Despite having been born in London, and spending my first six or so years in Willesden, north west London, I have visited other places in southern England only occasionally. My earliest memories include getting my face covered in smutty soot during a ride on what I assume to have been the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway, during which trip I first visited the seaside. I guess that I was about four years old. I have one recollection of the little zoo on the Isle of Wight from about this time, when my mother and her mother-in-law took me and my brother to what I later learned was a holiday camp somewhere near Sandown, I think. I was told in my teens that I had jumped in the deep end of the holiday camp swimming pool, nearly drowned, and had to be rescued by "a man". I have no recollection of this event, and my long-standing gentle love for water activities might challenge or support the story. My temptation would be to suggest that the "man" was real enough, but in relation to my mother's interest rather than mine. What detracts from this suggestion is that her mother-in-law was also present.
During my mid- to late-teens I visited Canterbury Cathedral and Sissinghurst Gardens, both in Kent. Canterbury Cathedral is not that impressive (but most cathedrals have to try quite hard to compete with the one in Durham) and felt grubbily touristy. I don't remember much about Canterbury as a town/city. Sissinghurst Gardens, on the other hand, are well worth visiting. Restored by Vita Sackville-West, one of the Bloomsbury set, they are very tastefully laid out. Gardens are now even more popular in Britain, and I suspect that Sissinghurst is enjoying the well-deserved limelight.
I have twice driven to the Channel Tunnel (to my knowledge, no-one calls it "the Chunnel"), and to Dover once (to catch the jet-foil to Belgium). I have been to Dover, Folkestone and Newhaven by train many times. Although I have romantic ideas and fantasies about these ports, my transitory contact with these places has not endeared them to me. I recall that the only occasion in my life when a cheque I wrote out was refused (because of my signature) was at Dover railway station. This was, in part, a result of having slept for part of the night on a milk crate.
It was also in my mid-teens that I went to Sussex, ostensibly to visit a young woman, Caroline, who lived with her family on a farm near Battle. I was dropped off in the morning by my parents, and collected later that afternoon, having platonically gathered cobnuts with Caroline in the woods. The hazel nuts went mouldy, and the romance foundered. On a second visit to Sussex, with my father, for reasons I cannot recall, my father lent me his car for the evening. I can only guess that I went to see Caroline, although I have no recollection of the meeting (why do I not keep anything like a regular journal?). My two memories of that drive are: mistaking a road junction in Eastbourne, and consequently driving the wrong side of a traffic island; driving fast along a long, straight road walled by Old Man's Beard. I have two other memories of the visit to Sussex: eating stem ginger in syrup for the first time (mmm!), and strange daylight at Beachy Head (a promontory into the sea, famous for suicides) involving cloud so low as to be mist on land, but not so low as to be at sea level, and sunshine shining upwards into the mist (weird!). I should like to visit Beachy Head in good weather.
I have a vague suspicion that I have visited Brighton twice: once in my teens with my mother and sisters, and once in my twenties with my wife. I remember little about either visit, apart from my disappointment the first time at finding a pebble beach. I know that Brighton is a centre for people who live politically left of centre and alternative lifestyles. I generally buy my vegan shoes by mail order from a company in Brighton: few towns boast a vegetarian shoe shop! I should love to visit Brighton Pavillion, represented in the film of Raymond Briggs' cartoon story book The Snowman, and more recently shown in the film, starring Ralph Fiennes, of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair.
I revisited the Isle of Wight, walking and youth hostelling, in my mid-teens. The walking party met at a youth hostel in a suburb of Southampton called Shirley. It has never ceased to strike me as odd that a suburb of anywhere should be given a woman's name. I assume that the name derives from a particular woman called Shirley, but I suppose it possible that the woman's name derives from the suburb - after all, there are men in the US named Chester, the etymology of which is a corruption of the Latin 'castra', meaning a Roman fort - although it might be slightly shocking to imagine that the true reason for the name derives from some poor man who had his vitals removed. The next morning we sailed (an inappropriate word to use for travel by a ferry without sails) across the Solent from Southampton to Cowes (a journey as uninspiring as that from Toronto to Toronto Islands). I can only assume that, from Cowes, the walking party en masse caught the bus to Newport. We started our walk across the island from Carisbrooke Castle (where Charles I was held under arrest before being removed to London), travelling south across the island towards St Catherine's Lighthouse. I recall, because I wrote a poem (now lost) about it, that we visited Ventnor (of which I have the abiding impression that it is stuck in a 1950s timewarp). Apuldurcombe Mansion and Niton were also on our itinerary. What was not supposed to be there was a large bull in a farmyard through which we had to walk. I have a feeling that I did something heroic with the bull that saved the day, but I can't imagine what, and fear that it might just be wishful thinking. We turned right, passing the curious horrors of Blackgang Chine (where there have been plaster-cast dinosaurs since long before dinosaurs achieved their latest popularity) and walked all the way to the Needles (a series of chalk stacks off the west coast of the island). I have photographs of the Needles, but they are not very impressive, as one really needs to be at sea in a boat to capture their needle-like qualities. Alum Bay (where there are sands of as many colours as Joseph's Coat) was just round the corner. It's possible that I first visited Alum Bay when I was four/five, because of one of those tasteless family ornaments consisting of a test-tube (meant to represent a lighthouse) filled with layers of different coloured sands from Alum Bay. However, I consider it likely that such nic-nacs can be bought in shops the length and breadth of the Isle of Wight, and so the ornament proves nothing. The walking party walked to Yarmouth (not to be confused with Great Yarmouth, a sea-side town on the Norfolk Broads north of Lowestoft) from where we caught the ferry back to Lymington (on the mainland). I recall seeing something of the New Forest, and assume that we must have stayed in a youth hostel at Brockenhurst or Lyndhurst. I have a suspicion that my father came and collected me from one of these two places. This suspicion is based partly on the negative evidence that I cannot recall travelling by train back to Chester (although there is a railway line to Southampton from both places), and partly because I have two memories that I cannot otherwise connect: a failed visit to the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu or else the Maritime Museum four kilometres away at Buckler's Hard (closed on Mondays, or some such excuse, although the books about such things report daily opening, but then times change, as do opening times), and a fleeting visit to Winchester. I feel certain that we did not visit Winchester Cathedral (locked? not open Mondays?), so what else we did there I cannot imagine. It is possible that this Winchester business is a complete fabrication by my ageing memory, as is my vague suspicion that we drove north via Stonehenge (q.v. below).
I have as-yet-unrealised plans, waiting to be dusted off, to visit the Isle of Wight again.
Sometime in the early 1980s, my wife and I visited Dorset. We camped at a village called Wool. Camping, to me, always sounds nicer than the reality of the experience. Predictably, it rained and we got wet. To dry out, we went into pubs, and used the air-heated hand-dryers to dry clothes, especially socks. We were not well received. South Dorset was conservative not only in political terms, but culturally, too. It was equally as far from being cosmopolitan as it was from the Kremlin. That at least half the men in the area worked for the Ministry of Defence (i.e. British army and related establishments) demonstrates something of the distance between south Dorset and the Kremlin. I have had the misfortune to visit public houses in some economically-deprived areas of north east England (and come close to receiving a beating - see the film Trainspotting for a graphic example). However, the icy manner in which we were treated in south Dorset pubs, with loud derogatory comments about "them Greenham women", and publicans being unavailable to serve us with beer, was humiliating. As minor consolation, we enjoyed Maiden Castle, an Iron Age earth fortress (see Julie Cristie and Terence Stamp in the film of Thomas Hardy's novel The Trumpet Major), Dorchester (Casterbridge, in Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge) and Durdle Door, a cove formed by an incursion of the sea into the chalk cliffs.
Sometime in the mid-1980s my wife and I were taken by her parents to Lyme Regis. Having read The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles, and seen the film many times, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, I was especially keen to visit Lyme Regis. Touristy it certainly was, but the day we chose to visit was blessed with perfect weather. I was able to do, for the first and only time, what I have witnessed only in films: dashing onto a sandy beach, discarding clothes on the way, and diving into warm sea water. The Cobb, a peculiarly-shaped breakwater, first made famous by Jane Austen, and shown highly atmospherically in the film of The French Lieutenant's Woman, is noticeably peculiar. Sadly, we did not get to walk on the Undercliff. One day.
Canterbury Cathedral, Sissinghurst Gardens, Dover, Folkestone; Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway
Beachy Head; Brighton
Southampton, Lymington, New Milton, Brockenhurst, New Forest, Winchester
Isle of Wight: Cowes, Ventnor, St Catherine's lighthouse, Appuldurcombe Mansion, the Needles, Alum Bay.
Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge (see photograph below), Avebury and Silbury Hill at the Summer Solstice.
Poole, Wool, Dorchester, Durdle Door, Lyme Regis
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