I’d never visited Deal before but had always wanted to. I read all the Hornblower books when I was at school and this is where they began. It’s the setting of the third James Bond novel, Moonraker: Hugo Drax plans to destroy London with a newfangled V2 rocket fired from his headquarters, nearby. And it’s one of the settings in my very favourite novel, Bleak House. The hero, Richard Carstone, is garrisoned there.
In fact, I’ve always had a fondness for seaside towns, particularly out of season when the streets are empty and the sky is grey and drizzling. At the time when I was reading Hornblower, my parents would often go to the South of France but they would send me, my sister and my nanny to Instow in Devonshire and the whole language of the British seaside has stayed with me. I love the sand dunes, the slot machines, the piers, the seagulls, the peppermint rock with the name printed, impossibly, all the way through. I have a hankering for the cafés and the tea shops, old ladies pouring muddy tea out of pots, slabs of millionaire shortbread, shops that sell fishing nets, windbreaks and novelty hats. I suppose it’s the age I am. These days, everyone leaps on a plane when they want a cheap holiday. But that’s also part of the charm of all those little towns along the coast, the fact that they’ve been left behind.
Deal seemed to be surprisingly charmless as we came out of the station and walked down the main street with the seagulls screaming at us from the rooftops. It was May but the season had yet to kick off and the weather was utterly miserable. I wondered what it must be like to live here, trapped in the triangle formed by the massive Sainsbury’s and the inevitable Poundland and Iceland supermarkets. A drink at the Sir Norman Wisdom pub, dinner at the Loon Hin Chinese restaurant and then on to the Ocean Rooms night club and bar (‘Entrance next to the Co-op’).
We came to the sea, as cold and uninviting as only the English Channel can be. Deal has a pier but it is one of the most depressing in the world, an empty stretch of concrete, brutalist in style, lacking any entertainments whatsoever: no penny arcades, no trampolines, no carousels. I wondered why the Godwins had sent their children here. Surely there must have been somewhere more fun?
But gradually the little town won me over. It had that peculiar defiance of all coastal resorts, that sense of being quite literally outside the mainstream, on the edge. Many of the houses and villas fronting the sea were brightly painted and had overflowing window boxes. The pebble beach, sloping down to the water, stretched into the distance, with a wide promenade and dozens of benches. There were flower beds, lawns and parkland, old fishing boats leaning on their side, dogs running, seagulls hovering. We came to a miniature castle and I began to see that in the sunshine Deal might provide a host of adventures. I was being too cynical. I needed to look at it with a child’s eye.
We did not visit the accident site to begin with.
Hawthorne wanted to see where Diana Cowper had been living and so when we reached the sea, we turned right – towards the neighbouring village of Walmer. We still weren’t talking to each other but as we continued along the seafront we passed an old antiques shop and Hawthorne suddenly stopped and looked in the window. There wasn’t much there: a ship’s compass, a globe, a sewing machine, some mouldering books and pictures. But as if to break the silence he pointed and said, ‘That’s a Focke-Wulf Fw 190.’
He was looking at a German fighter plane with three black crosses and the figure 1 on the fuselage, suspended on a thread. There was a tiny pilot just visible in the cockpit. It was from one of those plastic kits – Revell, Matchbox or Airfix – that children used to assemble although to be fair it had been so well made that I doubted that a child had been involved.
‘It’s a single-seat, single-engine fighter, developed in the thirties,’ he went on. ‘The Luftwaffe used it throughout the war. It was their favourite aircraft.’
It was quite a different Hawthorne who was speaking and I understood that he had given me this scrap of information as a peace offering, to make up for what he had told me on the train. It wasn’t the history of the Focke-Wulf that interested me. It was the fact that Hawthorne had shown it to be one of his enthusiasms. He had actually revealed two things about himself in the space of one day. There was the reading group and there was this. It didn’t add up to a character I particularly understood but it was a start and I was grateful.
We walked for another fifteen minutes and at some stage Deal turned into Walmer and we arrived at Stonor House, which was where Diana Cowper had lived until the accident that had forced her to move. It was sandwiched between two roads, Liverpool Road at the back and The Beach at the front, a private drive connecting them, with ornate metal gates at each end. From the little that I knew about Diana Cowper, I would have said the house had suited her very well. Certainly, I could imagine her living here. It was pale blue, solid, well maintained, with two floors, several chimneys and a garage. A pair of stone lions stood guard in front of the door. It was surrounded by topiary that had been precisely clipped and semi-tropical plants, equally disciplined, in narrow beds. The whole place was walled off so that it was both prominent and private. Of course, some of these particulars could have been installed by the new owners but I got the feeling that it was more likely they had inherited it the way it was.
‘Are we going to ring the bell?’ I asked. We were standing on the Liverpool Road side. As far as I could see, there was nobody at home.
‘No. There’s no need.’ He took a key out of his pocket and I saw the name of the house on the tag dangling underneath it. For a moment, I was puzzled. Then I realised. He must have taken it from Diana Cowper’s kitchen, although I wasn’t sure when. I didn’t think the police would have allowed him to remove evidence, so they were probably unaware it even existed.
The key was solid and chunky. Not a Yale. I saw now that it couldn’t have fitted the front door. It was much more likely to open the gate. Hawthorne tried it a couple of times, then shook his head. ‘Not this one.’
We walked around to the other side of the house and tried the gate that opened onto The Beach but the key didn’t fit that one either. ‘That’s a pity,’ Hawthorne muttered.
‘Why did she hold on to the key?’ I asked.
‘That’s what I wanted to find out.’
He looked around him and I thought we were going to walk back to Deal – but then he noticed a second gate on the other side of the road. Stonor House had a quite separate, private garden right next to the beach. Smiling to himself, he crossed the road and tried the key a third time. This time, it turned.
We entered a small square area, with bushes on all four sides. It wasn’t exactly a garden; more a courtyard with miniature yew trees and rose beds surrounding a pretty marble fountain and two wooden benches that faced each other. The ground was paved with York stone. The effect was theatrical – like a scene from a children’s story. Even as we walked up to the fountain, which was dry and hadn’t been used for some time, I felt a sense of sadness and had a good idea what we were going to find.
And there it was, carved onto the stone shelf of the fountain: Lawrence Cowper. 3 April 1946 – 22 October 1999. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’
‘Her husband,’ I said.
‘Yes. He died of cancer and she built this place as a memorial to him. She couldn’t stay in the house but she always knew she’d want to come back. So she kept a key.’
‘She must have loved him very much,’ I said.
He nodded. Just for once, we were equally uncomfortable, standing there. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.