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David Seabrook lives in Canterbury, this is his first book.

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All the Devils Are Here
By David Seabrook

Granta Books

Copyright © 2002 David Seabrook.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-86207-483-6

Chapter One

Daddlands

But what's wrong with this city? Why the long face on the cathedral clock? Whose shadow darkens the sundial?

    I check my dates. Thirteen decades have passed. The removal of mourning rings may require soap if Rochester ever recovers (which looks doubtful).

    This High Street is for readers, not shoppers. Peggotty's Parlour, More than Flowers, Two Cities, Expectations ... Expectations ? even in its abridged form an unhappy name for a pub. Slowly it dawns on you that tourism, ultimately, is of little account here. Slowly you begin to realize what a big deal it must have seemed just to have him around, and striding among them sometimes across these stones: There he goes. See him? There he goes.

    There he went.

    He's gone and they miss him. They want him back.

    Boz.

    Gad's Hill Place, a three-storey red-brick house near Rochester, was bought by Charles Dickens in 1856 and after extensive repairs it became his home for the last thirteen years of his life, years that were largely miserable. Shortly after the move from London his marriage to Catherine Hogarth finally broke down and he had his half of the bedroom walled off in farewell. His friendship with Wilkie Collins was weakened by, the marriage of his daughter Kate to Wilkie's brother Charles; he was a doomed choice, a sapless semi-invalid whose very existence Dickens on occasion appeared to resent. Other friends died, Thackeray chief among them; the two were newly reconciled after years of animosity and at Thackeray's funeral Dickens was the one who wasn't wearing mourning, who couldn't believe his eyes. In 1865 Dickens himself almost perished, along with his mistress, her mother and the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, in a railway disaster at Staplehurst station. His health deteriorated and he looked increasingly to his family, searching in vain for signs of future greatness in his sons. Two died young: Walter, a debt-ridden cadet with the East India Company, in 1863 and Sydney, a hot-headed naval midshipman, nine years later. Of the rest, Francis had a nervous stammer and no obvious talents, Charley's career in the paper-mill business ended in bankruptcy and the trio of Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens and Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens are memorable for one thing only ? the fact that he'd weighted their necks with writers' names, as if defying all three stooges not to drown.

    8 June 1870, the date of Dickens's own death, is where Rochester's history officially ends, but now, after more than a hundred years of darkness and confusion, high-profile heritage festivals, funded by Medway Council, have begun to shape a future at last.

    Each May Day at dawn a council officer drives down to the picnic centre at Bluebell Hill to oversee a crowd of pagan traditionalists as they wake from hibernation the Green Man, an eight-foot aluminium framework covered with birch leaves and blossom. The symbol of rebirth is taken away in a van and is next seen edging along Rochester High Street later the same morning, the verdant centrepiece of a dusky procession; local businessmen impersonate chimney sweeps and schoolchildren their climbing boys, clattering sticks on shovels as they dance. The Sweeps Festival is assigned to the first weekend in May, ideally following May Day (although the Christian calendar bides its time, waiting to interfere).

    None of this is peculiar to Rochester's past. The ceremony of the Green Man or ?Jack-in-the-Green? is universal, and, while it's true that large numbers of London sweeps and their apprentices would turn up in Kent as their own season ended and the hop-picking began, the climbing boys milked May Day on a nationwide scale, following the Jack in their ribbons and bows and begging all the way. They usually got money and often a feed as well because the first of May was their lucky day.

    Climbing boys became a special case in the nineteenth century. A myth had attached itself to them, concerning a wealthy lady, Mrs Montague, whose son had been stolen from his nurse by gypsies, only to be rediscovered by chance as a chimney sweep's apprentice; ?and understanding that her dear child had experienced great humanity from the worthy master he was with, she in consequence, as a grateful return for his kindness, gave a good dinner, a proper quantity of porter, and a shilling to every chimney-sweeper who should come to accept it, on the anniversary of the day her son was restored, which was the first of May?.

    A myth. Climbing boys were generally the offspring of widows, paupers and prostitutes who sold them or, in many cases, gave them away to chimney sweeps, who weren't known for their humanity. There are numerous reports of sweeps flogging, torturing and starving apprentices, yet nothing could have matched the physical horror of the job itself. Small boys were handed brushes and sent up the narrow flues of domestic and industrial chimneys, there to risk suffocation in sooty darkness or instant death from a fall. Ingrained soot (a mid-century drawing depicts a sweep's boy with negroid features) and a range of deformities lent those who survived a melancholy aspect and when May Day came round they were showered with shillings and sympathy. And the job offered another, shadier perk: the opportunity, when coming to clean your chimney, to take a mental inventory of household valuables and then sell the information to a party who might then clean you out altogether. Climbing boys were liked well enough, but they weren't necessarily trusted.

    In historical time climbing boys normally took premature retirement; in heritage time they go home, get washed and come back as smartly dressed urchins for the Dickens Festival on the last weekend in May. This is the highlight of Rochester's year, and though it now draws visitors from all over Europe it remains a labour of untough love. Costumed figures parade around the High Street, happy to present themselves as Havisham or Heep; Mr Bumble supervises children's competitions (?He promises to be nice to all children today?); there are fireworks, arm wrestlers, street organists, duellists; a Dickens memorial service is sung by the Cathedral Special Choir.

    The city traditionally spends the summer winding down from this event, though look out for the re-enactment spectacular at the end of August, when Norman warriors make their camp in the castle grounds. Once they've dispersed, the buildup begins to the Dickensian Christmas: more costumes, plus carol singers and a snow machine. And that's it. No more festivals until May.

    So what else is there?

    Evenings. Dead-eyed drinkers six deep at the bars, not always alone but often unspeaking, unsmiling ? as if the pubs were cider houses and Rochester were Hardy country, far away. Staccato laughter strafing the Casino Rooms just off the High Street, where audiences are entertained by comedians such as ?X-Rated? Jimmy Jones or Roy ?Chubby? Brown, big men who tour England ceaselessly like lardy takes on the Ancient Mariner, bringing none of the poetry and all of the guilt. And finally, down by the station, all the year round, scores of prostitutes, some of them very young indeed ? and every soul desperate for trade. They hassle locals hurrying home; they go down on drivers waiting for the lights to change; they pound locked cars like gibbons at Longleat. Residents have set up surveillance cameras to monitor the situation but the girls still show every evening at Gundulph Road, New Road and the base of Star Hill and they still take it in all the usual places (including the arm). Theirs is an industry in turmoil, the first sign, on the way into Chatham, that the sailors have gone for good.

    From this point onwards neo-classical façades begin to give way to boarded-up shop fronts as Rochester High Street merges into Chatham. It's an unsettling transition, a basic shift from retro to necro, because Chatham is a long time dead, killed off on 31 March 1984 when the Royal Navy, a presence for more than four hundred years, pulled out of the Dockyard. (The last flag was lowered to the strains of ?Sunset? played by a Royal Marines band on loan from another base.) The closure meant massive redundancies ? Chatham Job Centre had to draft in reinforcements to assist with the avalanche of fresh claims ? and a knock-on effect that proved disastrous. Bob Bean, an ex-Labour MP for Rochester and Chatham, told a Guardian reporter: ?The Navy has been a hard taskmaster as well as a provider. It created a culture, then pulled out, leaving nothing of it. The town has paid for its involvement over the years in blood.?

    ?How were lifeboats made self-righting? Who raided the dockyard in 1667? Why were ropes tarred? When was HMS Victory launched? What did submariners eat when all the fresh food had run out?? The Historic Dockyard holds its right hand out for the heritage shilling while its left is employed in rubbing these salty questions deep into the wounds of the locals. The only question worth asking now about Chatham is ?Can this corpse still crawl??

    Here in the High Street the answers are all around. At the Rochester end whitewash predominates (if you want colour there's a creature in a Day-Glo death's-head mask giving royal waves from the back of a speeding Sierra) but as I cross over into Chatham itself business begins to pick up. ?Previously enjoyed? baby clothes for sale and wanted, cheques discounted and loans secured on the rings off your fingers, and if life gets no better we'll sort something out or send you down the road to The Gun Shop.

    The Gun Shop keeps eccentric hours and is closed and barred right now. It's gloomy inside; the rifles and crossbows are there all right, tethered in the distance, but none in the windows, which are filled with every imaginable type of blade, from sawbacks to fake ceremonials (all good value). The solicitor next door appears to have drafted this explanatory notice:

A KNIFE IS A TOOL.
IT IS AN ESSENTIAL EVERYDAY ITEM.
A KNIFE DOES HAVE A PERFECTLY
LEGITIMATE USE.

Who could doubt it? Butchers' boning knives are essential for securing the cut of your choice, while Black Widow catapults prove indispensable when stoning vermin away from unforeseen fatalities. In the home.

    There is no tourist trade in Chatham, no overspill; nothing for a functioning shop to do but wait patiently and prey. Rochester the city melts into Chatham, the twilight zone. Walking along here now, I recall the first time I made the cross-over. It was summer, a Sunday afternoon. That afternoon, I had an eye on the future, and I was dawdling along, making plans in my head. Across the way, just past a junkshop, stood the sign. I read: ?Chatham / Loyal and True?. Behind me I could hear what sounded like dry heaves. ?Loyal and true?, I remember thinking, but I turned round anyway, and then, shading my eyes, looked up, way up, to where, beneath an open sash window, two adolescent boys, possibly brothers, were engaged in attempts to spit. But either the heat had closed their throats or they had yet to get the hang of it, this thing where you take aim and gob. When they saw me studying them they turned and studied each other, each mouth trailing a silver strand that wound itself, slow as molasses, down around the wooden frame. On the pavement a voice called me, and called me again. The woman ahead had turned, walked back.

    ?Chatham,? she said.

    Chatham spawns nightmares.

In the early nineteenth century the Dadds were an established and respected Chatham family. Robert Dadd was an apothecary and his son Richard, who was to prove the artist of the family, grew up with a knowledge and love of the area. Richard was a frequent visitor to Cobham, a village five miles west of Rochester, and some of his earliest surviving sketches are of Lord Darnley's estate, Cobham Park. He was also granted access to Cobham Hall, a Tudor mansion which housed one of the finest private art collections in Britain, and which included works by Titian, Rubens and Tintoretto. Richard's own talent ? he began drawing at about thirteen ? was encouraged by his father, who lived to see him attain some success and appears to have been proud of his achievements.

    The Dadds moved to London in 1836, but in the summer of 1843 Richard, now twenty-six, called on Robert to request his company on a return journey to Kent for a tour of his childhood haunts. On Monday 28 August 1843 father and son set off, reaching Cobham (Richard's choice) after a journey of about five hours. They ate at a local inn, the Ship, and accommodation was reserved for them in the village. It was evening now and Robert was tired but at Richard's insistence they went for a walk together in the park, where Richard attacked and killed him and then fled. The body was discovered early the following morning and a search began. ?So remorseless was his determination?, reported the Kentish Independent, ?that he had plunged the knife three times up to the hilt in the breast of his victim, though the first stab was quite sufficient to occasion death.? Richard Dadd, who had offered previous examples of deranged behaviour, was now recognized as insane.

    By the time of the murder madness had also afflicted Richard's younger brother George, who was committed to Kensington House Asylum on 31 August 1843 and later transferred to Bethlem Hospital. Information about another brother, Stephen, is scarce but we know that he also went insane and by 1853 was in the hands of a private attendant, or keeper. The youngest sister, Maria Elizabeth, married the artist John Phillip, Richard's close friend and contemporary, and moved to Aberdeen, where she was admitted to an asylum in 1863. Everything seemed to point back to that summer's day, the day when Ancient Greece came to Cobham.

    ?The spot selected for the murder was the most fitting that could be chosen for the perpetration of such an appalling crime. It is on the edge of a deep dell or ravine, which is surrounded by a belt of ancient elms, and though but a few paces from the high-road, the scene wears an aspect of the deepest solitude.? I enter Cobham Park, jumping gently from the stile Richard Dadd made his exit by; the spot remains recognisable, though there's nothing much to see. The dell was Paddock Hole, a chalk pit which soon became known as ?Dadd's Hole?, and it has been filled with a mixture of rubble from road-widening operations in the Sixties and, more recently, wood from demolished cattle buildings. Nettles and bracken stand in for elms but an avenue of lime trees still leads down to Cobham Hall ? now a girls' school ? in the middle distance. The avenue itself remains the property of the Darnley estate; the spot on which I'm standing is included in fifty-plus acres of land now owned by Joe Pasquale, the comedian with the strangled voice. It's a spot that won't quite fit on the heritage map. Kent police exercise their dogs here.

    I follow Halfpence Lane round into the village. The walls of the Ship are covered with prints; nothing by Dadd, though. Naturally they know the name. In fact, I've hardly sat down when a voice at the bar pipes up in plummy Hawtrey tones: ?Dadd, Dadd, Dadd.? A man seated with his back to me tips coffee dregs into his brandy glass and swirls the mixture around. ?The mother of all parricides!? Heads turn. He bolts it down. ?With apologies to dear Oedipus, of course.?

The twelve months leading up to the summer of 1842 were the most successful of Richard Dadd's career.

    He hit his stride around 1841 with a number of fairy paintings, among them Puck and Titania Sleeping. Dadd's treatments of familiar themes were judged to be technically impressive and critics agreed that he showed great promise in this ever-popular genre. The Victorians entered fairyland via a variety of art forms, including opera, ballet and pantomime, yet always with pleasure, since it represented escapism in its purest form: escape from hardship, progress, Church. But fairies themselves sometimes needed rejuvenating: Dadd's eye was fresh.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. Copyright © 2002 by David Seabrook. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.