Looking south from my childhood bedroom, the horizon was never dark, even on the gloomiest of nights in the depths of winter. Even during power cuts, which seemed to occur much more often than they do now, the row of bright lights remained undimmed. They belonged to the two nuclear power stations that stand on the coast at Dungeness.
Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.
Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.
Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:
“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”
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