BY THE BLOOMING MOTORWAY
Richard West finds the
Garden of England strangely transformed
Folkestone THE proposed Channel tunnel will start, on the English side, by the village of Cheriton, inland from Folkestone and Hythe, and close to the ruin of Sandgate Castle. King Henry VIII ordered the build- ing of Sandgate and other fortresses on the south-east coast in 1538, when France threatened to put into force the Papal bull of excommunication. Sandgate Castle was, for the times, a construction project almost as formidable as the tunnel; nor did the work go smoothly. The final cost of £2,887 14s was over the estimate, and three of the 18 months of building were lost owing to cold weather. In spite of the imminent danger from France, the men took a three-week holiday over Christmas. Evidently, in the short time since Henry had named himself the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church, the English had not acquired the Protestant work ethic. Sand- gate Castle should not be confused with the neighbouring Saltwood Castle which dates from the 11th century and may be the place where the four knights plotted the death of Thomas a Becket. In the 18th century it passed into the Deedes family until it was sold by the Christian Socialist William Deedes, the father of the great and good editor (till last week) of the Daily Tele- graph.
The Deedeses and other residents of this part of England braced themselves for another invasion from France by the troops of Napoleon. They lined the coast with Martell° towers and built a military canal — much to the scorn of Cobbett, who came here 30 years later:
Oh, Lord! To think that I should be destined to behold these monuments of the wisdom of Pitt and Dundas and Perceval! . . . I think I have counted along here upwards of thirty of these ridiculous things which, I dare say, cost from perhaps ten thousand pounds each:. . . Here is a canal . . . to keep out the French; for those armies who had so often crossed the Rhine, and the Danube, were to be kept back by a canal made by Pitt thirty feet wide at the most.
The arrival of the railway in 1844 made Folkestone a Channel port of equal im- portance with Dover, and also a town of military importance. The Folkestone Museum boasts an impressive oil painting 'The Landing of the Belgian Refugees, August 1914', showing the victims of Teutonic savagery stepping ashore from small boats in front of a party of liveried dignitaries. There is a photograph of the Germans who were arrested as they left to join the Kaiser's army; also a postcard inscribed with a patriotic song composed by Folkestone's town crier and his grandson:
My Daddy to the war is gone to fight the Germans, And all our British soldiers are doing what they can, But when the battle's o'er they lie tired in the field, They need a smoke to cheer them so to you I make appeal. Chorus Will anyone fill Daddy's pipe, Will anyone fill Daddy's pipe?
Smoke, smoke, smoke, bacca, bacca, bacca.
Will anyone fill Daddy's pipe?
These verses, to the tune of 'Has anyone seen my cat?', could well be arranged for singing on this week's National Anti- Smoking Day.
By 1918, over 11 million troops had been carried over the Channel through Folkes- tone. The town was just as important and suffered even worse bombing during the second world war. Defensive pill-boxes, cheaper than Pitt's Martell° towers, were built and disguised as bathing cabins, teashops, even passenger shelters for East Coast buses. Wire netting on the Leas was camouflaged to look like the flower-beds which were one of the town's great tourist attractions.
Just as the people of East Kent cross the Channel to stock up with food and wine, so hundreds of thousands of French people come to buy clothes, especially at Folkes- tone, a better shopping centre than Dover or Canterbury. Many French students come during the summer to learn English at one of the language schools, or just to enjoy themselves. But there is not much sign of the 'Gallic custom' that Julius Caesar found in the people of Cantium. noticed a young man reading Madame Bovary, in an English translation, but Folkestone is no longer an entrepot for salacious 'French novels', smuggled through customs and afterwards circulating in brown-paper covers. Pornography, pub- lished in England, is now available on the Folkestone station platform. Most of these works, such as Adventures of a Schoolboy, A Tale of the Victorian Underworld, appear to be set in a period when sexual behaviour was limited by taboo. The free- dom to publish, far from removing por- nography as was prophesied by the likes of John Mortimer, has stimulated demand; But whereas Victorian readers fantasised about licentious Paris, modern readers fantasise about that vanished time when sex was mysterious, naughty and therefore thrilling. No dirty old man would buy the Adventures of a Comprehensive School- boy. Pub conversation in Folkestone does not touch on the French so much as the Irish and Asians. 'There'll be racing in Ireland,' one man proclaimed during the recent frozen weather, 'they run there if you can see the horse's head over the snow.' WS companion embarked on a dissertation on immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, known as Ringo Chutney. 'You'll see,' lie said turning to me, 'how Ringo ChutneY has taken over Folkestone. He'll %%Talc quite hard at first, but then he moves in° the jobs where you don't have to work, like filling stations, tobacconists and news: agents. At a filling station, the custotnel fills his car from the pump himself. At ° tobacconist he just takes the money for 3 Mars bar. The only work a newsagent host to do is to go up and collect the papers 3 the station and then write the addresses orl, 56 Seacliffe Road.' The last aspersie2, struck me as particularly unkind, sin': Asian newsagents selling the Times, or ane, of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, al,. especially vunerable to assault from n' brutes of the printing unions. Folkestone is still renowned for flowerS in this county proud of its title the Garde.° of England'. An 18th-century Gerniavi Karl Philipp Moritz, wrote: 'In Englairies more than in any other land, living the all the limits of green cornfields so t it; all the countryside within sight is given t_ appearance of a large and majestic g"` den.' A modern writer on Kent, Michael McNay, is pessimistic about the future: Lorry drivers enter the country in swelling numbers driving bigger trucks and heavier loads. More motorways despoil more land and a Channel tunnel will bring yet more, and service industries too. In twenty years Kent could turn from a green and pleasant land to an anonymous morass of bricks and mortar and expressways set with jewelled beauty spots' (The Illustrated Counties of England, Allen & Unwin, L14.95). Yet, paradoxically, the Garden of Eng- land is now so cropped and sprayed and chemically cleansed for the sake of indust- rial agriculture that few flowers, insects, birds and animals still survive in the fields; on the other hand, wildlife flourishes by the side of the M 20 motorway which is the main route of approach to the Channel tunnel. Forbidden to man, these verges between the tarmac and the fields offer a haven to hedgehogs and weasels; to voles, mice and their predators such as the kestrel; to bees and butterflies; to bluebells, poppies, cowslips and even such rarities as the bee orchid. This I learned from a fascinating and quite original televi- sion documentary, On the Verge of Life, Shown on BBC 2 on 6 October last. The producer Patrick Uden, who surely de- serves some kind of award for his film, has kindly allowed me to make use of the script, and has given me more information. Many factors have helped transform the in4 otorway verges into a nature reserve. The starting point,' says the documentary film, 'is always the special coarse grass first Planted to stabilise the soil by the Ministry of Transport. From now on the new verge soil will be fixed by the grass to become a rich and varied habitat.' Uncut and un- treated, the verges soon put up shrubs and gorse to provide a nesting place for the birds and a shelter from predators. The debris that falls away from the traffic is also utilised. Voles and field mice take shelter 1.11 hub caps or bottles; caterpillars and ants in discarded tyres. The insects struck by !lie traffic provide a constant supply of iood to scavengers. The turbulent wind of the traffic in either direction carries with it the seeds of every kind of flower and plant. The M 20 L,11°Nv has the kind of vegetation that used to ue, found on the edge of woodlands, with Primroses, violets, oxlips, wood anemones and bluebells. The cowslip, once picked to make wine, is now a protected species and, ,as Patrick Uden points out, 'there's no °etter protection than traffic laws that 11:13rolubit stopping'. Some flowers have keen carried many miles south, such as the uee orchid. In the other direction, seaside „gra. sses are carried north, finding congenial rid with plenty of salt laid down against 'now and ice, such as we have this winter. „ According to Mr Uden, the terminal for Channel tunnel is likely to be a good tree for wildlife, especially since the epartment of Transport also takes more land than it needs. He concludes his film with the observation: 'As Britain's motor- way building programme continues, it's difficult to see these hostile engineering projects as beneficial to wildlife. But it could be that the motorway verge will one day be as desperately defended by conser- vationists as the hedgerow.'
What an appalling judgment on modern England!
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