green elm logs spit and jostle in the grate. The chart of the southern North Sea, pegged out on the floor by a book at each corner, has a ruled pencil line stretching diagonally across it from the Sunk to the Noord Hinder light vessels. It’s a fine thing to be able, just occasionally, to cut your foreseeable future down to a 5B pencil stroke on a piece of paper. If it weren’t for this bitter late easterly wind, we could be on the start of the line by sunset.
The back door has opened. A corner of the chart is flapping free of its mooring under Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. The draft is cold enough to make the mice shiver in their holes. At this rate, we’ll be here into next month.
“This cold’s insane.”
“I know, but we can use the extra days.”
“How is it going?”
“Slowly.” I type Slowly. Her coat at my ear is radiating a winter of its own.
“Where have you got to?”
Not far. Only here where we are now, before we go———
Coasting Page 31
