The tide runs out, Pat McCabe snacks, and going west of Walthamstow
With Richard Negus, Oliver Smith and Patrick McCabe
I’ve been thinking about good fortune, lately. The spring sunshine is so bright; the world is such a challenging place. But I’m lucky; I always try to be aware of that.
Another Lockerbie drama is coming to our screens: The Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, a six-part series, drops on BBC on May 18. It will tell ‘the untold story of the Scots-US investigation into the attack’. You may already have seen Lockerbie: The Search for Truth on Apple TV, which starred Colin Firth; a four-part CNN Originals documentary aired in February; last year’s After the Sky Fell on Lockerbie traced the impact of the disaster of this small Scottish community.
There have been so many horrors in the world since. Yet the Lockerbie bombing retains a peculiar resonance. So many young people headed home for Christmas. Rumours of warnings received and unheeded. A crime scene that stretched for 845 square miles. Persistence in the search for truth.
I flew home to New York from London on December 20, 1988. Pan Am flight 103: it was almost a commuter flight for students abroad, as air travel had become cheap and easy and safe. A few weeks earlier, I’d sat in STA Travel on a high street — that’s how we booked our tickets, back then — and dithered about my dates. The 20th or the 21st? I was safely home when Pan Am 103 was blasted from the sky the following day, killing 259 passengers and crew — 190 were Americans — and 11 people on the ground.
Maybe we all have a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God go I story, even if we don’t believe in God. A choice you made that you didn’t even recognise was a choice. I knew one of the passengers on that plane slightly; she was in the year ahead of me at my New York school. Her parents’ story so radically different from that of my parents: one set of lives derailed, another heading forward into the future.
It is only luck, sometimes. All we can do is be grateful and consider our next action, even if that’s just opening the door for a stranger or offering a smile when someone looks sad. Life goes on, we say lightly when things are tough. We’re so fortunate that it does.
Erica Wagner
Editor-at-Large
The Bombing of Flight 103 airs on BBC One on May 18
A change in the tide
Richard Negus on the evolution of his home
First it was the Danes and then the Dutch who tried their best to do their worst for Southwold. After that it was fire, then the Germans, and then the sea. The North Sea is a persistent and heartless neighbour. This notion of a place, scarred by battle, invasion and the forces of nature, runs counter to the bucolic visage most associate with such a beloved seaside resort. William Camden, writing in 1578, said of Southwold “it lieth in the plain, full against the open shore of the sea”. ‘Sole’ has long been the home-place of my maternal family. As far as records go, we know there were Wells’s here in 1750. Most likely there were more in preceding generations, long before James Wells made it onto the parish register; but the fisherfolk then, just as now, were a forgotten people.
As individuals, men like James were deemed inconsequential by the grander burghers, yet the herring, the sprats and flat fish, they caught in Sole Bay made the town, both financially and physically. So valuable was this haul, that it transformed Southwold from merely a beach on which to haul boats (with accompanying shacks), to a place of note. It was fish and fishing that were overwhelmingly responsible for the erection of Southwold’s mighty church of St Edmund, between 1460 -1490. The Town’s dependence on the sea’s harvest was noted by Daniel Defoe when he visited in the 1720s “This is a small port-town upon the coast, at the mouth of a little river call’d the Blith (Blyth): I found no business the people here were employ’d in, but the fishery... for herrings and sprats; which they cure by the help of smoak”.
As the sea borne local economy grew, so did the population. Rows of private cottages were built, followed by corporation housing, then grander villas and mansions. The latter were sited on prominent points, invariably with coastal views. A prosperous upper middle class demographic ‘discovered’ the Town. Southwold by the end of the 19th century bustled, retaining its industrious older self and, but it had also become a popular retirement location for those who’d made money elsewhere and connections to London were possible thanks to a regular paddle steamer. The narrow gauge Southwold railway rattled its ponderous way, sending fish to the mainline station at Halesworth, returning with a cargo of holiday makers. The shifting coastline, wild marshes, quaint Greens, promenade and pier blended with the existing trades of the Town. In 1909, 761 fishing boats, including a large number from Scotland, used Southwold harbour as a base from which to fish for herring. A small army of Scottish women came south each season to prepare and pack the ‘silver darlings’ as the oily fish was known. By 1912, the mixed economy based on and in support of fishing and tourism saw Southwold boom. The Town now boasted plentiful businesses, including: six grocers, one brewery, two rope makers, 122 apartment house owners, three antique dealers, seven bakers, two dressmakers, three doctors surgeries, three ironmongers, two boat builders and a photographer.
When Britain goes to war the coast is hardest bitten. Southwold discovered this in the aftermath of the Kaiser’s declaration of hostilities in 1914. The Town changed forever, physically from Zeppelin raids and the fallen whose names appear on the war memorial outside St Edmunds church. Financial ruin came via the German Naval blockade which ensured few fishing boats put out; those that did rarely left the safety of the bay to hunt herring in the North Sea. This coincided with a natural decline in the herring stocks. The ancillary fishing industries dwindled. Much of the workforce had already left the Town, recruited into the Royal Navy or as in the case of my grandfather Roly Wells, to the mud of the Western Front with The Suffolk Regiment. The Town he returned to in 1918, still carrying shrapnel in his head, was alien. The herring industry was gone.
Richard Negus is a hedgelayer and conservationist. His debut book, Words from the Hedge, which is all about rural people, conservation, and lost culture was published earlier this month
On the latest episode of the Boundless podcast, Patrick Galbraith talks to Richard Negus about hedgelaying, nature writing, and the disconnect between the urban and rural sphere.
Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Flying over Coppermill Lane
Oliver Smith takes a ritual walk west from Walthamstow
Harvey Dalton Johnson made a first fateful decision in the early days of World War II, crossing the border to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, fighting facism at a time when his fellow Americans stayed neutral. A second fateful decision came one Sunday in November 1942, as he was flying his Spitfire over Walthamstow and heard the engine cut out. He could bail out and watch his fighter crash into residential streets. Or, he could stay on board to try to glide it onto the edge of the Lea Valley – an empty expanse where the only death would be his own. He ‘rode a blazing plane to a hero's death’ according to an AP report. His plane had been low enough for residents to see his face.
For saving these Victorian terraces – quite possibly the one I live in now – Dalton’s sacrifice was honoured with a portrait at the local primary school, where he grins, martyred against fluffy white clouds. The area has changed much since residents looked up that November day. It has gentrified in the 12 years I’ve been here. Yet that empty plot he sighted from the cockpit is much as it ever was – a no man's land in inner city London, a patchwork of playing fields and reservoirs, padlocked substations and whirring pylons, plus the overgrowth and undergrowth and what passes for nature within the North Circular. I walk across it about twice a week on Coppermill Lane.
Coppermill Lane is a narrow road that runs for about a mile across the Lea Valley, linking Walthamstow and Clapton. It is a road with a sense of humour. A motorist can drive it west from Walthamstow to the edge of Clapton – whereupon the lane abruptly terminates at a locked gate. Also on the route is a booby trap: a railway bridge that offers a meagre 5ft of clearance. A passing Transit would get written off, a cyclist going too fast would get a concussion. Even walkers have to assume an odd penitential stoop to pass beneath the girders. They look, sometimes, like pilgrims entering some holy cave.
Here, you soon understand Coppermill Lane wasn’t meant for idle strolls – even less for through traffic. It is a thoroughfare to service the infrastructure of the capital, and is trodden by people with hard hats, clipboards and hi-vis.
Oliver Smith is the author of On This Holy Land: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain which published in 2024
What I was doing when I should have been writing: a series on distraction
The great Patrick McCabe, whose remarkable novel, Goldengrove, has just been published by Unbound, shares some details of what he gets up to (or what he wishes he could get up to) when he should be at the keyboard
There is nothing I like better than going to triple features and being sat in the dark of what used to be the Ritzy in Brixton armed to the teeth with a stack of munchies which includes Lion Bars, Maltesers and 1 pkt crisps, plus cola and assimilating all the allegorical nuances of 70's shadow thrashers such as Ulzana’s Raid by Robert Aldritch, a good squad of Pam Griers beauties such as Coffy and Foxy Brown before nipping out to acquire a further pkt of Rolo and being back just in time to enjoy the staccato bam bam bam of the Pearl and Dean concerto advertising finest home cuisine except now in the high street plus fags to smoke and booze to purchase with your Diners Club card just as a bunch of forthcoming attractions arrive including Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the greatest movie ever made by Sam Peckinpah but as I am happily enjoying the publication of my novel Goldengrove here in Dublin it will have to be projected on a screen at the back of my mind with the assistance of one large Jameson and a pint of Guinness for my companion here in the beat up white suit, Warren Oates.
Pat McCabe’s Goldengrove, a dark satire about a theatrical agency acting as a front for British counter-terrorism in 1960s Dublin, has just been published by Unbound