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.