Author: Julian Richards

Odd to think that when the Duke of York’s Royal Military School was tugged like a veruca from august accommodations in the Royal Hospital, Chelsea in 1911, the reason proferred was that young boys of meagre means deserved a reprieve from the blight and hopelessness of urban Edwardian England. So they sent them to Dover.

11th November 2018. Armistice Day. A hundred years ago to the hour, to the minute, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. He always wondered where he’d be on this day. In the end it was so simple. Forty years earlier, a child in a beret, brasses and oversized military blues marched clumsily from parade square to cenotaph; fidgeted through portentous silences and mothball prayers, the Last Post blown ragged as a seagull on the promenade smoking a french-fry. Just as his brother, dead for six months, had done before him. Miniature soldiers, cold and unparented, standing to attention in the fog. Before the roaring hymns. Before bath-house trench and dormitory battlefield and the dreadful No Man’s Land of night. Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer. This was his baptism into the bitter poetry of belonging. Dulce et Decorum Est. Everything was forged in the crucible of this place, the next seven years. That untouchable time. This place, everything, right here. Every crack in the pavement, the torque of each handle, the tug of every door. For better or for worse. And thus, some part of his daughters too; and on it goes. Man hands on misery to man. Neither proud nor ashamed. It’s just the truth. An active partner in something disgraceful. Everything belongs here.

 

 

They arrive at 3. They’ve come from Charing Cross, but no need for a taxi. Smiling off the man from Bangladesh with his Vauxhall Corsa, they can handle the walk to the hotel, they’re not pensioners yet. And anyway, it’ll be nice to see the town again after all this time. Along the Maison Dieu, past the leisure centre and the chip shop to the sea. Marine Parade. There it is. Huddled beneath the cliffs, clutching its faded-Regency knees like a tramp on Special Brew. Flickering shadows of Terence Rattigan, long-embalmed, of retired majors, pearl-strung spinsters and potted palms. They ring the bell. Nothing. Round the back, ring again. Only the stuttering motorway’s rapid rattle. An elderly lady shuffles across the rug like a glacier. The owner’s mum. He’s gone, she says, in clotted plum. Nobody’s here. Just her. Oh, and them. Five empty floors. Tables in the breakfast room set for ghosts. Smoke detectors beeping like budgerigars. Central heating’s off, but there’s Vim under the sink and an antique two-bar fire. They give it both barrels, inhale the familiar fog of hot electricity, burning dust, then tittering, shuffle out for cod and chips. The pedestrian precinct is damp, empty and littered, like God licked it after eating popcorn. Nothing’s open, nobody cares. The people at the bus stop all have one leg longer than the other or are missing a head. There’s a fight in the pub, blood on the pavement, drunk women shrieking. After an hour, they retreat to their canary-coloured bunker with a litre bottle of Yellowtail, family-size bar of Fruit & Nut and watch Strictly Come Dancing. In the morning they will crouch like fossils beneath the enlarged prostate of the shower and be dribbled upon. Bliss. There can be no true beauty without decay.

Sex. He’d been a late-developer, but that was hardly surprising, given the obstacles. He learned passion the boys’ school way; a kind of soaring, ceaseless yearning. ‘The first penis you ever held.’ she once teased him, knowing it had fostered his fantasy of her holding someone else’s. To feel it thicken in his palm. The lad’s soft face. Worship of the untouchable. He was quiet, looked at his plate, forked up the last of his Cumberland sausage. After breakfast they went for a walk. A rainy Sunday morning in Dover, the hydrogen bomb might have gone off for want of any glimmer of humanity. He took her to Karys’s house, at least as far as he could remember, and they stared up. Not a soul. No change there then. For him, he said, the corporeal mechanics of love never quite matched the poetry. Here, look. This bench was his Waterloo. They stopped. The far end of Pencester Gardens, behind a bush on a dark curve of the cycle path. Fifty feet from the Folkestone bus-stop. He was dragged to it from the pub, The Roman Quay, on a dark night in November, five snake-bites to the wind, by the prettiest girl in Dover. Karys Adams. She took the matter in hand, he said; at least he thought it was in hand until the texture slipped imperceptibly from dry to muggy with a chance of showers. And that was that. A shudder, like a yolked egg, the diffident hiss of a zipper and a wordless adieu. He’d need new trousers tomorrow. The bus ride back to Mrs Morris’s was a fluorescent uncoiling of what had or hadn’t just happened along with a compulsive, horrified sniffing of fingers. If this really was Yeats’ feathered glory pushed from her loosening thighs, he rather thought he’d prefer a cup of tea and a Jaffa Cake.

Later they walked the clifftops, blustered and seasoned by the ubiquitous drizzle, searching for the zig-zag path to the bay below and the greening mountain of chalk that had killed his brother four decades earlier. He wanted to bring home a little chunk for his daughter, an impotent effort to connect the dots. But the last thirty feet were gone, sheared from the face, leaving the wooden gantry dangling in space, high above Matthew Arnold’s beach. They leaned on the railing, stared down at the skeleton shipwreck of the SS Falcon, ravaged twice daily for a century by the iron engine of the tide.