The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  In this instance at least my teen instinct towards anti-establishmentarianism was perhaps not too wide of the mark. In retrospect the incident represented much of the spirit of the age of Thatcherism, with all its attendant social and ideological divisions. ‘Free enterprise’ was a flagship slogan for economic libertarianism. Critics of the government saw the ferry disaster as indicative of a greater evil than the shoddiness of one or a handful of crewmen. And when a minister of the day announced that the operator P&O would not face criminal charges, one parliamentarian described the Herald as ‘a latterday Titanic, wrecked on an iceberg of Department of Transport indifference, managerial incompetence and working methods that were apparently designed only to shorten turn-around times, regardless of risks to passengers and crew’.

  Had Ensor been alive, he would almost certainly have made something of it. The hareng saur was by no means so distracted by the fancies of his own imagination as to shirk his obligation to social commentary. In 1890 Ensor produced a series of paintings inspired by a demonstration by Ostend fishermen on the Visserkai. They were protesting against preferential treatment given to English trawlers landing their catch. Within eyeshot of Ostend’s promenading swells and dandies the gendarmes came out in force to quell what was quite a minor uprising. Several fishermen were shot, enraging Ensor and no doubt Spilliaert, whose atelier directly overlooked the quay.

  Ostend does little to give its artists their due. The Ensor House is halfway there but moulders for lack of funds. The MuZee, a repurposed 1950s department store in a backstreet beyond the Leopold Park, has a standing collection of works by the Ostend Set, but it is less than it could be. All the best paintings are somewhere across the North Sea and beyond. Every so often a major retrospective is held in New York or Paris, and the art world remembers that Ensor and friends were ‘major’ and ‘important’ painters, but then the dust settles, and they sink back into the shadows of the Belgian dunes.

  Major and important, but not household names like Cézanne or Gauguin, or bequeathing gardens full of lilies. Were they to be, the rule would be broken by which nobody can recall the names of above half a dozen famous Belgians.

  One wonders, indeed, whether Ostend underwent some collective trauma after the Second World War which severed its links with the past. On the front only two or three belle époque buildings remain. Nonsensically, they were vacant when I visited, their soft, elegant, sexy curlicues having lost the power to entrance. In their place are unremitting blocks, which, up close and singly, just escape being monstrous. But in sum they resemble a mile-long Stalinist vision of collectivist seaside fun.

  I had assumed that the Germans (easy to blame in Belgium) were responsible one way or other – perhaps for blowing the original buildings to smithereens. In fact much of old Ostend survived after 1945 only to be broken on the anvil of Belgium’s strange politics. Typically the buildings had been owned by rich merchant families, and a succession of leftist governments colluding with the spirit of populist capitalism implemented a policy of tearing down these totems of privilege, replacing them with apartments which are hideous but afford very many more people their proprietorial right to a view of the North Sea.

  Many Belgians feel sad about the national loss, though still in the summer they descend upon the coast in French- and Flemish-speaking droves, kicking up and tickling the beaches until the very sands groan beneath the thudding of their feet. And the Ensor collection is far too elitist an attraction to inflame the breast of Ostend’s city planners and tourist board. He is, as might be said, a ‘speciality attraction’ with limited pulling power.

  Not like Marvin Gaye.

  Gaye spent a year in Ostend at the invitation of the record producer and city native Freddy Clousaert, who offered him respite from the curse of drugs, women and unpaid taxes. For a brief, charmed spell, the soul music legend found sanctuary in this out-of-the-way seaside resort. He recorded his masterpiece ‘Sexual Healing’ in a studio not far from Waterloo and found a modicum of sanity away from the temptations of big-city life.

  A film by the director Richard Olivier documents Gaye running barefoot across the dunes and playing darts with Flemish fishermen, one of whom asks whether he is from Paraguay, and though never having heard of Marvin Gaye is impressed that he is playing a gig at the Kursaal, Ostend’s big casino-cum-conference venue. Gaye comes across as a man of extraordinary intelligence. Eloquent, modest, endowed with great powers of reflection. Ostend, Gaye declares, is ‘a beat back in tempo from London or Paris – or perhaps two beats back’, but he adds, ‘It’s where I need to be right now.’ Two years later he headed back to the US to face his demons, one of whom, his father, would fatally shoot him.

  In early spring Ostend plays up its Gaye connections. Tribute bands appear at the Kursaal, and the Marvin Gaye walking tour sells out each time, in contrast to the derisory sales for Ensor’s. I like Gaye, but it struck me that Ostend has over-associated itself with him, given the accidental, cursory nature of their coincidence.

  In the last days of my final visit I felt tender towards Ostend, strolling through the enormous market, where the city, sometimes so stifled and grey, now came to life in an ebullience of pâtés, sausages, cold meats, fruit, flowers, cheeses and scratchy-looking brassieres. The gruff market vendors’ shouts and haggling made good earlier city silences, and the water, studded with stars of light, belied the North Sea’s animus. Ostend isn’t beautiful, but on that long esplanade I realised the pleasures of a place where appearances, both the keeping up of them and the letting them slip, are everything.

  Just off the esplanade on Vlaanderenstraat I discovered the Galerie du Rat Mort – named after an annual dance started by Ensor and some friends and inspired by a debauched trip to the cabarets of Paris. Ensor conceived it as a kind of off-beam bal for the city’s radicals, eccentrics, poets and artists – a counterweight to its starchy bourgeois façade.

  At first sight, the proprietor of the gallery was a large sheepdog with a wary glance and a well-chewed novelty chicken. But fervent doorbell-pushing drew out Madame Devolder, elegantly coiffed and excellently dressed. For the greater part the works on show were sculptures and paintings dominated by a singular theme: men and fish, sometimes men-fish, sometimes fish-men. Men carried large fish, not as fishermen do, but with paternal tendresse, as one might a sleeping child. Or men ran races with fish. I found they touched an instant chord, as if in painting and sculpting these images their creator had delved deep into my own unconscious.

  ‘These are the works of Roland, my husband,’ said Madame. And soon he appeared beside her. Hair, beard and gypsum-white smile, short and spry, Roland was immediately likeable.

  ‘What is it with fish?’ I asked.

  He shrugged as if to indicate that surely that was obvious. ‘I am a fish. My spirit is a fish. When I was a child I would go to the fishermen’s quay and see that the fish were so big –’ he stretched out his arms ‘– and now they are so big.’ He shrank the space between them. ‘Maybe I’m trying to compensate!’

  The three of us talked about Ensor and the bal. Ostend had lost its magic, said Roland. Now the tourist board was trying to sell it as a kind of quirky kitsch city-break destination ‘for Philistines’. It was bringing in artists, but it was all so crass, brightly coloured and sensationalist. The current favourite, a landmark on the esplanade, an installation of four fluorescent red objects in the shape of crushed cans, each six metres tall, was a case in point. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .’ said Roland.

  Madame interjected to point out that even when one of her husband’s own paintings had been offered to the MuZee gratis, by a philanthropist, it had refused it on the grounds that it was ‘too classical’.

  ‘And this claims to be the city of Ensor!’ said Roland.

  I saw his point, though I’d entertained a fondness, as meaningless as its object, for the crushed cans.

  I had my train to catch and wanted to visit the aquarium, with which, it being open all year ro
und, I was acquainted from the very first of my Ostend sorties, and where, behind a turnstile in a dozen or so tanks with their grey and blue painted backdrops and patina of algae swam the inmates – a lobster, half a dozen brill, an elderly haddock, a turbot resigned to never gracing a dinner table and an assortment of blennies, weaver fish and bass. It sits a glance away from the small fish market, a squat oblong of concrete in which half a dozen stalls sell lobster, brill, haddock and turbot.

  Dirk, manning the booth, took my two euros. I asked him where the fish came from. ‘From the sea of course, eh!’ he said. ‘De fishermen brings ’em.’

  ‘So these are the lucky fish? The unlucky ones end up over there?’ I said, nodding towards the market.

  ‘No! The lucky ones are still in de sea, eh?’

  Dirk, a shortish man with a mild squint behind his steel-framed glasses, had that thick Ostend accent that sounds brusque and rough (but pleasantly so) and rounds off each sentence with a semi-affirmative and rhetorical ‘eh?’ It is the cherry on the icing of a dialect so its own that other Flemish speakers find it almost incomprehensible.

  Dirk said he didn’t work at the aquarium by choice but that the council had made him take the job. If he didn’t, he would no longer be eligible for his pension. He liked the fish all right – in fact, he loved nature – but he didn’t like to see them in a tank, and he didn’t like the lack of respect his colleagues, in particular his boss, showed the animals.

  Up until a few months ago, they’d had ‘an octopussy – the fishermen bring it. Ja! And you know, de octopussy, it become really friendly wid me. I tell it, like, “Come here!” or, “Go like making a circle,” eh? And the octopussy, he do it.’

  ‘You spoke to the . . . the . . . octopussy?’

  ‘No, but like, wid my hand, eh? But then something happened.’

  Dirk came out from behind the booth and took me to a tank in which a bloated lumpfish blinked and pouted.

  ‘Diss is where de octopussy lived. You see dese stones, eh? First, my boss, my boss who didn’t know anything about de octopussy, what he like and everything, he moved the stones. You see dese stones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I knew de octopussy had everything just right before, you know, comfortable. Dis arm here, and dat arm dere and hiding like dis, eh?’ Dirk demonstrated to the extent that was possible.

  ‘So de octopussy, you know, he wasn’t happy about dis, and he couldn’t get right. You know, he try to sit, here, and dere, but it wasn’t de same and den . . .’

  Assuming the denouement could only end in the cephalopod’s death I wasn’t sure I could bear to hear more.

  ‘And den my colleagues – fuckin’ stoopid! – my colleagues dey started to, you know, poke de octopussy – see if dey can make it do tricks like me – but it gets angry. And squirts its ink. And you know what happens if it squirts its ink tree times, eh?’

  ‘Did it . . .?’

  ‘Died. De octopussy died.’

  Dirk had, it seemed, a personal relationship with almost all of the fish, at least those that had been there for a while. In one tank a dozen flatfish lay heaped on top of each other, a little too hugger-mugger, I thought, but he said that if he got rid of any, ‘De fishermen, they come and check to see if we’re looking after the fish dey bring, and if dey don’t see them, dey don’t bring no more, eh?’

  That the trawler men of Ostend, to whom fish represent an economic resource, might actually feel sentimental about the individual specimens they deposited with Dirk was a revelation to me. But it seemed to be the case.

  Dirk showed me his favourite since the death of the octopus – a butterfish. ‘You see it eh? Just little. Behind de rock. Dese days dey never get so big any more. Not since the wind turbines . . .’ Almost as close to his heart was a little snub-nosed seahorse. He had, he said, tried to get it to grow, even sending off for a special kind of live food that could only be purchased from Salt Lake City, but, Dirk having successfully managed to hatch the eggs, his boss had thrown away the whole bucket.

  I didn’t like the sound of this guy who treated Ostend City Aquarium with such callous disregard. Clearly there was no love lost between him and Dirk. ‘I only stroke de little sharks when de boss is gone, eh? After what happened wid de octopus.’ Dirk lived by himself, though with some fish of his own. He was looking forward to giving up the job.

  I didn’t say that my Ostend days were over. ‘Maybe you’ll have a new octopus when I return.’

  ‘Maybe, eh?’

  Dirk and I shook hands. I liked him and his affinity with the fish, as I had liked Roland’s.

  Then I passed through the turnstile, and turned in the direction of Leopold’s station with a sea breeze and, I flattered myself, an approving Ensorial smile upon my back.

  5

  Shapes and Shingle on the Naked Shore

  . . . Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

  Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

  Luminously-peopled air ascends;

  And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

  Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

  Of shapes and shingle.

  Philip Larkin, ‘Here’

  Spurn Point is a just-so four-mile-long bony peninsula which dangles from the upper lip of the Humber into the river’s mouth. Mostly and loosely composed of dunes, it unfolds to a bunker-cankered bulbous expanse. On its beaches golden-horned poppies burst from the sands and yolk-berried sea-buckthorn flourishes in the thickets. It is a place where whales come to die and birds find succour from the North Sea. Poets, saints and hermits gravitate towards what Shakespeare called its ‘naked shore’.

  It feels like the end of England, but it has pedigree. Edward IV landed upon Spurn by ship, dishevelled and ‘sore weather beaten’ (Shakespeare again), and found lodgings at a ‘poor village’ two miles further up the coast. Five hundred years previously, the hermit Wilgils (sometimes Wilislig) made his soft sandal-prints in the sands and settled in for a long and lonely stay. Wilgils, out of the same mould as Cedd, was also in a state of recovery, seeking refuge from the Vikings’ sacking of Lindisfarne 200 miles north. And Philip Larkin no doubt was also fatigued when he arrived here on his bicycle ‘past the poppies blueish neutral distance’ to where ‘ends the land suddenly beyond a beach of shapes and shingle’.

  I arrived, with my teenage daughter in tow, having driven beyond Hull’s outer circle of retail parks and refineries to the flat levels of Holderness, curiously reminiscent of Friesland, some 200 miles across the North Sea.

  The geology of these fields is as fresh as rain, no older than the last ice age. And yet bones and boats are fetched up from the dark soil which dates from the time when men fought bears. Beneath the right sky – say at dusk in winter when amethyst, amber and violet shades cast the waves in tints of slippery bronze – the gaze of old gods can still be felt. So it was when my daughter and I arrived and stood full square to the affections of a puppyish half-gale on a low cliff abutting the threshold of the Sandy Beaches Caravan Park, the southernmost boundary of which marks the beginning of the peninsula, and whose inhabitants are no less appreciative of Spurn than the other pilgrims, aesthetes, ascetics and writers to have washed up here.

  We wandered among Sandy Beaches as if through a ghost town, and came upon a spectral figure, more mackintosh than man, emerging from his rickety caravan (a glimpse of a flickering screen and steam from a stovetop kettle before the vision snapped shut). The man in the mackintosh joined us. He had, he said, decided not to return yet to his winter roost far from the sea. This was the season for long walks and contemplation, just ‘thinking about things quietly’. He was forced to raise his voice above the wind, adding with no apparent regret that his wife had returned to Corby in September.

  A loner but not a misanthrope, he was happy to point out landmarks, decipher distant lights, excited by the transience of the fast-eroding coast. ‘One day soon . . .’ he said, his arm making a slow and grave sweep towards the caravans
and a scattering of abandoned white goods, ‘this will be gone.’ None of those things looked incapable of obsolescence. Just beyond the shoreline two great discs of concrete, each perhaps eighteen feet across, jutted from the oozing wet sand. They had been gun platforms, once standing guard against German bombers and now resembling the scattered pieces of an abandoned game.

  Eight years after the end of the First World War the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams subtitled one of his English Folk Songs ‘Spurn Point’. He had the melody from a former sailor called Leatherday whom he’d met at a Norfolk workhouse, but the piece was also inspired by the wreck of a ship called the Industry, stranded off Spurn in the winter of 1868, its captain refusing out of pride the assistance of a lifeboat, thus consigning himself and his crew to a cold and miserable death on the shoals.

  The music is as svelte as the source of its inspiration – and politely melancholic. But it fails to capture Spurn’s quirkiness, the shingle-scouring easterlies, opaline sunsets or its proclivity for oddity, indeed any of the qualities I like to imagine appealed to Wilgils, who found his sanctuary here and about whom little is known other than that, despite his hermitic condition, he fathered St Wilibrod, converter of the Dutch pagans.

  I would have known little about Wilibrod – a footnote in the hagiography of the North Sea – were it not for the small library of books and pamphlets pertaining to Spurn’s lifeboat service, gravel dredging and cobble gathering, lighthouses, butterflies, birds and moths that lined the shelves of a dresser in the breakfast room at West Farm B & B. The most compelling of these volumes was a log kept by the teachers who had taught between the late 1880s and the end of the First World War at a one-room school for the children of pilots, lighthouse keepers and lifeboat men, and of which stood in what is now the car park by the quayside. In terse prose this diary – its authors neutered by namelessness – etched the harshness of life on a wind-beholden near-island: a litany of measles, louse infections and vain attempts to inculcate the twelve-times table alongside the values of a waning empire.