The Sea, the Sea

magnificently built crooked stone quay, all silted up and entirely abandoned. There used to be fishing boats here, I gather, but these now operate only from further north: I sometimes see them upon my otherwise remarkably empty tract of sea. Beyond the harbour a long and quite broad shelving slope has been cut in the rock to form what is known as ‘the ladies’ bathing place’. I have seen no ladies there, only occasionally a few boys. (The local people hardly ever swim; they seem to regard the activity as a form of madness.) In fact ‘the ladies’ bathing place’ is now so overgrown with slippery brown weed and so strewn with boulders tossed in by the sea that it is scarcely ‘safer’ than anywhere else. The coast road here becomes a track (unfortunately suitable for motor cars) which climbs up into a wild region, which I have not yet had time to explore, where my yellow rocks turn into handsome and quite sizeable cliffs. The tarmac road turns inland to the village and beyond.

The village is called Narrowdean. The old form of the name was Nerodene, and a handsome milestone upon the coast road retains this spelling. The little place consists of a few streets of stone- built cottages, some hillside bungalows and one general shop. I cannot get The Times, or any batteries for my exhausted transistor radio, but this does not worry me too much, nor am I dismayed by the total absence of a butcher’s shop. There is one pub, the Black Lion. The cottages are charming, solidly built in the yellowish local stone, but the only building of any special architectural interest is the church, a fine eighteenth- century structure with a gallery. I am of course not a churchgoer, but I was glad to find that there are services, though only once a month. The church is well kept and regularly provided with flowers. The distant sound of bells which I sometimes hear comes I think from an equally tiny village lying inland beyond Amorne Farm, where the country is gentler and there is grazing for sheep. There is no rectory or manor house in Narrowdean; not that it was ever part of my plan to hobnob with the parson and the squire! I am also glad to intuit that the place is not infested with ‘intellectuals’, a hazard everywhere nowadays. To return to the church, there is a most attractive cimetiere marin, which evidences a more spacious past than one would expect this ‘one horse’ village to possess. Many of the tombstones carry carvings of sailing ships, decorative anchors and strangely eloquent whales. Could men have gone whaling from here? One stone in particular attracts me. It bears a beautiful ‘foul anchor’ and the simple inscription: Dummy 1879-1918. This puzzled me until I realized that ‘Dummy’ must have been a deaf and dumb sailor who never managed to achieve any other identity. Poor chap.

Let us now come back again to Shruff End. The facade which looks onto the road is, I suppose, not in itself remarkable, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house is a brick-built ‘double-fronted’ villa with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. The bricks are dark red. It would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb, but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. The back has been horribly ‘pebble-dashed’, no doubt against the weather. An expert could probably date the house from the pale buff-coloured blinds which survive in almost every room, in excellent condition, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and a lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds (expressive word) are drawn down, Shruff End, seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery. While within, the yellow light of the ‘blinded’ room somehow and sadly recalls my childhood, perhaps the atmosphere of my grandfather’s house in Lincolnshire.

The two bay-window rooms I have christened the book room (where I have put my crates of books, still not unpacked) and the dining room, where I store my wine. But I live entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in my bedroom and what I am determined to call my drawing room, and downstairs in the kitchen and a small den next to it which I call ‘the little red room’. Here there is a good fireplace, with traces of a wood fire, and also a decent bamboo table and bamboo arm-chair. The walls have white wooden panels on the lower part, above which they are painted tomato red, an exotic touch not matched elsewhere in the house. The kitchen, with the calor gas stove, is paved with the most enormous slate flags I have ever seen. There is of course no refrigerator, which is dismaying to a fish-eating man. There is a large larder full of woodlice. All the downstairs woodwork tends to be damp. I prised up some linoleum in the hall, and replaced it with a shudder. There was a salty smell. Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house? I suppose I ought to have had a surveyor’s report, but I was in too much of a hurry. There is an old-fashioned mechanical front door bell with a brass handle and a long wire. It rings in the kitchen.

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which I can produce no rational explanation, is that on the ground floor and on the first floor there is an inner room. By this I mean that there is, between the front room and the back room, a room which has no external window, but is lit by an internal window giving onto the adjacent seaward room (the drawing room upstairs, the kitchen downstairs). These two funny inner rooms are extremely dark, and entirely empty, except for a large sagging sofa in the downstairs one, and a small table in the upstairs one, where there is also a remarkable decorative cast-iron lamp bracket, the only one in the house. I shall certainly not occupy these rooms; later on, by the removal of walls, they shall enlarge the drawing room and the dining room. The whole house is indeed sparsely furnished. I have introduced very little of my own. (There is only one bed; I am not expecting visitors!) This emptiness suits me; unlike James I am not a collector or clutterer. I am even becoming fond of some of the stuff which I complained so much about having to buy. I am especially attached to a large oval mirror in the hall. Mrs Chorney’s things seem to ‘belong’; it is my own, few in fact, possessions which look out of place. I sold a great many things when I left the big flat in Barnes, and removed most of the remainder to a tiny pied-a-terre in Shepherd’s Bush where I pushed them in anyhow and locked the door. I rather dread going back there. I cannot now think why I bothered to keep a London base at all; my friends told me I ‘must’ have one.

I say ‘my friends’: but how few, as I take stock, they really are after a lifetime in the theatre. How friendly and ‘warm-hearted’ the theatre can seem, what a desolation it can be. The great ones have gone from me: Clement Makin dead, Wilfred Dunning dead, Sidney Ashe gone to Stratford, Ontario, Fritzie Eitel successful and done for in California. A handful remain: Perry, Al, Marcus, Gilbert, what’s left of the girls… I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.

Still no letters.

The sea is noisier today and the seagulls are crying. I do not really like silence except in the theatre. The sea is agitated, a very dark blue with white crests.

I went out looking for driftwood as far as the little stony beach. The tide was low, so I could not swim off the tower steps, and until I can get some handholds fixed I think I shall shun my ‘cliff’ except in calm weather. I swam at the beach but it was not a success. The pebbles hurt my feet and I had great difficulty in getting out, since the beach shelves and the waves kept tumbling the pebbles down against me. I came back really cold and disgruntled, and forgot the wood which I had collected.

I have now had lunch (lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits: a light Beaujolais) and I feel better. (Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine. I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.)

I shall now go and have an afternoon rest.

It is night. Two oil lamps, purring very faintly, shed a calm creamy light upon the scratched and stained surface of what was once a fine rosewood table, the erstwhile property of Mrs Chorney. This is my working table, at the window of the drawing room, though I also use the little folding table, which I have brought in from the ‘inner room’, to lay out books and papers. I have had to shut the window against the moths, huge ones with beige and orange wings, who have been coming in like little helicopters. The lamps, there are four in all, and in good working order, are also Chorneyana. They are handsome old-fashioned things, rather heavy, made of brass with graceful opaque glass shades. I learnt to master oil lamps in the USA, in that hut with Fritzie. Two paraffin heaters downstairs remain, however, a mystery. I must get new ones before chillier nights arrive. Last night was chilly enough. I attempted to light a driftwood fire in the little red room, but the wood was too damp and the chimney smoked.

I think that in winter I shall live downstairs. How I look forward to it. The drawing room is still more of a lookout point than a room. It is dominated by a tall black-painted wooden chimney piece, with a lot of little shelves with little mirrors above them. A collector’s item, no doubt, but it looks a little too like the altar of some weird sect. (It has that oriental vegetable look.)