It was lovely waking up in the Hastings B'n'B for my girlfriend's birthday, in the big brass bed, and the harmonious, human proportions of a Georgian bedroom, the big bay window looking out at a mediaeval flint church and its little garden full of bushes and trees with witchy ribbons tied in their branches.
At the table by that window, the endearing artist couple brought us waffles and maple syrup, him with his waistcoat and curly moustache; such a lovely room, in the home of a whole family of artists, and walking down the rickety old stairs, past their studio and their kitchen and their coat racks, we couldn't help but imagine the possibilities of a better life here, beyond the increasingly deranged demands the capital makes on its citizens, its sky-high rents and half million pound ex-council flats you grind yourself into exhaustion to barely afford ...
Though it was out of season, midweek in winter, the Old Town retained its higgledy piggledy old world charm, and even, I would suggest, its enchanted, if ever so slightly spooky, sense of magic; its winding old weatherboarded streets full of curios and bric-a-brac, pubs garlanded with dried hop bushes round old wooden beams and images of the green man carved in ancient wood, and we really fancied coming to the May Day Jack-O-The-Green celebrations, where people get painted green and dress up in rags and leaves and get very drunk on Sussex and Kent's best bitter ...
We wended our way up these handsome old streets, all Georgian stucco and mediaeval timber, huddled inbetween two hills; we wandered up to the West Hill with its ruined silhouette of a castle, keeping watch for a thousand years, governing the channel crossing the Normans had come and conquered from (the Battle of Hastings actually took place in a village called Battle, the previous stop on the train from London). From this lovely, serene green hilltop, the horizon was high, and the sea was huge and blue, beyond St Leonard's, and all the way along the curve of the coast to Beachy Head and Eastbourne in the magnificent distance ...
We headed back down to the Old Town, through a smugglers' winding alley, through a strange tunnel with a doorway to Harpsichord House, a rambling pile that looked like it was straight out of a Hammer Horror film, back down the high street and across to the beach, but not before the tacky hook-a-duck amusements and greasy chippies that fringe it, and then the ramshackle black-tarred sheds of the Hastings fishermen, Fresh Fish painted on one shed, a fearsome, naive portrait of Bluebeard on the other, with the legend Whoever Gets Hanged Deserved It beneath his fiery eyes and pigtails ...
It's on this stretch of shingle beach, in the long shadows of those strange black fishing sheds, incredibly tall and slender and foreboding, a Victorian top hat of a shed, among the swooping, squawking seagulls trying to nick your battered cod and chips, that Hastings most fully feels resolutely and distinctively itself: not Brighton, not Margate, not Whitstable - Hastings, the one and only; and that chilly winter's afternoon I think we both made a wish that we could one day call this beach home, looking out at the vast eternal blue from that particular spot, there and nowhere else.
Words by Michael Smith
Image courtesy of Hastings TouristInformation
Add a comment