Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was born in south east London, at a time when it was relatively easy to get from Brockley, his home, into the Kent countryside, which was close by. Today, it is for his 1927 work, `Tarka the Otter’ that he is best remembered. However, his first substantial novels were in the form of a quartet under the title, `The Flax of Dreams’. Of these, the 1922 `The Dream of Fair Women’ was mostly explicitly set in Folkestone. These drew on his experiences while posted there immediately after the First World War in 1919-1920. In `The Dream’, Folkestone figures as `Findlestone’. The plot revolves around events in the summer of 1919, in which the protagonist, Willie Maddison engages in a love affair with the wife of a fellow army officer. Evelyn (`Eve’) Fairfax was, according to a pamphlet `Recreating A Lost World: Henry Williamson and Folkestone 1919-20, Fact Into Fiction’ (Henry Williamson Society, no date) based on Mabel Baker, married to Reginald Baker, a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineer Signals. In 1919, the couple were living at 22 Bouverie Square. Williamson became friends with Baker and his wife, and, according to the pamphlet while his diaries and letters do refer him having feelings for her, `this fictional affair probably never amounted to much more than an ardent and frustrated admiration in real life.’
Williamson’s year in Folkestone was spent at the No 1 Dispersal Unit, Shorncliffe Military Camp, and then the No 3 Rest Camp on the Leas. This was one of several camps set up to process and demobilise solders returning to Britain from active service in the just recently terminated war. As `Recreating a Lost World’ explains, `Henry Williamsons life in Folkestone would have been rather humdrum: the adrenaline excitement of the war was over – reaction was setting in.’ He undertook simple clerical work. At the same time, after discovering the Victorian writer Richard Jefferies’ `The Story of My Heart’ in a local bookshop, he had determined to become a writer.
Despite beginning in North Devon, `The Dream’ quickly shifts to to Kent and is rich in detail about Folkestone. Some of this is conveyed through the language of the characters portrayed in the novel – many of whom, kike `Eve Fairfax, seem to be based on real life figures. One, George Bogside, might be a portrayal of the real mayor of Folkestone at the time, Sir Stephen Penfold. It is to this character that the unflattering declaration by a worker that `we’re helping to decorate the ancient and horrible town of Folkestone’ is made (`The Dream’, Faber and Faber, London, 1922, 2010 reprint, 189.). Even so, there are clear descriptions of the town at this time which refer to places that still exist and are largely unchanged. The Leas, along the sea front, is one of the most prominent, a place of grass, cliffs and then beach to this day: `Residential houses and private hotels faced the Leas, with small gardens before them, a pavement and roadway, and then a number of grassy lawns bordered by low connected chains stretching from post to post, on which people were sitting.’ (176)
In parts of the novel, however, Williamson does allude to the spirituality which was to figure more in his later life, something almost pagan and pantheistic. Wandering along the seafront by the same Leas he had prosaically described before, Willie ponders in the solitude the possibility that long before, in this place, `a Roman had mused here under the stars, pining for the olive groves and fireflies of the south, while the watch-fires winked on the shore, and the galleys rode at anchor in the bay.’ In ways a little similar to Joseph Conrad’s allusion to the troubled and troubling memory traces of the Roman occupation and its place in collective local modern memory at the start of the `Heart of Darkness’, Williamson writes:
`Ancient Briton and alien Roman, Saxon and Norman, Colonial and Englishman, all had breathed the salt wind of the hills, and pondered the star-meaning at night; were they of Something that strayed, and lingered awhile, and found itself again?’ (203)
This Something and its references to a mystical quality grates against the human society figuring in the book, where the demotic qualities of Folkestone as a place of unhappy embarkation and transition are far more to the fore. `Well,’ a character later in the book asks Willie, `how do you like Folkestone?’, to which is given the somewhat tepid reply `I find it rather an amusing place.’ (254)
There is little that is amusing about the direction in which Williamson’s mystical musing was to lead him in later life. An enthusiast for the Hitler Youth Movement in the 1930s, during a visit to Germany under the newly installed Third Reich, he was to join the Mosley Union of British Fascists in 1937, largely lamenting a fabled notion of English purity which he felt had been sullied by the tides of modernity and other contaminants he perceived then. Ideas of going to Germany to speak directly to Hitler to avoid the war were seen as extreme even by Mosley himself. In the Second World War, a brief incarceration by police for his by then well known sympathetic views of the National Socialist regime in Germany did not stop him from expressing what sounds almost like satisfaction at the destruction of London’ finance district. His political views were also tinged by anti-Semitism at this time.
After the war, he did repudiate politics, and tried to convince Mosley to do the same. For the rest of his life, he devoted his time to writing. Perhaps the most important reflection to be made about what he wrote about and in Folkestone is on the ways in which this construction of an English past, and the marriage of it to notions of some kind of cultural purity which has since been sullied, and which needs to be reacquired, can prove to be both intoxicating, but also toxic and dangerous. The musings on the coast of Kent about the Something other strangely swirling up from the spirit of the earth and the environment seem tame enough – but as Williamson showed, they can morph into something far less friendly and benign. And, alas, over the years, they all too often frequently have. properti