To the River (28 page)

It was hotter now, and I was becoming irritable and hungry. I wanted to get to the beach, strip off my damp clothes and swim, and after that I wanted a nice fat sandwich and a bottle of beer. There’d be cafés in Seaford, surely, or perhaps a little bar: I’d stop there at the end of the road and toast a journey done. So I didn’t go into Newhaven; I set my teeth against it and turned instead east, following the Ouse Way towards the old river course that led along Seaford beach. On the map it seemed simple enough: swing down Beach Road to Newhaven Harbour station and pick up the path as it runs parallel to the sea. But Beach Road dropped through a stretch of dingy terraces with blank, unscrubbed windows into a desolate hinterland as entrapping as a bad dream. I passed a brutal-looking pub, named, presumably in honour of John Smeaton, The Engineer. There was a Parker pen factory, two car yards, and then a row of shuttered office blocks and workshops that might have been abandoned on Friday at six o’clock or decades earlier. Those empty buildings spooked me. I couldn’t help feeling that I was being watched from somewhere, though I saw no one except two men in a black Subaru that twice cruised leisurely past. I went on unwillingly to the station, but faced with a chain-link fence and beyond it a holding pen of lorries I lost my nerve. There
couldn’t
be a path down there. I turned round sharply and retraced my steps.

Back at the A259 I slumped beneath a dwarf hawthorn and looked seriously at the map. There seemed to be another path I could take, which joined the unfindable one by cutting through a corner of the nature reserve. Fine. I went back down Beach Road, hot and self-conscious and by now furious with myself. And sure enough I couldn’t find that one either. I didn’t want to look at the map again in front of these peeling houses, their front yards sprouting dense upswells of bindweed, and so as a last resort I turned despairingly through the grounds of a primary school and found behind it a path that ran through scrubby woodland in what I hoped was the right direction.

It didn’t feel any safer than the street, for all that it was green. The sense of enclosure that had so unnerved me was echoed by the screening trees, and in the end I swallowed my pride and ran pell-mell under low vaults of sycamore and hazel, the trees so tightly fretted together that beneath them it was almost dusk. I burst out, sweating, onto the marsh, but my relief didn’t last a minute. It wasn’t the path I wanted, not
at all
. I’d come too far north, and now I was stuck, for there was half a mile of impenetrable reedbeds between me and the sea.

Damn it
. I pulled off my rucksack and kicked it. Then I retrieved the water bottle and glugged down a few warm gulps. This must be the Ouse Estuary nature reserve, for it was furnished with benches, cycle tracks and gapped screens of wood that I assumed were for watching birds. It had been established a few years back in one of those compromises brokered between environment and industry, to offset the impact of an access road and a business park. The marsh, which despite ten centuries of drainage schemes remained predisposed to mud, was furthermore used as a washland when the river rose too high, reducing the risk of floods in Newhaven and pleasing the waders besides. A flood! It hadn’t rained for weeks. The ground was bone dry and the reeds in their dank beds dipped and rose like a rusty ocean, the papery leaves brushing against one another and releasing a fricative hissing that also mimicked the sea. Yup, I was well and truly trapped. The only way out was to walk up to the road and follow it round to the Tide Mills car park. I looked across the reeds to where the ruins were and saw an ominous glitter. A midsummer Saturday. It was going to be hell.

The reserve was full of joggers and cyclists, a leisured drift of people moving aimlessly and at great speed. I stumped through them, cursing under my breath, then served a purgatorial sentence at the side of the A259 before turning at last up the seaward track. Both the car parks were full, and more cars were parked at random on the verge. The ground was wilder now, the brome and wild barley growing in spreading waves interspersed with bright spurs of dock and mallow. Already I could see broken walls rising to the height of a man above the tangles of vegetation, and beyond them a muddy channel surmounted by a shingle bank, a trickle of water puddling at its base. The shattered houses were made from flint, as was the custom in these parts, and here and there it was still possible to make out where doors or windows must once have been. This was all that remained of the abandoned village of Tide Mills, which was built in the eighteenth century and was once the largest of its kind in Europe, housing more than a hundred mill workers and producing at its height perhaps 1,500 sacks of flour a week.

To understand this lost place it is necessary to return for a moment to the shifting history of the Ouse, for Tide Mills was always at the mercy of water. In the medieval period, the relentless longshore drift that afflicts this coast created a shingle spit that choked the river’s mouth and forced it eastward to Seaford through the marshy beach. Later, in the reign of Henry VIII, local landowners made the cut at Newhaven that transformed the little village of Meeching into today’s thriving port. It didn’t take long for this new channel to fail, however, largely because some fool set the pier on the eastern flank, where it was helpless to prevent the glutting flux of shingle. The land hereabouts returned to marsh and the river pried a new outfall that passed again right through the beach. Though the cut was eventually repaired and a more useful pier produced, this twisting creek persisted, and in 1761 the mill was built on its banks, powered by the waves, with the creek serving as a route for the barges that hauled in corn and lugged out flour. Under the auspices of the charismatic William Catt the place thrived, and it’s said that he travelled more than once to France to advise Louis Philippe, then still in possession of his crown, on the development of similar schemes.

The decline began with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. A few years later Catt died and two decades on, during a terrible storm, the sea flooded the village, devastating the houses and causing irreparable damage to the mill. In 1883 another storm finished the job, smashing the sails to pieces, and the following year the railway reached Newhaven. The Railway Company took possession of the harbour and established an immigration facility on the East Quay, right where the creek split off from the river. Sluice gates were built to let the water trickle through but there was no possibility of a barge getting by, and so the mill closed for good and began the first of its new incarnations as a home for railway workers.

Later, it was converted into a racing stables and then a hospital for boys with polio and rickets. At the start of the Second World War the families who still inhabited the place – the Jenners, Bakers, Larkins, Tubbs, Gearings, Thompsons, Watsons and Gates – were evicted and the buildings partially demolished as part of the Coastal Defence Strategy, in case German invaders should use it for shelter. During the 1940s Canadian troops practised street fighting amid the ruins and after the war was over the place was left to decay, the roofless chambers filling with shingle flung by the waves that over time spawned poppies and sports of windblown elder. I reckoned adders must have moved in by now, sunning themselves against walls where espaliered pears once grew, for one population will replace another in this world until the jig is up and the weeds cease to bloom.

In the past few years this process of decay had been arrested, if not exactly undone. Tide Mills became the subject of a research project by the Sussex Archaeological Society, and at the beginning of the millennium prisoners on probation were brought out under the auspices of English Heritage to clear the site, cutting back brambles and shifting shovelfuls of brown and blue and creamish stones to reveal the buildings’ foundations. Later, local archaeologists began to assemble an archive of pictures and recollections that traced the incarnations of the village. In addition to the hospital and the mill there was a Marconi radio station here during the First World War, and a seaplane base that flew anti-submarine raids across the Channel.

A man had posted on the internet a collection of his grandfather’s photographs from this latter place, melancholy pictures of planes whirring through sepia skies or coasting across dark waves. Most were backed onto paper and labelled in fountain pen and two recorded the shattered remains of a crash against a nearby breakwater, in which Lieutenants Cole and Kitchen both lost their lives. The photographer, Henry Ross Alderson, had also died young, killed in a motorcycle accident when he was thirty. There was a picture of him at the top of the page, a handsome man in a leather coat and flying goggles standing on the beach with his shadow spooling west. Some of his photos were taken from the air, and one showed a field of puffy cumulus captioned in capitals
Cloudland
: that unchartable realm man visited only in dreams until, cock-a-hoop, he contrived the balloon, the biplane and the Easyjet package.

I crossed by the blind end of the old millrace, a stagnant wallow that at high tide becomes a creek. Behind it was a shingle bank made of golden and flinty pebbles, some the colour of bread and some cracked open to reveal facets of gunmetal grey. The bank dropped sharply to reveal an army of people spread out across the stones, some furnished with fishing rods and some with those kites that can yank a man into the air. They had colonised the littoral zone, filling it with buckets and boogie boards, and they lay there calling to one another like a colony of walruses, their young skittering at their feet. The sea stretched heavenward beyond them, coloured the clarified blue-green of jelly. It was rougher than I’d expected, the waves high and spray-less. At
last
. I sat down on a railway sleeper, yanked off my trousers and jerked my swimsuit on, then abandoned the pack, shucked my sandals and darted in. The beach shelved abruptly. I was waist-deep in three steps; up to my neck in six. Then the ground fell away altogether and I floundered for a minute as the waves pummelled me, my skin stinging with cold. I pulled hard, and with every stroke the weight of water beneath me grew.

What a bay! What a day! I turned full circle, treading water, liking the way the land seemed to hold out two chalky arms to fend off or embrace the waves. I could see all the way to Seaford Head in the east, and in the west there were the two lighthouses that marked the mouth of the Ouse, gushing out into the Channel at a thousand tonnes a minute. There must have been the odd molecule drifting in these crashing waters that had travelled south beside me, working its way from the oak-shadowed source down the deep gulleys of Sheffield Park, across the gravel beds of Sharpsbridge, over the fish ladders at Barcombe Mills, past the wharves of Lewes and out through the maze-ways of the Brooks. I sniffed. Nope, not a trace of Wealden clay or rain: just salt, the pure bloom of it, and I kicked out my legs and wallowed there in joy.

The price came later, when I had to haul myself gracelessly up the pebbles and attempt to dry and dress without the aid of a towel. It wasn’t a very dignified performance, but I managed not to reveal too much clammy flesh to an elderly gentleman with a panama hat who sat openly gawping from the top of the bank. There were two little girls playing by the water’s edge, one screaming like a car alarm each time the waves splashed her feet.

The sea was very blue now, the colour dissolving into light at its rim. Leonard Woolf used to swim down here during the Asham years, when he and Virginia were just beginning their married life. There was in those days a diving raft moored a little way from shore, and on 1 August 1914 he bicycled over from Asham, as was his custom that sweltering summer. It must have been a day rather like today, and Leonard swam out to the raft and dived from it far down into the sea. When he surfaced, he ‘came up against a large man with a large red face who was swimming out from the beach. I apologised and he said to me, almost casually, “Do you know it’s war?”’ and so it was, though on account of the tremor in his hands Leonard didn’t fight, but published books and worked in the service of the Labour Party, devoting himself to the cause of peace as his wife and the world unravelled. Poor Leonard. He was already convinced when he died in 1969 that the barbarians had smashed through the gate and I imagined him walking this beach in despair, his narrow shoulders stooped, for he loved mankind at large but was not so fond of their individual incarnations, sweating sunscreen with their shrieking spawn about them.

I rose then and turned away from the crowds, climbing to the top of the bank and picking my way into a shallow gully that muddled vaguely east. It was, I guessed, the remains of the Tide Mills creek, a dry riverbed that might carry a trickle when the winter seas ran high. I looked back to the shattered village, the houses subsiding into the shingle. There seemed to be something emblematic in the many fates of Tide Mills, a lesson that if I could only grasp it might stand me in good stead. But what struck me instead was a sense of foreshortening, as if my own time was already sinking out of view. If we could glimpse the people who will one day walk amidst our ruins –
Jenner, Baker, Larkin, Tubbs
– I think we would be paralysed, like the men on the island of the sirens –
Gearing, Thompson, Watson, Gates
– who sat in their flowering meadow unable to move a muscle or draw a breath until the hide rotted from their bones in strips. It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all. But we all have an inkling of what lies ahead, for against the ruins of the ages it is apparent that our time is nothing more than the passing of a shadow and that our lives – was it Derek Jarman who said this too? – run like sparks through the stubble.

The tenacity of our physical remains, their unwillingness to fully disappear, is at odds with whatever spark provides our animation, for the whereabouts of that after death is a mystery yet to be unpicked. What is this world, really? We’re told we have infinite choice and yet there’s so much that occurs beyond the perimeters of our command. We do not know why we’re set down here and though we may choose the moment when we leave, not a single one of us can shift the position we’ve been assigned in time, nor bring back those we love once they have ceased to breathe. To reclaim the dead there’s been invented no programme, no potion, no spell, not since Christ stood at the threshold of Lazarus’s grave and ordered him
Come out
. The dead have gone to wherever they go and even now they forget our names, as Anticlea, the mother of Odysseus, is said to have done until she drank from the trench of sheep’s blood that her son had poured and so recovered for a moment the semblance of a human heart.