The sash windows framing Johnson’s view over the Thames Estuary may have been sold to him as an attractive feature of 26 Marine Parade. Once he had moved in, however, they would start working almost as instruments for engaging the memory of those other watery views, thereby turning land, sea and air into the witnesses of a scarifying international history defined more fundamentally by war, murder and extreme ideological conflict than by pleasant days spent sailing, swimming, or strolling along the promenade — although these too had a place in Johnson’s memories of Mecklenburg and the Pomeranian coast further to the east.
It was thanks to this sliding theatre of contrasts and resemblances that Johnson went on to sketch one of the most arresting and revealing of twentieth-century “views” of the Thames Estuary. His is not a view that will be found fully expressed in a single text or image that might be listed alongside, say, the opening pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which a sunset over the river is so brilliantly used to evoke the “dark” times and places of European imperialism, or for that matter, classic estuarial paintings such as Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, in which an ancient ninety-eight-gun warship, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, is shown being towed upriver from Sheerness to Rotherhithe, where it will be scrapped, while a turned-round sunset burns luridly to the east behind it. Unlike these topographically engaged masterpieces, Johnson’s sea view does not exist in a single, finally achieved work. Like so much connected to his unfulfilled “island stories” project, it comes down to us as a characteristic perspective: a partly autobiographical way of seeing that Johnson shared with Gesine Cresspahl and the other “invented persons” gathered in his empty basement office during his last years on Marine Parade.
Following the prompting of his novels, in which the responsibility for making sense of a situation is so deliberately shared with the reader, and picking up on threads and fragmentary observations in his occasional writings about Sheerness, we can understand Johnson’s “sea view” as an approach in which exact observation is accompanied by this partly involuntary “appropriation” of a much larger remembered history. The tiered world beyond his windows would remind this expatriated citizen of the GDR that, while Sheerness was a long way from the Germany of his childhood and youth, it too lived — albeit with its own kind of dawdling somnolence — in the shadow of flood and fire.
View from the front bedroom, 26 Marine Parade, Sheerness.
[THE ESPLANADE RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE]
Here I am speaking only of myself, and yet it may be not merely egotistical if I describe to you some views to be seen over the course of a few afternoon hours. Views, namely, out the window, and I wish you could have seen them: the two of us, next to each other, right in front of the house, where the poorer folks from London enjoy disporting themselves on a Sunday like this one, as tourists by the sea, visible only from the waist up to me and my dear wife Mrs Letsnotdiscussit, and yet still a valuable warning about the lack of, or taste in, leisure attire. Following them come the waves of the River Thames, sea-like here, beating against the stones as high or as low as the Royal Geographical Tidal Institute’s calendar permits them to. For an ignorant observer such as myself, they are merely bright white a long way out, a little dirty-looking but choppy in any case; the last third of my visual field, though, is as blue as blue can be, magnificently changeable, from pale to gray to strapping within this color. Within and atop this blue, what is there to say to a lady from Königsberg: bathers in various stages of suffering from sunburn, boats with sails in fashionable colorations, some of them even classified and many of them well-suited to offer me certain memories, silent but critical, pertaining to the process of jibing. People paddling, those who let themselves be brought hither and thither by petrol engines, and on the horizon, where cartography would suggest that we should be able to detect the south coast of Essex, merely a difference: not a line but a smudge between water and sky, which educated people label as a horizon and which is therefore mine. And I’ve almost forgotten to admit to you the rude British Petroleum oil tanker that just now went pitching from right to left, from east to west, across the window — probably because I believe I share your opinion of such objects in one’s field of view.
[Uwe Johnson, letter to Hannah Arendt, 3 August 197511]
Bodsteller Bodden, Darß, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.
View from the Living Room, 26 Marine Parade
28. SEA DEFENCES: FROM GOD’S WILL TO “PUDDICOMBE’S FOLLY”
Remembered worlds would slide over one another in Johnson’s sea-facing sash windows, yet his letters reveal him to have been aware of another dramatic feature of the outlook from 26 Marine Parade. As you descend through the house the relation between those tiered bands of colour in the sea-facing windows changes. Seen from the window in the main upstairs bedroom on the first floor, the rusty strip of shingle and beach has shrunk thanks to the grey sea wall, which has risen up to nip off the lower parts of any person who may just then be walking past on the promenade. The beach has vanished entirely by the time you reach the living room on the raised ground floor. From Johnson’s office beneath that, the large expanse of grey concrete has cancelled everything except for a tiny strip of sky.
When I first looked out through the window of the “lower-ground-floor” room in which Johnson sat through much of 1982 — alone, unwell, ever more in debt and sustained, in the short term, by tea, tobacco and alcohol as he worked towards completion of the fourth volume of Anniversaries — I saw the wall directly opposite as testimony to his spiritual condition in these last years of his life. Things were bad enough, surely, without this blinding barrier rising up more than four metres from the pavement to press in on him like a cement sarcophagus. How, I wondered, could one not be shocked into silence by the brutal irony of the fact that the writer who had devised a new form of literature capable of articulating the division of Germany and, in Two Views, the experience of living in a city suddenly split by the Berlin Wall, should have spent his last days looking out at a vertical slab of concrete that did indeed seem to scream both “Dead End” and “Blind Alley”, even if no local graffiti artist had yet got round to persuading those words to stick to its roughly-textured surface?
It was Holger Helbig, director of the Uwe Johnson Society in Rostock, who awakened me to the fact that the wall now standing outside Johnson’s office wasn’t actually there in its present form when Johnson took up residence in 1974. That said, however, the lower concrete rampart that preceded it — and which his visitors registered as a “smooth high wall”1 despite the fact that it was topped with open iron railings and had garages below — was still sufficient to block the view from Johnson’s office. He informed Max Frisch that he didn’t intend to spend much time staring out of the window as he worked, and he would repeat the claim eight years later, reassuring a visiting interviewer that he did not make much use of his house’s view over the water, tending rather to spend his days head down at his “metal behemoth”2 of a table.
These may well have been evasive remarks but to see Marine Parade’s wall only as a hideous English reprise of the Berlin Wall is not to understand it at all. The “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” dividing East and West Berlin had been built in a few days by the GDR, but the version blocking the view from Johnson’s house was the outcome of a much longer struggle between a little town built on remote marshland which, even with the lower tides of the mid-Victorian age, was said by one concerned “inhabitant” of that time to have stood between five and seven feet below the high-water mark,3 and the vast force of nature that Joseph Conrad would declare “farthest removed in the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of mankind”.4 The unequal struggle between the marginal community of Sheerness and that vast inhuman sea had shaped the political, existential and religious life of the town from its earliest days. It had also ensured that, like the ocean they were intended to resist, the town’s sea walls had come in successive waves, each one absorbing the m
aterials of its defeated and collapsing predecessor. This fact was duly registered in Johnson’s “non-committal” understanding and also in some of the old photographs he gathered into his archive.
The Victorian Version: “Nothing more than a mud-heap”
The town of Sheerness did not exist to suffer the “universal fright”5 caused by the calamitous storm of 26–27 November 1703, which killed more than eight thousand people as it swept across the country, felling innumerable ancient trees, tumbling buildings, shattering ships and causing windmills to spin so crazily that they caught fire and burned to the ground. That disastrous visitation convinced the puritanical Daniel Defoe that “Storms and Tempests are Above our rules”, acts of divine punishment, imposed on people who needed to understand that “’tis in vain we pretend to be Wall’d about by the Ocean, and ride Masters of the Sea”.6 Built well over a century after the “worst storm in British history”7 and at first hardly walled about at all, the little town at Sheerness was also known for its non-conformist zeal, and its stricter chapel-going people shared Defoe’s understanding that “In publick Callamities, every Circumstance is A Sermon, and everything we see a Preacher”.8 William Shrubsole, the dockyard shipwright and founding congregationalist preacher at the Bethel Chapel in Blue Town, offered his view of such catastrophes in a sermon delivered on 24 June 1787. “Often”, so this ardent believer declaimed, “you may observe the righteous and the wicked perish together, in one undistinguishing calamity. The Earthquake overthrows and swallows up the crouded sacred temple, as well as the infamously frequented brothel! The pestilence breathes its deadly vapor on the good and on the evil! And the raging tempest, and the swelling waves ingulph or dash on the dreadful rocks, ships filled with religious refugees, or cruel pirates. The direful and devouring judgement makes no distinction between the righteous and the profane”.9
The fear of inundation had haunted Sheerness from the start, and not just in the minds of those who attended the emerging town’s more apocalyptic chapels. What were people here meant to think when the negligently managed Bilberry dam above the village of Holmfirth in the West Riding of Yorkshire burst in the middle of the night on 5 February 1852, washing away entire mills as well as houses, leaving eighty-one people dead and many others injured, orphaned and instantly pauperised? A well-informed correspondent drew the obvious, and far from theological, conclusion in the United Services Gazette: “Appalling as is the catastrophe that occurred at Holmfirth, one of a much more fearful nature threatens the town of Sheerness”.10 Sheerness lay “about eight feet below high water mark at the time of spring tide, and some parts more than ten feet” and an inundation here would surely sink “thousands” in a “watery grave”. There were by that time already about five thousand people living in Mile Town and half that in Blue Town, and the houses, which were mostly made of wood, would be swept away, leaving the people to drown along with the “immense quantity of sheep and cattle on the marshes”. Anyone visiting Sheerness at high water could already see the water rising to “within a foot of the top of the stonework of the dockyard and the beach wall”, with the wind, if it came from the north-west, sending great splashes over the top. It would only take “a two-feet rise” above the usual height — i.e. a rise of the sort already known in other places — to produce “a calamity not to be described or equalled in the annals of history”. Surely no inhabitant could avoid “shuddering for his own safety, especially when considering that [the influx] would extend for nearly two miles round the town, thus giving little room for retreat”. Meanwhile, the sea walls on which so many lives depended were “weak, and require strengthening with good stone-work instead of mud”. They needed to be raised “three feet higher at least” if the town and dockyard were really to be “safe from such an occurrence”. There was, in short, a job to be done and — here again is the thin silver lining that observers have strained to detect at the edge of so many dark and menacing clouds over Sheerness — it would “provide employment for many”.
Steps were eventually taken. An undated photograph in Johnson’s collection shows the view looking east along Marine Parade as it was towards the end of the nineteenth century. While the row of pink-stoned houses known as Shrimp Terrace is yet to fill the space before the last house on the inland side of the developing street, the terrace in which Johnson would live is visible to the right, as is the Victoria Hotel, a tall building that would come to be known as “the Glass House” on account of the many large windows it turned towards both the sea and the sunset upriver. Already taken in hand by Victorian reformers, the old sea wall has been turned into a promenade, surfaced with tarred gravel and, on the landward slope, faced with grouted stone. If later descriptions are to be believed, it has also been raised up from the pavement by a little vertical wall about eighteen inches high.
Marine Parade before 1890. From Johnson’s collection.
Had he wanted to go back to the beginning of Marine Parade’s sea defences, Johnson might have considered the experience of the English writer D.H. Lawrence’s mother, Lydia Beardsall, who grew up in Sheerness as the daughter of a Nottingham-born engine fitter employed at the dockyard. An ardent primitive Methodist and lay preacher who had moved to the booming town in March 1858, George Beardsall settled his family in a small house, 10 Chapel Street, at the western edge of the emerging new settlement of Marine Town.11 Lydia worked as a pupil teacher and governess until 1870, when her father, who had been disabled and impoverished by a fall at the dockyard, took the family back to Nottingham. Lawrence remembered his mother, whom he would later describe as a “superior soul”,12 as the model for Gertrude Morel in his 1913 novel Sons and Lovers: sensitive and intelligent but married to a brutalised and drunken Nottingham miner and inclined, in the midst of this life of “dreary endurance”, to grieve for the girl who had “run so lightly on the breakwater at Sheerness ten years before”.13
Photographs attributed to the year 1866 reveal the rudimentary nature of the “breakwater” along which Lydia Beardsall ran. In its first years, Marine Town was protected by a natural accumulation of shingle near the top of the beach and, on the landward side of that, a ridge of clay, raised up alongside the pavement to the height of a few feet.14 “Nothing more than a mud-heap”, as the Sheerness Times would scoff when reprinting the photographs of Marine Town’s first sea defences some sixty years later, and “a quagmire for pedestrians” in wet weather.15
Looking at these images from Marine Parade’s first decade, it is easy to grasp why, in November 1875, an “inhabitant” reported that “many residents” were still anxious for reassurance from “a competent authority” that they were not faced with the imminent prospect of “a breach … and that at midnight, amid a slumbering population”.16 Two weeks later, during the night of Sunday 21 November 1875, the sea duly poured over the defences for more than an hour, and it was only a fortuitous change in the wind forty minutes before high tide that limited the damage to displaced kerbstones and holes scooped in the road. The following month a government enquiry came to Sheerness to consider the case — ardently pressed on the authorities in a memorial signed by nine hundred of the town’s “working men” — for assistance towards the cost of building a more substantial sea wall and esplanade.17
“Nothing more than a mud-heap”: Marine Parade’s first sea wall, c. 1866.
A year or so later, in 1876, the council acquired the strip of land on which Marine Town’s “clay bank” stood, and set about “battering” stone headers into its sides.18 Even after the improvements shown in Johnson’s photograph, Marine Parade’s sea wall remained a consolidated version of the original “mud-heap”. As such, it was quickly revealed to be more convincing as a summer promenade than as a barrier protecting “Sheerness-on-Sea” from the storm-driven winter or spring tides.
In November 1880, residents of some of the town’s lower streets found the water two feet deep in their houses, prompting the Whitstable Times to declare that “the poorer classes are great sufferers by the c
alamity, which may prove fatal to many”.19 The paper also repeated local speculation that Sheerness’s sea defences had been weakened by “the removal of large quantities of shingle for sale, and the neglect to provide proper groynes”.20 Worse floods followed during the gales and blizzard of 18 January 1881. This particular storm surge brought death and mayhem all over the country — many boats and barges lost at sea, piers swept away, entire trains lost under blizzards of snow, and chaos in industrial and working-class districts of south London (the water stood five-and-a-half feet deep in houses from Waterloo to Upper Marsh Street).
Sheerness suffered “great damage” too.21 The sea broke through the defences in many places, including the eastern end of Marine Parade where the wall by Cheyney Rock was “entirely carried away”.22 This time, half the town is said to have been left under three feet of water and “the distress in the district is beyond description”.23 Within weeks, the Sheerness Board of Health had pressed forward a plan to improve Marine Parade’s esplanade, and the Sheerness Times was canvassing the support of ratepayers, who it was thought might be interested in the proposal “either as a precaution of public safety or as a local improvement certain to be self-paying in the long run”.24 That same month, members of the town’s Sea Defences Committee resolved to get a clause inserted into the Floods Prevention Bill to enable it to overrule the rights of the Lord of the Manor, a fellow named Polson, widely thought to have been endangering the town by removing large quantities of shingle for sale from the beach along Marine Parade.25 After protracted wrangling, the War Department accepted responsibility for the sea defences near the garrison and dockyard, sufficiently at least to repair overwhelmed stretches of the “mud wall” surrounding their land, and said that they would both build a three-foot concrete wall in the weakest place near the moat, and also introduce a series of groynes, intended to trap shingle in the hope that it would form a natural revetment between the town and the sea.26 “Urgently needed” works under the jurisdiction of the town, however, were left undone because the local Board of Health claimed that the sea defences were government property and not its own responsibility.27
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 49