Authors: Gordon Burn
A few hoorays come tooling in late on Friday afternoons in the spring and summer months and immediately set to it arranging themselves in outdoor tableaux straight out of the creamier advertising pages of
The
Tatler
.
Almost all the locals are tucked away in the council houses tastefully screened from the main road by a stand of spruce and elm, and shop at the Co-Op, which has a rather forbidding notice displayed on the counter – ‘Unlike boots and shoes, the words please and thank you never wear out. Use them as often as you like’ – but gives stamps.
There’s only one shop on the Cleve side – a post office-cum-general store with a psoriatic old dog dumped in the doorway and only swampy lettuce and purpling scrag-end identifiable in the Neapolitan gloom inside. ‘We can
get
it for you’ is what you get if you ask for anything outside the basic range.
A fish van (prop. a recycled public relations executive, dried-out but still noticeably stress-clenched) comes round once a week. For everything else, you have to cross over to Coombe. This means the tide decides when you shop.
There is another way to Coombe, on dry land. But this means climbing a hill steep enough to bring the blood taste up into your throat; you also risk being flattened by on-coming traffic. It is this traffic whose headlamps and tail-lights I can look out and see at nights, the only things moving in the dark.
From halfway up the hill, Kiln Cottage on the other side of the valley looks like a picture-postcard or sampler of itself, ‘quaint’ in a way it never feels from the inside.
Taking this route, you have to walk through a sixties development of houses tricked out with Andalusian arches, ships’ bells and carriage lamps, and jacked up on stilts facing the river as if straining to catch a glimpse of the passing show.
These houses have names like ‘Thousand Fathoms’ and ‘High Standing’, and deep dark picture-windows where you sense the curtains twitching even when they’re not. (‘Rattle the corner of
the curtain to show them you’re still there,’ was the advice an old pro gave me on the art of taking bows when I was just starting out.)
Going to Coombe by the river route is more scenic. Not only that, there’s the added excitement of miscalculating tide times and being left stranded on the wrong bank.
At low-tide, the river turns into a kind of concourse or pedestrian precinct, dotted with shoppers and awash with non-biodegradable junk. It’s a short walk across the rocks and seaweed, through the Mmmmmm-Matteson’s bacon wrappers and washed-up tumble-driers and spaghetti-hoops cans to the crossing-point, and the dog gets a chance to unload a couple of doo-doo’s on the way.
I’ve been caught on several occasions by the tide and had to whip off my shoes and roll up my trousers to beat the water pouring over the causeway, with the dog splashing along behind.
Queueing is still as much a way of life in these parts as it is in Moscow or Gdansk. Shopping is regarded as a branch of the performing arts, with scripts that are polished and well-worked rather than improvised.
‘If I were obliged to eat no meat for the rest of my life, on the whole it would be a relief and no hardship …’
‘I always think the flavour of asparagus is the very flavour of late spring …’
‘Very young, slender runner beans are almost as good as asparagus …’
‘Until I got a steamer I was always depressed about rhubarb …’
‘The joys of having one’s own new potatoes are worth any amount of sweat …’
‘A free-range egg is simply a different species from the stale, fishy-tasting battery variety …’
‘The best part of the flower becomes honey, and when I eat honey I like to believe that flower becomes part of me …’
The most important platform – Coombe’s Olivier or Drury Lane – is the shop run by a fleshy, middle-aged Jesus-freak. The
most conspicuous thing in the village is the tall cross erected on the roof of Loaves and Fishes. Its surface is a skein of thousands of faceted foil pieces which lighten or darken with the sky, and shimmer brightly at night like an elementary demonstration of all matter being in a state of perpetual agitation.
The owner of Loaves and Fishes prides herself on being nutritionally, as well as spiritually, right-on: although it’s the only place for miles around where you can buy a zinc bucket, cast-iron doorknocker or nylon washing-line, she sees herself as being primarily in the health-food game.
Inevitably, her customers take this as a challenge to come in and ask for things that they know she hasn’t got: rapeseed oil, balsamic vinegar, falafel, Star polenta, Greek-style yoghurt, nitrite-free crisps.
She reaps her revenge by employing no help and taking several minutes to weigh out a paper-twist of yeast or blanched almonds or peppercorns; by slopping around on big bare gristly plates-of-meat, and larding receipts with religious texts which she programmes daily on the computerised till: ‘Jesus is wonderful. He is doing wonders in my life’; ‘Know Jesus, no problem. No Jesus, know problem’; ‘All I care for is JESUS and the power of HIS resurrection’.
There then follows an address for the International Miracle Centre, in one of the poorer postal districts of London.
Housewifely zeal extends to every corner of village life. A trend I’ve noticed in recent years among the afternoon walkers on the cliff path, for example, is voluntary doggie-doo retrieval. Out comes the carrier bag, down goes the tissue, and another part of the national heritage is saved from desecration.
It’s thanks to the various environmental, heritage and ramblers’ agencies that the turf along the many miles of the coast path is kept in the sort of condition that, if it was in a house (certainly if it was in my mother’s house), it would have a plastic runner thrown over it for protection.
The timber of the gates and stiles along the route is architectonically sunk, oiled, tongued and mitred. The benches have evidently
never known a lovelorn Bev or Gary: they haven’t been gouged at or signed with graffiti. The sheep and rabbit pellets seem a last authenticating touch of the set-dresser.
It nagged at me for some time that I wasn’t having the proper response to the untamed beauty, the uncouth majesty, and so on, of the scenery. That I wasn’t experiencing those lashed-to-the-mast, big feelings that waves crashing on rocks, Turner skies, the sea’s rhythmic thrusts and sighs, were supposed to inspire. The dispiriting underwhelmingness of the experience kept reminding me of the old cockney one-liner: ‘You’re fuckin’ me, aren’t you? I can hear you.’
I worried that I didn’t have a feel for nature.
Only slowly did it come home to me that this was largely because the nature I was surrounded by had been patiently house-trained and suburbanised; toned down like Chinese and Indian and other ethnic flavours to suit the English palate.
This was impressed on me during my second winter. It took that long for the strength to come into my legs. And one day, in a fit of uncharacteristic enterprise, I decided to give them a test-drive by investigating a small bay that I knew lay beyond the perpendicular hill at the back of the house.
It was cold but bright when I set out. After a few hours, though, the weather went into full-dress gothic – thunderbolts, boiling black clouds, curtains of dense rain. I was clinging to a rock at the time, my feet skidding because of the cladding of red mud they’d collected, and my arms shaking from the effort of hanging on.
The tide was coming in fast in spitting white rollers and the dog kept almost knocking me off the narrow ledges I was timidly inching along to safety. At last I was standing in a small cove where a rusting ladder was set into the cliff. At the top of the ladder was more sharp rock, then crumbling earth – I had to snatch at grass clumps and outcroppings a couple of times to stop myself hurtling towards the abyss.
By now, you’ll gather, I was being visited by deep thoughts about those great elemental forces; I was getting it all in spectacular
Sensuround and Vistavision – my nails were bleeding, my fingerends were shredded, I was soaked to the skin. I shuffled left and crawled what seemed hundreds of yards on all-fours until I came to a piece of sailing rope leading to who-knew-where.
I hauled myself up – the dog was peering down at me, his knuckle tail whirling with excitement – and, through a hole in a hedge, found I was eyeball-to-eyeball with a fishing gnome, complete with ornamental pond and cloche-covered runner-beans, and a wrought-iron sign on a gibbet saying ‘The Retreat’.
I was in the caravan park that is still the target of perennial local complaints about ‘caravandalism’. The vans were a uniform pea-green colour with threadbare fifties curtains at the windows and wizened TV aerials on the roofs. They squatted in their decorative plots like favoured pets, too old and settled in their ways to be going anywhere other than here.
*
That was my last piece of freelance activity. Since then I have been happy to fall in with the local rhythms and observe the established codes and practices.
I stay tuned to gale warnings at nights so I can hold my own on the weather. I keep abreast of the latest health scares – listeria, BSE, glass in babyfood, carcinogenic trace-elements in coffee – in case I’m called on for a comment while kicking my heels (and biting my tongue), waiting to be served. I wrap the empties in newspaper when I throw them out, so as not to embarrass or alarm.
I take my walk at the same time every day and see the same soaps, chat shows, quizzes, and somnambulistic sporting occasions – the electric green of field and pitch and billiard table lending a pleasant aquarium air to the stolid, moteless rooms – through the windows I pass on the way.
Now and again the talking hairdo on the screen doing continuity or selling double-glazing or miming the meaning of ‘Easter’ or ‘sandwich’ to an animated machine operative from Chorley (whose prize of a weekend in Jersey or bench-top dishwasher
hangs in the balance) is one I once shared a bill with at the Chiswick Empire or the Tivoli, Hull.
People can say all they want about the so-called totalitarianism of the totally pleasant personality. It has all contributed to the sense of physical well-being and security I have known in my time here.
Steer clear of the rivalries, feuds, tensions, and petty vendettas, as I have managed to do, and the atmosphere is dull and soporific, admittedly, but also unthreatening, undemanding and benign.
I quickly acquired the habit of leaving the doors unlocked when I went out. (Although, for a time, I went through a routine of checking the many hiding-places in the cottage, humming a happy tune, when I got back.) I only lock up at nights in the winter.
At least that was true until some months ago, when something happened that I am taking as the sign (for which I have sensed myself becoming increasingly receptive; my radar for a long time has been silently sweeping the sky) that my time out of time may be reaching the end of its natural span.
Something you hear said occasionally is: ‘the only thing wrong with Cleve is having to look at Coombe.’ What they mean is the toothpaste-coloured bungalows looming out of the dark ilex trees, with their breeze-block barbecue pits and canopied outdoor loungers.
Cleve, by contrast, is mostly weathered natural stone-biscuit brown, sky grey – and lichen-covered tiles. One of the few postwar houses on this side is the first house beyond the slipway at the end of the quay; I pass under its picture-window and plastic teardrop chandelier walking along the river bottom on my way to the shops.
The people who live there used to be regular weekenders but, since the summer, have become permanents. She is stocky, long-suffering, capable; he is the sort of man who tucks the short end of his tie into his shirt and wears crackling diamond-patterned socks with a track-suit and trainers (this is guesswork – I’ve never been close enough to find out).
Even at a distance, though, he seems to bristle with repressed fury and self-hate. It comes off him like static. He kicks out at the debris trapped in the seaweed, slams car doors, changes colour like a traffic-light, and glowers. His neck is in a neck-brace, probably as a result of this pent-up rage. Sometimes the light catches the perspiration standing on the satiny neoprene rim of it in a way that makes it look as if it is beginning to melt.
There is a sign on the heavy gate on the road side of their house, aimed at scaring off burglars. It features a picture of a Dobermann and the slogan: ‘Go Ahead. Make His Day.’ But there is no dog. He is a dog-hater. (There’s a lot of them about.)
The river at low-tide is a popular place for exercising dogs, for obvious reasons. They can swim and chase sticks and do what they have to do, then the tide comes and handily sluices it away.
The couple in the house near the slipway have always kept a particularly unsightly sign in their kitchen window, where no dog-walker can miss it: a line-drawing of a dog squatting to take a dump with a broad red diagonal through it. (They seem to have a
fetich
about laminated signs and badges: the rear window of their car is spattered with stick-ons from stately homes and safari parks, in addition to one advertising another pointless untruth – ‘Child aboard – keep your distance’.)
Recently, though, a home-made effort went up, close to where they park their car on the far end of the quay by the slipway: ‘Please do NOT allow your dog to defecate in front of this house. Or please TAKE THE FAECES HOME WITH YOU’.
The contrast between the drawing-room language – ‘defecate’, ‘faeces’, the reiterated ‘please’ – and the crazy underlining and piece of old board on which the words were chalked, seemed evidence of a personality coming apart at the seams.
*
My last walk of the day is one of the parts of the day that I most look forward to. Taking the flashlight and walking along the river last thing has become one of my unshakeable rituals.
On the darkest nights, when there is no moon (it’s a connection I’ve only made since I’ve been here), it reminds me of being
backstage in the time before I was due on, just out of sight of the audience, which I always found a companionable place to be.