The novelist Graham Swift (1949-) was born and educated in London, and then at Cambridge and York universities. His `Last Orders’ (1996) is like a contemporary rendition of the `Canterbury Tales’ by Chaucer (see entry for him). Unlike Chaucer, however, Swift’s secular `pilgrims,’ some of them veterans of the Second World War, who are carrying the ashes of their late friend Jack Dobbs to scatter to the sea in Margate, show considerably more connection with the landscape that they are passing through than their Medieval predecessors ostensibly did. While on the Chaucerian tour, the mentions of particular places the story telling group are going through are few and far between (Sittingbourne, Rochester, and then Harbledon get brier notice), interjected amongst chapters relaying the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters on Swift’s journey – family members of the deceased Amy, Vince and Mandy Dobbs, and friends Vic Tucker, Ray Johnson and Lenny Tate – are descriptions of the places they pass through on their car journey to Margate. Some of the chapters even carry the names of the places they are at, to show how important this physical marking is in the unfolding and structuring of the narrative.
The plotting out of their car journey is clear enough. After leaving the outskirts of London along the Old Kent Road, they first come to Dartford (which gets hardly any detailed mention), then Rochester:
`We come up to the start of the M2 but Vince stays on the A2, through Strood to Rochester. We cross the Medway by the old bridge road, beside the railway bridge. It comes as a surprise, the sudden wide view of the river, like it’s a whole look=out on the world you hadn’t been thinking of, you’d forgotten it was there. Boats, jetties, moorings, mud banks.’ (Swift, `Last Orders’, Picador, 1996, 107).
From the barely noticing of Chaucer, we come to the granular detail of Swift. The approach to Chatham is rendered in the same way:
`So we trundle round half Chatham town and half Chatham dockyard with this hill in between, and Vince is fuming, though he was fuming in the first place… We finally find this car park, half-way up the other side of the Town Hall. But though it’s the other side of the Town Hall, it’s as though Chatham stops and the wilderness begins. It’s as though Chatham wasn’t ever nothing more than a camp.’ (Ibid 120)
Then there is the run up to Canterbury:
`The road twists along between the hills, with orchards climbing up the slopes on one side, all brown and bare and trimmed and lined up like bristles on a brush. The sign says, Canterbury, 3 miles. There’s a little river on the other side, then a railway line, and the road and river and the railway line wiggle along the valley as if they are competing.’ (Ibid 192)
And finally the culmination – Margate:
`We come in on the Canterbury Road, past faded, peely bay-windowed terraces with that icing-on-an-old-cake look that buildings only have at the seaside. Hotels, B-and-Bs. Vacancies. The buildings look extra pale against the grey, piled-up sky, and against the clouds you can see little twirling specks of white, like broken-off flakes of the buildings.’ (Ibid 262)
The road from the coast to Canterbury, and then from Canterbury to London, is an ancient but elusive one. Parts of it, from the great Roman fort at Richborough near Sandwich, are clear enough. But not for very long. Then it crops up, traced through some of the streets in Canterbury, and then as it emerges to run along what is today the route of the A2 past Faversham into Rainham, Sittingbourne, and dead through the heart of Chatham straight into Rochester and on from there to London. Parts of this route have the remnants of antiquity – the Maison Dieu at Ospringe from the 12th century for instance. But at times, as Swift notes, through Dartford or places like that the past is either covered over, or smothered in grime.
What is indisputable is that this route runs through a great deal of history. In Swift’s work, it is the place along which individuals wrestle with their own individual and shared memories, some of them separate from the place they happen to be in, some of them triggered by it, some of them growing from it.