OLD HASTINGS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 502, 3 November 1928, Page 28

OLD HASTINGS

TURN WHERE YOU WILL in the Old Town, every inch and comer is redolent of age-old traditions and the shadowy figures of long ago. You come down the Old London Road into the narrow, ancient High Street, full of aimless twistings and windings and unexpected angles, quaintly irregular gabled houses, uneven sidewalks and terraces, dark, crooked little alleys and passages and flights of steps. Straightway you feel that you have without warning stepped backwards into medieval England! The vei’y shops foster the feeling. Their dark, musty interiors, their heterogenous collections of antiques, their Toby jugs and bits of old china, their yellowed books and dusty prints and engravings—all seem saturated with the atmosphere of other days. And in the dead of night, when the old town is sclent and deserted, the very stones in the streets seem to echo with the footsteps of long-dead famous men. . . How many types, how many generations, how many varying customs and ages and ideals are represented in that long procession of shadowy figures! Thomas Hood and “Old Humphrey,” Titus Oates and

Lord Byron, General James Murray and Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Capel and David Garrick, Louis Napoleon and Louis Philippe, Lamb and Turner, Coventry Patmore and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—all are there, mingling with fisher folk, monks, soldiery, smugglers, church dignitaries and the princes of many ages! One has only to glance inside some of the old houses and churches in the town itself to get some idea of the extent and variety of the bistory of Hastings. There in All Saints’ Street you may still visit a quaint little house, with tiny rooms, a sagging roof, and walls heavily timbered with massive oak. where admiral Sir Cloudesley Shove) use o visit his mother. Farther along is All Saints’

(Written for THE SUN by IRMA O’CONNOR.)

Church, where Titus Oates’s father was once rector and where old brasses and monuments and the remains of an ancient mural painting are still to be seen, while “Old Humphrey’.* of childhood fame is buried in the churchyard. At the top of the High Street Coventry Patmore lived for years. Lower down is St. Clement’s Church, built in the reign of Richard 11. Here may still be seen two cannon-balls, relics of a French or Dutch raid, embedded in the wall of the tower. Here, too, in later times, Rosetti was married to Elizabeth Siddall. Down at the bottom of the High Street, where stands the old fisli-mar-ket, still the mariners go down to the sea in their ships, as they have done for nearly 20 centuries, and still in unfavourable weather, the red or brown-sailed fishing-smacks are to be seen piled up on the shingle at Rock-a-Nore, while the fisher-women, their plaid shawls across their shoulders, lay out their washing on the shingle or hang it on lines strung across the beach.

Nowadays the sea-front displays a pier and a band-rotunda, countless booths and side-shows, pleasure-boats and charabancs, goat-carts, donkeys

and pony-chaises, as well as a surging crowd of trippers and London holidaymakers, at least in the height of the summer season. But on stormy days the sea breaks in thunder on an unchanged shore, the wavering, irregular line of old houses still straggles unevenly along the front, and the great cliffs and headlands and the ancient flower-strewn ruins of Hastings Castle, towering up the sky on the West Hill, still dominates the town just as for nearly 900 years. Along the coast and throughout the hinterland beyond, the story of ancient days is as plain for modern eyes to read. The coast itself is honeycombed with caves, sometimes marked with strange devices and crude carvings reminiscent of smuggling days.

St. Clement’s Caves especially, with their wonderful natural arches and their vast subterranean passages, were a favourite haunt of smugglers long ago. Farther inland, the country is bestrewn with famous ruins, foremost among them being Battle Abbey, now a girls’ school, the terrace of which overlooks the actual site of the momentous battle, while a High Altar once marked the spot where Harold fell. Farther afield there are Pevensey Castle, Herstmonceux and Bodiam Castles, the last being now a national possession and the finest surviving moated fortress in England. Winchelsea has an interesting ruined church and a flavour of modern interest in the shape of a picturesque cottage owned by Ellen Terry. Last of all, there is Rye, notable for its cobbled streets, terraces of old red-roofed and gabled houses, the Mermaid Inn, and the wonderful old church, which has withstood the ravages of time as well as of fire and sword, and which, moreover, boasts a curious clock with an Immense pendulum that swings down through the roof just over the heads of the congregation. Nor is the present entirely without

its fame. Sheila Kaye Smith, who has made Sussex so peculiarly her own in the literary world, used as a child at Battle to accompany her doctor father on his rounds, gleaning much to form material for her books. Later, she lived at St. Leonard’s until her marriage. Hall Caine, Frankfort Moore, Coulson Kernahan, Bensusan, and Britten Austin are only a few of the many literary lions of the day who either live at Hastings or spend long periods there. Thus' the old town, vulgarised and popularised though it has been by the cheap excursions, charabanc tours and noisy amusements of modern days, yet preserves a little of the dignity and glory and much of the glamour of olden times. Inverness Place, London.