Marine Parade, c. 1974, Neptune Terrace on lower right.
After Johnson’s death, the director of his archive, Eberhard Fahlke, would try to deter those who saw only a fatal mistake in Johnson’s decision to move to Sheerness, insisting that the relocation was neither “any kind of political or aesthetic statement” nor a desperate “plunge into exile”. It was, he wrote, only an attempt to find “a roomy house with a view of the open sea far away from the hustle and bustle of Berlin” — one that would allow “the relaxation, concentration, and patience that were indispensable for his style of writing: faithful to historical fact and underlain with irony”.25
Johnson’s own letters suggest there was actually more to it than that. Within a few weeks of arriving, he was writing to describe his new home to Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish philosopher he had befriended while living in New York City. He admitted that the life of the town, if not the whole island, was “determined by a hulking lump of a steel factory where chopped-up cars are transformed into sheet metal for cars to be chopped up at a later date”.26 He didn’t dispute that Sheerness was a one-horse town, its people insecurely dependent on “this one employer”, but he praised it for being “an ugly, living community” and, as he had also informed Max Frisch, definitely not a “sleepy suburb like the scattered developments in the stockbrokers’ belt in Surrey, with their charming prosperity”. In Sheerness, so Arendt was informed, the people “say ‘plice’ for the fish but correct the foreigners’ pronunciation attempts with the proper form: ‘plaice.’ They are the kind of people who say ‘ta’ for ‘thank you’ and ‘tada’ for ‘bye’ — and are opposed to the Conservatives to boot. We are already speaking to them, even though we say goodbye with a ‘thank you,’ to be safe”. By no means a bad town, then, for a displaced East German who still carried a puritan “socialist morality”27 around with him. Nor for one who would insist, as Johnson did when a visiting American scholar eventually reached his door in 1982, that he, as a writer, believed in “individual truth, private truth”.28
Part of Johnson’s own truth was that he appreciated Sheerness for the very qualities that caused others to worry on his behalf. “He loved it”,29 remembers Anne Beresford, adding that she herself had failed to detect any charms in the wintry town Johnson had chosen: it seemed, as her husband Michael Hamburger agreed, to be both “peculiarly inaccessible” and “a rather bleak place at that time of year”. Kunert, meanwhile, had suggested that this obscure English backwater might have appealed to Johnson because it “reminded him of his home on the Baltic coast”.30
“He likes it there. It reminds him of home”, agreed Johnson’s friend, the Austrian-born Helga Michie, speaking in the present tense, as if Johnson was still there, when I phoned her at a London nursing home on 22 July 2015. When I asked how that could be, Michie, who had lost much of her family to the Nazis (but not her twin sister, the writer Ilse Aichinger) after herself escaping to England as a child on one of the last Kindertransport out of Vienna in July 1939, explained “it’s the landscape — sea, sand, marsh”. I could grasp that. The large skies over a flat and watery land were easily transferred to the Baltic coast. Sheppey knows both the high white light Johnson remembered there and spectacular sunsets that may match and, given the prismatic enhancements provided by the clouds of pollution over London, perhaps also exceed those he had seen from the shores of Mecklenburg and Pomerania. As for the marshes, I have yet to find anyone who can immediately distinguish photographs of the Swaleside marshes of Sheppey, from those on the flat and watery terrain between the Baltic and the shallow inland lagoon known as Saaler Bodden near Ahrenshoop on Fischland.
Had I phoned a few years earlier, Michie might have been able to help me understand other ways in which the struggling industrialised island of Sheppey resonated with the GDR. The large landowners may not have been quite as deplorable as the now dispossessed “Junkers” of Mecklenburg, but they had long known better than to live here, relying instead on tenants, bailiffs and “lookers” to take care of their unhealthy marshes and fields. There was little sign of a resident bourgeoisie in Sheerness, and, notwithstanding the colour TVs and G Plan furniture advertised by some shops, precious few invitations to conspicuous consumption along the High Street, where family-owned outlets battled on alongside chains like Boots and Burtons (the latter since retreated). The people of Sheerness had never lived under the Nazi or Soviet jackboot, but theirs was a military town (as the Luftwaffe had correctly noted on their aerial photographs) and several centuries of co-existence with the Admiralty and the Army Ordnance Board had, as Johnson would also point out, provided them with ample experience of the apparently arbitrary decisions of remote power.
Having grown up in the GDR, Johnson will surely also have been intrigued by the buildings — co-operatives, working men’s clubs, masonic halls, chapels as well as churches and, of course, pubs too. These revealed the influence on the town not just of working-class conservatism but also of an English strand of socialism that predated Lenin and Walter Ulbricht too: a non-statist and more organic variety that in March 1913 had led G.K. Chesterton to assure readers of the Daily Herald that the trade union was “the only really English institution of modern times”31 and which, in 1920, caused one dismayed member of the first Labour Party delegation sent to examine conditions in the USSR to announce, with more than a trace of affronted British presumption, that a new verse should now be added to the famous socialist song “The Red Flag”, acknowledging that the Bolshevik upstarts had stolen the movement’s precious totem and bleached it “the palest pink”.32
If the landscapes of the Isle of Sheppey reminded Johnson of Dievenow, Ahrenshoop and other places on the Baltic coast, it’s run-down charms as a human habitation were remarkably similar to those this no longer East German writer had associated, a few years earlier, with another derided industrial, flood-prone and largely working-class island he had got to know while living in New York City. In the third volume of Anniversaries, Gesine Cresspahl is taken there by her daughter Marie, who plans, one day (perhaps in 1982 as she will suggest later in the novel33) to repay her mother’s self-sacrifice by setting her up in a home of her own. With this in mind, she shows Gesine around Staten Island, commending it as a place where this uprooted Mecklenburger might one day come to feel at least a bit at home. “Or go live with the poor, Gesine”, so Marie says of this retirement option as Johnson runs through the contrary charms of this low-lying island, known for its stinking landfill sites as well as for linoleum production and fig trees planted by Italian immigrants. Several years before Michael Hamburger and Günter Kunert had surveyed the “rural slum” surrounding their train to Sheerness, Johnson had given his own version of the view from a train heading south across Staten Island:
After the wasteland of single-story brick on the north coast of the island, finally some trees and landscape… Electrical lines on rough-hewn poles that are often tilted, from an age of modest technology. Grass growing between slabs of the sidewalk, weed and shrubs high and rampant around the stairs…
a jerky rattling suburban line...
crippled houses huddled together, collapsing, draped with pieces of plastic…
Construction rubble, oil barrels, junk on the beach, splintering posts in the water, and, farther out, backlit pleasure craft and fishing boats. Everywhere, vegetation reclaiming the sick land, covering the scars and wounds of the ground…
A living cat, white, with deeply blackened eyes, wants to be noticed, there is something it knows…
An unexpected wide field of high grasses, wild shrubs growing everywhere. A steam freighter so close to the shore it seems grounded...
On the sandy roads, covered with puddles of water, lonely cars drove as if cowed by field and thicket so far from eight-lane highways and apartment buildings. Marshlands, no longer traversable due to broken bottles and rusty tin cans. A colony of summer houses falling apart. Children who stared at strangers walking by…34
As a borough of New Y
ork City inhabited by half a million people, Staten Island is no mere mudbank. Even so, there is little in this extracted inventory of its qualities that couldn’t find its equivalent on the Isle of Sheppey, another place where truth and dishevelment have run together in not always melancholy ways that repay reflection. The correspondence extends to the fact, used by Marie to clinch her case for New York’s island borough, that its flat and watery landscape resembled the Mecklenburg to which her mother, like Johnson himself, could never return. Both of these low-lying places — Staten Island and Sheppey — were derided as backwaters, and that would surely be the start of something in Johnson’s imagination (it was only after six or seven years in Sheerness that he described his fictional Mecklenburg settlement of Jerichow as “this windy backwater that called itself a town”35). Both were scarred, eroded and variously blighted places where people made their own kind of society out of an experience that more “successful” observers might fail to distinguish from abject failure. Both were places where historical memory may be more associated with wreckage — washed-up, stranded or just derelict — rather more than formal monuments. On that latter point, as Johnson came to know well, there was an exception to be made for the stone war memorial that has stood across the road from Sheerness railway station ever since 1922. Surmounted by the female figure of Liberty, who holds a scroll and torch over the names of civilians as well as serving soldiers and sailors who died during the Great War, it is carved with the words:
TRUE LOVE BY LIFE — TRUE LOVE BY
DEATH — IS TRIED.
LIVE THOU FOR ENGLAND! WE FOR
ENGLAND DIED.
That couplet, which would later be attributed to a retired classics master from Eton College named Arthur Campbell Ainger,36 had been printed under the heading “For a Memorial Tablet” in the Times on 16 February 1918 (it would be carved into war memorials up and down the land over the following few years). When I passed at the end of July 2013, I found a photograph of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death by Islamists in Woolwich a couple of months earlier, placed against the railing in front of Ainger’s words.
Sheerness War Memorial, with Fusilier Lee Rigby.
15. BLUE-FACED AND SHIVERING: A NEW TOWN ON ENGLAND’S FATAL SHORE
Jerichow was not in fact a town. It had a town charter dating back to 1240, it had a municipal council, it purchased electricity from the Herrenwyk power plant, it had an automatic telephone exchange and a train station, but it belonged to the nobility whose estates surrounded it.
— Anniversaries I, p. 25.
Marine Town from Johnson’s back window.
As he looked south from the rear bedroom at the top of No. 26, Johnson will have noticed a high-walled footpath — Telescope Alley — emerging at a slant from Marine Parade at the lower left of his field of vision and drawing his eye away towards the Heights of Alma. Though named after a high redoubt overlooking the road to the Crimean city of Sevastopol, the pub at the end of Alma Street actually stands across the alley from the Ebenezer chapel, opened by Bible Methodists in 1861, and, directly beyond that, the Alexandra Road boarding school for infants built some thirty years later. These larger buildings stand in a dense network of late-Victorian terraced houses: some, like Johnson’s own, still roofed with slate, but others already gone over to red cement tiles of the grant-aided “council” variety that became ubiquitous in the Seventies.
Marine Town, as this easternmost stretch of Sheerness is called, was built in an expansion that took off in the mid-nineteenth century and continued, in fits and starts, into the twentieth. If Johnson could glimpse fields beyond its roofs and gardens and, beyond them, the Kentish downs forming a low horizon on the far side of the Swale, this was only partly because the houses inland are smaller and more tightly “glued together” than the sea-facing terraces of Marine Parade. The land on which the back streets are built also stands lower. It is a slight difference, so easily overlooked that Johnson’s artist neighbour, Martin Aynscomb-Harris of 24 Marine Parade, used to clinch the case for its existence by citing years of experience jump-starting exhausted Jaguars on the almost imperceptible slope that brings Marine Parade down into the Broadway to the west. The existence of those vital inches had been more painfully proven on the repeated occasions over the previous century when tidal surges brought the North Sea flooding in, filling the houses behind without reaching those at the western end of Marine Parade.
The view over the Johnsons’s back garden prompts other questions beside the one vexing those in Germany we have heard wondering what can have possessed this brilliant author to cast himself away here “like a man shipwrecked at the end of the world”.1 Johnson appears to have put that question to himself. When a puzzled local asked him what had brought him to Sheerness, the writer replied, “That is what I am trying to find out”.2
Johnson’s record as a searching investigator of historical environments — be they in Mecklenburg, Carinthia, New York or, for that matter, further up the Thames in Richmond — invites us to follow him in turning the question back on the town in which he would spend the following nine years. What made it conceivable for even a “small” town to be built on this ground which one of the more appreciative of the local studies that Johnson would gather onto his shelves during his decade in Sheerness admits was really just a “watery morass”?3
It was not just the threat of flooding that placed Sheerness on the wrong side of a “contour of death”4 that had for centuries made the estuarial marshes such “insalubrious” places to live or even visit. Both shores of the Thames Estuary were affected but, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Sheerness was especially cursed as “the most fever-ridden place in the whole of England”.5 Typhoid and cholera would do their work here, but the abiding affliction was a native form of malaria known, before this mosquito-borne disease was scientifically understood, as “ague” or “marsh fever”. This pestilence may largely have died out by the beginning of the twentieth century, but it could always come back.
“His address was Sheppey”,6 so a government official declared of the Anopheles atroparvus mosquito in September 1917, while admitting that the island’s extensive population of these insects had been re-infected during the ongoing Great War by soldiers and naval ratings bringing the malaria parasite back from Salonika, Mesopotamia and Egypt. A member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Major Angus McDonald, who looked into the situation in 1918, confirmed that, of all the coastal saltmarsh areas affected in England, Sheppey claimed the “first rank” in the “order of menace”, thanks to the year-round stagnancy of its often untended dykes, its marshes being “close to the homes of people and the people being of a class amongst whom malaria carriers from abroad are likely to be many and frequent”.7 Major MacDonald confirmed that reinfection of the native mosquito had already happened — there were sixty-one known cases of indigenous malaria on the island in 1918. Army researchers had found the offending mosquito, here identified more generally as Anopheles maculipennis, in huts at Eastchurch aerodrome and the military camp at Holm Place, in dwelling houses and also bell tents at Leysdown and Shellbeach. The larvae, meanwhile, were thriving in grass, pools and overgrown ditches. While the war lasted, it had been possible to remove human carriers of the malaria parasite to France, where treatment had been more successful, but this convenience was no longer available after the Armistice of November 1918. McDonald then had to rely on other measures, including the screening of huts with cardboard strips and butter muslin. When it came to the Anopheles larva, he favoured drainage and clearing of dykes but had to admit, given the negligence of farmers and landowners, that “perhaps the most valuable enemy of maculipennis in the estuarian dykes is the stickleback”.8 There were, he concluded, eleven “infective foci” on the island, and some five or six hundred “carriers” living in its various settlements, including Sheerness.
No longer “a quagmire of vegetation and probably the chief breeding place of local maculipennis”. Drained dyke at Holm Place, Sheppey, 1
918.
Anopheles Maculipennis on a bedroom wall in Kent, 1918.
Against that background, it is hardly surprising that the Medical Health Officer responsible for Sheppey in 1949 should have worried that post-war conditions were once again ripe for a fatal outbreak.9 An expert at the government’s Malaria Laboratory at Horton Hospital in Epsom did nothing to dispel his fear that Sheppey’s mosquitoes might become carriers again, thanks this time to the “Families Camp” at Eastchurch, where the military authorities insisted — despite previous warnings — on accommodating the Indian, Anglo-Indian, Cypriot, and Maltese wives of men serving with the British Empire’s forces overseas. The expert in question, P.G. Chute, who claimed to have examined three cases of native malaria a little further east along Marine Parade in Sheerness immediately after the Second World War, urged Dr. Crichton to consider spraying the infested saltmarshes behind the pub named the Ship on Shore with DDT — an experimental measure that was, he admitted, still an entirely untried method of mosquito control.10
1667: A Tough Year for Sheep
How, then, as we may imagine Johnson and his visitors wondering, had a town of some fourteen thousand people come to exist on this notoriously infested swamp that, for centuries, as Johnson soon found out from his copy of William Lambarde’s A Perambulation of Kent, had been known primarily for its sheep? By 13 January 1976, he was telling his Rostock friends, Alice Hensan and her daughter Dorothy, that the Romans had marked the place on their maps as “the island of Ovinium”, and that Lambarde too had reckoned it “greatly esteemed either for the number of the sheepe, or for the finessese of the fleese … (which passeth all other in Europe at this day; and is to be compared with the ancient delicate wool of Tarentum, or the Golden Fleese of Colchos, it selfe) and for the abundant store of flocks…”11
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 20