Carol now looks back on this as a great time in her life. There were “hardly any foreigners in Sheppey”, as she recalls. And perhaps there was some “not prejudice” exactly, but “suspicion and a kind of reluctance” too. This, however, “all broke down when we played”. Music, she explains, is “the thing that breaks the ice [and] knocks barriers clear away”. Speaking from her home in Florida, Jeanette, who had the added difficulty of growing up partially-sighted (as a consequence of which, she ended up as a state-funded weekly boarder shuttling back and forth between Delamark Road and the parkland of an austere private school in Maidstone), remembers a neighbour whose xenophobic tendencies evaporated once she and her daughter started playing with the band. Sheerness was rough and tough, to be sure, and life on Delamark Road was marked by the harsh determination of some families to keep their children from mixing with those whose parents were in and out of jail. It was, nevertheless a good place to live, a town full of people getting by, despite the scarcity of work and the poverty that was also part of the story: a community where good lives could be lived without piles of money. The Contants played in their band and they also became ambassadors, taking this highly accessible music into schools, colleges and communities around Europe. As a performer, teacher, tuner and maker of pans, Mike Contant travelled to Russia and South Africa and he helped bands emerge in Switzerland and elsewhere. In Britain, he took pans into many schools, including one as Carol remembers in Northern Ireland, which chose to start a steel band at the height of the Troubles after the head decided that he must find a form of music-making in which children from both sides of the sectarian divide could collaborate, and which did not belong to one side or the other.
The Contants brought an invigorating story to Sheerness, but there is one more foreigner who had lived in the town, and Johnson had particular reason to notice his story as it surfaced in his paper from sixty years earlier. His copy of the Sheerness Times Guardian from 24 January 1975 contained a letter from an elderly former townsman who wrote from Poole to say that, while watching Upstairs, Downstairs on ITV, he had found himself remembering the First World War as he had experienced it on the Isle of Sheppey. Mr Howell asked if anyone remembered what had happened to a man “who once had a photographic business near the railway station” in Sheerness.65 This fellow’s premises had been “close to the vast guns of the Coast Defence Battery and from the upper windows of the house photographs could be taken of naval ships using the harbour”. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, “Mr Lozell” had been “whisked away. Rumour had it that he had been interned or that he had been arrested as a spy”. Kids — probably boys from the nearby council school — subsequently broke into his business premises and found “hundreds of photographs of ships lying around and everyone was convinced that he was up to no good”. Further details were soon volunteered by a reader who called himself “Sekona” and alleged that the patriotic young men who had “ransacked” Lozzell’s shop found “thousands of marks in banknotes along with the photographs of war ships and planes”.66
The Sheerness Times Guardian may never have known to inform its readers that Michael “Natsy” Contant had grown up as the illegitimate son of an absent and little-known German father named Schneider. There was, however, never any doubt about the origins of the vanished town photographer — his name was actually Franz Heinrich Lösel — who had come to Sheerness from Saxony when still in his teens in the 1870s. His motivation is not known but he had left home at a time when Saxony was being forcefully integrated into the Prussian state (a process that had introduced military conscription for young men), and, once in Sheerness, found work as “shopman” to an elderly High Street photographer named John Hunt. He stayed in the trade, eventually becoming a photographer in his own right, and acquiring a studio overlooking the park known as Beachfields — aka the town Recreation Ground — and the sea beyond that. As a photographer, Lösel offered “cartes de visite” portraits for customers, be they townspeople, members of the garrison or summer visitors. Surviving pictures, which still float by occasionally on the wide river of junk that is eBay, show family groups, portraits of men in uniform, practising choir boys, Christmas trees, babies and shopfronts. As for his work around the naval station and dockyard, the three surviving photographs that I have seen suggest that he was in the habit of taking his camera aboard warships, gathering a considerable portion of their crew to be photographed on an upper deck, and then returning a few days later to offer the men prints for sale.
Franz Heinrich Lösel, “Portion of Crew of H.M.S. ‘Victoria’ taken on Forecastle of Said Ship” (circa 1890)
Lösel was said to be scrupulously polite, but he discovered nonetheless what it was to attract suspicion as a solitary foreigner in an English naval town. When, one summer night in 1895 he and a friend — a fitter named J.J. Doran — interrupted a man who was in the process of assaulting a woman in the park, a witness for the culprit tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the magistrate that Lösel the outsider was actually the assailant.67 The cloud of suspicion thickened during the spy scare that attended the Anglo-German naval rivalry in the years leading up to the First World War. By the summer of 1905, a year in which tensions with Germany combined with an “alien” fear brewed up around the arrival of Jewish migrants fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire, the town’s children had started taunting “German Losel” (Sheerness had long since deprived him of his umlaut) and throwing stones at his many-windowed studio overlooking Beachfields park. When, one warm day in June, he hastened out to chase two twelve-year-old girls home to Blue Town in order to report them to their parents, he was accused of indecency by their outraged father, having allegedly been “incompletely dressed” at the time of the disturbance.68 He insisted on bringing the girls before the local police court, but was publicly humiliated by the magistrate, who sent the girls home with a minor ticking off but is also said to have told Lösel to ensure that he was “properly attired at all times”.69 A few days later, he was himself brought up before the magistrates for persistently refusing to pay the toll when he took his camera onto the pier in order to go aboard ships.70 He knew better than to suggest he was being persecuted by the council or its pier commissioners, but he did try unsuccessfully to assert his right of access as a ratepayer, and to establish that the council had no right to charge people for possessing the tools of their trade. Less than a month after losing to the council over pier charges, on 10 August 1905, it was revealed that Lösel — identified as “a German subject, who has been in business at Sheerness for the past thirty years as a photographer” — had been back in court the previous Wednesday to face more serious charges under the Official Secrets Act. This time Lösel was accused of attempting to take a photograph of “the new Ravelin Battery at Sheerness”.71 He was acquitted, having successfully established that he was actually pointing his camera in the opposite direction to take photographs of Bridge Road for a tradesman who wanted them for post cards. “The whole thing”, he declared at the time, “is preposterous”.72 Worse came over the following years. Personally isolated and with local demand for his services declining, Lösel lived under constant suspicion — accused of having a telescope as well as his camera trained on British warships or the defensive batteries across the park from his studio, and mistrusted by townspeople as well as military authorities, whose suspicions would be intensified by the fact that in August 1910, a soon-to-be convicted spy for the German Admiralty, a man named Karl P. Hentschel, really was offering German classes in the town — on 27 August, the Sheerness Times and General Advertiser carried his advertisement, boasting qualifications likely to be attractive to naval officers and dockyard officials.
Sheerness Times, 27 August 1910.
By this time, Lösel only had to show his camera in the town to risk being reported and arrested. In August 1905, the Treasury’s representative had been obliged to drop its charges against him, but things did not go so well for Lösel after he was acquitted on a comparable charge
on the first day of the Great War. Indeed, he was immediately taken into custody from the dock as a suspected spy. He was kept in various prisons — Maidstone, Brixton, Reading — without any hearing at which he might have tried to counter the charges of the journalists who so roundly condemned him. A surviving official note claims that he was sent back to Germany, perhaps through an exchange of prisoners effected via Switzerland, in August 1917. Within days of his arrest, his studio and photographic plates had indeed been smashed to pieces as the reader who called himself “Sekona” had informed Uwe Johnson and other readers, of the Times Guardian, leaving subsequent enquirers with the perhaps impossible job of distinguishing the truth about him from unreliable rumour.
Although there was surely something for Johnson in the story of “German Losel”, it wasn’t the memory of the First World War that confronted him as he stepped out into Sheerness sixty years later. He was much more likely to encounter painful memories of the Second, in which the island aerodrome at RAF Eastchurch, had been repeatedly bombed by the Luftwaffe. One of his articles about Sheerness, first published in Die Zeit on 3 February 1978, described an early encounter on Broadway in which his awareness of these historical sensitivities was very much to the fore:
[OH! YOU’RE A GERMAN?73]
A stranger visits the Isle of Sheppey in the mouth of the Thames and goes for a walk there, on the streets of the town of Sheerness-on-Sea. It is a small town; the residents know each other. How do they know he’s not from here? He buys a map: he has to find his way around. He looks at buildings more than at people: he doesn’t expect any conversations with acquaintances. He walks idly around on a working day: he is a visitor. Where might he be from? From the mainland, from London, from another county. So he is an Englishmen, like the people from here — he belongs here. Or he might have come on the ferry from Holland, so he’s a tourist, and tourists are welcome in Sheerness. When will the people of Sheerness know for sure? When he opens his mouth.
The stranger keeps his mouth shut. He’d smiled when the man behind the counter handed him the map, because the man behind the counter had smiled. A friendly comment about the summer weather was spoken to him and he only nodded in agreement. Does he not speak English? He can get by in this language. But he knows where he’s from. He has a German passport in his pocket. The war with the Germans was thirty years ago now, it’s over, but he thinks about this war. There was Eastchurch Airfield on this island, which the Germans bombed; there are people who were killed in air strikes and these people will remain in the memories of the citizens of Sheerness. The Germans fired rockets at London whose flight paths passed over this island; the residents of the island will remember these deadly arrows. This particular German was a child then, and his father was not in the German air force; he remains a German, one of the enemy. He does not expect to be greeted on Broadway in Sheerness. He is startled when a lady speaks to him, because now he has to answer, she will realise he’s German, and she will turn away from him, and that will be like a slap in the face.
“Excuse me, sir”, the lady says.
He answers the way he has learned to answer in school; there are many words in the answer and one of them will sound German. But the woman’s face remains friendly and expectant, and she asks: “Is it you?”
“You” in English, “you” can mean Sie or du. Formal for strangers, or informal, for people who are close. He hears the latter in the woman’s voice.
“I am not who you think, madam”, the stranger says, in the many words his school wanted him to say, thereby putting on display his whole nation’s struggle with the English th sound. The woman looks at him, asking for something, and she says:
“If it’s you, then your name is Charlie Baker, and you were at Eastchurch Airfield, and you know the year 1940, and then you had to go to Scotland, and I’m — you know who I am”.
The stranger knows the year 1940: the year of the first bombs. In the woman’s eyes, this German looks like someone who was eighteen years old during the war, and because he left her he is supposed to come back. She doesn’t believe in the six years the stranger actually spent then, she doesn’t notice his German accent, because to her he’s someone named Charlie Baker, who looks like him, walks like him. She was a lovely girl thirty years ago and Charlie was a fool, because she’s waited thirty years for him. Now the stranger has to tell her the truth, for Charlie and for himself.
“I am so sorry”, the woman says. “You are a guest in our country, you’re on holiday, and here I come up to you and disturb you. That is not how we usually behave — stopping a stranger on the street. Please believe me! It’s just, we had an airfield, Eastchurch, and a young man worked there who looked like you… Will you forgive me?”
The German doesn’t remember many words when he says goodbye to Charlie Baker’s girl, and they are the wrong words.
“Some come back one day”, she answers sadly, and then politely adds: “Welcome to the Isle of Sheppey! Welcome to England!”
21. A PAINTER OF OUR TIME
“We are on very good terms with our neighbours. We almost never speak to them”.1 Johnson quoted that brilliant fragment of Sheerness etiquette in a letter to the philosopher Hannah Arendt on 18 December 1974. Having moved into 26 Marine Parade a few weeks earlier, he went on to explain for the benefit of his friend and near neighbour in New York City: “That is true with someone in building number 24”. Indeed, he joked, “we would not have carried out this decision had we known in advance that an ‘artist’ makes his home there (quotation marks by way of example, to indicate possible pronunciation). Those are just the types we were trying to get away from!”
Fortunately, as Johnson quickly found out, the “artist” in question was really not of the “type” he had mocked in Anniversaries and fallen out with so chaotically in West Berlin. The Isle of Sheppey’s artist was formed in a different and, perhaps not just for the Johnsons, far weirder mould than might have produced a left-wing West German intellectual such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “Then again”, as Johnson told Arendt in his next sentence, “we could always claim that the visuals misled us. He drives a Jaguar, even if he uses it the way other people use apple carts — shopping, transporting the kids. It’s just that now, after only five weeks, he is scrubbing the spots of rust, oiling the stains, embalming it with varnish. And apparently he had a poster for the Conservatives in his window for the October elections. — That can’t be right, we immediately counter, and then it’s happened: We are speaking to our neighbours after all. We don’t understand them very well, as one would expect with the refined language of a conservative artist”.
On another occasion Johnson, who never developed a positive regard for his neighbour’s artistic work, would describe Martin Aynscomb-Harris as “a bearded man who produces landscapes and abstractions for the summer tourists”2—an exponent of the “representational art” with which, so Johnson also informed Hannah Arendt, Sheerness tried and failed to match Margate or Ramsgate as a tourist destination. And yet, had either of them ever allowed their conversation to trespass into such matters, Harris, who was surely not an artist of any previously known “Conservative” type, might have taught the East German incomer a thing or two about the things a creative person must be prepared to do in order to make a go of things on the Isle of Sheppey.
Marine Parade Nos. 26 (Johnson), 25 & 24, with windproof chimney belvedere (Aynscomb-Harris).
Although he could be quite insistent about his status as the only professionally trained artist on the island, Martin Harris (as he was known on Sheppey) did not espouse any of the approaches my friends saw emerging on the new Diploma in Art and Design programme at Canterbury College of Art in the early Seventies. The man who was then principal of this establishment, a Scottish painter named Thomas Watt, himself appointed from Leeds, espoused a post-Cézanne style of drawing and painting from the figure. He also spent a lot of time in his studio making sumptuous paintings with “splodges of colour”, so one former student recalls,
while the established staff tended, according to the same sources, to head for the pub at lunchtime and only reappear to repeat the performance on their next teaching day. If Canterbury was then among the most creative art colleges in the country, this was largely thanks to the younger teachers, including the Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos, who joined as a lecturer in 1970, and the part-time tutors. Geoff Rigden was a strong and original abstract painter — a long way, as former student Humphrey Ocean remembers, from being just another derivative “cadet in the good ship Hoyland”. Ian Dury, who lectured at Canterbury between 1970 and 1973 (and who once characterised Rigden’s students as “thrill painters”), represented the other side of the coin. Figuration and detail were his thing: his paintings offered a smuttier, more sequinned version of the British pop art espoused by Peter Blake, under whom Dury had studied at the Royal College of Art in London. Like Rigden, Dury impressed students by really putting the time in (most of the part-timers were around late on the days when they stayed overnight in Canterbury), and also in his ambition for serious work.
Some good painters would emerge from among Dury’s students, as would the anti-prog rock “dance band” Kilburn and the High Roads, which Dury set up at the college, having realised with the help of his students — “we laughed at his jokes”, remembers Ocean — that he was actually a better performer than he was an artist. A different forcefield had developed around another part-time tutor, Michael Craig Martin. Having returned to the country from America in 1966, he was developing a more “conceptual” approach than the painters. His own works at this time included “box” sculptures that weren’t boxes at all, and a creation entitled Oak Tree (1973), now in the Tate collection, which an uneducated viewer might reasonably decide was actually a glass placed on a glass bathroom shelf with an attendant text asserting that it was an oak tree. One erstwhile student, who preferred the arts of etching and traditional sign-writing to conceptual manoeuvres of this kind, remembers disputing Craig Martin’s suggestion that the yellow lines painted along the edge of the road were in any sense “like” the solvent flows to be found in the American Morris Louis’ paintings. Another recalls his sense of disbelief when Craig Martin declared, more than a decade before he went off to implement his plan with the help of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and other future YBAs at Goldsmith’s College in London, that he would like to raise a generation of artists unburdened by any familiarity with traditional technique.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 34