December 2023 Newsletter: Hell hounds on the Devil's Stairs
The Journey of the Magi; pilgrimages are made in and around Thundersley; when my grandfather cements a gravestone in place, it stays in place; a personal addition to a piecemeal local legend
I spent a significant portion of my teenage years being tutored in the ways of the world in a somewhat violent secondary comprehensive school. It was during a transitional era, occupied by two very distinct generations of teachers who shared very little common ground outside of their role as educators. The old guard were mostly male (it may be that the women had retired earlier). They were strict disciplinarians; the products of harder times. They were the ones who, if they saw two boys fighting, and the pairing looked even, were more likely to stand on the sidelines and allow matters to take their course. Some of them might have regarded doing so as a kindness.
I couldn't tell you whether they were decent people or not, I knew so little about them outside of the regimented classroom setting. I once stumbled across a letter that had been sent from the school regarding an upcoming parent's evening, where the teachers were listed by their full names. It had never occurred to me that these people, who I knew as Mr______. Miss________ or Mrs______, would even have first names; that the woodwork teacher who I knew as Mr Prior, whose eyes would bulge out in fury when he lost his temper, was known to his family and friends as Clarence.
Occasionally, a small detail of a life that unfolded away from the blackboard would make itself known. I was drinking with a couple of girls from school at a bar that was known for its gay clientèle, and that was extremely lax when it came to checking the ages of its patrons. I was 15 at the time and probably looked younger. We happened to catch sight of a pair of older teachers – a man and a women – socialising with their partners. They looked at us as if to say: 'We won't tell if you won't'. It is possible they thought that we were also gay (in fact one of us was though this was a secret at the time).
Very few of the teachers who hailed from this ebbing era took pains to conceal the less desirable aspects of their character. If someone was a sadist, or a pervert, or prone to disproportionate rage, then that side of them was at least partly visible.
A religious education teacher, whose name I daren't speak, lest I summon her unquiet ghost, was a bitter Irish catholic, with fizzy red hair and a mean, pinched face. She wore a fur coat that I am inclined to think was real, simply because it resembled a garment that had been cobbled together from the pelts scraps of many different species. I can't believe that anyone with access to fake fur would create something so ugly. She openly despised men and once spent a good portion of an R.E. Lesson describing, with relish, her son's medically-required circumcision.
Mr O'Donnell was a barely-functioning alcoholic. By the afternoon, he would be so drunk that the first five minutes of any lesson immediately after the lunch break would be lost to his attempts at aligning the key to the classroom with the door lock. He would insist on doing this himself and would become enraged if you offered assistance. In class, he would lose his temper very quickly and attempt to scare us back into obedience with his photographs of public beheadings that had been taken in one or more of the Arabic states.
Mr Rye was a tall man – I would estimate six and a half feet – with a long neck that gave him the appearance of a tortoise that had been deprived of its shell. He would write questions down on the chalkboard. Then, with minimal input from the classroom, he would write the answer underneath. We would copy both into our exercise books. At arbitrary points during a lesson he would deviate into the kind of rambling anecdote that you might hear at the bar of a provincial yacht club, concerning some amusing incident that had occurred while him and his wife were on holiday abroad. He would conclude these tales with self-indulgent laughter that most closely resembled a nasal crow caw. At the end of each lesson, we would hand in our books to be graded. A pointless exercise since they contained exactly the same information, phrased in exactly the same manner. They would be returned to us, the following week, marked out of ten according to where we sat in the classroom. Halfway through the year, everyone's grade went up a point. Following our exams, when our true abilities as students of geography suddenly gained an objective footing, he rearranged the seating in the classroom to reflect this new reality.
When I entered into secondary education, at the age of 11, these eccentrics, oddballs, and sociopaths were shuffling into retirement. They departed without fanfare, a few at a time, at the end of each academic year. When I happily walked through those school gates, for the final time, at the age of eighteen, they were all long gone. Though some of them were frightening individuals, who would make it abundantly clear if they disliked you, in hindsight, I learned more about life from them than I did from the teachers who followed after. With a couple of notable exceptions, the knowledge they imparted seemed more grounded – more aligned to their own interests and experiences, and less tethered to an obvious curriculum.
The deputy headmaster, Mr Hounsel, was a man who I falsely recall as being perpetually clad in a duffle coat and woollen gloves. There was an air of public school around him, as though he had never quite outgrown the role of head prefect. At the school carol service, which was held in the Baptist Church across the road, he would give a dramatic reading of The Journey of the Magi by “T... S... Eliot”. He would gather up the letters of the poet's surname and speak them almost all at once. He would utter the final line “I should be glad of another death,” as though he was a man who had come to the end of some harrowing personal narrative, that weighs so heavily upon his soul that it can only be delivered to a listener in profile, with head bowed down in reflection.
Douglas Hounsel (Dougie, but never to his face) is long gone from this world. His annual Christmastime performance, which endures in my memory as a beginning and an end, along with a disembodied line about the camels lying down in the snow, surfaced in my thoughts a couple of days ago.
In the distant past, three men (it is assumed that there were three, though it is never directly stated. In common with much that is in the Bible they may have been purely allegorical) bearing three undeniably allegorical gifts, embarked upon an arduous pilgrimage; one that was defined by a celestial object and the promise of a new heavenly order.
By comparison I am an uncomplicated soul. My tastes are cheap and tawdry. I have no use for gold, frankincense, or myrrh, symbolic or otherwise. I pay no mind to any seismic shifts that might occur among the higher spiritual powers. My pleasures are simple and are mostly the result of me following my own nose. Early on an insignificant Tuesday, in December, 2023, in an uncanny inversion of that great biblical journey (mentioned and then discarded within a few sentences in the gospel of Matthew. I intend to be more verbose) I was one man attempting a trio of pilgrimages over the course of a single morning; the only common ground being that they all lay within a long stone's throw of an unfamiliar bus route.
Long before the sun was up, I had already walked into town and boarded the number 28 from Southend to Basildon. I had taken a seat in darkness that, coaxed by the ignition and the ensuing rumble of the engine, juddered into an unforgiving glare, exposing every last flaw and blemish of passengers, who funnelled their attention onto the screens of their silent phones, or into the neutral spaces in-between the gazes of others, or to the windows that had been turned opaque black under the harsh illumination, so that even when we did get moving it felt theoretical. I put the side of my hand up against the glass, screening out the overhead light, revealing, beyond the lingering partial reflection of my own visage, an amorphous dust-scuffed patch of the outside world that was scrolling past, seemingly isolated from anything around it, as if I was looking at an indistinct vision glimpsed inside a crystal ball, while I tried to pick out those landmarks that would tell me when I was approaching my stop. A brightly lit Tesco metro suddenly loomed into view. Too late to press the stop button, but the bus pulled in anyway to gather up waiting passengers.
I following the meanderings of Rushbottom Lane through a late 20th century suburb of Thundersley that had spread out around the foot of Bread and Cheese Hill; past St George's – a long church that was constructed during the early 1960s when the area was still predominantly cow pasture. It must have seemed out of place when it was first built, before the community that it was intended to serve grew up around it. If it weren't for the low spire, that consists of bare metals rods and hoops and resembles the upper half of a navigational buoy, and the giant cross that adorns the tiled wall that faces onto the road, you could mistake the building for cheap chalet accommodation.
A barren underpass, that looked like it had been recently swept, undercuts both lanes of the busy A130. Angled strip-lighting cast the shadowy suggestion of bars onto the grubby pale-blue walls.
Beyond it lies one of those pockets of countryside that have survived the converging sprawl of Basildon and Southend. Electricity pylons marching in single file across the bare fields; the main road shored-up on the embankment marking out a gradual bend; the Harrow Road Bridle Path collaged in fallen leaves, clodded with fresh horseshit. Beyond the wiry branches that weave loosely together above the trail, a flight of honking geese passed low overhead on a south-easterly bearing. Blue rope swings dangled from the boughs of a tree, rooted in the centre of an elongated puddle that showed a glassy reflection of the heavens. The path dwindled into Harrow Road; actually more of a dead-end lane, intermittently lined with residences that give off a rural masonic air. I only say that because the last time I was there, a placard had been fastened to one of the telegraph poles – a photograph of two elderly men and a young woman, taken at some formal occasions – a wedding perhaps. Underneath, some writing:
William Cooper
A good servant of the Lord
Underneath that, a separate placard displayed the Cooper coat of arms – a pair of rampant lions crossed by a trio of crescent moons. I don't want to get into a pissing contest, then again, when you get right down into the nuts and bolts of heraldry, that's what it is – a pissing contest - my clan is better than your clan. The Heald coat of arms (that's my mother's side of the family) is bad ass (malus asinus, in Latin, presumably). The crest is a sword, pointed upward, crossed over a key. The shield is decorated by a trio of firebombs and a trio of gold coins.
I headed along another footpath, this one so barely-used that a fallen tree had formed a diagonal barrier partway along. I suspect that it might have been left there intentionally to dissuade motorcyclists from using the trail as a shortcut. Ahead, visible through a wreath of shrubbery, I could see the traffic blurring past on the A127. From somewhere off to the north-west the agitated barking of a dog carried on incessantly.
I followed the pavement that skirts the busy London-bound carriageway, passing a sign offering the opportunity to purchase hot tubs 100 yards hence. Soon after, behind a grey brick wall, spikedby a row of green railings, a square hot-tub with rounded, faux-wood-panelled corners, the interior compartmentalised and studded with a multitude of chrome jets, stood on its side in monolithic pose, facing the traffic. The barking of the dog was getting louder all the time, until finally, I saw it, on the opposite side of the road, behind one of those long wheeled gates that guard business premises; an alsatian warding off the passing vehicles. I wondered whether, in the mind of the animal, its barking was the only thing that was keeping the cars moving; that if stopped, even for a moment, then the drivers might also stop and attempt to gain entry.
I reached my destination five minutes before it opened: Alton Garden Centre. A hard place to get to when you don't have a car. When I first started going there, the houseplant section was located in an annex that resembled an over-crowded Kew Garden greenhouse; a humid treasure trove of hanging baskets and potted plants, some under bright lights in pseudo-arid conditions; others islanded in plastic saucers of water that were sedimented with stray compost. It was watched over by an elderly woman who sat at what appeared to be a home-made wooden desk.
Eventually they moved the houseplants into the main building and it was never the same again; certainly never as ecologically diverse. I still own a couple of cacti from the greenhouse era. A former girlfriend used to refer to one of them 'an old man's willy' because it was covered in fine grey bristles. The sight of it would sometimes reduce her to fits of giggles. I have just put a tape measure up against that 'old man's willy' (I would like to stress here that I am still talking about the cactus). It is a virile eleven inches and, I might add, a stout 6 inches in girth.
These days, I visit Alton once a year, in December, for their Christmas decoration display, which has also evolved, from faded shop-floor mannequins press-ganged into fairytales tableaus, to dioramas that are a bit more refined but that still carry an air of surrealism – where, for example, a pride of almost life-size plush leopards (I think one of them may have been wearing a crown) are somehow representive of Las Vegas.
Alton operates on the unjudgemental credo that one man's tat is another man's treasure. There is no attempt to set a benchmark for taste, which is what makes it such a joyful place to visit and browse. Maybe you have been searching high and low for a photo print of a Maserati parked outside The Ritz, in London, where the sports car is bright orange and has tiny rhinestones embedded in the headlights, while the remainder of the picture is in black and white. If this strikes a chord, then Alton has got you covered, as it does if you want a Cliff Richard calender, or a nice woollen scarf, or a scented candle, or a life-size painted resin cast of a gorilla.
It was strange walking around the place and being the only customer among the abundant staff. It was strange too, to sit in the cafe with a cappuccino and an apple danish and to be the only person there, aside from a pair of men discussing how they might expand the range of sandwiches on offer.
You may think it foolish for someone to venture all this way on the bus, and thereafter on foot across countryside, and then along a busy and somewhat dangerous main road, just to visit a garden centre. The truth is, while I lean into Christmas hard with the decorations and the lights, I don't feel it anymore. I could happily condense the festive season down to a visit to Alton and my annual run through the BBC adaptation of The Box of Delights. Those are the two things that I look forward to now.
I went back the way I had come. Almost all the way to the bottom of Rushbottom Lane, where Church Road cuts a crooked path up the side of Bread and Cheese Hill, brushing against the flank of St Peter's Churchyard, roughly two-thirds of the way up.
A strange place Thundersley – a village consisting of scattered properties that grew rapidly into a suburb, but never entirely let go of its rural identity; those countryside eccentricities; that mistrust of interlopers. It is a place where a pavement that only ever occupies one side of a steep hillside road keeps switching back and forth, necessitating dangerous crossings on semi-blind bends. It is a place where you can stop and spy, across the road, quite a way further up the hill, a white horse staring back at you over a fence. That horse will not be pleased to see you. Even though you are very far away from it, and cut off from it by two lanes of traffic, it will toss its head and shake its shoulders at you. It has decided that it doesn’t like you. Now it wants you gone.
I have two sets of great grandparents buried in the sprawling hillside churchyard at St Peter's: Ada (who I knew as Gummy) and her husband, whose name escapes me, lived on Downer Road North, in a bungalow with an orchard in the back garden, one road south from where they were laid to rest. The house is gone now and the road has been paved. I have never been able to locate their graves. My mother recalls them being buried in adjacent plots. I remember a grave on the flat part of the cemetery, surrounded by a stone border that was filled with chips of frosted green glass. There are hundreds just like it, most of them missing their headstones, which wore away, or were broken-up by the elements. You see the odd one lying on its back among the fractured and disjointed edging of a grave plot that is slowly being drawn into the soil, as if the collective fate of these memorials is to also eventually be buried and thereafter absorbed into the archaeology of the place.
Henry and Lilian Heald (my grandfather's parents) are buried on one of the soft terraces where the graveyard slopes steeply downhill from the church. I assume any remains that were interred in these plots have been gradually carried downward through the earth, passing through the graves of others along the way; pieces of disembodied bone racing each other in a cycle of predetermined posthumous reincarnation; everyone ending up in a disparate heap at the bottom of the slope, like a chaotic toboggan collision on a snowy day.
A couple of years before his own death, my grandfather received a call from the church warden. His parent's headstone had been blown down in a storm. He drove to the church on Sunday afternoon, with me and my two brothers in tow. The stone was almost at the bottom of the hill. We tried to drag it back up the slope by hand, but it was too heavy, and otherwise too hard to gain a secure footing in the mud. My grandfather, who had come well-prepared, fastened a rope around the stone, the same way you tie up a parcel. We ran the rope uphill, looping it around the trunk of the tree that grew alongside the grave. Then we pulled – my grandfather, me, and my brother Simon – shifting it a few inches at a time. My brother Tom, who was too young to be involved, played by himself in the trees. Occasionally we would have to go down and manoeuvre the stone around some slight obstacle. I remember it taking us almost an hour to haul it over the brow of the terrace. My grandfather cemented it back in place. As a precaution he drove a metal stake into the ground behind it, to prevent it from falling, if it ever again came loose.
I entered the cemetery the back way. They keep the grass short around the crumbling graves. Elsewhere, nature is being allowed to take its course. At this time of year the ground is covered over by fallen leaves. I paused to get my bearings. Turning to face uphill I saw the bare metal stake, literally a few feet above me on the next terrace – still standing sentry as a precaution, though it was not needed - the stone had remained fixed in its socket.
Henry and Lilian lived hard lives. He went first, at the age of 78. She joined him a few months later, aged 82. My grandfather, despite his wealth, died at 69. His life was hard in a different way; his teenage years and young adulthood shaped by the stresses and the deprivations of war. Onto that honeycomb foundation were heaped the pressures and indulgences of a corporate environment; the long, boozy lunches; the traditional heart attack at work. Around the same time that we dragged his parent's gravestone back up the hill, he stopped purchasing wine – an indicator that he was no longer looking very far into the future. He died of bowel cancer. The last thing that he ate, in the hospice, was a bowl of vanilla ice-cream.
Near to the summit of Bread and Cheese Hill, a watchful distance from St Peter's Church, cowled in the woodland of Thundersley Glen, you will find the Devil's Steps. Unlike the village of Canewdon, situated 12 miles away to the north-east and richly steeped in the machinations of witchcraft and the occult, the folklore that has built up around this steep flight of wooded stairs is an unconvincing hodgepodge of tall tales and wild flights of fancy. There are some who say that the steps acquired their name as a result of the expletives uttered by those who were required to climb them, which those who overheard surmised were so foul they could only have issued from the mouth of the devil. There is a tale of a woman who fell from the top of the steps after she was either confronted by, or pushed by, the devil. Another story has the devil living underneath the steps.
Mount Road, which is the point of access to this largely unsung landmark, is unmade and, when I visited, was fissured with deep, clay-coloured puddles. As I contemplated the 'private road' sign, a car crawled past, its driver eyeing me with suspicion. A wooden public footpath signpost, standing in a small ditch at the junction with Mount Crescent, resembled a gallows. The writing on the signs had been blackened out. I walked a short distance along the crescent then stopped. The way ahead appeared to be blocked by somebody's garden, as if one of the owners of an adjacent property had decided to appropriate the land for themselves. The sound of angry barking to my left alerted me to the approach of a large grey dog. A tall, muscular specimen charged across the lawn of the house on the corner, and threw itself up against the wire fence. Cautiously I advanced a few feet, attempting to discern the route taken by the footpath. Beside me, the dog was becoming more and more aggressive. It seemed increasingly likely that it might scrabble over the fence and attack me. Slowly I backed away towards the junction. A large brown dog of a different breed lunged at the fence behind me. I continued to back away, retreating along Mount Road, heading for the relative safety of Bread and Cheese Hill.
The unconvincing reputation of the Devil's Steps rests upon a heaped foundation of local gossip and here-say that never really coalesced into something that might carry mythological weight. On the bus back to Southend, it occurred to me that I had added my own story to the pile. I had attempted a visit and had been driven away by hell hounds.
If there was an overlying theme to the events of that morning, then it was one of animals taking umbrage at my presence. The alsatian barking at me across the incessant traffic of the A127, the white horse infuriated by the very sight of me, and the two guard dogs whose barking hounded me all the way back to the London Road.
I think I got the message: Your family has been away from here too long. The houses where they lived have been levelled and their foundations uprooted from the ground. Their names are fading on their memorials and no longer carry any weight in these parts. The road junction that bears the name of your father’s side of the family is a confusing oddity of traffic management, as if any attempt to impose human order on the landscape is doomed to failure. Go back to Leigh-on-Sea, go back to Chalkwell and Thorpe Bay. You do not belong here.
On the outskirts of Leigh, a man and his daughter got on the bus. The little girl immediately raced all the way to the back. They disembarked a few stops later, close to St Margaret's Church, where I once attended Mrs Warner's nursery school; the girl tottering down the aisle saying “bye” to each of the passengers individually.
It was the most honest statement I heard all day, for it is likely that the two of us will never cross paths again in this life.