A Man For All Seasons
We reach Dungeness early. It’s a simple trip, park the car by the old lighthouse and walk a big circle. Seafront side first then back via Derek Jarman’s garden and that’s it. Yes, a few miles at most but one of the most evocative and memorable landscapes one could imagine – and there’s the rub; you couldn’t imagine it.
An ever-shifting ocean of shingle is dotted with abandoned vessels and pieces of boat-related equipment that could be a few months or a few decades old. Architectural salvage folk must have drooled over the chains alone, but you can be sure that nobody takes anything away. It is still a working area, you just can’t see who’s working and what they’re doing, but fresh boat-trails leading to and from the sea are everywhere. As they say in Cisco, Utah (see The American Southwest) ‘take nothing but pictures,’ and that’s Dungeness. It has been left alone. Nobody has tried to ‘heritage’ it or ‘preserve’ it – don’t mess with the end of the world. The only local feature that seems to have been tarted-up is the Dymchurch Light Railway, its station lies in the shadow of the great power station and it has undoubtedly seen plenty of paintbrush action recently – maybe the ghost of The Queen Mum (God bless ‘er) has passed through. The station shop sells brilliant fridge magnets. I buy seven. There are boardwalks for the mature visitor as shingle is hard yakka.
The plant life is the full Star Trek so we boldly head to the centre of the universe for all things botanical in this corner of the galaxy – Derek Jarman’s garden. The property and gardens are perfect in the pale light and we are the only people here, we amble in silence for a while and that’s it. Prospect Cottage nearly fell into irreversible decay before some Dangerous Liberal Homo-Loving Urban Elite Lefties raised the money to keep it wonderful for anyone who’d like to come and look at it. How dare they do their treacherous nice things! The fishermen pretend to ignore the porpoises sliding past and we wonder if we could handle a winter here, it must be brutal so we decide to stick things out in Hove.
Boys, Nuclear Power Stations, Guns & Trains: A brief interlude. All the right-on parents have tried it. All of ’em. Don’t let the boy have guns and don’t dress the girl in pink. It fails. There’s something deeper that you cannot get your feeble Guardian-reading fingers on (spoiler: I’ve read The Guardian for over forty years). Boys want nuclear power with added trains, girls want ponies and rainbows. Dungeness has the perfect storm: Dungeness B Power Station, a light railway and abandoned boat-stuff. To be able to gawp at them all in a square mile is almost overwhelming. The Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Light Railway is a beautifully maintained and well oiled machine. It is entirely staffed by charming men who have probably not known penetrative sex with a human female for quite some time – if ever – this is no bad thing as they can concentrate their efforts on running the perfect light railway and idiots like me can come and dribble over it. Dungeness B is simply a big snuggly power station that sits quietly on the horizon. I once took Ashly off to Sizewell B nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast, and, after the initial shock had worn off she was fine. And here’s the pay-off. Our world is so choc-full of by hatred, division and greed at the moment that the once terrifying spectre of Nuclear Fission now seems like a benign old gentleman wandering round the village waving his stick and saying hello. A bit like when my father was petrified by the The Irish; convinced anyone from the Emerald Isle wanted to put a bomb in his pyjamas. Nuclear power Ja Danke!
