All This Now Gone: 31 Dead in the English Channel

This week 31 bodies washed up on the English beaches. Some children. A pregnant woman. Our government’s policy is to send any boats that arrive, back to France, via the rather treacherous waters of our English channel.

It feels like a dramatic contraction has occurred. As the boats set sail for our shores directly, not as some future destination, it now feels like we are the front line. In closing our borders to European migration thanks to Brexit, we opened up an immense attraction for asylum seekers. As I write the are over a million job vacancies in the UK. This creates an unprecedented pull-factor as powerful the “long withdrawing roar” of the heavily tidal channel that fills Mathew Arnold with a sense of foreboding in his poem “Dover Beach”.

Come to the window, he whispers to his new bride, sweet is the night air. This is the kind of language our beaches used to inspire.

Brexit has added immeasurably to the pull of the economic riptide. A million jobs. A narrow channel. A brief crossing. Our long withdrawing roar, Get Brexit Done, is not yet over, even though our bellicose throats were red raw with hatred years ago.

Soon bodies on our beaches will be a weekly, perhaps daily occurrence. The channel, home to poetic beaches, chalk cliffs, flotilla’s evacuating the distant beaches of Dunkirk, kids in flannel shirts investigating mysterious islands, the cheap and cheerful British holiday, fish and chips, rock-pooling, the discovery of our fossil record, returning victorious from famous wars, setting out on great explorations that resulting in murderous colonisations that are, truth be told, the basis for the majority of all migratory push-factors, regattas, flotillas, Fawlty Towers, Cornish fish, Devon cream teas, Kentish apples, Chesil Beach, the way the new forest all but steps out into the sea, Shell Beach, sandbanks, the dramatic, blood-coloured cliffs of the English Riveria, indescribably lovely Cornwall, the mordant Dickensian mudflats where the Thames runs out into the worlds’ oceans, and a thousand other lovely associations with our channel coastline will be dipped in blood, and dismay.

Instead of a child, in old-fashioned shorts, riding a donkey, sporting an ice-cream, beneath a grying flock of seagulls, if this is allowed to continue, we will find ourselves like TS Eliot did on his honeymoon, desolate and alone on a windswept beach of perpetual sorrow.

“On Margate sands, I can connect nothing with nothing”. Yet that is what a beach is, a connection. No one ever in the history of culture, ever thought of a beach as a border, a barrier, a wall.

Beaches are where the human spirit is called to sport and play and build meaningless castles soon lost to the arrival of the waves. The waves, the waves.

A beach is where the land makes peace with the sea. And the English beach is the most magical place in the land.

This year I paddled with my family along the cliff-line at Sidmouth, looking at the recent rockfalls, commenting on how desert-like the red rocks are there.

Next year, I will be afraid to do that, lest my paddle snag.

This year we thought we saw seals on the beach. As we got closer they were just different coloured rocks. We laughed at that.

Next year we won’t think they are seals.

Next year they may not be rocks.

I don’t want my children to see that.

I don’t want other children to be that.

All I want to see on English beaches, on all beaches, are seals, windbreaks, and donkeys.

When you get out of your boat, on a Kentish or Hampshire beach, there is always that welcoming crunch. I want everyone to have the right to hear that sound and think, that’s nice, think I’ll get a cup of tea before that rain cloud hits.

You take the towel and gather them into it, their shivering forms, the water so cold. Load up the bag, sand in everything, and make your way back to the car. As you leave the beach, the sun angling slightly but far from set, you always look back for a moment and say “Bye beach, bye sea,” not knowing when you will see it again, but certain you will return. Nothing of sadness there, nothing of death, just the perfect place for a perfect day.

All this now gone.