Even at the time — and I cannot have been more than eleven or twelve — I remember thinking that this fellow must have been formidably stupid to have invested in a property on the brink of a sea cliff; for had Barratt not just told the viewers that this was the fastest-eroding coast in Europe? That its biscuity loess was being dunked, then chomped, by the North Sea at the prodigious rate of two whole yards every year, as fast, in geological terms, as a speeding bullet?
Then again, I may be giving too much credence to a capacity for retention that I’ve already conceded is ruptured, because, now I come to think of it, Barratt seldom ventured beyond the Lime Grove studios from where Nationwide was put out live. These local interviews were conducted by regional reporters and screened via a feed. Barratt, with his distinctively 1970s hairdo — a splodge of ice cream rippling over his forehead — was a rock of a presenter, who, even when the mass medium was only twenty-odd years old, still managed to fuse dash and paternalism in a uniquely televisual way.
A snappy clarion of horns, a rappel of strings: ‘Dadadaaa! Dada-daaa!’ ‘The Good Word’ by Johnny Scott leapt down the scale accompanying the beguiling title sequence. Archetypes of modern Britain appeared in quick succession: a car accelerating up on to the Severn Bridge; a man with a child in his arms; the Tyne at Newcastle; a man speaking on a car phone the size of a small car; electricity pylons stalking across countryside; the ectomorphic cooling towers of a power station with sheep grazing in the foreground; a train disgorging commuters.
These vignettes took up alternate spaces with the Nationwide logo in a 3 X 3 grid, the logo being simply the letters ‘NW’, with the arm of the W and the leg of N curled so as to cuddle the couple. In retrospect this logo was strongly evocative of the Nazi swastika, while the sequence evoked our own naive faith in technological advance. The very rapidity of these images of motion, then the way the ‘NW’ logo multiplied, streaming in threads across the screen to form four revolving cogs, while ‘The Good Word’ went on ‘Dada-daaa! Dada-daaa!’ing — all this I am able to summon up despite Nationwide being closer to the Normandy landings than I am now to it. I wonder, has each generation’s perception of time — its decadences, its stratigraphy — always been like this? Or is our current sense of time piling up into a necessarily terminal moraine of events simply a function of the digitization of knowledge, which makes it inevitable that the entire networked society will end up, like poor Funes in Borges’s tale ‘Funes the Memorious’, unable to delete a single paltry occurrence or cultural factoid?
And so, there will be Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day — until the significance of the Holocaust itself — which no one any longer living has had direct experience of — is quite forgotten.
I repeat, a culture that is afflicted with such a hyperthymestic syndrome will never recoup itself, never experience the necessary downtime for renaissance to occur. ‘It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.)’
There was a raw constructivism to the Nationwide title sequence — and a peculiar masculinity also. There were no women nationwide — at least, not in this erect procession of images, whose subtext was a series of phallicisms: Progress, the well-lubricated interpenetration of Town and Country, Benign Paternalism. I loved Nationwide; my brother and I would watch it whenever we could — which wasn’t often, because our insufferably bien-pensant parents had, in their infinite snobbery, got rid of our television. Usually, the current affairs the show reported were emphatically soft and mushy: items about skateboarding ducks, or a monastic order that manufactured toothbrushes; hard news resounded elsewhere. It was presumably in this spirit of quirky human interest that the man at Skipsea Sands on the Holderness coast had been interviewed.
Middle age — the fulcrum around which the mind-world turns. In youth the future is murky, while the past has a seeming clarity — but now it’s the future that becomes crystal clear: blackberries shining in a hawthorn hedge after sudden autumnal rain. Decline — then death. Meanwhile the past recedes, lapping back from a muddied shore across which it’s unsafe to wade — who knows what might have happened there?
At New Year there had been a photograph in the newspaper headed ‘Hazardous New Year’ and captioned ‘Houses close to a cliff in Skipsea, Yorkshire, have been gradually falling over the edge and it is thought unlikely that they will survive the year.’ They? Survive? Echoes surely of the personification of property that had dominated Britain in the early years of the century, but, setting this to one side, there remained the uncanny feeling that while the householders had been watching for years as the void encroached on their loved ones — undercutting the gardens, munching on the rockeries, crunching up the cucumber frames, then picking its teeth with raspberry canes — I had been watching them watch.
I conceived of taking a walk from Flamborough Head, north of Bridlington, where the chalk synclines of the Yorkshire Wolds are sheered off by the brown sea, to Spurn Head, that peculiar three-mile shingle bracket that hooks round into the wide mouth of the River Humber. It occurred to me that were I to keep for the entire distance within six feet of either cliff edge or shoreline, I would, very likely, have completed a journey it would be impossible for anyone to ever make again. By the time another year had passed the solid ground that had risen up to meet my feet would have disappeared forever.
This would be a unique walk of erasure — a forty-mile extended metaphor for my own embattled persona, as its foundations were washed away by what I suspected was earlyonset Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was also sympathetic magic: the walk devised as a ritualized erection of groynes, which might impede the longshore drift of my psyche.
To counter this — frankly morbid — self-absorption, I scanned the data on long-, short- and medium-term cliff erosion rates. I checked out coastal evolution and beach plan shape modelling. I examined the evidence of site inspections, and the various proposals — including the Mappleton coastal defences — that had been advanced against the ceding of solid to liquid. I read the reports of expert witnesses, and looked at the aerial photographs they had posted on the web, marked up so as to make explicit the underlying dynamics.
The names of the towns and villages that had been inundated since the medieval era were legion: Wilsthorpe, Hartburn, Hyde, Withow and Cleton; Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe; Great Golden, Golden Parva and Old Aldborough — and so on; like mortality itself, the sea had ground into utter oblivion, these, the habitations of already faceless villeins. Near to Spurn Head itself had stood the substantial town of Ravenser, a sturdy plantation of spires and spars where Henry Bolingbroke landed in 1399, and which, until the rise of Hull, was the principal port of Yorkshire. Since the Roman occupation more than fifty square miles of land had gone from Holderness, and still it disintegrated, clods and stones plash-plopping into the shallow sea.