Afterwards the festival organiser explained the recherché character of the event and confirmed my thesis: ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘Italian literature hasn’t really had modernism yet. They had a little bit of Futurism and then fascism instead. The whole scene is petrified.’ Petrified, yes, but with the kind of petrification Rome offers who needs mere fluidity?
Foulness
The landlord of the George & Dragon was wary; his voice dropped in tone — almost as if afraid of being overheard: ‘Oh no, no — you can’t go up there, they wouldn’t like it.’ He elaborated. ‘They’ll think you’re looking in through their windows, you might not mean to do it — but you will, and then. . well, then they’ll call Security.’ I had only suggested that I might leave the pub in Churchend and cycle up to the next village, Courtsend, but clearly this would be a mile too far. Up until that moment I’d known I was in as strange a place as you can reach in an hour by train from London — but suddenly things had turned weird.
The landlord said I was allowed to cycle down to the quay, so I did. It was a half-mile or so, past the church of St Mary the Virgin, past the old primary school which had been converted into a ‘heritage centre’, past the gates to one of the strange complexes of concrete buildings which studded the green fields of the island. I cycled through a deserted farmyard; in the bare branches of the surrounding trees were huge rooks’ nests and the glossy, blue-black birds circled around me as I pedalled, relentlessly kraarking.
At the quay I sat and looked west to where the sun was setting behind a cloud, sending down a perfect fan of rays: violet, grey and pearly pink. At my feet the wide creek purled, the muddy banks were smooth and silvery. Geese clamoured overhead, while in the far distance the dwarfish tower blocks of Southend-on-Sea chewed on the horizon like the snaggle teeth of a senescent world. I felt altogether at peace in this place of war.
Foulness Island — I’d known about it for years. It was a place where sky, sea and mud merged; at once within easy reach and totally inaccessible. Over the years I’d picked up other dribs of information. I knew that the island — the largest off the Essex coast — was wholly owned by the Ministry of Defence and that there were still villages and farms on it, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned you could actually visit the place.
All you had to do, it transpired, was phone the landlord of the George and Dragon and ask him to put your name on the gate. Drinking by appointment — surely the ultimate licensing law. I pitched up late afternoon and a bored security guard signed me in. This being 2005 the MoD have passed management of the 10,000 acres of firing ranges and fields over to a private company, Qinetiqa. ‘Welcome to Foulness Island’ an electronic signboard greeted me as I pedalled off down a military road ruled straight across the flat landscape.
At first sight the island didn’t look that peculiar. I mean, not that peculiar if you’re familiar with quite how peculiar this part of the British coastline can be: to the north was Dengemarsh — of fever fame — an introverted empty quarter of dykes and isolated farmhouses. To the south, across the Thames estuary in Kent, was the Isle of Grain, where chav meets Deliverance in a duel of Burberry banjos.
I passed signs to ‘New England’ and ‘Havengore’ — both names of firing ranges. In the distance I could hear the sound of gunfire; in this bucolic context it sounded no more threatening than someone repeatedly slamming a car door. Somewhere to the south, out on the great morass of Maplin Sands, Britain’s biggest colony of avocets were wading and dipping. Isolated farmhouses stood kilometres off from the road, gaunt, austere buildings, their windows no more inviting than the cameras oddly angled over steel barriers, and fixed there — I later realised — to record the impact of artillery shells.
I cycled into Churchend. The weatherboard, white-painted houses were all a tad uniform and perhaps their gardens a shade too neat, but it still looked like a real village — not Midwich. It was only chatting to Fred Farenden, the landlord, in the snug of his beautiful 1659 inn that the strangeness of the place started to well over me. Fred is a rubicund and welcoming fellow, but the tale he had to tell was of enterprise constantly thwarted by indifference and bureaucratic meddling. He’d tried bird-watching weekends, B&B packages, and now he was even brewing his own beer — Beaters’ Best — but all to no avail. He still had the same sized clientele that he’d had when he first came twenty-four years before: a handful of curious trippers and yachties in the summer, then the long, quiet months of the winter.
Personally I was at a loss to understand it. It might’ve taken me thirty-five years to get to Foulness — but now I’d arrived I couldn’t conceive of any other place I’d rather be.
Spain — the Final Frontier
It appears that my generation — and the two or three which preceded us — were entirely wrong; far from space being the final frontier, it transpires that Spain is. Far more human effort, ingenuity and sheer dosh is being expended to send men and women to Spain than ever was putting them into space. The computing power tied up in the air traffic control mainframes, automatic pilots, baggage handling systems, on the laps of hundreds of airline passengers en route to Madrid, Barcelona and perhaps even Bilbao — completely dwarfs the dear little IBM machines which were used to crunch the numbers necessary to traject Armstrong, Aldrin and their shipmates. to the moon. I doubt you’d even be able to play Space Invaders with the pile of clunker they had at Cape Kennedy in 1969.
In the 1970s we all fondly imagined that Spain had been conquered. Been there — done that straw hat. Spain was so passé, so colonised, that there was even a Carry On film about hapless Brits pitching up on the Costa Blanca to find their hotel not yet built. Space, on the other hand, was wide open: the moon had been visited, golf had been played there, a dune buggy driven and a rigid Stars and Stripes raised. By the standards of more recent American colonial ventures this may seem pretty convincing — but we knew that there was much more infrastructure to come. First an orbiting space station where the interplanetary craft would be built, then Mars, then Venus.
Suspended animation and nuclear power were the key: knock those super-fit boffins out, tuck them in to chilly sarcophaguses, then power up the plutonium. Bosh-bosh-bosh. Why go to Spain when you could loop your spaceship round Neptune and, using the gargantuan ergs of inertia, whip like stone from a multimillion-mile-long slingshot towards Betelgeuse! Ah, the sights we were going to see, the Asteroid Belt, the Rings of Saturn (these from Ganymede, where we’d have an echoing dinner with an old buffer in a dressing gown), the Horsehead Nebula, black holes. . And because we’d be gone for so many thousands of earth years — while only ageing a few of our own — when we returned we’d find Spain entirely concreted over, and Soylent Green the only tapas available.
So entirely has that ad astra per aspera urge been sucked out of us that even to set this stuff down looks pathetic. From the standpoint of an era when Spain is the final frontier, space looks hopelessly archaic — provincial even. Can you sell time shares there? Can you look to it for a renaissance in the cinematic arts or fashion? Has space even got a cuisine to speak of? Fat chance of getting Frank Gehry to build a signature building in. . don’t make me laugh. . space. Spain, by contrast, has become everything space once promised to be, an almost infinite realm of possibility on to which human aspirations of all kinds can be projected. There is a posh Spain and a poor Spain, a gay Spain and a straight Spain, an urban, bustling Spain and a parched, deserted Spain. Some speculative thinkers have wondered whether or not Spain has any intrinsic character — such is its great diversity.