Very different to the soft and genial landscapes about Cobham is the grey and desolate aspect of another haunt which Dickens loved to frequent. This was the "meshes" around Cooling. In winter, when it was possible to make a short cut across the stubble fields, he would visit Cooling churchyard not less seldom than in summer he would go to sit in the churchyard of Shorne. First, however, he would have to pass through the village of Higham, where, too, was his nearest railway station, though he often preferred to walk over and entrain at Gravesend or Greenhithe. But the pleasant tinkle of harness bells was a familiar sound in the night to the Higham villagers, as the carriage was sent down from Gadshill Place to meet the master or his friends returning from London by the ten o'clock train. Dickens took a kindly and active interest in the affairs of the village, and the last cheque which he ever drew was for his subscription to the Higham Cricket Club.
SHORNE CHURCH
The flat levels that stretch away from beyond Higham towards the estuary of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn, and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling, overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls, plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark, flat wilderness", as Dickens has described it in Great Expectations, "intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it"; still farther away is the "low, leaden line" of the river, and the "distant, savage lair", from which the wind comes rushing, is the sea. It was in this churchyard that the conception of the story sprang into life, and there are actually not five but ten little stone lozenges in one row, with three more at the back of them, which suggested to Dickens the five little prematurely cut off brothers of Pip. The grey ruins of Cooling Castle attracted him no less than the grey and weather-beaten churchyard. Besides some crumbling and broken walls there is a gate tower, with an inscription on fourteen copper plates, the writing in black, the ground of white enamel, with a seal and silk cords in their proper colours, which made known to all and sundry the purpose for which Lord Cobham—whose granddaughter married, for one of her five husbands, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard martyr—had erected this castle.
COOLING CHURCH
"Knoweth that beth and schul be
That i am mad in help of the cuntre
In knowyng of whych thyng
This is chartre and witnessyng."
No forge stands now on the site of Joe Gargery's smithy, where, as the hammer rang on the anvil to the refrain—
"Beat it out, beat it out—Old Clem!
With a clink for the stout—Old Clem!
Blow the fire, blow the fire—Old Clem!
Roaring drier, soaring higher—Old Clem!"—
Pip would see visions of Estella's face in the glowing fire or at the wooden window of the forge, looking in from the darkness of the night, and flitting away. But though the smithy has gone, the "Three Jolly Bargemen", where Joe would smoke his pipe by the kitchen fire on a Saturday night, still survives as the "Three Horseshoes"—the inn to which the secret-looking man who stirred his rum and water with a file, brought Magwitch's two one-pound notes for Pip, and the redoubtable Jaggers, the autocrat of the Old Bailey, with his burly form, great head, and huge, cross-examining forefinger announced to Pip his Great Expectations. Down the river in the direction of yonder "distant savage lair", from which the wind comes rushing, lie those long reaches, between Kent and Essex, "where the river is broad and solitary, where the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are scattered here and there"—the lonely riverside on which Pip and Herbert sought a hiding-place for Magwitch until the steamer for Hamburg or the steamer for Rotterdam could be boarded, as she dropped down the tide from the Port of London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud, and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. The course which the boat bearing the hunted man took from Mill Pond stairs through the crowded shipping of the Pool, past the floating Custom House at Gravesend, and onwards, skirting the little creeks and mudbanks where the Thames widens to the sea—when every sound of the tide flapping heavily at irregular intervals against the shore, and every ripple, were fraught with the terror of pursuit—exemplifies in the most striking way the rapidity and instinctive ease of Dickens's observation. Forster says:—