The world from the Isle of Grain

I’ve long been obsessed by the Isle of Grain – the name, the idea of it – although I’d never been there. I even wrote a poem about it, informed by a painting by David Harker. David had never been there either (he’d based the painting on a photograph he’d been given) so together we entered into an imaginative speculation about this magical weird spot, a misnomer (the name is derived from the Old English greon meaning gravel), the end of the world.

Because sometimes art is better for not having had the experience, just imagining what it might be like. Why get hung up on truth?

But this Monday I finally, physically, arrived in Grain – by bus, in the company of Steve Perfect (http://www.steveperfect.com/) and other artists (including Mike Nelson and Adam Chodzko) / keen psychogeographers. I can report that it truly does feel like the end of the world; although it’s now linked to the land, it has the aloof air of somewhere cut-off, on the edge.

We began our walk at the footpath at the end of the tarmacked road, which follows the sea barrier along the coast. Across the water at Sheerness, Garrison Point Fort was to our right, and, just over the ridge, Grain Power Station to our left. The power station was decommissioned in 2012 and is in the process of being torn down; its chimney remains (the second-tallest power station chimney in the UK). One of our group said the locals had protested against its demolition. You could argue it’s a strange structure to love, a reminder of our grim nuclear history, not worth preserving. But if you had grown up in its shadow, and it had represented work and prosperity, you might begin to understand its symbolism. And besides, it’s rather beautiful, with its gently tapered base, imposing in a stark landscape where there are few defining features. Like Grain’s answer to the Shard.

As we walked, we could begin to see our destination looming in the distance, forlorn and imposing: the Grain Tower Battery. There are many Martellos, mysterious squat structures that dot the east coast of England, mostly along the curved shore of Kent and Sussex. They were constructed to keep Napoleon at bay, over two hundred years ago. But the tower at Grain is unique; its Martello-style base was built slightly later, in 1855, to protect the nearby Sheerness and Chatham dockyards from possible attack by France. It was added to during both the First and Second World Wars, so what remains is an odd, slightly thrown-together construction, like something a kid might make if he’d gone mad with Lego. It has the best address in the world – Number One Thames, and sits in prime position, at the point where the Thames and the Medway meet. It is bunker and fairy castle combined, its brick and concrete daubed in graffiti, but undeniably beautiful, in a sort of butch, brutalist way.

As soon as we saw it, we had to get out there. The tower is accessed along a stone causeway that joins it to the foreshore, only passable at low tide. We started across, wading through the thick mud that sucked at our boots, making slow but steady progress.

What makes these strange, set-alone places so alluring? Often, it’s simply the challenge of reaching them (our journey to the tower at the easier level of achievement). Once there, it’s the promise of solitude, in this case, an opportunity to feel as if we’d stepped into the sea, with all the secrecy of codes and campaigns that the tower suggests.

The urban explorer Bradley Garrett made a point of getting stranded at Grain Tower at high tide: http://www.bradleygarrett.com/our-own-private-island/. Even more extreme was artist Stephen Turner’s thirty-six days in isolation at Shivering Sands, one of the incredible sea forts in the Thames Estuary: http://www.seafort.org/theproject.html. It was enough for us to touch the heavy bomb-proof walls, to climb the makeshift ladder into the upper levels of the lookout, and stare across the estuary to the sea.

Perhaps we also crave a notion of safety. We live in frightening times, and these coastal defenses were built to last, built to deter intruders, still standing to purpose two hundred years on. We find them romantic, windswept and lonely, looking out to sea, but they were symbols of defiance and fear, born from our panic that the channel wasn’t wide enough to repel the French.

And now we make them into desirable homes. Even as the power station is demolished, Grain Tower Battery is being repurposed. It has just been sold for £500,000, and may be turned into an exclusive residence, or maybe a hotel or nightclub. And so another reason for our desire is to see these places before they are modernised beyond recognition, always more beautiful as ruin than when made whole again.

Home is so sad

Various discussions over the past week have triggered a preoccupation with the concept of home. As readers of Invective already know, I have made my home in London for the past 26 years, having spent the previous 21 years in New Jersey and New York. When I first moved here – with no particular plans, and probably no clear intention to stay – I found I was writing poems about my childhood in America, as it seemed I had gained the necessary distant to do so, not just physical distance, but also mental distance. At a certain point, when I started to establish a life for myself here, those American poems stopped. If it can be said that the majority of my poems are situated anywhere, it is London, or at least an urban location resembling or based on London. In my favourite poem by Cavafy, he talks about the possibility of ‘finding another city better than this one’ but the reality is that:

This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city.

Cavafy’s poem is relentlessly negative, concluding ‘As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.’ So the city becomes a metaphor for his failure, which he is fated to carry with him forever. Although I would contest his conclusion, I agree with Cavafy that a place you have spent much of your life becomes engrained in you, and any other place you visit is held against that dominant place, the place you call ‘home’. You do carry your city with you everywhere you go, like a garment you wear against your skin. But for me, that is a comfort rather than a burden.

‘Home’ is necessarily complicated for me, in that I consider London home, but I also recognise that I am not a Londoner. This is my adopted city, and perhaps for that reason, it is always precious, and I have never taken it for granted. If you think of writers like Conrad or Kundera or Nabokov, it is their otherness, the fact that they were from one place, and made a decision to reside permanently in another (and give up their mother tongue to write in the language of the place they made home) that charges their prose with a quality of surprise and energy. I have just switched from one kind of English to another (sometimes mixing my poems with both American English and British English, as I do in my speech). I think of myself as Anglo-American, and, like Plath or Eliot (if I could even begin to compare myself to them) my poems reflect the dual nature of who I am.

At the recent Place: Roots – Journeying Home weekend at Snape Maltings, the discussions began with Benjamin Britten and his commitment to place (in his case, Suffolk) in his music. The beginning of Peter Grimes just sounds like the beach at Aldeburgh; it makes sense of the place entirely, so that no other music can represent it so well. This idea of being firmly rooted was carried through to a discussion by Patrick Wright of the German writer Uwe Johnson, who, like Sebald and Hamburger, ended up in eastern England (Johnson rolled up in Sheerness, which even he thought was a dump, but somehow that awful place added a quality of stark alienation in his writing).

 

Wright made the point that ‘roots are also routes’, which makes me think of writers such as Bishop who was always searching for a home, and laid down roots in many places, only to uproot herself and start again. I always think of her line (in Questions of Travel) ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ every time I embark on a journey elsewhere, impossible as it is to take away with you the ‘folded sunset’. It seems that lately I have returned to America, not physically (I have only been back once in the last six years), but psychically. When doing readings from The City with Horns in 2011, I found myself telling audiences that the New York I depict in my Jackson Pollock poems isn’t the New York I remember, but the New York of my parents’ generation, a New York that filled my early years with stories of glamorous book launches and classic cocktails. And now I am trying to recreate the New Jersey suburbs of the 70s in my novel – thinking of Cheever, and Rick Moody, and Tony Soprano, and my own childhood.

I’ll finish on this poem by Larkin, which Anne Berkeley and I were discussing during the Snape weekend – the definitive statement on home:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.