The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  I don’t know who we’d expected to meet on the walk, if anyone at all, but I don’t think it was Chris, a north London Jewish history teacher working with young offenders who had moved to the nearby village of Great Wakering to be closer to his wife’s parents, who, he said, were part of the well-established Jewish community around Southend. Jews, he said, had moved out of the East End like so many others. ‘There’s more space here. It’s closer to the sea,’ he said, ‘like Miami.’ And he gave a shrill chuckle. Nothing ever stayed the same. Until recently Southend had possessed two proper Jewish delicatessens, as good as those in Golders Green, but a kosher food section in Sainsbury’s had killed them off. At least there were still two synagogues. I asked to which he belonged. ‘Definitely the Reform.’

  Around his neck Chris wore an improbably large pair of binoculars built for star-gazing. And he discharged excited puffs of knowledge about the coast and the birds he’d seen. As he did so his elbows sat close to his body while his forearms and hands opened and closed with a kind of rabbinical rhythm like the wings of a mechanical bird, his fingertips briefly interleaving. The gradual dispersal of the local Jewish community was not, he said, a cause of any great sorrow. Now there were thriving Polish and Nigerian communities and new foods and delicatessens. And he loved his new proximity to the wild, strange, quasi-military coast and its curious connections with history. He, the grandson of Jewish refugees, had made friends with men who had fought with the Wehrmacht and, having been confined in POW camps, had chosen to settle close to the North Sea for the rest of their lives.

  Chris’s path veered left inland; ours went right. The mysterious architecture of war was everywhere: half hidden among the flats and marshes was a necropolis of crumbling bunkers, discarded machinery and windowless structures, the purpose of which was neither clear nor, I guessed, remembered. And at ebb tide the sea pulled back to reveal a shore-scape of rusting sheets of iron, shell holes blasted through the middle, jagged and mangled at the edges. It’s a lethal beach, the kind to which a child would be compulsively drawn. Indeed, my friend Alex tripped on a slab of slippery concrete and smacked his head on a rock, narrowly avoiding losing an eye on a vicious and random spike. Shoeburyness has yet to be made safe.

  Still more dangerous, just across a tiny creek lies the island of Foulness. Once an atomic weapons research establishment, access to strangers is utterly forbidden, but peering from a hummock we could just make out the shapes of improbably leaning towers, unorthodox derricks, structures poised at preposterous angles. I had heard that the beef reared among this junkyard of Cold War detritus, grazing on thrift, aster, milkwort and other exotic seagrasses, is piquant, tender and well-seasoned, almost as true a taste of the estuary as that denizen of its ooze, the cockle.

  The drum-shaped ruin of Hadleigh Castle – decrepit as painted by John Constable, more so now – is deliciously reminiscent of a sandcastle that has withstood the lapping of a first wave but will topple at the second. Baron Hubert de Burgh had it built some time in the early 1200s; a century later Edward III improved Hadleigh, and from the windows of its long-vanished solarium gazed out beyond the marshes towards the sea from which a French invasion might have come but never did.

  The turn-off from the A12 (follow the sign to Essex World of Beds) is unpromising, but one majestic, sweeping view from the castle redeems the visit, taking in the glistening spike of Canary Wharf and on the Kent side of the Thames the Isle of Grain refinery spewing too-white smoke and other fumes. Falling away from the castle itself, a soft wooded escarpment rolls down to the marshes and to Two Tree Island, which is neither as bare as it sounds nor in any obvious way an island, but a place where stalks of shoulder-high fennel flourish and infuse the air with the fragrance of aniseed and liquorice. Signs – yet more signs – caution that nesting avocets are not to be disturbed, but fail to dampen the petrol whine of the radio-controlled aeroplanes climbing and tumbling above the island’s scrubby heath.

  A mile’s walk east along the estuary, and the path stops at Leigh (-on-Sea, lest anyone be in doubt as to the status of the river), where I supped with royalty.

  Michael Bates is the second-generation Prince of Sealand, a former World War II gun platform built seven sea miles out from the Suffolk coast as a defence against the Luftwaffe. His father Roy was a natural adventurer who fought demob boredom through a series of erratic business ventures and an attempt, culminating in his prosecution, to start a pirate radio station somewhere in the English Channel. On 2 September 1967, driven both by revenge and by entrepreneurialism, Bates Senior sailed out to one of the many fortress islands built around the British coast during the war to defend against invasion and declared himself its monarch.

  What was Roughs Tower he renamed Sealand, arguing that as it lay beyond the recently redrawn UK territorial limit and had been abandoned by the War Office in the 1950s, the platform was terra nullius with little or no legal impediment existing to prevent the appointment of himself and his wife, Princess Joan, as its heads of state. The incensed government set about the destruction of other forts so as to prevent imitators or even any aspiration Bates might possess to establish an archipelago nation, but even now the sovereignty and very existence of Sealand is a question about which Foreign Office lawyers feel decidedly queasy.

  Sealand has accrued a near-mythical status among aficionados of quirkiness, something the Bates family has worked hard to achieve, playing on its patchwork heritage of stories, such as the attempted ‘theft’ of the platform in 1973 by a consortium of Dutch businessmen which resulted in a helicopter shoot-out, fisticuffs and the Bates family taking hostages. Less well confirmed – but rumoured – is that a Sealand passport was among the artefacts discovered at the scene of Gianni Versace’s murder.

  I wanted to visit the platform. Michael Bates suggested we meet to discuss things over a pint of cockles.

  Bates as good as grew up on Sealand, an isolated steel and concrete pile of nothing, and by his account his adolescence was terrifying at times, with him often being left alone to watch against chancers and the Royal Navy, with no one for company but imaginary voices carried in the battering seas and winds. Now in his sixties, he carries a barrel chest on spindly legs, and wheezes and puffs as he walks. In the manuscript of the autobiography that he showed me he boasted of having done bad things – not least during the hostage/helicopter episode. After meeting me off the train at Leigh station he whisked me away in his silver Range Rover. There were reasons of state behind our destination – it was all, he said, ‘a bit political’.

  Deteriorating relations between Michael and his girlfriend meant he was back at his ex-wife’s semi-detached house in Westcliff. She made tea, and we sat in a tidy but not regal kitchen as toy dogs and fancy cats skirled around our ankles and the prince regaled me with tales of plots and coups and dirty tricks. He was already in discussions with Hollywood about the biopic, he said, and had a strong vision of how the movie should be. Had I ever seen a film called Lethal Weapon? But I sensed that Michael was himself beginning to tire of Sealand. I’d seen him on a Canadian chat show telling the world that he was looking to sell it for something in the region of £75 million.

  Not a lot, he pointed out, for an independent state that generated decent revenue. It was ‘no secret’, he told me, that Sealand made money through the sale of peerages – a knighthood can be purchased for ninety-nine pounds. ‘How much do you make?’ I asked. ‘A lot.’ When we’d finished our tea and looked through the family albums (his daughter had been a local beauty queen and took up many of its pages), we drove down to the quayside to take a peek at his other line of business.

  Leigh-on-Sea is a glorious surprise of pubs, whelk and winkle stalls, ice creams, coffee shops and even a strip of sand, which for want of any other purpose serves fairly successfully as a beach. The train to Fenchurch Street takes only an hour. It is the perfect Dickensian day out, neither la-di-da nor ’ow’s your father but friendly, well mannered and non-judgemental. Ancient black-tarred c
ockle sheds exude steam and pleasant fish smells, while behind them on the quay sit a jaunty little fleet of boats and a tangle of gear.

  Until the early 1970s cockling was a dangerous, body-wrecking pursuit. The small boats would sail out to the cockle beds, and as the tide ebbed men would wade to the exposed sands and rake up the molluscs into large hand-held scoops. The whole job is undertaken now with vacuums, which suck up cockle colonies in one slurp. Michael owns two boats, and we watched as one drew alongside the quay, a lorry came to meet it, and cockles were hauled up in one-tonne sacks to be driven away. The cockles, said Michael, would be in Spain by the end of the next day. They couldn’t get enough of them there, where they were known as almejas – so much more appetising than ‘cockles’ with its connotations of poor-man’s food.

  ‘We don’t appreciate them like the Spanish – they pay fortunes for good cockles,’ he said.

  ‘How much will one of those big sacks make?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot.’

  Later, a well-informed source suggested that each cockle boat could make up to a million pounds in a summer’s work, and if the Spanish recession had dented that figure, it hadn’t been by much.

  Michael never delivered on the half-promise to take me out to Sealand. My interest seemed to have been eclipsed by that of a celebrity journalist with whom he was in yet more talks about a possible visit. But in most respects I’d gleaned what I wanted to know over tea. There was less to Sealand than met the eye. And Prince Michael, perhaps like Emperor Hirohito or Lady Jane Grey, had reluctantly accepted the burden of monarchy which his line had imposed.

  Some fifty miles north-east of Leigh sprawls the Suffolk settlement of Shingle Street, a long, hard and lonely stretch of mist-muffled East Anglia between the estuaries of the Rivers Orwell and Deben. This part of the coast is a quiet mecca for sailors who enjoy poking and nuzzling at its estuaries, the Stour, the Twizzle, the Deben and the Ore, where sometimes the tawny-coloured, loose-footed sails of Thames barges can still be seen breaking the monotony of the flat marshland.

  This is challenging sailing. Shoals and tides rip and ripple through the seabed like spitting snakes, and as breakers leap from the water full of threat it’s hard not to imagine them as slathering dogs on the cusp of snapping their chains. Like an anvil for the breaking of boats, here the shingle steps down into the North Sea and piles into banks that break the surface like the backs of whales. But there’s a magic in listening to the thump and clap of the waves and their sizzle as they draw back like an archer’s arm.

  The name Shingle Street is self-explanatory. Three miles long or so, it is armadillo-like and serpentine, its curves unyielding, not easily conquered. The Street now comprises a defiant armada of coastguard cottages and other little houses, weatherboarded and brick, valiantly facing off against the sea, and a curious cluster of Martello towers, so many that you’d think whoever planned them found they had a surplus at Shingle Street and dispensed with them all at once. One is now a holiday let. Another has fallen to the temptation of becoming a ‘luxury home’, albeit without windows. Above all this snaps and shakes a Union Jack, jeered and goaded by the hard wind glancing off the stones.

  What has sometimes been said in the saloon bars of local pubs is that, some time in August 1940, a flotilla of ships set out from the ports of Germany and Belgium in a manner not dissimilar to that concocted by Erskine Childers a generation before. Even before it appeared on the horizon the British military’s new-fangled radar detected its presence, the army set the sea alight with an impenetrable barrage of flame, and the would-be invaders, stealthily crawling towards the English shore, were devoured in swathes of burning petrol. For weeks after, those who tell the tale say, the North Sea spat charred bodies onto the late-summer beaches, where they lay, quite defeated, pending their silent removal by ‘the authorities’.

  The strange thing about Shingle Street is that even now this may-have-been episode wobbles like a mirage. Believers argue that the Shingle Street Incident was covered up by the government to protect the morale of a public that would have lost heart to know it had come this close to invasion. But then there are the others who insist that the Shingle Street story was invented by a government anxious to spread the rumour that perhaps as many as 50,000 German soldiers burned to death on a single night and that a similarly dreadful demise would be visited upon other unwelcome strangers. And indeed, no clues can be found in the trembling tendrils of sea beet, the sea-clanked stones, the sea-borne miscellany of rubbish and weeds, or the hiss of the sea itself to suggest anything other than that the near-invasion of England by way of Shingle Street was a masterful exercise in black ops.

  On the Dengie peninsula, squeezed between the Rivers Blackwater and Crouch like a fist, a different war story has taken root. Defoe warned of the high probability of catching the ‘Ague’ (malaria) on Dengie, where he said he had met a man who had married twelve women, all of whom had died of it, rife as it was in the undrained meadows and semi-swamp. More recent fears of illness stem from Bradwell nuclear power station, around which rumours of increased incidents of cancer and leukaemia have been reported, discounted and resuscitated. It was recently decommissioned, but its bulk still manages to unsettle the quiet of the fields, sharpens the cawing of rooks and lends to the rustle of the hedgerows just the slightest hint of something untoward. And more signs (KEEP OUT! THIS IS THE PROPERTY OF THE NUCLEAR DECOMMISSIONING AGENCY) imbue otherwise placid pastures with an aftertaste of something apocalyptic.

  Dengie demands some kind of pilgrimage nonetheless for it is lilting and beguiling, in summer expansive and generous, its sands hot and uncontrived. Even in winter, when the tide draws great breaths and hurls the waves back upon the marsh, it is savage but not unkind. There is always, on account of its emptiness and the sense of being far from anywhere (the great metropolis of Bradwell boasts under 900 souls), an undertone of sombre quietness and the oxymoronic sensation that the absence of conspicuous glories creates its own presence.

  At the north-east corner of Dengie, two miles’ hard, noisy walk on shingle and broken shell from the power station, is a building some fifteen hundred years old that constitutes an architectural statement so elemental as to exercise a kind of unshakeable authority over the surrounding fields, sea and marsh. There was a Roman fort here, housing a garrison charged with keeping watch for the pirates who periodically poked up the Blackwater and upset the Pax Romana. In its current incarnation it is a church, the Chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, founded by Cedd (brother of Chad, Cynibil and Caelin), one of a brood of saints that poured out of the Northumbrian monasteries in the wake of their sacking by the terrible Vikings.

  It has also at various junctures served as a hayloft, and is now tended by a religious group called the Othona Community, established by a former RAF chaplain in 1946 as an attempt to foster reconciliation and draw together people of different faiths and which, as befits the generosity of its guiding principles, is open to anyone caring to stroll through its compound of timber-framed dormitories, kitchens and allotments scattered among hedges and trees. When I visited I found the complex pervaded by the kind of institutional smells (yesterday’s spaghetti Bolognese, tumble dryers, Vim) that comfort the noses of some but get up those of others. I had called in advance so as not to take the Othonas by surprise with a quiver of intrusive questions, and found that my name had been written on a whiteboard, below that of a Pastor Rupert and above a washing-up rota.

  In my own mind I had attempted to draw a link or comparison between the presence of the power station and the Othona Community. Nuclear power stations are built at places like Bradwell (or Sizewell, a little further north) because they need to be both close to the sea, from which they draw their cooling water, and also far away from any large settlement, which might be affected in the event of the reactor melting down. Communities like Othona gravitate towards the periphery for other reasons. Remoteness allows them to create their own sense of singularity unchafed by the scorn, curiosity and ab
rasion of the rest of society. Does the sea also play a role as a kind of meditational tool, a simile for the ever-changing but eternal truths underpinning the human condition?

  The young pony-tailed deputy warden who kindly volunteered to have coffee with me wasn’t about to indulge my hypothesis. It was true, he said, that the sea could be calming if he was feeling wound up. Sometimes he took himself on long walks and returned relaxed, but at other times he found the waves too repetitive and wanted to be as far away from them as possible. I didn’t press him on the point. He had some photograph albums for me to look at, charting the community’s early black-and-white days in Nissen shelters and army tents, and then a sudden leap into colour and checked shirts around 1963. It could have been any kind of grassroots slightly radical movement of the kind of which sing-songs, loosely organised group activities and table tennis are common denominators. But, said Mike, there wasn’t a good relationship with the Bradwell villagers, who were suspicious of the Othonas and their constant stream of visitors from outside Dengie, though the community had done everything, he said, to share what they had with the locals.

  Generously, Mike suggested that I stay for a meal. I could see that he was trying to impress upon me the community’s lack of dogma and that the chapel, with its simple, unfussy lines and interior untrammelled by ornateness or imagery, was a space in which anyone might find their own god. Uncharitably perhaps, I found it claustrophobic. Raring to commune with my own deity of the sea, I escaped out to where the fields and hedges came to an end and the Cockle Spit began. Beyond was a dark expanse of salt marshes – saltings – and then banks of shells where the tide rolls dead cockles into huge crunchy drifts.