Enright, who was still in and out of the Sea View in 1974, remembers Johnson as an unexpected, perhaps rather lugubrious presence in the ground floor bar, asking questions which were not always welcome or, for that matter, taken seriously by the younger customers who may only have registered the writer as another of the town’s washed-up boozers. The Sea View was by then being given new life by Peel and Mason. Having met while on naval service in the Second World War (their engagements had included the Battle of the River Plate at the close of which the German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled outside Montevideo harbour), they had gone on to run the Admirals Walk in Blue Town. Remembered as the first openly gay couple to run a pub in Sheerness,27 they were also ahead of the council in seeing the case for the recovery and renovation of Marine Town. In October 1974, as may be read in one of Johnson’s earliest saved copies of the Sheerness Times Guardian, Ron Peel was happy to lend the paper a photograph of the area as it had been when “The Sea View was the place to reside”, and when music hall stars “like Marie Lloyd played the Hippodrome and stayed here”.28 For him the Sea View was “steeped in nostalgia and history”, and the joint licensees had become the devoted custodians of all its memories: “I love it here”, said Peel, “it isn’t too difficult to imagine the place when it boasted four bars, attracted the best clientele, and was the finest place in town”. Peel had recently paid £10 for a stone cider jar bearing the hotel’s name; it was so thickly encrusted with barnacles that he reckoned it must have been in the sea for a century. A week later he was sent an identical one that someone had dug up in a garden in Gillingham: “Call it coincidence, but there is an atmosphere about the hotel that defies description, and I can’t help feeling there is a connection between the two ‘finds’”. So Peel and Mason were engaged in a providential as well as contrary project: trying to make a going concern of the past, pushing back against the dereliction and demolition gripping so much of the area, while also fund-raising for local causes in concert with other members of the Sheppey Licensed Victuallers and Beer Retailers’ Protection Association. In November 1974, Peel claimed that “By such efforts we’ve helped to provide bedside radios for the sick, aid the lifeboat and to lay concrete paths to the new church”.
Unfortunately, the Sea View’s customers hadn’t always proved worthy of the licensees’ determination to keep this venerated Sheerness institution on the right side of oblivion. In February 1975, Peel and Mason were robbed by a group of men on a stag night pub crawl. Before moving on to trouble the next publican on their path, the celebrants had nicked an “oak plaque” the two naval veterans had commissioned to mark their war service on the cruiser HMS Ajax and the convoy-escorting destroyer HMS Kempenfelt. “We are getting sick of this pilfering”, said Peel: “Every week something is taken, not only ashtrays and ornaments, but even the chalk and darts from the board… This crowd only took the plaque — they threw the darts at an aspidistra plant and speared the leaves”.29 Of course the two publicans kept going. By November 1976, when the scaffolding that had covered the building for eight months (and confined its operation to the smallest bar) was removed, the hotel would open two bars: “sleekly modernised” but furnished in traditional style, as was promised: “We wanted the hotel to resume some of its former grandeur”.30 Aware that the place once had fourteen bedrooms and a ballroom capable of accommodating 150 guests, their dream was “to put the Sea View once more in the five-star bracket”.
By that time Johnson was already finding his place among the Sea View’s regulars: a generous supplier of coins to the Salvation Army, he also bought tickets for the lotteries run by the pub, and did so generously despite his fear that one of his numbers might come up. In December 1975, he had won an unwanted Christmas cake in a raffle held on behalf of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution: it was, as he told Alice and Dorothy Hensan in Rostock, “a veritable Alpine landscape, that cake, with ski-jumps, mountain cabins etc., and weighs about five pounds”,31 and he’d rashly bought ten tickets (“when the boys showed it to me I could read the challenge”). A few years later he would find himself pulled into a photograph that would be printed in the Sheerness Times Guardian on 15 September 1978. Col Mason, is handing a cheque for £184 to Mr Larry Larsen, the chairman of the local Kidney Unit Fund. The money for this vital hospital service had been raised by the pub, “mainly from very generous donations from customers”, although £60 had been brought in by a raffle that very night in which the winner, a lady from the Rushenden estate near Queenborough, had won a bedspread. The mayor is in attendance, complete with his chains, and so too is Johnson: an uncaptioned figure standing alongside others at the back. He looks neither well nor particularly keen to be included, but he is definitely there:
[WELCOMED INTO THE COMMUNITY]
Now, I wanted to win that bedspread for you. Further details can be found on the two enclosed raffle tickets, and as for this white monstrosity’s weight, I will say only that the ladies’ knees buckled slightly when it was placed on their two arms for them to admire it. I would also like to mention that I had in my possession the next four numbers consecutive to each of these, in other words ten chances in all to win.
The night of the draw, Norman (second from the left) was only slightly more excited than Ron (fifth from the left), the donor for this lottery. For Norman’s wife had spent more than a year knitting the bright white lump in the foreground — knitting, stitching, weaving, knotting, sewing, what do I know — and as he told a man he didn’t know, a foreigner, living on Marine Parade (third from the right), he already had three people picked out in case he won the blanket himself. Now it turns out Norman’s daughter sold the ticket
— I could kick myself! she says to one Mrs Stanton, but she is related to Norman’s family, and so off he went with the thick bale to take it to her.
If it had gone to me, you would have received quite an amazing package in the near future.
[Letter to Alice and Dorothy Hensan, 15 September 197832]
And that wouldn’t be Johnson’s only appearance in the island media. Two months later, he featured as “Mr U. Johnson” in the Sheppey Gazette, this time as the spokesman and scribe of the group of Sea View customers who had nominated Col Mason for a “Local Life Award” offered by the national Brewers and Licensees’ Association and open to pub landlords who had made a significant contribution to their community.33 In his commendation, which the paper in turn commended as the first ever gained by a Sheppey publican, Johnson mentioned Mason’s work for charity, including his successful fundraising for the hospital kidney machine (the appeal had gone ahead in a fit of broadmindedness even after a doctor came to the island to explain that the NHS unfortunately lacked the facilities to station the device in question actually on the island), and also his kindness to his competitors in the trade, who knew him as a former chairman of the Sheppey branch of the Licensed Victuallers Association. Johnson’s central point, however, was that Mason knew exactly how a publican should treat his customers:
He provides a sanctuary for the time between the strain of work and family’s demands to follow and he does it in a friendly, quiet sort of way”, says Mr U. Johnson, of Marine Parade, Sheerness, who leads a band of regulars who believe Mr Mason to be one of the best “mine hosts” in the business.… Mr Mason will blush with pride when he hears that Mr Johnson has this to say of him: “strangers, even foreigners, feel welcome … It’s a place you like to live in for one or two hours … he does not force the customer into conversation, but is always quite ready for it. He remembers customers and their habits even after they have been away for three years. He is concerned about his customers’ affairs once they are brought to his attention … he never gives away confidential information.
Such, then, was the largely male society in which Johnson occasionally let his “non-committal” guard drop. A well-kept pub may have been full of well-maintained distances, but the Sea View and Napier were also places where he was tolerated as well as mocked and sometimes even liked
too. A letter written to one of his old school friends in Güstrow reveals that he knew just what he — this curious visitor from Communist Germany — might look like to the Englishmen with whom he now rubbed along “as friends”:
[SO THAT CHARLES CAN WRITE THE RIGHT THING TOO]
Since the previous Friday, too, had turned to evening, after weather that was partly sunny but mostly blasted through with a cold wind, we’d gathered together in our male society, referred to as a beer department store, due to the prices, for we had things to discuss…
Charles comes in, the foreigner, I’ve probably told you about him already. Real name’s something totally different but who can pronounce German names like that, so we rechristened him, suits him pretty well by this point. — Gd’eevenin, Charles! Good heavening! As we expect from him, he sits down on the far left stool, which we keep free for him til at least seven, and since the evening paper for Sheerness and the region was laid out for him there as usual, he dutifully starts reading: windows broken in, TV stolen, gold watch for so many years of service…, until he notices a new sign hanging behind the bar:
DO NOT THROW / CIGARETTES ON THE FLOOR / AS PEOPLE LEAVING ON / THEIR HANDS AND KNEES / WILL BE BURNT
We know what’s coming next. Charles pulled out his notebook and writes it down. Embarrassing to him but we’re used to it. It’s one of those phrases that’s hard to remember, and Charles apparently can’t let that happen in his line of work, whatever it is, something to do with writing. Still, he does find it embarrassing to write in public, so he hurries to get it down and stick the notebook back in his pocket, so that we’ll forget about it. That’s when he finally realizes that we were all talking at once, talking like crazy.
- Just cut em off. Cut their hands off!
- Chop em off!
- Right here, at the wrist.
- As a taxpayer I represent the view that —
- Right you are! They just live off the dole. Just don’t want to work!
- I say chop em off only for repeat offenders. The first time they should just break their arm.
- Under doctor’s supervision.
By this point Charlie had understood enough to realize that we’re batting around a philosophical question — the ethics of the penal code — and he asks us the nature of the crime in question.
- We’ve been turned over! said one of the victims, in an almost enthusiastic tone. They’d had a break-in.
- They broke open the jukebox, the one-armed bandits, drank all the bottles dry —
- And the telephone? Charles asked. Did you report any calls to the phone company?
- What? we say. What are you talking about, Charles.
- They could have called Yokohama on your phone.
We just have to shake our heads at that. Only Charles could think of something like that. That’s just how he is.
- They were just amateurs, Charles.
- Young people, out for a good time.
- I’m not saying anything about anyone specifically, but the boys knew their way around, one of them could be standing right here in the room with us.
- Damn right!
- I have my ideas, I’ll tell you that.
- They took all the rum, all the martini, vodka, eggnog, but left a bottle of whisky untouched. That tells me something.
- A clue. Someone who couldn’t drink whisky!
- Chop his hands off!
- Nah, another of the victims said. If they’d only have put the empties back on the bar, though, they could’ve washed up a bit. That’s the only thing I hold against em.
But we are for chopping off, breaking, and otherwise mistreating the offending, thieving hands.
…
- Children! Children! the publican finally says — ominous, the patriarch in full possession of his householder’s rights — but it was too late, Charles had already taken in a whole heap of thought-provoking material. True, he acts like he was just reading his carefree way through the newspaper for the Isle of Sheppey and its surroundings, but we can see right through him. The truth is, he’s trying to retain and remember everything. Want to bet that when he got back home he writes it all down?
That was why we tell him, quietly and casually of course, our good wishes for Lady Di too, for 29 July namely, or rather for the morning after the wedding night: let her be in such a good mood that she says to the man in bed next to her, in a sweet voice: Oh my Royal Highness dear … do the poor get this?
So that Charles writes the good stuff down too. Because he’s going to write a book about this island of ours someday, how can you doubt it. He won’t be able to help it. Just look at us. How we’re put together. How we say whatever comes into our heads, can’t keep our mouths shut.
[Letter to Heinz Lehmbäcker, 16 April 198134]
The drinkers in the pub found ways of making their own use of Johnson’s writing habit — his papers included the typescript of a letter, written as a member of “The Oversights Committee” to be sent to a miscreant member of their company, John Jakaley, of 56 Marine Parade. As Johnson notes in a scribbled comment, this fellow was born in 1920, the son of a Russian sailor named Jakovlev who had jumped ship in 1917. He was instructed, in this communication of 9 October 1982, to buy himself a frying pan, get his eyes examined for glasses and leave his body to medical science, wrongly assumed to be pursued at the University of Kent at Canterbury (phone number provided). The fellowship of the Sea View and Napier would sometimes also include their East German friend in their trips to other hostelries on the island, and Johnson reciprocated by inviting them to join him in on longer excursions:
[AN INVOLUNTARY TRIP]
In my letter from a good month ago I told you I would be taking an involuntary trip to New York, and in fact no strike has prevented me from doing so. I had prudently invited a companion to come with me, a man known as Joe who earlier gave me my nickname on the island, Charles, and who, in the present state of consumer society, is up for any sort of small task and particularly for keeping the keys for the various businesses, from the hair salon to the funeral home. He once deflected my offered thanks for support he’d offered with the words: I did it as a friend, and perhaps we really are as friends. It was his first time taking an airplane, his first time leaving the country at all, and his experience of New York started off in an “overwhelming way”, namely with the New York Airways Sikorsky helicopter in which he was suspended for nine minutes before the crazy towers on the southern tip of Manhattan and above the parched quadrangle of Central Park. We had to do a lot of tourist things for his sake: walk across the George and Martha Washington Bridge, take a pleasure trip to Staten Island on the South Ferry (usually a ship only commuters take), drive for fun across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, go see Coney Island (in April!), and avoid Harlem because he does have a family. But I did have something to do on Upper Broadway, in Riverside Park too, and when we walked by under the windows of the building where we, this is a different we now, lived years ago, he praised the view. So it was nice to have someone along, not to be forced to be alone with the other contents of my mind, which were, of course, present enough just then, as indeed on every other day.
So, back to Sheerness: runs the answer. Here is where my taxes are paid; here stand two rooms full of material for the conclusion of Anniversaries.
[Letter to Erika Klemm, 4 May 197735]
Johnson arranged a different trip for a seventy-four-year-old — “one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island” — who is also named “Charlie”. This fellow, whom Johnson would describe as “the only new friend of my later years”,36 “had long since appointed himself to the job (although he won’t take money) of caring for the roses in Johnson’s garden, “bringing to bear the convincing argument that he is just better at it”.37 By April 1979, however, Charlie has fallen ill. As Johnson goes on to explain, he has:
[A GOOD IDEA, CHARLIE]
. . . “a sudden painful lump” in his stomach area … For weeks now he has not been able to
keep down any food, and he has gotten so weak from weight loss that he walks unsteadily. He is stubborn too, so he has only recently requested an x-ray. He is obviously in very bad shape but they’ve put him at the end of the waiting list anyway — it will be his turn in three weeks.
“Yes. What you’re thinking is what I am afraid of too”.
On days when the swelling goes down and he is “almost pain-free” Charlie, who lives alone having managed with much difficulty to get a divorce, talks about what he would like to do when he is healthy again:
“He will take a trip to the Isle of Man.
What can his visitor say? Nothing comes to mind except: Good idea, Charlie.
Yesterday he asked me (-Excuse me, Charlie, I don’t want to get personal) what I had planned for June, and I told him. I did not have a single workday free.
-- Too bad, he said. If?? In June I really do want to go to the Isle of Man, and it would have been a pleasure to ask if you would care to come with me”.
[Letter to Burgel Zeeh, 4 April 197938]
It may not have happened in June, but Johnson did respond to the request, organising a trip, negotiating it into reality by presenting it as “one of my whims”39 and then accompanying the older “Charlie” to the island that, for reasons that remained mysterious, he yearned to see. The trip would prove almost more than the gravely unwell old man could handle, but Johnson went through with it: “We spent many afternoons practicing mutual silence across two big teacups; everything that needed to had long since been said”.
24. SHEERNESS AS “MORAL UTOPIA”? (ON NOT MEETING RAY PAHL)
One of Johnson’s most complete “island stories” was written in October 1978 for an edition of a German literary journal concerned with “Exemplars”. Entitled “An Exemplary Case”, it describes the events that befell “Jonathan”, the name with which Johnson masks a man who has only consented for his experiences to be recorded on that condition and “since they’re not about me”.1 On the evening in question, Jonathan had been in the pub with “Charles” and three others. He had set off for home a little earlier than usual, apparently at his wife’s insistence, leaving fellow drinkers feeling “a little bad for him”.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 40