The Kent Coast Cycling Lesson – post 3

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 wobbled around the coast, making a series of discoveries, 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 1b

GRAVESEND TO ROCHESTER – SATURDAY 14 MARCH 1998

“I don’t know why, but I had to start it somewhere. So it started… there.” Pulp

A man with a job to do

I hauled the bike over a stile, mounted it awkwardly and followed the track winding through gorse bushes. The cycling here was easier, and I soon emerged at the end of Cliffe Creek, at the edge of a huge rubbish dump that looked decidedly less than tidal in origin. The next nine miles were laborious yet steady along the top of the high, grassy bank that extended north east and overlooked the estuary on the left and marshland on the right. It would always be that way round: the sea always on my left. The sea wall was even more substantial here, higher and wider, as if it were gearing up for when estuary would become full-on sea coast. On the landward side, it sloped down to a greensward, which sometimes made for better cycling, and then to a creek or large ditch running parallel.

Ahead stretched Cliffe Marshes: flat as Holland and interlaced with ditches and fleets, grazing sheep and hosts of birds. It was strange to think that as recently as the 13th century this was all sea. Peering over the wall on the bank top revealed a small pebble beach, and, across the estuary, the Tilbury refineries, Canvey Island and Southend beyond. The path continued for miles, punctuated by stiles in fences and ever more laborious liftings of the bike. Past Lower Hope Point, past the strange-looking arrangement of sixteen sheds above Cliffe Marshes, all along the shore to Egypt Bay. Here, the bank path was closed off, so I tut-tutted a detour around the back of the tidal marsh, along a narrow bank with long grass, overlooking birds and rabbits in the marshland below.

Sleeping with the ghosts of hulks

At Egypt Bay, I laid the bike down, took my rucksack off and lit a cigarette. Between drags I flicked through Bea Cowan’s Saxon Shore Way, to check that this was indeed where prison ships were moored during the Napoleonic Wars. I squinted across the grey water to where I imagined they would have been, then crushed the cigarette underfoot. The welcoming dry grass invited me to sit down and close my eyes to better conjure up old decaying hulks no longer fit for service; cribbed and barred, rotting to death and stuck fast forever to the mud of the estuary bed by ancient rusted chains manacled to great heavy anchors that made these once-proud craft prisoners too. I could hear the moaning of convicts and prisoners of war incarcerated between the low decks of the foetid hold. There was no headroom for the inmates, clamped in irons, who stooped or lay down on the bare floor in the dark, crowded low spaces. Thinking about it made me feel claustrophobic. I jumped to my feet and stretched my arms above my head, just to show that I could. Then I lay down again and drifted into a nightshifter’s loose doze.

These poor souls subsisted on brackish water and meagre stale or rotten food. The scuttling, scraping presence of rats made sleep difficult. Clothing turned to rank rags and the skin it tried to cover became flea-ridden, crawling with flies, and exposed to contagious diseases. There was no sanitation. The only escape from this nightmare existence was in death, and even then, whole days might pass before your corpse was removed and buried, a concern for those prisoners of a religious disposition. Between 1776 and 1795, 2,000 out of 6,000 inmates of the hulks died. James Hardy Vaux survived his sentence on board the aptly-named Retribution:

“There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly 600 men, most of them double ironed; and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard amongst them. On arriving on board, we were all immediately stripped and washed in two large tubs of water, then, after putting on each a suit of coarse slop clothing, we were ironed and sent below; our own clothes being taken from us.”

Prison hulk Discovery at Deptford, 1829.

It fell to the authorities to make sure conditions were worse for prisoners than for the poorest of those on the outside. By all accounts they did a pretty good job of it.

This stretch of marsh is where Pip spent the first part of his life in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and where Pip’s ill-tempered and much older sister, Mrs Gargery, raised him “by hand”, which is to say, by frequent clips round the earhole. His only refuge was in his friendship with the blacksmith, Joe, Mrs Gargery’s good-hearted husband.

In my mind’s eye I joined Pip and Joe in the heat of the forge, catching the last echoes of clanging, clinking and ringing of metal on metal down the years, accreting in the air all day long, every day except Sunday. Probably the only sound to break the quiet murmur of daily life in nearly every village in the country in the early to mid-19th century. Pip and I watched through hands splayed on our faces to protect against flying sparks as Joe performed the final act: using the long-tongs to plunge the red-hot metal into the quenching trough in a hissing mist of scalding steam. It was thirsty work and dangerous, too. It would perhaps have been even more dangerous had the blacksmith’s daily beer consumption matched that typically given to refresh and placate labourers on one large Dorset farm, according to GE Mingay in Rural Life in Victorian England:

“…the men were allowed a gallon a day: a quart for breakfast at ten o’clock, a pint at half past eleven for luncheon, a quart during dinner between one and two o’clock, a pint at four, with something to eat at five, and the rest when work was finished for the day.”

Harvest time must have been fun. By the time the wheat was half cut, most of the workers would have been likewise.

The harsh marsh

A hard life and a lonely one. The marshes at that time were isolated and the few roads poor. In bad weather many villages were cut off for days at a time, if not weeks. Few working people had a horse; walking was the only option. In 1892, Anderson Graham wrote of the farm labourer that “a ten-mile journey was an event that kept him in talk for a life-time. Even at this day I know rustics who live within that distance of the sea and yet have never beheld it.”

Pip’s reflection in Great Expectations on what drew Joe and Mrs Gargery together is that: “She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand.” In my dream, I couldn’t help picturing dissolving bands of early morning ground haze about Mrs Gargery, forming a wispy, silken robe that over the years gradually stiffened into an impenetrable blank pea-souper of a grey cotton smock. Then, this estuary day shrank to cold dark night, damp moonlight-touched swirls of mist shrouding dim landmarks as, in my dream, I had become a child of the mist. I passed gibbet, beacon tower and battery mound. The ring of a sheep’s bell, muffled by drifting fog across the death-cold marsh flats and through the old churchyard where the presences of family faded with each passing year. Then the sudden appearance of the escaped convict:

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”

I awoke with a head full of aching wool and slowly got to my feet. There was no one about, though it must have been one o’clock by now, I’d seen hardly anyone since the promenade at Gravesend – just a couple walking a dog, and a few anglers.

Around West Point the path became stony, so I walked the bike for fear of getting a puncture. Maybe I would need a sturdier machine. After St Mary’s Marshes, the bank narrowed and became lower and lower until only the path itself was left to meander at the level of the marsh, right on the shore. What a lovely smell of salty coast air. What a shame about all the rubbish lying around: torn plastic bags flapping in occasional gusts, pinned to the ground by broken glass and soiled cloth, car batteries and gutted old fridges leaking poison into the ground. Fast moving consumer goods now slow, corroding, spent. I wondered how the fridges got here; too heavy to carry far and no road nearby.

As I trod a little further on, my nostrils were overwhelmed by a pungency of herb, a wonderful concentrated smell, like coriander, released by my crushing footfall on clumps of Sea Arrowgrass. You can eat the leaves but do avoid the greener parts, which store hydrocyanic acid that’s not awfully good for you, because it’s essentially cyanide. Danger lurks in all beauty.

From holding hands to ball and chain

A young couple approached slowly on the path ahead. Smiling and laughing shyly, side-to-side as well as side-by-side. Near each other, yet not actually touching or holding hands, as though it were only their first or second date. As they drew near, I looked down to avoid making eye contact, though I did hope they’d start holding hands soon, and always affectionately. In Great Expectations Pip longed to hold hands with Estella, but I’m not sure a polite handshake counts. I recalled the happy hand-holding with my own “Estella” at the time we threw caution to the wind, or perhaps just ushered it to a light breeze, and set up home together far too soon. As Dickens put it in The Cricket On The Hearth, “We forge the chains we wear in life.” Once the young couple passed behind me, I looked up and over at the further grey distance: a line of electricity pylons and what looked like a great grey power station.

I continued pushing the bike along the stone and seaweed beach, concentrating on the low buildings of Allhallows-on-Sea up ahead. This definitely felt like seaside coast rather than an estuary-edge muddy mess. But there was hardly a breath of breeze, so it was a sea with a surface still as glass, the shifting greys all darker than the pale grey of the sky above it, and the greys all complementing the green of the marsh.

It was a shame the tide was in. During the Battle of Britain, a Messerschmitt shot down a Spitfire over the River Medway. The pilot bailed out and was rescued, and the plane crashed onto the tidal mudflats just here. I guess it was too much to hope it would be visible today, but just the knowledge that it was there made my spine shiver at the knife edge thrill and fear of warfare.

Never in the field…

The Supermarine Spitfire remains a symbol of the backs-to-the-wall defiance of those who took part in the Battle of Britain in 1940. After being taken to see the film Battle of Britain aged 11, I was so fired up that I asked Santa, who had only recently morphed into my father, for Airfix model kits of both the Spitfire and its arch-enemy the Messerschmitt ME109E so I could play out for myself the Spitfire’s superior speed and manoeuvrability. I remember like yesterday painting its underside duck egg blue and being impatient for the paint to dry so I could apply the decals and other finishing touches, before mounting it on a transparent plastic plinth. The Spitfire’s advantages also had a downside; if you tried to turn too suddenly you risked losing consciousness. As Keith Ogilvie, Battle of Britain Pilot with 609 Squadron, said: ‘Two hours a day in these thunder buggies and you are poohed right out.’

As I looked out to where I thought the plane had crashed, my imagination played out my own version of what might have happened.

Bernie knew his plane had been hit when he heard a loud clattering behind him and the fuselage jolted. He had no inkling of where his attacker was and there was no time to think; no time for anything. He just had to get out. With one hand he pulled the joystick to lift the plane’s nose into a shallower dive, while with the other scrabbled at the cockpit cover as he felt himself start to succumb to the increasingly strong smell of smoke and burning through his mask. He was now a mass of fear and claustrophobia and screamed ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ over and over. At last the cover budged but the relief sublimed instantly into the deadweight vertigo of recent nightmares as the flapping cover was wrenched away by the screeching wind and he hauled himself over the edge of the cockpit and rolled out, into the void. He counted to three: ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ then pulled the parachute cord, losing control of his bladder as the parachute opened and swung him upwards and back, his stomach churning.

As the wind blew him sideways and around, he felt more than heard the explosion of the crash as the heat blast lifted him up again. He became engulfed by the large plume of smoke rising at an angle from where what remained of the plane was sinking into the mud by the shore. As the air cleared he noticed several children, just dots on the ground, running towards the crash site, followed by a few larger dots. One of the children stopped, seemingly pointing up at him. He looked down at the sea far below between his legs, then to the side and realised he was being blown gradually, gratifyingly inland. Sheep scattered in an arc as the lumpy marsh rushed up and hit him before he could get his feet and knees ready. He lay still for a full minute, his mind blown by the shock and relief. He tried to stand up but his ankle raced with pain and wouldn’t let him, so he sat back down and started to gather up his parachute as best he could. It was still a bright early morning, and it couldn’t have been more than an hour since the start of this, only his third sortie, yet he’d already lost a plane, buggered his ankle, and blown his chances of seeing the lovely Mary at church parade today. But he did thank God he was alive.

Supermarine Spitfire without streamlined transparent plastic plinth.

To be continued

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