The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  By the time their discussion had moved on to the recently imposed ban on using garden hosepipes, thanks to which Johnson’s parched lawn was unlikely to be improved by the “capful of rain the wind was scattering across the island at the moment”, Jonathan was driving along what he took to be “an unfrequented road” a couple of miles to the east. Suddenly, “his car conked out, throwing him through the windscreen, and across several yards of jagged cement that ripped open his skin”. Jonathan had lost consciousness when his head hit the ground, and “much to his relief, since a second car was unexpectedly there on the street, occupied by a woman and numerous children and now lightly dented by Jonathan’s; he would not have enjoyed waking up with such a memory. He could rely on our obituaries, his wife likewise: He’d only had three half-pints, we say, and: It must have been this cloudburst. The usual sort of thing one tells a woman who might be half an hour away from a widow’s fate. Here, with the ambulance and police hurrying to the scene, is where the story would end in many another part of the world”.

  “Not so”, however, “on the Isle of Sheppey”. Instead of “preparing a statement and exploring the possibility of pressing charges against Jonathan”, the driver of the other car “calls the ambulance for him and stands faithfully by as he is loaded into it”. She picks up one of Jonathan’s shoes, which she finds some fifty feet from the wreck, hoping that it might still be fit for use. “Neither her children’s bewilderment nor her own rain-ruined hairdo is enough to make her husband decide to bellow pre-emptively at Mrs Jonathan, rather he gives her his card and promises to help her however he can with the insurance company. So Jonathan’s wife has something in her hand as she is driven off to casualty with the nearly lifeless man”.

  The hospital is on the mainland, ten miles away in Gillingham, but Jonathan’s wife soon has “someone at her side” as she waits outside the operating theatre in which her husband “might well be dying under the doctor’s knife”. The man in question had been standing next to Jonathan at the bar, and knew how to be helpful: “he lied the three pints down to one and a quarter, applied the worthy adjective ‘brilliant’ to Jonathan’s driving abilities, and above all assured her that the children in the other car may, at the very worst, have had a hair on their heads bent out of shape”. By the time of the second emergency operation, at around midnight, he is still there, failing to distract the nearly widowed lady from thoughts of “how handy a trust in God sometimes was, in case there should be one”, by pointing out “the blind smile” that could surely be seen, oxygen mask permitting, on Jonathan’s face.

  Jonathan would later marvel at the persistence of this particular friend: “he had spent almost the whole night lurking in the hospital corridor? On his feet? Without smoking? Well if they’d had a chair there … he retorted, almost snippily”. Before that, however, his wife had to deal with a different challenge. The surgeon had at first left it open whether Jonathan would ever speak again, or, indeed, be anything other than “a total write-off like his car”. So how was she to get back to the hospital to visit him? It was a long way off and the “less-than-rapid” train was expensive. The answer was provided by the driver of the car Jonathan had crashed into, who called “not lusting for revenge but rather offering to lend her his second car!” “How embarrassing”, then that “Jonathan’s wife does not even know how to drive, she has him for that. Not now. From that morning on there was a private taxi service for her, she could call upon neighbours, friends, and acquaintances round the clock and she sat at Jonathan’s bedside twice a day”. At home, meanwhile, there was “Help with the children, with shopping, with staying by the phone — all of that was casually included in the net of assistance that had been woven around her”. Despite the penalty points that eventually appeared on his licence, Jonathan remained adamant that the blame belonged to the used-car dealer who had obviously unloaded a car with “defective steering” on him. “Asked in an official capacity whether he was feeling any pain, he [had] answered like the legendary Indian nailed to a tree with a hail of arrows: Only when I larf”.

  *

  Two years earlier, in October 1976, Johnson had described the events behind “An Exemplary Case” in a letter to the German writer Hans Joachim Schädlich, then living under increasingly difficult circumstances in the GDR. Having outlined the story of “Jonathan’s” accident and community-assisted recovery, he manoeuvred around the unspoken question of drink-driving and its advisability or otherwise to declare that he could think of no place in the world where one might rely so completely on friendship and solidarity as the Isle of Sheppey. He went further, suggesting that, by moving to Sheerness, he had found his way into a “moral utopia”.2

  Sheerness as a “moral utopia”? Definitely not for Mr Eric Nicholls, the publican at the Brewery Tap, on Sheerness High Street. Johnson’s newspaper tells us that, during the night of 10 December 1974, he was knocked about and tied up by a pair of bungling Sheppey brothers who, in the course of a burglary, locked him in the lavatory where he was discovered the next morning in such a traumatised state that he died a few days later.3

  And not for the TV “psychic” Mia Dolan, who grew up during these years in Minster, a mile or two east along the coast from Sheerness. Her father was a former merchant seaman who had gone into sales, while her mother came from a family that “stretched its roots between Italy and Lancashire” and had settled on Sheppey after her grandfather was posted to an army barracks there. In her memoir, The Gift: The Story of an Ordinary Woman’s Extraordinary Power,4 Dolan describes the simple pleasures of an island childhood in which she’d enjoyed the shingle beach and dreamed of becoming a classical ballerina after excelling in lessons at a local dance school. Unfortunately, her childhood was also disrupted by the molestations of “Uncle Arthur”. The abuse had resumed when a man of twenty or so hit on her, still only thirteen or fourteen, at an under-sixteen disco at the Sheppey Comprehensive School. “Tony” stalked Dolan for weeks, hanging around her school and house, jumping out of bushes to grab her as she passed: he even followed her to Devon, where her worried parents had sent her to stay with a grandparent for safety, and trapped her overnight in a Victorian beach shelter. Six weeks after the Devon police dismissed her attacker without charge and sent her back to her parents on Sheppey, “Tony” caught up with her again at the Sheerness fairground, took her off at knifepoint (“the blade was a foot long”) to an isolated and desolate slope along the seafront — local boys called it “the Greenhill Café”, when they invited girls to join them there — and raped her.

  After reporting the assault, which appears from Johnson’s newspaper collection to have happened in 1975, Dolan discovered the dark side of island solidarity. She faced the accusations circulated by Tony’s friends, who visited the accused on remand, believed his lying protestations of innocence, and put it about that she was “a slag” and a “prick tease” who had invited the approach. She was attacked by a gang of girls in the toilets at school and, when she struck back at them, falsely accused of being the aggressor by the supposedly progressive headmaster. Eventually, “Tony” was tried at Maidstone Crown Court and Dolan endured two days of interrogation in which his barrister tried to portray this fourteen-year-old child as a willing and experienced seductress. Her assailant got seven years, and Dolan went home to a family facing other difficulties thanks to her father’s loss of health and bankruptcy.

  In her memoir, Mia Dolan remembers the rape as the moment she realised, as her spirit seemed to split away and float somewhere above her assaulted body, that she possessed the psychic powers that would later bring her fame as a clairvoyant, while also drawing clients, including the derelict Royal known as “Fergie”,5 across the Swale to Sheerness, where they hoped to receive insights from the spirit world. Dolan may well have discovered unexpected potentialities in “ordinary” life, but her story hardly adds to the case for considering Sheerness a “utopia”, moral or otherwise.

  That, however, is really not what the German author meant
. In a later letter to Schädlich, Johnson, who was well aware of the town’s underside, admitted that his wife Elisabeth also reckoned that he had exaggerated the virtues of Sheerness when claiming it as such. And yet the idea of utopia was definitely alive in the Marxist literature Schädlich and Johnson had studied as students at Leipzig: repudiated in its totalitarian forms but also rehabilitated, not as a fantasy island projected across space into some remote ocean, nor as a programmatic blueprint to be realised through a power-grab and a Stalinist re-engineering of the human soul, but as the pre-figurative glimpse of a possible future in the present. This attempted redefinition of utopia, by now located in historical time rather than geographical space, could be found in various sources known to Johnson and his correspondent: in Ernst Bloch’s idea of “hope”, in the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács’s identification of a “second ethics” opposed to the “logic of the institutions of the state”,6 and perhaps especially in the thought of Bertolt Brecht, particularly in the fragmentary Me-ti texts from the Thirties (recently translated as Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things7) which Johnson had edited for his and Brecht’s publisher, Peter Suhrkamp, while living in West Berlin in the early Sixties.8 Here, the utopian impulse is explored as an “intention” for the better, connected to the comparatively modest business of “drawing the conclusion from what already exists” while both ignoring the “priests” demanding the realisation of the “Great Order” and also leaving “as much as possible open”.9 It is possible, too, that, even without a few pints of Hürlimann lager, these moments of informal solidarity among people living largely offshore from the state and its regulating institutions somehow impressed Johnson as an unexpected Kentish echo of the suppressed capabilities he had seen breaking through at critical moments in Eastern Europe: the courageous Christian students he had seen jailed or driven into exile from their school at Güstrow, the worker’s revolt in East Berlin in 1953, the revolutionary outbreak snuffed out in Hungary in 1956 and — Gesine Cresspahl’s destination in the still unwritten closing days of Anniversaries IV — the “Socialism with a human face” promised by the Prague Spring of 1968.

  “Charles” Johnson would surely have encountered rude English guffaws had he ventured the idea that the Isle of Sheppey might harbour any kind of “moral utopia” in the Sea View or the Napier. There were, however, some on the island who don’t just laugh at the thought. I never asked Susan Harris what she made of her neighbour’s suggestion, but we can deduce a possible answer from some of the things she did say about the island. She knew full well that Sheppey fell far short of perfection, but she also defended it repeatedly against the mainland knockers who derided the island as a sink of poverty and degradation where people and projects only went to fail. Her point in these defensive interjections, which she was quite capable of making in public meetings as well as in letters to national newspapers, was that islanders did what they could to watch out for one another: “there is”, she declared, “a lot of humanity on the island”.

  And how did the idea sound to Carole Contant, who stayed in Sheerness until after her husband Michael’s death in 2002? She has no recollection of Uwe Johnson and would not herself have used such a phrase as “moral utopia”. She was, nevertheless, intrigued when I told her that the writer had claimed such a thing for the town where she and her family had lived and performed with their Rainbow Steel Band. Sheerness was poorly placed in conventional terms, and no stranger to failure, violence and grinding poverty. Yet it was also rich in sympathy and a broken-off kind of solidarity that may well sometimes have crossed the frontier of strict legality. Even the local police, she said while gathering up her memories on the phone, seemed “not too bad”. All her children, meanwhile, had grown up as “people persons” — good at taking people as they were and finding possibilities in others, an approach they had learned during a childhood in which, even on the hard-pressed street that was Delamark Road, the door was open to everyone. Carole’s daughter Jeanette remembers this quality of their life in Sheerness too — people of all sorts coming and going, mothers bringing children to stay overnight because their father had come home drunk. Blue Town was definitely rough, but there was a lot of good to be found among people who were only just coping or getting by. In one of her recent Bahá’í-influenced songs, Jeanette, who nowadays lives in Florida and performs as “Kiskadee”, sings “I may not even like you, but you’re my brother. One God, one religion, one human race”.

  *

  There was another Sheerness householder who might have helped Johnson deepen his understanding of the situation gripping the people of this town, where a sense of abandonment and disintegration coincided with the defensive solidarity he had glimpsed from his observation posts in the Sea View Hotel and Napier Tavern.

  By the mid-Seventies, Ray Pahl, who had been Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent since it opened in 1965, was in no doubt that Britain was undergoing a chaotic transition from a planned economy in which full employment had seemed an achievable aim, to a far less predictable one that was already producing high levels of unemployment. Though the prospect of a “post-industrial society” alarmed many, it had also been welcomed with various degrees of recklessness by followers of various alternative and oppositional creeds. From such perspectives, intimations of the coming scarcity provoked a sense of promise as well as fear. Though devastating in its impact on long-established communities, “deindustrialization” might also mean a welcome kick in the teeth for the bosses, just rewards for a country that had built its wealth on imperialist extraction, a preliminary step along the road to revolution, an end to dehumanising jobs and the manufactured needs of consumerism. For readers of the Californian prophet of counterculture, Theodore Roszak, we were living Where the Wasteland Ends: “In that sense, there is nothing to do, nowhere to get. We need only ‘stand still in the light’”. So this champion of “old Gnosis” concluded on the last page of his book of 1972, subtitled Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society.10 The apocalyptic vision was shared by other green voices too: from Edward Goldsmith’s Ecology magazine with its 1972 edition Blueprint for Survival, which disconcerted its more critical readers by failing adequately to distinguish its own recommended “back-to-the-land” movement from the variety pursued by Pol Pot in Cambodia, to the gentler anti-growth types who dreamed of fitting domes, solar panels and earth-closets from the Whole Earth Catalogue into a smoke-free English utopia that owed as much to the upper Thames visions of William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890) as to the Shire of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

  There is nothing at all to suggest that Ray Pahl was personally tempted by the unstolen “wonders of being without”11 — hymned by Spirogyra, an acid-folk band launched at the University of Kent in 1969. He was, however, intrigued by the idea that leaving behind the expectations of full employment and “affluence” may not be a matter of loss alone. Indeed, he would offer several grateful nods to Marshall Sahlins’ 1972 book Stone Age Economics, with its exploration of the “original affluent society” said to have been inhabited by our hunter-gathering ancestors: folk who don’t appear, at least in Sahlins’ pages, to have “worked” very hard at all for their survival (this view has since been much criticised, not least by Ted Kaczynski, the imprisoned Unabomber, who has taken Sahlins to task for grossly underestimating the work it actually takes, say, to turn a deer skin into something even a stone age being might consider wearing).12

  Pahl started with the fact that “very little creative political thinking”13 was being applied to the British economy’s collapsing condition. Industrial manufacturing was in apparently irreversible decline, transformed by various developments including the “micro-processor revolution”,14 which was already promising to undermine established habits of centralisation and nationalisation.15 An average of 134,000 British jobs had been lost every year over the decade up to 1976. It had been anticipated that the gap would be closed by new openings in the service industries, yet by the mid-S
eventies that expansion seemed to have stalled. It was with these facts playing on his mind that Pahl started visiting some of the coastal towns in north Kent, intent on exploring the implications of this decline in industrial employment “for the organisation of our society”16 and to ask what might become of both “work” and “unemployment” in a society facing an apparently permanent dearth of jobs.

  Uwe Johnson may have been in a league of his own, but Pahl wasn’t an entirely easy man either, and he leaves little doubt that he was relieved to be escaping his colleagues as he climbed into his car and headed north to the Medway towns. Personal antipathies aside, he had wanted to break with the “Golden Age”17 stereotypes pinioning too much sociological discussion of work in Britain. Although many of the students at the University of Kent knew better from their own experience, their lecturers were still influenced by an anachronistic notion of the “traditional” working-class community — an absurdly generalised idea, so Pahl claimed, which provided no way of telling the difference between, say, a Yorkshire mining village and an East Anglian fishing village, and which came encrusted with auxiliary clichés: the “typical image of the factory worker attending meetings of his union”, for example, or the assumption that this industrious fellow’s wife stayed at home cooking and looking after the children, and that “work” only meant “employment” as represented by the full-time male job.18