Six Facets of Light by Ann Wroe

Author:Ann Wroe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473523630
Publisher: Random House

CATCH AS CATCH CAN

‘I can’t recognise that,’ says Jack to George. ‘Can you make it out?’

‘No, I can’t recognise it. Not at all,’ agrees George.

The two old men are sitting at a corner table in the sun lounge of the Birling Gap café, a mile or so west of Beachy Head. It is a winter Friday afternoon; they are in no hurry to finish their tea. They have wind-beaten faces and silver hair and wear many layers of matted wool, like fishermen. From their slow, ambling talk, they turn out to be retired policemen. This was their patch in the old days: a terrace of drab Victorian coastguard houses slowly tumbling down the cliff, the café with a chain-link fence along the precipitous edge, and the steep metal steps down to the beach. At the top of the steps is a planking deck where a few small girls, armed with chunks of chalk, are carefully sketching out six-pointed stars.

Ravilious knew it well.1 In October 1927 he bought a postcard of the Devil’s Chimney at Beachy Head by moonlight, above the lower lighthouse with its great beam shining, and drew on the tip of the pinnacle a lean young man reading a book. ‘The stylite meditating is not a self-portrait – not this time,’ he wrote, though it certainly looked like him. Some years later, from roughly the same spot (‘a projecting bit of cliff about four yards square’), he fervently admired ‘an immense bar of light on the sea [that] is splendid and must be done’. His postcard stylite, however, was contemplating a huge full-breasted cartoon Venus, rising from the regular moonlit waves with gladly open arms.

Venus would cause a commotion in the café and a minor tsunami on the beach; but Jack and George are looking resolutely the other way, as though they have had enough of the wide, pale, winking sea. They are staring instead at a large wall-mounted photograph of the Birling Gap Ravilious knew. It shows a Scout camp of a dozen tents on the clifftop, a run of high, square cars on the road, and a different tea room on the edge. They struggle to remember it.

‘That’s not this bit of cliff,’ says Jack. ‘It doesn’t look right.’

George wonders. Cliffs crumble and fall very fast round here. The Devil’s Chimney went long ago; in a few weeks even this sun lounge will be gone, declared unsafe, together with the steps to the shore. But that is not what Jack means.

‘You know the place where the pulley was, with the sacks that went down to the beach? I don’t recognise it.’

It emerges that he means the sacks to haul up heavy contraband, or flotsam, or the dead bodies – shipwrecks or suicides – that are cast up here by weather and by cruel, tricking light. Some of those were the unknowns who lie at Friston, washed ashore among the white chalk, all along this coast. On a happier note there have been wrecks of timber; wrecks

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