The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  If Loxton impressed Poule as a “fabulous” artist, so too did Martin Harris, the artist responsible for “Barrie’s” mistaken assumption that Hann Trier’s painting was an attempt of Johnson’s own. Poule had indeed been asked to photograph Harris’ “brilliant paintings” before they were sent for exhibition or sale in galleries. He also used to accompany Harris to London to photograph some of his larger panoramic pictures — sometimes eight foot in length — showing them in situ in hotel or office reception areas or, as was the case with his series of four large panels of St Katherine’s dock, actually painted on doors, which hung in Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street.

  Poule doesn’t at first remember much about Uwe Johnson, but a glance at the photograph on the cover of Inselgeschichten starts him off. He looks at it, weighing up the pipe, the spectacles (“rather NHS, don’t you think?”), and the glum unyielding expression: “I don’t think I took him seriously”, he says of this “not talkative” customer. He later confirms that Johnson was introduced to the studio by Martin Harris: “He liked being called Charlie, and he visited the studio a few times for other photographic needs. He was distinctive as he always smoked his pipe or cigars (in those days it was allowed) and had a German accent. He was a gentleman, but with no sense of humour”. As for Blackboard, faint memories are stirring there too. He doesn’t recall feeling shocked or disconcerted when it was unwrapped in his crowded studio, nor assuming that Johnson must have painted it himself. “It didn’t look anything wonderful”, he says of Hann Trier’s painting, diplomatically, but in a tone that made it clear that he would not have chosen a Trier over another Harris or a Loxton to join the lighthouse on his own living room wall.

  At the same time, he confirms the accuracy of various details in Johnson’s account. For his studio work, he used a Linhof large-format camera and five-by-four-inch sheet film for copying. And the young school-leavers? “We had a YOP programme”, he says, referring to the Manpower Services Commission’s Youth Opportunities Programme, which had been launched under the Labour government of James Callaghan in 1978, with the aim of helping sixteen to eighteen-year-olds into employment. Like Race Furniture and other employers who set out to make manageable and productive workers of Sheppey’s youth, Poule was strict on matters of discipline. His policy was to recruit young and insist on “proper rules” from the start. One unbreachable edict declared that “the customer is always right”. Another decreed that you shouldn’t start sneering or swearing until after the customers have left the shop. As for what he calls “the dancing chair”, there was, as he later emailed to explain, more to this than the crazy swivelling structure than caught Johnson’s eye:

  I had made a modified revolving chair, to use as a platform to get height and position to capture an object, sometimes even with a tripod attached! I used to stand on it and sometimes it did swing a bit. Obviously he must have thought this was quite funny and he must have been worrying about his painting getting damaged more than me falling off.

  So it must have been a funny situation: let’s try to imagine the YOPers holding the studio lights and learning to spot them at the right place and myself with a 3 kilo camera swinging on a rotating chair and trying to focus on his painting. Mr Johnson, by now, must be having some concern about his painting and at the same time nervously smoking his pipe/cigars and watching every movement we made through his circular glasses.

  It must have been a bit of a comedy show (like Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em — Michael Crawford visited Studio 137 in the old days). Happily we must finally have succeeded, as he did not make any complaint after all that. Our only problem was that the whole studio smelled of tobacco afterwards.7

  Poule notes Johnson’s account of being asked for payment in advance: “I cannot remember for sure, but I must have asked how he would make the payment. I asked because I had previously photographed some pictures for local farmers and one of them was of a white horse/s in a field, which was still hanging on the wall because he/she never collected or paid for the print”. After reading Johnson’s description of the episode, he repeats that Trier’s painting was simply “not charming enough” for his liking, and if he gave priority to the baby and aerial jobs mentioned by Johnson, this may indeed have been because he was not convinced he would ever “get paid for something so basic”.

  Studio 137 carried on into the mid-Eighties, with Tim Oxley increasingly in charge. In 1980, George Poule started a new business, Travel World, based in a shop on the Broadway, which included a VIP Cruise Club and became one of the biggest travel agencies in the south-east. However, the days when it took art and expensive equipment to make a good photograph were passing, and he eventually sold the photography business. When I spoke to him at the end of 2015, the building, which George described as his “pension”, was tenanted by the Direct Pizza Company.

  PART V.

  SOCIETY: “I DON’T WANT TO GET PERSONAL”

  You have another suggestion for me: the neighbours. I have close to fifteen thousand of them; only nine hundred and eighty of them occupy my imagination, since they are unemployed and some of them are ashamed to live off the dole.

  — Uwe Johnson, “Consider Yourself Many Times Thanked”, Die Zeit, 13 June 1980.

  23. BECOMING “CHARLIE”

  I share in the lives of the people here, I want to be part of it and understand it.

  — Uwe Johnson in a letter to Erika Klemm, 31 January 1976, Inselgeschichten, p. 101.

  The air ticket receipts preserved in the Johnson Archive at Rostock show that Johnson never really settled for the life of a marooned castaway. There were trips to America (two in 1975 alone) and he frequently flew back and forth to West Germany for readings, award ceremonies, and meetings with his publisher or the Academy of Literature. Johnson may have been content to leave Michael Hamburger’s Suffolk home to the younger German émigré, W.G. Sebald, who would later feature Hamburger and his apple trees in The Rings of Saturn, but there were offshore excursions in England too. He would often cross the Swale to visit London, and not just to make occasional contributions to BBC radio documentaries about the divided Germany. He visited the far side of the Thames Estuary in Essex, and also explored the Kentish mainland: the cathedral at Canterbury, Dover with its “Shakespeare Cliffs”, and the coast path around the Isle of Thanet to Ramsgate from Broadstairs, where he was keen to show the Dickens house to Rudolf Augstein, a West German journalist who had been among the founders of Der Spiegel magazine.

  In between his travels, however, and despite the rising impatience of his publisher Siegfried Unseld, who sometimes accused him of wallowing in the miseries his English exile imposed on him, Johnson really did find a world for himself in Sheerness — much of it concentrated along a few hundred yards of the Broadway, built as the proud spine of Marine Town but struggling to survive in the Seventies. The Catholic Church and the Victoria Working Men’s Club held out on the north side of the road, as did both the post office and the stationary and book shop, run by the local publisher A.J. Cassell (and well used by the Johnsons) directly to the west of it at No. 31. However, a number of the institutions that had defined the street for earlier generations were dying or already gone. The Rio Cinema endured and so did the Argosy across the road from it, which had converted to Bingo in 1968. The Hippodrome, located in a building erected as Victoria Hall Theatre in 1870 and said to be the place where the local comedian Rod Hull began his career after the Second World War (at that stage allegedly without his emu), had recently given way to a nondescript bank. Despite a last-ditch introduction of nude girls on stage — according to one disapproving witness these figures, who were also obliged to remain motionless to stay within the law, “stood there on pedestals … starkers but covered in a veil”1 — the site was cleared in 1970.

  The schools in the area had also fallen into redundancy when the island’s new comprehensive school opened at Halfway in 1970. By October 1974, as Johnson learned from the Sheerness Times Guardian, the long-empty and
increasingly vandalised Technical School for Boys which had prepared many of its charges for apprenticeships in the dockyard and its associated industries, was leased to a company seeking planning permission to convert it into flats and community facilities. The decision finally to demolish the building — already condemned in the Pevsner guide as “anaemic neo-Wren by W.H. Robinson”2 — was announced in May 1975. “The outside is attractive”, admitted the chairman of the responsible planning committee, “but the inside is diabolical”, and “not suited” to any of the council’s purposes.3 By August, the local paper found nothing to show but a pile of rubble soon to be cleared to make way for a temporary carpark. “It had the appearance of a country estate which was in the wrong place”, remembered the reporter Bel Norris, before placing it on record that “Even with the continuous drone of traffic and the distraction of sea views, students had managed high marks in examinations”.4

  By the time the Johnsons landed in Marine Town, efforts were already being made to check the slide into dereliction and newbuilt mediocrity. The case for restoration and reuse of buildings was being asserted by civic-minded members of the leavening minority Martin Harris described as both admirable and too small really to lift the town out of its difficulties. These local activists did, nevertheless, have some achievements to their credit. The Sheppey Entertainments Association may not have made it onto the council’s list of the island’s rich array of voluntary associations (a copy of which Johnson had on his shelves), but it had nevertheless been set up in the late Sixties to raise the funds to buy a hall that had once been the Sunday School of a long-since burned-down congregationalist church, and convert it into the Sheppey Little Theatre, which was opened, thanks partly to a frantic last-minute bond-selling campaign, as a 130-seat venue by the left-wing Labour Minister for the Arts, Hugh Jenkins, in October 1975. The Sheerness Times Guardian kept the Johnsons and its other readers informed about the events held here, although its reviewers would repeatedly note with regret that touring shows from the far side of the Swale were poorly attended, unlike the performances of the Contant family’s Rainbow Steel Band.

  The “blight” fought by these local citizens also extended north of the Broadway to the sea wall where the prospect of demolition had long hung over one of Marine Town’s earliest and most singular buildings, Neptune Terrace. Here too, however, public policy was changing in accordance with the new mood. In January 1975, a previous plan to flatten Neptune Terrace and associated buildings complicating the promenade here was finally dropped by the council planners.5 The residents who expressed relief at this decision included Mr Stan Northover of the Cellar Club — a late-night boozer’s den at 9 Neptune Terrace whose ceiling and walls are said to have been adorned with hanging chamber pots. He and his wife would be moving on shortly — he explained that the family needed more space — but he commended the terrace as “beautifully placed, solidly built with stacks of character”.6 Mr and Mrs Barry Norman were only in their second year as proprietors of the Dolphin Café next door, although they understood that “this part of the terrace has been a café for about 25 years”. The eighty-five-year-old resident Albert Tyler also welcomed the planners’ change of mind, confirming that Neptune Terrace was “historic” and should indeed be saved, despite its highly exposed position on the sea front, and properly recognised as “a tourist attraction”. So this rashly-placed terrace survived to be commended as “a wonderfully amateurish piece of stuccoed classicism” in John Newman’s revised edition of Pevsner’s Kent: North East and East, published in 2013.

  Neptune Terrace (detail).

  Both the county planners and Swale Borough Council, the wider district authority that took over from Sheppey’s three local authorities in 1974, had got the message by the end of 1976, when Johnson’s local paper printed an editorial confirming their acceptance that “Marine Town was well worth saving”.7 The Housing Action Area, promised in April that year (as long as enough residents in the working-class streets behind Johnson’s house raised themselves sufficiently to apply for “bath and basin grants”),8 was welcomed as a rejection of the “pull it down” approach that would have flattened not just Neptune Terrace but the “friendly community” behind the Johnsons’s house, where Victorian terraces might have gone to make way for “soulless, featureless boxes”. “There are too few places left in the country where pubs nestle amidst the rows of houses and where you don’t have to go to the concrete shopping centre with its vandalised water fountain and piece of misunderstood sculpture to buy a loaf of bread and a packet of tea”. The Sheerness Times Guardian hoped to see Marine Town saved as “a memorial to the time when senseless demolition came to an end”.

  *

  Such was the little Kentish world in which Johnson established a daily routine for himself. On 6 March 1979, he informed Helen Wolff that he ordered his hours “tidily” in the hope of encouraging progress in his work, and creating a skeleton on which the hours of each day might be hung.9 Having cleared all correspondence from his desk by 1pm, he would walk across the road to the Dolphin Café, one of several businesses holding out on the promenade above Marine Parade — all of them, as is remembered by Ian Lambeth, who grew up here in the Seventies, “hoping to catch whatever was left of the tourist trade”.10 There was a seasonal beach store that sold buckets, spades, inflatable lilos and other “classic seaside paraphernalia”. There was a pool and snooker hall (which appears to have joined the migration to bingo by the early Eighties) and also an amusement arcade — K’s Kasino — with its traditional collection of coin cascades, one-armed bandits, a mechanical horserace, and a food service of the “ice cream and chips” variety. According to Lambeth, who remembers the place from his present home in Florida, Johnson is likely to have heard the thin whining of the arcade’s sirens as he made his way to the easternmost house in Neptune Terrace. The Dolphin Café was “a pretty generic ‘caff’” with a “serving counter at the back of the room, small tables, fried breakfast, fried everything, there may even have been handwritten signs in the windows advertising the available combinations”. Johnson regularly came here for lunch, secure in the knowledge that “Denise” would have his black tea ready by the time he reached the counter.11 Over the years, he would sympathise with the proprietors he saw struggling to make a living from this marginal outpost of seaside capitalism while also registering the systematic and inevitable nature of their defeat. In a letter written after the close of the summer season in 1980, he described the place under an ironically adjusted name for a couple of East German friends (both by that time working as art historians in Dresden) from his student days in Leipzig:

  [DIAGONALLY ACROSS FROM MY WINDOW, TO THE LEFT]

  Diagonally across from my window to the left, improbable as it may seem to you, begins a row of houses named Neptune Terrace and containing the Dauphin Café, where I get a hot meal of bacon and egg around noon. A few working men, gas-meter-readers, drivers, are there too, and they can eat heartier meals than that because they are less fat than I am. A misfortune occurred there this weekend. The fifth crew manning the café (since I’ve been going there), a married couple with two developmentally disabled children, has had to give up. They’d really tried. They wanted to make the establishment — basically just a single, rather dingy room — more attractive with a fancy curtain over the shop window. For every single one of the eight tables, they purchased new salt and pepper shakers, plastic, stainless-steel-looking, and probably at least ninety pence each. They greeted every guest, upon their entrance and also their departure. They noticed and remembered when someone regularly ordered the same thing. But only rarely were more than seven of the nineteen wobbly chairs occupied, and when the family huddled together at a table during quarter-hour spans of time without much of anything to do, they seemed to be taking refuge with each other. There were probably fights from the stress too; one time, the woman, some portion of disaster already present in her unwieldy, misplaced corpulence and her insistence on wearing black clothes, was se
en running through the town in a state of excitement, in tears, out of control, passing people and not even noticing one of her regular guests, me. They had placed their hopes on next summer and its tourists, but in vain; on Friday, she stacked the furniture crying, and an awkwardly written note asking to be excused for the early closing hung in the window. On Monday, a new family took over, their predecessors having vanished from the island into a void that I picture to myself as a bare, dark, expensive room in a slum — all because there wasn’t enough money on one occasion for the thirty pounds rent that someone in Gillingham has the right to rake in just because at some point in the past he was able to buy the building.

  [Letter to Lore and Joachim Menzhausen, 29 October 198012]

  Having lunched at the “Dauphin”, Johnson would complete whatever shopping or errands he had in the town, taking care to be home by 2pm so that the next spell of “sitting in front of a blank white sheet of paper in the typewriter can start punctually”.13 In the evening, he would walk along the Broadway to the pub, either the Napier, on the junction where Alma Road comes in from the south, or, in the earlier years especially, the Sea View Hotel across the road a little further along:

  The two hours I spend with people in the “Sea View” every evening offer a kind of substitute for socializing. The conversations are strictly limited to the weather; since the floods at New Year’s, they could be extended to cover the relationship between the published high tide and the direction, also the strength, of the wind. On the other hand, the prices went up again yesterday so there was a little discussion of the economic union with Europe (they were against). And if someone explains a bandage on his hand after all — thereby expanding the scope of the topic of conversation to his job, the ride to work, the behaviour of the attending physician — he will end by thanking me for my interjections, emphasizing the conventional behaviour: Thank you for the company, Charles. This game of stock phrases and silences never lasts longer than two hours for me, and then, from all sides: Tada, Charles!14