Medway, She Wrote

  • Mysterious and spooky

    “Everyone knows someone who has seen the ghost of Blue Bell Hill.”

    A conversation overheard in a local bookshop, once upon a time:

    Customer: Do you have any books about local ghosts?

    Bookseller: I think we’ve got one or two. Were you looking for something in particular?

    Customer: Do you have anything about the ghost of Blue Bell Hill?

    Bookseller: (makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a cough) Sorry. It’s just that it’s one of those things, you know – everyone knows someone who has seen the ghost of Blue Bell Hill.

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  • Walking the Lines

    The Great Lines Heritage Park, with the Pentagon Centre and Chatham Naval Memorial in the background.

    ‘To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum.’

    Jane Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice’

    It took a national lockdown for me to fully appreciate the Great Lines.

    March 2020. Covid-19. Lockdown. Everyone ordered to stay at home, stay two metres apart, and only go outside for one hour a day. Well, those of us who weren’t frontline workers risking their lives for the rest of us, anyway.

    I’d been commuting into an office in London five days a week for my whole working life until then. Gillingham to London Cannon Street, London Victoria, occasionally London Blackfriars – and back again – Monday to Friday for about 15 years. More on commuting another time. For now, suffice it to say that leaving the house by 7:00am and getting home around 7:00pm on weekdays doesn’t leave much time for exploring the neighbourhood after work.

    That all changed in March 2020. Suddenly my office wasn’t an open plan space with a view over central London; it was the dining room in our tiny house. My brisk walk to and from Gillingham station, and London-speed march to the office and back again at the other end, was no longer available. Going out in the evening was totally kiboshed. I wasn’t furloughed, nor was the Man of Kent, so we worked from home, at alternate ends of the dining room table. That’s a heck of a lot of time in one small house, on top of plenty of sedentary telly-watching after work. Getting out for some exercise and fresh air was no longer baked into the day as part of my commute, or an optional weekend leisure activity. It was now imperative. A sanity-saving daily mission.

    So I, and often the Man of Kent too, started going out for late afternoon walks in a big, open space not far from here – the Great Lines Heritage Park.

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  • Books, She Bought

    An image of the exterior of Baggins Book Bazaar, Rochester.

    “A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”

    Terry Pratchett, ‘Guards! Guards!’

    In a small, terraced house in Medway, there is a spare bedroom full of books. There’s also a bed and a chest of drawers in the room, a cupboard, and an old Victorian fireplace. But the books take up most of the space and they’re everywhere. Not in a gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling-shelves, fairy-tale-library kind of way, but in a boxes-upon-boxes-of-books-amassed-over-many-years way. There are books in cardboard boxes under the bed, in the drawers in the chest, on top of the cupboard and in plastic crates on the floor. If you stood in the limited amount of empty floorspace in the middle of this room and looked around, you’d think that whoever lives here is either a wannabe librarian, or someone with a serious book-hoarding problem.

    Well, one of the people living in the house is me, and it’s my lifelong love of reading that has led to the creation of this booky black hole.

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  • From NE10 to ME7

    “You’ll like Gillingham. It’s a lot like Gateshead.”

    The year was 2005-ish. I had just finished university, where I met my now-husband. I’d left my hometown of Gateshead to move in with him, and we were discussing where we were going to live.  

    My husband is a man of Kent. Specifically, a man born and raised in the Medway towns. I knew very little about Medway before I met him. In fact, it’s fair to say that I didn’t know much about the South East past London before then. I knew Kent was known as ‘the garden of England’, home of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett and green fields dotted with oasthouses. But Medway? I’d never heard of it.

    He was trying to sell me Gillingham as being like a home from home, I think possibly on the basis that Gillingham and Gateshead both have lots of Victorian terraced houses. I wasn’t fooled though; I knew the real reason he wanted to move to Gillingham was to be within walking distance of a certain Priestfield Stadium, home of his beloved football team. But, for solid pragmatic reasons (we both had jobs in London that we needed to commute to by train) and more importantly because I love him, I agreed to move down South. It was a leap of faith, and a geographic leap of about 303 miles from postcode NE10 to ME7.

    So we moved in together in the mid-noughties, a young (then) lass from Gateshead and a man of Kent. We lived then, and continue to live now, in a tiny, ramshackle house in Gillingham.

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