I spent St George’s Day watching Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. The film is an apocalypse of sorts. It reveals what is to come. More importantly, it reveals what is already here. An opening monologue tries to pin down the moment when soul leaves body: “We pull the curtains tight over the dawn and shiver by empty grates. The household gods have departed, no one remembers quite when… The oaks died this year. On every green field mourners stand and weep for the Last of England.”
In 1986, a year before The Last of England was released, Jarman purchased a home by the sea. Prospect Cottage is a small wooden house clinging to the shingle ribbon at Dungeness. The walls are black, the door and window frames gorse yellow. An excerpt from John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” is picked out on one wall: “Sawcy Pedantique wretch, goe chide / late schoole boyes and sore prentices…” Today the cottage has become something of a meme. Its neat proportions and stark location do well on Instagram, and you can buy a Prospect Cottage model kit for the aspiring hermit in your life. Jarman, always suspicious of the heritage industry, would laugh.
Dungeness is a place for fishermen and ascetics. Stone, sky, sea. The place is bound by water, with the English Channel to one side and the flat weirdness of Romney Marsh to the other. Dungeness is England stripped naked. Everything is on show. The little cottages crouch in the lee of a defunct nuclear power station and the horizon is swagged with power lines. Migrants arrive in rubber dinghies every summer now. What do they make of it? Relics of industry, toy houses, the click and shift of shingle beneath their feet. Is this what they expected?
The Last of England was a response to the paint-by-numbers neoliberalism of Britain in the late Eighties. It was also the record of a personal apocalypse. Jarman was dying from Aids and so were most of his friends. He feared that England’s memory was being wiped, just as the collective memory of his own generation was erased by death. And what was left? Cold hearths and dead oaks. Some scenes, in which balaclava-clad men brutalise emaciated prisoners, could be spliced into a nuclear war film like Threads with ease. The departure of the household gods is not an end, but a chilling new start.
A different man might have retreated to postcard England. A Cotswolds bolthole, perhaps, all buttery stone and Britain in Bloom awards. Instead he chose Dungeness. The bleak landscape pulled at him, as did the austere charm of Prospect Cottage. Although he still spent time in London, the city had become a degraded husk. Hampstead Heath seems to have been the only place in London he enjoyed, largely for its Arcadian atmosphere after dark. The rest of the capital was a drab blend of drunks and traffic.
The southern countryside wasn’t much better: “Poor ruined Kent with its ugly commuter towns, there every field and hedgerow is under siege.” Dungeness was different. While the busy-bodies had arrived — Jarman mourned the appearance of unnecessary fences and the replacement of the red phone box with a modern glass version — the place retained its essential character. Like Hampstead Heath, Dungeness had texture. It was still England.
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