LI
All Saints’ Street is the most picturesque in the old town. Its houses are for the most part ancient, and rarely are two alike. Many are gabled, some lean heavily forward or against their neighbours, others have latticed casements and great heavy timber frames; few are those that are not sketchable, and in between them goes the long narrow street, deep down below the raised pavements, towards the sea. The most picturesque of these ancient tenements, and perhaps also the oldest, is certainly the most famous, for it was the home of the aged mother of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel at the time when his squadron came cruising off the Sussex coast. We are told how, coming off Hastings, the Admiral, saying he had business ashore, was rowed to the Stade. Walking up All Saints’ Street, to the house pictured here, a humble old woman came forth, and he kissed her, called her “Mother,” and asked her blessing.
If improving frenzy will permit, the old house, already well on into its fifth century, is sound enough to last centuries more; and when modern iron and steel have rusted, or become brittle, its stout oaken timbering will be as sturdy as ever.
OLD HOUSE, ALL SAINTS’ STREET.
Between All Saints’ Street and High Street formerly ran the Bourne stream to the sea. Its course is now marked by Bourne Street, running, narrow and steep, to the shore.
And there is the sea. Not something outside the picture, as it seems to the road-farer who, tracing the road to Brighton, comes at last to the Aquarium, and finds the beach and the sea, as it were, “side-shows,” but an intimate part of the place—great waves slapping down vigorously upon a narrow shore, and, when the stormy winds do blow, spouting in great clouds of spray overhead, bringing with them tons of shingle or taking away many cubic yards of Parade and sea-wall.
No one could ever entertain the remotest doubt of Hastings being, in the most intimate sense, the seaside. The roadway of the front, especially the front of the Old Town, is so narrow, and the groyne-protected beach in general of such meagre proportions that, to be housed on the front, is to enjoy every sea-salty benefit of an ocean voyage, without its accompanying miseries of sickness. But the situation is not without its own peculiar drawbacks. Just as some great vessel, ploughing through heaving billows, will, in sailor language, “ship it green,” so do the more exposed houses take full measure when waves run high, cataracts flowing down basement steps and converting coal-cellars into impromptu marine tanks.
The elements at Hastings are at odds with the Board of Trade, which has forbidden the Corporation to take beach from the foreshore. Winds, waves, and currents deposit shingle in the roadway, and it has then to be cleared up; and, since the Government Department cannot require it to be replaced, it is sold. According to the town accounts for 1904, the Town Council in that year made £24 out of 120 tons of beach washed up in this way.
The sea in this Old Town corner of Hastings is undoubtedly the “ever fresh, the ever free” of the poet: the rolling ocean, the heaving billow, and everything adjectival in the marine sort. It is unquestionably that which you fail in many places of the Eastbourne type quite to realise: the home of little sprats and great whales; the cruising-ground of fisher-boats, steamships, and navies, no less than of the Albertine, the New Albertine, and the Favourite sailing-yachts, on which you get very seasick for the ridiculous sum of a shilling an hour.
The sea is that which your point of view makes it: home of the guardian fleets; a course upon which steamships earn dividends for their owners; the grave of thousands of drowned sailors; or fishing-ground for trawlers and seiners.
For what were you created? Answer, wild waves! For the delight of the midsummer child, with spade and bucket, and clothes tucked up; to enable the railway companies to run excursions to the “resorts” risen by the edge of you? What, on balance, are you: blessing or curse? You render our shores inviolate, but your sundering straits and oceans perpetuate Babel and maintain conflicting nationalities.
Were it not for you and St. George’s Channel there would be no Ireland, and consequently no Home Rule Question. For that, at any rate, we owe you a grudge—and must, since we cannot yet shift to fill that Channel up—continue to owe it.
HASTINGS OLD TOWN.
This is the Stade, where the fisher-town exists, sufficient to itself, self-contained, and quite as apart in feeling, manners and customs, from the modern town and St. Leonards as though it were sundered by gulfs and distances, instead of just adjoining. Not a gulf, in fact, but something in the way of a mountain—the West Hill—intervenes, and only by the narrow line of George Street, Pelham Place, and Castle Street is ready communication open. It is sufficiently ready, but new town and old have different ideals in life, and agree to mingle over that thoroughfare threshold only when business calls. In the unconventional streets of the Old Town you lounge in the sunshine at open windows, or squat in unconcerned deshabille on doorsteps, gossiping across the width of the road; in modern Hastings the streets are of a greater width, but the manners are more strait, and you do not gaze forth from windows or exchange scandal with the house opposite.
The grandest view of Hastings is that of the Old Town from hard by the modern, but picturesque, Lifeboat House, whence you see the great East Hill looming magnificently up above the huddled houses that, whether they be of old red brick or tarred wood, are all, in the mass, artistically “right.” It is, in the summer, a crowded quarter, for the excursionists who feel a little abashed by the stucco magnificences and primnesses of newer Hastings and St. Leonards, and cannot elsewhere come into close communion with the untamed sea, find here an ideal dumping-ground for babies and provision-baskets. Here, thanks to modern masonry groynes, a fine mass of beach is gradually accumulating, in heaped-up plenty.
But it is not a crowded beach and a sunny sky that give the artist his chance at this point. His opportunity comes at those times when most folk would choose to be under shelter; when the rainbow arches in the leaden sky, the domestic washing of the Old Town flaps wetly in the squalls, and the distant tackle-boxes and the bell-turret of the Fishermen’s Church stand out almost in the blackness of silhouettes. Then the East Hill looks all its size, and more.
Unhappily, brutal things have been done in modern times to East Hill and West, in the cutting of shafts through the chalk for lifts; and the scar thus made in the face of the East Hill is, from many points, atrociously prominent; while day-trippers have even been known to mistake the embattled lift-station on the sky-line up there for the Castle.