Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Page B

swept away. In their literal matter-of-factness, the names of the cottages I passed every day walking through Cleve seemed to confirm that this was the case.
    Rose Cottage (roses round the rustic gate, roses round the door). Plum Tree Cottage. White Cottage. Blue Shutters. Round House. Greystones. Court View Cottage (overlooking the municipal tennis courts). Smithy Cottage (opposite the old smithy). East Wood. West View. Churchunder. Steps End. End of the Strand. Slipway Cottage. The Slope.
    They were the very embodiment of the life of certainties and ‘real values’ that all town-dwellers are supposed to aspire to as some kind of earthly nirvana. And for a long time, as I say, I bought it.
    As the in-comer from a world I had no doubt they all regarded as ugly and tawdry and meretricious, violent and distasteful (I could hear them mouthing off at choir practice in the village hall, over whist, at the Young Wives’ Thursday Afternoon Club and the W. I., righteous eyes blazing, lips pursed in distaste), I kept myself scarce.
    It took me a long time to get my eye in; to find out who the madmen are.
    ‘You can tell by their gardens which class they’re from,’I overheard one woman saying to another shortly after I arrived. Well I couldn’t. Not at first. (And, if I’m honest, still really can’t. Not the way I can tell at fifty paces genuine Rolex or Chanel from the Hong Kong bootleg. Short of match-practice as I am, I could still walk into most clubs and tell you what the bar take is to a penny.)
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    Cleve is really two villages, Cleve and Coombe, one on each side of a steep valley. The oldest parts of the two villages are down on the waterside, where a rough causeway connects them at low-tide.
    The causeway is made of cement which must have been of some special fast-setting kind to resist being washed away by the current. In fact, impressions of water-movement are visible at certain points along its length – smooth, swirled areas fixed into the surface, which remind me of those time-stop shots of dandelions releasing their clocks, and the technically enhanced pictures of the motorcade in Dallas that purport to show a section of President Kennedy’s scalp being blown away.
    Near the water is where you find the traditional whitewashed cottages, black-tarred at their bases, which in the early days I fondly imagined housing unruly families of honest-to-God shit-kickers and decent, atmospherically stinking fisher-folk;
    The name-plates attached to the cottages – hand-decorated and-fired tiles, and loftily inscribed lozenges of local slate (both styles no doubt the work of rat-race drop-outs and hairy back-to-the-earthers) – should have alerted me to the fact that these wereall now either holiday homes or the homes of young commuter professionals and comfortably-off retirees.
    A few hoorays come tooling in late on Friday afternoons in the spring and summer months and immediately set to it arranging themselves in outdoor tableaux straight out of the creamier advertising pages of The Tatler .
    Almost all the locals are tucked away in the council houses tastefully screened from the main road by a stand of spruce and elm, and shop at the Co-Op, which has a rather forbidding notice displayed on the counter – ‘Unlike boots and shoes, the words please and thank you never wear out. Use them as often as you like’ – but gives stamps.
    There’s only one shop on the Cleve side – a post office-cum-general store with a psoriatic old dog dumped in the doorway and only swampy lettuce and purpling scrag-end identifiable in the Neapolitan gloom inside. ‘We can get it for you’ is what you get if you ask for anything outside the basic range.
    A fish van (prop. a recycled public relations executive, dried-out but still noticeably stress-clenched) comes round once a week. For everything else, you have to cross over to Coombe. This means the tide decides when you shop.
    There is another way to Coombe, on dry land. But this