A little further on is another house linked with a painter. The resident was to become one of the world’s most famous painted ladies. Anna McNeill Whistler, subject of a painting in the Louvre officially called Arrangement in Grey and Black, but known everywhere as Whistler’s Mother, moved to Hastings in 1875 and died there in 1881. She too came from somewhere else: North Carolina in the old American South. Members of her parents’ families kept slaves before the American Civil War; she married George Washington Whistler, an Indiana-born soldier who became an engineer, who built the first mile of passenger track in the US for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and who invented the locomotive steam whistle. She moved to Russia, because her husband served the imperial court as a consulting engineer during the construction of the first main Russian railway line, the link between Moscow and St Petersburg. These were the tracks that carried the train that brought Tolstoy’s heroine Anna Karenina to Moscow, to her fatal encounter with Vronsky, to public shame, unhappiness and finally death under the wheels of a locomotive. So Anna McNeill Whistler had already played, by marriage and location, an incidental role in the making of the cultural heritage of Europe, long before she came to England. She had five children: one of them was the painter James McNeill Whistler, and he composed her portrait in 1870, while she stayed at his London flat. Both Mrs Whistler and Tressell were conspicuous outsiders: that is, they were not Hastings people.
But I now realise that, in my twenty-three years in Hastings, I have probably known very few people who could claim to have been born in the town, or even to have spent most of their lives there. Of the houses that border our own house and garden, more than half have changed hands not just once, but several times in those twenty-three years. Most of my immediate neigh-bours had moved to the town, as we had done, from some other place: London, Kent, rural Sussex, Surrey, the English Midlands, the West Country, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Poland, South Africa, the United States and Australia. There is seldom a single reason for settling in one town rather than another: family connections and job opportunities play a role; so too does the cost of housing, and for most of my twenty-three years there, Hastings was conspicuously more affordable than many other south coast localities. Physical beauty must also have been part of the lure.
Hastings began as a seaport, one of the Cinque Ports, a confederation of towns required by a Royal Charter of 1155 to maintain ships for a royal navy, should such a need arise. In return, Edward I gave Cinque Port townsmen the right to bring goods into the country from abroad without paying import duties, a right that seems to have been very unwillingly surrendered sometime in the reign of Edward III, and smuggling remained a significant source of income well into the nineteenth century. Hastings’s role as a naval and military base was relatively short-lived. What had once been a secure harbour was in the thirteenth century swept away by storms and coastal erosion, but the town survived as a home to fishermen, smugglers and traders, and it grew up around a small sheltered inlet in a narrow valley and then spread inland between two steep ridges called simply the West Hill and the East Hill, along the course of a stream called the Bourne: this is now submerged beneath a high road still called The Bourne. The town experienced the usual buffets of history, along with plague, fire, assault and property speculation followed by slump. It remained well known without ever becoming very fashionable, and much visited without ever becoming rich. In the course of the last five centuries, houses were renewed or restored, propped up and extended, built over and upstaged, in ways that would now give town planners the vapours. Old shops, warehouses and alehouses would become homes, and then turn back into businesses, or restaurants, or studios, or antique shops, and then morph back into accommodation again, while still retaining the paraphernalia of commerce about them.
Hastings Old Town was where I first came across the phenomenon of a ‘flying freehold’, in which some long-gone property-owner might add an extra attic room or two to his house by building it over the roof of his immediate neighbour, and then leave subsequent generations of lawyers, tenants and freeholders to sort out the consequences for themselves. In one case, access to an eighteenth-century hillside cottage was only possible through the garden of the house immediately below it; in another, rows of little terraced cottages could be approached only by a footpath or a flight of steps; in a third, somebody’s little front garden and terrace sat on top of somebody else’s lock-up garage. Whole streets of properties could be quaint, picturesque, charming and barely habitable, so small were the staircases, so cramped the rooms.
The appeal of old Hastings had a great deal to do with its long-term impoverishment, its place at the bottom of the property pecking order: old Georgian tiles and Welsh slates stayed where they had been put because owners could not afford to modernise; sash windows continued to rattle in the gales because unplasticised polyvinyl-chloride-coated double glazing was too expensive; householders had quite enough to manage, coping with dry rot, damp, death watch beetle, subsidence, defective drains and the notorious impact of salt-laden wind and rain on the property’s paintwork and timber. But for many visitors, the unexpectedness of some of the houses was its own reward; for others it was the view. Someone standing on the West Hill of Hastings could see, looking due south, a long sward of green punctuated by people walking dogs, children playing with kites, and little knots of picnickers, and beyond them the broken stones of a not quite levelled Norman castle, and beyond that the English Channel, the colour of pewter on an overcast day, a sheet of silver and azure when the Sun shone. A visitor who turned slightly to the east could see a tiny fishing harbour protected by a small breakwater, a row of broad-beamed, sturdy fishing boats hauled up each day onto the pebble beach, a collection of tall net-drying sheds protected by coatings of creosote or pitch, a fairground, a disorderly jumble of attractive roofs and house fronts on both sides of the valley, huddled together either for economy or security, with small and often steep gardens.
Within view would also be two fine stone churches, and a handful of conspicuously handsome but not especially large properties. The townscape would be framed by woodland and terraces of allotments on the steep western hillside, but on the eastern hill, the houses would be crammed together until, just about halfway up the slope, they would stop, as if restrained by a regal hand that had drawn a line with a ruler, and beyond that the observer would see only the grassland and scrub and forest of a country park, ablaze with gorse and hawthorn in spring, and arrested along the coast by steep sandstone cliffs.
This extraordinary view – you could never get tired of it, which was just as well because it was almost inescapable – belonged to everybody, and was divorced from all other privilege. Some of the poorest families, housed in an estate along the slope of the West Hill, probably had the best outlook in the whole of southern England: a panorama framed by two headlands, a valley crammed with picture-postcard roofs, a beach and seaport that had been a magnet for painters for two centuries, and then beyond it, just the sea and the sky.
This prodigal exposure to beauty came at a small but inexorable cost: prodigal exposure to wet and cold when the clouds gathered and the sea began to pound the coast and shrieking winds from the Bay of Biscay, or from the Baltic, would drive rain almost horizontally into the hillsides. People on the sea front would find passage perilous, as waves swept up the shingle to thunder against the stone walls above the beach, and explode in a shrapnel burst of freezing salt spray against the buildings on the landward side of the road.
The hills on either side of the Old Town were so steep that some of the access was by stepped passages, and for short periods during the more severe assaults of snow and ice, neither taxis nor buses would tackle the climb up the West Hill. At such inclement times, the short walk across the open green before the more sheltered descent to the shops, cinema and railway station was a headache of a different kind: the howling winds could turn an umbrella inside out, drive the rain down the lining of the strongest waterproof and chill the exposed cheekbones, sinuses and the temples to temperatures so agonising that the sufferer, once under