*
The country really did seem to be tearing itself apart by the beginning of 1974, the year in which Germany’s praised and excoriated searcher after “concrete utopias”, Uwe Johnson, would choose Kent as the county of his English residence. I was by then a teacher at the Sir William Nottidge secondary modern school in Whitstable, on the coast seven miles to the north of Canterbury. Latterly, Whitstable has become notorious as a favourite habitat of prosperous media wraiths who come “Down from London”, buy the best of the seaside properties and then get lonely and start commending their investment to others like themselves. (“The perfect place to escape”, and “The coffee and cakes are delicious”.12) There were precious few “DFLs” in the Whitstable of 1974 — although the actor Peter Cushing, well known from Hammer Horror’s Dracula films, was an established resident, whilst the town was also rumoured to be favoured by south London villains associated with the Richardson and Kray gangs. As I remember from parents’ evenings in that sometimes unlit year when Harold Wilson followed Edward Heath in losing the alleged “Second Battle of Britain”13 against inflation and trade union militancy, Whitstable was well-supplied with inhabitants who could be rugged in defence of their (and their children’s) customary way of life. And that was by no means the limit of the town’s cultural distinction.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the young Somerset Maugham had lived there, growing up orphaned and miserable in the care of an elderly uncle, the otherwise childless Vicar of Whitstable. Maugham later drew on his memories to create the “Blackstable” of his 1915 autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage. The Whitstable he knew was “a fishing village”, with a small harbour that was also used by ships bringing coal from the north-east — a coincidence of industries that could lead to ferocious altercations on windy days. In the early Seventies much of Whitstable still conformed to Maugham’s description. The streets could indeed still look “shabby”. Some of the houses along the seafront were still occupied by “fishermen and poor people”, a few of whom may even have frequented the non-conformist chapels on the High Street and, therefore, been “of no account” to the Church of England vicar.14
By 1974 Whitstable’s writer of moment was surely Terry Harknett, who lived at the eastern edge of town. He was one of the so-called “Piccadilly cowboys”, named after their habit of meeting up in central London pubs to drink and talk about the Western novels they confected by pulling motifs, landscapes and situations out of Spaghetti Westerns and lifting their weapons from catalogues and magazines of the Guns ’n Ammo variety. Writing under the pen name of George G. Gilman, Harknett came up with a hero named Edge, a Mexican-Swedish “halfbreed”, with a limitless capacity for violence and a distinctive technique with a razor too. Both deplored and admired for their extreme violence, the “Edge” stories were distinguished by their brazen lack of moral compass, and by the fact that things just did not come right in the end. (“The only thing you have to be careful of is to get your guns right: if you get your guns wrong you get in terrible trouble”, Harknett is reported to have said of the stories he turned out at such an incredible rate.15)
“The Nottidge”, meanwhile, was a troubled secondary modern school, named after an already forgotten former Chairman of Kent County Council, which had, as I have been surprised recently to discover, been opened in 1952 to much local enthusiasm (a memorial website recalls the first impressions of two witnesses: “As a kid, I marvelled at the sheer extent of Sir William Nottidge”16; “Going up there after being in the old Whitstable Endowed buildings was brilliant”17). Although I knew nothing of this when I began my stint as an uncertificated supply teacher (it was a case of interview one day, start work the next), “the Nottidge” had been conceived as another improving vision on a hilltop. Designed by an architect who had started his career in collaboration with the University of Kent’s defeated master planner William Holford, it too had once been filled with the promise of a better world to come.
This time, the visionary architect was F.R.S. Yorke, a pioneer of English modernism whose first house had been made of reinforced concrete and designed with Holford for the 1934 “Modern Homes” exhibition at Gidea Park (the recent Pevsner guide to East London describes it, accurately, as “a rectilinear concrete box”18). In the early years of the Second World War, Yorke had once again worked alongside Holford, this time on larger projects — ordnance depots, factories, camps — connected to the munitions industry. In 1944 he teamed up with Czech and Finnish modernist friends to form the practice Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardall, which would, as Holford himself testified, grow into one of “the largest and most effective architectural practices in Britain”.19 During its first decade, YRM’s output was, in the words of the influential critic Reyner Banham, so “characteristic of the Welfare State” that it might be expected to loom “far larger in histories of our time than architects who currently monopolise all the praise and blame that is going”.20 YRM was among the practices invited by the planner Sir Frederick Gibberd to design housing at new town Harlow in Essex. Yet much of the firm’s bread and butter came from producing schools, in accordance with the selective system of free secondary education established by the Butler Education Act of 1944.
Like the yet-to-be imagined University of Kent, Whitstable’s new school was built on open land above its town. The site, as the Architectural Review’s contemporary report testifies, was “high and very exposed but with extensive views in all directions”. The school plan was consequently both “extended and open” in order to make the most of those views. At its centre stood a pair of two-storey teaching blocks, one with “normal classrooms”, the other with more specialised rooms for science, domestic science, woodwork, metalwork and needlework. The blocks were steel-framed structures, incorporating pre-cast concrete panels finished with white spar. And yet Yorke had specified more traditional materials too: London stock as well as local brick; areas of red cedar panelling on exterior elevations; and even some old-fashioned walls of rough-hewn local stone placed just inside the main entrance. The silhouette offered to the town of Whitstable was never going to rival that of an ancient Italian hilltop town, but the Nottidge was purposefully enhanced by a dramatically raised “tank tower”: no match for the famous medieval bell towers of Siena or Urbino, but it did incorporate a concrete chimney as well as a water supply for the boiler house below.
Tank tower, Sir William Nottidge School, Whitstable.
Despite the sense of optimism that once inspired YRM’s building, it’s carefully chosen interior details — West African mahogany block floor tiles in the classrooms, brightly painted lockers in the corridors, Peggy Angus tiles in the dining area — lacked the power to sustain the school as an advertisement for the Conservative county of Kent’s selective education policy. Some teachers worked hard on behalf of children with few second chances, but “the Nottidge” had its share of defeated figures too. One was on long-term sick leave and only present as part of the absence I had been employed to fill. Others sat in the staff room silently listening, or perhaps not, as a science teacher rehearsed his daily fantasy of placing some or other troublesome child under a bell jar and slowly suffocating the miscreant with the help of an oxygen tap. After a couple of terms of this, I left for the far side of the world. It was there, in Vancouver, that a new friend would introduce me to the first two volumes of Johnson’s Anniversaries in the truncated translation published by the New York publisher Helen Wolff at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1975. Remarkably, as I would discover shortly afterwards, this extraordinary writer, who had done so much to re-engage the novel with post-war realities, had by then chosen to quit West Berlin and to settle with his wife and daughter not just in Kent but on the offshore island I had looked out over from Whitstable’s all-but-failing secondary modern school.
8. NEITHER ST HELENA NOR HONG KONG
No oracle, while the island lies at a distance.
— Douglas Oliver, “An Island That is All the World”, 1990.
The I
sle of Sheppey from an upstairs bedroom at 32 Bellevue Road, Whitstable.
The Nottidge has since been demolished and replaced, but there is a house not far along Bellevue Road that preserves the view around which Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardall organised their north-west facing classrooms. Unlike those in so many Victorian schools, the Nottidge’s windows weren’t mounted high in the walls to ensure that children who strayed from their lessons saw nothing but brick. Indeed, they were so revealing that it sometimes seemed as if there were no separation at all between the interior and the world outside. On clear days, your eye was encouraged to float out over the flat-roofed Portakabins in front of the already outgrown school, and then to drift down the slope occupied by allotments and the town cemetery, past Canterbury City Council’s twelve-storey block of sheltered housing — Windsor House was then only five years old and not a disintegrating tower block of the kind that nowadays provides such arresting images of social dereliction in the songs of Wild Billy Childish and the Chatham Singers.1 Beyond that lay the lower town and then the sea.
Looking north-east over a North Sea that had, as Uwe Johnson would soon be pointing out in letters to friends, been commonly known as “the German Ocean” before the antipathies of the First World War forced that name into retirement, an idling child or teacher might watch ships passing in and out of the wide Thames Estuary, or test the day’s visibility by trying to distinguish the gun towers of the old Red Sands army fort, placed on stilts above a submerged sandbar seven miles offshore in order to intercept German bombers during the Second World War. To the west of this abandoned relic, the long view across the estuary towards Essex is interrupted by a thin tongue of land, which rises gently from flat salt marshes to culminate in a muddy headland marked by a white crater that, were it in Sussex or Dorset, might be an ancient chalk quarry rather than the caravan park — “Warden Springs” — that it will actually turn out to be.
West-facing classrooms, Sir William Nottidge school.
The Financial Times recently announced that “the island is always a dream”.2 The fellow who made that statement lives by selling Mediterranean or Caribbean islands as “trophy assets” to oligarchs and other insufficiently taxed individuals. The point applied differently in north Kent forty-five years ago, when the island to which Johnson moved towards the end of 1974 had briefly become entangled with my own deliberations about leaving the country. On days that were clear as well as educationally challenging, the island outside the classroom window seemed not just to shimmer across the water, but to hint at the better future that surely awaited anyone prepared to put a stretch of water between themselves and their present situation in Britain. This alluring land had a proper name, of course, but, for all I knew about the removed place that beckoned from across a widening arm of the sea, the Isle of Sheppey only needed to be “Elsewhere” to cast its spell.
On the one occasion when I visited the island that year, I encountered little beyond my own sense of disorientation. I remember queueing while a ship passed through the raised Kingsferry Bridge separating Sheppey from the mainland, and then crawling in a line of lorries through an industrial wasteland that culminated in a beaten-looking town named Sheerness. I recall glimpsing the High Street in passing, and pausing at a weird pub named the Ship on Shore before driving on past sprawling bungalows and caravan and chalet parks, all of them waiting for the opening of a summer season that threatened to be as chimerical as the unattainable land I had imagined while looking across the Swale from the Nottidge’s windows. That, more or less, is how Sheppey registered in my mind during the spring of 1974: an inviting prospect, to be sure, but also, as I had concluded by the time I looked back towards Whitstable from the desolate out-of-season resort named Leysdown-on-Sea, a perplexing oscillation in which paradise kept collapsing into the bleakest kind of slum. I may not have known it then, but I was by no means the first to see the island in this acutely polarised way.
The Ship on Shore, Sheerness. Pub grotto made from salvaged ship carrying barrels that turned out, disappointingly, to be filled with Portland cement. Postcard (“Bad weather here”), September 1913.
The view of Sheppey across the water from the seafront has long formed one of Whitstable’s best attractions — especially when augmented by a lurid sunset. By the early Seventies, the combination was a seasoned favourite on picture postcards: the island as a low band of darkening purple stretched out just to the west of the sinking sun. The same view is still enjoyed by the drinkers who, now as then, tend to drift out of the Old Neptune (aka “The Old Pub on the Beach”) on summer evenings to gaze out as the sun makes its final descent. In 2012 the much-pictured outlook would be commended in Brian Barnett’s unofficial town song, “Viva Whitstable”, in which the Girl from Ipanema joins the migrants seeking asylum in this part of the world:
With a drink at the Neppy
She could see the Isle of Sheppey
And the sun falling in the sea.3
That choice of attraction will also be familiar to surviving admirers of the appropriately-named north Kentish “prog rock” band Caravan, whose members used to practice in a church hall at Graveney, a village on the marshes a few miles west along the Swale. These pioneers of the retrospectively named “Canterbury scene” invoked the Swale’s sunsets when they named their most admired LP, In the Land of Grey and Pink — leaving the cover artist, Ann Marie Anderson, to replace Sheppey with a Tolkien-esque fantasy world that quickly became an emblem of Kent as “a stoned shire of winding cobblestone streets and patchouli-scented head shops where zonked out hippies on a diet of dope and mung beans created 18-minute song suites”.4 That faded vision is unlikely to have convinced those who understood Sheppey to be a prosaic, and predominantly working-class island where there is nothing weird about the clustered caravans — nearly all of the “static” rather than “touring” variety nowadays.
*
A small, low-lying and, over much of its extent, watery world of some thirty-six square miles, the Isle of Sheppey lies on the eastern shore of the river Medway, where it flows out into the wide, outer reaches of the Thames Estuary. On its western side, it emerges from the water, in a marshy and noncommittal kind of way, not far from a bone-strewn mudbank called “Dead Man’s Island”. To the south, once you get past the landfill site at Ladies Hole Point, the island is dominated by marshes and separated from the mainland by the tidal strait known as the Swale. The northern shore is formed by a ridge of London Clay, which rises towards the east of the island and reaches its highest point of some seventy-six metres above sea level at Minster, a village at the early Christian site where St Sexburga, the widow of a Kentish King, established a convent in 664 AD.
Such basic facts are true, and yet, like so many offshore islands, the “Isle of Sheep”, as Sheppey’s originally Saxon name “Sceapig” would have it, remains various and prismatic in its separation from the mainland. Not yet buried under solar panels, it may appear primarily as a natural habitat, thanks largely to the marshes along the Swale, now one of the primary wetland nature reserves in northern Europe. It may be seen as a bastion of British naval history, a status owed to the centuries during which Sheerness and Queenborough on the island’s western shore served as outlying elements of the naval establishment based further up the Medway at Chatham. This view was espoused by the bicycling correspondent for the London Daily News in 1899. He advised Londoners undertaking a “circular” (and surely rather strenuous) Saturday excursion to the Isle of Sheppey to pause at a carefully identified vantage point before crossing the Swale to see “the Might of the Mailed Hand of England” moored off the island’s Medway shore: “Gazing here, down upon these evidences of power, you feel that it is good to be an Englishman”.5 Those who prefer more ancient history must ignore the bungalows and caravan and chalet parks in order to glimpse the island of the complete Bronze Age foundry excavated at the remote settlement (once an island of its own) of Harty in 1879, or of the Danes who raided and overwintered here in the ninth century, ra
vaging the island, and allegedly firing St Sexburga’s abbey as they went about it.
While some of Sheppey’s antiquarians struggle to pull indisputable facts out of the swirling “mists of time”, others have been quite at ease with legend. This is how Sheppey features, still appropriately coated in “the majesty of mud”,6 in The Ingoldsby Legends, a once highly popular collection of fables written by a Kentish vicar named Richard Barham and published pseudonymously from the 1830s onwards. The atmosphere of “fog and fantasy” has persisted to yield the recent claim, made by a Kentish archaeologist and enthusiastically welcomed by some on Sheppey, that Beowulf, the warrior hero of that Anglo-Saxon epic, landed here rather than in Scandinavia, as knowledgeable medievalists continue strongly to insist.7 The mural adorning the wall outside Brian’s Euronics, a white goods store overlooking Beachfields Park in Sheerness, invites us to imagine this Old English hero striding up past the amusement arcades of Leysdown-on-Sea to fight it out with the monstrous Grendel somewhere in the neighbourhood of the ancient marshland church of St Thomas the Apostle at Harty. On Sheppey, as elsewhere in Britain, legend can couple with living memory to bring time itself to a halt. That is how the island lingers in the memories of many who holidayed here in the Fifties and Sixties. Perhaps the same glamour of backwardness touched the island on which the singer Billy Bragg found himself playing alongside a band named the Chords during the brief “Mod Revival” of 1979/80: on Sheppey, he suggests, that particular “revival” may not have been strictly necessary, since the inhabitants appeared never to have given up on their parkas and scooters in the first place.8
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 9
