A glimpse of the French Coast — or maybe not
Last month our online writing group gathered from Austria, the UK and Canada for a face-to-face writing retreat. The last-minute cancellation of our AirBnB in Hastings turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Our replacement accommodation was a quiet beachside home. And while Hastings suffered from a breakdown of its water supply, we had no water problems.
Pett Level Beach, on the south coast, overlooks the English Channel, and we sometimes saw ships going by. The coast of France is close and from the lookout room at the top of the house we could see a row of lights gleaming in the distance. We took these to be ships until it became clear that they were not moving.
The liminal vision of the nearby coast of France put me in mind of the opening lines of Dover Beach: “The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full; the moon lies fair upon the straits; on the French coast, the light gleams and is gone…”
We were closer to Hastings than Dover, with the peninsula of Dungeness between. Yet we were close enough to catch a glimmer of the European continent. Thinking of the poem and the Foyle’s War television series, I knew this beach was mined against possible invasion when the Nazi machine, so perilously close, controlled the French coast.
When I read Dover Beach in high school, it captured my imagination. Written in 1851, Matthew Arnold’s poem speaks to the wide array of human experiences. Arnold begins by describing the sea coast as seen by lovers. Then his mood darkens. The world that “seems so various, so beautiful, so new,” is illusory. The lovers must cling together against the terrible uncertainty of “a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”
How grateful we five were to be together exploring the beach between sharing meals and working on our novels. How glad we were to have water when the nearby town did not. Above all, how wonderful it was to be in a place of peace, even while in other parts of our troubled world, ignorant armies still clash by day and night.