Channel Shore Page 11

  ‘I like it here,’ he said. ‘I can hear the sea from my bedroom. It sends me to sleep. What is it about the seaside? I don’t know, I just know I can’t be without it.’

  The middle-aged lady working in the library was fourth-generation Hayling Island. She had seen the whole of the southern end of the island built over and suburbanised. It was a shame, she said, but that was the way of things. You couldn’t expect it to stay as it was. No, she had no desire to get away. ‘If I’m inland for any length of time I start getting breathless. I have to be somewhere on the edge.’ She walked on the beach every day, on the shingle. ‘It doesn’t matter what the weather is, your feet stay clean. I love that.’

  Below the band of shingle, low tide exposes a great expanse of pale sand. John Betjeman wrote fondly of ‘the ripple and suck of a smooth tide flooding over silvery mud, and the salt, sand-coated vegetation of the marsh.’ Betjeman was there in time to enjoy the old Hayling Island, before the village became a shapeless holiday resort and the prime sites along the seafront were filled with modern villas and anonymous blocks of flats. Towards the western end is Norfolk Crescent, an incongruously gracious Georgian relic of a short-lived attempt in the 1820s to create a smart seaside resort, which has been permitted to slide into a sad state of decay.

  Hayling Island’s one undisputed claim to fame, or at least notice, is that windsurfing was invented there by a local lad, Peter Chilvers, whose invention has conquered the world and brought him honour wherever the wind whips across waves. More contentious is the story that the Holy Grail is buried somewhere on the island; and more contentious still the theory that Jesus Christ himself spent time there.

  First, the Grail. It hasn’t been found on Hayling Island yet, nor – unless I have missed something – in any of the other locations proposed by Grail enthusiasts between Ethiopia and Nova Scotia. There is, however, a Knights Templar cross on the floor of the chancel of St Mary’s Church, which some like to see as a clue. It was enough, apparently, to persuade the novelist Nevil Shute that it should be investigated by unorthodox means.

  Shute’s full name was Nevil Shute Norway. Born in 1899, he was a brilliantly original aeronautical engineer and designer who founded a highly successful aircraft company in Portsmouth and became a millionaire, and who wrote fiction to relax. In 1940 Shute Norway joined a highly hush-hush unit called the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons, known colloquially as the Wheezers and Dodgers, where he designed or helped design a variety of death-dealing contraptions. The best-known of these was the Great Panjandrum, a cylinder suspended between two Catherine wheels bristling with rockets which was intended to carry 4000 pounds of high explosives at 60 m.p.h. up and through Rommel’s concrete defence wall along the Normandy beaches, although the project was abandoned after trials at Westward Ho! ended prematurely amid a storm of errant exploding rockets.

  Shute Norway had a briskly uncomplicated view of novel-writing in wartime: ‘I have no respect for the writer of any age or sex who thinks he or she can serve the country best by sitting still and writing.’ Nevertheless he did sit still and write in the evenings after work, and right at the end of the war produced the book which became one of his greatest successes.

  No Highway is an extraordinary novel, extraordinary in its ordinariness. The story, such as it is, revolves around a new airliner which is rushed prematurely into commercial use with disastrous results. The setting is mainly suburban; the protagonist is a dull, socially inept nonentity; there is some love but no sex; not much action, no violence. The prose is flat and functional, the dialogue wooden, the characterisation perfunctory, the denouement more than somewhat absurd. Yet it sold in mounds, and was made into a Hollywood picture with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. Did I miss something?

  The climax of No Highway sees the designer of the airliner put his daughter into a trance and prompt her, by means of a planchette, to identify the location in the Canadian wilderness of the tailpiece of the crashed plane. Like other hard-nosed boffins, Shute Norway had a strong mystical streak, which apparently led him to try to make contact with those Knights Templar (or possibly French monks) who may or may not have brought the Grail to Hayling Island.

  Shute Norway and his family lived in Pond Head House, a large, secluded residence close to Mengeham Rythe, a creek on the south-eastern side of the island giving access to Chichester Harbour. His neighbour and fellow sailing-club stalwart was Rear-Admiral Ralph Fisher. The story goes that Fisher had a barn or Wendy house on his property, very hidden away, and that seances were conducted there to try to ascertain the whereabouts of the chalice from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. Details are sketchy – actually, more like non-existent – but I think we can safely assume that firm information about the Grail’s whereabouts was not forthcoming.

  By the time No Highway was published, Nevil Shute Norway had had enough of Hayling Island, and indeed of England. He was much upset by a row at the sailing club, which led to him being rebuked by the Commodore for the unspeakable offence of untying a boat that had used his mooring without permission and letting it float out to sea. He was also a deep-dyed Conservative and meritocrat who loathed the idea of a welfare state, and regarded the election of the Labour government with horror. He emigrated to Australia, where he wrote more bestsellers including A Town Like Alice, and his famous vision of post-nuclear dystopia, On The Beach. Incidentally, Shute Norway much disliked the Hollywood version of this, his last completed book, because it depicted the love between Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner being consummated, whereas the point in the novel was that the two protagonists were too decent to give way to coarse fleshly urges.

  So, did Jesus come to Hayling Island?

  To my uninformed eye, the case looks rather thin; in fact it makes the Holy Grail story seem as solid as rock. The main evidence adduced by the authors of a recent guide to the island is a reference in a letter from St Augustine to the Pope of the time to a ‘Royal Island’ with a church ‘built by no human act but by the hands of Christ himself.’ This Royal Island, the authors of the guide assert, can be none other than Hayling Island, its royal status derived from a connection with Commius, leader of the Atrebates tribe in Gaul. They claim it was given special protected status by Julius Caesar, which would have made it a safe haven for the Jewish tin merchant Joseph of Arimathea when he came to Britain with his young charge – Jesus of Nazareth.

  ‘It is exciting to think that the young Jesus could have enjoyed life on this island,’ the guide says. ‘We could easily imagine him teaching and healing people near the church.’ Indeed. But then again . . .

  10

  WIGHT

  I feel I owe the Isle of Wight an apology for leaving it out of this book, although I am confident it will survive the blow. I have also omitted the Channel Islands, but am not inclined to apologise to them, as my subject is the Channel shore and the Channel Islands clearly do not belong to it.

  For the same reason I have left out the major Channel ports except where – as in the case of Dover, Folkestone and Newhaven – they face directly onto the open sea. I do not think I need to say sorry to Chichester, Portsmouth, Gosport, Southampton, Lymington, Poole, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Fowey or Falmouth. The point about them is that, strictly speaking, they are NOT on the Channel. They had good, deep anchorages and protected, defensible access to the open sea, which is why they became what they became. That was their good fortune, and England’s good fortune.

  So I need not feel I have let these historic ports down. But I am troubled by the Isle of Wight. It clearly does have a Channel shore, between Bembridge and the Needles, and indeed was part of the mainland until a mere seven thousand years ago. All I can say in my defence is that I decided on a mainland journey and I stuck to that. I hope the Isle will forgive me, for I think highly of it and its people and have had happy seaside days there both as boy and man.

  The Isle of Wight became detached from what is now Hampshire as a result of the enormous rise in sea levels that followed the end
of the last Ice Age. Very broadly speaking, the Channel as we know it took shape as part of that process. At the eastern end, between Dover and Calais, a final break with mainland Europe was effected. West was open sea, leading to the Atlantic.

  Sonar imaging of the Channel bed has revealed the existence of a submerged valley miles wide and up to fifty metres deep which the scientists believe was scoured from the chalk bedrock by a flood of cataclysmic violence around 450,000 years ago. Their hypothesis is that it was caused when the southern wall holding in a giant lake extending from East Anglia across the southern North Sea to Germany gave way, or was breached – possibly as a result of an earthquake. It is likely that there was a second cataclysm, 200,000 years or so after the first, which left the chalk cliffs along the Kent coast near Dover and along the north French coast as relics of the ridge as it had been, with a shelf between that would have been periodically submerged by rises in sea levels, and finally submerged for good.

  Although that process left the proto-Channel familiar to us now, the eastern section – roughly from the Isle of Wight to Dover – was vulnerable to further significant reshaping. It was low-lying and composed of softish rock, easily eroded. Over time that stretch of coastline collapsed into marsh and shallow sea – the old cliff line is discernible as an arc between Hastings and Hythe – although it was subsequently reclaimed as dry or dryish land.

  West of the Solent the line of the coast has been altered much less, partly because the rock is generally harder, partly because the lie of the hinterland is higher. Cliff faces have been pushed back and continue to be pushed back, those of sandstone much more obviously than those of granite. What were once river valleys have been invaded by the sea and turned into estuaries or permanent inlets, such as the one between Salcombe and Kingsbridge in Devon. But overall the line has been modified rather than radically redrawn, in contrast to the eastern section.

  The character of the beaches changes with the coastline itself. The typical West Country beach is of fine sand overlaying a substratum of rock. The sand is the pulverised fragments of the rocks and stones and clays caught between the headlands and pounded and beaten by the waves. Further east, where the coast is less fractured by headlands and therefore more open, shingle predominates. The prevailing west and south-west winds compel an incessant eastward shifting of stones great and small. East of the Isle of Wight most of the beaches are of shingle down to the half-tide mark. The shingle gives way to sand, which then slopes more gently down to the sea’s edge, and on below the water. Actually sand is present all the way up to hightide level, but overlaid by the stones.

  This shift of the shingle is an inexorable process. The waves break at an angle against the beach (although the backwash is perpendicular). One small pebble can be shunted several feet to the east by one wave of modest force. But it is only the top layer of stones that is exposed to the force of the waves. The remainder stay where they are until they are exposed. Then it is their turn. In cycles the whole enormous mass of stones migrates along the shore, an implacable, relentless march. The positioning of groynes along the beaches checks the march; the shingle piles up to the west of these obstructions, forming steep drops in the eastern side. Left to their own devices the groynes are eventually buried.

  Hurst Castle

  After the break that is the Solent, the Channel shore resumes at Hurst Point, the low spit of land on which Hurst Castle was built on the orders of Henry VIII to guard the western approach to Southampton. The first significant settlement to the west is Milford-on-Sea (or Milford On Sea, no one seems entirely sure of the hyphens) which is bunched above low, rapidly eroding sandstone and gravel cliffs a couple of miles west of Hurst Point. It is a pleasant, unremarkable place, the old village centre enclosed by the usual sprawl of modern housing. There is not much sign now of what it might have been.

  In the 1880s the local bigwig, William Cornwallis-West, decided to emulate what his friend the Duke of Devonshire had done in Eastbourne, and turn Milford into a classy seaside resort. The plans were ambitious. There would be a pier, a railway station, warm-water baths, elegant hotels, a fine esplanade. The first step was to amplify Milford’s name by adding the ‘On Sea’, and the second was to lay out spacious pleasure gardens on the clifftop. There was no third step; the funds available from Cornwallis-West were swiftly exhausted, and his hopes of attracting investors were apparently stymied by an outbreak of typhoid.

  In time the Milford estate – centred on Newlands Manor, a Gothic pile to the north of the village – was inherited by William’s only son, George. Unloved and ignored by his mother, he was a profligate young man with a penchant for unsuitable and short-lived marriages – first to Winston Churchill’s mother (he was about the same age as Winston), and then to the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell. With Newlands Manor he also inherited the family’s other estate, Ruthin Castle in Denbighshire, but both were by then saddled by crushing debt. He sold the Welsh castle and estate in 1919 and Newlands Manor the following year. Poor chap, he continued to be plagued by money worries for the rest of his life, which ended abruptly in 1951 in his suicide.

  I have a soft spot for him because he had a soft spot for fish and fishing. In addition to a very popular volume of memoirs, Edwardian Heydays, George put together a charming medley of fishing tales which he called Edwardians Go Fishing. As a boy he caught roach in the lake at Newlands, dace and trout in the little stream that ran out of the New Forest into the Solent at Keyhaven and some decent sea trout in its estuary. But most of the book consists of a string of anecdotes peppered with the names of the blue bloods, the rich, the idle and the highly privileged. A typical Cornwallis-West paragraph begins thus:

  ‘Many years ago I found myself at a weekend party at Keele Hall, where the late King Edward was also a guest. At the bottom of the garden was a large clear pond fed by springs, and in it innumerable trout had been placed by Colonel Ralph Sneyd, the owner of the place which at that time was let to Grand Duke Michael of Russia . . .’

  The coastline between Hurst Point and Christchurch Harbour has been in steady retreat for centuries. Late sixteenth-century maps show Milford well inland and the village of Hordle and its church just to the west and close to the sea. Two centuries later the church was crumbling on the cliff edge and the houses nearby were abandoned. The Earl of Bute was thoroughly irritated by the reduction in his estate at Highcliffe, and when his cliff path disappeared over the edge his workmen dug a new one in the hope that he would not notice the difference. Examination of the first Ordnance Survey map of 1810 suggests that the cliff edge has retreated around 200 yards since then.

  This stretch of Channel shore took a tremendous battering in the storms of late winter 2014. The worst, on St Valentine’s Day, destroyed many of Milford’s distinctive concrete beach huts and sent huge waves laced with stones bursting over the back of the beach, the sea wall and the road. The windows of the Marine Restaurant on Hurst Road were shattered and its ground floor was engulfed by sea water; couples who’d arrived intent on romance found themselves being rescued by the Army.

  The next settlement to the west, Barton, finds itself contemplating ever closer communion with the advancing sea. Many of the older cottages built near the edge were gobbled up by major landslips in 1953 and in the winter of 1974–5, and since then there have been many more, less spectacular slippages. A wide buffer of greensward was left between the cliffs and the bungalows and villas and blocks of flats that spread across what was previously open farmland from the 1930s onwards. At the time it must have seemed ample protection against the sea, but little by little it is being nibbled away.

  Between Milford and Barton are the rolling fairways and emerald greens of Barton Golf Club. There are probably a few club stalwarts who would elect to have their mortal remains interred there if they could, but thus far the only memorial is not to a golfer at all, but to a horse – or, to be more precise, a pony.

  Remember the 1968 Mexico Olympics? Bob Beamon’s immortal leap. The Fosbury
Flop. The Black Power salute. David Hemery’s gold in the 400m hurdles. Wonderful Lillian Board’s silver. And Stroller, the only pony ever to showjump at Olympic level.

  Showjumping was very big on the BBC in those distant days. The music from Mozart via Waldo de los Rios, commentary from Dorian Williams and Raymond Brooks-Ward, men and women in hats and tight jackets and breeches circumnavigating Hickstead knocking poles down. My grandmother – who lived next door to us and had a TV when we did not – loved it with a passion. I detested it as a non-sport, but the Olympics was different. It would have required a heart of stone not to have been stirred and moved by the gallantry and delicacy of this little horse and the fresh-faced farmer’s daughter who rode him, wholesome Marion Coakes.

  How we booed her great rival, the German Alwin Schockemöhle on his Teutonic beast. But it was the American Bill Steinkraus and Snowbound who thwarted Coakes and Stroller in the individual jumping. She had two down in the final round, he had one. But never mind – in that innocent, pre-professional era we loved our brave losers as much as our rare winners, and none lost more bravely than little Stroller.

  He was already almost eighteen when winning silver in Mexico, and he went on competing into his twenties before retiring to graze honourably at the farm owned by Marion’s parents. Stroller lived to thirty-six, by which time part of the farm had been sold to be incorporated into Barton golf course. And I went back to detesting showjumping.

  Barton-on-Sea

  On the greensward at Barton two old naval salts were walking their schnauzers. They had both served at HMS Ganges, the training establishment in Suffolk, but at different times, so hadn’t known each other until retirement to Barton brought them together. Now both their wives were dead, and they met twice a day in fine weather to stroll a little creakily in one direction and then back while the little dogs snuffled and scampered about.