Читать книгу The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things - Tim Radford, Tim Radford - Страница 6

Chapter Two

The Town

The Man from Somewhere

In June 1652, smallpox being rife in London, the diarist John Evelyn left his wife and mother-in-law taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, and headed for London. It was hot, he sent his manservant on ahead, and rode ‘negligently under favour of the shade’ till he got within three miles of Bromley, at a place called the Procession Oak. Suddenly, ‘Two cut-throates started out, and striking with long staves at the horse, and taking hold of the reines threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into a deepe thicket some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they might securely rob me, as they soone did.’ Evelyn observed that ‘it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and were 14 companions’.

Evelyn lived, of course, to tell the tale. The story is a reminder that towns grew up as they did not because they could deliver jobs, public transport, banks, schools, recycling centres and planned housing: they grew up as they did to offer security to like-minded people in a menacing world. For much of European history, the countryside could be a dangerous place, home to vagabonds, beggars, fraudsters, robbers, smugglers, outlaws and freebooting soldiery. Kings reigned in capitals, but farther from the seats of power, their barons could do as they pleased, and often did; and pilgrims, merchants and craftsmen travelled in convoy, or hired an escort, or kept together as best they could, for their own protection.

The wildwood was a threatening environment. In 1285, the Statute of Winchester by Edward I required local landholders to clear the scrub, coppices and ditches for two hundred feet on either side of the highway between market towns, to prevent surprise attacks by highwaymen, footpads and robber bands. In such a world, European towns became places of safety for the people of the countryside: safe from outlaws, safe from the notional upholders of the feudal law, too. Perhaps because they had gates that could be locked at night and watched by daylight, towns became independent entities: communities of free citizens who could control trade and join guilds and plan cathedrals and repair battlements; could impose quarantine to keep leprosy or the plague at bay; could support hospitals and almshouses for the sick and elderly and build bath-houses and complain about sanitation; could levy tolls and impose building regulations; could decide to support a prince, or defy him; who could declare for the king or the Puritans in one country, or for the pope or the Cathars in another, or even declare neutrality, as Bremen did in the Thirty Years War.

Medieval towns, says the historian Lewis Mumford in The Culture of the Cities (1938), ‘won the right to hold a regular market, the right to be subject to a special market law, the right to coin money and establish weights and measures, the right of citizens to be tried in their local courts and to bear arms in their own defence’. These were places that offered security and demanded loyalty; and each was different, with variant laws and customs, differing traditions and festivals, unique privileges and obligations, and unique penalties, too. Such towns might even, once they reached a certain level of commercial power and population density, grow into city-states or self-contained republics: Florence was one, and Venice another; Geneva a third, Strasbourg a fourth. Something of this sense of community, this sense of mutual support, survives in all local patriotism. A town was once, and in some ways still is, a place of belonging. You belong to Glasgow. Chicago is your kind of town. Maybe it’s because you’re a Londoner.

This sense of membership, of belonging, becomes in some ways a part of the identity that others confer upon us. Dickens’s wonderful novel Our Mutual Friend announces one of its themes and introduces one of its protagonists in the second chapter with an idle dinner-party conversation about a capricious legacy that has befallen a man whose origins nobody can remember: Jamaica, Tobago, or … and it comes to the narrator at last, ‘the country where they make the Cape Wine’. For conversational shorthand, however, the migrant in search of his inheritance has already become simply ‘the man from somewhere’. Interestingly, although it is his life history, and his strange fortune, the bizarre codicil to a dusty legacy, that is compelling, to achieve even conversational reality, this person must first of all have a geographic location, however insubstantial: the man from somewhere. He must be placed, before his history can begin, and even though he is no longer there, he has departed, he has earned the preposition ‘from’, and his place of origin, however imprecise, is his first identification.

Towns confer an identity that grows from a sense of community. That word carries a strange burden, even in the original language. The French word commune in Latin was something that was common, in the sense of shared, for common use; it could also mean a community or state. Communio, according to my ancient Latin Dictionary for Schools, implied fellowship and mutual participation; but it also had a second meaning: to fortify on all sides, to barricade, to entrench. If you were a townsman, you were not a villein, not a feudal serf, not a bondsman, not tied to a manor or fated to till someone else’s fields, you were not a beggar or a vagrant, a person with no rights, and with no fixed abode. Citizenship of a town authorised not just security and a certain fragile dignity, it also conferred identity, and this identity lives on in names, stories, plays, songs, psalms and ballads, in signatures, in public records, almost everywhere we choose to look, and sometimes we become so accustomed to the organic link between townsman and town that we barely notice the conjunction.

For example, when Jesus of Nazareth could no longer carry the cross on which he was to be crucified, Roman soldiers pressed a foreign visitor or tourist to help him. That is why we know about Simon of Cyrene: because three Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, all record the incident. After Jesus died – with, according to the Gospel of John, the Roman lettering Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm, or Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews – above his head, a rich man called Joseph of Arimathea asked the Roman governor for his body. This story achieved its widest circulation once the Old and New Testaments had been printed in moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg. But even people who have never read the Gospels know the story, because episodes from the life and death of the Nazarene have been discussed by Augustine of Hippo and St Teresa of Avila and painted by Raphael of Urbino and Leonardo da Vinci. I can find no reference to Cyrene or Arimathea in the essays of Michel de Montaigne.

There is a clear theme here: everybody in this account so far is quite naturally identified by his or her place of origin, that is, the place from which they had come, and where they might normally have been found. In some cases, the identification is so sure and so natural that the name-bearers are sometimes referred to only by the places from which they had come. Michel Eyquem took the extended name de Montaigne from the château that his trader family had purchased in Perigord. His essais (literally, attempts) were composed there, and he is now known in the English-speaking literary world simply as Montaigne. Johannes Gensfleisch zu Laden zum Gutenberg’s final surname comes not from his father but from the agricultural estate where his father lived. Vinci is a small Florentine commune or town in Tuscany that has been in existence for at least eight hundred years: so emphatic, however, is the fame of its most famous son that (once again in the English-speaking world) he is often and no doubt incorrectly referred to as da Vinci, as if it were a formal modern surname, like de Tocqueville. Nazareth is still known in Hebrew as Natz’rat and in Arabic as al-Nasira. It is an Israeli town with a large Arab and Christian population, and it is incontestably the home of the Jesus of the Gospels: his birth in Bethlehem is reported as an administrative accident during an episode of temporary urban overcrowding. Nazareth in Galilee dates from the Bronze Age: two thousand years ago it had a reputation of sorts among people elsewhere in the region because, in the Gospel of John, a certain Nathaniel asks rhetorically, ‘Can good come from Nazareth?’

Arimathea, on the other hand, is described by Luke as ‘a city of the Jews’, but which city, and where it might be found, is not known. Biblical scholars have proposed several candidate locations, including the modern Palestinian town of Ramallah, on the West Bank, but for all the available evidence Joseph might as easily have come from Glastonbury in Somerset, a town much linked with his name. Cyrene is more easily identified: it was an ancient Greek colony – known to Herodotus – on the African shores of the Mediterranean, and part of Libya is still called Cyrenaica. Like Alexandria and other Greek cities, it had a Jewish population, and one imagines (because there is no evidence either way) that Simon was in Jerusalem for the Passover, perhaps visiting friends and relatives (because Mark calls him ‘the father of Alexander and Rufus’). These relatives might not have lived in Jerusalem, however, because Luke and Mark both describe him as ‘coming from the country’. This phrase may have meant either the countryside, as in ‘not the town’, or the country where Cyrene lies. I do not know. We do know he didn’t volunteer to help Jesus with his burden: all three Evangelists say he was compelled to help. The point is that all three choose to identify him by his place of origin. Of course they would. In a city and rural region that must have been home to hundreds of Simons there had to be additional identification: Simon the fisherman, Simon son of Jonas, Simon Magus, or Simon, the one from Cyrenaica.

Our towns become us, perhaps most of all when we are away from them. The John of Gaunt who with his dying words celebrates England in Shakespeare’s Richard II (‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings’), was historically John of Ghent – he was born in that town in Flanders in 1340 – as well as Duke of Lancaster and King of Castile and Leon. Other people quite unconsciously tend to place us, a neutral act that is entirely to do with geography, rather than classification, as in ‘put us in our place’.

Sometimes this works in reverse: an individual bequeaths his name to the town. Adelaide, Darwin, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney in Australia; Auckland, Wellington, Napier and Palmerston North in New Zealand; Vancouver, Halifax and Churchill in Canada; Alexandria in Egypt; and so on, were all named for individuals. These namings however were salutes and celebrations rather than claims of direct connection: in most cases the name-bearer never visited the namesake. There are rare cases in which the identities of town and first citizen seem difficult to separate: outside Geneva is the commune of Ferney-Voltaire. It was simply called Fernex or Ferney until François-Marie Arouet, one of whose pen names was Voltaire, moved there in 1759.

Sometimes we salute the town unconsciously when we reach for the wardrobe, because towns dress us. The whole world has adopted denim, originally known as serge de Nîmes, after the town in southern France where it was traditionally made, and cambric takes its name from Cambrai in northern France. But islands, districts and townships have also given their names to a variety of clothing forms: Jersey, Guernsey and Arran for woolly knitting; Harris for a tweed weave; calico from the southern Indian city of Kozhikode once known, to the English at least, as Calicut; and so on. Towns give their name to products: Bakewell tart, Pontefract cake, Stilton cheese, spaghetti Bolognese, Chelsea bun, frankfurter and so on.

Towns also address us. Hastings is a common surname in the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, and there isn’t much doubt that as a surname, its origins lie in the town of Hastings. The suffix ‘ing’ once meant ‘the people of’, and one version of the town’s history has it settled by an invading Saxon clan called the Hastingas, or sons of Haesten. There is a similar-sounding Norman word that implies swiftness, speed or haste, and Hastings is where the Norman invaders landed, and fought and defeated the English in 1066; but the settlement name of Hastings is a great deal older than that: the ‘men of Hastings’ get a separate mention in the story of Offa, king of Mercia, who seized Sussex in 771, and according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Danish marauders committed violence there in 1011. The town was the first Norman conquest in Britain, the site of the oldest Norman castle, an early gift of land by the conqueror to a loyal tribesman. There is an eleventh-century title of Baron Hastings: it was held by John, son of Henry de Hastings. Shakespeare evokes one of his descendants in three of the history plays. ‘… ere I go,’ says Edward IV, in Henry VI Part Two,

Hastings and Montague,

Resolve my doubt. You twain, of all the rest,

Are near to Warwick by blood and by alliance:

Tell me if you love Warwick more than me?

Warwick, too, is a place that became inseparable from a name, especially in Australia and New Zealand, two countries rich in toponymic first names such as Warwick and Clyde.

So there are a number of levels at which we accept that our identity derives from our place in the world. These connections between identity and place seem the more natural because they are timeworn: we are comfortable with a book title such as The Da Vinci Code, but nobody, as far as I know, ever refers to a painter called Urbino; he is either Raphael, or Raphael of Urbino.

In a café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a bartender once hailed me as ‘London’ to bring me to the counter to collect my hot salt-beef on rye: she knew the names of her regular customers, and by default she identified me by the place that I had said I was from. I heard her later call out the word ‘Ohio’ for somebody else’s double cheeseburger. It seemed, at the moment, quite reasonable in the land in which movies could be named for the Man from Laramie or a bandit called the Sundance Kid because he once served a prison sentence in Sundance, Wyoming.

This identification with place and origin must have made sense in an older world, too – one in which many people must have stayed where they were born, and rarely travelled for more than a day from their homes, for most of their lives. It is possible to identify a very tentative modern trend in what might properly be called place-name christenings: Chelsea for a president’s daughter, Brooklyn for a footballer’s son. But it remains hard to imagine Londoners being identified by registrars as ‘Catford’ or ‘Peckham’, or young bucks addressed as Milton Keynes. One feels that Henry de Hastings was plausibly so-called because he more or less owned the place, could deliver its rents, loyalty and fighting men to the king’s cause, but most of all because he was another Henry, the one from Hastings. Back in Hastings, he would have seemed an outsider, because of the time he spent at court. But this connection of identity with place is a little tenuous and uncertain everywhere, and through all history, and so, on occasion is its reverse: the connection of place with identity.

I live in one of the most famous towns in the English-speaking world, but about this fame hangs a faint air of embarrassment, a whiff of inferiority complex. J. Manwaring Baines, a former local museum curator and author of Historic Hastings, a 1955 memoir, observes that ‘it is rather remarkable that although so many noteworthy people have visited Hastings, few of its citizens have achieved national fame’. The town’s name is linked forever with William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard and William, Duke of Normandy, and the Battle of Hastings in 1066; but William’s cross-Channel invasion force neither landed at Hastings, nor fought there. William brought his troops ashore at Pevensey, and defeated the forces of England at a place now called Battle, miles to the north of Hastings. As an ancient town that grew swiftly in the seaside property boom that followed Regency investment in Brighton during and after the Napoleonic wars, Hastings has had its share of famous residents, but many of them stayed there only fleetingly. The pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti brought the beautiful model Elizabeth Siddall to Hastings, and later married her there. Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, veteran of the eighteenth-century campaign to subdue India, was quartered there, and returned for a while during the war against Napoleon. Another soldier briefly billeted in Hastings and celebrated by a blue plaque was Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular War at Corunna in Spain and was immortalised by the poet Charles Wolfe in verses that children of my generation were required to learn by heart (‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried …’). Byron swam off Hastings in August 1814, ate turbot there, walked the cliffs, and in a fit of pique threw an ink bottle out of a window. Keats visited Hastings, and Edward Lear painted there. A plaque commemorates Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who in 1707 sailed his squadron onto the rocks of the Scilly Isles, and perished with 1,400 other men. His connection with Hastings is that he ‘in about 1700 took the opportunity whilst sailing past Hastings to visit the house reputedly lived in by his mother’. Titus Oates, a turbulent figure from the seventeenth century (dismissed as an Anglican priest for drunken blasphemy, discharged as a ship’s chaplain for buggery), certainly lived in Hastings in his youth: he is now famous for producing fraudulent claims of a Popish plot against King Charles II, charges that ended with the murder and execution of a number of Catholics. Oates was later exposed as a liar, prosecuted for perjury, fined, pilloried, whipped, imprisoned for life and then a few years later released. The town’s shingle beach, its fishing fleet, its long history and its picturesque streets made it a popular resort for painters, but two of the best-known are linked not with the Old Town, but the new town, on the western side of the West Hill. Not far from my house in Hastings is one of the temporary homes of Robert Noonan, painter, signwriter and decorator. Noonan achieved his fame under the pen name of Robert Tressell, author of the socialist classic The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, in which Hastings achieved pseudonymous immortality as a place called Mugsborough. In fact, Noonan was a Dubliner who emigrated to South Africa and died in Liverpool: he lived only nine years in Hastings.

A little further on is another house linked with a painter. The resident was to become one of the world’s most famous painted ladies. Anna McNeill Whistler, subject of a painting in the Louvre officially called Arrangement in Grey and Black, but known everywhere as Whistler’s Mother, moved to Hastings in 1875 and died there in 1881. She too came from somewhere else: North Carolina in the old American South. Members of her parents’ families kept slaves before the American Civil War; she married George Washington Whistler, an Indiana-born soldier who became an engineer, who built the first mile of passenger track in the US for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and who invented the locomotive steam whistle. She moved to Russia, because her husband served the imperial court as a consulting engineer during the construction of the first main Russian railway line, the link between Moscow and St Petersburg. These were the tracks that carried the train that brought Tolstoy’s heroine Anna Karenina to Moscow, to her fatal encounter with Vronsky, to public shame, unhappiness and finally death under the wheels of a locomotive. So Anna McNeill Whistler had already played, by marriage and location, an incidental role in the making of the cultural heritage of Europe, long before she came to England. She had five children: one of them was the painter James McNeill Whistler, and he composed her portrait in 1870, while she stayed at his London flat. Both Mrs Whistler and Tressell were conspicuous outsiders: that is, they were not Hastings people.

But I now realise that, in my twenty-three years in Hastings, I have probably known very few people who could claim to have been born in the town, or even to have spent most of their lives there. Of the houses that border our own house and garden, more than half have changed hands not just once, but several times in those twenty-three years. Most of my immediate neigh-bours had moved to the town, as we had done, from some other place: London, Kent, rural Sussex, Surrey, the English Midlands, the West Country, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Poland, South Africa, the United States and Australia. There is seldom a single reason for settling in one town rather than another: family connections and job opportunities play a role; so too does the cost of housing, and for most of my twenty-three years there, Hastings was conspicuously more affordable than many other south coast localities. Physical beauty must also have been part of the lure.

Hastings began as a seaport, one of the Cinque Ports, a confederation of towns required by a Royal Charter of 1155 to maintain ships for a royal navy, should such a need arise. In return, Edward I gave Cinque Port townsmen the right to bring goods into the country from abroad without paying import duties, a right that seems to have been very unwillingly surrendered sometime in the reign of Edward III, and smuggling remained a significant source of income well into the nineteenth century. Hastings’s role as a naval and military base was relatively short-lived. What had once been a secure harbour was in the thirteenth century swept away by storms and coastal erosion, but the town survived as a home to fishermen, smugglers and traders, and it grew up around a small sheltered inlet in a narrow valley and then spread inland between two steep ridges called simply the West Hill and the East Hill, along the course of a stream called the Bourne: this is now submerged beneath a high road still called The Bourne. The town experienced the usual buffets of history, along with plague, fire, assault and property speculation followed by slump. It remained well known without ever becoming very fashionable, and much visited without ever becoming rich. In the course of the last five centuries, houses were renewed or restored, propped up and extended, built over and upstaged, in ways that would now give town planners the vapours. Old shops, warehouses and alehouses would become homes, and then turn back into businesses, or restaurants, or studios, or antique shops, and then morph back into accommodation again, while still retaining the paraphernalia of commerce about them.

Hastings Old Town was where I first came across the phenomenon of a ‘flying freehold’, in which some long-gone property-owner might add an extra attic room or two to his house by building it over the roof of his immediate neighbour, and then leave subsequent generations of lawyers, tenants and freeholders to sort out the consequences for themselves. In one case, access to an eighteenth-century hillside cottage was only possible through the garden of the house immediately below it; in another, rows of little terraced cottages could be approached only by a footpath or a flight of steps; in a third, somebody’s little front garden and terrace sat on top of somebody else’s lock-up garage. Whole streets of properties could be quaint, picturesque, charming and barely habitable, so small were the staircases, so cramped the rooms.

The appeal of old Hastings had a great deal to do with its long-term impoverishment, its place at the bottom of the property pecking order: old Georgian tiles and Welsh slates stayed where they had been put because owners could not afford to modernise; sash windows continued to rattle in the gales because unplasticised polyvinyl-chloride-coated double glazing was too expensive; householders had quite enough to manage, coping with dry rot, damp, death watch beetle, subsidence, defective drains and the notorious impact of salt-laden wind and rain on the property’s paintwork and timber. But for many visitors, the unexpectedness of some of the houses was its own reward; for others it was the view. Someone standing on the West Hill of Hastings could see, looking due south, a long sward of green punctuated by people walking dogs, children playing with kites, and little knots of picnickers, and beyond them the broken stones of a not quite levelled Norman castle, and beyond that the English Channel, the colour of pewter on an overcast day, a sheet of silver and azure when the Sun shone. A visitor who turned slightly to the east could see a tiny fishing harbour protected by a small breakwater, a row of broad-beamed, sturdy fishing boats hauled up each day onto the pebble beach, a collection of tall net-drying sheds protected by coatings of creosote or pitch, a fairground, a disorderly jumble of attractive roofs and house fronts on both sides of the valley, huddled together either for economy or security, with small and often steep gardens.

Within view would also be two fine stone churches, and a handful of conspicuously handsome but not especially large properties. The townscape would be framed by woodland and terraces of allotments on the steep western hillside, but on the eastern hill, the houses would be crammed together until, just about halfway up the slope, they would stop, as if restrained by a regal hand that had drawn a line with a ruler, and beyond that the observer would see only the grassland and scrub and forest of a country park, ablaze with gorse and hawthorn in spring, and arrested along the coast by steep sandstone cliffs.

This extraordinary view – you could never get tired of it, which was just as well because it was almost inescapable – belonged to everybody, and was divorced from all other privilege. Some of the poorest families, housed in an estate along the slope of the West Hill, probably had the best outlook in the whole of southern England: a panorama framed by two headlands, a valley crammed with picture-postcard roofs, a beach and seaport that had been a magnet for painters for two centuries, and then beyond it, just the sea and the sky.

This prodigal exposure to beauty came at a small but inexorable cost: prodigal exposure to wet and cold when the clouds gathered and the sea began to pound the coast and shrieking winds from the Bay of Biscay, or from the Baltic, would drive rain almost horizontally into the hillsides. People on the sea front would find passage perilous, as waves swept up the shingle to thunder against the stone walls above the beach, and explode in a shrapnel burst of freezing salt spray against the buildings on the landward side of the road.

The hills on either side of the Old Town were so steep that some of the access was by stepped passages, and for short periods during the more severe assaults of snow and ice, neither taxis nor buses would tackle the climb up the West Hill. At such inclement times, the short walk across the open green before the more sheltered descent to the shops, cinema and railway station was a headache of a different kind: the howling winds could turn an umbrella inside out, drive the rain down the lining of the strongest waterproof and chill the exposed cheekbones, sinuses and the temples to temperatures so agonising that the sufferer, once under shelter and back in the warmth, required a few minutes of privacy to sob and gasp with the pain that arrived as the numbness ebbed.

Most people, most of the time, accepted such discomforts philosophically, as the obvious and unavoidable reciprocal of the rewards of seaside life. These included fish caught that morning, landed before noon and sold at shops that backed onto the fishing harbour, or freshly preserved in a smokehouse across the road; a more than usually liberal supply of inns, bars, cafés, restaurants, bakeries and fish and chip shops aimed at the tourist trade but sufficiently dependent on patronage from the townspeople to keep the prices keen; and enough antique, second-hand and knick-knack shops to guarantee – for the purchaser prepared to plod a sufficient distance – almost any clothing, furniture, instrument, implement or distraction desired.

Seaside communities share a set of characteristics that would define them as a species in the taxonomy of township: for one thing, they smell of the sea, parked cars are splattered with seagull excrement and the buildings nearest the front tend to look either freshly painted or faded and weatherbeaten, because these are the only two states possible on a southern coast exposed to prevailing winds. The seawall, promenade or coastal defences provide one obvious limit to expansion, and ambitious town planners hoping to exploit the holiday trade long ago zoned conspicuous areas of parkland to enhance amenity, and at the same time took steps to preserve access to the open countryside, so light industry, warehouses and superstores tend to accrete asymmetrically in one direction along a coast road and on the high terrain inland from the newest developments. All such towns have seen better days, and hotels and mansion blocks once built by speculators to attract the regular patronage of gentry and aristocracy have in some cases become temporary and uncomfortable accommodation for the dispossessed: refugees and asylum seekers from a dozen civil wars in Europe, Africa and Asia; and the unemployed, divorced, rejected, alcoholic, drug-addicted and depressed from the cities to the north. The south coast towns embrace pockets of considerable poverty within bigger settlements of only modest wealth, but the communities of have and have-not seem to muddle along peacefully most of the time. The areas nearest the promenade, pier and beach tend to become no man’s lands of peeling hotels, bars, amusement arcades, small ethnic restaurants, fish and chip shops, sweetshops, ice-cream parlours and kiosks specialising in souvenirs, ethnic jewellery, crass postcards and silly objects. In high summer and good weather, the beachfront roads and pavements are crowded with cars, cyclists, roller skaters, joggers, strollers, buskers and gangs of teenagers; the numbers are intermittently swollen by chartered busloads of day trippers, some of them families from south or west London out for a picnic in the fresh air; some of them visitors from Belgium or Holland. Near the close of the day, the numbers diminish, and the seagulls reclaim the shore, to peck at discarded and rejected kebabs, half-eaten pizzas and discarded boxes of chips.

Although such things define the seaside town as a species, each English south coast settlement retains a distinctive individuality, and could not – except for limited aspects within the ‘tripper zone’ that they all share – be mistaken for any other seaside town. Eastbourne, on the western side of the Pevensey Levels, has a spacious and gracious old town of flint and brick buildings served by brick pavements of the sort I have seen nowhere else, and an extended and cultivated promenade that gets wilder and more beautiful the further westward it is from the town’s heart. Hastings town comes almost to a dead halt around a crush of little buildings opposite the fishing harbour, at the foot of the East Cliffs. Its promenade begins beyond a seafront fairground and extends gracefully enough beyond the town’s pier, all but destroyed by fire, and along in front of a succession of handsome buildings all the way past St Leonards to a place known as Bo-Peep, where the attempt at formal seaside identity collapses into a clutter of light industrial buildings and small houses, beach huts and boat sheds and a long shingle walk to a huge, detached shopping development that announces the start of Bexhill-on-Sea. This southern perimeter is the baseline for a bulging triangle of suburban development that extends north to a road called The Ridge, beyond which the countryside begins. At the 2001 census, this area was home to 85,029 people, with a mean age of 39.6 years, of whom more than 94.5 percent were born in the United Kingdom, 67.4 percent of whom identified themselves as Christian, and only 2 percent of other faiths.

* * *

In 2001, I and my family were of this number: now, in this addendum to a chapter that has taken more than a year to complete, we are not. We have moved across the Pevensey Levels to Eastbourne; another town that grew up around a bourne or stream, another town mentioned in the Domesday Book, a town in its own different way as distinctive as Hastings, and to a house in no way as distinctive as the one we maintained in Hastings. The reasons for the move are not important: what matters is that we felt no great wrench, no dislocation and no sense of loss as we made it. The twenty-three years that I spent living in Hastings was the longest period of my life in any one settlement, let alone one house. If we count by years of residence, then that would make me a Hastings man. But it does not. The towns of Kent and Sussex, of Essex and Surrey and Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, have to some extent struck a bargain with the national capital, London. You provide the employment, and we will provide the people; you provide the income, and we will furnish the beds, the county towns might have said. The distinctive autonomy, the panoply of entirely local legislation, custom and practice that distinguished one community from another, began to disappear centuries ago as central government exerted increasing authority. The arrival of the railways did the rest: a million or two households in the south-east of England depend on earnings paid by London-based employers, and places such as Kent and Sussex are simply part of a larger commune called the commuter belt. Townspeople from Hastings – and from Tunbridge Wells and Ashford and Lewes and so on – began to get used to spending hours of each day neither at home nor at work, as citizens of nowhere in particular, travelling at an average of fifty miles an hour through landscapes at which they have long since ceased to look.

Once a town becomes a dormitory suburb of a metropolis, a place of convenience and affordability, it loses some of its character. Economic policies now encourage the movement of capital and labour, but it is important to remember that they always did. Towns welcomed merchants and merchandise; after the great plague of 1348, which is supposed to have killed more than one person in three in Europe, the survivors also welcomed any craftsman or skilled labour that came their way. For precisely the same reasons that medieval settlements grew into fortified towns, each with its own unique character, so this uniqueness began to dissipate. People have always been prepared to move home, to go somewhere else in the hope of a new and perhaps a better life, a greater challenge, a more thrilling vocation, and this departure is the thing that confers some of the substance of identity. Jesus the carpenter’s son became Jesus of Nazareth when he left Nazareth, first for the countryside and then for Jerusalem. At home in Vinci, Leonardo was simply the son of Messer Piero; he became Leonardo da Vinci when he moved to Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome. But bureaucracy now confers upon us other, more precise forms of identification: we have formal surnames, registered at birth and recorded on a passport. These surnames are sometimes place names – Norton, Barton, Sutton all date back to old English locations – but they define lineage rather than place. We acquire tax and National Insurance numbers, and must be identified by our dates of birth. The town exists as a postal address, but it could, in Britain, be supplanted by that unfeeling and relatively recent precision tool, the postcode.

Most of us are uprooted, detached and replanted. The Duke of Devonshire has his historic home in Derbyshire. The Prince of Wales does not live in Wales: he may more easily be found in Scotland, Norfolk, Buckinghamshire, London or Gloucestershire. And this writer, who made a home in Hastings for almost a third of a lifetime, has somewhat ruefully discovered that he is not a Hastings man. He has become a man from somewhere. He is a United Kingdom citizen; he has made his home in England for almost fifty years; he loves Sussex; he is married to a Londoner; his son is a Yorkshireman by birth, and his daughter a Maid of Kent; he is a monoglot Francophile and Russophile and emphatically European in his political sympathies; but he cannot shake off an awareness, a cast of mind, a substrate of identity that set in his teenage years, under bright skies in which the Sun was always in the north, beer was always served cold, roads were covered with loose metal, houses had verandas, trees were evergreen, Christmas Day was hot and children ran to the beach in bare feet.

To be aware of this is not to wish to go back. We cannot go back to what was, because that too has altered, and in some ways vanished. However assimilated one tries to be, however aware of the history, geography and romance of the new location, one remains a stranger in one’s adopted country, and at the same time one becomes a stranger in one’s place of birth. That may not present a disadvantage: people who never leave a place never really understand where they are. Those of us who change places, who migrate, perhaps get the best of both worlds. It was a commonplace of 1950s fiction that young people set off to find themselves: to find out who they really were. When you migrate, you find out who you are not; you can be at ease, and secure, and part of a community, but you also discover that you are never quite at home.