By Tony Sears
Being about a marriage failing, and neither partner having the means to move out. One of us (me) hatched a plan to escape on weekends, taking an old bike by train to Kent. There I made my way along the margins where sea meets shore, discovering all sorts of things, including how I was not entirely blameless in all this. The story is set in 1998–99, when mobile telephones and the internet were still new magic.
CHAPTER 1a
GRAVESEND TO ROCHESTER – SATURDAY 14 MARCH 1998
“I don’t know why, but I had to start it somewhere. So it started… there.” Pulp
Nine months after That’s It We’re Finished, tunes started returning to my head. A fragment of Pulp had just popped into it as I clumsily hauled my bike off the train. “I don’t know why, but I had to start it somewhere. So it started… there.” “There” being Gravesend railway station, which looked neat but damp at 9.15am on this grey Sunday morning. The bottom of the soggy cloud didn’t seem all that far above my head and was a lowering weight unhappy enough to want to hang around all day.
I declared this pedal-powered circumnavigation of Britain open, by taking a photo of the Victorian station front. Then I wheeled the bike down to the waterfront to find the start of the Saxon Shore Way, which I planned to follow whenever I couldn’t get closer to the sea. For the Way follows the ancient coastline as it was in Roman times, not as it is now. It was opened in 1980, so the Way itself isn’t that ancient, then. As I neared the promenade the sight of the estuary water gave me that first-glimpse-of-the-sea thrill I used to get as a kid, even if today’s drab scene was no deep blue summer holiday sea of childhood memory. Small boats moved gently rose and fell by the piers and jetties to which they were moored, cargo ships were making their way west upstream towards London, and sea birds circled overhead. Through the mist, Tilbury power station haunted the opposite shore.
Leaning self and bike against the promenade wall, I rummaged in my rucksack for the Ordnance Survey map: OS Landranger 178 – Thames Estuary (Rochester & Southend-on-Sea). As I unfolded it slowly yet eagerly, as if in slow motion, I found myself declaring this map open too, in a mutter I hoped no passer-by noticed.
Beginnings and endings
Being unsure where the Thames stops being a river and starts being the sea, it hadn’t been easy to decide where to begin the rides. I plumped for Gravesend because I found it an odd, ironic name for a starting point. It connotes a feeling of flat finality, of gothic endings in Victorian churchyards, yet there were many beginnings associated with this place: Cabot, Frobisher and Drake each once set sail from here.
Historical records suggest several origins of the name Gravesend from which to take our pick. Surely they can’t all be true? Graaf-ham (home of the lord of the manor’s reeve) and Grafs-ham (the place at the end of the grove). Then there’s Gerevesend(from the Saxon for the end of the authority) and‘s-Gravenzande (from the Dutch for a sandy area belonging to the count). In the Domesday Book of 1086, it was down as Gravesham and had been bestowed upon Odo, Earl of Kent, Bishop of Bayeux and half-brother of William the Conqueror in 1067. Odo ruled only nominally, for the people of Kent had fiercely resisted the Norman Conquest, earning themselves the epithet of Invicta, and were granted the status of a semi-autonomous county palantine. A century later, orthographic licence had tweaked the name of the settlement to Gravesende and in a court record of 1422 it had been transmuted to Graveshend, the place where the graves ended after the Black Death. Oh, do please make your minds up.
In later times, the naming of places was a headache for surveyors creating the first Ordnance Survey maps, when even locals couldn’t agree on what a place was called, never mind how it was spelt. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to believe.
Before embarking on this journey I knew little about the life of Charles Dickens, so I had no idea that he and his bride Catherine Hogarth spent their honeymoon here in Gravesend in 1836. Their bumpy ride of a marriage started in a white weather-boarded house called Craddock’s Cottage, where Dickens wrote his first novel Pickwick Papers. They say that nothing inspires quite like love, and when without a care Catherine let her hat drop to the floor that first evening, she may have had no inkling she would inspire her new husband to father ten children and write the fifteen novels it would take to feed and clothe them. In the process, Dickens invented a total of 13,000 characters, 318 of whom were orphans. All this to ensure his own children didn’t end up likewise. Nor perhaps did Catherine anticipate the unhappiness the master storyteller would bring to her own tale.
A man of many parts
On top of all that, our energetic hero also edited various magazines, wrote and produced endless plays, and went on many lucrative reading tours, at home and abroad. These tours usually involved a few hours’ performance in the evening followed by a lavish meal. On one tour of the United States Dickens was unable to do justice to such hospitality because he suffered from gum disease and neither of his two sets of dentures were functioning correctly. Long-distance travel was slow and uncomfortable in the age of the stagecoach and Dickens’ life was made much easier with the arrival of rail travel. That is, until one tragic day in June 1865 when a train he was travelling in derailed at Staplehurst, killing ten passengers and injuring many more. He never fully regained his health.
Just down the road from Craddock’s Cottage is The Old Forge at Chalk, the inspiration for the forge in Great Expectations. This is where Dickens had blacksmith Joe Gargery spend long days at it hammer and tongs, red-hot iron on anvil. The last blacksmith at the Old Forge retired in 1953 and the building is now listed. Picture its once soot-encrusted internal walls now stripped-to-brick, brushed and nicely matt-sealed; an estate agent’s dream.
Gravesend has witnessed endings, too. Pocahontas ended up in a grave here in 1617, after a short and tragic life. She was a Native American captured by the English in 1613, and repeatedly raped before being encouraged to convert to Christianity. While in captivity she met John Rolfe, a tobacco planter who desperately wanted to know her tribe’s secret process for curing tobacco. So he married Pocahontas, or Rebecca as she had by then been renamed, conveniently became one of the family and was let in on the precious knowledge. In 1616, they sailed to England where she was presented as a “civilised savage”, to dispel rumours about wild murderous Native Americans. The following year, the couple set out to return to America, but only got as far as Gravesend before Pocahontas fell ill, was taken ashore and died. Some say she was poisoned.
She wasn’t even yet twenty-one. Her story earned her a statue in the graveyard of St George’s church and her name adorning one of the local ferry boats.
This town…
Despite the unpromising name, Gravesend was a more attractive place than I’d expected. The town centre had a haggard run-down look about it that was interesting, almost ghostly. Nearly all the shops in the cobbled street leading down to the promenade were closed at this early hour, but many looked closed for good.
In contrast, I felt open for business, full of a curiosity and anticipation that cut through my tiredness. I was looking forward to doing something, rather than spending another weekend trying to avoid my ex-spouse-in-waiting for a whole two days in a small flat. Well, I say ex-spouse-in-waiting, for when does a partner stop being a partner when you split up? What are we called before final divorce, when we become fully ex? Is there a word for the transitional phase, like the estuary between the river and the sea? Perhaps “soon-to-be-ex-spouse” would be better than “ex-spouse-in-waiting”. Yes, “soon” sounds better than “waiting”.
A little knowledge being an underrated thing, I’d visited the local library at home before embarking on this voyage of discovery. There were few relevant books that weren’t already out on loan, though. I did find one book called The Sea on our Left, about a couple who walked around the coast of Britain and nearly split up in the process. I was about to do it the other way around, having split up beforehand, and on two wheels rather than two legs. I’d also heard about the World Wide Web, but the library didn’t have any computers yet and I certainly didn’t own one. The only person I knew with access to the marvellous new world of the internet was the studio manager at Saatchi’s, but she worked on the day shift and her computer was out of bounds to us night workers.
I put the map away in the front pocket of my anorak, where it would be easier to get at, and looked out over the water, picturing how Gravesend might have looked in its heyday, when hundreds of trading ships made their way under sail, up and down the Thames estuary, chaotic silver highway and major artery of empire. As a child I was fascinated by tales of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars and read all of CS Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower adventure books, usually by bunkbed torchlight, imagining I was on board a frigate, unable to sleep for the massive sway of heavy seas and the swish of wave tops sliced by vicious gusts of wind, waiting for the next watch when I and my fictional heroes would continue to battle on against all the odds, to victory.
Ghosts of industry
Continuing onwards and eastwards along the promenade and through the streets by the Custom House, I passed behind disused old warehouses and wharves, the cranes that must once have loomed over them long gone. I felt the aura of their dilapidation, the crumbling, dirty old buildings with their black walls and forlorn atmosphere of history forgotten. The air of neglect and foreboding drew me in under a sombre sky rubbed with dirt and full of rain.
Gravesend is the home of the Port of London Authority and has been the river’s guardhouse and gateway since the 14th century when Searchers and then Tide Waiters were appointed to stop and search all vessels and impose duties on their cargoes. Their captains also had to swear on the Plague Bible that there was no illness onboard. By the 17th century there was so much shipping and so many Tide Waiters, that they resorted to using Gravesend’s inns as offices, which makes you wonder how much ‘leakage’ there was of the duties levied. This problem was solved by the construction of the old Custom House in 1782, replaced by the current one in 1815.
The river that wanted to be a sea was pale, as if the remaining tinges of silver and green had been washed out by the tide. Looking up, the sky was now a light grey above a dark base of heavy pewter clouds, layer upon layer, undefined and out-of-focus. Peeping at it hurt my eyes.
A different kind of cycle lane
The cycling became difficult on the grassy-banked sea wall that, according to the map, extended for the next fourteen miles along the top of Kent, and I hoped it wasn’t going to be like this all the way. For the most part, the ground was bumpy, muddy and stony. For the rest, it was clover-thick springy grass, no easier to cycle on. In spite of this, I was enjoying it all much more than cycling in London; it was as if I were meant to be here. Before me were the broad vistas of the estuary and the marsh, and not too much wind – the peace and quiet of the high and wide outdoors. The only sounds were of sea birds crying, marsh birds twittering and the reverberating bass throb of massive cargo ships making their way upriver.
At Higham Saltings, the marshland spread on both sides of the king-of-the-castle raised bank, and the salty sea-and-marsh tang was more perceptible on the breeze. It’s because a salting (apart from being a lovely word) is an area of coastal marsh covered by seawater at high tide. The cycle of flooding and evaporation with the flow and ebb of the tides causes the air to be permanently super-salty. I stopped, closed my eyes and gulped it all in, to make sure I really was here and not still suffocating in London. It was wonderful to breathe properly after so many months gasping in despair and frustration. It began to drizzle; I opened my eyes and looked over towards Cliffe Fort and the massive Coryton oil refinery beyond, with its brooding presence and burning flares.
Unimaginably vast amounts of puff and sweat must have gone into building, maintaining and strengthening the sea wall over the centuries, not to mention the huge task of banking-in the unending mudflats and saltings, then cutting drainage ditches between them so that over time they were no longer covered by the sea at high tide. To think that the North Kent Marshes once extended all the way from Dartford in the west to Whitstable in the east. Mile after mile of shoreline, shifting, amorphous, not defined by cliff or even beach, but as hard to grasp as the mists that rolled and swirled on the marsh at night. The sense of vastness added to the glorious feeling from cycling and walking in this place; I could feel the cobwebs starting to shake and fall from my tired mind, to be replaced by birdsong and occasional ships’ hooters.
Rust never sleeping
Reaching Higham Creek, I followed a gravel-and-stone path north past Cliffe Fort, denoted on the OS map in expectation-raising gothic script, but in reality a squat, square overgrown disappointment. Behind it was abandoned machinery for a long-disused gravel works. Fascinated by this arrangement frozen in time, I stopped and leaned the bike against an abandoned conveyor belt that rose up at an angle to the point at which it presumably once fed a hopper long since gone. I studied the world of rust on the old metal: dried-blood-red and black speckles among saffron flakes and pale verdigris lichen spots. Beyond, the rocks at the high-tide mark were strewn with all kinds of debris, presumably washed up from the estuary. I wandered around older debris too, including the spiky weathered shell of a large old wooden boat. The Hans Egede was a three-masted ship built in 1922 in Denmark. For many years, she was a coal and grain hulk in the Medway estuary. At the end of her working life she was beached here on the estuary margins where she remains sticking out of the ancient slime like a partially disinterred skeleton, all ribs and rotting superstructure.
There was a charm to the odd almost-beauty of the natural scenery, roughened by remnants of old industry and pock-marked by random small piles of rubbish, obscure faded offerings at some imagined path-side shrine.
Around Hanwell and up the allotment 
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