*
It is possible that Pahl was among the passersby who continued to peer down from the promenade along Marine Parade: hoping, even after Johnson had moved a shrub from his back garden in an attempt to reduce his visibility, to glimpse the uprooted East German writer sitting at the typewriter in his basement office. But did these two explorers of Sheerness society ever meet properly to discuss the town’s claim to “utopian” qualities? When I put that question to Claire Wallace, who conducted a lot of Pahl’s household interviews in Marine Town, she thought not — although she could just about remember “an eccentric German who lived on Marine Parade”.
We can only hypothesise, in the subjunctive mood so much favoured by Uwe Johnson. The pub would have been the obvious place for a discussion, since both men treated these hostelries as informal research institutes. We can forget the smart establishment on the Leas at the beginning of Minster to the east of Marine Town where, so Pahl claimed, “a small elite of red-faced men with large stomachs, large Fords and tinselly wives with long fingernails patronize the Playa Club on Minster Cliffs and drink many gins before their steak or scampi and chips”.71 An encounter might surely have gone better in the Sea View or the Napier. Pahl, who was a comparatively urbane figure, would not have been required to share Johnson’s enthusiasm for Shepherd Neame’s Hürlimann lager, but who could predict which version of the German author he would come up against had he ever tried to join the displaced novelist in “the game of stock phrases and silences”72 he played with the regulars? He might have been lucky and encountered the interested and sympathetic novelist who was capable both of discussing sociological theory and of exact observation of attitudes, behaviours and linguistic usage. The two investigators might have, for example, reviewed the precarious working conditions experienced by “John” who, as Johnson recorded in an unpublished note, was casually employed to drive 11 imported cars an hour from the belly of the just docked vehicle carrier to the car park three quarters of a mile away and then back by bus for the next one. He earned £2.46 an hour (after tax) on those days, and had to wash his hair every day due to the clinging stench of petrol. He had different problems when using hand trolleys to unload the banana ships. The refrigerated holds caused such dryness in his throat that he was in the habit of going to work with Thermos flasks full of beer.
Then again, Pahl might have been blanked by the “Charles” who preferred to skulk there, sullenly, inside his “bell jar of strangeness”. Worse still, he might have been repelled by the more alarming version whose heavy head could swivel round at any moment in the manner evoked by the West German novelist Martin Walser some years later, “like a howitzer” mounted on a coastal rock. This was the Johnson who, as the publican Ron Peel remembered, would interrogate people with a ferocious battery of questions until he had them all squeezed out, who remained pedantic and insistent on accuracy even (or especially) when drinking, and who would stare at a stranger who dared try his luck in the pub with such hostility that the imposter left after a single hastened pint.73
No meeting, then, but we can still register how strongly the two men’s findings in and around the pubs of Sheerness reinforce one another. Pahl provides a convincing sociological background to the evocations and encounters presented in Johnson’s letters and stories: the rise of “self-provisioning” and other DIY initiatives, the difficulty of improvising a “livelihood” in the absence of reliable jobs, even the likelihood of marital stress and breakdown as gender roles changed. Both observers were interested in the ways in which the people of the island made sense of their situation. For Pahl, the prevailing attitudes, which are also captured in Johnson’s informal despatches from the barstool, include a forceful and reactive patriotism combined with a libertarian mistrust and, where possible, disengagement from all branches of government. Both observers were familiar with the moaning and hand-wringing with which people expressed their “utter powerlessness in the face of forces based largely outside the island”.74 Both registered that this sense of helplessness was often mixed with a paradoxically fond regard for the employers that did produce jobs in the locality — as distinct from the council and the statutory authorities, which were more or less universally reviled.75
Like Johnson, Pahl saw the people of Sheerness as everyday sociologists and philosophers, vernacular raconteurs who had their own theories of history and society, their own polarised stories of “them” against “us”. They were highly susceptible to “Churchillian pastiche”76 and it was surely not only during the national steel strike of 1980, which the men at Sheerness Steel refused to join, that the attractions of a “‘Passport to Pimlico’ type of UDI” were loudly extolled on the island. The residents had variously stylised ways of looking up at the ceiling and groaning, in the phrase Pahl quotes from a local councillor, that “Enough is Enough”. “Many islanders”, he remarks, “cannot see the present except in terms of its decline from the past”.77 This tendency to see the world in terms of “before” and “after” is to be found elsewhere around the Thames Estuary. Canvey Island’s well-known guitarist Wilko Johnson once told me that while people of his parents’ generation living “in England” tended generally to employ the Second World War as the turning point, the decline and fall remembered “on Canvey” pivoted around the fatal floods of 1953.78 On Sheppey, where nobody died in the inundation of 1953, it was the closure of the naval dockyard that formed the key break. So powerful was the sense of “the world we have lost” that, as Pahl was intrigued to discover, it was claimed as a personal injury even by people who had moved to the island since 1960.
Pahl offered a cod-sociological typology of “Islanders’ Ways of Making Sense of Their World” as he had encountered them when talking to people at home or in cafés, clubs and pubs — and here too his observations share a lot with those of Johnson. According to the “Durkheimian myth”, the island had never recovered from the dockyard closure. Before that, they had enjoyed a “strong sense of social cohesion… built up over the centuries, based on the pride of craftsmanship, the patriotism associated with working for the Army and Navy, and the solidarity based on working men’s clubs and the co-operative movement”.79 This particular “theory from below” was strongly supported by the Sheerness Times Guardian, which resorted to cavalier and bizarre invocations of history in order “to foster the dominance of an imagined past over the present”. So strongly was this view felt that, in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s war in the south Atlantic, one correspondent urged readers to think of moving to the heavily subsidised Falkland Islands, where they would surely get looked after far better by the British government than on Sheppey.
Espoused even by pub-goers who had no time at all for any kind of socialism, the “Marxist myth” portrayed the islanders as members of an isolated and trapped labour force, a captive and characteristically docile “reserve army of labour” that had been profitably abused by capitalist extractors who came to suck the wealth out of Sheppey and, given the extensive involvement of foreign capital and companies in and around the de-unionised port, often out of Britain too.
The Weberian myth, alternately, emphasised the trials of people who found themselves helpless in the face of rationalisation and bureaucratisation. As Pahl writes, “Resentment against the apparently ever-expanding state was a common topic of pub conversation in working-class areas”.80 Island solidarity was inextricably connected to self-defence against bad council housing, insensitive social security officials “comprehensive schools that do not seem self-evidently good things”,81 and also, as Johnson’s story of “Jonathan” invites us to add, the drink-driving laws and breathalysers introduced by Barbara Castle in the late Sixties. Whatever the issue, the decision-makers were always elsewhere, and the island “has always been victim of circumstances over which it has no control”.82
A great deal of energy was also devoted to repudiating the “psychogenetic” theory, imposed on the islanders by visiting employers, officials of local government or welfare state a
gencies and, of course, by mainland observers who have long enjoyed cracking jokes about “Sheermess” or even “Sheernastiness”. These mainland stories imposed various false ideas about the islanders’ origins — alleging that they were the descendants of escaped convicts from the hulks once moored in the Medway, or the result of “substantial inbreeding” from “a small number of landless quasi-gypsy families” or cockneys relocated early in the twentieth century. It was also said that the IQ of Sheppey was lower than elsewhere in the county, and that there were more ESN pupils in the school. Pahl dismisses the theory as a “pernicious myth”, which his own investigations had proved wrong in every aspect. Johnson knew that the sun sometimes shone on “backwaters” too. On a good day, he might even have agreed with the woman who betrayed no trace of irony as she told Pahl, “I like it here because it is so central: you’ve got London and city life in one direction and Canterbury and rural life in the other”.83
While Pahl’s islanders displayed “working-class solidarity” in abundance, this was not, so he concluded rather gleefully, of the kind approved by the academic Marxists who seem to have occupied a place in Pahl’s outlook similar to the one Johnson reserved for the well-off and hypocritical New York liberals who made a mockery of the progressive causes for which they occasionally came out of their brownstones and apartment buildings to march about with such self-importance. Pahl suggested that his Marxist colleagues might usefully visit Sheppey and study “the pile of ‘useful things’ — old doors, planks, bricks, iron bars and the like — that accumulate in the gardens and yards of rural owner-occupied houses ‘in case they come in handy one day’”. They should then ask themselves whether they hadn’t failed to “come to terms with the essence of individualism in ordinary English people” with their strong attachment to “homeliness, cosiness, domesticity”.84 Pahl defended working-class islanders against the fury of “socialists” who scorned “privatisation” and the sale of council housing and considered the desire for a home of one’s own to be an act of class betrayal. He also suggested that international corporations might be more reliable employers than some of the homegrown alternatives. He might have dropped his early fantasy that some islanders had deeply settled roots reaching continuously back into a time before the enclosures, but he still placed them in the tradition of the freeborn Englishman, comparing their outlook with the “radical individualism” of the seventeenth-century Leveller John Lilburne.85
As he joined Raymond Williams and other contemporaries in looking forward — “Towards 2000”, as the imagined future was in those days — Pahl concluded from his Sheppey investigations that the people may not be going much further with “municipal socialism and the teleological planners”. It was Johnson who noticed that a negative opinion of Britain’s membership of the EEC was already in place when it came to attributing the blame for rising prices (“detrimental” as he noted in a letter to Helen Wolff86). Johnson and Pahl may have passed rather than met one another, but they provide mutually reinforcing sighting of the island narratives that would, thirty years later, be mustered behind the cause of Brexit — although not necessarily, once again, in the manner assumed by the academics of our time. I asked one senior drinker in the Belle and Lion, Wetherspoon’s thriving pub on the High Street, whether he counted himself among those whom a present-day Professor of Sociology at Kent, Matthew Goodwin, has so influentially dubbed “the left-behind”.87 He didn’t need to know the word “agency” — nor, for that matter, to seek guidance from one of Tim Martin’s Brexiteering beermats or house magazines — before robustly rejecting the appellation. Far from being a helpless victim of changed circumstances, he preferred, so he told me stiffly, to think of himself as a proud member of “the stayed behind”. That may be one latter-day manifestation of the “moral utopia” Johnson imagined finding in Sheerness.
[THERE SIT THE GUYS]
Now I would like to tell you the story of fifteen minutes at the Sea View.
There sit the guys, where they’ve been jabbering away for forty-five minutes already, someone died, well, it’s a sign, hard to say what it means, it came in disguise, or: The butcher at the Halfway co-op, filling in for the regular bloke, who decided after a week, at 2:30 on a Saturday, to make off with the week’s takings, he was just thumbing his nose at the negligence of the main office not even checking if he’d done what he was supposed to do and deposited the day’s earnings in the bank across the street, in which case he probably got the idea before Saturday between two and three, right you are!, and as for what will become of Mr So-and-So, they all give such staunch suggestions that none of them could be arraigned before the court. Now a couple comes in, and that changes the scene. Unlike when a lady walks in, when the word bloody and all its various direct objects disappear from the conversation, this couple demands more than merely following conventional morals — they require, without even fully realizing it, that we pay attention to them.
The woman makes the couple, even if her companion does the ordering — grapefruit for her, in small quantities; beer for himself, in large quantities — she allows him to, by coming up and standing inconspicuously next to him. In truth, at no point was she behind him. She is pregnant, and she feels it in her whole body. That’s one thing: she already has to wear a dress that all but evens out the surface between her breasts and her belly. As she stands there she holds her hands loosely on her belly, she relaxes, she has something to protect. She is so full of her condition, visibly happy, her happiness increasing with every breath she takes. She is young — it’s not about that. Her husband stands next to her, he is not a big talker, but there’s no need for words now, she’s here. That’s another thing. She tells us the latest, and thanks to her they will be getting the key to their own home in a day or three, even if the mortgage payments look to be terrible, but they have escaped the impositions of the borough council and rent collectors. She speaks softly, but as though she is the one being asked, and no one has any doubt that everything important has to come from her. The husband, in his chubby stupor, acts almost sanctified, that is to say idiotic in his well-being, wanting merely to multiply and perfect this well-being at once by appearing with her and with that which he takes credit for and knows redounds to her credit too. She is masterful, discussing contractor problems with us, accepting respectful commentary and suggestions. Everyone is modest, almost shy; in such a way are idols created, as Bachofen says. It is clear on the faces of the bachelors young and old what they think: Best of luck to you both; I hope you can pull it off; don’t worry about any envy on my count; ah if only I could be that young again; if I had been close to someone and she to me like that, I would have lived a full life. None of which is spoken, but by a kind of osmosis it is more real in the bar than anything else is, even if Joe does have a damned clever way of rolling himself a cigarette. The two of them stood next to each other, looking straight ahead, not at each other, and everyone there knew that they knew: I am with you, you are with me. We saw, without scoffing, that he reacts the way men do when she put her hand on the back of his neck, she reacts the way women do when he will later take her plate away because he’s going to wash up, and their little fingers touch each other’s. He knows it, he sees it, she can see it in advance; when she asks him to come with [= to leave] he’s already trembled in several parts of his body. It is no less affectionate, it comes from them both, when she says: Everything’s fine Ron. Ron, I am all right. Cheerio, you all.
[Letter to Erika Klemm, 3 November 197588]
25. “IT’S YOUR OPINION”: A POSTCARD FOR THE KENT EVENING POST
“You should never read other people’s mail, even if they show it to you”.
— Uwe Johnson on Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Anniversaries II, p. 698.
In Anniversaries I, Gesine Cresspahl justifies her refusal to join her daughter’s protests against the Vietnam War on the grounds that “I’m a guest in this country”.1 Johnson repeatedly gave the same justification for his own refusal to take public political
positions in England, and he wasn’t going to drop his “non-committal” stance for the very few British enquirers who made it across the Kingsferry Bridge to pester him on the Isle of Sheppey. He told Colin Riordan, for example, that he would not express a view on Thatcher’s conduct of the 1982 war over the Falkland Islands. There would, however, be one occasion on which this expatriated East German could not resist intervening in an indisputably English political debate.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 44