(England)…When we saw the danger warnings and little red shields peppered across the shooting range of Shorne Marshes, my friend Alex Carlisle and I, and sometimes Paul Obey and Clive Gilby, would know it was time to gather our belongings and get ready to disembark. Emerging from a tunnel, the train swept along the Thames & Medway Canal, which came right up to the train track’s side, and we stepped out at the tiny Kent station of Higham, which was not in Higham at all, rather in Lower Higham, a hamlet in that it did not possess a church. The station was an Edwardian, one-story building that dragged along the platform, with a ticket office that was never open and no railways employer that I ever saw.
I felt some connection with the railways, albeit a very tenuous one. I have had three grandfathers, and of the two that I met, one worked for the railways all his working life. My mother would tell me of how he worked half a day on Christmas Day, every year. Throughout my life there have never been trains on Christmas Day, though I rather feel that I would have loved to have taken one and wander around Higham on any December twenty-fifth, especially to the end of Church Street, where there was a church, all on its own, a mile from Lower Higham. The frost would have been crisp on the stalks of grass, and there would have been few other people around. Perhaps a woman wearing a headscarf would poke a head over a hedge, or a man would be seen tapping a walking stick against a low wall and walking a dog. Even watching an idling car, it exhaust-pipe fumes crystallising in the air, would take on a quiet beauty and otherworldly fascination.
When Granddad Barton died, his wife, my Nan Barton, took us on summer holidays on the train with heavily discounted tickets that came through my granddad’s working associations and her continued membership of the Old Southeronians of the British Transport Pensioners’ Federation. My uncle Mike Polglaze, the husband of my Dad’s eldest sister, ran for a while the Bluebell Railway steam train that went from Sheffield Park to Kingscote via Horsted Keynes along the Kent-East Sussex border. My father grew up in Sussex, while the rest of my family are from Kent, true Kentishmen and women, born to the west of the River Medway that divides our county and us from the Men of Kent born to its east. Polglaze is a Cornish name, but then Uncle Mike married into our family. In his attic, he had a scaled model train, with steam trains, tunnels, lakes, switches, stations, hillocks, deer, passengers, station employees and short-trousered schoolchildren holding little notebooks to record train numbers.
The River Medway flows into and out of the Weir Wood Reservoir, one of its earliest tributaries touching Kingscote station, before taking on steam and flowing all the way to the beginnings of the English Channel along the Thames Estuary just beyond the bishopric of Rochester. The Medway’s flow is responsible for the flooding and drying of the Isle of Grain, also known as the Hoo Peninsula, on which at its beginnings lie Higham and the neighbouring village of Cliffe. On the same parcel of land is Allhallows-on-Sea, where my Aunt Glad and Uncle Frank lived after moving from Northwest London; during World War II they operated a bacon-and-eggs café in Harrow and were blown across the road by a German bomb. The family legend states that Aunt Glad was still holding the frying pan when she recovered her senses on the other side of the road.
Residents nickname this Thamesside spot Allhallows-on-Mud, for that is what one generally sees. It’s also the inspiration for the name of this blog. Opposite Higham Station was a thin, disused quarry. Trees had secured footholds on its far side, and these were the haunts of Little owls, which would pop up out of holes at twilight before flying no more than ten yards to a viewing perch. If any of us had some money, we would stop off at a corner shop where we had to shout in order for the owner to appear.
A little more than twenty-five miles from the centre of London, Higham was a hamlet of ghosts. Church Road was the long lane that led from station to church and the start of Higham Marshes. Half way down was an apple orchard, the fruit of which often spilt into the road and our haversacks. Once we climbed in, only to run when we heard the farmer’s yell, something I thought only happened in old films. Turtle doves cooed from electricity wires as we scarpered to the end of the road, where St. Mary’s Church appeared at the bottom of a very slight slope. A Kentish flint wall surrounded it. It was never open, and a little later it was announced abandoned. Just before the church, the road forked in two, with both branches quickly ending. The fork to the right led to a footpath that skirted the ruins of a Benedictine priory founded in 1148. Its first prioress was Mary, daughter of King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror. Stephen is buried just down the road in Faversham. Also down the road and much, much closer is a small settlement called Lillechurch that was the priory’s first site. Parts of it are said to remain in the walls of houses there.
We were all inwardly pleased to learn of the scandal that befell Higham Priory. In the early 16th century, when it was dissolved, it was found that two of its nuns had had children with the hamlet’s vicar, Bardefelde. Income came in from various sources including an annual three-day fayre, the permission for which came from Henry III, but at its end, financial irregularities were seen to have been commonplace. To appease the locals, alms of twelve pence a year were given over to the poor of Higham, while the other remaining funds seemed to have been invested into priories in Cambridge and Dartford, where I was born. That John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester and the man responsible for the dissolvement of Higham Priory, had a sister who was a nun in Dartford might neither be here nor there. Later, Henry VIII executed Fisher, who refused to acknowledge the king as the head of the new English church.
On the other side of Higham is Gad’s Hill Place, the home Charles Dickens bought when fame came his way, a place mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry IV. Taking the left fork, we would cross a branch of the rail line that took us to Higham, walk beneath two lines of pylons and emerge out on the marshes. The landscape is so flat that the large Thames tankers, coming down from the nearby jetties of Tilbury and West Thurrock on the other side of the river in Essex, passing in sight of the memorial to the Powhatan Indian princess Pocahontas, who died in and is supposedly buried in Gravesend, the name given to the place where at last ran out the bodies, dead from the great bubonic plagues of the medieval era, in need of burial space.
After passing by the rookeries that made the trees appear pockmarked and dying, the flat grasses would begin of Lapwing and Common curlew nests. Thin dykes spliced the land at right angles, and Barrow Hill, rising to a mighty five feet above sea level, stood to the right, rutted by sheep that during our years there one year were no longer there.Puncturing our slow walk to the levees on the Thames were Whimbrel, Grey heron, Stonechat and Winchat. On the other side, only a few feet of rounded stones dividing the walkway on top of the levee from the river, at least at high tide, were Purple sandpiper, Ringed plover, Redshank and Greenshank, as well as, on the other side of the river, Coalhouse Fort, built in 1874 to protect the estuary from French invasion. Farther on, we used to search for fossils in the chalk around the Martello tower of Cliffe Fort, one of many rectangular structures built in the century earlier to guard as against other Europeans, this time the Dutch, who were more successful in terrorising the riverside inhabitants.
Alex would always find the best fossils. Martello towers were named after the Corsican village of Mortella (somehow the vowels got twisted) on San Fiorenzo Bay, whose towers, originally constructed by the Genoese, so impressed the British besiegers, who in 1794 with two warships of the latest design fought long and hard to subdue a spot guarded by only 33 men. When it was taken, a study was made of this new defence and orders followed by Acts of Parliament soon materialised. Today, San Fiorenzo goes by the name of Saint-Florent, almost directly due south of Genoa and on the other side of the Cap Corse peninsula from Bastia, the second town of Corsica.