2
Mirror of the Sea
The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.
– The Mirror of the Sea, Joseph Conrad, 1906
We rose early the next morning to catch the tide and were underway before 8 a.m. The weather was changeable, spitting lightly in the early morning then stopping for a while; the sky was a blanket of grey clouds. I sat out on deck at the stern with Sefryn and James. Having left the mooring at Queenborough, we soon reached the mouth of the Medway and passed Garrison Point on our starboard side. A derelict semicircular Victorian fort with a radar tower on the roof sits above the busy commercial port of Sheerness Docks. Orange cranes lift multicoloured, rectangular containers off great tankers into the water. In front of them, a line of tugs was moored against the quayside.
On a spit guarding the river mouth sit the remnants of a Napoleonic battery tower. Behind us was the now defunct Isle of Grain power station, which once generated electricity from oil for much of Kent. From across the water in Southend, the giant smoke stack has dominated the horizon since the 1970s, with the grey-blue hills of Kent behind. Known locally as the ‘upturned cigarette’, probably because of the huge puff of smoke that was once a permanent feature above the chimney, the power station is for the most part a much-loved landmark. It changes colour constantly, depending on the light, from china blue to deep purple to black-grey, and features in thousands of local photographs and paintings. But most people have been unaware of the dangerous levels of toxic waste which have been emitting from the chimney and into the atmosphere for decades. Like much of the heavy industry along the Estuary coastline, the power station has recently been decommissioned, as the level of pollutants it releases is deemed unacceptable under EU law. It will soon be demolished.
Ben nervously manoeuvred his eighty-foot-long Dutch barge across shallow waters, away from Sea Reach buoy no. 1, which bobs around in the water, marking the site of a treacherous sandbank called the Nore: a place, Joseph Conrad wrote, that could ‘conjure visions of historical events, of battles, of fleets, of mutinies’. The sandbank has been a major hazard for shipping for centuries – a wooden lightship powered by sperm-whale oil was located there in the eighteenth century to warn vessels to steer clear of this dangerous area – but it was also an important anchorage and assembly point for ships coming into London. But of all its guises, the Nore is best known now as the resting place for the ‘ship full of bombs’.
The SS Montgomery, one of the most hazardous wrecks in British waters, lies half buried in the shifting sands of the Nore. This American Liberty ship ran aground there on 20 August 1944, loaded with nearly seven thousand tons of bombs and explosives. The crew was rescued and, during the following few days, most of the volatile cargo on board was removed; but on the fifth day, the Montgomery broke her back on the sandbank and later that night sank in a storm, still loaded with unexploded bombs. Dubbed the ‘Doomsday Ship’ by locals, the Montgomery is a broken, waterlogged, ticking timebomb.
A number of warning buoys mark the edges of the 1,600-foot exclusion zone around the wreck, which is monitored day and night by the Port of London Authority. Shipping routes have been diverted around the submerged boat for seventy-odd years now, and pilots approaching Sheerness from the North Sea know to look out for the ominous sign of the ship’s three masts above the waterline, as if warning of the dangerous presence below.
As Ben cautiously moved the barge away from the Nore into deeper channels, I looked through my binoculars, searching for the masts, before turning around to study the coastline of Grain. Apart from the petrochemical tanks and other industrial structures on the shoreline near the Medway, the only other buildings were some wooden chalets in the nearby All Hallows caravan park. I had never been this close to the Hoo Peninsula before, even though I had looked across throughout my life at this rural landscape, which is situated just a few miles away as the crow flies from my hometown. Compared to the built-up shoreline of Southend, it looks like a different country – remote, wild and almost completely uninhabited.
Once we cleared the Nore and moved further out into the Estuary, we picked up speed. There was good visibility across the main shipping channel and not another vessel in sight. Big, ominous, dark-grey clouds arced above. The water, which looked like sheet metal from a distance, broke up into different planes of colour as we sailed towards Sea Reach; dirty jade-green, slate brown, pearlescent white, cadmium yellow.
We edged out across the wide-open sea on a north-west course towards Southend Pier, where we hoped to moor for the night. As we crossed the choppy waters, the bow hit the waves continually, dipping up and down throughout the hour-long journey. Ben stood in the wheelhouse the whole time, paying close attention to the Medway VHS radio channel, listening out for any big ships or tankers coming upriver. The radio buzzed with traffic coming in and out of the river, voices talking boat to boat, shore to shore. Our barge lacked speed and manoeuvrability, and the biggest container ships can travel at twenty-five knots; we moved across the main shipping channel of Middle Deep as quickly as possible. As we crossed, I scanned the waters again. Two container ships, loaded high, were coming in from the east, some distance behind us, making their way upriver.
Far out in the North Sea, faintly visible architectural structures punctuated the horizon: the elegant white masts and sails of an offshore wind farm and the tiny, mushroom-shaped silhouettes of the Red Sands Sea Forts, one of three sets of army forts erected at strategic points in the Estuary during the Second World War to guard against submarines, sea mines and possible invasion. The others were Shivering Sands Forts (still standing) and Nore Forts (destroyed). These defensive buildings on stilts were abandoned by the military in the 1950s and used as a base for pirate radio stations in the 1960s, but most have been empty since, although some have had periods of human habitation. The designer of these forts, Guy Maunsell, also designed a series of heavily armed naval forts in the Estuary to deter and report on German air raids. There were four naval forts: at Rough Sands, Sunk Head, Tongue Sands and Knock John.
As we moved towards Southend, I noticed the great black hulk known locally as Mulberry Harbour emerging out of the sea off the Maplin Sands. Built in the dockyards of Chatham, then towed upriver, destined for Normandy, this gigantic concrete caisson would have formed part of a vast floating deep-sea port for the D-Day landings, but it snapped away from the tug, crashing on to the mudflats below and breaking in two. It has remained there ever since, a seaweed-encrusted war relic.
The wreck is a well-known local landmark and a magnet for mud walkers, who make a beeline for the dark shape on the horizon when the tide goes out. From a distance, it looks like an upturned boat. Southend coastguards constantly patrol the area, calling out to people through loudhailers, warning them to start walking ashore when the tide starts to turn.
As the boat moved nearer to the Essex coastline, the low-lying shore of Southend seafront came into view, underlined by a strip of deep-ochre sand running the length of the seven-mile-long promenade. Rising up behind the beaches, there is a mass of buildings – tower blocks, houses, pubs and amusement parks – broken up on occasion by patches of green on the gently sloping hills of Leigh and Westcliff.
From the water, I could clearly see Southend’s most iconic landmark, the Victorian domed tower of the Kursaal, which is renowned for being the world’s first-ever theme park and the place where female lion-tamers once performed. The Kursaal is also an important site in my own family history: my parents first met there in the mid-1960s, at a dance in the main ballroom. Today, the site has reduced dramatically in size and, despite attempts at renovating the complex, most of the building remains empty. Even the McDonald’s next door has closed down for lack of business. A neon-lit bowling alley and some arcade games are the only remaining attractions in Southend’s former palace of fun.
Moving up to the bow of the boat, I peered through my binoculars, trying to identify other familiar places from the water. I could just make out our family beach hut in Shoeburyness, the hotel next to my parents’ house on the cliffs in Westcliff, the amusement park of Adventure Island and, of course, the pier, stretching more than a mile from the land out into the sea. This iron-and-wood Victorian structure is famous for being the longest pleasure pier in the world, but it was constructed as a working dock: a place for tea clippers, cargo ships and steamboats to offload, and to allow ferry passengers to disembark whether the tide was in or out.
To the far west of the pier, the tall chimneys of the decommissioned Shell Haven oil refinery rise up behind the gasworks on Canvey Island like the spires of a sunken, magical city. Clumps of green salt marsh sit out in the creeks around Leigh-on-Sea and Two Tree Island. Cockle-fishing boats bob in the water next to small sailing yachts and motorboats in the Ray. Behind fishermen’s cottages dotted amongst the pubs on the beachfront, the white line of the c2c train flashed past on its way to London. I could see the ruins of Hadleigh Castle, a Norman keep built to defend this section of the Estuary from French attack, high on a ridge in the distance. My childhood memories of time spent at these places are filled with colour, noise and laughter but, seen from the water, this is a melancholy landscape of grey and purple; it looks unpeopled, abandoned, silent.
As we moved towards this familiar terrain, our navigator, the gentle musician John Eacott, joined me on deck. Sitting behind the anchor house, trying to avoid the spray coming up off the hull of the boat, he told me about his recent project, Floodtide, the sonification of water flow. Using a foot-long probe called an acoustic velocimeter, he mapped tidal movement in the sea, then transformed this data into a musical composition, which was performed live, on the water’s edge, to the incoming tide.
We sat together, moving with the rhythm of the boat, staring at the great expanse of water and sky in front. Dark shadow clouds sped across the surface of the sea. The sun broke momentarily through and, for a few seconds, the water mirrored the soft blue tones above before quickly returning to the colour of grey clay. As the end of the pier came into focus, John made his way to the wheelhouse to assist Ben.
We anchored in shallow water some distance east of the pier head. Our skipper and John lowered the small, inflatable tender into the water then motored out towards the pier to check the mooring site. I watched them as they reached the pier head then disappeared out of sight. The barge drifted in the wind, turning on the anchor, swirling up blue-grey silt under the stern. I sat on deck with my notebook, documenting the scene around me.
After having spoken to the foreshore officer on the pier and arranged our mooring for the night, Ben and John returned by the dinghy to Ideaal. The water continued to ebb away beneath us. Eventually, we ran aground, temporarily, on the Oaze; time to pause and reflect between the tides. Ben and some of the others took the opportunity to have a nap. I stayed up on deck and watched the activity on the pier through my binoculars. A few people were braving the weather and taking the long walk across the boards to the end. The train rattled past every half-hour or so. I saw a group of men fishing with lines and rods. By late afternoon, waves started to creep back in over the mud. When the water was deep enough, we sailed cautiously towards the lifeboat station on the north side of the pier head. From a distance, the old steel structure seemed to weigh nothing; it was as if it were suspended on light. As we drew closer, the black ironwork of the pier legs became monstrous, the water dark with shadows.
The wind had picked up by then, and there was quite a swell. Ben manoeuvred the boat against the flow of water, with the bow pointing towards the North Sea, then sailed alongside the spine of the pier, purposefully turning Ideaal eastwards, using the tide as a brake to slow down the boat, concerned all the time about crashing into the great iron legs.
With the help of a lone fisherman, we secured the barge with thick ropes to huge wooden pillars beside a platform known as the lower deck, which is situated underneath the lifeboat station at the end of the pier. Strong currents pulled the vessel around. It began to rain. Jumping off ship, we explored that extraordinary space: a dark, slippery, seaweed-covered area with rotting wooden planks encrusted with barnacles, and rusting machinery. No longer accessible to the public, the lower deck is lost under the tides repeatedly throughout the day and night. As we wandered around, picking up the shells and bones of sea creatures, examining the oysters, mussels and clams attached to the surfaces of this strange room, it felt like we were walking in a subterranean dream space.
We made our way carefully up some slimy, concrete stairs on to the upper deck and took the Sir John Betjeman diesel pier train to the pier head instead of taking the long, windswept walk back to the shore. ‘Southend is the Pier, the Pier is Southend’ runs a quote by the celebrated poet on the side of the carriage.