It seems that these days I spend a great deal of time searching for books that either feature the area where I grew up or, better still, are by local writers. Unhappily not a great many of those with a creative bent and hailing from the environs of Gravesend are inclined to writing. What is more infuriating, a number of promising volumes with Gravesend in their titles seem to emerge from a totally alien place somewhere in suburban New York. And to add insult to injury our own town suffers somewhat from the huge success of the inspired and prolific Charles Dickens. His name is the very first that is likely to emerge from a determined search.
In the 1950s all local schools seemed intent upon fully informing their students about the life and work of our best known home grown writer. This wasn’t altogether surprising as the redoubtable Mr Dickens’ fame had certainly spread further by far than the area in which he had been born and raised and once we fully realised that, most of us could see the logic in spending time on him. Despite all that, Dickens was hard work for nine and ten year olds, even those who regularly read for entertainment as some of us did in those days before ipads and mobile phones. We could manage the Christmas stories well enough and even a few chapters featuring children of similar age suffering greater hardship than ourselves but a great deal of Dickens’ literary genius was wasted on us.
We knew absolutely nothing of Joseph Conrad who, by stretching a point or two, could also be considered a Local Writer. I am reliably informed that he wrote most of `Heart of Darkness’ whilst living in Gravesend and in fact the book begins there. Conrad was not a true local lad of course and apparently hailed from The Ukraine which was still a place most of us had never heard of.
By the time we were eleven or twelve we had even heard of Chaucer and knew he was responsible for `The Canterbury Tales’ and that the band of colourful pilgrims he spoke of must have at least brushed past our riverside town on their journey. We couldn’t have claimed him as a Local, however. For one thing he came from London and his focus town of Canterbury was about forty miles distant and a very tedious bus ride. But lack of Gravesend literature simply means casting the net a little wider.
When the overall dearth of North Kent writing is considered you can imagine the excitement generated in the last day or two when I stumbled across Brian Dillon’s `The Great Explosion’ telling the story of the catastrophe that ended the lives of over a hundred people in the early years of the twentieth century. Sinead discovered it in her local Islington library in North London. A book, set on the North Kent Marshes and practically on our doorstep. Dillon is a brilliant story teller and recreates the disaster in excruciatingly compelling detail. And as a lover of the area he evokes with clarity the remarkable landscape. To read it brings back childhood memories with a jolt so unexpected that the marshland smells are once again astonishingly real.
This ancient marshland is a special place and a childhood acquaintance with it leaves an impression that is never erased. Writer friend Jennifer Barraclough, now living in Auckland, whose own childhood was spent in Gravesend, fervently agrees. Her 2019 novel `You Yet Shall Die’ is set in the area and family secrets are revealed against a background all Gravesenders would immediately recognise and respond to. Jennifer and I are in complete agreement that considering the compelling allure of the area it is surprising that it does not attract more enduring links with literature. Perhaps she and I simply have to concentrate on writing more ourselves!
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