Into the Haze
First there is Hadleigh Castle, guardian of the western marches. On a bluff east of Benfleet, set among smooth mounds of the grass which specialises in cloaking ruins, squat the stout Nor- man towers which have crumbled little enough since the days when Constable painted them. These are rich ruins, ample in girth and im- pressive in their pallor; and I like them also because of the homely way in which they look across an orchard-filled declivity to the nineteen- twentyish villas marking the hither limit of Leigh's Marine Parade. (If ghosts be here, they are not superior ones. Superiority is not an atti- tude which Southend encourages.) They watch over the railway line which runs straight across the polderland between Benfleet and Leigh, and the eye follows to the east into the haze from which Southend's `immoderate pier,' as Alan Dent called it, marches out towards the seaway. When I went there again the other day there was no one about: a lark vanished into the oyster sky, a pair of crows flapped over the towers and into the trees, and a salty wind moaned mildly round the old stone.
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