betwixteurope

“When the King’s messenger came there, they gave 3d in winter and 2d in summer for horse passage. The burgesses found a steersman and 1 other assistant. If there was more labour it was hired with his own money.”

From the Doomsday Survey, 1086

Dover has been around a long time. Many of the stories can be found here. And here. When its name comes up in immigration scare stories on Google Alert – which is often – it is worth considering who exactly was looking out on the civilized Romans who bowled up here two thousand years ago; proto stag-party in Prague fodder, I suspect. If the Romans were lucky. The Romans left excellent remains here, built the first fortress, and there’s a museum in the town now, after a planned car-park threw up great excavations. And with global warming as it is, the Kentish vineyards will soon be as good as they were in 44AD.

Just over 400 years ago, in 1606, a Royal Charter brought the ‘Dover Harbour Board’ into being, comprising of eleven commissioners. The chairman was also Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. Shipyards came in the 18th century.

Wars against France (Napoleon) were organized from here, but today I am interested only in the Second World War; and in particular a solitary image. Buried beneath the White Cliffs, and accessed via tunnels now part of English Heritage’s Dover Castle complex, is the HQ of Britain’s border battle with Nazi Germany, a labyrinth of underground tunnels and cavernous rooms where soldiers, doctors, sailors and nurses, plotted first the withdraw that is “Dunkirk” , the “Battle of Britain” in the skies, and later the D-Day invasions of 1944.

These days there is a marvellous guided tour of the tunnels, with audio actors playing out an emergency surgery for a downed fighter pilot. At the entrance it is possible to look out to France. In the spring and summer of 1940 Winston Churchill often did this; champagne glass in hand. Sometimes he was accompanied by the first of the enigmatic women who fleck this trip, his new young daughter-in-law Pamela, who had recently accepted the proposal of Winston’s son, Randolph, on their second date in London. Randolph had proposed to several women that spring.

Winston’s spy…

Churchill in the Jamaica Gleaner news, this week.

Pamela – who we know as Pamela Harriman, and was (amongst many things) Bill Clinton’s Ambassador in Paris – had quickly become a great asset to Churchill as her “proximity” to several very important Americans and journalists in London made her at 20, an English rosy-cheeked version Martha Hari.

She was born Pamela Beryl Digby in Farnborough, Hampshire. But she saw more of the world than most Hampshire debs, then and now: Pamela, her men, and possibly even a philosopher or two, return in Paris.

Thus much of Dover.

…really neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain

If you are standing on the deck of a cross channel ferry headed for France and looking back to land then I reckon that Shakespeare takes the left cliff, Auden (and Isherwood) take the harbour, and the right cliff belongs (in literary terms, for it will also always be Churchill’s spot as well) to the Victorian poet and critic, Matthew Arnold.

Dover Beach is such a well-known and anthologized poem in the English Canon that it is a cliché inclusion here; yet it is a marvellous work that towards its conclusion moves us to wonder how we continue to get things so wrong. The poem is 140 years old this summer. Perhaps the only time I’ve not fully appreciated Dover Beach was the poem’s stagey appearance at the end of Saturday, Ian McEwan’s Waitrose rewrite of Ulysses. If I am seeking anything on this journey it is a vision of humanity as far from the cloisters of McEwan’s Fitzroy square as it is possible to go.

Above, from The Dovonian, the Dover College magazine, summer 1963.

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Goodfellow.

Fairy to Puck: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act II Sc 1.

Bushy Ruff Cottages, Kearsney, South Kent. Saturday May 12th. D-Day minus two.

For over thirty five years I’ve walked out of the back gate of my father’s home at Bushy Ruff cottages in the village of Kearsney, which is about three miles from the White Cliffs of Dover. You can smell the sea, most days.

I turn left up a slope and walk across the elegant grounds of Kearsney Abbey, passing the lake where at weekends old men and young boys steer model boats away from the many moody swans. I’ll cross the small bridge and then visit the Co-op store in River close to the water mill; buy newspapers and milk, sometimes Argentine Merlots or a pork pie. Never once have I thought that I might be following in the footsteps of a famous literary life.

But – yesterday, my last day in the British Library for some time – I discovered a fact stranger than fiction. Suitably, perhaps, in a biography entitled Stranger than Fiction. The book was written by the feisty Newsnight Political Editor, Michael Crick, and considers the life of Jeffrey Archer, author and “character”.

Crick is the kind of journalist we’d all like to be. It was said that in the 2005 General Election the five most frightening words for politicians were: “Michael Crick is in reception.” His study of Archer is quite brilliant, telling a story of which Charles Dickens or Laurence Sterne would be proud. On the cover of the 2000 paperback there are two brief quotes: “Brilliant” says The Times. “I hate this book,” says Jeffrey Archer.

But back to Kearsney Abbey, the summer of 1962. A keen young PE teacher at Dover College, “very contemporary, very pukka, with a pronounced taste for Kipling, a voice like a razor-blade, and a Henry V haircut that was never out of character,” (wrote The Dovonian), appears in a “Dover Players” amateur production right here, in Kearsney Abbey. Where I’ve walked twenty minutes ago.

As Crick writes: “His [Archer’s] most notable role was as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which the players performed in the grounds of nearby Kearsney Abbey. Every night the audience was startled as Puck, clad completely in green, suddenly leapt on to the stage from behind a tall hedge. In fact this leap wasn’t quite as agile and spectacular as it looked, since he’d actually taken off from a raised platform on the other side. But, in the opinion of the Dover Express, “Never could Dover Audiences have seen a more energetic puckish-Puck than Dover College master Jeffrey Archer who created havoc in the wood as he worked for his fairy king Oberon.”

I can, and will, make many literary allusions during this trip, but I was not expecting Jeffrey Archer to make an appearance. But thinking about it, and chance, Archer is not such a surprise – is rather welcome, actually. His lives and myths, their abrupt peaks and troughs, girdled from Oxford onwards by huge press interest that brought celebrity status for good and bad and Prison Diaries, tell us much about our times. Whatever one feels about Archer it is impossible to ignore the man. Simon Cowell of X-Factor fame was an old boy of Dover College too.

Jeffrey Archer is also geographically entwined with a very different pair of writers who I will consider tomorrow.

For a short time in 1961 Archer – known at Dover College as the “Grip Kid” as he was always telling his students to get one – lived at the digs of Alice Slaughter at Victoria Park, in Dover. She, Crick says, “was used to having lodgers with unusual activities. Before the war, she had owned a house on the seafront near the Eastern Dock, where Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden had briefly been her tenants. “they used to have the strangest people there,” says her daughter Joan Czarnowski, “and E.M Forster used to stay.”

More of them on Sunday.

Archer will, I suspect, be one for the historians as well as the journalists. His life is not as unusual as Tom Coryat’s, but just as enigmatic; and both are men of Somerset, for what it is worth. My fellow Contemporary Nomad, the Crime Writer Kevin Wignall, pointed out recently that Jeffrey was last year’s top British author in America – where hardback sales of False Impression – yes, really – were close to 275,000. Archer is still going strong. And there is that Judas book, as well.

Truly the ex-Dover Grip Kid has “put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.”

Thus much of Kearsney Abbey.

Today there is a piece in The Times of London about me and the trip:

“While my life is weighty (in a not-unpleasant way), his is light.”

From Kate Muir’s The Dark Ages

And Crime writer and friend Olen Steinhauer is supportive too.