People seem to tumble down to Hastings and not get up to go home again. It’s where they turn up, every Jack and Jill that ever fell out with the family, lost a job, had half an idea, got a bad habit. The town is a huddle of administrative towers and down-at-heel shops with their backs turned on the sea views.
Poor Hastings. The steam train once chuffed proudly into Warrior Square where the statue of the Empress of India stood with her hooded eyes on the sea. The minor royals played here for a season, the gentry’s carriages drew up at the West Hill lift, the bourgeois bought villas in St Leonards. But now the Olympic-sized bathing pool is gone, the model town vandalized and the pier closed. Lettered rock congeals in cellophane under blow heaters and steel udders drop soft whip in souvenir shops. In the tuppenny arcade, on any given day of the week, there’ll be an old man feeling for change in the trays.
The seafront west to St Leonards is a parade of four-storeyed Regency guesthouses that display ‘For Sale’ or ‘To Let’ signs. In size and colour, they are as uniform as a pack of custard creams and nothing bothers the skyline until the end of the promenade where ‘Marine Court’ soars – a 1930s fantasy, a block of flats masquerading as a cruise liner.
Where the seafront ends, the buildings kneel, going from three storeys to two, and the twentieth century bobs and jogs along in semis until it’s brought up short at the Bo Peep pub. On a blackboard tied to a lamp post, the pub has two bands chalked up for this weekend; Friday night’s ‘Shameless Behaviour’ will be followed on Saturday by ‘Dirty Shoes’. From here on is the road to Bexhill, a few miles of terraced houses, lining a corridor through which the traffic is relentless. This is the area known as Bulverhythe; it is where his father lives now.
Nick’s shoulders round as he scans the house names. He ducks when they pass under a railway bridge, and slows the Range Rover to a crawl. Those obliged to go round him honk censoriously, all the heavier on the horn because of the car it is.
‘A bungalow,’ Dave said. ‘You’ll find it.’
His father’s is the only house reduced to a single storey of meanness on this street and it’s the worst placed. Two lanes of traffic careen down the steep hill from the right and spill cars outside the old man’s place, branching left and right at his very front door. Ken lives slap bang on the junction, and in between the traffic lights.
Nick pulls up on to the pavement without indicating, and the pair of them, he and Astrid, sit tight with the great car rattling and shuddering in the wake of the abuse and hooting of the passing cars.
It is fifteen years since he last saw his father.