I do hope that many of our readers will be spending their summer holidays in the heaven on earth that is Sussex. In East Sussex you may see Christine feeding the birds in the park in Bexhill and in West Sussex our esteemed moderators will be carrying out essential maintenance work on the electric cars that are raced along Worthing seafront by older people.

Both counties are featured in the pieces that follow and some of these even contain references to corporal punishment.

The first is a true story and has been adapted from the writing of my dear, dear friend, Nigel.

I had planned to write about gays in Brighton and was told that I really should speak to an old queen known as Lady Precious Stream, who was described to me as Brighton’s very own Quentin Crisp - well into his eighties, still outrageously flamboyant, with fifty years behind him as a drag artiste in London’s East End and on the south coast. A friend called Graham said he would be an intermediary, set up a meeting, preferably in Lady Precious’s flat, which was a miasma of scent and feather boas. First, though, could I write a letter explaining my intentions? So I did this, being careful to include a promise not to reveal her true identity in anything I wrote, and Graham passed the letter on. After a few days I heard back: she was not interested in talking. Lady Precious Stream had dried up.

The pattern repeated itself with several other people who agreed to talk and then backed off. Ever obliging, my friend Graham said he would try to come up with some more names. And then it dawned on me. I didn’t need anybody else. ‘It’s you,’ I said. ‘We’ve been trying to find some interesting people and all the time it’s been staring us in the face. I’ll talk to you.’ We were the Grosvenor pub at the time. Graham rolled his eyes and looked at his lager and I thought even he was going to turn me down. Then he said, ‘All right. But I have to have a drink in front of me. And I can’t be doing with tape recorders or notebooks.’

After he had talked to me, over several evenings and pints of lager, he said: ‘There. I’ve told you things I’ve never told anyone else.’

One day in the early nineteen sixties, in the small market town of Hassocks, some ten miles north of Brighton, a young boy was spending his last few pennies on a cup of tea at the end of a long hot summer’s afternoon. He had caught the train from Brighton that morning with the intention of going all the way to London, but when the train stopped at Hassocks he had lost his nerve and got off. He had mooched around for half a day looking for half a chance, but it was a dead sort of place, at least from the waist down. By spending the last of his money on a cup of tea he was burning his boats; if he still wanted to get up to London, or even back to Brighton, he would have to hide in the toilet and run for it at the other end. But he didn’t care.

He went into the café near the station, debated between having lemonade and tea, chose tea, and sat down at a table next to the window, with a view of the rest of the café. He drank the tea slowly, so it grew discernibly colder between sips, and looked at the men there. Most of them were old enough to be his grandfather. They were rheumy-eyed and grey-whiskered, they had hacking coughs and smoked incessantly. The boy thought of the way the flesh on an old man went grey, so it looked dead. He had seen plenty of old, ill-nourished, half-poisoned flesh. But his father’s flesh was brown and tough. He pictured the way the small knife had slid across the flesh of his father’s forearm when he tried to stab him. There had been blood, but not much, which he regretted. Still, they must be looking for him. But no one was looking at him in this café, and he was glad because they were disgusting. What he was required to do was not disgusting at all, he could enjoy it, but whom he was required to do it with was frequently insupportable. So he was relieved not to be noticed, even if it meant he would have no money tonight.

But then a man walked into the smoky café and the boy knew pretty soon his luck had changed. The man was close in age to the men around him, but there the similarity ended. Despite the heat, he wore a belted woollen overcoat. There were drops of sweat on his upper lip and on his forehead. He was very tanned, looked foreign, Italian maybe. He was fat, but it was a sleek, prosperous fatness. He took a seat and stayed there, expecting to be served. The men around him coughed and smoked, didn’t acknowledge him at all. It was as if they didn’t see him, and perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they saw nothing any more. Minutes passed.

The owner was in the kitchen at the back, listening to the racing results on the radio. The boy looked at his tea, swilled it around the cup - stone cold now, still half an inch to go. The man loosened the belt of the coat, eased the coat open, rattled a shoe on the lino and shifted his chair. He was going to leave, but then he saw the boy. He stared at the boy quite openly, intently, as if sure that the other men in the café didn’t count, would be powerless to intervene. The boy liked being looked at in this way, felt the power of the man. He wondered what it would lead to. He was ready for whatever that may be. The man nodded at the boy, stood up and left the café without being served. The boy followed, as the man had known he would.

Perhaps the man just wanted a quick toss-off in the bushes for a couple of quid, but the boy didn’t think so. The man had time and money, perhaps a lot of money. The man was worth being obliging to. The man crossed the station forecourt to the left-luggage office. He came out with two suitcases, approached the boy and spoke to him for the first time. ‘Is this too heavy?’ He handed the boy the smaller of the cases. The boy tried it, said no. ‘Good,’ said the man. ‘Follow me.’ He waddled as he carried the heavier case. Two paces behind, the boy watched him struggling along the pavement. Sweat flicked off his forehead and on to the still-warm pavement. With a half-glance behind him to the boy, the man turned into the entrance of the coaching inn, rang a bell at the reception desk just inside. As he waited for someone to come he turned to the boy and said, ‘You’re my son, by the way.’ The boy thought, I know that.

The room had two single beds. The man said, ‘I’ll give you ten pounds.’ This was a lot of money and the boy smiled. ‘But I expect my money’s worth.’ The man instructed the boy to undress while he watched. Then the man undressed. The boy was energetic and gave the man his money’s worth. It was getting dark outside. They could hear laughter and the clinking of glasses coming from the bar downstairs. The boy reached for his clothes and began to dress. Now he had £10, things became possible. Up to London or back to Brighton? He still didn’t know. He supposed that if he went back to Brighton he would have to face the music, sooner or later. You couldn’t go around stabbing your own father and expect to get away with it. But London was difficult. He didn’t know the place, had never been there, would scarcely know where to start, except for the obvious.

The man lay in bed watching the boy dressing, as he had watched him undress. The boy buttoned up his flies and tied his jumper round his waist by the arms and asked for his money. ‘Later,’ said the man. ‘I’m tired. What’s the hurry?’ The boy said his mother would be missing him. She knew he had gone to Hassocks. People might be looking for him. He thought of threatening to scream, but as he looked at the man, lying there in bed, he saw his eyelids drooping, and decided on another plan. ‘Just calm down,’ breathed the man sleepily. ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

Within five minutes the man was snoring. The boy stood over him, waved a hand right in front of the man’s face. He went over to his overcoat, draped it over a chair, took out his wallet and took all the money there was in it. He let himself out of the hotel room and forced himself to walk quietly out of the hotel. He passed the receptionist who smiled at him. The boy ran to the station. There was a train to London in seven minutes. He bought a ticket and waited anxiously for the train to arrive. Once on board he went straight to the toilet and counted his takings: £120 in tenners, fivers and one-pound notes. It was an unimaginable fortune.

The boy was fourteen and had been having sex with men for money since he was nine and a man had approached him in a public toilet on the seafront. It was just tossing men off with his hand for a long time, or having it done to him, and he enjoyed it mostly. Then a man tried something different. The man asked him to hide his genitals between his legs, so he looked like a girl, and simulated vaginal penetration of the boy, thrusting away between his legs, hurting him, banging on the walls of the cubicle with his fists. When the pain and the noise were reaching a crescendo the door of the cubicle was kicked in by the police and both of them were arrested by the police, who had been staking out the toilets.

This was the first the boy’s parents knew of what he got up to. The boy’s father, who was a merchant seaman and away from home for long stretches, thrashed him with a belt. It was a blood-curdling event. The father actually locked the door of the boy’s bedroom before beating him. Downstairs, the mother busied herself in the kitchen with the radio turned up. Afterwards, the boy spent twenty-four hours locked in his bedroom without food. At the suggestion and recommendation of the police, the boy’s father sent him to a psychiatrist in New Church Road, Hove, who specialised in deviancy.

The psychiatrist asked the boy to describe exactly what he had been required to do by the men he had gone with. As he listened to the boy’s prosaic catalogue of mechanical acts, the psychiatrist seemed to get excited. In a thick voice he ordered the boy to take off his trousers and, unable to stop himself, he pushed the boy face first against the wall and buggered him. ‘Like this, like this?’ he screamed as he did it. The boy escaped and ran home. His mother was out - probably on his way to collect him from the psychiatrist in New Church Road.

In his bedroom the boy picked up a penknife and waited for his father to return from his lunchtime session at the pub. He didn’t intend to kill him, just to hurt him. In the event he hardly did that. His father was drunk, but managed to deflect the blow with his forearm. The boy had then run to the station and caught the London train, getting off at Hassocks. In London he went to the only place he knew of, the dilly, and made money the only way he knew how. He was pretty by then, incredibly so. He spent some of his new-found fortune on clothes, looked like Alain Delon. He didn’t need to take on the rancid, the furtive, the ones with wives, with sons the same age as him, the ones who cried and wished to kiss him on the lips. He liked the sort he had made happy in the coaching inn at Hassocks, who carried around wads of money, wore belted overcoats. He liked cars, doing it in cars, on leather, the smell of leather and of mahogany. He had done it in the back of a chauffeur-driven car with the chauffeur there in the front, affecting not to notice, not to see, not to smell, not to hear. He was passed on, like a new brand of cigar. He stayed in hotels with people who were famous. He was the regular companion of a peer of the realm and of a psychopathic gangster.

What wonderful anecdotes and so well written! Thank you for sharing.


BoB

Thank you, BoB. It is good to hear from you again. (See ‘Reminiscences of a not-so-wild colonial boy’ currently on Page 9 for evidence of BoB’s tipping ability).

I hope to send in another piece this evening.

He would be summoned by the gangster, along with three or four others. They would wait in a car outside a Soho club, sometimes for hours. Sometimes they were told they could go; a henchman would open the car door and say, ‘Go on, scarper,’ without seeing the gangster at all. Usually, though, they got the word at some stage during the evening. Then they would be taken down into the club into the cigar smoke and menace and be sat at a table near the gangster. The gangster would joke, ‘Vimto all round,’ and his friends would laugh. The gangster might make clucking noises and they would have to cluck back. ‘Come on chickens,’ he would say, 'come on you poultry, sing for your supper,’ and the friends would laugh.

But he meant it and the boys would have to cluck like chickens, there and then, with stinging eyes and trembling hearts and it seemed as if the whole world were laughing at them then. Or the gangster was serious, wouldn’t look at them the whole evening, until he pointed his cigar at the chosen one. Sometimes the gangster chose more than one at a time, which was better, safety in numbers. Going to bed with the gangster was like being locked in the lion enclosure for the night. He liked scratching their backs until he drew blood and grew his fingernails for the purpose.

In the morning the boys stole the silver teaspoons from the breakfast tray brought in by the liveried bellboy. Sometimes the bellboy was about the same age as the boys and the gangster would make suggestions. The bellboy would stammer, ‘Enjoy your breakfast, sir,’ and back out of the room. The gangster might say, ‘What if I want you for breakfast?’ and cackle smokily as the door closed. The gangster enjoyed throwing back the sheets so young bellboys would see the streaks of blood there, see what they were missing. If, however, the bellboy was old, the gangster would fold a ten-bob note into his top pocket and say, ‘There you go, cock. Have one on me.’

The boy reckoned he enjoyed protection from the gangster. How else was it that he slipped like a sprat through the net the police spread every so often over Piccadilly Circus? Uniformed officers looked through him on Broadwick Street. Then one day it changed. Perhaps he had grown too old, too knowing in the face, too padded on the hips. Perhaps his technique, thrilling and thoughtful as it was, had grown stale. Now he would wait in the car and not be summoned. Or if he was, if he made it as far as the club, he would get no further but be dispatched into the night, back to the West End trolling grounds of the Dilly and Soho.

The law’s agents provocateurs began to stare at him rather than through him. He took more care, looked left and right and up and down, but you can never take enough care when they have marked your card. It happened, as he knew it would, with a punter who’d been hardly worth it in the first place - a fat Russian diplomat with sepia-tinted fingers. The copper was in the next cubicle, perhaps having a crafty J. Arthur himself while he waited. The Ruskie’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly when the door was kicked in. The Ruskie shoved himself away and buttoned himself up and the boy shrugged.

The policeman had a soft round face that the boy could have stroked, strangely enough. In a moment of madness this was what he almost did. But then the Russian fled and the policeman had the boy’s arm up behind his back so it was almost breaking and even then he could feel the copper’s breath, if he turned his head could have kissed his cheek, and who knew then what might have happened, fireworks or dungeons, exalted life or a kind of death. ‘Nice out, isn’t it?’ said the boy instead, gasping through the pain, and then, changing voice: ‘Yes, well, put it away, there’s a policeman coming.’

At West End Central they charged him with procuring and discovered they had netted a runaway, a juvenile wanted for a serious assault on his own father. ‘You don’t have to tell him, though?’ asked the boy helplessly. ‘Please don’t tell me dad.’ Then they knew they had him, could hurt him, this snake-hipped kid with his arch eyes and mocking mouth. They called Brighton Police, who went round to see the father, then they slung the boy in a cell with a drunk where he huddled and shivered all night. And in the morning the hatch over the small barred window in the cell door slid open and the boy saw, divided into strips by the bars, the face of a man with a score to settle.

He was beaten now. All the knowingness he had acquired, the manipulativeness, the humour and the art of provocation, the smile and the wink, the laugh and the shrug, his ways of winning against the world, all went when he saw that face. The face took him away, back to orderliness, propriety and wholesomeness, short back and sides and chops for tea, back to thrashings with a belt for filthy little queers. Back to Brighton, and what a very odd sort of Brighton it was, a dungeon in the basement of England. This time the locked bedroom door was a necessity as well as a punishment, buying time for the bruises and cuts to fade from their initial, unmissable luridness. The father administered a double dose, for the knifing as well as the poncing. The mother listened to the radio, ‘Round the Horne’ turned up so the voices distorted. But the father hadn’t finished with the boy, in fact had barely started.

The father had talked to a priest as well as the police. Between them they mapped a course for the boy. He would plead guilty, in juvenile court, to the charge of procuring and would be discharged by the bench on the understanding that he would be sent to a corrective institution in west London which specialized in curing young boys of perverted desires.

And so the boy found a dungeon even deeper and danker than Brighton. The boy was stripped and shown homosexual pornography. If he responded with arousal, he was beaten. At night, the staff who took off his clothes during the day, and brought the visual material, and slapped him about, these same staff took off his clothes in the dark, and caressed him, and slapped him about, and held him down so they could take him, one after the other. He bled and ached constantly. Then one day he got hold of some pills and tried to kill himself. He awoke in the hospital wing and wondered momentarily if this were it, heaven, the other side, eternal life for ever and ever, amen.

His eyes saw white light with a cross in the middle. He clenched them shut. The light hurt his eyes, reached into his brain and hurt that too. Would his head ache forever like this? He opened his eyes and the white light and the cross sharpened, came into focus, as he blinked, and he realised that he was looking at a window. The white light was the sky above Goldhawk Road. The cross was the frame of the window. So it was a kind of heaven after all, or at least a future. It was a window on the rest of his life.

He looked around. A couple of other people lay sleeping beneath stiff blue blankets. He sat up, dressed hurriedly from the pile of clothes in the bedside locker - grey trousers, grey T-shirt, plimsolls. His own beautiful clothes, his drape jacket and belted raincoat, his trousers with knife-edge creases, his drip-dry, slim-fit shirts, his real leather shoes were locked up elsewhere and would be sacrificed to the escape, the flight from the past. He threw up the sash, climbed through the window and dropped fifteen feet into an alleyway, making no sound in his plimsolls. Then he walked off towards Shepherd’s Bush and into the rest of his life.

For several years he did not go back to Brighton. He stayed in London, but on the other side, Mile End way. He learned a trade, and he learned to have sex with lovers rather than punters. He went to drag shows - plenty of those for such a rough, butch neighbourhood. He drank and forgot. For days on end he forgot, but then a memory crept up on him, tapped him on the shoulder and walloped him between the eyes when he looked round. He learned to ride these blows, to bob his head around them. He discovered he was good with money, good at making and at saving it. He bought property and traded up. He met people who went to Brighton at weekends.

Some of them followed drag artists who performed down there; some just went for the change of scene. It was very butch and gangsterish, Mile End way, and the boy couldn’t be doing with it. So why didn’t he come to Brighton? He’d like it in Brighton, he really would. Very jolly, and the salt was good for your pores. But the boy always declined.

Then he got some news. His sole remaining contact was an older sister who rang him occasionally. She rang to say his father had died, accident at sea. He did not go to the funeral, he did not talk to his mother, who had played the radio so loud. He bided his time and when he got the all clear form his sister - the family house was sold, his mother had moved - he laid his plans.

Where he had seen shadows and a fist, now he saw light and caresses. Someone said to him, when he moved back to Brighton, ‘You’ll love it here. When I’ve been away and I come back over those Downs and see the streets spread out over the hillsides, when I see the piers and smell the sea, when I get blown by the wind in those streets down to the sea, I think I’ve come home to the lost bleedin’ tribe.’

And Graham said: ‘Buy me a drink before I ******* weep.’

Those who have enjoyed reading the above story may be interested in a television serialisation of ‘The Long Firm’, the first episode of which is to be shown on BBC 2 on Wednesday 7 July at 9pm.

Jake Arnott's novel 'The Long Firm' (upon which the film is based) is the story of london gangster, Harry Starks - a character who although fictional bears just about every possible resemblance to Ronnie Kray.

Like most crime writers, Jake Arnott, throws in more than a few strange words and phrases well-known in criminal circles but less well-known in polite society.

Ask 1000 people on your local High Street what a 'long firm' is and it's likely that not one of them will be able to tell you.

To save viewers wondering, a 'long firm' is a trading company set up for fraudulent purposes. The basic operation is to run the company as an apparently legitimate business while gradually extending the amount of cash advanced by customers at the same time as increasing the amount of credit from suppliers. When the time is right, the perpetrators disappear with customers' money and suppliers' goods.

Virginia Woolf by Lily

One bright spring morning in March 1941 Virginia Woolf in a note to her husband, Leonard, wrote: ‘I have a feeling I shall go mad in these terrible times.’ The note was the last thing she would ever write. Leaving it in a conspicuous place at their Sussex home in Rodmell, she took up her walking stick and strolled down to the banks of the River Ouse where she filled her pockets with stones. Three weeks later some boys found her body floating below the water’s surface a few miles away.

It was a tragic end to what had begun so promisingly some forty years previously for Virginia Stephen at her family home in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, which she was sharing at the time with her sister, Vanessa, and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian. A brand new century was just beginning and the future prospects for these four bright young things must have seemed limitless. The Stephen brothers and sisters were artistic, literate, exceptionally talented and still only in their early twenties. Modern in outlook, they anticipated great things taking place in their brave new world.

Some of Thoby’s friends, a witty and uninhibited set, recently down from Cambridge, where they had called themselves The Apostles, made the house in Gordon Square their meeting place. There were writers and artists with names of which more would be heard - E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and Desmond MacCarthy. At Gordon Square they would engage in esoteric conversation, praise each other’s writing, admire each other’s artwork and scratch each other’s backs. It was a kind of intellectually snobbish, mutual admiration society. [This reminds me of something, but I cannot think what].

What was to become known as the Bloomsbury Group was really no more than a set of youngsters who were overly pleased with themselves. Despising conformist behaviour, they developed their own permissive and amoral code of conduct. They advocated free love of both the homosexual and heterosexual varieties and evolved an ideology that was left-wing, unpatriotic, cynical and terribly clever.

Virginia was tall and thin with wispy hair. Her dress was invariably dowdy. In contrast to Vanessa, her more promiscuous elder sister, Virginia earned a reputation for being somewhat remote and untouchable. The homosexual Lytton Strachey proposed marriage to her on one occasion and immediately regretted his impetuousness. Writing to his friend Leonard Woolf, who was working in Ceylon at the time, he suggested that Leonard might care to marry Virginia in his stead. The idea appealed to Leonard who had long been dazzled by the Bloomsbury Group and thought of Virginia as a genius. They were married in 1912 after his return from overseas.

Virginia suffered from periodic bouts of ill health and had romantic notions of leaving London to live in some idyllic country retreat which she fondly believed would end all her infirmities. The search was on for what she longingly described as her ‘cottage in the South Downs’. Her first incursion into Sussex scarcely lived up to the desired description. The three storey, semi-detached house she rented in Firle village was she had to admit to Leonard, a ‘really hideous, suburban villa’.
Her next find came nearer to her ideal. She came across Asham House, a place of elegance sheltered by elm trees and nestling in a hidden valley with a view across the River Ouse to the South Downs. Life in rural Sussex was at that time, she was soon to discover, generally primitive. Wood and coal fires provided the heating and cooking was done on a Primus stove. Visitors were told to bring their own meat and other provisions as there was little available locally.

For nearly thirty years Virginia and Leonard were able to divide their time between Sussex and London. Virginia published her first novel ‘The Voyage Out’ shortly after moving into Asham House. Meanwhile the locals watched them with suspicion. ‘Foreigners’ was the general verdict and Virginia’s odd behaviour and appearance would be excused with the explanation ‘she writes books’.

Other members of the Bloomsbury Group were establishing footholds in Sussex. Vanessa and her husband, Clive Bell, rented Charleston Farmhouse , off the Lewes-Eastbourne road, and Maynard Keynes and his ballerina wife, Lydia Lopokova, made their country home at nearby Tilton. The painter Duncan Grant spent 1914 in an old boat shed at West Wittering before becoming Vanessa’s lover and turning Charleston into a menage a trois.

They were the vanguard of the horde of arty types. Although most of those who came after could not claim to be members of the Bloomsbury Group their aspirations and lifestyles were similar. Generally speaking they were completely self-centred, took no part in county life and treated the locals in a condescending manner. It became a tradition for a London writer or artist to own a Sussex retreat.

From a wooden shed, which she called her writing lodge, at the end of her garden
Virginia churned out her immortal prose - ‘Night and Day’, ‘Jacob’s Room’ ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and in 1927 the much acclaimed ‘To the Lighthouse’. A local postmistress once admitted that she did not understand Virginia’s books at all but had nevertheless read every one of them because the words were so beautiful.

For three years Virginia carried on a rapturous, lesbian affair with Vita Sackville West - a liaison which did not seem to distress her husband, Leonard, at all. With tolerance worthy of the true Bloomsbury he simply looked the other way.

At the time of her fateful walk to the banks of the Ouse, Virginia had been working on ‘Between the Acts’. She was unhappy with it and, with madness taking over her mind, she believed she was losing her writing ability. The book was published posthumously and acclaimed a masterpiece.

Slow-witted and clumsy, the natural butt of jokes, Billy Masters wasn’t your typical Brightonian. We were first-years together at a boarding school in the Sussex countryside. It was a charity school, founded for orphans and paupers and now serving the children of the middle classes who had fallen on hardish times for one reason or another. The business of boarding didn’t run in the family or in the genes and came as an icy shock after the bourgeois verities of Wimbledon or Redhill or, in Billy’s case, somewhere rather grandly shabby and leafy of Dyke Road, Brighton.

I remember, in the first few days at school, asking a master a question, a perfectly reasonable enquiry about mealtimes or table tennis, and being told to look on the notice board, being asked in disbelief if I had not noticed the notice board. From now on we were surnames and numbers in a quasi-military bureaucracy and we were often made to feel as if we were infuriating hindrances to the smooth running of that bureaucracy. If only there were no ghastly little oiks, with their asinine enquiries and ill-fitting new clothes, the system would run perfectly! And so it was the function of the system to break us down into manageable and obedient component parts of the big, implacable machine.

Those early days were dark, literally so, for much of the time. We were woken in darkness at five to seven by the clanging of a bell. A master would come into the dormitories, flick on the rows of bare light bulbs and rouse us from dreams of home by kicking the ends of our iron bedsteads. We had twenty minutes to wash and dress and be on parade on the asphalt outside for roll-call. Then, to barked orders from a duty monitor, we march in ranks of four, military fashion and still in darkness the quarter-mile to the dining hall for breakfast. ‘Squad, squad, ‘shun! From the right, number… Form fours. Right turn! By the left, quick march! Left, right, left… Square-bashing before sunrise - later it would seem ludicrous, yet we also marched to lunch, to the accompaniment of the school brass band, as if every day were a passing-out parade at Sandhurst.

It was the marching that first fingered Billy Masters as lacking the basic requisites for survival in this Darwinian forcing house. In the classroom and on the rugby field he was merely averagely useless, but when it came to marching he was uniquely and hilariously incapable. When he took a step forward with his left foot, his left arm swung forward also; his right foot and arm behaved likewise. It was an involuntary movement and it seemed there was nothing he could do to prevent it. But God, was it funny! He looked like an ape!

It was doubly funny because not only did it make us laugh, but Billy Masters would be punished for failing to achieve the standard of marching required and expected by the school, and his punishment would be - more marching! Every evening the housemaster would take him out on to the asphalt and drill him for fifteen minutes while we looked on from the windows of the day room, watched him blundering miserably about like a junior Frankenstein’s monster. Our housemaster - a chain-smoking bachelor whose usually mild stutter became uncontrollable when he was obliged to talk to the boys’ mothers - mocked and bullied Billy Masters between puffs on his Senior Service: ‘Left, left, right, left, right…Good God, boy. Are you d-deaf, or stupid, or b-both?’

We were all enormously indebted to Billy, had we but known it. Billy taught us that however miserable and bewildered we may have been, however yearningly we dreamed of our mothers and our own bedrooms, someone was worse off than us. We transferred all our own miseries on to Billy and then, following the example of the housemaster, we bullied him and punished him for carrying such a burden. Then one day Billy disappeared.

Official anger at his absence turned to panic as the day wore on and he hadn’t returned. Boys were dispatched to search hidey-holes. Masters scurried about looking at their watches. Soon the police would have to become involved, which wouldn’t do at all. Rumour was rife. The previous year, before we had started the school, a boy had hanged himself. This had been kept quiet at the time, presumably lest it put off the parents of the next year’s intake, and we had not learned of it until we became pupils ourselves. The official version of this occurrence was that the boy had developed a macabre interest in methods of execution, and tried an experiment that went wrong. But even at the age of eleven we found this hard to believe. We reckoned that the boy had done it because he was unhappy. This was much more believable.

Perhaps Billy Masters had killed himself too, which was also believable. As twenty-four hours passed with no sign of Billy, what had started as speculation hardened into near-certainty. Billy Masters had killed himself! No one knew where, but we were sure he had done it. It was just a question of someone stumbling across his body. After the initial shock and excitement at the notion of Billy’s suicide, we began to feel guilty. If Billy had been unhappy, who had made him so? By the second day of Billy’s absence, with the masters refusing to give us any information, a cloud of collective depression had settled upon us.

Then, that evening, the housemaster called a special meeting in the day room. We shuffled into the room in a state of silent tension. The housemaster, drawing so hard on his cigarette he whistled as he inhaled, looked grim too. But when he spoke, it was to tell us Masters had returned. When we went up to the dormitory we would see him there in bed. ‘And I will not have boys talking to him, asking him questions, feeling s-sorry for him. Masters has done wrong. He has to learn that this s-sort of transgression will not be tolerated. The boy must have solitude in which to contemplate the gravity of his offence. And now if you will join with me in the Lord’s Prayer…’

Masters lay in bed with the bedclothes pulled over his head. The bed moved now and then with his silent sobs. He knew he had been officially sent to Coventry and we didn’t dare speak to him in case the patrolling housemaster caught us doing so. We readied ourselves for bed in near-silence, put on our pyjamas, turned down our beds, queued to use the wash basins in orderly fashion. Slowly our subdued behaviour assumed the qualities of a silent protest. The housemaster, when he came into the dormitory, tried to jolly us up, as if nothing had happened. We just smiled ruefully at him and carried on reading our books. The housemaster grew visibly annoyed. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘An early night will do us all good.’ And he snapped off the lights fifteen minutes early. The silence continued for many minutes, then a voiced pierced the dark silence, speaking for us all. ‘Hey, Billy! Where’ve you been? Where’d you go?’

‘Brighton,’ whispered Billy Masters. ‘I went to Brighton.’

As marching had been Billy’s downfall, so escape became his redemption. He had found the thing he was good at. We all wanted to escape. We all gazed beyond the perimeter fence, saw the roofs of nice little bungalows, saw ordinary people going about their business, saw, in fact, little facsimiles of the comfortable world we had so recently come from. We all wanted to be there on the outside rather than here on the inside. But no one except Billy did anything about it. He became an inveterate escaper, but these weren’t impulsive, hysterical dashes across the green fields. He was cold-eyed, biding his time, and when he glimpsed a chink of possibility he’d be off, swift and silent. When Billy bolted our hearts went with him, and while his freedom lasted we walked a foot off the ground.

Billy’s means of escape were various and resourceful - buses, trains bicycles, thumbing lifts - and his goal was always the same, always Brighton. Once there he would make a beeline for the seafront. There was no question of going home. His escapes were also escapades, fantasies. In Brighton he could lose himself. I would wonder precisely what he got up to in his few snatched hours there, while we were in double Latin or making Airfix Spitfires, and I suppose most of the time he had so little money he just mooched about enjoying his unaccustomed freedom and anonymity, letting the ocean light hit the back of his eyes.

After one jaunt, for which I lent him money in return for a full debriefing when he got back, he told me he had met a man from the secret service who had led him on to the beach beneath the Palace Pier, where the crashing of the sea sounded like cymbals, and taken down Billy’s details in a notebook: name, address, age, height, weight, hobbies. The man had said he reckoned Billy might be secret agent material, but he would need to complete the formality of a thorough medical examination. He suggested they wander up the beach and find a more private spot. At this point Billy had the nous to make his excuses and get the hell out, though he still wanted to believe the man was genuine. ‘P’raps,’ he said as he whispered the story to me in the changing rooms, ‘I could get a note from the school quack saying I’m OK, then this bloke wouldn’t need to examine me.’

It would grow dark, and Billy would grow cold and hungry, and eventually there would be nothing for it but to leave the seafront and return to the house he had shown me pictures of, gothic and rambling, to face the music. His parents, already notified by the school that he was on the loose, would be waiting. His mother would be in tears. His father, for whom Billy’s unhappiness at school betrayed a lack of moral fibre, would thrash him with a belt and drive him back to school where, with parental approval, the housemaster gave him a second beating with a gymshoe and sent him off to the dormitory with no supper. This is where we would find him and where, despite strict instructions not to talk to him, we would try to be kind.

Billy Masters learned to curb his compulsion to escape, learned the craft of survival. At sixteen he failed all his O levels - intentionally, I liked to think - and was finally removed and sent to a local comprehensive school in Brighton. I had never become a particular friend and as far as I was concerned that was the end of the story. But there was a postscript. Some five years later, when I was a student, I was walking along the seafront past the bottom of Regency Square, on my way to visit a friend who was studying at Sussex University and had a bedsit in Hove.

It was the spring bank holiday and the sun was shining; on my right was the cream stucco and caramel brickwork of Regency Square, on my left the dazzling silver of the sea. As I walked along my eyes were drawn to a shocking-pink car parked on the south side of the square. It was an open-topped, 1950s American gas-guzzler, and as I registered its space-rocket lines I became aware that there was a figure lounging in the back seat, using the car as a kind of park bench with knobs on this boulevarding spring day, and that this figure looked familiar.

I risked a more direct look and found myself staring at Billy Masters. He had lost the puppy fat that had stayed with him into adolescence. He wore wraparound shades and a Hawaiian shirt, and he looked pretty hip. But it was Billy all right. It was as if the character I saw before me was a brilliant kidder and the old Billy - the young Billy, the boy who couldn’t march - was just one of his many plausible creations. As I hurried on by - face averted, too confused to confront the past head-on - it struck me happily that Billy had learned an important lesson, the lesson Brighton had for us all: why march when you could swank?

The following piece is for Samantha and there is no reference therein to corporal punishment.

Peacehaven’s Seaside Speculator by Lily

Half way along the rough track from Newhaven to Brighton, Charles Neville drove his sturdy Hupmobile car on to the grass verge and stepped down to survey the scene. Cigar-chomping and Homburg-hatted, he looked exactly what he was, a big businessman recently arrived from America. He stood on the cliff edge for a long time, screwing up his eyes in the bright sunlight, studying the view across the Downs. What he saw seemed to please him. In his mind’s eye he was dividing up the lovely countryside into thousands of squares - drawing imaginary north/south and east/west lines over the rolling hills to form a gigantic Manhattan-style grid.

He took a deep breath of the salt air and listened to the sound of the shingle being drawn down the beach by the receding waves.

Wonderful! Perfect!

And to think that land was not only cheap here but that there was also a total absence of tiresome building regulations. For a long while he gazed thoughtfully at the scene and then got back into his car and drove on to Brighton. What he had seen was an opportunity to make a great deal of money.

Charles Neville was born in Darlington in 1881 but when he was still a boy his family had emigrated to Canada, where Charles, at an early age, broke free from parental control to do his own thing. Having worked his way through college he started a newspaper in Toronto. But Toronto, he decided was ‘bigoted and churchified’ so he moved on to Australia where he worked as an estate agent. Finding that also rather dull, he bought a half share in a schooner called ‘The Snark’ and sailed to New Guinea. He carried with him a cargo of cheap trinkets to barter with the natives, but a better deal, with a group of tribal chiefs, presented itself and he ended by exchanging the entire shipload of worthless baubles for some valuable mineral rights. With the proceeds from the sale of these rights he returned to Canada and bought land in Saskatchewan which he divided up into small building plots for sale to British settlers.

And so, still in his early thirties but with more than a normal lifetime of experience, he returned to Britain where he intended to put his land development skills to good use. Unfortunately for Sussex it was along that stretch of unspoilt coast between Newhaven and Brighton that in 1914 he found what he was looking for.

Soon the world would erupt into war and as the full horror of the conflagration became apparent, land prices along the south coast tumbled. While the two armies were engaged on the other side of the English Channel, Neville went on a land buying spree and by the time Armistice had been declared he had thousands of prime sea-front acres in his possession.

‘Homes for heroes’ he claimed in his advertisements as the troops were being demobilised. ‘A seaside paradise with its wonderfully invigorating, health-promoting air and rich, fertile soil’.

The biggest seaside development project this side of the Atlantic was underway and although the envisaged forest of neat, three-bed roomed bungalows had not yet materialised, building plots were available at £82 each.

As yet the new resort was unnamed and a cash prize was offered for the best suggestion with a free plot of land for the runner-up. Names like Shangri-La and Paradise-on-Earth poured in from East Anglia and Thornton Heath and finally the winner was selected. After four years of a horrible war, people were obsessed with peace and so the new resort was to be called Peacehaven. The public rushed to secure a plot for themselves in this ‘garden city by the sea’ and by 1921 the first settlers started to arrive. They were like colonisers of a foreign, hostile territory. Some were experienced Empire-builders from Britain’s far-flung, overseas possessions but most were from London’s urban jungle, determined to make a new start in a more wholesome environment.

What they found on arrival came as a nasty shock to most. Electricity had not yet been laid on and the water supply was erratic. A network of dirt roads had been laid out but there were as yet very few houses. Old railway carriages seemed to be a favourite form of accommodation. Large areas of land were undeveloped and were being occupied by squatters. There was no school, no doctor and no proper police force; instead Neville recruited his own uniformed squad of vigilante patrolmen.

The downland had been transformed into a huge building site and the once clean air was now laden with dust. The rolling grassland had been dug up and the rain had converted the excavated earth into a quagmire. The wild flowers had gone and in place of bird song was the cacophony of construction.

Still Neville advertised. A composer of popular music, Felix Powell, who had written the wartime marching song ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, was commissioned to extol the new resort in song. ‘Come to Peacehaven’ he wrote and ‘The Lureland Waltz’. Neville secured the services of Anthony Fokker, the Dutch airman, to give a daring display of aerobatics in his biplane and to tow banners urging people to ‘Come to the Sunny South Coast for Health and Happiness’.

Meanwhile the horrible sprawl of bungalows and ‘non-traditional houses’ continued to multiply. By 1926 Peacehaven boasted a population of four thousand. The resort was becoming a byword for tasteless development.

It exemplified the absurdity of inducing people to come and enjoy the natural beauty of a certain location and by so doing destroy the natural beauty they came to enjoy. Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, described Peacehaven as ‘miles of disorderly ugliness, shoddiness and squalor’.

Charles Neville died in Rottingdean in 1960, before they painted double yellow lines round the village green.

Charles Neville died in Rottingdean in 1960, before they painted double yellow lines round the village green.

"'Ello 'Ello 'Ello"

"So what's been going on 'ere then?"

"Who said you could paint them double yellow lines green?"

"Bloody Green Party save the whale type are we?"

"YOUR NICKED MATEY!"

http://www.peacehaven.co.uk/index.php

is a great web site about my kind-a town.

For ten long years I’ve been a-cravin’
To live in a bungalow in Peacehaven.

The following piece is especially for YOBBO, one of our most illustrious contributors.

Rudyard Kipling moved to Rottingdean, to a house called The Elms, on the Green, in 1897. Though still in his thirties the author of ‘Kim’, the ‘Just So Stories’ and the patriotic verses of the Boer War was a famous national figure. The landlord of the ‘White Horse’, Stephen Welfare, who ran a horse-drawn bus service to bring trippers up from Brighton, hit on the idea of laying on detours to Kipling’s house. It was a good way of stealing a march on his rivals in the highly competitive tourist bus business: ‘Come to Rottingdean and see the soldiers’ poet AT NO EXTRA CHARGE’.

Picking up his customers in the Old Steine, Welfare advised them to ride on the upper deck of the open-topped bus, for the walls surrounding The Elms were high (Kipling valued his privacy). The first Kipling knew of this enterprising little venture was when he was sitting in his garden reading the day before’s Times one Sunday morning and he looked up to see a row of people grinning at him from above the garden wall. ‘And here we have Mr. Kipling, the soldiers’ poet,’ shouted Stephen Welfare triumphantly, gesturing over the wall at the astonished writer. Kipling began to wave his newspaper back and forth as if swatting flies. The effect was so unintentionally comic that the people on the bus roared with laughter. Here was Mr. Kipling, large as life, looking - there was no doubt - precisely as Mr Kipling should look, in cream summer suit, with Panama hat, those distinctive round spectacles, and yet here he was acting like a cartoon character come to life, as if he were on a veranda in the Raj.

The sightseeing visits quickly became popular, and Kipling went ballistic. He talked to the local constabulary, who told him that Mr. Welfare was not actually committing an offence. He tried reasoning with Welfare face-to-face, shouting at him with as much politeness as he could muster over the garden wall. Kipling was becoming a prisoner in his own home, frightened to set foot in his garden for fear of being ogled. The buses might turn up at any time of day, any day of the week.

Unable to heed his own injunction in his most famous poem about keeping one’s head while all around are losing theirs, Kipling wrote a pleading letter, appealing to the man’s better nature, and posted it off to the White Horse. Welfare was delighted by the letter. He took it with him on his next bus trip to The Elms. ‘Here we have the splendid abode of Mr. Kipling, the soldiers’ poet - observe the great man peeping from yonder window - and here we have a missive, written and signed by the great man himself, in that very abode, only yesterday.’

Kipling ran downstairs and out into the garden. ‘Mr. Welfare,’ he yelled, trying desperately to keep a lid on his rage, ‘did you not receive my letter?’ A buzz of excitement passed around the bus at the sight of Kipling at such close quarters. Evidently, too he was on close terms with their driver and guide.

With his pith-helmeted patriotism, his gung-ho verses and mass popularity, Kipling was a very un-Brightonian sort of writer. In the Black Horse pub, as we sat there drinking and laughing at the notion of Kipling blowing his top, I spotted a reminder of his diametric opposite, the quintessence of writerly Brighton. On the wall was a poster advertising a production of Patrick Hamilton’s thriller ‘Gaslight’ at a theatre in Eastbourne.

Patrick Hamilton had been an unholy mess of a man, a gentleman who haunted dive bars and cheap boarding houses, a Marxist who became a Tory, a vituperative bore and a braggart, a drunken, chain-smoking wreck - a true Brightonian, as Kipling could never have been.

John and Roy Boulting had just finished making a film called ‘Fame is the Spur’ when out of the blue someone rang from the film agents O’Brien, Linnit & Dunfee. A company part owned by Terence Rattigan had acquired the film rights to Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’. Rattigan had attempted a couple of film scripts but had been unhappy with the results.

The Boulting twins re-read the novel that on its publication eight years earlier in 1938 had been a bestseller and cause celebre, and made a happy discovery. ‘Brighton Rock’ was film writing, something that only could have been done by someone interested in and knowledgeable about film.

The brothers agreed immediately to buy the rights and to ask Greene himself to write the screenplay. Greene produced an excellent draft, based closely on the book but not afraid to depart from it for filmic imperatives. The co-credit on the finished film (and one of the ‘facts’ people tend to remember about it), ‘Screenplay by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan’, is merely the result of contractual obligation.

The casting didn’t run smoothly, however. Looking remarkably callow even for his twenty-four years, Richard Attenborough in one important respect seemed the appropriate choice as Green’s Pinkie, the teenage mobster. For Greene made Pinkie abjure alcohol and drink milk instead – like gangsters Greene had observed in a club near King’s Cross Station – and no actor of the time looked more recently weaned the absurdly youthful ‘Dickie darling’. But after watching Attenborough play Pinkie in the stage play which preceded the film, Greene decided he wasn’t right. ‘Please do not use Richard Attenborough,’ he wrote to the twins. ‘He will never be able to convey the evil that’s in Pinkie.’

After the film came out he was big enough to write to them again: ‘I am grateful that you disregarded what I had to say about Richard Attenborough.’ To Attenborough himself he posted off a copy of ‘Brighton Rock’ with this inscription written on the flyleaf: ‘For my perfect Pinkie.’

The book had been badly received in Brighton when it came out. Greene noted how the civic authorities had not taken kindly to the picture he painted of mobsters, extortion rackets and race gangs: ‘It must have galled them to see my book unwittingly advertised at every sweetstall – “Buy Brighton Rock”.’ The film, which came out nine years later, could only add to the misrepresentation as far as Brightonians were concerned, hence the strange disclaimer which appears on the screen at the beginning, over shots of the beach crowded with happy holidaymakers:

Brighton today is a large, jolly, friendly seaside town in Sussex, exactly one hour’s journey from London. But in the years between the two wars, behind the Regency terraces and crowded beaches, there was another Brighton of dark alleyways and festering slums. From here the poison of crime and violence and gang warfare began to spread until the challenge was taken up by the Police. This is the story of that other Brighton – now happily no more.

In the spring of 1947, before filming started, Roy Boulting had spent three months in Brighton, staying with friends in Ovingdean while he worked on a shooting script. His research entailed much hanging about in pubs, dropping lavish hints about the old razor gangs and hoping someone would pick them up. There were plenty of old soaks, of course, who claimed to have been in this or that mob, but Roy struck lucky when he was put on to a ferret-like chap called Carl Ramon.

Once Ramon had established that Roy was not an undercover policeman or a fantasist, Roy had him eating out of his hand, and for the nest several weeks the ran the gauntlet of demob-happy servicemen as they diligently mapped out what was left of the Brighton underworld, from the pre-twee Lanes to low-life haunts in the North Laine area and anonymous refuelling stops around the railway station.

After the stiff-upper-lip output of the war years, the film was genuinely shocking to many people, the ‘Natural Born Killers’ of its day. Proving that Roy and Carl had done their homework, the characters chewed gum, wore wide-boy suits, spoke in working-class accents and used rhyming slang. Much of it was shot on the streets of Brighton during the long hot summer of 1947 - what’s called ‘stolen’ filming, for which cameras are hidden and people going about their business on the streets have no idea that the chap running past is an actor. So real life went on in the background: downtrodden women pushing huge prams, cats stalking the hot pavements, lending a ghastly verisimilitude to the premeditated violence at the front of the screen, in the core of the fiction.

The film premiered at the Savoy Cinema in East Street, Brighton on the evening of 8 January 1948. A surprisingly modern-sounding PR exercise accompanied the screening, for the twins and the cast – all except Carol Marsh who played Rose came on the stage afterwards and joked with the audience.

The film was ‘an unfortunate essay in brutality’, according to the ‘Brighton & Hove Herald’ but the ‘Evening Argus’ took a more progressive stance, dismissing the film’s critics as elitist and reactionary: ‘Brighton Rock the film which had its first showing last night and will soon be going round cinemas all over the world, has been described as bad publicity for the town. Those who raise these objections are the same people who prefer to attract the few and continually oppose plans which attract the crowds.’ The national press was hysterical. The film critic of the ‘Daily Mirror’ posted a health warning, requisitioning the centre spread to say: ‘This film must not be shown.’

The film saves its biggest departure from the book for the very end. The ending of the novel is as bleak as you will find in fiction. In a kiosk on the pier, Pinkie, at Rose’s request, has recorded on a vulcanite disc a message for her. She wants it as a keepsake of their wedding day, an expression of his love for her. But instead of whispering sweet nothings, what he has really said, in the sound-proof booth as she waits outside, is this: ‘God damn you, you little bitch, why can’t you go back home for ever and let me be?’ In the film he says: ‘What you want me to say is, I love you. Here’s the truth. I hate you, you little slut. You make me sick. Why don’t you get back to Nelson Place and leave me be…’ Outside the booth, Carol Marsh looks radiantly adoring. For Rose, the record of Pinkie’s voice, and his message of love, will be a tiny, warming flame amid the permafrost of a future without him. When she walks purposefully along the seafront towards Frank’s place, the greasy rooming house where the gang lived, to retrieve the record, she is, according to the novel, walking towards the worst horror of all.

This is not an ending which translates into film, which is why Greene and the twins came up with another ending for their film. But while the celluloid ending was different from the book’s, it was just as shocking. Unfortunately it no longer exists and Roy could not remember what it was.

The reason their original ending was lost was that the film censor took exception to it. The replacement was hated with a vengeance by everyone concerned, not least by Greene himself. For him it was a cheap way out. For the twins it was a hasty, botched piece of filmmaking, against the clock, which in its mood and lighting looked as if it belonged in a different film altogether. Yet it is that very quality of strangeness that now lends it a haunting air. Carol/Rose is in a nunnery. The priest who in the book solaces her by invoking the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God is replaced by a mother superior. A gramophone is handy in the room. ‘He loved me,’ says Carol. ‘I’ll show you he loved me. Mother, can I?’ She gestures at the gramophone, puts on the disc, lifts the needle across and listens raptly. ‘You asked me to make a record of my voice,’ says Pinkie’s voice. ‘Here it is. What you want me to say is, I love you, I love you, I love you…’ The record sticks. The film ends.

Carol Marsh attracted good reviews for her performance. It should have been the start of something, but it wasn’t. The British Film Institute could find no record of Carol after 1966, when she appeared in a television programme called ‘Lord Raingo’: no press cuttings, no obituary. ‘It’s quite unusual, actually,’ said the researcher, ‘for someone to just disappear like that.’

I am pleased to inform readers that Carol is alive and living quietly in a flat in London.

At 75 years old, she retains the slim figure of her youth.

She has never married and hates any mention of her career as an actress. Although physically well, she has been less than happy for a great many years and any reader meeting her would be especially well advised not to mention 'Brighton Rock'.

Hereunder is Nigel’s account of his meeting with Carol Marsh in 1996. I shed a few tears while typing it.

I hadn’t expected to find Carol Marsh. The general feeling was that she had drifted away somewhere a long time ago. But then a reporter on the ‘Argus’ gave me her phone number. Carol lived in Bloomsbury but we arranged to meet, at her suggestion, on the lower concourse of Canary Wharf station. The last time I had seen her she wore a spotted dress and tears glistened on her cheeks as she listened to Pinkie’s voice saying ‘I love you…’ She said on the phone, ‘You’ll recognise me from the blue woollen coat.’ If fact I recognised the sad, crinkly-eyed smile, intact after fifty years. Rose worked as a waitress in Snow’s café. Carol and I drank tea in the Canary Wharf Café Rouge.

She had made a few films after ‘Brighton Rock’. ‘People kept telling me, “When the nest film comes out you’ll be a star forever.” But it never happened.’ She had done lots of theatre and radio and now she lived a reclusive life, ‘with no one to please and no one to hurt me.’

She was seventeen when she made the film, but by her own reckoning had an emotional age of about ten. Like Rose, she had been dreadfully preyed upon and ‘Brighton Rock’ was an unhappy memory. ‘People were very, very cruel. Why didn’t they just leave me alone?’ I said I thought she was luminous in the film and she replied that the thought of how good she might have been crucified her now.

‘I’ve never seen the film and I couldn’t bear to. I could not. All I’ve seen is when I been sitting at home and clips come on the TV. I was riveted by one shot of me running down the pier and saying, “Pinkie!” I thought, my God what a sweet little girl. So naturally sweet.’

I asked Carol to sign my copy of the novel. I had in mind a variation on Greene’s inscription to Attenborough: ‘From your perfect Rose’, but Carol said this would be big-headed.

She wrote: ‘It was lovely meeting you. From “Rose”.’

A woman hurried along towards the sea end of the pier, taking a last puff of a filterless cigarette and flicking the butt in an arc towards the waves. She wore a turban and a long maroon coat with a moth-eaten fur collar, lugging a box the dimensions of a hatbox, but containing something heavier than a hat, from the evidence of her grimace and limp.

Roy Boulting bounced along the boardwalk, happy to be free of Carl Ramon after successive nights drinking among the criminally inclined. He saw rain whipping in gusts across the pier, saw very few people about save the disappearing back of the bizarre looking woman he had spied coming on to the pier. He was supposed to be researching the scene when Pinkie tries to get Rose to kill herself right on the end of the pier. She is saved between the stirrup and the ground, by the arrival of Ida, Dallow and the police. Pinkie leaps off the end of the pier and straight into hell. Suddenly Roy felt thirsty. He turned up his collar against the gusting wind and rain, hurried on past the ghost train and the shooting gallery and stepped into the bar near the end of the pier (occupying then approximately the same site as the karaoke bar now) for a quick one. He ordered, turned round and observed that there were only two other souls in on this cold, grey weekday in early spring, both sozzled old-timers. He drained his glass briskly and left.

As he did so he looked up into the slanting rain and his eye was caught by a placard high up by a window next to the bar: MADAME BINNY, CLAIRVOYANTE. In he went through the open door, into a small room hung with swagged drapes and lined with ill-assorted chairs: half doctor’s waiting room he thought, half brothel. There was no one about. At the far end of the room was a small flight of steps leading to an opening hung on either side by velvet curtains. From beyond the curtains came the sound of paper rustling.

He called softly: ‘Madame Binny?’

Beyond the curtains all sound ceased. Then a head poked out, like a tortoise from its ramparts, wearing a turban. ‘Who’s that?’

Roy recognised the strange woman he had followed on to the pier. Are you Madame Binny?’ he asked.

The head emerged further, followed by a fur collar, a body draped in a maroon overcoat and a bony hand holding a cigarette, from which a thread of blue smoke spiralled pleasingly. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Madame Binny, it is merely someone who has been persuaded that you have a talent for revealing… a talent, that is, for foretelling… am I right? And I wondered if you might spare the time to practise your singular talents upon this curious passer-by.’

‘I see.’ She changed her tune now, sounded faux-posh: ‘Will you be so kind as to wait one minute, please?’ She withdrew behind the curtains and Roy heard more rustling. Then: ‘Please step this way.’

Roy climbed the steps, ducked through the curtains and into a small windowless chamber lit by a single candle. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw pictures of star signs on the walls around him; a table in front of him draped in pink velvet upon which flickered the candle; next to it a large clear glass globe on a plinth, shot with deep fissures of orange light from the flame. Madame Binny sat behind the table. She still wore the turban but the overcoat had been replaced with a burgundy velvet cape. She had appended large round gypsy earrings, smeared a postbox of vermilion lipstick around her mouth, and slipped heavy silver rings on her fingers, which now caressed the base of the crystal ball. ‘Would you please sit down? I wasn’t expecting anyone on a day like this, to be honest, dear. Now, what was it you was wanting?’

‘I would like you to read my future, if you will.’

Yes, dear, but…’ and she indicated a tariff card he had not noticed on the wall. ‘Half a crown for one hand, four shillings for two, ten shillings for both hands and a reading of the ball as well. The ball is most efficacious.’

I’ll have ten shillings’ worth,’ said Roy and held out his hands.

The readings turned out to be vague in the extreme. ‘Are you in love, my dear? Because if you are I can tell you it will all turn out for the best in the end. Trust me. Trust Madame Binny…’ And so on.

Roy felt half embarrassed on Madame Binny’s behalf, annoyed with himself for having thrown away ten shillings. He should have stayed in the bar next door, bought a round for the old soaks there - money better spent. Then Madame Binny peered wide-eyed at the crystal ball, suddenly rubbed its surface furiously. ‘I thought I’d seen it wrong at first but there’s no mistaking it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether I should tell you this but I’m going to anyway. If you’re on the beach in the next few weeks just keep your eyes open, will you? Just keep your eyes open.’

‘Why?’ said Roy, rather wearily.

‘I’ll say no more than that, but it may mean something important.’

Roy thought no more of this, assuming it to be part of the rehearsed patter, and more or less forgot about Madame Binny. Three weeks or so later they had started filming and the weather could not have been better, not a single day’s shooting lost to rain - blue skies, high temperatures, warm enough to swim in the sea even in June in that glorious summer of 1947. They rented rooms in the Grand Hotel to use as the production offices, and on this particular morning it was so hot that an air of Latin laziness had settled upon everybody, cast and crew alike.

Roy paced restlessly, trying to jolly the troops, with little success. He decided it was that sort of day and it was best to go with the flow. He would go for a swim. After his swim he fashioned a pillow from his shirt and lay there watching people enjoying themselves around him. A man walked past Roy on his way down to the water and Roy absent-mindedly watched him go. The man waded into the sea and forced his way through the people at the water’s edge. Roy lost sight of him for a second or two, then picked him up again beyond the cordon of bodies as he launched himself into a competent-looking front crawl.

The man cruised about for a minute or so, then disappeared under the water. Roy waited for him to come up a few feet in front of where he had been, but there was no sign of him. Roy rocked forward on his knees for a better look. Perhaps he had changed direction underwater. But no one was there. Roy suddenly felt sick. He stood up. The swimmer had definitely not surfaced. He sprinted down to the water, jumping over bodies, and plunged underwater at the spot where he calculated the man had disappeared.

He fumbled about, feeling rather than looking in the frothy sea, came up for air, had another go. And this time he found the man, felt the bulk of his shoulders, was sapped by his hand. He tried to drag him up above the surface but was not strong enough so he waved and shouted for help. Some people heard him over the general din and suddenly everyone in the vicinity had intuited a crisis, and the man was taken from Roy’s arms and conveyed on a wave of goodwill to the beach.

The man did not come round, despite the increasingly frantic attentions of a doctor and ambulance crew. Roy sneaked a look through the thicket of legs. The man’s lips were blue. The doctor tried again and eventually - it must have been fifteen minutes at least since they took him from the water - the man spluttered and stirred and people cheered.

Twenty years later Roy was down in Brighton, strolling on the pier, when he saw a sign on a kiosk: UNLOCK THE SECRETS OR YOUR SIGNATURE WITH WORLD-FAMOUS GRAPHOLOGIST MISS BINNY. AS SEEN ON TV. The young woman was reading a magazine and posting ice cream into her mouth. ‘Copy a few lines of this out, then,’ she said, barely looking up, and she handed him a mushy verse. Roy could have made a better reading of his signature himself, but he didn’t mind. ‘Miss Binny, thank you,’ he said. ‘And may I ask, are you related to Madame Binny?’

She started back, looking suspicious and amazed, as if he were possessed of the gift of clairvoyance himself. ‘Why do you ask? How do you know?’

‘I had’, said Roy, ‘a great admiration for your mother.’

I went for a stroll on Brighton Pier today and took a few photographs of the present graphologist and her premises.

http://www.geocities.com/carlandmats/Pier.html

Thank you, Miles, for going to so much trouble. The photographs are a welcome addition to the story.

Here for you and Lotta is a picture of Carol Marsh with dear, dear Dickie celebrating his eightieth birthday.

One December evening a good seventy years ago, Graham Greene settled himself in a seafront shelter on the border between Brighton and Hove. With a promising first novel to his credit, and having made the decision to resign his job-for-life as a sub-editor on ‘The Times’, Greene was just getting used to the idea of spending his future being A Writer. It was a cold, bright night and, gazing seaward, Greene noted, with the forensic precision he was learning to cultivate, how the thin line of the surf appeared phosphorescent in the moonlight and how the frosty wind smoothed off its rough top edge.

So preoccupied was he in registering these observations that he had not noticed that the shelter contained another occupant. Suddenly a voice form the far corner said: ‘Do you know who I am?’

Greene started and peered into the shadows. He could barely make out a human form, let alone recognise it. ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ he said politely.

‘I’m Old Moore,’ said the voice, meaning of Almanac fame, the anonymous astrologer whose predictions are published every year. Failing to understand the reference, Greene said nothing. ‘I live alone in a basement,’ the voice continued. Greene still said nothing, wondering what he could possibly say to this rambling, lonely old man, ‘I bake my own bread.’ The silence lengthened, intensified. The sea made little rushes on the beach. The voice resumed. ‘The Almanac, you know,’ it said humbly, realising the young man hadn’t understood who he was. ‘I write the Almanac.’

Old Moore, the voice from the shadows, found an immortality in the booklets bearing his name. But Greene perpetuated him in another way, by turning him into the bent, broken lawyer Prewitt in ‘Brighton Rock’. Greene conjured a whole life, or rather a death in the midst of life, from that voice in the seafront shelter where Brighton runs up against Hove. Racked by a stomach ulcer, married to a hag with a passion for tinned salmon, lusting after typists, Prewitt fights urges to expose himself in a public park.

Greene wrote that ‘poor hopeless Mr. Prewitt’ was the only character in the book that had sprung from his actual experience of Brighton. The rest of the book, he said, was the invention of the characters he himself had originally invented. ‘Brighton Rock was fiction twice over, funnelling back into the shadowy seafront shelters of the imagination. Greene’s Brighton was a state of mind.

The above postings re 'Brighton Rock' (so elegantly written they might have been penned by Margaret Watson herself) have prompted me to obtain a copy of the book and to read it.

Not only is it entertaining, it's educational!

I now know that 'buer' and 'polony' are slang terms for 'woman' and that, in 1930's Brighton, cars were commonly left unlocked in pub car parks and their back seats used by total strangers for bonking!

Never mind being a gangster - if Pinkie had had any business acumen, he'd have opened a valeting company and made a fortune!

I am very pleased that you are enjoying ‘Brighton Rock’, Lotta. I assure you that Margaret and Nigel are not related. The word ‘palony’ comes from Polari/Parlaree/Palari and here are a few words that Nigel has written on the subject. None of this will be new to you but others might find it interesting.

Nigel wrote:

Of the men who habitually drank in the Grosvenor Arms [in Little Western Street] more than half were gay. But then you wouldn’t necessarily know which was which just by looking and listening, as two of the campest drinkers were in fact straight. Sometimes they spoke in Polari, the gay slang so daringly used on the radio show ‘Round the Horne’. ‘Bona’ meant good, ‘lallies’ were legs, a ‘palone’ was a woman, ‘vada’ was to look, ‘trolling’ was cruising for sexual partners, ‘riah’ was hair. Back in fifties Brighton, when somebody was wearing a noticeably bad wig they used to say, ‘Riah by Fludes,’ Fludes being a local carpet shop.

Using Polari was a joke now, but it had evolved as a necessary secret form of communication. In those days exposure as a homosexual probably meant losing job, home and friends and often resulted in a prison sentence. Being gay was as bad as being a delinquent or an immigrant, a Communist or a prostitute. Bosses, landladies, doctors, neighbours could seem like spies bent on the unmasking and punishment of deviants. The slightest detail might give the game away, so you could never relax. Were those cufflinks a bit much? Did I show I was bored when that woman was talking to me? Did I mince or lisp when I got drunk last night?

The Creator of Bognor’s Regimented Holidays by Lily

In the early 1930s, Bognor was a dignified place, self-importantly bearing its appendage Regis and undisturbed by the more vulgar features of other seaside resorts. The Town Council prided itself on attracting a better class of visitor and it was basking in all the wonderful publicity generated by the four month’s stay of the convalescing King George V.

The council were soon to discover that publicity can sometimes be counter-productive. It not only attracts the attention of the desirable but also of those who see opportunities to exploit it. The king’s patronage had provided a bandwagon on which the gambler could jump and one such bandwagon jumper was a diminutive, bouncy, innovative livewire called Billy Butlin.

The world of fairgrounds, fish and chips and candy floss, so despised by Bognor’s municipal establishment, was the very world in which Billy Butlin had been brought up. His mother had been the daughter of a travelling showman who used to play the fairs around Gloucester and Somerset. She had eloped and run away to South Africa where Billy had been born, but had separated from her husband after a few years, returned with Billy to England and resumed her itinerant fairground way of life. Then another husband carried her off to Canada with Billy in tow. All this traipsing around the world at such an early age played havoc with Billy’s education. He once estimated that he had attended school for a total of only three years in his life. In 1921, with just £5 in his pocket and scarcely able to read and write but with a superabundance of self-confidence, he arrived back in England ready to make his fortune and immediately gravitated towards the fairground fraternity which held such vivid childhood memories.

For a few years he was the proprietor of a travelling hoop-la, moving from one country fair to the next, but that served as no more than an apprenticeship for the leap he was soon to make from five pounds in his pocket to one million in the bank.

Before the Second World War few working class people had an annual holiday. Employers were not legally bound to grant such favours and few felt obliged to do so. The workers, should they take a break for one reason or another, certainly did not expect to be paid for it. The concept of a holiday-with-pay was, therefore, considered to be a revolutionary one. A week off work with a week’s wages in one’s pocket was most people’s idea of heaven and that is exactly what the government was proposing.

Billy Butlin perceptively sensed a bandwagon.. If he could provide a week’s family holiday at a price just below the average weekly wage he would make a killing and so the concept of a Butlin’s Holiday Camp was born. The chalet type accommodation, the non-stop entertainment and the tightly-scheduled routine supervised by a regiment of uniformed officials in red blazers and white trousers. The secret was never to allow the holidaymakers time to get bored. The days were filled with an endless succession of bright ideas - Tiny Tots Contests, Glamorous Grandmother Beauty Competitions, Veleta Dance Championships, with prizes for all the winners. And all this for just £3. 10s a week. The masses flocked to Butlin’s.

With a £2000 bank loan, Billy opened his Skegness Holiday Camp in 1936 and Clacton two years later, just before war broke out which put on hold further development for the duration. Meanwhile Billy had bought some land on the Eastern Esplanade at Bognor where he planned to open a zoo and a funfair. In 1933 a lion was reported to have escaped while being transported to the Esplanade site and for some weeks people lived in terror. Everyone kept their doors locked and a sheep was reported to have been savaged on a farm at Pagham. Finally the news came through that there had been a mistake. A lion had not escaped, in fact it did not even exist. Someone had made up the story as a hoax. Within hours the people of Bognor had forgotten their terror but the name of Billy Butlin stuck. People wondered if the whole episode had been no more than a clever publicity stunt from the beginning.

Meanwhile the council was up in arms at the noisy and unsightly type of amusements Billy was putting up on the Eastern Esplanade. The Free Church Council joined in the chorus of complaints, alleging that Billy’s activities were having an adverse effect on the town’s Sunday observance. Bognor Regis was split down the middle between the anti-Butlinites and the pro-Butlinites, between the Western Esplanade and the Eastern Esplanade. Civil war was threatening to break out and the ‘Evening Argus’ added fuel to the dispute by giving the town new name - Butlin Regis.

Peace was at last restored by means of an ingenious compromise. The council wanted Billy off the Esplanade at all costs and had unsuccessfully been trying to buy back his holdings. Up to now Billy had resolutely refused all offers but when the council suggested that he take thirty-nine acres at a place called Brooklands, half way between Bognor and neighbouring Felpham, in exchange, Billy gave in. He agreed that there would be no more funfairs but instead he would erect a new holiday camp on the Brooklands site. Work began immediately.

‘B-Day’, as the opening was called, took place on 2 July 1960 and 3000 visitors came in the first week. Nowadays some 125,000 campers take their holidays on the site every year and Bognor Regis has had its tranquillity restored and is contentedly sinking into a state of faded glory.

On sale at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery at the amazingly low price of £8.99 is the book ‘Kiss and Kill: Film Visions of Brighton’. It contains an interview, reproduced below, given by Richard Attenborough to Frank Gray about the film of ‘Brighton Rock’. I have it on good authority that Dickie got through the whole interview almost without shedding a tear.

FG: Your first connection with Brighton was to play the starring role in the Boulting brothers’ ‘Brighton Rock’ in 1947. How did you become to be involved with film?

Dickie: There are all sorts of stories about how I became involved with the movie and actually they were totally simple. [!] I was in the Air Force and I was making a film with John Boulting called ‘Journey Together’ (1946). It was a semi-government film, propaganda film with Edward G. Robinson and I became a very close friend of John’s and his brother, Roy. John had not seen [the play] ‘Brighton Rock’ in which I played Pinkie, but was a huge Graham Greene fan, and said, “Dick, do you want to do it again?” And so I came out of the Air Force in 1946 and did a dreadful Graham Greene film called ‘The Man Within’ (1947). It was sometime after that I did ‘Brighton Rock’.
We became good friends with Graham Greene. Over the years, Sheila [Lady Attenborough] and I spent our holidays very often in the South of France, and Graham lived in Antibes, so we would see him every summer, two or three times, go and have lunch on the porch and so on. Oh, he was a sweet man; I liked him very much indeed. And a great novelist. He worked on the screenplay [for ‘Brighton Rock’] with John. And he approved of the movie and was very complimentary. I got some stinking reviews in one or two papers - you always remember your bad reviews, you don’t remember your good ones. There was a bad review written by a critic in the ‘Daily Express’ who said, “Richard Attenborough’s Pinkie is as close to Graham Greene’s character as Donald Duck is to Greta Garbo.” Not a totally complimentary review! But I didn’t care because I possessed an original mint copy of ‘Brighton Rock’, signed inside, “To my perfect Pinkie”. So that’s alright!

FG: One of the interesting aspects of ‘Brighton Rock’ is that it was one of the first Brighton films to be made on location in the town.

Dickie: Yes, the Boultings were one of the first companies to work with hidden cameras. I mean all the stuff of the escape through the lanes, and so on. They carried them in cardboard boxes on their shoulders …it was all invented for the moment. And we put them in shop windows which you couldn’t see through - double glass and so on, it was a huge advance - you’ve got to remember that it was not until early 1940s that we started shooting movies outside at all. Sheila was in one of the very first - ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (1942) and that was a revolution in British Cinema.

FG: How did you prepare for playing the part of Pinkie?

Dickie: Well, it had to be based obviously entirely on one’s instinct and imagination, [as] there was no actual research that you could do, although John arranged to have a razor gangster on the picture. His name was Carl, I remember, and he had very thick plastered-down black hair and he taught me how to slash a razor - I mean you can’t think of anything more horrific - and the way he dressed and so on… [an] awful lot of that was achieved, I mean, you do gather a character from research… literally reading, or museums or archives, and you then can do a certain amount of research with somebody who can talk to you about it, but at the end of the day you are left with your actor’s instinct, and either it comes through or it doesn’t.
This sort of part [Pinkie] was unknown. It was a very new character to be seen in the cinema in the ‘40s in the UK. It was extraordinary, and of course we were attacked tremendously for the violence. Violence, of course, was totally proper in that subject, it was inherent in that subject, so it was a vital part of it.
I had played Pinkie in the theatre, in the Garrick Theatre. I don’t know what the Garrick holds, must be 1200 I would think, so everything had to be projected theatrically to the back of the stalls…So that was a performance of scale to a certain extent. Now what I had to understand was that if you bring a camera into that position [placing his hands on either side of his face in order to convey a close-up] so that you have these eyes on the screen which are six feet across, there is a reduction and a reducing of presentation and performance which actually almost goes beyond the natural. In other words, on occasion, when heavy lenses are used, it has to come down even further than what a natural reaction would be. John Boulting kept saying to me, “Dick, Dick, take it down.” I had been so used to the mannerisms of Pinkie Brown in the theatre. But I loved doing it; it was a fantastic break for me.

FG: One of the criticisms of British cinema in the 1920s and 1930s was that it was always too theatrical.

Dickie: That’s right. I remember most of the movies that were shot at that time, and a large proportion of them were the Aldwych Farces [with] Tom Walls, Bunny Hare [Robertson Hare], Alfred Drayton etc. And there was a phrase in British Cinema which actually said “We’ll do this with a ‘Tom Walls tight eight’”, and what they meant was that eight characters literally were held within the frame. But, of course, this not only illustrated a form of shooting, but also a form of acting. And what happened was that during the War great film-makers - Pat Jackson, John and Roy Boulting - made documentary movies. And so we saw ‘Target for Tonight’ (1941) and ‘Fires were Started’ (1943) and suddenly British actors saw real airmen, real sailors, real frontline troops behaving in a certain way, and of course they realised, with a blinding embarrassment, that people didn’t behave like actors - they behaved like these real people. So, after the War, people like the Boultings, Carol Reed and Lean, Puffin Asquith [Anthony Asquith] etc. suddenly were - in conjunction with the actors - saying, “Come on guys, let’s get away from theatricality into reality.” So the documentary cinema in British films changed fundamentally the actors’ understanding of what acting was and changed that extraordinary attitude - “Are you an actor or do you work in films?” Suddenly, actors Jimmy Mason, Johnny Mills, bless him, and one or two others started to achieve a stature for acting in the cinema which had not existed before.

Today I had the pleasure of visiting the Brunswick Festival, held in the garden of Brunswick Square, Hove.

It would be unkind for me to comment on the performance of the ‘Brunswick Broncos’, an over-sixties line dancing troop, but I was very impressed by some of the other performers, in particular the kinky tango band, a kinky accordionist, kinky dancers and a kinky trombonist.

Our wonderful technical team have undertaken to upload to the Internet within the next few days some photographs taken at the festival.

The photographs may be seen at:

http://www.geocities.com/carlandmats/Brunswick.html

KipHouseCom.jpg

Kipling's House

 

An Old Sussex Soldier by Lily

George IV was fifty eight and had grown absurdly obese by the time he finally succeeded to the throne. His coronation was not an occasion to stimulate widespread rejoicing. The improvidence he had shown with public funds during the nine years he had spent as Prince Regent had not endeared him to the man in the street except, perhaps, to the inhabitants of the one place that had benefited from his overspending.

In Brighton the celebrations were wholehearted and taking part in them was a remarkable lady of 107. Phoebe Hessel had been born during the reign of Queen Anne, had seen three King Georges come and go and was now still alive to welcome the fourth. She was a royalist to the core and was given pride of place in the leading carriage of the celebratory procession through Brighton Town.

More than ninety years previously, as a girl of fifteen, Phoebe had fallen in love with a soldier and had been heartbroken when he was posted abroad to the West Indies. She was not, however, a girl to sit around sighing. Neither was she noted for her good judgment and, in one of her more reckless moments, she dreamed up a hare-brained plan which she fondly hoped would reunite her with her lover. She dressed as a man and enlisted in the army. Unfortunately her regiment was assigned to Europe instead of the West Indies and she found herself taking part in the abortive attempt to relieve the siege of Tournai in Belgium. During the Battle of Fontenoy which followed, the Duke of Cumberland’s army was soundly defeated by the French and suffered some 7,000 casualties, one of them being Phoebe whose arm was pierced by a French bayonet. Her regiment was later posted to Gibraltar where she helped repel one of Spain’s periodic attacks on that colony. She served with distinction for five years before revealing her gender to the authorities. Phoebe’s escapade caused quite a stir at the time, she became a popular heroine overnight, was discharged from the army with honour and awarded a Chelsea pension.

Her love story, the course of which had scarcely been smooth up to then, was now to have a happy ending. Soon after her own discharge, her sweetheart was invalided out of the army, the lovers were reunited and at last free to marry. Twenty years and nine children later her husband died and Phoebe remarried. Her second husband was a fisherman in Brighton, then known as Brighthelmstone, and Phoebe was to become, in every sense of the word, a fishwife - coarse-mannered and raucous as she led her donkey and cart through the streets of Brighton hawking her wares.

Brighton, at that time, was where it was all happening. It was where Dr. Richard Russell had set up his practice to promote the beneficial qualities of sea water. The town was spreading out with row upon row of lodging-houses and the line of bathing machines on the beach stretching as far as the eye could see. Foppish dandies strolled the promenade spying on the stylishly-dressed young ladies through their quizzing-glasses. Sometimes one might even spot the young Prince of Wales, not yet grown fat, taking the sea air with the actress, Mrs. Robinson, on his arm.

This, however, was not Phoebe’s world. Dressed, summer and winter, in her brown serge dress she struggled from morning till night to make a living selling her husband’s catch. When he died she went bankrupt and ended up in the workhouse. Phoebe, however, was a survivor. No adversity lasts for ever and, having spent some time in the workhouse, she bravely started all over again. With a basket full of fruit, confectionary and toys she would settle down every morning on a corner of the Old Steine to start her day’s trading. And there she sat, day after day, year in and year out, rain or shine. She became part of the scene: almost a tourist attraction in her own right. Many years passed and she became so old that there was no one alive who remembered the time she had not been there, on her own corner of the Old Steine.

As Phoebe shrivelled with age so the Prince Regent grew paunchy in inverse ratio. One wonders if HRH ever paused during a morning stroll to buy an apple or some other trifle from the little old lady on the roadside and, if so, would he have been aware that this wrinkled street trader had once fought for her country on the field at Fontenay and helped to defend Gibraltar from England’s enemies. And, if by some miracle, he had an inkling of all this, one wonders what thoughts would have entered his mind, what comparisons he might have made with his own pampered existence.

Carrying this conjecture a step further, one wonders how it came about that at HRH’s coronation celebrations this selfsame female was sitting proudly in the leading carriage beside the mayor of Brighton, still wearing her brown serge dress, and acknowledging the cheering crowds with all the condescension of a queen.

Phoebe died shortly after this great honour and she was buried in Brighton’s St. Nicholas churchyard.

http://www.sussexforums.co.uk/

I hope to see you there!

http://wiki.worldnakedbikeride.org/index.php?title=Brighton

There were no titties on display, despite the fact that on Hove beach at this very moment there are dozens of women with them swinging about. I saw one bloke with his arse hanging out, but I wasn’t interested in that.

The Torygraph has the story thus:

Naked cyclists taking part in a global one-day protest against the supremacy of the car have been forced to cover up in Brighton for fear of arrest.
World Naked Bike Ride day is being celebrated in London, Manchester, York and Brighton to promote sustainable transport.
Organisers of the Brighton ride advised participants to cover up using fig leaves, fake topiary, "censored" signs and wigs.
They said Sussex Police would arrest anyone exposing themselves.
Nick Sayers, Brighton & Hove co-ordinator for the event, said: "The threat of arrest is bizarre. Like neighbouring London, Brighton is supposed to be a cosmopolitan, forward-thinking city.
"However, it seems the attitude of the authorities here is still that of a provincial, prudish backwater."
The ride departed at 10am from The Level park, passing famous locations including the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Pier.
A Sussex Police spokesman said: "No arrests have been made yet. Everybody appears to be behaving themselves."

Then

The dog’s gone to the kennels,
The budgie’s with a neighbour
As Mister brings the cases to the car.
Missis checks the gas stove
And puts the landing light on
And thinks again before she slams the door.
It’s holiday designed
To suit the children.

Sharon’s feeling car-sick
And Darren’s started wailing
As suddenly the rain begins to pour.
Missis nags at Mister
To moderate his language
‘Til Sharon pukes her guts out on the floor.
It’s holiday designed
To suit the children.

The hotel nights are sleepless
With Darren starting teething
While Misses counts the patterns on the floor.
Mister smacks his daughter
For being mildly cheeky
And sinks a triple vodka in the bar.
It’s holiday designed
To suit the children.

Mister jams his knuckles
In a deckchair on the promenade
And Missis puts her fingers in her ears.
Sharon cuts her ankle
On a piece of broken bottle,
But the postcards fail to mention blood and tears.
It’s holiday designed
To suit the children.


Now

The dog’s gone to the kennels,
The budgie’s with a neighbour
As Mister brings the cases to the car.
Missis checks the gas stove
And puts the landing light on
And thinks again before she slams the door.
It’s the first time, for a long time, they can drive off on their own
Without the children.

The last few weeks were busy ones
With Sharon getting married,
What a pity it was all arranged so fast.
And Darren’s off to scout camp
In a frenzy of excitement
But now it’s past, they’re on their own at last.
And they’re free now, relaxing on their own
Without the children.

Mister in his deckchair
Underneath the Sunday paper
Twitches at each boy’s shout of “dad!”
Missis helps a youngster
Close beside her making castles
And wonders why she’s feeling rather sad.
But they’re free now, peaceful on the sands
Without the children.

Mister has his fishing-rod
But leaves it in its cover,
For he sees no point in fishing on his own.
Missis tires of window-shopping,
Buys her picture-postcards
And sends the jolly messages back home.
For the first time, in a long time, they’re having so much fun
Without the children.

A rare photograph

the days that are no more.

We have been asked "Who is the Windmill Man?" (Mentioned in 'Your Questions Answered by Dave', April 4 2009, 08.15).

The Windmill Man can often be seen on the naturist beach in Brighton. A part of his body is of such enormous length that he is able to make it rotate without the use of his hands. He is very popular with German tourists.

We had our own windmill man in the slums of SW London; he preferred the beaches of Mustigue to Brighton, accompanied by a certain person who didnt drive a white Fiat uno. His endowment was of such enormous length he could rotate hands free, and rumoured to have been capable of hanging several half-pint mugs on his expenditure.

This weekend Sussex is in festive mood. There's the Hangleton & Knoll Medieval Festival at Greenleas Recreation Ground in Hove and the Lions Fayre on the double-yellow-lines-surrounded village green at Rottingdean. But I myself will be heading for the annual Tits Out event in Brighton.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/46171

...will be seen tomorrow...probably...possibly. The photograph was taken at 16.43 BST today.



Despite having been bought off for over £20m by someone who used to be in the Beatles, and acquiring the restaurant at a credit crunching knock-down price of £140k, this ghastly woman has chosen not to have an important part of the building fully renovated, as roofophile Bob T of downtown Chicago and Missouri will surely notice.

They came by land and by sea.


Just look at that mouth-watering nettle-n-straw burger encased in an eco-friendly giant bun made from half a recycled milk carton. At only £7.79 a throw, how does she do it?


The Bognor Regis Swingers provided a musical interlude.


3rd trombonist, Kevin, always plays by ear.


Paula says:

If you meat-eating vegetarians in Sussex don't wanna get fat in them bathing suit areas like done many of my fellow Americans, get your asses down to Heifer Cow's and sample what this real sassy gal has on offer. Hove Lagoon - it's a bathing suit area!

...if she will let you in.

From today's ARGUS:

Shareera Asante of Carlisle Road said: "We've come down with two children [don't worry, Shareera, it can be cured nowadays] and we're starving [not true] and we've been waiting for ages to get served. We haven't been allowed to go inside.

Where have all the punters gone?
Gone to Burger King, most of them.
When will this silly woman ever learn that the people of Hove do not want something with a 'funky interior'? They just want somewhere to go for a cup of tea where they can park their Zimmer frames.