Meanwhile, it was by no means only in my own initial perceptions that the island has alternated between paradise and a slum. Some have indeed looked across the water and seen a sea-washed island utopia. That is how it appeared both to the Rev. Turmine, author of the early Victorian guidebook in which “Sheppy” is identified with the enchanted “Fary Land” of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queen,9 and to Sir Charles Igglesden, the “sauntering” editor and proprietor of the Kentish Express who, nearly a century later, in 1937, hailed the place as “The Island Jewel of Kent”.10 Sheppey was also touched with serendipity for Father Paul Hennessy who, in 1983, took up his ministry at the Roman Catholic church of St Henry & St Elizabeth on Broadway in Sheerness. Father Hennessy sensed the world-to-come in the realisation that, many years earlier, he had walked along the beach at Seasalter, just west of Whitstable, looking out at the “magnificent” view of Sheppey and thinking, “now there is a place I have never visited”.11 Eight years later, Iain Sinclair allowed a different redemptive possibility to glimmer through the closing chapter of his novel Downriver. At an unexpected moment of remission owed partly to the island vision of the expatriated Anglo-Scottish poet Douglas Oliver (“Redrawing the map, I take out harm, restart in the centre”12), Sinclair’s character Joblard, who has come here from Whitechapel to seek out traces of his unknown mother, suspends his jabbering chronicle of deformity and dereliction and allows Sheppey to emerge in a transfigured, almost prayerful light: “This is an island that is not the world. It is removed, discrete; one of those transitory border zones, caught in uncertain weather, nudged, dislocated by a lurch in the intensity of the light. A special place where, I’d like to believe, ‘good persists in time’.”3
The mainland knockers and snobs, meanwhile, are careful to see only the slum. Over the decades, the denigration of Sheppey as the “septic Isle”14 has been read all the way back into the island’s geology, which consists of slimy mud, gravel and clay rather than load-bearing, nationally prestigious, upper-class rocks such as limestone, granite and even chalk. The two world wars may have encouraged the view that Sheppey should be honoured as a beacon of British liberty, but it has by no means always been displayed as a trophy in the procession of national history. No British patriot has found a great deal to say about the island’s performance during the second Anglo-Dutch War of 1667, when Sheppey was conquered by Dutch invaders (assisted by English Republican deserters), who had the uncontested run of the island for a week or so before leaving in their own time having loaded up on the livestock. In 1815, and for a brief moment before the more genuinely remote island of St Helena was chosen, Sheppey was judged sufficiently miserable for the fort at Sheerness to be rumoured as the possible place of Napoleon’s confinement after his defeat at Waterloo.15 It was in a similar spirit of denigration that the island appeared in the Irish press when Hong Kong was ceded to the British Crown at the end of the First Opium War against China in 1841. The Sligo Journal, a paper that was fierce in its belief that the only “diplomacy” understood by the Celestial Empire and its Imperial Commissioner Qishan was the British bayonet, judged the settlement ludicrously inadequate. Hong Kong may have possessed a “very good harbour” but it was “nearly out in the ocean” and hardly represented an adequate concession for the victorious British Empire.16 It was, so this contemptuous scribe concluded, “scarcely so large as the Isle of Sheppy”.
This long history of slighting condescension, in which the sea becomes an isolating rampart rather than the “great common” Herman Melville had imagined it might one day become,17 continues to weigh on the island and its population. Sheppey is still the butt of stupid jokes in mainland pantomimes as well as at Remainer dinner parties. As Mayor of London, Boris Johnson saw only improvement in the thought of floating a new international airport just offshore. Mouthy celebrities find the island an easy target too. A few years ago Jeremy Clarkson used his column in Top Gear magazine to sneer that the Isle of Sheppey was “mostly… a caravan site” where there are “thousands and thousands of mobile homes, all of which I suspect belong to former London cabbies”.18 As for the inhabitants, they tend, so Clarkson went on, “to be the sort of people who arrived in England in the back of a refrigerated truck or clinging to the underside of a Eurostar train”.
Some of the nastiest mainland jokes dwell less on the chalets and caravans than on the reproductive choices of the island’s supposedly indigenous population, people whose alleged inbreeding is assumed to have thrown human evolution into reverse. Sociological surveys of mobility may suggest otherwise, but mainland prejudice against this island of working-class liberties is reluctant to surrender its view of Sheppey as the (un)natural home of a two-fingered English aborigine known as the “Swampy”: an inbred mutant who nowadays lurks in the metropolitan imagination as the Brexiteering native of a hostile estuarial country that European cartographers might, if they heed the reports of returning migrant workers, soon be mapping as “Fuck-off England” (“Sheerness”, as was indeed announced by one street scrawler in the approach to the Brexit referendum, “is not the capital of Poland”).
The islanders, who are well aware of the stigma that has for so long been attached to them, can be understandably quick to detect a slight. Here, as elsewhere on the Thames Estuary, however, they have also developed creative ways of defusing and redirecting the insults reflecting a wider metropolitan abandonment of the English working class. Ray Pahl, a sociologist at the University of Kent who did much to counter these false allegations, noticed that islanders were inclined to “adopt a mocking, self-deprecating tone often hiding a fierce pride”.19 This was the pre-emptive spirit in which he was told several times, sometimes with the help of a rough drawing of the Thames Estuary, that “Sheppey was a piece of shit in the arse ’ole of England”. I remembered that in January 2015, when the words “Welcome to Hell!” were sprayed in large letters on a concrete pier supporting the bridge leading across the Swale to Father Paul Hennessy’s Heavenly Island. “Turn back now”, said the words on the subsequent pier. Perhaps somebody wasn’t wanted.
*
And Uwe Johnson? It is safe to assume that this particular European migrant knew nothing about Sheppey or its conflicted status in the Kentish imagination when he decided to ignore the warnings of his English friends and move there with his wife and daughter towards the end of 1974. The Belgian writer Pierre Mertens invites his readers to imagine Johnson as a “German Crusoe” who, having tired of the political and ideological battles of his time, finally chose to shipwreck himself on an island that was all the better for being “without historic references”.20 He would live there, Mertens suggests, as a “double dissident”, who had rejected both sides of the Cold War schism, and now “finds his destiny where it nailed him, outside the history of a people, a state, an era. Does contemporary literature count many ‘incarnations’ of this kind?”
In reply to that question, we must surely wonder whether contemporary literature actually counts even one such example. Johnson had indeed decided to remove himself from the literary scene in West Berlin, but there was never any possibility of him finding a place — whether a desert island or a “moral Switzerland” of the unattainable sort for which his character Gesine Cresspahl sometimes yearns — outside the history he carried with him. In this respect, Johnson, who had already demonstrated himself a penetrating investigator of historical environments in Germany and America, was well prepared for a populated English island that was full not just of “historical references” but also of physical resemblances to the landscapes of his past. In a famous passage of his book about Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński remarked that “Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star”.21 Johnson too had an eye for struggling and apparently abandoned “backwaters”. Writi
ng before globalisation had done so much to reduce the grounded experience of place to a mocking consolation prize for left-behind losers all over the world, he was also interested in the historical currents, both personal and wider, that could bring far-flung “backwaters” together.
Baltic Resort, Dievenow, postcard, mailed 1940.
When Johnson first saw Sheppey from the air (in the summer of 1978), he registered it not as an island but as “a spit of land between the Medway and the Thames”.22 “Spit” (die Spitze) is a suggestive word, given the importance of topographical memory in Johnson’s imagination, and it aligns Sheppey with a series of other “spits” that he remembered: from Dievenow on the Pomeranian Baltic, where he had watched haymaking in watery meadows as a four-year-old staying with his maternal grandparents in 1934, to Fischland further west along the Baltic, and on to Staten Island and several other examples he had registered on the east coast of the United States. Forty years later, we can allow his chosen word to hint at the sense of estranged familiarity he encountered on the Isle of Sheppey: no homecoming, to be sure, but a fleeting sense of recognition that would only be available to one whose sense of place and landscape was neither entirely desolate nor locked, Brexit-like, into a singular idea of national identity. The word “spit” also suggests an appropriate landing point on the island. Not Heathrow followed by a taxi driven by his friend Frank, as it may actually have been for Johnson when he flew back to England on that day in 1978, and not yet the capital town of Sheerness, at the island’s north-western point, where he had chosen to live across the road from the beach. We will opt instead for the often truly deserted spit at the island’s south-eastern corner and then make our way north, picking up English echoes of the history explored in Anniversaries as we proceed around the coast to the house in which the Johnsons were living by the close of 1974. I have placed three warning notices at our starting point in memory of the forbidding signs that once marked approaches to the inner German border.
Inner German frontier on Priwall spit, from the west, 1960.
9. SHELLNESS: A POINT WITH THREE WARNINGS
The Isle of Sheppey, looking north from Shellness Point.
For a closer sense of the island on which our alleged “German Crusoe” chose to beach himself together with his storm-tossed wife and daughter, we must force a descent on the eye that glides so easily across the shining surface of the Swale from Whitstable. We can thicken those superficially tranquil waters by remembering not just the native oysters once harvested in such abundance from the seabed here, but the four coastguards who set off from Whitstable beach shortly after 4pm on Wednesday, 11 December 1844.1 They had been despatched in “the four-oared gig on duty” to watch over the “various craft that might be rounding Shellness Point”, and then to land at the coastguard station at Shellness, where they were expected both to communicate with the chief officer and to deliver their passenger, the thirty-three-year-old Mr Henry Pym, who had recently “retired” to Bridge, near Canterbury, having run an “extensive” farm near Leysdown — a little further north along the coast of what remains, so we are assured by a plain-speaking fish-and-chip operator of our time, definitely “the back end of the island”.2
It was a routine trip and the coastguards were experienced sailors — all of them, as the coroner’s inquest would affirm, “steady and careful men” and “sober” too. They understood exactly what the North Sea tides could do to the waters of the eastern Swale but they still failed to reach their destination. Five bodies were eventually found on or in the vicinity of the Pollard Sands, as was their boat, “lying on her larboard side” nearby. Various witnesses spoke at the inquest, including Charles Foreman, a dredger from Whitstable who, at the time of the accident, had been out wildfowling in a punt near the Pollard oyster grounds: he had seen the coastguards’ gig travelling fast towards Shellness and assumed the men must have lowered their sails after passing out of his view. Since there were no other vessels to cause a collision, it was concluded that the boat had been capsized by “a heavy swell of the sea; which often takes place by the meeting of the two tides near the place where the bodies were found”. The inspecting officer for the district, Captain Blair R.N., confirmed that “at times the crossing was a difficult one”, arising from what was termed by the seafaring men of Whitstable a “hollow” or “counter sea” occasioned by the general tide, and by the water flowing through the “East Swale”. Reassured that there had been nothing about the weather that might imply culpability on anyone’s part, the Coroner returned a verdict of accidental death.
You would search in vain along the gravel beach at Shellness for a memorial to the “melancholy catastrophe” caused by the unusually deep troughs of that “hollow” sea. No one, however, could miss the derelict two-chambered concrete pillbox surviving as the southernmost structure on this flat and desolate point, a relic of twentieth-century warfare that must have accommodated a few raving Lears before the day in 2016, when Robbie Williams came to this deserted place to film the video for his single “Love My Life”. Not a palm tree in sight, but that has not discouraged the fifty million YouTubers who have so far watched the singer sauntering about, while a cluster of young women wheel around him, their cameras and clothes as black as the trails of smoke with which steamers carrying excursionists back and forth between London, Herne Bay and Margate once filled the air over the waters here.3 Forty years before that brief manifestation, Uwe Johnson’s copy of the island’s weekly newspaper invited a different authority to explain why the southern end of this sand and shingle spit was being added to the Swale nature reserve. An obliging spokesman from the Nature Conservancy Council explained that Shellness was “an excellent example of a hooked peninsula resulting from longshore drift accumulation”.4
I. In the Pink Again: A Bird for Mr Johnson
Above Riverside Park, a brightly colored bird gave off a swishing swinging sound. Then it lifted its tail and hung in the wind over the Hudson and cried arr-arr. It was not an ABC TV copter, sir, it was your escaped electric razor, whose motor has had just about enough of its casing.
—Anniversaries I, p. 207.
On less hectic days, Shellness Point settles back into its existence as part of a grazing salt marsh managed with the interest of wild birds in mind. The wildfowlers who may, for all I know, sometimes still be allowed onto the marshes, pay more attention to the grazing geese than the waders — dunlin, knot, sanderling — that can be seen creeping along the exposed mud banks as they follow the tide up towards the shelly beach. The bird watchers also understand that the marsh harriers, curlew and redshank have been beneficiaries of EU subsidies paid to the marshland farmers who take care of their breeding grounds along the Swale. They may also get more excited by the oddities that sometimes turn up on the wind: a cluster of eight twite, perhaps, a shore lark or a Richard’s pipit, or the pomarine skua seen coasting past Shellness Point that same year.
While Sheppey has always owed a lot to erratic visitors, washed up or blown in, it’s characteristic “spirit of place” has also been shaped by the human interventions that can make such an implausible thing of nature in this repeatedly used and abandoned part of the world. There may be nothing here to match the helicopter-bird that Johnson imagined from Gesine Cresspahl’s high apartment on New York’s Riverside Drive, having crossed the grinding of an electric razor with reports from the Vietnam War drifting through the wall from a neighbour’s TV set and possibly a hangover too. Yet there was one spectacularly unusual fowl that sought refuge on the Sheppey marshes towards the end of July 1873, a specimen that surely offers a fitting avian emblem for Uwe Johnson’s adopted island.
Some Islanders must have wondered about the brilliant creature that briefly found refuge on the Isle of Sheppey’s wilder marshes. Its plumage was said to be “perfectly white, excepting the wings, which are tinted with a beautiful rose colour”.5 What was this unusual incomer? Where did it come from? And how would it fare in its unlikely new habitat? The answer to the last of
those questions was quickly provided by a labourer named Heathfield. On Saturday, 2 August 1873, this otherwise obscure fellow made his way across the Swale from his home at Murston, then just outside Sittingbourne on the mainland, tracked the marvelous firebird down to an inlet named Sharfleet Creek on Sheppey’s Elmley marshes, and shot it.
News of Heathfield’s Swaleside bag was sent to the Field by another local man, Mr Arthur John Jackson, who wrote from Sittingbourne to claim the “Flamingo in the Isle of Sheppey” as a first for the country.6 Sheppey’s rare bird was female and “full-winged” and measured four feet six inches in height. Identified as a specimen of the type Phoenicopterus ruber, the dead flamingo had since been placed in the hands of a “naturalist” of Sittingbourne, for the “purpose of being stuffed and mounted”. The Field, which plainly had its suspicions from the start, added an editorial note reassuring readers that another correspondent had confirmed that “the bird in question showed no traces of confinement”. It also corrected an egregious error in the report, suggesting that “if the bird really is a flamingo, as it would appear to be from the description, we should imagine that it would prove to be the European species (P. antiquorum) and not the American species (P. ruber) as stated by Mr Jackson”. It was left to the Kentish papers to record that the enigmatic vagrant, which was now being eviscerated and stuffed by Mr George Young, of 17 High Street, East Sittingbourne, had also changed hands in another sense: it was “now the property of Mr T.L. Dene of Hollybank”7 near Tonbridge.
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