Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ lost in some unknown place, not knowing how to get home; it was the same sense of abandonment I felt when, lying in my top bunk in the bedroom I now shared with my two grown-up brothers, I heard in my head ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, and realised for the first time, with a sudden and sharp pain, the reality of loss.

      Marshalled into lines and into the building that was to be home for half my waking life, we filed into long glazed corridors of creaking floorboards smelling of polish and chalk and ink and leather. At the end was the hallway to the chapel, and as we trooped down to Mass we would catch sight of the dark interior of the old house beyond. To cross this point was forbidden. Occasionally, a monk would pass through the connecting door, allowing a glimpse of a stark domesticity. I imagined the monks’ bedrooms to be bare, with iron bedsteads, crucifixes and bedside tracts – whereas the prosaic truth was probably the deputy headmaster with his feet up, reading Sporting Life over a glass of whisky.

      Crippen was said to have tailor-made leather straps hanging on the wall of his office, each whimsically named after his ‘girlfriends’ and ready to punish any transgression. He was the most worldly in an eccentric staffroom of characters easily baited by the ingenious cruelty of schoolboys: the shell-shocked language teacher whom we’d tease by imitating exploding bombs; another well-meaning brother who taught maths and whose fury was kept under control only by his undoubted devotion; and a physics master who, it was claimed, had helped invent the aerosol. He may have been a genius, but we could hardly care less. It was our duty, like prisoners of war, to taunt a chalky-cassocked and leather-patched cast who would not have been out of place in Nicholas Nickleby. The sense of them and us, of prisoners and wardens, was emphasised by our uniforms and their cassocks. The wooded grounds provided cover for our transgressions, a place to smoke illicit cigarettes and conduct other experiments, not all of them the kind that even the deputy’s girlfriends could dissuade.

      In front of the school buildings, once gracious but now shaggy lawns sloped down to a series of turf banks dividing the school from its playing fields below. We were barred from the manicured grass in front of the White House itself, under which it was rumoured tunnels ran. One came out under the library; others we could only speculate about in our prisoner-of-war fantasies. As my best friend, Peter, and I trespassed in the cellars, he told me – and I had no reason to doubt him – that one tunnel led far out under the playing fields, down and down until it reached the distant shore of Netley.

In a Lonely Place

      … The shores fringed with oak to the very margin, and studded with the fairest vestiges of magnificence and modern comfort, seem to connect the past with the present, like the wild yet bewitching imagery of a poet’s dream.

      MARY RUSSELL MITFORD

      visiting Southampton Water, 1812

      From its shore, the slow-moving estuary seems like the Loch Ness of my dream. The gently rippling surface belies its length and width, a foreshortened trick of the eye as deceptive as the calm surface of the fathomless Scottish lake. It is a liminal space, a place of possibilities, evocative of the deep oceans that lie beyond.

      But Southampton Water is an unlikely place to find a sea monster, although occasionally the sinister, half-submerged black bulk of a submarine slips silently out of its military port. Neither sea nor river, this sinuous inlet reaches deep into England’s underbelly like a gynaecologist’s finger. Stoppered at one end by the Isle of Wight, the island is believed to bounce the moon-dragged sea back up the estuary, creating the watery déjà vu of Southampton’s unique double high tides (in fact it is the result of the port’s midway point on the Channel, combined with the Atlantic Pulse and the relative positions of the sun and moon).

      Fed by the Atlantic Pulse, it is a fortuitous piece of geography. ‘A seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land,’ extolled one nineteenth-century promoter of its virtues. Here the great Hampshire rivers of the Itchen and the Test conjoin, their chalk-filtered fresh waters mingling in the salt of the seaway. Like the Pool of London at the beginning of Marlow’s journey in Heart of Darkness, in which ‘the sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway’, Southampton Water has always promised adventure and commerce, a country’s past and future. To incomers it was the Gateway to England; to the inhabitants, it became the ‘Gateway to the Empire’. From here too England reaches out into the dark heart of other lands.

      Centuries have passed through this inseminal conduit. From Roman barges to ocean liners; from plague ships to Pilgrim Fathers; from French marauders to Hollywood film stars; from Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, laden with Spanish gold for the Virgin Queen, to Goering’s bombers, heavy with a deadlier cargo. Enemies or tourists, missionaries or immigrants, they all entered or left the land here, and in some other age their phantoms are still processing along Southampton Water: the stately red and black hulk of Titanic, crewed by the men of Spike Island; the speed boat piloted by T. E. Lawrence, the doomed hero of Arabia; the flying boat in whose leather seats was strapped the aesthete, the Honourable Stephen Tennant, on course for the tamarisk-lined shores and pink sunsets of the Riviera. Here they pass for ever, these pale, mortal, glamorous ghosts, unobserved by the cars that speed along Weston Shore.

      When Weston’s housing estate was built in the 1950s, the council tried to turn the shore into a resort. Like the strand made in the shadow of the Tower of London for Cockneys to swim off, a beach was created and an esplanade was constructed, studded at intervals with shelters built like waiting rooms for a railway which would never come. Old photographs show holiday makers in their Sunday best, strolling the prom, children paddling at the water’s edge.

      Nowadays Weston Shore, at the bottom of the hill from Sholing, seems a grey parody of a place. The shelters’ windows were long ago shattered and the beach reclaimed by banks of shingle and scrubby grass. Here the land lies low, and often floods, as if to mark its transition from the city’s edge to the woods ahead, where the road inclines to leave the shore through a tunnel of trees, and from where it rises then falls again, gently and without due ceremony, into the village of Netley. Even now, those few hundred yards act like a timeslip, a fault in the chronology; as though, having passed through this interzone, you have left one world for another. The concrete tower blocks at your back and the ancient woodland ahead only serve to make Netley’s past all the more extraordinary.

      Netley extends the tongue of land that begins at Sholing, bounded by the Itchen and Southampton Water on one side and the Hamble river on the other, the borders of Spike Island. Half ceded from the coastline, this peninsula is occupied by villages which long ago lost their discrete identities to new housing and the out-of-town developments spreading along the motorway corridor – the visible symptom of what Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘subtopia’. Subsumed by light industry, yachting marinas and modern estates, it is a place of retreat and recreation; a faithless culture that seems to have no other aim than the nearest shopping opportunity. It is as though England lost its way in this cul-de-sac; as if it gave up keeping the barbarian at bay.

      Nothing happens here now. But once it did.

      In 1826, during one of his ‘rural rides’, William Cobbett called on the Chamberlaynes at Weston Grove, their marine villa on the shores of Southampton Water. The estate is now only discernible by stately cedars among the council houses and the traces of a carriage drive in neighbouring Mayfield Park, but in its brief century of existence it epitomised the area’s Georgian gentility, a time when the eastern banks of the water were studded with such mansions.

      William Chamberlayne had built the house, where he lived with his sister, in 1802, on land inherited from his close friend and neighbour, Thomas Lee СКАЧАТЬ