It would be easy to imagine Dover was the most depressed and depressing town in the kingdom, were it not so close to Folkestone. And Margate. And, across the Sussex border, Hastings. In the midst of this lot, there is a far more fascinating place. And that, truly, is the end of the line.
The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway runs thirteen and a half miles from Hythe to Dungeness, the southernmost point of Kent. It is a fifteen-inch-gauge railway, opened in 1927, when improbable lines elsewhere in the country were just starting to close, and the tiny carriages were somewhat more accessible for the average holidaymaker than they are in the supersize era.
It was the fantasy of a pair of racing drivers from the whizz-bangprang era, Captain J. E. P. Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, who was killed before the line could open when he wrapped himself round a tree at Monza, as one did. Howey was rich enough and determined enough to carry his dream through to fruition.
And what a wonder it is. It does not connect with any mainline railway; it hardly seems to connect with the real world at all. It takes sixty-eight minutes to do the length of the line, at an average speed of just under 12 mph. Yet it survives and thrives, and even has a life beyond the tourist industry, running a daily school train. Clearly, some of Kent’s more ample visitors get a certain pleasure by corseting themselves into the seats.
The fog that had enveloped St Margaret’s had not lifted. But the destination would be a weird one whatever the weather. As you approach the sea at Dungeness, two lighthouses appear, along with two nuclear power stations. Close to the headland, the railway takes a sweeping loop across the wide expanse of shingle and deposits you just outside the perimeter wall of Dungeness A. The following sign greets the innocent holidaymaker:
EXPOSURE TO RADIATION BY
• INHALATION
• INGESTION
• ABSORPTION THROUGH OPEN WOUNDS
COULD CAUSE HARMFUL HEALTH EFFECTS.
Well, welcome to Dungeness. Have a nice day.
As I arrived, two well-protected figures wearing dark glasses pulled mysterious pieces of luggage along the perimeter wall. Perhaps they were armed with Geiger counters to deal with a nuclear crisis that might endanger the planet. Perhaps they were just fishermen. There were a lot at the water’s edge, having spent a day of their lives peering at the grey Channel in return for a few undersized whiting. Even so, it felt as though the apocalypse had already happened and that we were among the handful of survivors eking out a fragile existence in a perpetual nuclear winter.
There is no defined boundary between beach and anything else at Dungeness. It is all just one vast expanse of shingle, decorated with the great blue spikes of viper’s bugloss and dotted with, well, what exactly? Buildings of a kind, for sure, but what kind? Some of them looked like outcrops of the power station. But many of them seemed to be loved and lived in.
Most were just huts or shacks or converted railway carriages. It was a sort of village, of a peculiarly higgledy-piggledly kind. It had none of the indicators of an English village: no fences, most notably; hardly any sign at all of where the public ended and the private began. It might have been some marginal community in Arizona: what they call hardscrabble. Difficult to imagine that any member of the council planning department had ever set foot here.
Dungeness became known as a place to live because of the late filmmaker Derek Jarman, who in this bleak setting endured his long, bleak final illness and reached the culmination of his bleak – indeed apocalyptic – artistic vision. But he also cultivated the garden of Prospect Cottage. The lighthouse being closed until July, and the power station permanently closed to visitors since the post 9/11 panic, the garden was the obvious place to visit, though it was a long, slow trudge across the yielding stones.
It was still maintained, nearly twenty years after Jarman’s early death, by his partner, Keith Collins. It is not exactly Sissinghurst: the range of plants that will grow on this terrain are limited. But it constituted a defiant affirmation of life. Especially with the wisps of mist passing by, the sound of the foghorns to seaward and, most numinous of all, the shrill whistle of the second-last train of the day heading into the station.
As I waited to become the only passenger on the last train, I got talking to Peter, the station master, indeed sole employee. I remarked that some people might find this a strange place to be deposited. ‘Hmmm, yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Not everyone’s cup of tea.’
It hadn’t been his cuppa either, originally. But his wife had desperately wanted to get out of London and he had come to love Dungeness, especially after this improbably handy and agreeable job came up. It was a real community, he said, where everyone looked out for each other. Even the nuclear people were good neighbours; they had a lot of resources in case of emergency. And, this being south-east England, property was much in demand.
He pointed out a white-painted bungalow, the nearest house to the outer wall of the power station, and reminded me of a story that was in all the papers in 2009: it had been advertised for sale at £247,000 accompanied by a skilfully taken photo showing it alone in the open landscape against a bright blue sky. Following complaints from a flabbergasted potential buyer, the press showed the view from the other direction, complete with rather domineering neighbour.
‘Remember that?’ asked Peter.
I did, vaguely.
‘Put the price up, all that publicity. Sold for £270,000 in the end.’
It might be a good long-term investment. Very long term. Dungeness A, unlike its neighbour Dungeness B, has already been decommissioned and, following the complex processes that attend the closure of a nuclear power station, will be demolished … in 2097. I repeat, 2097. By which time the Queen’s great-great grandchild may be on the throne of England, if the throne still exists, if England still exists. All rather Derek Jarman.
There was one last thing I wanted to do in Kent. On my very first day, I had driven past an old isolated, cottagey pub outside Plaxtol, between Sevenoaks and Maidstone: the Golding Hop, a name suffused with Kentish heritage. ‘Beers from the wood,’ said a peeling sign outside. It was early morning and there was no chance of a drink. But it had looked wonderful, a thought supported by an internet search: ‘I’ve been visiting this pub for more than 30 years, and the place hasn’t really changed at all, apart from the fact that the door now opens outwards,’ reported one drinker.
And indeed it was as expected. The landlord was suitably indifferent to a stranger but not to his beer: a pint of Adnams, which was drawn, though not quite from the wood, from a barrel out the back. It was splendid. Except that, between the counter and the bar billiards table, was a television, blaring out an ITV soap opera. Not even one I had heard of.
The fog in the Channel; the diesel fumes that mingled with the perfume of roses; the beguilingly isolated bungalow right next to a nuclear power station; the near-perfect pub dominated by a fucking television set. Kent is a pearl of a county but there’s a heck of a lot of grit in those Whitstable oysters.
June 2012
17. Good morning, Your Grace
DERBYSHIRE
In mid-August, four days before the big day, I rang Janet Quier just to double-check the schedule. Her husband answered, I got a one-word reply and then the line went dead. As one-word replies go, it was extremely helpful. The word was ‘petalling’.
What it conveyed was that the Taddington Well Dressing and Flower Festival was going ahead as planned on the Saturday; that she was engaged in the most intricate and important part of the operation and was far too busy to talk to the likes of me; and perhaps (I never did discover whether this was true) that I had offended him by asking for Mrs Queer rather than Mrs Quire.
Taddington is a small, high, usually nippy village 1,000 feet above sea level in the Peak District, bypassed by the A6. Well-dressing is Derbyshire’s defining tradition. From Chester Green in early May to Hartington in September, you could tick off several festivals every weekend and visit just about every parish in
the county, marvelling at the inventiveness and skill of the inhabitants.
Each village decorates its well with a large work of art, usually with a religious or topical theme, made primarily from flowers. It is an odd custom, substantially confined to Derbyshire, perhaps because much of the county is on limestone, through which rainfall is inclined to slither away. This makes water particularly precious: something to be honoured, thanked and appeased and maybe indeed worshipped, even in a place as habitually wet as the Peak District. The notion is almost certainly pagan in origin, though the Church of England, in its adaptive way, eventually put itself centre stage. The current vigour of the tradition, however, is thoroughly post-religious. When I turned up at Taddington church, well before the 2.30 start, the attendant fete was already in full cry, complete with bouncy slide and pillow fights, and the centrepiece was getting comparatively little attention.
This village is not considered to be in the well-dressing premier league, which is headed by Tissington, north of Ashbourne, where the custom was first noted in the fourteenth century. But in Taddington it was still an awesome operation: months of preparation – soaking the wooden frame to make it thoroughly moist and holding; ‘puddling’ the clay base to create the surface; choosing a subject; creating a design; pricking out the template; finding the raw materials, especially begging or, in extremis, buying the flowers; and, then, in a final week of frantic activity by the ladies of the parish (these days – it used to be man’s work), making it all happen. That’s the petalling. Thousands of petals, plus bracken and bark and cones and moss and eggshells and, in the case of Taddington, hundreds of mussel shells, scrounged from a fish restaurant in Southend by a villager on holiday. Seventy-six different materials, the designer Diana Syder told me later, for a life-size but very temporary artwork. No wonder Janet Quier was unavailable.
In 2012 almost every village wanted a design incorporating the Diamond Jubilee and/or the Olympics. However, Diana, who is a poet and painter in real life as well as doing the well design pro bono, was rather keen on getting some creative satisfaction and was very anti the idea of doing the season’s clichés. She opted for the moon landing, which did after all occur in the Queen’s reign. ‘The decision was democratic,’ she said. ‘We invite suggestions and then go away and make a decision. So not democratic.’
A respectable number of villagers and a few visitors dragged themselves away from the white elephant stall and the tea tent for a brief service. Then some of us processed up the hillside towards the High Well, where the children choose the design (they went for Union Jack and Olympic rings). There I met Janet Quier who – free of petalling for another year – was very friendly. Normally, the hill is alive with meadow cranesbill. It was now denuded. ‘I think we’ve raided them all,’ she said. On the way back down, we passed a garden still in full bloom. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘those hydrangeas got away.’
This is a riveting little subculture, dependent on the flowers in bloom at the time and so completely different in Taddington, with its late summer slot in the well dressing calendar, to, say, Tissington at Whitsuntide. ‘The flowers you’d think would work, like roses and geraniums, don’t last,’ Diana explained. ‘So we do have to buy in some stuff like chrysanths. It’s brinksmanship, whether you’ve got enough.’
The mussel shells were mainly for Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit, along with (inter alia) cabbage, yarrow and sheep’s fleece. His helmet was made from the cut-off bottoms of Camembert boxes. The moon’s surface included grey gravel (squirrelled away when they resurfaced the road), dead lavender flowers, black banana skins, a whole variety of tiny shells and everything except green cheese. The petals go on last, because otherwise they might not survive the week. Diana’s particular forte is the use of dead rhubarb leaves: her own discovery, she likes to think.
Much of this she told me later in an email. At the time she was just anxious to sit down: ‘I’m tired beyond exhaustion,’ she sighed, though there was another exhausting week ahead with a steam engine rally on the Sunday, quiz night on Monday, lanes race and barbecue Tuesday, variety night on Thursday (dress code: red, white and blue) and a summer serenade on Saturday, when the dressings come down, with luck, before they wither. That turned out to be the day Neil Armstrong died, making the design seem eerily perceptive rather than idiosyncratic.
‘The lengths to which we go are not unique to this village,’ Diana said. ‘I’m interested to know why people well-dress, why people push themselves to do this. For me, it’s an offering. I’m not Christian, but it’s an offering.’ I could suggest two other possible explanations. One is that winters are long, dank and dark up here, full of wind and wuthering: there is plenty of time to slump and watch television. The other is that well-dressing constitutes community art, which in most places in Britain involves council grants and paid team leaders and the whiff of organised worthiness. The whole process of well-dressing is based on oral tradition: there is no book to explain which petals work well and which don’t. The knowledge is handed down, and everything happens from the bottom up, naturally, like water springing out of the ground. And that seems to me very Derbyshire.
It was the columnist Matthew Parris, once a Derbyshire MP, who put the thought into my head when he was commending the little market town of Wirksworth: ‘It’s one of those places that creates its own world.’ Wirksworth is indeed unusually interesting. There are a fair number of what one resident calls ‘lesbian potters and picture framers’. But here the relationship between different sections of the community is more balanced than in, say, Hebden Bridge: Top Ken’s Discount Store stares at Traid Links and Le Mistral café du vin without looking threatened. And this mix of old and new gives the town an inner strength that would enable it to get along nicely if ever Brussels, Strasbourg, Westminster, Derbyshire County Council and Derbyshire Dales District all chose to mind their own business. Wirksworth might have been entirely taken over by camomile-tea drinkers but for its ugly name. Were it called Snowfield (as George Eliot rechristened it in Adam Bede), the whole place would be decamping to the new-agey Star Disc in Stoney Wood for Mind, Body, Spirit Events (as some do anyway), and I would fear for Top Ken and the chippy. But it isn’t; it’s called dreary old Wirksworth. And it wirks.
A lot of other places in the county have a similar air of self-sufficiency. Derbyshire is long and thin, and its only substantial place, Derby, is right down the bottom. Derby is a working-class city (Rolls-Royce, Toyota, Bombardier Trains). It does not have a university with a status to match Nottingham, Leicester or Sheffield. It does not have regional head offices or civil servants or even the county council (which is based in Matlock). So the middle class do not commute en masse into Derby.
The M1, the A61 and the Midland main-line railway serve the eastern edge of the county, between Derby and Chesterfield, which is the ugly bit. The only other route north is the A6, which, its low number notwithstanding, hardly has any dual carriageway (except, oddly, the Taddington bypass) and is not a fast route for commuting.
The railway across Monsal Dale once reduced Ruskin to lyrical fury (‘The valley is gone and the Gods with it, and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’). It closed in 1967, mourned ever since by the sentimentalists who are Ruskin’s heirs. But reopening it would be a disaster for Derbyshire. True, on summer weekends, the Peak is overrun by motorised trippers from Sheffield, who regard the area as an extension of their back gardens. But the absence of commuters and second-home owners (in any case a much weaker phenomenon in the North than the South) is the making of communities strong enough to dress wells.
A friend of a friend moved from the city into a big Derbyshire country house. Very quickly, he received a visit from one of the locals, who informed him that their garage was the petalling shed. The newcomer began to stutter and say that the garage was full of boxes and perhaps next year it might be a bit easier –
‘So you’ll be moving the boxes.’
; He was further informed that it was customary for the ladies to be given tea and the gentleman helpers whisky. Wisely, he complied, and has been very happy in the village. You move to Derbyshire on Derbyshire’s terms. I like that.
So where are we? Is this the North or what? Certainly, somewhere in Derbyshire, the North begins. Julian Glover, writer and historian, thinks there is a border just south of Brassington where the hedgerows give out and the drystone walls take over. Neil Hallam, journalist and naturalist, thinks it may come on the Via Gellia near Matlock, the most northerly redoubt of the clustered bellflower. John Beatty, photographer and geologist, says the North starts where the limestone of the low hills – what locals call the White Peak – gives way to the millstone grit of the real uplands, the Dark Peak. Indeed, as I drove around with John, we may have identified the very spot: Newhaven Cottage, in the village of Sparrowpit – its southern half built of limestone, its northern half of gritstone.
All these erudite friends agreed on one thing about Derbyshire: I had to visit Chatsworth, gracious home since 1549 of the Cavendish family, latterly Dukes of Devonshire. I kept trying to tell them, pompously but gently: this isn’t a guidebook; I’m not interested in stately homes; I couldn’t give a stuff about sodding dukes; I’m trying to grasp the essence of each county. Sometimes, as with the bloke who had bought the petalling shed, it takes a while to grasp what is going on. No one can understand a thing about Derbyshire without understanding Chatsworth.
Most stately homes sit behind high walls and iron fences past which the public may or may not be admitted at set times, to be ushered out with a sigh of relief. Here, the main road actually runs through the park. The house stands out against the ridge, beckoningly. There are no fences to speak of and no one demands any money until you approach the very door. Part of a Derbyshire childhood is turning up and swimming in the river on a hot afternoon, without handing the Devonshires a farthing.
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