Oh I wish I was Brentwood bound…

Why Paul Simon wished he was homeward bound to Brentwood

As a teenager I’d heard a rumour that Paul Simon wrote his classic song Homeward Bound while sitting at Brentwood Station in the 1960s. Back then it was easy to imagine him in the moribund waiting room writing lines about shades of mediocrity.

But in the internet age it’s possible to verify such assertions, and the truth is that Simon penned Homeward Bound in either Ditton or Halebank stations in Widnes, while waiting for a train back to Brentwood, where he was living with his girlfriend. Blimey. Yes, it was Brentwood that made Simon and Garfunkel get all poetic.

SITTING IN THE RAILWAY STATION
He made his UK debut at the Railway Inn Folk Club in Brentwood in 1964 and met Kathy Chitty there, the inspiration for Kathy’s Song and America. She was a 17-year-old Essex girl on the door selling tickets to bearded men in cord jackets. They dated for two years until Paul returned to the US. Kathy now lives in Wales and maintains a diplomatic sound of silence on all Simon-related subjects. Although I can picture her as a slightly folksier version of Celebrity Big Brother’s uber-Essex babe Chantelle.

These days if Simon was homeward bound to Brentwood, he’d walk out of the station, trudge 100 metres up King’s Road and come to the Amstrad headquarters. You wonder what Sir Alan Sugar would make of the wandering folk troubadour:

“Paul, shut up a minute will yer, you’re doing my head in! You took a bloody trip to Widnes to play a gig and all you could do is whinge about yer bleeding girlfriend Kaffy. No sales figures, just lyrics scrawled on a British Rail timetable. I’m not having that. Shut up, I am talking! OK, you can knock out a decent tune, but you ain’t doing it for me. If I asked you to build me a swimming pool you’d be knocking off every time you saw some leaves that are green turn to brown. With regret, Paul, you’re fired!”

Literary Geezers — Would Mr Darcy now come from Essex?

David Nicholls is channelling Essex for literary success via Southend-on-Sea

Would Mr Darcy now come from Essex? It’s interesting to note that the hero of David Nicholls’ very funny novel Starter For Ten is a character called Brian from Southend. The opening scene sees Brian and his two old mates from school on the end of Southend Pier, drinking beer and contemplating his imminent departure to university.

The novel is heavily autobiographical, but even though Nicholls himself hails from Hampshire he makes Brian an Essex man. These days coming from Essex is a form of literary shorthand for an unsophisticated bloke who drinks too much and then has many comedic moments trying to bed a posh bird with middle-class bohemian parents who walk around the house in the nude. And having to overcome the prejudice against Essex men makes it all the better when he finally gets a girl.

DICKENS' PUB LANDLORD
Indeed, Essex characters have a long history in literature. A recent reading of Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, published in 1841, made me realise that old Dicko had created the Pub Landlord 170 years before Al Murray. Dickens’ character of John Willet, landlord of the Maypole Inn in Chigwell, likes to sit by his fireside boiler ‘tackling’ subjects in his slow-witted boorish manner, surrounded by his barroom acolytes. He would almost definitely read the Daily Express, dislike the EU and insist on a white wine for the lady. Dickens’ enjoys his comeuppance. There’s a very funny and poignant scene where a stunned John is finally rendered speechless as anti-Papist Gordon Rioters smash up his pub.

Hopefully there might one day be a sophisticated Essex character in a novel. But perhaps the comedy of Essex characters is just too good for authors to resist. Indeed, there may well be a PhD to be had studying the role of the Essex Geezer in literature.

The Road to Southend Pier

In Southend you can stand in the middle of the Thames Estuary and still keep your feet dry…

We’re eating fish and chips on the gravel beach in the rain. A typical English day trip, but the chips are good and we’re just about sheltered by two deck-chairs. For my nine-year-old daughter Nell it’s a real adventure. And after eating chips she then finds three dead baby crabs and we dip a toe in the sea. It’s hard to believe we were in London an hour ago.

It’s less enjoyable for the Essex family with teenage kids behind us on the front. “What a shit day… only ‘cos you made it shit… move your fat arse… shut up!… but I’ve got a soaking wet arse!”

Still, the weather clears up and it’s pleasing to see Southend, once a solidly white working class resort, now being used by many ‘new’ EastEnders. We spot families who are black, Bangladeshi and orthodox Jewish in 100 metres on the seafront.

The listed domed front of the Kursaal — the world's first theme park — is still there, which brings back memories of Rod Stewart and the Faces and Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel gigs in the 1970s. Today it’s full of fail-to-grab a soft toy machines, ten-pin bowling and staff in electronic illuminated bunny ears.

ADVENTURE ISLAND
Nell loves Adventure Island, the fun fair by the Pier. We avoid the chuck a ball at something for two quid stalls and my daughter enjoys the high windmill slide and crooked house. It’s staffed by friendly studenty types and obviously hugely popular with families.

But the real highlight of any trip is Southend Pier — although sadly the nearby Pier Bar where my mate Nick used to bop in his Teddy Boy days appears to have disappeared.

There’s a newly rebuilt glass and wood entrance hall with Matrix-style futuristic lifts. We buy walk there/get the train back tickets (£3 adults, £1.60 kids). The Pier appears to stretch into the sea forever. Nell decides to walk only a little way because she says she’ll be scared walking over water and even more scared on the train. She tackles her fear by crawling on the planks and looking through the gaps at the water below. A splinter in her finger puts a halt to this but at least takes her mind off being scared. I entice her onwards by revealing it’s the longest pleasure pier in the world at 1.33 miles.

ESTUARY ENGLISH
Southend Pier has had a battered history, but it refuses to die. It’s suffered devastating fires in 1959, 1976, 1995 and 2005, plus in 1986 the MV Kingsabbey sliced through the pier and left it with a 70 feet gap. But as Sir John Betjeman said “The pier is Southend. Southend is the Pier”. And they just keep on rebuilding it.

It’s calm out at sea after the busy promenade. We wave at the passing train named the Sir John Betjeman. And stopping at the shelters on the way, fortified by a shared Mars Bar at the vending machine half way out, we find ourselves edging towards the pierhead and sensing just how wide the mouth of the Thames is.

“Look, we’ve come a really long way. You can’t see the name of Adventure Island anymore!” says Nell.

It reminds me of my own childish excitement when our family first ventured down the Pier. The Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey are vivid and enticing across the estuary. The sea is flat and on a hot day there’s a pleasing breeze. Boats sail past, tantalizingly close.

END OF THE PIER SHOW
Finally we reach the rectangular platform at the end of the pier. There aren’t many places where you can stand 1.33 miles out to sea. It’s much better than say Brighton pier. The tacky amusements have gone and there’s just a reasonably priced café and a new lifeboat station with a RNLI shop and the lifeboats on display through glass windows.

From the café Nell rings her sister: “Lola, I’m 1.33 miles out in the sea!”

People fish from the end of the pier, or sit and gaze at Kent and Cooling Marshes and the mouth of the Thames in the distance. Nell looks through a pay and display telescope and watches the cargo ships heading towards Tilbury.

It’s all rather splendid. There aren’t many places that have a world record anything, yet so close to London we have the world’s longest pleasure pier. And for children and dads it’s a great day trip. Perhaps we should succumb to pier pressure a bit more.

All Stations to Shoeburyness

Who needs the Settle-Carlisle line when you’ve got Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness?

It’s strange to have reached middle age and never used the Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness line (bar the Barking to Upminster section that my dad used to use to get home quicker from West Ham games).

There was a sort of railway apartheid as a teenager in the 1970s; the denizens of Brentwood and Shenfield used the Liverpool Street line. The Fenchurch Street line belonged to West Horndon and Laindonites and if you travelled too far along it the rumour was you went straight off the end of Southend Pier.

ROMAN INVASION
Whatever side you approach Fenchurch Street from, it has great views of either the Tower of London or the Gherkin. And once you’re on the c2c train and past the social housing and building works, it gets really rather scenic beyond Upminster. There’s fields stretching all the way across the reclaimed marshes to the Thames and it’s not dissimilar to Cooling Marsh in Kent where Vinnie Jones-lookalike Magwitch might still be lurking.

On the north side of the railway there’s the ruin of Hadleigh Castle, once painted by Constable. The park here is now going to feature in the mountain biking events at the 2012 Olympics. The land here rises up to wooded hills. In his book Britain BC, the Time Team archaeologist Francis Pryor reckons the Roman invaders mounted a steep gravel ridge between East Tilbury and Mucking and used it as a defensive position in 43AD. You wonder if there might have been the odd bundle on these hills at Hadleigh too as the Romans defended themselves against hordes of Brittunculi armed with satellite dishes and super strength lager.

LEIGH COCKLES
But the biggest surprise after a glimpse of Canvey Island from Benfleet is when the track starts to hog the coast. There’s the boats and river estuary of Leigh-on-Sea, with a series of Dickensian-looking weather-boarded houses and cobbled streets by the shore in Old Leigh and the Crooked Billet pub. When I interviewed the late Lee Brilleaux over a lunchtime pint or four he recommended the cockles here at Leigh as a great cure for a hangover.

Chalkwell station is right on the beach and through the salt-ravaged station windows you can see nothing but sea. It’s the sort of place you’d rave about were it in Devon and quite a way to start a commute into the City.

Southend Central spoils it a bit by being slightly inland but at the terminus of Shoeburyness you are only a short hop to the North Sea. And I must confess it easily beats the Southend to Liverpool Street line.

Forty-odd minutes from London you can be on a beach via the Thames estuary, boats, beaches and glimpses of Kent. And the Grays and Dagenham Docks loop is yet to come… Never mind the train to Penzance, explore the Essex Riviera line.

A walk in the Woods with Billericay Dickie

Tiptoe through the bluebells and get one-fingered salutes in Billericay's Norsey Wood…

“Had a love affair with Nina in the back of my Cortina, a seasoned up hyena could not have been more obscener…”

Maybe I shouldn’t have played my daughters Billericay Dickie so many times. It’s now their favourite song and as we drive into Billericay from Shenfield, they burst into an Ian Dury-esque chorus. Luckily they’ve not heard Plaistow Patricia yet.

Billericay has gone upmarket since my last visit in the 1980s. There’s delis and gosh, a Waitrose. But some things haven’t changed. It’s back in May and as Her Indoors drives past the gated homes of wannabe footballers down Norsey Road, looking for the famed bluebells in Norsey Wood she’s perhaps going too slowly for the driver behind. He veers off at the next left giving us a one-fingered salute out of the window. Well, this is Essex, where the car is king.

WE HAVE WOODS
You don’t expect to find an ancient coppiced woodland in the heart of Billericay, but here it is, as featured recently on BBC2’s Natural World. Thankfully it’s now protected and run by Basildon Council. We park up and set off on one of the guided trails with our dog Vulcan. The bluebells are stunning, all over the undulating leafy forest floor and giving the whole place a Narnia meets Ian Dury feel.

We picnic on the fallen trunks of a coppiced hornbeam amid a swathe of bluebells. Nicola spots wood anemones, town hall clock, yellow archangel, wild garlic (ransoms) and sweet woodruff, all overseen by a robin whose territory we are obviously steaming in to, which is well out of order.

There’s plenty to see in the woods as you pass dog walkers in purple boots and pink cagoules; a not very clearly defined bronze age tumulus (found to contain the cremation urns in 1865), a hazel plantation, ponds and trenches dug in both world wars by the London Defence volunteers. Our dog Vulcan goes off lead and makes joyous circular runs up and down the surprising wet valley system, which makes the wood feel more like lush Devon than flat old Essex.

PLEASANT VALLEY SUNDAY
We get hopelessly lost in the valleys, but eventually return to the start, where the warden says he’s only ever had to rescue one person at post number five. Who would have believed you could get lost in Billericay?

It’s a weird outpost of Iron Age woods in Essex and a romantic spot with its May carpet of bluebells. We drive home wondering if Billericay Dickie might have found it an ideal spot to take Joyce and Vicky or indeed rendezvous with Janet from quite near the Isle of Thanet (who looked more like a gannet).

www.norseywoods.org.uk

Armageddon in Kelvedon Hatch

Why was Margaret Thatcher planning to take to her bunker in Essex?

Kelvedon Hatch in the afternoon appears to be a town bereft of inhabitants. We get off the 501 bus from Brentwood and walk up the A128. No shops, no children, it could be an episode of The Survivors. Finally we find a man gardening by his bungalow.

“Excuse me, do you know where the Secret Nuclear Bunker is?”

“It’s down that way on the left, but it’s a long old walk… ,” he says of the not-so-secret bunker, with the bemused look of a man who has never before seen a man and two children attempting to access a nuclear bunker via public transport. And it doesn’t look like he expects us to return.

The pavement soon disappears. It looks like a nuclear strike has already hit Essex. The verges, hedges and ditches of the A128 are full of shattered plastic mineral water and Coca-Cola bottles and rusting lager cans.

NUCLEAR FAMILY
Eventually we come across a bunker sign pointing to a long track winding track heading across a ploughed field. There’s just a grassy hill in the distance with a mysterious mast perched on its top.

It feels like a real adventure, a trek into the unknown regions of both history and Essex. The track descends into a gulley where there’s a sentry box and a paintballing shed. We walk on past a stream and wood, post-apocalyptic paintballers scaling ropes in the trees, and eventually find a car park and a path to a suburban bungalow on the side of the hill.

Eerily there are no staff on duty, just hand-held audio guides in a rack. We enter to the left of the bungalow and find it’s a huge steel corridor with bunker plans and Geiger counters hanging on the walls.

It’s square and featureless and designed to defend the government from civilians if they tried to storm the bunker to escape the radiation and perhaps query their MPs’ expenses.

BLAST DOORS
There’s an Armageddon time soundtrack on the public address system; four-minute warning wailing sirens and calls for Captain Palmer to head to the operations room.

Then we move through blast doors that are the weight of four cars each and descend further down to the depths.

We’re 100 feet underground and encased in ten feet of reinforced concrete. The bunker was built in 1953 and decommissioned in 1993 as it cost £3 million a year to run. The family who owned the land, the Parrishes, bought the bunker and now run it as a tourist attraction. The ideal place to fall out with the kids.

There’s no natural light and only circular vents in the ceiling to circulate the air.

We enter the communications area where 1950s switchboards give way to ancient telex machines.

“This is cool! Everything’s grey. These are so old. What are these?” says 11-year-old Lola, banging the keys of a Telex machine.

A uniformed female dummy sits in the incoming messages booth. The bog-roll like print-outs list innocuous towns like Aberystwyth and Luton. Here the 300 self-appointed survivors of a nuclear holocaust would search for signs of life in other bunkers around the blighted landscape.

Panic pervades our party. Static crackles in the scientists’ centre where the fall-out patterns would have been monitored. Red phones stand in a box on the wall.

““I want to leave, I'm scared!” says nine-year-old Nell.

And so am I. It nearly happened. It still could.


STAND UP MARGARET
In the BBC Studio a dummy of Margaret Thatcher stands headphones-on ready to talk to the shell of a nation.

Lights flash on machines and everywhere there’s great big clunking boxes with dials on them. It all feels like 1970s Doctor Who. The dummies look like Autons and there are gas masks on the walls. It would be no surprise to find Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and his chaps from UNIT here, trying to maintain discipline and lay on a cup of instant coffee in an impossible situation. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor would be shaking his head at humanity’s folly.

We move up a flight of stairs to the “floor”, where there’s a map of Britain complete with pointers for military planning.

PROTECT AND SURVIVE
The children watch a TV playing Protect and Survive. It’s the best CND recruitment video ever. Everyone must stay in their improvised house shelter for 14 days with water and tinned food. The sections on placing your toilet waste in a plastic bag and storing it in a larger bucket fascinate Lola and Nell. “If someone dies wrap the body in plastic or blankets and move it to a separate room,” says the keep calm and carry on voiceover.

We see the giant grey tanks and pipes of the plant room where the life support systems supplied water and pumped filtered air around the bunker.

It’s up another flight of stairs to the sick bay where a dummy lies with a bloody eye. “Look there’s a coffin!” says Nell.

It’s the most surreal kids’ day out ever. We see the bunks where staff would have “hot-bedded” in the dormitory and a large room full of ancient computers that would have been the devolved central government. Although now it’s staffed by dummies with no legs and flapping white sleeves. A sign says “Justice” on the walls. And the controller of this bunker really would have had the power of life and death.

We find our house in the giant laminated map of London on the wall. And in the Gents piped music pays “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Weird. The children try on gas masks and army uniforms in a dressing-up area.

IRRADIATED FOOD
And then it’s up to the canteen where the smell of institutionalized food from stainless steel ovens evokes just how awful the post-nuclear bunker would have felt. And a sign reads that the food may contain nuts, which seems the last thing to worry about after the invisible death cloud arrives. I’m tempted to ask if they do irradiated food.

And finally we find two staff alive behind the counter, although everything has to be paid for in the honesty box.

We admire the nuclear bunker mugs, postcards and pencils and rubber toys beneath the grey tomb-like beams.

“Are these dead?” asks an elderly retainer picking up our coffee mugs and cans. No, but everyone outside is.

And then we take the final exit, walking down a long arced tunnel that finally emerges at a small camouflaged opening in the side of the hill.

Daylight at last. And thankfully there’s no sign of fall out.

www.secretnuclearbunker.com

Miss Willmott's Lost Garden

Ellen Willmott booby-trapped her daffodils, employed 100 gardeners and brought Alpine Ravines and boating lakes to Great Warley
Collapsed cellars, a ruined conservatory, hidden reservoirs, stone paths, cold frames and boating lakes emerging from the undergrowth. If Warley Place were in Cornwall it would surely be the subject of a Lost Gardens of Heligan-style TV series.

Warley Place was a welcome discovery while visiting my late father’s old farm in Great Warley. As a child I remember scrambling up a huge earth bank in Dark Lane and discovering the Narnia-like ruins of an old house in the woods. It was, in fact, the remains of one of England’s finest gardens created by the formidable Ellen Willmott, one of the top gardeners of her day.

Forty odd years later it’s been renovated by the Essex Wildlife Trust. The entrance is next to the busy Thatchers Arms pub.

MISS WILLMOTT'S GHOST
Ellen Willmott moved into Warley Place with her parents in 1875 and spent a lifetime developing a sumptuous garden. Numerous plants are named after her (the Eryngium giganteum is still called "Miss Willmott's Ghost) and she once employed more than 100 gardeners. She was a big mover in the Royal Horticultural Society and was awarded the Medal of Honour in 1907.

She died penniless in 1934, perhaps having perhaps spent all her dosh on mail-order seeds, and the grand house was demolished in 1939.

The walk begins along the old main road to Brentwood which medieval pilgrims once used when travelling from Walsingham to Canterbury. Past the old crocus field is South Pond, Great Warley’s watering hole in medieval times. Then it's in to the woods and the ruins of the Willmotts’ old house.

The roofless shell of the grand old conservatory is still standing, an evocative sight in the dappled green light. While around it are drops in to the old basements. You can still see the tiled walls of the kitchen and the overgrown alcoves of the old cellars.

Mosaic stone paths have been unearthed by the Wildlife Trust's dedicated staff and the 17th century walled garden is relatively intact, still housing a palm tree, a ginko tree, magnolias, comfrey and anemones.

The wooded trail continues past wild garlic and the remains of Willmott’s cold frames, greenhouses, and a half-moon shaped pond and a deep reservoir.

DARK LANE
Down the hill, the boating ponds are empty but the brickwork is still there complete with a mooring rail. A huge earth bank, now supported by steel trusses, descends to my dad’s old farm workers’ cottages in Dark Lane. You sense the huge effort Miss Willmott went to in taming and controlling nature — a very Victorian philosophy.

There’s still a carp pond with water and past the seven Spanish chestnuts, planted by the diarist John Evelyn who briefly owned Warley Place, there's a viewpoint by a daffodil-strewn meadow. Here you can gaze across the fields of my dad’s old farm, towards the M25 and then in the distance the towers of the City of London. You feel the history of encroachment at Warley Place; of both time and the city of London.

The tour ends with a bridge over a gorge that Willmott created to showcase her Alpine plants. Water used to flow through it and in to the South Pond. The huge rocks in the gorge were lugged all the way from Yorkshire by the company she employed.

REVOLVER IN HER HANDBAG
Willmott never married and as she grew older she became increasingly eccentric, relying ever more on her faithful butler Robinson (whose daughter was my headmistress at primary school). She was arrested for shop-lifting (the charges were eventually dropped), carried a revolver in her handbag for those late-night walks back from Brentwood station and booby-trapped her daffodil fields to ward off bulb thieves.

Yes, Miss Willmott’s project was the work of a loaded toff. She wasn’t great on workers’ rights, and was said to sack any gardener if he allowed a weed to show. But the scale and ambition of her life’s work is still inspiring. She spent everything on her garden and died penniless.

After her death Warley Place was sold to developers (nothing changes there) but then the Second World War intervened and afterwards the area was designated part of London’s Green Belt.

Ellen’s pristine garden was overtaken by undergrowth, decay and Japanese knotweed, until volunteers unearthed it in the last decade. And the sense of decay makes it even better, within sight of the M25 lies a place to reflect, wonder down mysterious overgrown, shadowy paths and move back in time to an era of grand projects in the shrubbery.

www.warleyplace.org.uk