The rain drove me back onto the railway. I took the train across the flat meadowy marsh called Pevensey Levels, past the temporary-looking cottage settlements at Norman's Bay. This was part of the holiday coast, the dwellings ugly and unpleasant, and only the place names were memorable, like Wartling and the Crumbles. The train swung several miles around the flat meadow, making a wide circle, and then turned on a long meadow as flat and green as a billiard table and approached Eastbourne from the back. There was no coastal line here, because the original line went from Lewes to Hastings, and Eastbourne hardly existed then. The Eastbourne spur was not added until later, but it was decades before Eastbourne came into its own. It was a village until the turn of the century.
Eastbourne was planned and zoned in a calculated way, designed to be elegant and deliberately unreachable by day-trippers. It was meant to be high class, and it succeeded because it was just a bit too far from London to attract cheese-paring tourists. It did not have a harbor, so it was spared the high spirits of sailors and the taint of trade. The streets were laid out, the hotels inserted, the parks, the golf links, the bandstands, the pier, and the Front — no shops were to be allowed on it — all of these were determined at the time of Eastbourne's building. And it worked. It had never been Cockneyfied. The town had a graspable size and a sense of civic pride and a modest grandeur. Folkestone's elegance was its geriatric propriety. But Eastbourne was a thriving place, and there was enough in it that was ordinary to give balance to its beauty.
I stayed in a village just outside Eastbourne, not far from Beachy Head. Mountain climbers often practiced climbing the sheer wall of Beachy Head, and it was also a favorite spot for suicides — thirty in the past two years. There was a valley just west of where I was staying in which ardent socialists had settled and become landowners and country squires. They were union men or politicians who, after a career of howling at the rich, had been awarded knighthoods and appointed to directorships and had become well-to-do themselves. They lived in manor houses or on large farms, and some, amazingly, still espoused views that were in contradiction to the way they lived. It was a curious combination of secrecy, hypocrisy, and the sort of muddle that enabled an Englishman to hold two opposing views in his head. And it demonstrated that the best way to become a baron or an earl or a knight of the Garter was to spend half a lifetime singing "The Red Flag" and becoming a conspicuous irritation to the Establishment. It was an easy transition from any smoke-filled room of whining conspirators to a seat in the House of Lords. The English aristocracy had nearly always been recruited from the ranks of flatterers, cutthroats, boyfriends, political pirates, and people of very conceited ambition. So it was not so strange that this blue valley on the coast of East Sussex was populated by wine-bibbing lords who had formerly been Marxist union men named Jones and Brown.
I set off for Brighton on foot, starting at Birling Gap. The tide was high, so I could not walk along the beach. I was not sorry about this. I was spared the possibility of being embayed or of having the cliffs fall down and brain me — they were very crumbly cliffs. I walked in bright sunshine across the Seven Sisters to Seaford. The turf on these seven bluffs was very spongy and green. There were sheep in the meadows that lay parallel to this high part of the coast. Their bells clunked as they jerked their heads up to look at me. And there were gulls on the cliffs. Gulls squawk, but they also bark, scream, shriek, yap, whimper, and crow. Sometimes, roosting, they whine. I also heard them mew like cats. They are stupid hungry birds, and there was a common species on the British coast that had heads so black and hooded that they looked like hangmen.
There were rabbits on the Seven Sisters. They were small cute creatures. They had burrowed into the seventh sister, eaten much of her grass, and in this way had loosened the whole bluff by allowing the rain and erosion to take hold. The little creatures hippity-hopped all over the bluff, and they were in the process of destroying one of the most beautiful cliffs on the coast — the bunnies had just about brought it down.
I came to the Cuckmere River. That was a problem. The South Downs Way detours around it; there was no way of getting across the wide wet estuary. I walked along the east bank of the Cuckmere River, past World War Two pillboxes and gun emplacements, and herons and swans. Then over the bridge and across Seaford Head to Seaford proper, which was a nice town, once full of prep schools. Most of the schools were now closed, and Seaford was regarded as something of a backwater, overshadowed by Newhaven on the green River Ouse. Virginia Woolf had drowned herself a few miles upstream in 1941.
I walked on, through Newhaven and up the bluff to Peacehaven, until it started to rain. Peacehaven was solid with bungalows on little plots with just room enough in front for a garden gnome and a square yard of crazy paving. I caught a bus here. It swayed on the high cliff road, past the open space that marks the Zero Meridian, past Telescombe Cliffs, where, under a sky of yapping gulls, all the sewage of Brighton and Hove empties into the English Channel. And then into Rottingdean.
In Rottingdean "in 1882 there had been but one daily bus from Brighton, which took forty minutes," Rudyard Kipling wrote in his autobiography, Something of Myself. "And when a stranger appeared on the village green the native young would stick out their tongues at him." It was, he said, an almost empty coast of green fields and isolated houses. But it had changed in Kipling's lifetime. Before he died, in 1936, he wrote, "Today, from Rottingdean to Newhaven is almost fully developed suburb, of great horror." It was much worse now, so I stayed on the bus and did not get off until we reached Brighton.
4. The 18:11 to Bognor Regis
PEOPLE IN BRIGHTON were imagined to be perpetually on the razzle, their days spent prowling the Lanes or Marine Parade, and their nights full of ramping sexuality. Think I'll go down and have a dirty weekend, people said. Brighton had a great reputation. You were supposed to have fun in Brighton, but Brighton had the face of an old tart and a very brief appeal.
It was an hour from London. It was one of London's resorts. It was two hours from Dieppe by ferry. It was one of France's resorts. The scowling foreigners gave it a crassly cosmopolitan air, but no one knew what to make of it. Greeks and Indians opened restaurants and cheap shops, and then stood in front, hardly believing that business could be so bad. The English were shrewder. They opened casinos and public houses. There were more pubs in Brighton than in any other seaside town in Great Britain, because there was little else to do but drink. Serious fishermen went down to Newhaven, and swimmers up the coast a little to Hove. Like many places that have a great reputation, Brighton was full of disappointed and bad-tempered visitors.
Brighton Rock contains the popular impression of Brighton: gangsters, hilarity, murder, and Mortal Sin — all in sight of Palace Pier. But Graham Greene subsequently wrote in an introduction to the novel that, while he had been fastidious about the detail in the novels set in Mexico and Indo-China, the setting of Brighton "may in part belong to an imaginary geographic region." He said he was writing about the past — already, in 1937, that Brighton had vanished — so, "I must plead guilty to manufacturing this Brighton of mine."
Even so, the novel is very good in describing Brighton disappointment and the progress of the day-trippers: "They had stood all the way from Victoria in crowded carriages, they would have to wait in queues for lunch, at midnight half asleep they would rock back in trains to the cramped streets and the closed pubs and the weary walks home. With immense labour and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure: this sun, this music, the rattle of the miniature cars, the ghost train diving between the grinning skeletons under the Aquarium promenade, the sticks of Brighton rock, the paper sailors' hats."