For some time, Hastings has had little else to attract visitors, and its boarding houses ended up being filled by social security claimants. It is a handsomely built town, though the Priory Meadow shopping centre, which replaced the grand old cricket ground, is very ugly and the seafront is a disaster. Part of the problem is that the main coast road runs next to the beach, and much of the promenade has been turned into a cycle raceway, leaving no safe haven for pedestrians.
The pier was closed long before most of it burned down in 2010. It was standing completely forlorn, with a sign announcing ‘HASTINGS PIER IS STILL NOT BEING DEMOLISHED’, which did not sound like sure and certain hope of resurrection. The town has been pinning its hope on the Jerwood Art Gallery, but my hunch is that the Louvre would struggle to find an audience in this town. If Hastings has a future, then surely it must be as a cheap and cheerful kind of resort. The crazy golf looked quite good, I thought.
Neighbouring Bexhill is very different. Its centrepiece, the modernist De La Warr Pavilion, has been refurbished and turned into a very funky arts centre. It was showing an Andy Warhol exhibition. People stood around looking at the six skulls, fifty Marilyns, ten Maos, the boxes of Brillo Pads and the nudes, one of them male and contemplating masturbation. I stared at the green pea and tomato soups, wondering if Bexhill’s tastes might be better served by Brown Windsor or mock turtle.
Architecturally, the pavilion has been much praised over the years. Personally, I was more taken with the neighbouring homes in Marina Court Avenue, an Edwardian terrace built in Moghul style and rumoured to have been created for a maharaja and his entourage. They would be pretty even if they did not have long gardens leading directly down to the prom and the beach. It was dark, the moon was above the sea and everything was bathed in its light. There was no sound but the waves. One of the houses had an agent’s board outside and I started fantasising about the possibility of life in Bexhill. It occurred to me that gardening might be tricky here given the need for salt-resistant plants. Also, there might be a problem with privacy so close to the beach. Nude sunbathing on the balcony would be especially problematic, though I don’t suppose that would bother anyone who had been to the Warhol.
I confined my impulsiveness to booking into the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, ‘the only five-star hotel on the British coastline’, which came slightly cheaper – if not that much cheaper – than the £695,000 requested by the vendors of Marina Court Avenue. Before dinner, I slumped into an armchair by the fire in the Great Hall, whence the BBC Light Programme used to broadcast concerts by the Palm Court orchestra. It was a very comfy armchair and a very beautiful room.
Although never, even in the darkest moments, tempted by Beachy Head, I have sometimes wondered about the perfect way to go. I think it was P. D. James who suggested ‘in a hammock, on a summer’s afternoon, with a distant hubbub of great-grandchildren’. That would do. But one could also settle for an armchair by the fire in the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, having just finished a large gin and tonic, but not paid for it.
I skipped Worthing, having known it all too well. Eastbourne is sometimes called ‘life’s departure lounge’ – a reference to the aged population, not to Beachy Head. But Worthing is the holding area at the gate. In later years, my parents had a holiday flat there. I would sometimes visit them and find they had aged twenty years since they left home the previous week. Then they would go back and return to normal. Senescence obviously being infectious, it seemed safest to steer clear. I did want to see the beach at Littlehampton, a town unsuited to any of Warhol’s male nudes. (A basic knowledge of rhyming slang may be essential to comprehension of the preceding sentence.) But having driven round the one-way system three times, I gave up and stormed off to Bognor.
On the edge of Eastbourne, there are brick-built beach huts that look like houses. Bognor has a shantytown with houses that look like beach huts, which is taking eccentricity a bit far. Prime position on the seafront was commandeered by Butlins more than half a century ago. The holiday camp is surrounded by a high-security fence, cutting its territory off from the beach and lending the entire seafront the air of a prison. There is some argument about when, why or whether George V said: ‘Bugger Bognor.’ But Bognor has been duly buggered.
Which leaves Brighton. The much-missed columnist Keith Waterhouse is supposed to have described it as a town ‘constantly helping police with their enquiries’. He also said it was possible to buy one’s love a new pair of knickers at Victoria Station and have them off (and, indeed, it off) in the Grand Hotel inside two hours.
On one level, this seems unduly pessimistic. A fast train, not stopping after East Croydon … a bit of luck with the taxi queue at the other end … an hour and a half would seem perfectly possible. On the other hand, by 2011 it was no longer possible to buy knickers at Victoria Station. You could place a bet, in two separate venues; have a haircut or a vaccination; buy ‘handmade sexy peel-rich citrus marmalade soap’, and even a sandwich or a newspaper. But knickers, no. Perhaps regular users of the Brighton line have stopped wearing them.
Three months passed after saying an unfond farewell to Bognor before I could make this trip. I knew the place well enough to write about it from memory. But, hell, having gone to Dewsbury, there was no way I would miss out on Brighton. Even London that day was bitterly cold; snow was piled up throughout the Sussex countryside; the railway, which in 1970 gave way to Laurence Olivier and briefly restored kippers to the breakfast menu on the Brighton Belle, now treats passengers like kippers instead of serving them. But simply arriving there restores the spirits. The sun was out, looking a little wan but beckoning invitingly towards the seafront. And there, barrelling up West Street to greet me, was the Prince Regent.
This was not the original, you understand, but a bus, one of a couple of hundred Brighton & Hove buses named after local personalities. This is a delicious tradition. It was not invented in Brighton: it was done much earlier in, doubtless among other places, both Hereford and Northampton, where I remember nearly being run over by Alan Parkhouse, a nice man who had once been town clerk. Short of a more glittering cast list, both places gave up. In Brighton, however, the stars (prime qualification: being dead) queue up for inclusion. The oldest name on the list, and the most tangential, is Charles II, who spent just one night in town – fleeing the victorious Roundheads after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. He found a man, Nicholas Tettersell, captain of the coal brig Surprise, willing to transport him and his party to France, though Tettersell more than trebled the price after finding out who his chief passenger was. This strikes me as very Brighton indeed, mixing disdain for the ruling authorities with an eye to the main chance.
Before the day was out, I had also spotted Phyllis Pearsall (inventor of the A to Z street map), the 1950s crooner Donald Peers, Sir Terence Rattigan and Douglas Byng, the last two both leading members of Brighton’s gay community in the old days when, to the uninitiated, the town was more associated with Graham Greene’s Pinky than pink. The artist Eric Gill also has a bus named after him despite complaints that he should be banished because of his unconventional sex life. Adam Trimingham, the Brighton Argus columnist who advises the bus company on possible candidates, said that if that was to be a criterion, almost the entire fleet would have to be scrapped.
Outré sexuality has been part of the Brighton mix since at least the Prince Regent’s time; it has a terrible drug problem, though it also has a great many drug users who don’t perceive that as a problem; and the undertow of violence, captured by Greene, has not gone away, especially round the West Street clubs on a Friday and Saturday night. Brighton was and is poorer and rougher than its image suggests. Yet while so much of England has been squashed by conformity, Brighton’s spirit remains unbroken. I saw a young lad dribbling a football amid the traffic on Queen’s Drive, which was a pretty daft thing to do, and fairly unimaginable anywhere else.
How did Brighton retain its vibrancy? The turning point may well have been the defeat, in the early 1970s
, of a plan for a motorway that would have destroyed the North Laine area. Some credit is given to the reforming Labour council that came to power in 1986, which pushed forward the marina and, among other things, made the North Laine a conservation area, which was a bold thing to do at that time for a district that had down-at-heel charm rather than grandeur. The decision was also taken to put the chain stores in Churchill Square, which is central but invisible.
The journalist Peter Nichols pinpoints the importance of the Tour de France, which hosted a stage of the race on a perfect day in 1994, with the TV pictures showing Brighton at its most seductive. Simon Fanshawe, the comedian and local activist, cites the significance of the Stomp dance troupe and Body Shop, started by the late Anita Roddick (now bus no. 912) in the North Laine in 1976. ‘If you had come out with the idea for that in Hull, you would have got laughed out of court,’ says Fanshawe. ‘When Anita started here and said: “I’m going to do foot lotion made out of peppermints,” they said: “Where’s the shop?”’
Now Brighton has elected Britain’s first Green MP and the Greens have taken over the council, which is more a fashion statement than a political one. But the nature of a place like Brighton is not determined by politics. I think the most significant thing is the shingle. If Brighton’s beach were more child-friendly, it would have developed differently. But instead of being the place to take the family, it became the place to do the thing that starts a family, or to get away from the family, or break up a family, or not have a family. It turned into Britain’s San Francisco.
And even on this bleak February morning, the sun was on the waters, and the beach – stony and scrunchy though it is – was still the place to go. And, at what seemed to be regular intervals, there were people at the water’s edge. At first I thought they were fishermen. Then I wondered if this was some new Antony Gormley installation. Then I realised they were all just sitting there, contemplating infinity. If you believe that giving us the capability of joie de vivre is whatever passes for a divine plan – a route to not ending up at Beachy Head – then Brighton is a great place to contemplate infinity. There is a very Sussex sense of enjoyment that links a walk up Chanctonbury Ring, a game of Poohsticks, Bonfire in Lewes and all the delights of Brighton.
An old verse about San Francisco sprang to mind. It was written after the 1906 earthquake when the churches were destroyed but not the huge Hotaling liquor repository.
If, as they say, God spanked this town
For being over-frisky,
Why did he burn His churches down
And save Hotaling’s whiskey?
I like to think God looks down on Brighton, shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘Whatever.’
November 2011/February 2012
There were no reports of any deaths on Beachy Head in January 2012 (a comparatively mild month), but this record was sadly not maintained: 2012 turned into the chaplaincy’s busiest year ever.
In July 2014 Eastbourne Pier followed the sad fashion set by Brighton West Pier and Hastings, and partially burned down. Eastbourne being a marginal constituency, the prime minister immediately promised funds for restoration.
9. Ignorant Hobbledehoyshire (not)
RUTLAND
On a mild February evening, with the snow still just about lying, members were summoned to the council chamber for the 201st meeting of the restored Rutland County Council. Also present were one representative of the local press, one member of the public and someone writing a book.
There were nineteen items on the agenda and all except one were rattled through in no time. The general tone was cordial, consensual and seemingly apolitical. One councillor arrived late. She happened to be Mrs Lucy Stephenson, daughter of the chairman, Edward Baines. Her apology was greeted with some mirth by her colleagues. ‘Lack of parental control, there, chairman,’ said one. ‘Good thrashing,’ muttered another. He was about three-quarters joking.
The council accepted without demur such matters as item 2.2: the Conservative-controlled Rutland Cabinet’s recommendation to approve ‘the Prudential Indicators and limits for 2012–13 to 2014–15 contained within Appendix A of Report no. 24/2012 including the Authorised Limit Prudential Indicator’.
It did, however, spend three-quarters of an hour discussing a report from the chief executive on ‘members’ support’. This, on the face of it, was merely a Rutlandish manifestation of the most boring conversation in the world: The Problems I’m Having With My Laptop (Nightmare!). There was a lot of talk about connectivity and the state of the local broadband alongside the question of whether members should conduct council business on their own laptops. It almost grew animated at one stage – ‘Mr Roper, we are coming into the realms of debate,’ warned the chairman – but not quite. Here we were in England’s tiniest county: a place that is a byword for parochialism. There would be something wrong if the council meetings were not boring.
Then the one member of the public, a blogger called Martin, leaned across to me. ‘They think the council’s hacking their emails,’ he hissed.
They, in this case, were the county’s newest political party, holding four of the twenty-six seats: the Rutland Anti-Corruption Group, which is a big name for a political party in a very small county. Martin also whispered something to me about ‘The Mystery’ of Barleythorpe Hall.
But three of the four anti-corruption members had failed to turn up and the fourth, Brian Montgomery, said nothing. I rang him two days later, by which time I had already discovered that Barleythorpe Hall, a former old people’s home, was long-derelict and there was a question about what had happened to some of the stainless-steel kitchen equipment.
‘Are you saying the council is corrupt?’ I asked Councillor Montgomery.
‘It depends on how you define the word.’
‘Are you saying the council is financially corrupt?’
‘I don’t think anyone is saying that anyone is financially corrupt.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘We’re saying the system is corrupt.’
But he could not explain how or why it was corrupt. It is a reasonable assumption that financial corruption exists in different forms in every council in England. But there are three reasons why it seems less plausible in Rutland than anywhere else. One look at the cabinet provided the first reason: they were better-heeled than any council cabinet I’ve ever seen, including several dressed in the clashing tweed checks worn only by the wealthiest country gentlemen. Which led on to reason two: they could probably fund Rutland Council, with its minuscule budget, out of their Coutts’ current accounts. The leader, Roger Begy, gave me reason three in the pub afterwards: ‘You’d never get away with it,’ he said. ‘Everybody here knows everybody else’s business.’
None of this means Rutland is innocent. I was baffled by the way the council press officer veered – after my visit – from extreme helpfulness to a blanket failure to reply to messages. One could only conclude he was acting under orders. This council is not used to any meaningful scrutiny. Maybe it is Chicago and not Camberwick Green. But the most reliable-seeming informant I could find offered no evidence. And if it were true, it would be heart-breaking because …
… Rutland! The very name is the embodiment of the romance that lies behind this book. Whenever I mentioned that I was writing about England’s historic counties, people would reply: ‘Oh, you mean Rutland?’
I used to read the Fern Hollow books to my son, full of animal characters – Lord Trundle of Trundleberry Manor, PC Hoppit, Parson Dimly, Farmer Bramble and Boris Blinks of the bookshop – all living in idyllic English countryside by a railway line, probably offering a service like Oakham’s two direct trains to London a day: ‘The animals of Fern Hollow are all good friends and neighbours and, if you are a stranger, they will make you feel at home in next to no time.’ It had to be Rutland.
It was always the tiniest of English counties: in terms of acreage, from the moment it emerged in the twelfth century; in terms of population, certainly
by the mid-eighteenth century. If you count the Isle of Wight as a county, which I don’t, Rutland would have a rival. The island is said to be smaller than Rutland when the tide is in, but bigger when it’s out. But it has nearly four times Rutland’s population. There are only two towns, both attractive: Oakham and Uppingham. In the Domesday Book Rutland was considered part of Nottinghamshire, which it doesn’t even border, a fact that offers an explanation for it splitting off in the first place, though not how Rutland survived untouched for 800 years.
Then came the mid-twentieth century and the growth of governmental tinkering. The county’s independence was threatened just after the war, but it successfully resisted everything except the forced merger of Rutland Constabulary (twenty-nine men, one woman, one police car). The police’s very success in crime prevention – there was barely any crime except speeding and poaching – made them expendable. In the early 1960s Whitehall called again: the county was recommended for merger with Leicestershire. More than 27,000 people signed a petition against the change, which was clever since there were only 13,000 on the electoral roll. A public inquiry was held in Oakham Castle (itself very small) and was graced by a forceful defence from the protesters’ QC, Geoffrey Lane, who held up the report from the Local Government Commission and declaimed: ‘The impression they obviously want to create is that you cross the frontier into Rutland, your car jolts into cart tracks, unshod illiterate children stand by the roadside brought into the world by their rude peasant mothers without the help of medical science.’
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