Nostalgia for old, rundown coastal Sussex

Sally Bayley’s The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history. In her excellent memoir Girl with Dove (2018), she wrote about her neglected childhood in the coastal Sussex town of Littlehampton. Here she returns to the same locality, but considers her forebears, embroidering episodes from her own rackety childhood into the lives of her ancestors and local people. The title refers to a hostel on the corner of the lane where Bayley grew up. Its owner, Mary Neal, opened it up to factory girls from London. This is the central image of the book, encapsulating themes of wealth and poverty, town and country, the limitations placed on women throughout the 20th century, and how they worked and cared for each other, or didn’t. The Green Lady is a force of compassion, but a complicated one.

I grew up in Sussex in the 1980s and 1990s, and my world almost overlapped with Bayley’s. It was a peculiar place. The run-down amusement parks of Littlehampton were a stone’s throw from the idyll of Climping, while the conurbation that begins in the east with Brighton was stretching along the coast, encroaching on the farms and valleys of the Downs. Bayley renders this liminal place both enchanted and menacing. Weaving in local legends of the Lyminster Worm and Lobb’s Wood (which we learnt at my now long-defunct prep school Rosemead), she reminds us about a pupil who was found hanging from a tree in an unexplained accident. She evokes the down-at-heel gentility of the seafront parades where the actress Margaret Rutherford liked to holiday, contrasting it with the real poverty she experienced as a child, when menacing men holding cans of beer might appear at any moment.