Sinclair McKay

Ghosts of the past

Sinclair McKay on Estuary, by Rachel Lichtenstein, and London In Fragments, by Ted Sandling

You find it in the vistas of skeletal metal gangways, the abandoned 18th-century forts, the squat oil holders and rusted pipelines, the pale reeds of the marshes, the barbed wire, the peeling housing estates, the lonely river paths. You hear it in the thick silence by the water, broken only by the wide river slurping and slopping against the embankment. There is something in the landscape of the Thames estuary that is curiously and powerfully uncanny.

But how can that be in the otherwise earthy county of Essex? This is one of the subterranean themes of Rachel Lichtenstein’s electrifying exploration of the estuary. What ought to be a grey stretch of post-industrial England is in fact rich in eerie poetry. During the middle of one howlingly stormy night, as the author huddles in her bunk in a pitching boat tied to the lower decking of Southend pier, the banging of hull against wood is accompanied by more frightening, hallucinatory noises — ‘the clamour of a great crowd of people crying out in fear. I could distinguish a woman’s scream, the dreadful noise of children sobbing.’ And Lichtenstein is not alone; her cabin-mate can hear the voices too. They are forced to take their sleeping bags into the boat’s hold to escape the ghosts. Southend pier is apparently infested with them.

This is also a working river with the most extraordinary depth of history; from the Romans sailing in and laying the foundations for the Londinium property boom, to the ships that later sailed out into the world to create the British empire. Here is the sunken SS Richard Montgomery just off the Isle of Sheppey: it’s an American second world war boat, still laden with a massive quantity of explosives altogether too tricky and delicate to retrieve, and which could still blow up at any minute, resulting in a Southend-engulfing tsunami.

There are still cockle-fishers here at Leigh-on-Sea, as there have been for generations; Lichtenstein movingly chronicles just how precarious and indeed dangerous their working lives are.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in