A segue. An interlude. A momentary departure.
In 2020, I experienced a mental breakdown. I returned to Sittingbourne for three weeks in a state of ecstatic, non rational, and non-verbal perambulation. The fierce head that sat at the top, unequivocally. The mad pink gravel. The troughs of earth. The boy in the front lake. The rotting roach rudd gutted, inexplicably in the middle of the road. The palm tree, in combination with the pylon. The whistling postman outside homebase. Its featurelessness. Its landscapes (which I secretly love). The car crash I witnessed in Bobbing. The house fire. & so on & und so weiter.
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I was being carried by a southeastern train to what I imagined to be very realistically the place. Slow Death. Sittingbourne, Sidyngborne. The Swale. Sittingbourne was anciently written Sedingbourne, in Saxon, Saedingburga, i.e. the hamlet by the bourne or small stream. There was no entry for Sittingbourne in the Domesday book. I had 22 pages of the 12 step program printed on pink card paper by a friend.
They say John Marshall de Synele holds one small encroachment in the vill of Sittingbourne and he pays the lord king 1d. each year and the lord king loses nothing and that Peter of London holds one small encroachment in the vill of Sittingbourne and he pays 1d. each year to the lord king and the king loses nothing.
The first time I read Sittingbourne was in Canterbury Tales. I read it unthinkingly.
Of friars ere I come to Sittingbourne, That certainly will give you cause to mourn.
For well I know your patience will be gone.
Our host cried out, "Now peace, and that anon!"
& that anon. From its clay substrata. The area around Sittingbourne was subject to constant air raids by Zeppelins and aeroplanes during the First World War. The Germans used the town as a reference point for bearings on the way to London and would drop bombs indiscriminately. The first visit by a German aeroplane happened on Christmas Day 1914. Guns at Sheerness fired at the lone invader but still one shell dropped into a field at Iwade. The next event was to occur on 16 January 1915 when another solitary pilot from a German aerodrome in Belgium bombed Sittingbourne. This aircraft, a Taube, was pursued by two local airmen, but managed to escape after dropping a couple of bombs. About 100 air-raid warnings were sounded in Sittingbourne during the First World War and anti-aircraft batteries were strengthened in 1917.
The last big raid to pass over the town on Whit Sunday (19 May 1918), carried out by a number of Gothas, eliciting perhaps the most ferocious barrage from the ground defences the town had ever seen.
The local newspaper, the East Kent Gazette, reported:
The first of these duels occurred about an hour after the raid had been in progress, and probably this machine was caught while on its way to London. It was engaged by a daring aviation officer while at a great height.
The British airman attacked his opponent so fiercely that the German was forced down to a lower height, and ultimately, to the joy of the onlookers, the Gotha burst into flames, seemed to break in two and came down piecemeal, all aflame. The wrecked machine and the three occupants fell by a farm.
Two of the Germans fell into marshy ground and their bodies were deeply embedded in the mud.
The third man's head struck a wall and was shattered like an eggshell. All three bodies were removed to a local aviation establishment.
The fall of the burning Gotha was seen for miles around.
The fall of the burning Gotha.
All of these notions rive up a feeling that Sittingbourne draws out of me. A place I had been moved to, aged 13/14 against my will. I recall the car journey up to Kemsley, which is the penultimate stop before the Isle of Sheppey. A place driven by a dockyard, a port, the inimitable presence of three prisons, and various caravan sites. In the early 00’s my dad & subsequently my Granny had caravans at Warden Springs.
That car journey is etched into my mind. It involved my dad (who had opened all the windows on an October morning). A perambulation of Kent, conteining the description, hystorie, and customes of that shire.
Up that hill, is a large public house. The Kemsley Arms. Behind which was marsh land. My dad proceeded to tell one of his many corrupted stories likely developed from one of the few books he owned, which was on the London Necropolis Company. I do not believe he got half way through it properly, and would spin unrealistic mostly botched shaggy dog tales. He pointed to the marshland & said they were all pauper graves & that he heard from someone who heard from someone that occasionally, bones would emerge from the ground. Bones would emerge like green peas sprouting. On the way up the hill, which is straddled by Victorian workhouses (mostly built in the 1890s for the paper mill) fanned out, to solely present the rotting vegetation of this beyond it Pub, as if it rose from the ground itself.
'The love of Nature is ever returned double to us... by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which ... a thousand casual recollections recall to our memory.
(Anima Poetae, from the unpublished Notebooks, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge)
There was a mud field with a washing machine in the middle, two children throwing bricks into the drum. It was as if this place had been nightmarishly conjured by Ken Loach to emotionally plea bargain with his middle class viewership, that This Really is England.
The journey around Kemsley was injurious, somehow I was being coaxed/muffled into this place. Not that I had come from much better, but at 13/14 being ripped out of a Catholic school, away from my much loved Granny & into an unknown. A cluster of houses sits atop a green hillock, surrounded by trees and fields. A row of hay bales neatly arranged behind the hill (everything behind a hill), a thin strip of deep blue sea is visible. Above is boundless blue sky.
Barratt Built Homes. 2002, a year known for the horrors of construction trade cutting corners. The itinerant & mendacious use of drain pipes, the illogical implementation of roundabouts, the poorest quality stud walls imaginable, anti-longevity, anti-building compliance & known for literally collapsing on top of families. It was on a road named Recreation Way, everything appeared for the purpose of a driveway car parking position. Everything seemingly compromised to the very pleasurable sense of that particular form of security. To be able to park one car inside. Close a steel garage door. Then place another car directly outside. To have your car literally parked inside your house was the largesse of some of these people. That was dinner talk. But I was to finally get my own room. So I happily conceded & accepted whatever fate awaited me.
For to mourn here
each day the Tudor Rose
is 99p, and the king loses
nothing on clay substrate
sinking again midstream
in dead grass with wrecked boats
where nothing lives
from Recreation Way
to Green Porch Close
and Holy Trinity Church
sometimes in grasswort
& sometimes golden samphires,
for protection against
the hard reed bed
look out at the Swale
under the new EU directive
is brown-red & the unpeopled estate
is the mud of UK paper,
where Fleet Streets conspire
against the migrant moths
near Ridham Docks
known by their fruits
of Euromix concrete
O watch ward over veil
at Christmas 1454
the topsoil yields
a silver penny that the mad gene
carried from France,
containerboard a red knot
on Roman walk
badly paved the whistling postman
not from France
but from bourne
stands sometimes sits
but does not beg
for it is charity & he is old
& stays in the memory
like the Battle of Britain
or a Christmas fire.
I would walk the creek
near Milton Pipes
anon out the earth
& not say nothing
I would go to The Saxon Shore Way
formerly Church Marshes Country Park,
formerly a disused landfill site
to Toy Town
stand in middle of the palm tree roundabout
pylon in the middle
and ask, blind men where am I?
under venerated springs,
or a post industrial pilgrimage?
said to song as a place of inns
& bore most where it ought not to bear
at all, & did not bear
where it ought
to have been borne most
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid & broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards the evening. Dawn setting on an unflinching continuous, unvarying landscape. It was as if life had itself escaped into the unspectacular.
I would daily walk a gravel trail, there seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. Yellow marsh sun blanched was simply to be looked at, idled in extending somewhere out. Marshland for millenia & for the next & the next. With scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry.
The dancers swallowed great draughts, smacked their lips, and, amid the roaring merriment of the spectators, remarked that it was very, very good. The clowns were now upon their mettle, each trying to surpass his neighbors in feats of nastiness. One swallowed a fragment of corn-husk, saying he thought it very good and better than bread; his vis-à-vis attempted to chew and gulp down a piece of filthy rag. Another expressed regret that the dance had not been held out of doors, in one of the plazas; there they could show what they could do. There they always made it a point of honor to eat the excrement of men and dogs.
