Hastings: Of Magik, Fishing, the Call of the Wild and Social Engineering
Hello Steemians, here’s the sorry tale of how I was lead astray first; by my friend sharing his passion for sea fishing with me, and then by the The Wolf of the Sea - aka the Sea Bass. It’s also a tale of Edwardians who reinvented themselves, and of a social cleansing program that pushes the addicted and mentally ill into a ghetto by the sea.
It all started in Hastings.
A sorry-assed seaside town. Where economic failure means stunning Victorian villas, that would be a ‘conservation area’ anywhere else have been sub-divided into rabbit-hutch one room ‘bed-sits’ and the town has become a coastal dumping ground for the workless and unwanted.
My friend, we’ll call him Jonah, had moved to Hastings. He mentioned in passing that he’d taken to fishing from the pebble beaches that make up that part of the English coastline. I joined him for an impromptu lesson in Bass fishing. It went well but had unintended consequences.
Are you sitting comfortably? Good then I’ll begin.
In the south of England there is a town, a bit like Gabriel García Márquez's ‘Macondo’, forever separated from its near by neighbors. No high mountain pass, no thick jungle, just the solitude of an economic divide that's lasted over a hundred years. With its shitty transport links, and dead-on-its-arse fishing port, Hastings is probably the skuzziest seaside town the south of England has to offer. It’s the sort of place that only makes the national news when a particularly virulent outbreak of some kind of venereal disease threatens to overwhelm the local health service.
In Hastings I'm almost fat enough, my head is almost closely shaven enough, but I'm a little under-tattooed. I love it.
Just down the coast Brighton has become a suburb of London with house prices to match. Affluent and cosmopolitan with tech companies and great restaurants: a sort of English San Francisco.
Hastings died a little over a hundred years ago. At that time the railway lines were private companies each serving a route or two. The owners of a few of the lines in the south east saw the opportunity that would be afforded them and banned together to form a syndicate that would cover the south east of the country. They approached the fella who owned the line between London and Hastings. Having received a resounding “No”, they went back to their plans, and leaving him to his own devices sealed that part of the country’s fate. They invested, they expanded, developed more complex forms of signalling that let ‘through trains’ bypass local trains, and made it possible to live in the south east but work in London. If you live in upmarket Brighton, just a few miles away, with four trains an hour you can commute to London in under an hour. Hastings has one train an hour, if you’re lucky, and it seems to stop at almost every village along the way, covering the same distance in two hours.
Except on a Sunday when the unwise traveller will be subjected to a 'replacement bus service'. Where a bus will wend its way through the villages of East Sussex stopping at at least half of them before sitting in the gridlocked traffic of south london. It’s a Sunday afternoon [and possibly evening] you'll never get back. I wouldn't recommend it.
I’ve long wanted to live outside of the industrialised food chain, but being a city boy I didn't have the first idea about how to get started. I don't come from a country sports kind of family. A quick mooch around the internet’s fishing site revealed a world of frightening complexity where mountains of kit cost mountains of cash. Worse still it looked as though if you want to feed yourself by fishing you’ll be at it a longtime trying to catch enough river fish. You’d starve to death before you could catch enough wild trout.
Sea fishing is looked down on by ‘serious fisherman’, as ‘chuck and luck’ a low-class version of fishing that compares poorly with the noble art of trying to cheat an animal with a brain the size of a cheerio, using gear that cost the price of a used car. I quite like it. This isn't the pay-to-play trout lakes, or the distant wilds of the Scottish highlands. This is free fishing. You don't even need a licence. A whole beach fishing set up can be bought new from thirty quid. Take some sandwiches and you're good to go. Sitting on the beach, watching the waves break on the shore, listening to the sound of a stolen car doing doughnuts in a dogging car park. What it loses in romance it gains in utility. A bit like Hastings itself.
In fishing there are two kinds of bad luck, the ‘one that got away’ kind, and my kind. Where early success leads to massive expenditure in search of never to be repeated results. It was all the fault of that first lucky fish. I've spent fortunes on fishing gear; I've got the kit for lots of different kinds of fishing, I’ve got luggage bought with fishing in mind, and wish-lists for even more shit.
Something, most likely the low house prices, had drawn Jonah to Hastings in the noughties ‘it’s a town on the up’ he said with the optimism of a man who’s just bought a crumbling shit-hole in a dying town, ‘its really going to take off when the new high speed rail link comes!’ He wasn’t the first to fall for this fairy tale; the same sentiment is in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. Published 1914.
Hastings is the end of the line, a kind of reverse Shangri-La. A place where people who have taken-the-hump can make a home safe in the knowledge that whatever form their disenchantment takes they’ll find either like-minded souls or at least the anonymity offered by coastal degradation.
Magik-Al: the Alistair Crowley connection.
When ‘The Great Beast’ had burned all his bridges, all the money was gone and, his followers were whittled down to a few 50-something’s living in their mum’s garages. With just a bag of heroin and his demons for company Alistair Crowley made his home in a guest house on The Ridge. His fishing exploits remain unknown.
First Nation Fakery: the call of the wild
One noted Fisherman and outdoorsman who started from Hastings is the Edwardian bullshitter Archie Belaney. who passed himself off a member of Canada’s Ojibwe nation called ‘Grey Owl’. I cant see that he did it maliciously; he travels to Canada, lived in the wilds trapping Beaver for food and pelts to exchange for supplies. After a few years somehow he came to the attention of the press, he had a fantastically noble middle-distance stare and cut quite a dash in buckskin. Someone asked his name and instead of saying Archie he said Grey Owl. He found a previously undiscovered talent for public speaking and before you know it he was poster boy for conservation. The deception was a massive success, even going as far as him being sent as a representative of the Canadian government to meet Queen Victoria. Proper bullshiter. Whether he fished the pier or by the dogger’s car park is unknown
Down On The Beach
Away from the piss stained mini-vegas of the seafront with it’s slot machines and fried chicken shops you’ll still find mumbo-jumbo merchants selling crystals and incense, and those empty café’s posh girls open to get rid of that burdensome inheritance. Otherwise it’s all Poundland, charity shops, and greasy cafes. The locals either import their entertainment from Afghanistan or make their own by ‘dogging’ as they call the charming local tradition of having anonymous sex in car parks.
Bait is an unbelievable price.
The tourist board seems reluctant to celebrate Crowley and Grey Archie and instead use legends of witches, smugglers, and abundant heroin to draw people in. Social security offices in the rest of England have hit upon Hastings as a way to massage their figures into a more fiscally pleasing shape. They'd make magical ‘discretionary payments’ to the jobless junkies, recently released prisoners, and the mentally ill, who were standing in the way of their performance related pay. Buying them a ticket to Hastings, transferring their claims to the Hastings office, and registering them with the drugs and or mental health outreach team. The dole office people got their bonuses, Hastings got their junkies.
Time and Tide wait for no man.
You might think that beach fishing is just sitting around, and you’d be right, but it all starts at very specific times. At the time both myself and Jonah were in the midst of what Ricky Gervais called ‘the eating years’ and second lunch had meant we were late for the incoming tide.
The idea of sitting here just for the sake of sitting there hadn't occurred to me, I thought fishing was about catching and eating fish. So concerned that the shop keepers of Hastings might not be able to provide Rice, Soy, Nori and Wasabi
I’d had to run back to the kitchen to get the Sushi kit I’d brought from home.
Jonah:
" What are you doing? You've just got to go for the fun of it, if you catch anything it’s a bonus"
Mrs Jonah:
"You want to be more like him baby, he’s got a positive mental attitude”
On the Shore
Having made our way past the parade of street drinkers, beggars and street walkers. We're finally sitting on the beach with our cheap-arse fishing gear enjoying the reflected lights of the fast food joints that line the shore.
These days I use different excuses, but this was back in the day when I at least had the excuse of not having cast bait out to sea before. I managed one of the most ungainly and shortest range casts in the history of fishing. The bait splashed down about fifteen feet out landing in about two feet of water.
Ashamed, I was about to wind it in and start again but Jonah would have none of it. Admonished to 'just pour some coffees' I was recovering from pouring scalding coffee out of his comedy flask on to my hands and trousers when I looked up to see that in his excitement he'd lost the power of speech and, hyperventilating, was pointing and the tip of my rod.
Even if you've never fished the difference between the tide bouncing the rod tip up and down and an actual fish yanking it about is obvious. I leapt to my feet and started to 'pump and wind' pulling in an eighteen inch long Sea Bass! Despite my incompetent efforts to launch the bait over the horizon, it had splashed down just beyond the first breaker. I was later to learn that beginners luck had sent the bait to exactly the place where Bass come in to feed on the rising tide.
After the Bass had been rendered senseless with a rock - no sandy beaches in Hastings - we put some more bait out and spent the next few hours chatting with passers by, all of whom remarked that I was now the fishing champion of the area, as nothing that big had been pulled out in months. Coincidently the same number of months that Jonah had been resident in Hastings.
With every passing fisherman’s congratulations Jonah’s mood darkened. The tide too had turned and we called it a night.
It was the first and last fish I ever caught in Hastings.
After scoffing the Bass at the next day’s victory lunch, with Jonah's mood showing no sign of improving, I decided to quit while still ahead and packed my bag for the train home. As she dropped me off at the station, Mrs Jonah smiled brightly
"Don’t worry babe, he'll get over it, green was never a colour that suited him.”
More Soon
Your pal
SBW
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