- No whites’ll get out of this city alive.
- …
- Well maybe they are overdoing it a bit.
- Flags at half-mast! It’s not like he was Kennedy.
- The blacks need to be smoked out, block by block!
- Maybe it was one of them that did it themselves.37
The National Front’s anti-Common Market slogan — “Make Britain Great Again” — may since have been admitted to America under Reagan in 1980 and then again under Donald Trump, but Eastchurch continues to be a place of outspoken views in our time too. In April 2019, there was outrage on Swale Borough Council, thanks to the discovery of a Facebook post by a UKIP councillor for Sheppey East named Padmini Nissanga. A self-styled English “patriot” of Sri Lankan origin, this former care home owner had denounced Remainers as “traitors” who must “face the death penalty” in the Saudi-Arabian style. She had also insisted that, thanks to arch-traitors such as Tony Blair and Michael Heseltine, “hundreds of children were abused by Muslims every single day”.38 The answer, as Cllr. Nissanga had earlier decreed, was to hang Remainers and finish off their voters with “huge machetes”.
10. COINCIDENCE ON ENGLAND’S BALTIC SHORE
Had he really been shipwrecked at Shellness Point, Johnson would have found himself on a flat, bare and flood-prone shore that remains littered with the debris of a twentieth century that repeatedly broke over the island and then melted away, leaving its residues scattered through the encompassing emptiness. To walk north along this scarcely elevated spit is to feel the truth of an observation that the Polish photographer Pawel Starzec has recently made in connection with “repurposed” sites of atrocity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “A point on the map stands still”, he writes, “but the context moves”.1
“We have fine weather”, postcard of Fischland, mailed by “Grete”, 31 June 1955.
Uwe Johnson knew how that had worked in Germany. As he evokes the remembered geography of the GDR’s Baltic coast, he insistently recovers the presences of the Nazi era — prisons, slave-labour barracks and armament factories, concentration camps — that may have been removed, converted to new uses, or forgotten, more or less systematically, since 1945. He of all twentieth-century novelists knew that, besides being “a point on the map”, every truly historical landscape is also a slipping catch in remembered time. And that would prove as true on the Isle of Sheppey as on the different sandy “spit” he had known and loved during his years in East Germany. Situated at the traditional border between Mecklenburg and Pomerania, Fischland stretches out under similarly vast skies between the Baltic and a shallow inland lagoon named Saaler Bodden. Johnson had spent the summer of 1956 here with his wife to be, Elisabeth Schmidt, working on the manuscript of his long unpublished first novel, Ingrid Babendererde, and, as some witnesses are said to have recalled, swimming alarmingly far out to sea, much further than anyone else in that young company dared to go.2 It was in pages written on Sheppey that he would have Gesine Cresspahl remember Fischland as “the most beautiful place in the world”.3
Just to the north of the blockhouse at Shellness Point stands a terrace of cottages, still recognisable as part of the coastguard station to which those drowned coastguards from Whitstable were sailing. As late as 1934, a “sauntering” Kentish topographer could convince himself, if not all his readers, that Shellness was “once an uninhabited spit of land save for the hut of a fisherman who also acted as watchman when foreigners poached the oyster beds”.4 In 1827, when Trinity House installed permanent buoys in the East Swale, the “Southernmost dwelling-house at Shellness Point” was still known as “Bell’s House”.5 By that time, however, this remote spot was destined for service as the “watch house” of the armed “Coastal Blockade Service” set up after the end of the Napoleonic Wars by a government determined to put an end to smuggling along the English coast from Shellness Point all the way around to Beachy Head in Sussex. The coastguard station that stood here through much of the nineteenth century — photographs from 1909 show a terrace of houses to the north of “Bell’s House” with a handful of additional buildings — was augmented in the twentieth, not least by the military authorities which took the place over in time for the First World War and later built more houses, a couple of single-storey but still barrack-like accommodation blocks, and a control tower that now looks like a gimcrack trial run for the new international airport that the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, once wanted to impose on the Isle of Sheppey. These days, the “Shellness Estate” is a privately-owned holiday “hamlet”, the various residents of which enjoy their own tennis court and swimming pool and get by without incorporated roads, mains water, sewerage or other publicly-funded services (including sea defences). The “Private” notices posted along their perimeter fences initiate a series of forthright and occasionally menacing warnings that can be followed north along the coast from here, culminating in the example — perhaps a souvenir from Donald Trump’s America — stuck on the high gate of a private bastion on the slope up to Warden Point: “Trespassers will be shot”, it says, before adding that “Survivors will be shot again”.
Shellness with twentieth-century additions, looking north, February 2019.
“There I saw the sunset, many times…” (Gesine Cresspahl in Anniversaries IV), Ahrenshoop, Fischland, June 2016.
Shellbeach, February 2019.
Directly to the north of the otherwise quite undefended “hamlet” of Shellness, the spit briefly widens into an open dune, a narrow slice of which is now designated a nudist beach. Beyond that, the low ridge is occupied by a line of fifteen or so individual cabins. These various and in some cases much reconfigured improvisations are what remains of a makeshift resort known as Shellbeach. A few of its surviving shacks are still recognisable as “bungalettes” of an early twentieth-century type that English Heritage has yet to classify as the Thames Estuary’s contribution to vernacular architecture. Like the more solidly built structures of Shellness, they survive as DIY havens. One of the more picturesque examples may somehow have made the cover of Country Living in August 2011, but they remain pleasantly ramshackle structures, only a few of which show signs of the aesthetic double-take pioneered by Derek Jarman at “Prospect Cottage” in Dungeness. The adjacent road running down to Sheerness has long remained untarred: little better, indeed, than the “rough shoreward track” described in 1913.6 Here, as on the point, the beach is made of billions of seashells, banked up in such profusion that many of the island’s paths and tracks have traditionally been surfaced with them. The plastic flotsam that more recent decades have added to the mix is matched by now illegible fragments of concrete, metal and wire remaining from other installations that have been and gone.
In the last years of the twentieth century, Shellbeach would find its literary witness in Nicola Barker, whose 1998 novel Wide Open is set on this watery, windswept and definitely wide-open edge of the island, with its peculiar colony of black-furred rabbits (specimens are allegedly still seen dodging marsh harriers in the old salt-workings on the marshes), its yellow-horned poppies and the sometimes overwhelming sense of abandonment that seems to enclose its few out-of-season inhabitants: damaged, twisted and existentially ship-wrecked characters, getting by under huge skies with the help of a caravan or, in the word Barker uses to encapsulate what is actually a variety of structures, a “prefab”. Wide Open is the inventive vision of a car-boot Prospero, who once told the Daily Telegraph, “An island is like a little world. You can control it. It has its own logic”.7 According to a Irish journalist who described Barker’s novel when it turned up as an unexpected guest on the shortlist for the £100,000 Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2000 (it won), Wide Open showed “the bizarre Isle of Sheppey” to be “a forgotten zone which possesses little more than a small nudist beach, some chalets, a boar farm and a cast of glorious characters” who are “extraordinarily insane”.8 A few aggrieved residents may have spurned Barker’s novel as yet another insulting misrepresentation of island l
ife,9 yet Barker surely does catch something of the spirit of this offcut place in the last years of the twentieth century, by which time the North Sea had several times already announced its intention of permanently claiming this low and officially undefended shore.
The collection of Sheppey newspapers saved by Uwe Johnson reveals that unconventional things were going on at Shellbeach in his time too. By the end of 1976, No. 18 Shellbeach was owned by a fellow named Stan Northover. This handsome young embodiment of a Sheppey-type known locally as the “rough diamond” was the son of a showman, also named Stan Northover, who had been hailed by the Stage, some twelve years previously, as “one of the best known personalities on the Isle of Sheppey”.10 In 1974, when the Johnsons first moved to Sheerness, Stan the younger was running a private drinking establishment known as the Cellar Club at 9 Neptune Terrace, scarcely more than a stone’s throw from the Johnsons’s house. Since then, Northover, who was never proved to have been a “fence” for the island’s stolen jewellery as a pair of robbers among his club members had encouraged police to believe,11 had decided to “opt out” of society. Rather than seeking “an exotic hideaway on a foreign island” or joining “a more fashionable hippy-type commune”, the former manager of the Cellar Club had bought a burned-out chalet with a fifty-foot stretch of private beach here in “the wilds of Sheppey” and set to work creating Sheppey’s own answer to the improvised castaway lairs that the American sailor and author of Moby Dick Herman Melville once claimed to have found on the Galapagos Islands — including the one housing a “wild white creature” named Oberlus, who survived “beastlike” and diabolical among crawling tortoises on “McCain’s Beclouded Isle”.12
In December 1976, a Sheerness Times Guardian reporter found this unlikely outcast in residence with his wife and three children, insisting he had “never been happier”, living in rarely interrupted solitude with “no income” and a diet of rabbits, pheasant eggs and fish. From “dawn to dusk” this pioneer worked on rebuilding and strengthening the “remote island retreat” that had been named “Tides Time”, perhaps at one of the “family conferences” in which, so Northover declared, all his household’s decisions were now made. Asked to explain why his property, No. 18, was the first building standing in Shellbeach, he explained that “The other 17 were washed away with the winds and tide and my main concern is that the same fate does not befall this one”.
If Northover’s retreat seemed vaguely Spanish in its “adobe hacienda” style, this was, he suggested, an unintended consequence of the fact that all its materials had been salvaged or, in some cases, retrieved as they were washed up on the shore. He knew that his recycled six-foot-high windows would look “ridiculous” in a low chalet wall so, having installed them, he set about masking them with “artificial curves. The effect softened the regimental look, and I liked the feeling of space the curves created”. The interior had started out as a single room built in the first summer to meet the family’s need for simple shelter — just a roof for everyone to sleep under, with a stone fireplace for heat and cooking and a chimney stack and canopy made of old oil drums. The case for a second floor was sealed by the acquisition of an “ancient staircase”. Low-pitched and full of light, the upstairs extension included a studio of sorts and, as was remembered by one visitor (Martin Aynscomb-Harris, to whom we will return in due course), a four-poster bed that Northover had somehow managed to squeeze into a “bedroom” that seemed only to measure about four feet from ceiling to floor. While Stan raised money, allegedly by selling wooden carvings, the eldest child, Beverley, went off to art college and the two younger children got used to the long walk to school in Minster or Halfway. Life here was good. The family read “everything from encyclopaedias to sauce bottle labels” and also had the advantage of a battery TV and radio. Meanwhile the sea kept giving — fish, driftwood and the lengths of oiled rope with which Northover framed the doors of his house. To the Sheerness Times Guardian’s appreciative feature writer, Northover’s retreat was “like a Utopian paradise right here on Sheppey”.
Like many such projects, however, this one would also be short-lived. On 20 January 1978, Johnson’s paper had reported that, like other parts of Sheppey, Shellness had been utterly devastated by the storm-driven floods that had hit the island a week or so earlier. The road past Shellbeach was quite washed away, and the hamlet of Shellness, which happened to have been sold to its new owner only a month earlier (contrary to the wishes of the council, which had hoped that it might be turned into a “nature park with camping facilities”13), was drowned after its rudimentary sea defences were smashed and the entire place left covered in slime, gravel and mud. Stan Northover returned “from holiday” to discover that his “Self-built Beach House”14 had taken “the brunt of the storm, which gashed a hole in the sea wall 100 yards across. The only sign that a house had ever stood there is a pair of net curtains swaying gently in the breeze”. According to Bel Austin, who wrote that article, Northover gave up on “Tides Time” and moved to Waverley Avenue, an inland street further around the coast in Minster, where he knocked two bungalows together to create his next island retreat.
Before ourselves moving on from Shellbeach, we should recognise that storms and floods are not the only hazards that have threatened summer residents here. We can follow the shifting context of Sheppey’s south-eastern spit further back into the century that weighed so heavily on Johnson with the help of an incident that took place here one summer day between the two world wars. In the calendrical structure of Anniversaries, 15 August is shared between the years 1968 and 1952, the latter being the day on which Gesine Cresspahl had said farewell to her father in Jerichow (“Make sure ya wear yer scarf”15), and set off for Halle on the Saale River, where she would study English Literature through the official Marxist prism at Martin Luther University. We, though, are concerned with 15 August 1933. In Germany, that was the day on which the newly empowered Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, survived a car crash while motoring in the mountains near the Bavarian village of Reit im Winkl.16 There would be no such luck for the seventeen-year-old Jean Chesterton or, for that matter, for her older sister Joan, with whom she had crossed the Thames from Ilford in Essex to spend the summer as usual in the family’s holiday home — a shack variously described as a “bungalette” and a “bungalow hut”17 — overlooking the sea at Shellbeach.
After breakfast that bright morning, Jean and Joan noticed a small girl crying as she watched her large yellow beach ball, which had been caught by the wind, vanishing out to sea. Already clad in bright swimming costumes — one green, the other blue — the Chesterton sisters jumped into the family’s wooden rowing boat and pulled out to rescue the ball. Catching up with it about a quarter of a mile from the shore, they noticed little splashes in the water around them and realised, helplessly, that they were being machine-gunned from the air. Five Westland Wapiti biplanes had suddenly materialised overhead, and the gunner in one of them, a civilian from the Midlands named John Boahemia, was practising “splash tactics” for the first time during a training week with the 605 County of Warwick Bomber Squadron of the Auxiliary Air Force. Hit twice, Jean slid down into the boat and was dead by the time Joan had managed to row back to the shore. “The water”, as Johnson’s Heinrich Cresspahl would say while imagining British bombs falling into the Baltic, “is as hard as stone”.18
“The rowboat nearest to the water is the one in which the girl was shot”. Shellbeach, 22 August 1933.
It was established at the inquest that the Chesterton sisters, who were enjoying their fifth summer holiday in “one of the first”19 bungalettes to be erected at Shellbeach, had not strayed into the RAF’s buoyed-off danger zone immediately to the south as some horrified airmen had at first alleged. In reality, aircraftman Boahemia, who complained of the day’s fierce “Sea-glare”,20 had opened fire too soon, having mistaken the Chesterton’s wooden boat for one of the target buoys anchored a few hundred yards beyond. Everyone behaved as well as they could u
nder the circumstances. The girls’ father, Mr William Chesterton (a partner in a firm of manufacturing furriers, Chesterton and Hancox, in the City of London), shook hands with the mortified aircraftman after the inquest, and Boahemia sent a wreath extending his “deepest sympathy and regret” to the funeral in Manor Park. The officiating congregationalist minister offered the respectfully absent gunner some words of reassurance, insisting that “the man who was also afflicted by this tragedy” could “walk with head erect, knowing that those who have been so deeply bereaved were without bitterness and able to recognize the innocence of his activities”.21 The Daily Herald, a Labour paper that had long opposed the War Office’s insistence on grabbing land for military use all over the country since the First World War, preferred the less forgiving judgement of one of the dead girl’s less reconciled brothers: “One would think that, during August, when the bungalows are occupied by 200 or more people the R.A.F. would practise as far away as possible”.22 The Air Ministry would, of course, stay put. They did, however, mark the perimeter of the “danger area” with larger noticeboards and brightly painted pylons.
As for the “bungalows”, two hundred may have been a round count of residents, but there is no question that things had changed along the once “isolated and shut-off” spit leading down to the point at Shellness, and not for the better according to the dismayed assessment provided by Sir Charles Igglesden, who came here the following year, in 1934, and found the seafront at Shellbeach “covered with numberless bungalows”.23 Meanwhile, Shellness “at the extreme point [was] a mass of other buildings, the residences of members of a London club. The difference is so great that you would never recognise the Shellness of today as the same place ten years ago”. And that, as anyone walking further north along this coast soon discovers, was by no means the extent of the changes the twentieth century would bring to this no longer quite so remote shore.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 12