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  I asked about Barton. ‘Wind and widows,’ the one in the woolly hat said. ‘Or in our case widowers.’ He’d been there ten years – ‘it’ll be a pine box job,’ he replied when I asked him if he ever thought of moving. ‘Best view in England,’ his friend said. And on a morning like that morning, the sky blue, the sea blue and flecked with white wave crests, the Needles gleaming to the east and Old Harry to the west, I could not argue.

  * * *

  I had to wait a while at Mudeford for the ferry across to Hengistbury Head. The incoming tide was racing through the narrow entrance into Christchurch Harbour, forcing the navigation buoys back at an angle against their taut chains, boiling and gurgling around the boats at anchor. I watched a fisherman tidying up the ropes and pots in his vessel. I asked him how the fishing was. ‘Bloody awful,’ he snarled. He’d been at it for fifty years, couldn’t remember a worse three months: the wind in the east, the sole and plaice somewhere, but not in Christchurch Bay where they should have been. ‘Bloody hopeless waste of time,’ he grunted, then stalked off to the pub.

  Beach huts at Hengistbury Head

  The most costly beach huts in the country are those arranged in two snaking lines along the tongue of sand and scrubby grass licking across the mouth of Christchurch Harbour from the west. One line looks out to sea, the other across the harbour, and it is these that are the most select: £200,000 plus is the going rate, which at £1000 a square foot puts them up with a flat in Mayfair.

  They are bigger than normal beach huts – big enough to accommodate a minute mezzanine – and the regulations allow overnight use for eight months of the year. I accosted an elderly chap doing good work with a dustpan and brush. He said his was owned by his son, who’d done nicely in property. There was a wooden ladder leading up to where the mattresses were laid out under the pitched roof. He told me Christchurch Council charged £3000 ground rent for each property and £30,000 in fees when one changed hands, which made Mudeford Spit a nice little milch cow.

  I wheeled my bike past the clutter of dinghies and kayaks and surfboards. Wetsuits encrusted with sand had been slung over every verandah rail. Where the huts end and the slopes of Hengistbury Head begin there is a pond with a notice beside it appealing for its colony of natterjack toads to be left in peace. A million people a year come to Hengistbury Head to tramp around the network of paths, gaze over the water and study other noticeboards about the sea knotgrass, carnivorous heathland flowers, green hairstreak butterflies, rare beetles, skylarks, Dartford warblers and other flora and fauna to be found there.

  It is the last significant stretch of coastland in East Dorset that has not been covered in houses. It is a Nature Reserve, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), a Special Area of Conservation, a Special Protection Area, an Environmentally Sensitive Area and a Site of Nature Conservation Interest. (I may have missed out one or two other designations.) In a world ideal for natterjack toads and Dartford warblers no one would go near the place. But they are not the point, they are merely the advertised – though infrequently spotted – attractions. The point is that the Head is an asset, and to emphasise the point, a spanking-new and tremendously eco (grass roof, straw-bale walls, solar heating, etc.) £1.25 million visitor centre has been opened.

  It is close to the Double Dykes, a visually uninteresting fortification of some kind raised by Iron Age people. A particularly lavish display board nearby informs the eager visitor that Hengistbury Head was then the most important port in Britain, which makes you wonder about its rivals. Olives, wine, glass and assorted luxuries are said to have been imported. Exports included precious metals, slaves and hunting dogs. Hunting dogs? Where did they get that from?

  Everything would have been very different around here if Gordon Selfridge, of Selfridges in Oxford Street, had got his way – as he usually did. At the end of the 1914–18 war Selfridge was the tenant of Highcliffe Castle, from whose battlements he cast hungry eyes across Christchurch Bay to Hengistbury Head. Having built the biggest department store in London, it must have seemed the obvious next step for this epitome of the American money-crazed vulgarian to build the biggest castle in the world.

  He bought the Head from Sir George Meyrick, who owned a goodly chunk of Anglesey and of the most valuable land in Bournemouth. Selfridge summoned the fashionable architect of the day, Philip Tilden, and instructed him to think bigger than he had ever have dreamed of.

  Tilden’s design, expressed in hundreds of drawings, envisaged encircling the high ground of Hengistbury Head with four miles of walls punctuated by towers. There would be a lesser castle sheer to the sea and a greater castle within. A dual drive would sweep up on the inland side, and divide to pass through two gateways in the bastioned walls. Two hundred and fifty guest suites, each with bedroom, bathroom, dressing room and sitting room, would be accommodated within a tower 300 feet high. There would a dome with a diameter only ten feet less than that of St Paul’s, a theatre, art galleries, tennis courts, winter gardens, a hall of mirrors to match the one at Versailles, a covered lake and a Gothic hall complete with organ.

  The cost of this exercise in gigantism was put at a modest £2.5 million (at least £100 million in today’s money). But as Tilden’s portfolio of designs grew, Selfridge’s fortune diminished. The Wall Street crash dealt a mortal blow to any lingering hopes that Hengistbury Castle might ever take physical form. In 1930 Selfridge sold the land to Bournemouth Borough Council for a little over £25,000. A few years later he was virtually penniless, cleaned out by his addiction to high living, gambling and the company of parasitic female hangers-on.

  11

  PEACE AND LOVE

  ‘Very pleasant is this winter residence which retains its evergreen beauty and aromatic odours through all the severity of winter.’ These words, from one of the innumerable Victorian and Edwardian guides to the genteel charms of Bournemouth, echoed somewhat hollowly on a boisterous late January day. The south-west gale drove flying sand into the eyes rather than distributing aromatic odours. Evergreens there certainly were, wind-blasted and sombre, lining the Pine Walk (disappointingly no longer known as the Invalids’ Walk). The grey heaving sea dispatched line after line of white waves to beat against the criss-cross supports of the pier. A flotilla of surfers bobbed on the water, craning black-hooded heads to identify the standout crest that would lift them and drive them to the beach.

  I had a wander through the town centre, which seemed to me rather meagre for such an enormous conurbation. There were no pubs of the kind that would draw me through the doors, not a restaurant where I would willingly have eaten, no fishing tackle or secondhand bookshops or interesting junk shops; just flash bars and Tex-Mex and the usual chains. The wind, laced with rain, muscled down Avenue Road and whipped around the deserted space of The Square, buffeting the circular glass café at the centre where fugitives from the weather huddled over their lattes.

  I had a room at the Royal Bath Hotel, attracted partly by Oscar Wilde’s recommendation – he congratulated the proprietors for creating ‘a palace of the greatest beauty and elegance’ and filling it with ‘gems of art’ – and also by the offer of dinner, bed and breakfast for £62. The dinner, however, was a serious disappointment. The restaurant, inevitably called Oscar’s, was virtually empty, which did not stop the head waiter scolding me for not booking a table. The choices for the set menu were wretched: I paid a £7 surcharge for an exiguous ribeye steak. Having demolished my slice of strawberry gâteau in three mouthfuls I asked the waiter if it might be possible to have a little cheese to help fill up a hungry traveller. He looked at me as if I’d asked him to procure a tart, shook his head and went off to rattle some more cutlery.

  In the morning workmen were busy demolishing the IMAX cinema on the seafront. The one distinction in the very short life of this glass-and-steel crime against architecture was to have won a national poll to identify the most hated building in Britain, and it has now been replaced by an ‘open-air multi-use events space’. The council justif
ied getting rid of it on the grounds that it was ugly, which it certainly was. It occurred to me that, were the removal of ugly buildings to be adopted as a council priority, a long list of Bournemouth’s more recent constructions would be at risk, starting with the town’s International Centre.

  The hideous and brutal BIC squats like a monstrous dark-red toad opposite the IMAX site. One cannot even revile the designers of this enormity by name – the plaque inside the entrance recording the official opening in 1984 identifies the architects as Module 2 Bridgend. As far as I can ascertain, this company no longer exists. When it did, it advertised itself as specialising in ‘low-cost recreation and sports centre facilities’; it was chosen by the Conservative council because its estimate was lower than anyone else’s.

  I crossed the road to another building, starkly angular with soaring redbrick walls, a square tower and a needle of a spire. The Punshon Memorial Methodist Church may not be easy on the eye – it isn’t – but at least it articulates an idea of what a public building should be. It was built in the 1950s when the Methodists must have been going strong in Bournemouth, which they no longer are. Worship ceased there a few years ago and the church was bought by a well-known Bournemouth property developer, Philip Oram.

  I wandered inside and immediately encountered a man who looked like a beardless version of the former Liverpool football manager, Rafael Benítez. He introduced himself as Derek Stuart and said he was an associate of Mr Oram. Encouraged by my interest, he embarked upon an account of the ups and downs of his business career – including how he came to own two E-Type Jags at seventeen and a Rolls-Royce at eighteen. From that Mr Stuart moved seamlessly into a complex narrative concerning the negotiations with Bournemouth Council over the church’s future, which I found somewhat difficult to follow. The upshot, however, was clear: it was to be transformed into the John Lennon Hotel of Peace and Love under the control of a charity which planned to fund the £4 million asking price by selling the four million bricks used to build it at £1 each to four million children in the 196 countries of the world.

  Even though the details of Derek Stuart’s business plan seemed a little imprecise, I thought Lennon would have liked the notion. He was famously keen on peace and love, which seemed to be exactly what Bournemouth needed a lot more of.

  I took refuge from the wind and rain in the light and airy public library. Upstairs there is a splendid local studies and history section, where dedicated staff guard and cherish Bournemouth’s rich literary heritage. Considering that two hundred years ago it was no more than a scattering of fishermen’s hovels, and even fifty years later had a population of just two thousand, it is extraordinary how many writers and other notables have associations with the town. It is speckled with blue plaques; I was told that they had run out of money for any more.

  Shelley’s heart, famously – and possibly apocryphally – snatched by Trelawny from the funeral fire on the beach near Viareggio, is interred at St Peter’s Church. The last time Gladstone appeared in public was at Bournemouth Station, on his way home to die – in response to the cheers he delivered his last public utterance: ‘God bless you all and this place and the land you love.’ Robert Louis Stevenson spent three years at various addresses along the seafront where he wrote Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Rupert Brooke stayed with his grandfather in Dean Park Road – the plaque states proudly ‘here Rupert Brooke discovered poetry’. Galsworthy went to school in Bournemouth and D. H. Lawrence wrote his story The Trespasser while staying at a boarding house in St Peter’s Road.

  It is pleasing to think of the French symbolist Paul Verlaine – absinthe addict and scandalous bisexual – teaching the sons of Bournemouth worthies at St Aloysius’s School in Surrey Road. Apart from trying to drum into their heads the essentials of his own mother tongue and what he called ‘the dead languages’, Verlaine took the boys bathing most days and spent a lot of time staring at the sea. He wrote a poem, called Bournemouth:

  Le long bois de sapins se tord jusqu’au rivage,

  L’étroit bois de sapins, de lauriers et de pins,

  Avec la ville autour déguisée en village:

  Chalets éparpillés rouges dans le feuillage

  Et les blanches villas des stations de bains . . .

  Other associations are perhaps less elevated. Dorothy L. Sayers gave birth in secret to her only child at a discreet maternity home in Tuckton, the eastern outpost of Bournemouth. J. R. R. Tolkien spent many holidays in Room 37 of the Hotel Miramar between Grove Road and East Overcliff Drive, and eventually retired to a bungalow in Lakeside Road, Branksome. Bill Bryson spent two years as a sub-editor on the Bournemouth Echo and wrote affectionately about the town in Notes from a Small Island. That phenomenon of verbal fecundity, John Creasey, lived in Bournemouth for twenty years and tried in vain to become the town’s Liberal MP; he wrote 7000 words every day, published more than 600 books under twenty-eight different names, twenty-nine of them in a single year, and is now utterly forgotten.

  *

  Tolstoy did not come to Bournemouth, but his spirit was very strongly present. For ten years his most fervent disciple – his lover, according to Tolstoy’s crazily jealous wife, Sonya – was resident in the quiet and respectable suburb of Tuckton. Count Vladimir Tcherkov has not, on the whole, received favourable notices. In the film dramatisation of Tolstoy’s old age, The Last Station, he was portrayed by the American actor Paul Giamatti as sleek, devious, tyrannical and ruthless in his determination to shut Tolstoy’s wife and most of their children out of what was left of his life. Henri Troyat’s epic biography of the writer presents Tcherkov in a very similar light, and Tolstoy as being torn and buffeted between competing claims of spiritual ownership.

  Certainly Tcherkov did – for better or worse – devote himself with singular energy to supporting and encouraging Tolstoy and promoting his work. Born into an immensely wealthy family, he met the writer for the first time in 1883 and succumbed immediately to Tolstoy’s magnetism. Spreading the Tolstoyan message became his single mission, one that inevitably attracted unfavourable attention from the Tsarist censors. Tcherkov left for England in 1897 and graduated in time to Tuckton, where his mother had settled. There was an established community of exiled Russians at Tuckton House, which Tcherkov quickly took control of and converted to Tolstoyan principles. They wore smocks and lived the simple life: hard beds, upright wooden chairs, plenty of hard work outdoors, modest portions of vegetarian food, no alcohol, no indulgence in the vices of the flesh.

  Tcherkov acquired a pumping station from Bournemouth Gas and Water Company and converted it into a branch of the Free Age Press, devoted to publishing Tolstoy’s religious and ethical works in English and other European languages. Tcherkov had the building fitted with a steel-lined strong room, in which were stored all the original manuscripts, and to which only he had the key.

  Eventually the Russian authorities relented and allowed Tcherkov to return and renew his collaboration with the master. After Tolstoy’s death in 1910, he exploited his position as literary executor to tighten his control over the legacy. The Bolsheviks seem to have taken the view that, in spirit anyway, Tolstoy was one of them, and Lenin commissioned Tcherkov to oversee a new edition of the complete works. He was clearly a survivor – his father was executed and his mother returned to Bournemouth as an exile, but he remained in Moscow and in favour until his death in 1937.

  Among the exiles who found sanctuary at Tuckton House was Alexander Sirnis, half-Latvian, half-Russian, wholly revolutionary. He had been recruited by Tcherkov to help translate Tolstoy’s diaries into English, and while living at the commune met and married a middle-class English woman of advanced political views, Gertrude Stedman. Sirnis later became the first translator of Lenin’s works into English, but his contribution to the Communist cause was to be far eclipsed by that of his daughter Melita, whom he called Letty. In 1999 she was revealed – to general astonishment – to have been a long-term spy for the Russians.
As Melita Norwood she had passed vital secrets about the Anglo-American atomic bomb project to Moscow, and had been regarded by the KGB as a more precious asset than Philby, Burgess and Maclean.

  I came across a curious footnote to the story of the Russians of Tuckton in the form of a letter published in the Bournemouth Echo on 4 February 1962. It came from Vladimir V. Tcherkov, a resident of Moscow, and recalled his happy days playing at left-back for Tuckton Football Club when his father was the president (and, incidentally, Alexander Sirnis was playing on the left-wing). The letter says that the writer has been distressed to hear from his friend, Mr Potter, that the team were having a hard time of it in the local league. ‘I hope that the boys will play better in the second half of the season,’ Mr Tcherkov wrote.

  There is a plaque on the wall of the old pumping station in Tuckton in memory of its Tolstoy connection. No novelist secured greater fame in his lifetime and retained it thereafter than Tolstoy. Few, if any, can have subsided into deeper obscurity than a former resident of 4 Amira Court, a modestly proportioned whitewashed block of apartments across Bourne Avenue from the Bournemouth Tennis Club.

  Yet there was a time when the latest offering from Rupert Croft-Cooke – a novel, a detective story, a volume of memoirs – was, if not eagerly awaited by a large and avid readership, at least guaranteed to receive some respectful notices and respectable sales. Croft-Cooke covered a wide range. There was his policeman, Sergeant Beef, and his gentleman schoolmaster detective, Carolus Deene (A Louse for the Hangman, A Bone and a Hank of Hair and more than twenty others). There were books about cooking, darts, the circus, Buffalo Bill. There were novels, thirty or so of them. Above all there was the autobiography, under the umbrella title The Sensual World: twenty-four volumes of it (with three supplementaries), surely the most extended such exercise ever published.