SHEERNESS AND A CANTERBURY TALE

An edited diary entry 

Tuesday. We drive as if going to Gatwick Airport but leave it, thankfully, on our left and continue to the M25 where we turn to the east. The London orbital is thick with traffic, mostly lorries from all over Europe, all colours, all cargoes, bright in the morning sun. We're in a recession, apparently, but if a recessionary state can be judged by the movement of goods, then we're not. Not by a long way. M25. Somewhere over there a farm on the Pilgrims' Way, a village called Titsey and some memories of a child of three or four years. A sandstone wall, wooden gates, dark hedges (are they yew?). Who lived here? Name of Leveson-Gower (we pronounced it Lewson-Gore). All gone now. The great house abandoned and re-instated as a tourist attraction. A dead badger in the dewey morning and a single black skid mark at the top of the hill. Brock meets Royal Enfield late one autumn night. 1951 or '52. No sound of the European lorries then over the pastures full of mushrooms. Memories or imagination? Who knows? For however faithful we wish our memories to be they are ever the product of imagination. 

And miles have passed without me seeing them for I have been lost in these pictures of long ago. Suddenly it's the M26, almost empty by comparison with the M25, and then the M20 to Dover but this too, is soon behind us and it's the A249 and there are signs to Sheerness – a silhouette of a lorry on a silhouette of a ship. Other signs: 'MOT while-U-wait', 'Crematorium' and, by far the biggest, 'Pole dancing competition. Friday and Sat.' This on a desperate pub marooned by the main road and which stands alone and sinister and as welcoming as the Bates Motel, gritty dust and the shredded tyre from a semi-trailer at its forecourt. Grey pylons and brown marshes its backdrop. These two, although we don't yet know this, will become a sort of leitmotif for the next two days.

Sittingbourne on the right. Coldharbour Marshes. Ridham Marshes. A railway line beside the road and soon we swing on to the high curving concrete bridge which is the Sheppey crossing. Queenborough. West Minster and Sheerness-on-Sea. The first impression of Sheerness is that it is a staggeringly unappealing place where the men don't wash and the women don't care. A town in regret and what it regrets is the closure of the RN Dockyard in the 1960s, since when the population has fallen from 25,000 to something like half that. The steel works, which is unfortunately pretty central to the town, presumably employs the unwashed men in their jeans and perforated t-shirts. On Sundays they will be wearing track suits, Lycra, and will be showing off their tattoos. (Several piercing and tattoo parlours in the side streets). Actually Sheerness seems a town of side streets and back streets. There's nothing very main here, nothing to be proud of, no big house, no sense of social hierarchy. The two best buildings are both abandoned. The Working Mens' Club & Institute — good brown brickwork and falling surprisingly comfortably between Classical and Gothic — is all dirty, white-painted plywood shuttering below with green plastic mesh covering the windows. Too late — all broken. The Sheerness Local Board of Health building is little better but its red brick and Classical pink stone mouldings are well-preserved. Galvanised mesh and shelter for pigeons.

But before we see these we park the car in an empty car park of pot-holes and stones and walk on the shingle of the sea. It's the Thames estuary but wide enough here to be called the sea. Sandwiches and a flask of tea and we watch the birds — herring- and black-backed gulls, golden plovers; and we watch the ships too, and the afternoon sun shining on the far off houses of Southend-on-Sea. From here you can't make out the famous pier. To our right are thirty white wind turbines revolving lazily on the far horizon and to their left the black towers of the Thames Estuary Army Forts. Anti-aircraft posts from the second world war and looking, through the binoculars, like the horrible striding things from The War of the Worlds. We look at the map and decide to drive towards Leysdown-on-Sea and Shell Ness.

Through Minster. We miss the abbey but cannot miss the bungalows. Nor do we miss the Abbey Hotel, where we thought about staying. Thank God we didn't. It's a Tesco under another name lying unloved in an empty sea of gravel. Through Eastchurch and past the prison to Leysdown where we park the car and put on our walking boots. Warden, Leysdown and Bay View are the resting places for thousands of mobile holiday homes, each as interesting as a mass-produced brick. To our left the sea and a boat, the Matty Jay, half a mile out, circling, fishing we presume. We talk to an angler with his rod held in a tripod on the shingle. He's hoping for whiting, bass, eels and dab and, if he's lucky, thornback. He's from South London, a regular visitor '. . . it's only an hour in the car.' And he has an interesting slant on racism, although he undoubtedly doesn't see it as such: 'I like it here. Everyone talks like me.' It's the accent, not the colour that unsettles him. His friend is a large Alsatian, the sort you see behind the padlocks of a scrapyard. To our right the marshes, dotted, according to the map, with saltworks but the word is always in Gothic type and it's an old industry, long dead. A wind-pump spinning in the distance. At Shellbeach there are a dozen little bungalows on the edge. Not bungalows really but more elaborate than beach huts. Each is different yet all share the same characteristics, hand-made, wooden, some painted, some not. Eccentric. Can't imagine they involve planning permission and clearly they don't conform to any sort of building regulations. They are utterly charming and I want one. One of them is called 'Sea View'. Another has a hare cut from a sheet of tin nailed to the shallow point of its gable. I suppose there are hares on the marshes. Our walk takes us through the naturist beach where men stand about in the marram grass, their hands on their hips, as if looking for women but there are no women here.

When we reach the end, the hamlet of Shellness, we return to the landward side of the sea wall (here it's just a high earth bank) and walk in its shelter on the edge of the saltmarsh. It is warm and the warmth is made heavier by the thick perfume of sea wormwood (artemesia), wild rocket and sea aster. A wall butterfly and a small, dark, blue which, earlier in the year you'd say was a Small blue, but it's too late. The flood tide is filling the creeks fast and we respect the notices that warn of the path being flooded at high water. It would have been good to walk on to Harty Ferry and the little church of St Thomas the Apostle, built in 1089 and still, quite properly, without electricity although the marshes are strung together with pylons and power cables. John Betjeman wrote of its 'splendid isolation'. But the tide is rising and my back is telling me it has had enough so we return to the car. The beach (it is, after all, called Shellbeach for good reason) is covered with cockles, razor shells, whelks and others and they crunch like cornflakes under our feet. Oysters too. Whitstable is just over there on the other side of the water and isn't it Whitstable that's famous for oysters?

Back to Sheerness and the guest house. No answer from the door-bell so we telephone. Nikki will be here in two minutes — she's collecting the children from school, and while we wait we contemplate Marine Parade. It's a sorry, dark road, narrow and busy with cars. On the south side it is lined with three-storey Victorian terraced houses of which our guest house is one and which would once have looked over the estuary to the lights of Southend but on the other side of the road a brutal concrete sea defence has been set up to face the terrace, almost as high as the houses, so that they now look on to a concrete wall which takes away the light and traps the sound of the traffic. The wall has been given a miserable gesture of decoration in some concrete relief, part geometric, part organic, but somehow this only increases its overwhelming and depressing mass. It's a sea defence of which the Thames barrier is presumably a part — an attempt to delay the effects of the sinking of the English east coast. In the case of Sheerness you can't help thinking why did they bother? 

Here's Nikki (in Sheerness-on-Sea her name must be spelled with that final i). A small woman in her late thirties but looking very much younger and a little flustered. Tight blue jeans. She's clean and pretty — a good sign we think as she turns the Yale key in the lock of the deep red Victorian door. Indeed, we will later vote her the prettiest girl on the island, though she hasn't a lot of competition. Our optimism soon turns to disappointment as she turns the other key in the fire door of room number three. It could have been made as the set for a low-budget Dracula movie. Deep reds and rich dark browns and the four-poster bed is conctructed from badly sawn pine, stained brown and fastened with shiny cross-head screws. There is no en-suite bathroom which we had assumed there would be and no sea view which we were assured there would be. When we ask about this Nikki goes to one corner, squeezes herself behind the very wide wide-screen television, flattens herself against the wall and points at an acute angle through the middle window. She's done this before, she knows the trajectory well, and she's right. There's the sea, or a bit of it, with one distant wind turbine, glimpsed through a narrow gap between two greyish houses above the sea defence on the other side of the road. When we complain Nikki doesn't seem to know how to respond and I begin to feel sorry for her while, of course, she should be feeling sorry for me. The bed, a travesty of furniture design, is, however, firm and comfortable and we agree to give the room a try for one night.

The pictures on the walls are mostly reproductions of Victorian mild erotic photographs (is this the honeymoon suite? Surely not). There is a also a reproduction of a landscape by W F Witherington, RA, 'The Homestead', and a nice print behind old glass of a portrait by Karl Shellbach. There is also a big apparent oil painting of a galleon on a rough sea which is printed on imitation canvas but does not in any way convince. On the table there is a folder which holds leaflets and information about the area, most of it out of date. From the guest house information sheet I am reminded of the SS Richard Montgomery, a United States liberty ship which '. . . went aground on the sands off Sheerness on Sunday August 24, 1944 while carrying 1200 tons of explosives which remain to this day in the holds. If it should explode it would result in the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever and which would destroy every building in Sheerness.' The next sentence reads: 'We hope you enjoy your stay at the Guest House, Colin and Nikki'. 

We decide to risk being blown to pieces and go into the town to look for a draught Guinness. Two of the many shop window notices: '1½ hours on our sunbed for £55' and 'National Walking The Plank Championships'. Hard to know which would be worse. The perfume of industry (the steel works?) hangs in the late afternoon air. We try four pubs. Guinness, it seems, is not too popular here. Not like Bailey's. Bailey's would seem to be north Kent's beverage of the moment. They talk about it a lot. The first of our four pubs has run out of Guinness, the second keeps only the undrinkable ice-cold variety, the third is shut but a dirty though affable youth is hanging about at the side door. He tells us that we can get Guinness at The Napier. It's run by his nan and has a good restaurant. He is right about the Guinness and we decide to order some dinner. My lasagne is stodgy and micro-waved and Fulvia's rump steak which she ordered medium is so well done that the serrated steak knife produces a sort of sawdust. We don't complain. Do we have the right to demand what we are used to when we have come to somewhere where they do things differently? That, after all, is why we're here. As it turns out we wouldn't have had time to send the roof tile of a steak back as, without warning, all customers are asked to leave because the police need to conduct interviews with the staff due to 'an incident' the previous evening. No-one seems surprised at this, as if it's a regular occurrance and we fall in with the acceptance and leave The Napier, looking for blood on the carpet. If there is any it won't be from Fulvia's steak but there's none. We walk down to the beach. A few late gulls against the stars and a distant ship sliding slowly out of the Thames and into the North Sea. To where? Tiny waves fold with hardly a sound on the shingle and far away is the ribbon of lights that is Southend and I am reminded for some reason that someone I once knew had a brother who lived over there. Way across that cold water dusted with reflections. 

Walking back to the guest house we pass a few remnants of some good original cast iron decorative railings with matching boot scrapers built into the walls along Marine Parade. They remind anyone who might notice them of a time when Sheerness had something to be proud of. Now, though, they have almost all been replaced by newer and much less ornate substitutes. Back at the Dracula suite we try out the wide-screen telly. It's Inspector Barnaby but all the cars in Midsomer have elliptical wheels and everyone is short and fat and greenish. We go to bed and sleep well.

The bathroom at the guest house is up a half-landing. It's pink and, apart from the lavatory, is plastic. There is a yellowish non-slip mat in the bottom of the bath. It's covered in the sort of suckers you find on the tentacles of the octopus and we decide to wash in Dracula's hand-basin. At breakfast we meet Colin. He's friendly and knows everything about Sheerness. One of the things he knows is that the Richard Montgomery was carrying mustard gas, not explosives. It's comforting (so long as the wind is in the other direction. "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling") but we don't believe him. In a way we don't want to. Orange juice, corn flakes, scrambled eggs with bacon and baked beans and espresso coffee which is not espresso at all but it's alright. The television, high on a ledge above the door, tells us of dust storms in Sydney and of a man with a metal detector who has found a hoard to rival Sutton Hoo. Warwickshire, I think.

Today, Wednesday, we go to Canterbury by train. From Sheerness station we catch the 9.56 to Sittingbourne where we'll change on to the train to Dover Priory — third stop Canterbury East. The helpful guard ('Don't blame me. I didn't design it') explains the time-table to us and we settle down to watch the industry and the marshes which are the colour of sunny concrete pass us by. Between the flats of sunny concrete (and some of it may really be concrete) are winding dykes of greenish water and then a great flat of imported cars shining and aggressive in the late summer sun. The port of Sheerness is apparently and shamelessly responsible for importing more cars than any other. And timber. And fresh fruit and vegetables, though how fresh after crossing the North Sea? This is a landscape of pylons and cattle and sheep and container lorries on unseen roads. Broken wooden fences. A concrete flyover curving on concrete piers. The Swale. I suppose this is the bridge we crossed yesterday and this the railway line we looked down to. Shining mud and someone digging bait. Distant cranes. Swale station has only one platform and it lies in the shade of the flyover. No-one leaves the train and no-one joins.

Now we are on mainland Kent and the marshes are replaced by harvested stubble, the kestrels and gulls by rooks. At Kemsley, sycamores brush the windows as we pass. There is a development of new housing which apparently uses traditional materials but I swear the white weatherboarding is plastic. uPVC without a doubt. After Sittingbourne, Kent becomes more Kentish: close studding on early timber houses, oast houses and high, hop poles, empty now, and wires. Rolling orchards with unharvested apples red like baubles at Christmas. The train to Canterbury. I had dreamily imagined this to be a wooden-panelled train, 'smoking' engraved on the windows. I, a GI from Oregon, Fulvia a pretty girl looking for a caravan, and both trying to reason with a posh gent with a pot of glue. But it is air-conditioned and white and smooth and someone is talking in Chinese on a mobile phone. Beyond the un-engraved and wide windows are blackcurrant bushes, a shed of rusting corrugated tin and a line of washing. High umbellifers, brown and brittle. More poles empty of hops. This is Selling. The buildings thicken, the houses and the warehouses, and there, above them all, Canterbury cathedral. If you take away the colour this, at last, is the same distant view as in the film. At Canterbury East station there is a fine signal box, greeen cast-iron frame and white weatherboarding (made indisputably of wood) and looking a bit top heavy. There is also a confusing notice: 'Customers for the city centre and cathedral please change here and follow the signs'. Change or alight?

We can see the cathedral and this would seem to be the only sign we need. The centuries old sign, the pilgrims' sign, and we walk towards it on the path which is the top of the city walls. Every so often there is a rounded look-out post with lancets. A battery, I suppose you'd call it. These are made, like the rest of the wall, from flint mainly, but those used here are better knapped and closer set — really quite fine. On our left the bus station and the city. On our right the ring road forming a sort of latter-day moat and then beyond that the utterly predictable — Citröen showrooms, lavish offices (local government?), a night club. These seeming somehow more of a threat than the marauders at whom arrows would be aimed from the lancets. At the end of our elevated stroll there is a new flint building with elegantly curved walls into which are set small, rectangular and heavily framed windows — almost le Corbusier. We buy grapes and walnuts from the market stall (walnuts local, grapes perhaps via Sheerness). Next to the fruit stall is one selling Airfix aeroplane kits and some coaches and rolling-stock for electric train sets. There is a red and cream Hornby corridor coach which takes me back, as trains always do. 

We are each obliged to pay £6.50 each to go into the cathedral and I think of it as an art gallery and a film set rather than a church. The spiritual is too well-camouflaged for me. On the floor of the Trinity Chapel are twelve marble roundels representing the signs of the zodiac. There is a reassurance where Christian and pre-Christian meet and correspond. I'm looking for the organ. It's not where I expect it to be, but then I've only seen it in A Canterbury Tale and I ask one of the guides to help. It turns out he was in the film. One of the boys, though not allowed on the water. Too young. Robin Eyres his name. He lived in Chilham (Chillingborough in the film) where the location scenes were shot. He seems surprised that someone today knows of the film and for a while he seems to forget that I am asking about the organ. It's been moved. You can't see it now and the spiral staircase you can see in the film is long gone. Pity. I liked that staircase. We buy a guide book and some post cards and walk out into the cloisters just as the nave is being over-run by Japanese schoolboys, curiously wearing what I take to be an English school uniform: black blazer with badge on the breast pocket, grey trousers. 

Outside it is warm and sunny. The centre of Canterbury is short on tarmac and strong on cobbles and natural stone and I'm thinking that perhaps it's just a bit too tasteful. We go to Strada in Sun Street for lunch. You don't find these chains in Sheerness (except for McDonald's) and there is something comforting about familiarity. This, of course, is just what the chains' proprietors would wish me to feel and I am saddened and disturbed by my reaction. I do, however, draw the line long before Starbucks. The chef is from Kosovo and the food is good — spigola al forno and orecchiette liguri, garlic bread, water and espressos for thirty quid. Far better value than the Napier yesterday though perhaps less entertaining.

We had hoped to go into Greyfriars, the oldest Franciscan building in Britain, apparently. Open from 2 to 4 pm daily. But at three o'clock it is padlocked and chained. Books on Matisse (one a well-translated 2005 exhibition catalogue from Düsseldorf which deals with the great man's responses to the female figure) from Waterstone's and some others from the Chaucer Bookshop in Beer Cart Lane where the bloke is Sir Robert Sherston-Baker, Bt. He shows us some of his typographic private press books which are behind locked glass doors. Very good, some of it and although we make it clear that we're not able to buy any of these volumes he seems happy for us to look at them. He seems to enjoy our enjoyment but too soon we must say goodbye and we walk slowly back to the station. 

The platform is full of fat girls eating chocolate. On their way back from college. All the fat girls have i-pods — a twisted white wire to the ear. The i-pod appears to have become essential. It is no more an accessory, no more a way of listening to music or even a fashion statement. It holds the same status, the same level of necessity as your clothes or your spectacles. You can't go out without it. The fat girls, like us, are going to Sheerness. Sheerness seems to me to be a paradigm of the pointlessness of life. No prospects, impending explosive (and environmental and ecological) doom, if you think about these things, so why not drink Bailey's and eat chocolate and grow fat. I can understand that.

In the evening  we buy a small cod and chips from Bongo's chip shop and eat them on the sea wall, watching the lights of Southend, the winking buoys and the passing boats. As last night a few nocturnal gulls patrolling. Then back to the Dracula suite, looking at books, and an early night. 

Thursday. Breakfast as yesterday. Breakfast time TV as yesterday. Colin, as yesterday, telling the history of Sheerness, shows us his photographs of the Edwardian sea-front. Then we pack our bags and say goodbye to him with the odd feeling that we'll miss him, his laugh, his tattoos and his scrambled eggs. 

We drive along the main road and turn left at a sign saying 'Elmley National Nature Reserve'. It is a narrow road and rough and runs for two slow miles through Cheyney Marshes, Minster Marshes, Stray Marshes to Elmley Island and Elmley Marshes. Narrow the road may be but we are overtaken in a cloud of dust by a bouncing, rusting, once yellow LDV van. Unless you are disabled you have to leave the car at Kings Hill Farm. The farmhouse, which is now rented to the RSPB, is a very fine red-brick building with a plain tiled roof, some nice detailing on the brickwork and good wooden casement windows at the front. The bricks will be local, dug from these clayey marshes. At the back the windows are metal and cheap and the whole aspect is shabby and sad indeed. The house must date from the 1790s or thereabouts. On the south side a new wing was added in the middle of the nineteenth century. It's vaguely Georgian in style and is made of yellow London bricks, which, and you don't have to look too closely to see this, are cracking, in some places alarmingly. When later, we ring the bell and speak to one of the wardens who looks like a young John Mortimer, he tells us that the foundations are woefully inadequate for the weight of the building. (It's always 'woefully' when you're talking about inadequacies, but that's what he said).

Elmley. Once here was a church, a school, a row of cottages as well as the farm with its house and very fine timber barn. Except for these last two all gone now, and the laughing children. There are a couple of new and unimaginitive houses that look as if they were destined for a middle-management estate in Chelmsford but got lost on the way. There is an air of sadness, an air accentuated by the heavy fruit trees, pears mainly, still fruiting as if someone may still want their produce as someone used to.

We take the binoculars and cameras and walk across the marshes looking, and feeling, decidedly amateur and inadequate as we are passed by striding twitchers each carrying those telescopes that you see advertised in the glossy bird-watching magazines. (Recent sightings: spoonbill, curlew sandpiper, marsh harrier). It would be nice to see an avocet, so black and white, so graphic, with those strange blue legs that look exactly right. But I'm as interested in the land and the water and the oddly entirely harmonious relationship between these and the distant chimneys of the paper mill, and the pylons. The marshes are grazed by cattle of all colours. Some have calves. There are great flocks of starlings in clouds which suddenly fall to the ground for the thousands of crane flies that fly low over the coarse grass and around the legs of the cattle. Flocks of lapwings too. 

It is very dry. It's a marsh but as we walk our boots kick up dust. You can tell by the stems of the reeds that the water is a good foot below its normal level. The sea defence, an earth bank as high as a house, has cracks along its top, deep and jagged. If it were not dry, if it were not sunny, if it were damp and cold and wintry you could hear Magwitch's manacles clanking in the frosty fog. And not far away there would be a house of those same bricks as Kings Hill Farmhouse in which you'd find a crazy, broken-hearted woman, some cobwebs, and the prettiest girl you had ever seen. But Dickens set his story a bit nearer to London than this and besides, you'd never find anyone of that femme-fatalistic allure here on the Isle of Sheppey. But it isn't winter, it's late summer and it's dry and it's sunny, the rough pasture is savannah brown, the water the richest green, the deep blue sky is laced with the white trails of high aeroplanes and is full of the cries of lapwings. We don't walk far — perhaps a couple of miles one way and another couple back. At the car in the shade of the barn we drink tea and think of desolation. On the other side of the yard there is the rusty yellow van and someone is welding something at the back of a blue tractor. Time to make for the main road and all its lorries and swirling grit.

After an hour or so we turn off the M25 towards Godstone. We feel like a late lunch. The Bell in the HIgh Street looks rather flashy. An old timber-framed building all done up and enlarged. The sort of place a printer's rep might bring a lady client whom he fancied and was trying to impress. Perhaps he might get some orders from her but at the moment what is on his mind is the colour of her knickers. So, not really the sort of place for us, we think, but it's here and we're here and we give it a try. And actually it's alright. Then back to the main roads and in under an hour we're home.

Home with my mind swimming with articulated lorries, brown marshes, the perfume of industry and the perfume of fish, with grey pylons and white chimneys, with lights across the water, with a great Gothic cathedral and a stubborn theologian with a cloak and his blood on the stones. Oyster shells and cockles, scrambled eggs, the train to Canterbury, girls who would be pretty if they were not fat, cattle, sheep, artemesia, and a great estuary. But mostly with a sense of having left somewhere which, though staggeringly unappealing, I find already I am missing.