I wasn’t at all well that summer. My doctor had diagnosed a balance problem and there was going to be a long wait to see the specialist. A gentler than usual holiday was called for, so we booked a room in Broadstairs. We had asked for a sea view and there were two comfortable chairs that we moved to face the big window. One of the books I had taken with me was Agatha Christie’s N or M. I found that I was sitting in a seaside guest house, reading a second world war spy thriller about the search for a German spy in a seaside guest house. I can’t remember, though, whether I had chosen that book because of its setting or whether the match of reading and location was a happy accident.
Certainly, I was aware of other literary associations in Broadstairs. On one of the walks I was able to manage, we had a look at the North Foreland and wondered which set of steps cut into the chalk were the ones that had given John Buchan the title The 39 Steps.
On a later visit, the literary allusions came to us, without our looking for them. It was autumn this time. We went for a walk along the beach as the light was fading. As we turned to come back, we noticed a figure in the distance. The figure seemed to be following us. We stopped and the figure stopped too, moving off again as we did and keeping the same distance. We were experiencing in reality the situation from M R James. Eventually, the figure turned towards the cliffs. When we looked again, it had disappeared. Perhaps it had gone up the steps.
We stood under the cliff, discussing this strange occurrence. It was almost dark now, but on the edge of the cliff, we could make out a sinister figure looking down at us. It appeared to have its arms folded. After a few minutes peering into the near darkness, the penny dropped as we realised that the strange figure was actually a chimney stack.
That was not the only time that I felt I had walked into the pages of M R James. We stayed at a hotel in North Norfolk, not far from the beach and with a golf course nearby. The hotel was quite old and in the past guests had come for seaside golf, like James’ characters. An old framed menu on the wall told us that dinner at 7.30 would be followed by bridge. A reassuring lack of choice in those days. There was a small sitting room, with some books on a shelf. Among them was a battered paperback copy of James’ stories. So I had the experience of reading Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad and A Warning to the Curious in a place very like the fictional locations.
It started to rain, and we went to the bar for a drink. We sat looking out at the hotel grounds and beyond them the now deserted beach. It seemed a far less friendly place in the wind and rain. The cloth canopy of one of the tables on the terrace flapped against its pole. As the wind and rain whipped it back and forth, it looked to me, with my imagination no doubt primed by reading James, like the ghost under the sheet in Whistle.
The hotel might well have had its own ghosts. Another old framed menu was from the second world war. It was for a very special occasion, the farewell dinner for the officers who had been billeted there, while training for D-day. A poignant artefact that made me wonder how many of them had returned from Normandy. I would not have been at all surprised to encounter the shade of a young subaltern on the lonely beach at twilight.
One final thing. During our stay at the Norfolk hotel, there was a fellow guest, a lady, who could be seen each evening sitting quietly and writing in a notebook. Perhaps we weren’t the only ones to find our imaginations refreshed by this stretch of coast.
The Good Reader 