LII
But sketchable at every turn is the Stade: the very reverse of St. Leonards, whose formal houses and formal people no one would choose to sketch or interest one’s self in. Here is the “Dolphin” inn, the “House for sea-wonders,” with an amazing fish from some distant clime hanging, very goggle-eyed and finny, and very dry, by the door; and, no doubt, stranger sights within. Beside it are “Tamarisk Steps.” Who is there would not, for sheer love of their names, explore Tamarisk Steps and Tackleway, that goes inland, parallel with All Saints’ Street, to the back of All Saints’ itself?
OLD TACKLE-BOXES, HASTINGS.
The “tackle-boxes” on the beach at Rock-a-Nore are a peculiar feature of the fisherman’s quarter. They are tall, tower-like, black-tarred wooden sheds of four or five storeys’ height, built in rows at right-angles to the sea, and identified by letters of the alphabet. In them are stored the nets and miscellaneous gear of the smacks. Generally groups of depressed, guernseyed, weather-beaten smacksmen may be seen and spoken with while mending their tackle, and are as unlike the fishermen and longshore folk of the comic artists as well may be. They are not so phenomenally broad in the “starn,” so pot-bellied, nor so patchy; and, instead of having that little dense patch of spade-beard, like the chin-beards of Rameses and other typical Egyptian statues, as inseparable from the conventional fisherman as a nimbus from the head of a saint, they are either very full-whiskered or quite clean-shaven. But the conventional fisherman will no more become obsolete than the conventional burglar with his ankle-jacks, his fur cap, and his furtive glance; or the conventional John Bull. There is nothing like them on earth, but they are necessary abstractions for the feeding of unimaginative minds.
You may read in the guide-books how the term “Chop-back” will rouse a Hastings fisherman to fury, and timid, yet inquiring people, approach the subject with them apologetically; but I declare they turn a puzzled look upon you, and seem hardly to comprehend the meaning of what is supposed to be a very offensive name—“Hastings Chop-backs,” deriving from the supposed descent of the Hastingers from those Norse rovers whose terrible axes cleaved their enemies down the back from skull to chine. Traditions of this undoubted antiquity are deserving of all respect, and probably the Hastings fisherfolk are descendants of those fierce rovers, but they are the mildest vikings it is possible to conceive, and would no more think of chopping any one down the back than they would dream of refusing a drink, even though the Blue Ribbonites of the Mission Church are active among them.
“Fishin’ ain’t wot it wur” is the general verdict; neither for “hur’n”—that is to say, “herring”—in the fore-part of the year, nor for mackerel in the after; yet the fish-market on the Stade seems busier than ever in the mornings, and over a thousand people subsist upon the proceeds of the harvest of the sea. But the fisherman is forced to cruise greater distances than before, the Channel being fished out and clean-swept by trawlers. Indeed, to listen to the doleful talk of a Hastings fisherman, one might think that not a single sprat or mackerel swam the English Channel between the North Foreland and the Lizard.
Those who explore this corner of old Hastings will acquire odd pieces of information from the fisherfolk. Rock-a-Nore, it will be found from them, and from one’s own personal experience, is the coldest place in the town; and, although they are not responsive to “Chop-backs,” they tell you that “Bourne” (i.e. Eastbourne) men are “Winnicks.” They look with disapproval on the new harbour-works; and are, indeed, true Conservatives, for they instinctively think any change to be inevitably for the worse.
Were I a fisherman I should, at any rate, resent the inference of the Mission Church planted on the beach, in their midst, as though an outpost of Christianity among the heathen. And such a mildewed, blue-mouldy, repellent building! But perhaps the situation, at the remote end—the cul-de-sac—of the beach, suggested the idea of paganism, piracy, and all sorts of unchristian things, at Rock-a-Nore; but if it be true that Labore est orare, then the fishermen are on more certain ground than many of the prayerful people who missionise them.
This is indeed, geographically, a dead-end, under the grey-white cliffs of East Hill; and being so, the Hastings Corporation have planted here those undesirable things—a mortuary and a dust-shoot. Next door to the mortuary you see the grim, unconscious humour of a warehousing firm’s announcement, “Tapner and Co. for Removals,” and at the end of all things, where a gigantic stone and concrete groyne projects into the sea, there is the town dust-destructor. Beyond is the perilous beach to Ecclesbourne, where the toppling cliffs above and the treacherous tide below often offer the unwary the unwelcome choice of being crushed or drowned.