ON A FOOTLOOSE impulse one fair Saturday morning, in that faraway time before all such weekend whimsy was dashed away by parenthood and giving a shit about the garden, my wife and I set out for a motoring mystery tour. After enjoying breakfast, a leisurely and expansive affair of the type then popular in building society TV adverts, we popped sunglasses on the top of our heads and strolled out to my old Rover. It seems like we ought to have worn jumpers over our shoulders with the arms knotted, and possibly even thrown back our heads and laughed.
As we burbled out of west London, my wife leafed ruminatively through the road atlas. ‘Let’s go to Leeds Castle,’ she said, once we were nosing into the green belt. ‘We’ve never been there, and it’s supposed to be lovely.’
Except we didn’t go to Leeds Castle. Somehow – perhaps we were too busy congratulating ourselves for knowing it wasn’t in Yorkshire – this substantial moated edifice completely evaded us. One minute we were homing in on it through the smooth and sunny Kentish hills, counting down the miles on those brown tourist information signs, and the next we were out in some lonely, unkempt coastal plain. The brown signs were no more, replaced by tilted finger-posts pointing the way to Whither Island and Fuck-Knows-by-Sea. At length we arrived at a roundabout whose accompanying navigational information unequivocally demonstrated that we had overshot our intended destination by some distance. After a brief and amicable inquest – like I say, it was a long time ago – we agreed to head on rather than turn back.
‘Let’s go to Whitstable,’ I said. ‘We’ve never been there, and it’s supposed to be lovely.’
Except we didn’t go to Whitstable. The next wrong turn took us down a spectacularly unappealing peninsula that probed deep into the Thames Estuary’s brownest waters, and identified itself as the Isle of Grain. I’ve just established that this area is named after the Old English word for gravel, and that in 1918 it hosted Britain’s last recorded outbreak of malaria. Throw in a sprawl of refineries, a vast commercial port and an oil-fired power station crowned by the UK’s second-highest chimney, and you have a full appreciation of its merits as a day-trip destination.
Looking at the map now, our subsequent directional mishap seems no more than a continuation of the extravagant U-turn that put the Isle of Grain in our mirrors. Almost straight away our chosen escape route veered up a broad and sinuous concrete bridge, which carried us across a wide estuarine creek and offered an overview of Grain’s belching awfulness. Then it was down into a thick band of coastal fog that had rolled in from nowhere.
‘Must be the Isle of Sheppey,’ said my wife, nose to the atlas. A convoy of enormous container lorries roared towards us out of the mist and were swallowed up by it behind. Then emptiness and silence. It wasn’t a fair summer’s day any more: we’d gone from July to November, from the heart of the Garden of England to its bleak and steaming compost heap. When at last something else loomed out of the fog, it was the entrance sign to a prison. As a small, flat island engulfed by estuary mud and huge-scale industrial filth, Sheppey certainly seemed a good place for one. So good, indeed, that within moments we’d driven past the entrances to a further two. Just after the third a rather less obvious adaptation suggested itself: a family in beachwear lugging buckets, spades and a large inflatable shark out through the gates of a compound, home to the shadowy silhouettes of several hundred static caravans. Improbably, impossibly, this barren, befogged offshore correction facility managed to lead a double life as a place that people came to voluntarily, in search of fun.
‘Only way out is back over that bridge,’ my wife murmured. But curiosity, in its brow-crevassing, jaw-slackening, morbid essence, drove us on. Presently the roadside family groups swelled, and the murky gaps between caravan parks were filled with chip shops and purveyors of lurid plastic beach accessories. A sign welcomed us to Leysdown-on-Sea. We turned down this settlement’s main drag, a densely peopled thoroughfare lined with amusement arcades that bleeped and winked at us through the fog. The road terminated at what must have been the sea wall, though in these conditions it was hard to be sure. A flip-flopped stream of holidaymakers slapped away towards a gloomy space in the concrete, and in silence we watched the vapour claim them, one by one.
It was extraordinary to think that we had lived our lives – short and beautiful as they then were – entirely ignorant of the existence of this evidently popular resort, despite it lying just a 30-mile drive from our front door, had we gone there directly and on purpose, and lived in Bexleyheath. More extraordinary still to wonder how a fog-smothered mudbank in the Thames Estuary had ever become a holiday resort in the first instance, and little short of truly, madly, cow-hurlingly preposterous to discover that it still was one. As we drove back to the mainland these thoughts coalesced into loud and rather hysterical words, which is no doubt why we missed the turning for Whitstable, and ended up in Margate.
This whole curious misadventure recurred to me as I drove home from Gatwick Airport one morning twenty summers later, having dropped my family off for the annual visit to their Icelandic motherland. I’d stayed behind to meet several professional deadlines and fulfil a long-standing commitment relating to the refreshment of our exterior woodwork, which may explain why at a crucial juncture I found myself turning right instead of left. Of course I was going to compose many thousand words on manorexia, celebrity druids and the Battle of the Somme, and of course I was going to sit on a window ledge for a week listening to Eurosport’s coverage of the Tour de France while holding a wire brush. But first, just one sunny afternoon of Kentish prevarication, the righting of a twenty-year wrong. I’d had an idea: I was going to Leeds Castle. Forty minutes later I exited the M20 at the requisite turn-off, spotted another name on the big blue sign at the roundabout above it, and had a better idea, or at least a different one.
That long-ago evening my wife and I hit Margate in a state of exhausted delirium, one that led seamlessly into a night of dimpled pint pots and period disco stylings at an establishment called the Ace of Clubs. We stumbled into a seafront b. & b., and stumbled out some hours later in blinding sun and bleary befuddlement. The beach was already filling up with bucket-and-spaders; that bracing seaside whiff of brine and vinegar hung in the air. As a place that people came to on holiday, Margate made sense in a way that Leysdown-on-Sea hadn’t. Indeed, as we ran through the previous day’s events in the cold light of a terrible hangover, the whole Leysdown experience already seemed anomalous and unreal, a fogged-up, fucked-up fantasy. The stuff, indeed, that legends are made of. So it was that Leysdown-on-Sea had matured over the years into our yardstick for seaside misery, a metaphor for any truly terrible place – a hyphenated triplet to be muttered over a plastic cup of weak tea in a draughty promenade cafeteria, or bawled in gleeful disgust across a rural yard full of doorless fridges flat on their backs in oily mud.
But had it really been so mad and bad? Was there any truth in the myth? Leeds Castle be damned – I was going back to the Temple of Doom. On sea.