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| Romney Marsh drainage channels |
I
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do not know why, but I have never been particularly
drawn to travel writing, and the only books I’ve read that qualify are John
Hillaby’s Journey Through Britain,
and S. P. B. Mais’ The Land of the Cinque
Ports. I did once start Paul Theroux’s The
Great Railway Bazaar. However, in his description of the journey between
Victoria and Folkestone, I was somewhat startled by this sentence:
The black train yards of Ashford
loomed and tumbled past, and we were crossing the hummocky grass of Romney
Marsh, headed towards Folkestone.
Well, there is what might be described as hummocky
grass on Romney Marsh. However, the railway between Ashford and Folkestone not
only does not cross Romney Marsh,
but neither is a single
glimpse of it afforded from the train! To the south–west of the railway the land
rises gradually for some two to three miles until it reaches the degraded sea
cliffs which stretch from Hythe to Ham Street. These cliffs are on average 95
feet high, and at their base are the rich alluvial levels of Romney Marsh proper.
Only from a helicopter hovering some 100 feet above the railway it would it be
possible to see the spread of the Marsh out towards Dungeness and Rye. “Does this matter?” you may well
ask, “Was not Theroux only being impressionistic and using his imagination?”
Perhaps, but after reading something so demonstrably false, I felt that I could
have no confidence in his description of places I had never seen. Further, it
seems from Theroux’s sentence as if it is “the ‘black train yards of Ashford”
that are looming and tumbling past us; and if either the train or “the black train
yards” were tumbling past it’s hard to imagine anything short of disastrous
consequences.
There is a similarly misleading sentence in Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around The Coasts of Great Britain. In
the chapter entitled “The Branch Line to Hastings”, Theroux takes the train from Rye to Hastings.
The stops between are Winchelsea, Doleham, Three Oaks, and Ore. Here is the impressionistic sentence:
At Three Oaks and farther on at Ore there were pink
flowers, and more sheep browsing in the meadows, and ivy growing so thickly on
the oaks it seemed to upholster them.
I like the idea of the oaks seeming to be upholstered
by the ivy. However, pink flowers and sheep may be seen anywhere along the line
from Rye to Three Oaks; but as to sheep, I have never – over a period of sixty
years – seen a single one on the steep, overgrown slopes around Ore Station
(which otherwise sits in the middle of a built–up area).
I am not sure that Theroux is not more interested in
people, their ideas and habits, and what they have built and discarded in land–
and city–scapes, than he is in natural history (what, for example, were those
‘pink flowers’ called?). So it is that he seems impatient to get from one place
to another. However, I am finding The
Kingdom by the Sea very readable. Here is one of his encounters at a hotel
in Littlestone (part of the ‘ribbon–blight’ of bungalows that stretch from
Hythe to Dungeness – and indeed despoil the coast from Camber to Portsmouth,
except where the Cliffs of the Hastings Beds and the South Downs prevent
development).
The lady
from the front desk, Mrs Turgis, showed me to my room and hesitated and then
sat on my bed and said,
“You’ll want this switched off,” and moved her slender
figure against a toggle on the wall.
“The intercom,” she explained, “When it is
on we can hear everything that happens.”
“Me talking to myself,” I said.
“Or you
might have a young lady in here,” Mrs Turgis said.
“Is that likely?” I said.
“And
then you wouldn’t want anyone to hear,” she said, and smiled.
She was sitting
on my pillow.
~
_________________________________________________ ~
From Littlestone, Theroux makes his way via Dungeness
and Lydd to Camber on the far western edge of the Marsh (just within the county
of East Sussex). Camber sands are a delight, but on the landward side of the
dunes is a mess of bungalows and holiday camps, and at the western end of the
sands Theroux finds
...peeling, collapsing huts and rusting caravans and
weeds and even a dump full of twisted metal and yesterday’s plastic... [A]
disfigurement... reminiscent of a Third World country.
This is good, and true enough of the blight south of
Rye, and had Theroux been able to walk on the western side of the Rother he
might well have come across an abandoned works, where the ground reeked of oil
and was littered with rusting machine parts and empty oil drums. All a far cry
from the cosy tea rooms of Rye... And Rye Harbour village is a dispiriting mess
of houses and bungalows, built everywhere and anywhere, without shape or plan.
It is not hard to see why no one who lives there seems to smile. But Theroux
does not take to Rye. He finds it is “not a restful place . . . It urges you to
remark on the pretty houses and the well–kept gardens and the self–conscious
sign painting and then it urges you to move on.” Well, this is perhaps the
problem with passing through a place instead of spending time there. I have
visited Rye probably in excess of one hundred times, and every year my wife and
I spend a few days there. True, a lady once jocularly remarked to us at a bus
stop that in Rye they were, “All pickled in aspic and gin and jaguars.” That is
certainly true of some, and yet there is a bohemian side to the town, and a
degree of eccentricity that has nothing to do with class. And it is one of
those places where you can speak to almost anyone, and that makes me feel at
home. Then too, it is placed between the sea, the Marsh, and the Weald of Kent
and Sussex.
It is a pity that Theroux did not walk the footpaths
between Rye and Hastings: the topography is as varied as anyone could wish for.
However, once in (Old) Hastings, Theroux finds a rich variety of people to talk
to. He starts by visiting the artist,
John Bratby, in his house, The Cupola, perched at the top of a road on the East
Hill. Asked why he had come to live in Hastings, Bratby replied, “Because it is
one of the three cheapest places to live in England . . . I could never buy a
house this large in London . . . I’d have a poky flat if I didn’t live in
Hastings.” Theroux tells us that Bratby “sometimes referred to his famous
riotous past – so riotous that it nearly killed him.”
|
John
Bratby. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. 1959
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