DANGER!
Severe Cliff Subsidence
No Vehicles Beyond This Point
I turned off the car’s motor, got out, leaned on the barrier. Before me the road went on – and disappeared only thirty yards ahead. And there stretched the new rim of the cliffs. Of the village, Easingham itself – forget it! On this side of the cliffs, reaching back on both sides of the road behind overgrown gardens, weedy paths and driveways, there stood the empty shells of what had once been residences of the “posh” folks of Easingham. Now, even on a day as lovely as this one, they were morose in their desolation.
The windows of these derelicts, where there were windows, seemed to gaze gauntly down on approaching doom, like old men in twin rows of deathbeds. Brambles and ivy were rank; the whole place seemed as despairing as the cries of the gulls rising on the warm air; Easingham was a place no more.
Not that there had ever been a lot of it. Three streets lengthwise with a few shops; two more, shorter streets cutting through the three at right angles and going down to the cliffs and the vertiginous wooden steps that used to climb down to the beach, the bay, the old harbour and fish market; and, standing over the bay, a Methodist church on a jutting promontory, which in the old times had also served as a lighthouse. But now –
No streets, no promontory or church, no harbour, fish market, rickety steps. No Easingham.
“Gone, all of it,” said a wheezy, tired old voice from directly behind me, causing me to start. “Gone for ever, to the Devil and the deep blue sea!”
I turned, formed words, said something barely coherent to the leathery old scarecrow of a man I found standing there.
“Eh? Eh?” he said. “Did I startle you? I have to say you startled me! First car I’ve seen in a three-month! After bricks, are you? Cheap bricks? Timber?”
“No, no,” I told him, finding my voice. “I’m – well, sightseeing, I suppose.” I shrugged. “I just came to see how the old village was getting on. I didn’t live here, but a long line of my people did. I just thought I’d like to see how much was left – while it was left! Except it seems I’m too late.”
“Oh, aye, too late,” he nodded. “Three or four years too late. That was when the last of the old fishing houses went down: four years ago. Sea took ‘em. Takes six or seven feet of cliff every year. Aye, and if I lived long enough it would take me too. But it won’t ‘cos I’m getting on a bit.” And he grinned and nodded, as if to say: so that’s that!
“Well, well, sightseeing! Not much to see, though, not now. Do you fancy a coffee?”
Before I could answer he put his fingers to his mouth and blew a piercing whistle, then paused and waited, shaking his head in puzzlement. “Ben,” he explained. “My old dog. He’s not been himself lately and I don’t like him to stray too far. He was out all night, was Ben. Still, it’s summer, and there may have been a bitch about . . .”
While he had talked I’d looked him over and decided that I liked him. He reminded me of my own grandfather, what little I could remember of him. Grandad had been a miner in one of the colliery villages further north, retiring here to doze and dry up and die – only to find himself denied the choice. The sea’s incursion had put paid to that when it finally made the place untenable. I fancied this old lad had been a miner, too. Certainly he bore the scars, the stigmata, of the miner: the dark, leathery skin with black specks bedded in; the bad, bowed legs; the shortness of breath, making for short sentences. A generally gritty appearance overall, though I’d no doubt he was clean as fresh-scrubbed.
“Coffee would be fine,” I told him, holding out my hand. “Greg’s my name – Greg Lane.”
He took my hand, shook it warmly and nodded. “Garth Bentham,” he said. And then he set off stiffly back up the crumbling road some two or three houses, turning right into an overgrown garden through a fancy wooden gate recently painted white. “I’d intended doing the whole place up,” he said, as I followed close behind. “Did the gate, part of the fence, ran out of paint!”
Before letting us into the dim interior of the house, he paused and whistled again for Ben, then worriedly shook his head in something of concern. “After rats in the old timber yard again, I suppose. But God knows I wish he’d stay out of there!”
Then we were inside the tiny cloakroom, where the sun filtered through fly-specked windows and probed golden searchlights on a few fairly dilapidated furnishings and the brassy face of an old grandfather clock that clucked like a mechanical hen. Dust motes drifted like tiny planets in a cosmos of faery, eddying round my host where he guided me through a door and into his living-room. Where the dust had settled on the occasional ledge, I noticed that it was tinged red, like rust.
“I cleaned the windows in here,” Garth informed, “so’s to see the sea. I like to know what it’s up to!”
“Making sure it won’t creep up on you,” I nodded.
His eyes twinkled. “Nah, just joking,” he said, tapping on the side of his blue-veined nose. “No, it’ll be ten or even twenty years before all this goes, but I don’t have that long. Five if I’m lucky. I’m sixty-eight, after all!”
Sixty-eight! Was that really as old as all that? But he was probably right: a lot of old-timers from the mines didn’t even last that long, not entirely mobile and coherent, anyway. “Retiring at sixty-five doesn’t leave a lot, does it?” I said. “Of time, I mean.”
He went into his kitchen, called back: “Me, I’ve been here a ten-year. Didn’t retire, quit! Stuff your pension, I told ‘em. I’d rather have my lungs, what’s left of ‘em. So I came here, got this place for a song, take care of myself and my old dog, and no one to tip my hat to and no one to bother me. I get a letter once a fortnight from my sister in Dunbar, and one of these days the postman will find me stretched out in here and he’ll think: ‘Well, I needn’t come out here any more.’”
He wasn’t bemoaning his fate, but I felt sorry for him anyway. I settled myself on a dusty settee, looked out of the window down across his garden of brambles to the sea’s horizon. A great curved millpond – for the time being. “Didn’t you have any savings?” I could have bitten my tongue off the momentl’d said it, for that was to imply he hadn’t done very well for himself.
Cups rattled in the kitchen. “Savings? Lad, when I was a young ‘un I had three things: my lamp, my helmet and a pack of cards. If it wasn’t pitch ‘n’ toss with weighted pennies on the beach banks, it was three-card brag in the back room of the pub. Oh, I was a game gambler, right enough, but a bad ‘un. In my blood, like my Old Man before me. My mother never did see a penny; nor did my wife, I’m ashamed to say, before we moved out here – God bless her! Savings? That’s a laugh. But out here there’s no bookie’s runner, and you’d be damned hard put to find a card school in Easingham these days! What the hell,” he shrugged as he stuck his head back into the room, “it was a life . . .”
We sipped our coffee. After awhile I said, “Have you been on your own very long? I mean . . . your wife?”
“Lily-Anne?” he glanced at me, blinked, and suddenly there was a peculiar expression on his face. “On my own, you say . . .” He straightened his shoulders, took a deep breath. “Well, I am on my own in a way, and in a way I’m not. I have Ben – or would have if he’d get done with what he’s doing and come home – and Lily-Anne’s not all that far away. In fact, sometimes I suspect she’s sort of watching over me, keeping me company, so to speak. You know, when I’m feeling especially lonely.”
“Oh?”
“Well,” he shrugged again. “I mean she is here, now isn’t she.” It was a statement, not a question.