From Peckham Rye to Rye

Take the no. 63 bus from Peckham Rye to Kings Cross. Board a train, with a changeover at Ashford Int., then you’re in Rye.

An odd town that slipped down the back of the sofa and is quite neatly tucked in to Antiquity.

‘I don’t see the sea.’

‘I don’t think we cross the sea on the way down.’

I thought it was a coastal town right up until the time we were standing in Rye. Feet firmly on cobbled streets, looking through thin panes of glass at nick nacks from another era – proud porcelain cats and those hairbrushes that have horse hairs for bristles. All the houses are lopsided from age. Red roof tiles slacken and look like they are slowly slipping downhill, pulling the plaster and the weight of the houses with them, sinking with decrepitude. But the wooden beams sprout upwards, holding up the entire town, lifting masses up to St. Mary’s church spire. Which has ‘one of the oldest working church tower clocks in the country’, says the free pamphlet. Dating to ‘1561-2’ it tells me, with the sort of accuracy only someone with smalltown pride would insist on hammering in. I mean, it was like 500 years ago. But this clock face has emblazoned on it an inscription, which I stare at morbidly when the bell sounds a delicate chime:

For our time is a very shadow that passeth away

-       Wisdom

That makes me think accuracy may be all we have. Quite timely too, as we arrive three hours early to check-in at the Tea House, next to the Mint. It is lovely, though the guesthouse owner surprised by our early arrival wants us to get out of her hair, so that she can tidy the rooms in peace (completely fair, but we only want to leave our bags here, so that we can walk on down to the sea – there is a sea nearby). He tells her full of gestures and charm (because he’s better at it than me) and Brenda who is accommodating and glittery, in persona, grabs her keys to the Mercedes and offers to drive us down. What a winner.

On the way to her parked car, she tells us a strange story of a cantorial monk who had done the deed with a local girl in the Medieval times.

‘He was holed up in here – Right here.’

Pointing to an embankment of green presided over by a weeping willow.

‘They buried him alive.’

I expected her to tell us tales of singing ghosts, but none followed.

Camber Sands. That’s where the sea is at! The Camber is a huge stretch of sand with wide open seas all round, rolling waves. Surfers and dogs. The weather was unusually warm so I took my socks off and got my feet sandy, then wet. Strolling. You can see Rye rise up in the distance. It sits on a ridge, which according to Wikipedia is the reason for the town’s name. I was almost right too, about it being a coastal town, because in Medieval days the sea reached Rye. It was a port town – one of the Cinque Ports – renowned for smuggling. But in the proceeding centuries landowners who wanted to expand their farmlands, reclaimed the marshland from the ocean. They stemmed the flow of the River Rother so that it became the only waterway that let ships sails right up to Rye, until the seascape changed to what it is today. Rye is about 2 miles from the sea when it used to be on top of it. I guess that clock face has seen a lot of change.

Cormorants and sturdy sheep. Tumbling border collies; funny scruffy looking dogs out on walks with their funny scruffy looking owners. It takes an hour or so to walk back to Rye. We eat sweet vinegary mussels from styrofoam cups, which reminds me in Normandy there was a dish on the menu called fruits de mer. We pass under Land’s Gate built in the 14^th Century, again Medieval, looking immoveable. Rye is really pedalling the School for Wizards & Witches and I’m starting to see a pattern. Anything that is so old that it could be deemed mystical is on the menu at Rye. The Mermaids Inn is very famous for being a smuggler’s haunt centuries ago. I eat two day’s running at Simon The Pie Man, where the older waitresses wear white pinafore aprons over their sombre black skirts and have their hair tied back in exquisite buns. I enter and buy books from the Tiny Book Store, where the bookshop owner gives me a knowing speech about his collection –

‘Like I say. Books come to me. I don’t go looking for them… We got a load of Vintage Penguins in. A whole load but it’s hard to find a First Edition… Can’t for the life of me get hold of any Seamus Heaney, not these days.’

I like Rye. I like how peculiar it is, or is trying to be, but does that matter? There’s a rusted blade of a short-sword sticking out of one of the beams in our guesthouse. No one attests to knowing what it’s doing there. Gold. I’m a tourist and I love it.

On the final day we go to Rye Castle and Museum. £4 entry. Bargain. A well kept Medieval castle later used as a jail. Also the first prison in Britain to have a women’s tower, how thoughtful. I particularly liked the exhibition cabinet on Coopers: craftsmen who made barrels. I learnt a lot of barrel facts, such as, ‘All barrels are casks but not all casks are barrels’. Did you know that a barrel is a measurement? And a Hogshead is one up from a Barrel? Me neither.

On the walk down steep cobbled streets to the station I’m inordinately glad I found Rye. For no good reason, I feel like I’ve made an important pilgrimage from my hometown featuring Rye in its title. (Do New Yorkers feel the same when they visit York?) As we leave, hand in hand, I am met by the exuberant copy of the tourist information board…

Welcome to Historic Rye

Perched on a hill, the medieval town of Rye is the sort of place you thought existed only in your imagination.

Parallel Parking

For the first time in my life I am learning to drive. It is very difficult, but I’ve already had more than six lessons and I’ve passed the Theory Test, so you have to take your Driving Test within two years of doing that. I am actually paying for the privilege of putting my nerves through strenuous exercise every Saturday morning, I murmur to myself as I tie up my laces at the bottom of the stairs, so best get on with it. My driving instructor, John, is a hero. Pushing down on his brake pads when I’m about to slowly crash in to the stationary car in front. Or swerving my steering wheel as I narrowly escape clipping the white van parked by the side of the road. When I stutter and stall in the middle of Lewisham junction, almost every time we go through there, he fends off the angry drivers with a wave of his hand and gives me clear and quiet instructions on how to fix this problem.

I am concentrating so hard on driving that my neck and upper shoulders are permanently tense, and when I go down bends on a road, it feels like when you're strapped inside a rollercoaster by one of those over the shoulder safety mechanisms, only releasing and letting you breathe when the ride’s over. I’m not a natural driver, but then I never imagined I would be. I have rarely sat in a car during my growing up years, my parents didn’t own one and I rode around on mini-buses at school, quite far back from the driver. John says, ‘People usually pick up little rules of the road paying attention to their parents, or whoever’s driving them around.’ Even when I’m in a car I don’t pay attention to what the driver is doing. I'm always staring out the window at the other people and the colour of shopfronts! Or something equally un-drivey.

Today we do a new route to Blackheath and I find myself doing exactly that and staring out at things instead of concentrating on the driving. It’s because I used to come here when I was at school. The heath looks so different when you’re driving around it. It looks smooth and manageable, but I know underfoot it feels rough and takes an age to walk over. The No. 54 bus crosses my path and I remember that’s how I used to get home. We follow the one-way system as plump pedestrians walk out in front of parked cars (hazard!) and I wait at the traffic lights, with the clutch pressed firmly half down, trying to hover for John.

Once we’re on a quiet residential street I have to practice my parallel parking. I don’t understand parallel parking. Conceptually and rationally, yes I understand parallel parking, but in practice of having to make the car I am in control of do it, I cannot fathom how. Because you have to turn your steering wheel right in many different angles or degrees (John tries to make me understand by drawing and explaining laboriously, pouring out his care and due diligence trying to make me see), but when you put your vehicle in reverse you have to steer in the opposite direction. It hurts my head and tortured neck looking out the back window trying to understand it. For now, I will just do exactly as John tells me to and one day I hope that I will get past this.

As I’m doing this painfully slow reversing and neck craning, I see all shades of life through the multiple windows and mirrors. A Royal Mail van is parked up quite close. The postman opens his red double doors and is shuffling through letters and packages, then stuffing the ones that fit inside his courier bag slung low below his hip. A funny looking family come ambling down the pavement towards me, a grandma wearing an oversized sweatshirt with NAVY stamped on the chest, a little girl, and a grandad wearing baggy khaki clothes, walking boots, and an enormous neon yellow bucket hat with a floppy rim. Reminding me of those stereotypical Australian hats, with the bits of cork hanging off string. He also has a little leather pouch. Now a second postman comes out from a side street and crosses the road behind me, making his way to the parked van. I must wait. Next time I look through the windshield I see the two postmen having a natter, I wonder if they’re on eachothers’ turf? Next time I look out of my rear window, I see the grandad smoking a pipe sat on a low garden wall, still in his hi-vis hat but no longer with the kid.

Looking from a car out in to the world is a very strange perspective. It’s like a moving room. Usually the view stays pretty much the same from a window of a room, apart from the change of seasons, or maybe if you live somewhere without light pollution, the stars will sometimes look different. But in a car you can study people in the outside world, with no real offence taken. You can even say stuff about strangers who are only a few metres away from you, without being heard or harassed. I guess I’m describing some of the grounds for road rage, but I feel no rage, only nerves and wonder.

Thank You, Moon Gazing Hare

I want to thank the Moon Gazing Hare, appropriately. She who sits on my chest of drawers, with her neck cranked back waiting patiently, sniffing the air. She watches stellar time and I, sometimes crouched with her, sitting low on my dark blue carpet stared out to space. She came from a trip to Cambridge, which ended in a disaster. Retrieved out of a handbag, unbroken. The Moon Gazing Hare is made from alabaster, she is white and chalky like how we imagine the moon to be. But she looks soft, like cheese or mochi, which is also how we imagine the moon to be. In flux / many things at once / ‘the inconstant moon.’ I love her. I fear her. I am in awe of her.

The Moon Gazing Hare has been a constant. As I turned over another year, changed offices, visited continents, said goodbyes, wept at brides, left a job and started a new one; she has been steadfast and still. Her elongated ears swept back and streamlined, her tiny eyes marking the heavens. Apparently a Norse myth, a pagan belief, where if one clocked a hare looking up at the moon it was a good omen. A sign of stirring hope, new beginnings, re-birth and growth. That was all stated on the package I received her in, which is now in the recycling. The Moon Gazing Hare will stay with me still, I’ll put her on my window sill. For tonight the moon is full, a yellow dot high above our polluted air, beaming.