The next day we drove to Bodiam Castle, everyone’s idea of a perfect medieval castle, complete with its moat, symmetrical layout in very good repair, round towers, working portcullis and murder holes, and exceptional views of pastoral Sussex. Then it was on to the coast to see the site of the Battle of Hastings, actually at Senlac, some distance inland, where King Harold was defeated and killed by the invading Duke William of Normandy in 1066. Senlac “Hill” is now merely an undistinguished ridge, and it is difficult to imagine, 900 years later, Saxon warriors holding the hill with the invaders waiting for them to make their inevitable fatal downhill assault, a rush prompted, it is believed, by the false rumour that Duke William had been killed. The audio-visual presentation of the battle by English Heritage, complete with video re-enactments, is a brave effort to bring history to life, but there is, alas, not much to see, but a great deal to imagine. Finally, before returning to Frant, we drove to Beachy Head, over which my father flew in fighter aircraft from RAF 257 Squadron to help defend the south coast from marauding Nazi fighter-bombers in 1943. You can walk to the edge of the high chalk cliff over grass cropped short by grazing sheep, and fall four hundred feet or more into the sea or onto the pebbled shore at low tide. There is no warning sign, and no guard-rail: it is clear that officialdom feels no responsibility to protect the unwary against the consequences of carelessness or folly. It was terrifying to glimpse how far the cliffs descended, and how the sea boiled up to their base. It was picturesque, very windy, and exceedingly dangerous.
When I raised the question of this danger to the churchwarden of St. Alban’s Church that evening back in Frant, over a church-sponsored barbecue held outdoors there, he agreed, adding laconically “Yes, Beachy Head is a favourite place for suicides.” The speaker, Malcolm Carruthers, turned out to have lived in Ottawa between 1973 and 1977, where he was employed by the British High Commission on Elgin Street. It is a small world.
One of the advantages to staying in a small hostelry in a little village is the chance to meet both the visitors and the people who live locally. Mr. Carruthers was one of the latter, as were several of the mostly older members of the parish, one of whom, to my astonishment, had known of, but never met, my father in London when they both worked as volunteers for the Boy Scouts in the post-war years before I was born. Small world indeed! At the B&B, we had as company a group of elderly American tourists, experienced travellers all, very friendly and talkative. After they left, my boys went outside to play with Pebbles, the family dog trained to head a soccer ball thrown to him back to the thrower with commendable accuracy. I went back to reading more of 84 Charing Cross Road, its charming New York anglophile author Helene Hanff’s account of her friendship with a London bookseller, only to be interrupted by the B&B’s owner, with a question that had clearly puzzled her, but which she had hesitated to ask:
