Where an engineer might have settled for a “plain bleak uncompromising wall”, as Concrete Quarterly admitted, Jack Garnham Wright’s team had decided to give the surface a strongly “rusticated” pattern: a roughly textured surface, ornamented by a relief design that could be cast in sections as the wall proceeded along the road. This pattern was an attempt to “reconcile the ideas of inherent strength with the architectural scale of the terraces and the nautical and seaside associations of the location”. The surface had to be rough and resistant to graffiti, but the design, which was intended to establish the wall as a “backdrop” to the new pedestrian area, was strongly formal, drawing on the visual language of “classical” architecture and incorporating patterns of the type found on the stuccoed exteriors of many Georgian buildings: in grand parts of towns and cities, to be sure, but also in seaside resorts where stucco had often been used to protect buildings from saltwater spray.
According to Concrete Quarterly, the idea was to create an “arcaded” effect, using smooth formwork in the recessed areas, and rough-textured concrete to create the illusion of outstanding masonry blocks enclosing them. Each simulated arch had a pronounced “keystone”, inspired partly by the kind that might be found at the centre of a window arch in a Georgian house. The “rusticated” effect of the supporting “pilasters” was achieved by creating a shadow-catching “pattern of V-shaped grooves in the concrete to resemble masonry joints”. Further tributes to the local streetscape were built into the new pedestrian area, which was planted with saplings and paved in a pattern of coloured bricks that followed the rhythm of the arcaded wall while also echoing the colours of Shrimp Terrace, built as it was in “red brick with pink ‘stone’ dressings and other elegant embellishments”.
Not content with this, the architects pulled their wall into focus on the landward side by placing a more elaborate section midway along its length. This included two raised pedestrian areas, the fronts of which were faced in brick and shaped in a way that paid abstract tribute to the memory of the “garages” that previously stood here. Like their interwar predecessors, the architects tried to appease local objectors by including flowers in the scheme. The raised areas were capped with lintels containing beds that might be planted, while further plant boxes were sited on the pavement between them. Visitors may still be surprised to encounter the central item (the words “quirky” and “light-hearted” were used to describe it): an ancient ship’s figurehead of “Titan”, actually a fibreglass replica of one that had adorned the prow of HMS Forte, said to have been selected from the dockyard’s collection. Gaily painted, possibly by Jack Garnham Wright himself, it was mounted on the new wall between the two raised areas — the scarlet of “Titan’s” toga being repeated in the colour of the two nearby street lights. The entire setup was conceived as a jaunty tribute to Sheerness’s history as a seaside resort: a Kentish answer, perhaps, both to the “unsophisticated arts” praised by Barbara Jones, the originator of English pop art, and even to the “seaside surrealism” Paul Nash had earlier detected in the strangely out-of-place iron street furniture to be found in Dorset’s coastal town of Swanage, reused after being collected as ballast for stone-bearing ships returning from London.17
On 10 June 1983, the Sheerness Times Guardian showed a picture of the ongoing works. At that time, the completion date was set for early October and local opinion was now concentrating its arguments on the “beautification” scheme proposed for the enlarged strip of land between the road and the new wall. Should this really be planted with tree-lined walkways, equipped with “modern lighting” and turned into something resembling a linear park, as Southern Water, the architects, and the local planners were proposing, or should it be used to widen the road and provide car parking for residents? Mrs Beryl Sunderland at 40 Marine Parade leaned towards a wider road and may also have agreed with a former mayor, who considered the very thought of public flowerbeds a provocation to vandals. Mrs Janice Monday at No. 36 came out for beautification, but could, of course, see both sides: “It’s a thorny problem”, she said, “and I’m glad I don’t have to solve it”.
View from Living Room, 26 Marine Parade
It was not until 4 May 1984 that a collection of councillors and Southern Water officials gathered in the central area of the new sea wall in Marine Parade to watch as the Mayor of Swale, Councillor Hugh Curling, unveiled the black-bearded figurehead of Titan, declaring that, with Sheppey now “as safe as it could be from the risk of tidal flooding”, residents could “look forward to many years of peace and prosperity untroubled by the waters behind us”.18 The assembled company, which included Jack Garnham Wright, admired “Titan”, who to this day looks both surprised and surprising in his immobile role as the “focal point” of an “attractive landscaping scheme” that seems long since to have lost its point as well as such plants as it may ever have possessed.
Lawn and sea wall in snow behind the (demolished) Sea View Hotel, 28 February 2018
Johnson was gone by then, and there is nothing to suggest he suspended his enduringly “non-committal” stand on English political matters for long enough to take a position over the argument between beautification and parking. He did though, see enough of the wall to form a view of the architect’s work. His artist neighbour Martin Harris was inclined to scoff at the thing, which he condemned as both “brutalist” and entirely unnecessary. He remembered, though, that Johnson saw something other than “brutalism” in the textured and graffiti-resistant surface with which the new wall confronted residents across the road. Recognising the classical language used in Jack Garnham Wright’s “rusticated” design, Johnson declared it to be all too reminiscent of the monumental works of Hitler’s preferred architect, Albert Speer. Johnson’s death, aged forty-nine, towards the end of February may have been a grievous loss for literature, but it spared the writer the knowledge that Speer’s rehabilitation was already being prepared in England — or that, largely thanks to the Luxembourg-born architect Leon Krier, whose book on Speer and his works would be published to a very mixed reception in 1985,19 Hitler’s architect would soon be installed as the inspiration for a British “classical revival” championed by Prince Charles.
AFTERWORD
A very dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen – from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels’ foot-prints, crocodiles’ hatching places, loosened grains of expression from the visages of blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned merchants, vegetation from jungles, frozen snow from the Himalayas. O! It was very very dark upon the Thames, and it was bitter bitter cold.
— Charles Dickens, “Down with the tide”, 1853
“The East German novelist Uwe Johnson, known locally as ‘Charles’, was found dead at his home in Marine Parade on Monday”. That is how the Sheerness Times Guardian relayed the news to its readers on 16 March 1984. The forty-nine-year old writer, who “lived alone in his three storey home” and had an exclusive circle of friends at his two favourite pubs, was thought to have died about two weeks previously, perhaps on the night of 22 February, the date of his last appearance at the Napier Tavern. The author, who was understood to have spent “a great deal of time away on lecture tours in America”, was also reported to be separated from his wife, who lived nearby with the couple’s twenty-year-old daughter and worked as a language tutor at Sheppey School Further Education classes. Registered that same day, the death certificate tells us that Lionel Skingley, the recently appointed Coroner for North Kent decided, on the basis of a post-mortem without inquest, that the forty-nine-year-old Uwe Klaus Dietrich Johnson had died of hypertensive heart disease. It wasn’t his job to record that Sheerness may have lost its most distinguished resident alien since Napoleon Bonaparte failed to take up enforced reside
nce there after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815.
News of Johnson’s death reached his publishers in Frankfurt on the day his body was discovered. Siegfried Unseld and his secretary, Burgel Zeeh, had for some time been trying to raise a response from their author. On Monday 12 March they had sent a telegram asking Johnson to get in touch, but the call came from Elisabeth Johnson, who told Unseld that “Uwe is dead”.1 Unseld and Zeeh were soon in the office of Johnson’s Sheerness solicitor, Sevier and Partners, where Mr Clough showed them an article about Johnson in the national Daily Telegraph, before relaying what he had been able to find out about the accompanying circumstances.
Clough confirmed that his client was last seen alive on Wednesday 22 February, when he had told Nora Harris, who had for years been coming to his house three times a week to clean, that he wouldn’t be needing her services until 8 March.2 Arriving at the house on the appointed day, she had found the front door locked and chained on the inside and decided that Johnson must still have been too busy to face any disturbance. Unable to gain access the following morning, she peered through the letter box and saw letters and newspapers piled up on the floor and the light on. She relayed her concern to Col Mason and Ron Peel, landlords of the Napier Tavern, who decided to wait until after the weekend before investigating further: “perhaps Charles, as they called him, would return and you couldn’t enter his house against his will”.3 On Monday 12 the two publicans went to the house, smashed a lower ground floor window at the rear, and climbed in to find Johnson lying on the bloodied parquet floor of his living room. They had, as Mr Clough also explained, noticed two empty bottles of red wine on the table. Such was the news that confronted Siegfried Unseld and Burgel Zeeh. Their brilliant author, who’d found so little satisfaction in the literary fame Suhrkamp had helped bring his way, had died unwell, alone and, in more than one sense, heartbroken in a wintry English seaside town. And he had apparently done so while struggling to bring about the exodus of a cork from a third bottle that Unseld and Zeeh would see for themselves when they entered the house, still standing upright on the floor next to the table on which Johnson had struck his head as he went down.
Before that, however, Mr Clough had something else to announce. A year or so previously, Johnson had ordered Sevier and Co. to draw up a new will, invalidating the one he had prepared jointly with his wife on 2 October 1975, when they were about to depart on a visit to America. Some of the revisions the solicitor was about to reveal might have been anticipated following a letter Unseld had sent to Johnson on 7 December 1982, a little over a year before the changes were made. In this, the publisher had informed Johnson that “we need to talk about your finances”.4 Unseld, who had for many years been paying Johnson a regular advance, stated that by the end of that December — when, in accordance with the most recently broken deadline, Johnson had been due to deliver the completed text of Anniversaries IV — his debit balance with Suhrkamp would stand at DM 230,094.89 (approximately £60,000 at the exchange rate of the time). The payments would continue until the end of March 1983. It was a short communication, in which Unseld stated three times, “we have to talk about it”.
Johnson had spent a couple of weeks mulling over the situation before replying with a sketch of the course of action he proposed to follow in order to escape, or at least postpone, looming disaster. He accepted that, whatever Unseld might decide, future arrangements must “revolve around my obligation to reimburse Suhrkamp” for this debt (which had, as he pointed out with customary precision, actually grown a little beyond the sum Unseld mentioned).5 As a preliminary step in this direction, he announced that he had already signed over his life insurance to Unseld and proposed that the publisher should draw up a contract specifying that he — “the landlord” — would not receive any payments from his copyright after 31 March until the debt was cleared. He undertook to allocate his share of the joint-owned house on Marine Parade to the publisher. He offered to take on such editing work as Unseld might suggest, volunteering that a monthly proportion of the income from any such work should be set against the debt. As for his own writing, he intended to wrap up Anniversaries IV in a few months, and then embark on another book — a history of the Cresspahl family since the late nineteenth century — which he imagined completing over a six-month period. He hoped the time for the latter project might be financed from the sale of the manuscripts of his seven published novels, reserved for his daughter in the will of 1975 but now also put on the table for Unseld, who would surely, even under present straitened circumstances, be able to find a buyer willing to stump up six times Johnson’s monthly subvention. By this means, Unseld might (“if you want to help”) secure Johnson’s “place at the typewriter” for long enough to bring both Anniversaries and the new work to completion.
Dated 22 March 1983, the new will now disclosed by Mr Gough followed this course of action through to its abject conclusion. In the will of 1975, Johnson had left everything to his wife, asking his executors, in the event of their early death, to ensure that funds were made available to help his daughter through university, and also to ensure that she received various of his possessions, including his collection of Mecklenburg maps and books, his typed manuscripts and author’s copies of his books, and also his thirty-volume 1973/4 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannnica.6 In the new will, the encyclopaedia went to his wife, but everything else — including the collection of Kentish publications he had previously asked to be offered to the public reference library in Sheerness — was left to Suhrkamp.7
Clough also revealed a “Statement to my Executors”, prepared on his company’s advice in case the new will was ever challenged. In this declaration, which the author claimed to have “made in the trust that it will never be made public”, Johnson sought to justify the change by repeating and, indeed, magnifying the accusations he had made in his Frankfurt Lectures.8 He also asserted that, thanks to his inability to work following his wife’s alleged betrayal (which he also blamed for the heart attack he had suffered in 1975), he had run up “enormous debts” with Suhrkamp. Since he could not have survived “without their generosity”, he wished to repay “the kindness and the steadfastness” they had shown “by bequeathing any money and property I have to them, as I may owe them a great debt at the date of my death”. In the final paragraph of this awful statement against “my wife E.J. and her daughter”, he asked his executors to take “all sensible steps” to prevent Elisabeth Johnson, whom he still recognised as the part owner of 26 Marine Parade, from entering the house or, failing that, of “laying hand on anything in the house including any of the contents”.9
The cremation took place at Vinters Park in Maidstone on Friday 23 March. Siegfried Unseld justified his own attendance by explaining that he had promised the author that he would make sure things were done in accordance with his last wishes: “no music, speeches, flowers or any religious or other service whatsoever”.10 Elisabeth and Katharina Johnson were present, as were Johnson’s sister, Elke an Huef, his friends and now executors Felix and Antonia Landgraf, and Mr. Clough, the solicitor from Sevier and Partners.
Although none of Johnson’s English acquaintances had been invited to join those who gathered to see “Charles” make his final departure in this unceremonious manner, Unseld records that “two other people were present in the crematorium chapel, a man and a woman I could not identify”.11 The two in question were Martin and Susan Harris. They had been surprised to look out of the window earlier that day and see a hearse drawing up outside 26 Marine Parade so that the coffin could, as Unseld recalls Elisabeth Johnson wishing, start its journey from the house. The Harrises wanted to pay neighbourly respects to the man they had known for nearly a decade, so they pulled on some smarter clothes, jumped into their car and followed the little cortege as it made its way past Sheppey cemetery before crossing the Kingsferry Bridge onto the mainland. Having arrived at Vinters Park, they crept into the crematorium chapel and sat down in the obscurest seats they could find at the back.
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What they saw struck them as overwhelmingly bleak. For a start, there was hardly anybody there. According to Unseld’s record, the four women who were present sat in a row in front of the coffin, Mr Clough the solicitor sat near Dr Felix Landgraf behind them, and Unseld himself (whom Harris remembered as the busy fellow who must have been Johnson’s “agent”) remained standing throughout, perhaps worrying less about the presence of these two English interlopers at the back than about the flowers the crematorium staff had placed on either side of the chapel, and which he had not been in any position to remove. After some minutes of silence, which Unseld himself described as “long”, the sky-blue curtain closed and Johnson was gone. More than three decades later, Martin Harris was still wondering about the things he had seen that day: “not a word was spoken” he said with a mixture of puzzlement and dismay. He and Susan had driven home perplexed and also worried that they may have been wrong to intrude on the event. They didn’t know that everything they’d witnessed had actually been done in accordance with Johnson’s wishes which, in this matter, as in the request that his executors discourage any future attempt to write his biography, had not changed between the wills of 1975 and 1983.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 62