Life in an in-between landscape: Norman Angell,Tom Driberg,and the Blackwater Marshlands

Introduction

Since the poststructuralist turn, new landscape studies have reimagined the making of landscapes: not as combinations of essentially divided things, but as hybrid forms that question notions of categorical separation. It is in this context that John Wylie concluded that landscape is both a work and something that carries out work: ‘far from being an image or construction of culture-nature relations, landscape is their very entanglement’. ¹

In this essay I draw on recent studies in geography and biography, and on geographies of private spaces, to examine the making and the working-out of landscape as an entanglement. In it, I use the private records of diaries and letters, and question the public record of autobiographies, biographies, and interviews relating to two very different men. The patterns that become apparent, ethnographies of the local, trace interconnections between self and place, ² in what Stephen Daniels and Catherine Nash called ‘life geographies’, ³ intimate biographies set in their local context. Of particular help in this respect has been a series of examinations of the ‘emotional economy’ of life geographies in the landscape of the English wetlands of the mid-20th century tracing how, there, geographies of private life acted to produce a ‘temperamental space’, the meaningfulness of which proceeded from a specific ‘mode of connection to place and people’. ⁴

The issue of landscape must be understood within the context of the dominant tradition in western culture that has tended to present nature as a real, material category − and has therefore imagined landscapes as marked by a separation between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘natural’. ⁵ Under the influence of this categorical approach, in the dominant discourse marshes as locations have been presented as marginal, intermediate between land and sea; marshlands as landscapes have been presented as unfixed and unstable, subject to contestation. ⁶

As locations, marshes have been imagined as a zone of contact between land and water, and therefore the stuff of boundaries. As a result of this identity they are described as straddling the divide between the included and the excluded, and by implication as a limit to a dissidence ‘from which something begins its presencing’ ⁷ . Like any boundary, however, this designation is arbitrary, the work of a process described in the apposite words of Pamela Shurmer-Smith and Kevin Hannam as artificial like ‘a dyke which separates the land from the sea’ ⁸ , and the material conditions of marshes do not necessarily fit comfortably into such a neat typology.

As landscapes, marshlands have been imagined as culturally problematic, a ‘half-land’, neither solid land nor flowing water, and presenting confounding ambiguities. The main characteristic conventionally attributed to the wetland landscape has therefore been its insecure condition, which according to Rod Giblett made marshlands imagined as landscapes of ‘double meanings, not simply of ambiguity . . . but of ambivalence’. ⁹ According to William Howarth, marshlands have therefore come to be perceived as a particular ‘mind-place’ representing ‘divided values’ because of ‘(1) difficulty or uncertainty, as in a quagmire, or morass; (2) change, since wetlands are transition zones between water and land; and (3) contingency or possibility, because wetlands may foster new life’. ¹⁰

This peculiarity of marshlands as neither-nor landscapes has been a feature of narratives ranging from the supernaturalism of Beowulf or Susan Hill to the realism of Charles Dickens or Graham Swift. ¹¹ It proved particularly problematic in the culture of mid-20th-century England, when notions of an organic social and natural order conflicted with newer demands for the planned defence of landscape against archaic, disorderly feelings. ¹² For that period, as in David Matless’s account of the Norfolk Broads, marshlands were intermediate places lacking precise edges, a ‘shifting land . . . lent a long-term instability by the proximate sea’. ¹³ In those marshlands, the sacred and the profane mixed so that mystic wetlands jostled against popular places to produce landscapes represented as encompassing both the modern and the premodern. ¹⁴ Those landscapes encoded and represented the products of local knowledges that expressed an interplay between highly complex and highly contradictory values. ¹⁵ It was into this ambiguity, and the muddled conditions of a shifting culture, that Norman Angell and Tom Driberg came to make and live their lives in the marshlands of the Blackwater.

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Figure 1.

The Blackwater Estuary.

Marshland landscapes

Norman Angell

From 1923 until after the Second World War, Norman Angell was the owner of Northey Island, at the head of the Blackwater estuary. Journalist and campaigner, he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Great Illusion, a highly influential book that presented modern war as a costly futility and which created on its publication, according to his Times obituary, ‘what is perhaps fairly described as a sensation’. ²⁵ The son of the owner of a chain of Lincolnshire shops, after a spell adventuring as a cowboy and homesteader in California, Angell turned to journalism with the Daily Mail. Having become increasingly involved in political campaigning, he was elected Labour MP for North Bradford from 1929 to 1931, knighted in 1931, and awarded the Peace Prize in 1933 for his anti-war work. Angell remained actively campaigning on political issues until after the Second World War, and died in 1967.

Mary Hamilton, a memorialist of Angell, described him as a ‘frail little man, with his sharp-cut, faun-like face, dominated by its large, light, wide-apart all-seeing eyes’, ²⁶ and The Times had him as ‘a frail, fair man of slight build, ascetic of feature and quiet and undemonstrative in manner − tough when the occasion required he could be vigorous and indeed vehement enough in argument’. ²⁷ In his career Angell was led by, above all, what his biographer J.D.B. Miller described as a ‘devotion to reason’ ²⁸ and, similarly, Hamilton commented: ‘I do not think I have known anyone animated by a purer and more consistent intellectual passion than Norman Angell’. ²⁹

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Figure 2.

The ‘wrecked island’ of Northey.

Detached intellectual analysis was a lifelong commitment for Angell but, as he made clear in his autobiography, it was only pursued at the cost of a harsh constraint of whom he might have been:

To that young journalist of 1890 neither monasteries nor Communist Parties were available as avenues of escape; and whatever his childhood, in the care and under the influence of his beautiful sister, had done for him, or his boyhood under the influence of his father and his tutor Ralph Ram, they had at least closed any road of escape into crude sensuality, into cynicism, or absorbtion [sic] in ‘sport’. ³⁰

Crucially for Angell, the closing of these more-travelled roads of escape seems to have been linked with a sense of awkward ill-ease in life. He experienced this as what he called a ‘restlessness’, an anxiety that left him with a desire for what he described as an ‘escape from contacts’. ³¹ Angell was characterized by his biographer Albert Marrin as a ‘lonely, troubled individual’ who ‘appeared to outsiders incapable of lowering the barriers and opening himself to another’s affection’, ³² and the issue of emotional openness − in particular with women − was the cause of what Marrin described his ‘greatest personal misfortune’. ³³ Angell’s relations with women were typified by an ‘[i]nexperience coupled with an idealized view of woman-kind’ ³⁴ that seems to have prevented him from ever fully realizing the redemptive possibilities of sexual love. He married Beatrice Cuvellier in 1898, but they were parted by 1914 and legally separated in 1932 ³⁵ − which discretion left entirely unmentioned in his autobiography. ³⁶

The defence of Northey Island

Angell’s pleasure in living on Northey Island derived, initially at least, from its location: ‘It was remote, a true retreat, a “funk hole,” to use the expression which the First World War with its trenches had given us.’ ⁴⁷ Apparently drawing on Angell’s own interpretation of the island, Murray described it as his ‘domain’ ⁴⁸ and, similarly, his friend Beatrice Hall had teased after a visit: ‘Dear King! Ever so many congratulations on your island kingdom!’ ⁴⁹ But Angell constantly had to defend his refuge, and his anxious feelings about peace were manifested in what proved to be a close personal connection with the island’s troubled history. As Angell reminded readers of his autobiography, Northey had apparently provided the ‘Danish stronghold’ of the battle of Maldon in AD 991; ⁵⁰ more recently, it had been the home of Major De Crespigny, Angell’s predecessor, whose involvement in the violence of pre-independence Ireland left him in fear of retribution by an IRA assassination squad. During the Second World War, invasion fears meant that Northey’s causeway had to be mined, preventing access by road, ⁵¹ and then as Angell wryly recorded ‘Jerry took great pains and, alas, to some degree successfully, to bomb the buildings on Northey’. ⁵²

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Figure 3.

Machicolated turret guarding Northey Island House.

Beyond its location, though, the island’s landscape allowed Angell a secure, moated surveillance − making its marshland setting defendable and safe. The usefulness of Northey to the Danes had relied on its narrow and floodable causeway ⁵³ and, as Angell noted, the beleaguered De Crespigny had slept away from Northey Island House on the defendable outlands of the island. The issue of the landscape of the island was likewise significant in Murray’s account of what he (or at least his hasty subeditor) described as ‘England’s queerest island’ on the basis that, with inundation, ‘every minute it changes its size’, and he praised the ‘fine views’ from Northey Island House’s penthouse study ⁵⁴ from which Angell gazed out on what he later came to call the world’s ‘fatal drift’ to war. ⁵⁵

Unable to change the figurative drift of the world, Angell made a determined effort to make his own refuge in the intimate landscape of Northey Island. In these endeavours, the forced breeziness of Murray’s journalism contained a darker truth about the empty landscape of Angell’s loneliness: ‘If you really want peace the best place to live is an island of which you are the only inhabitant’. ⁵⁶ So, Angell personally built a very solid stone wall around the house, complete with machicolated turrets. ⁵⁷ He also became actively involved in the reclamation of the island’s outlands against flooding − to such an extent that Beatrice Hall warned him lest the ‘worry and expense’ might prove excessive. ⁵⁸ Following techniques pioneered in the 19th century, ⁵⁹ Angell planned the planting of spartina grass, reclaiming the ‘wrecked’ land for solid ground. As he enthusiastically informed his correspondent Colonel Wills: ‘I hope to do some very considerable seeding of Spartina within the next two weeks, and it will be interesting then to see what happens to this “wrecked island”.’ ⁶⁰ The spartina proved what Angell subsequently described as an ‘interesting experiment’, ⁶¹ and his work was sufficiently well known that, following the East Coast floods of 1953, The Times commended its example:

Spartina Townsendii − believed to be a cross between American and European species − was first introduced into Essex by the county institute of agriculture in 1925 as the result of a request from Sir Norman Angell, then farming Northey Island at the head of the Blackwater estuary. His sea wall was breached, and he asked for some grass which would grow in salt water and yet be edible by his cattle. ⁶²

Northey Island provided, then, an isolated location, but for Angell it also came to be an intimate and defendable landscape of charm and ‘relative peace’. Despite or perhaps because of the importance that Northey’s landscape had for Angell, his private struggle on his ‘island kingdom’ seems to have elided with and been overshadowed by the eventual failure of his public struggle for world peace. Angell’s autobiographical account of Northey was, as a consequence, infused with a melancholy sense of the moribund, and his chapter on the island concluded with the pregnant epigram ‘Après nous, le déluge’. ⁶³ The years of Angell’s intimate work on Northey island, the struggle to reclaim the ‘wrecked’, to hold back the drift of an overwhelming tide, meant that his subsequent failure in the world also came to be a profoundly personal one − literally close-to-home.

Tom Driberg

Tom Driberg lived at Bradwell Lodge, Bradwell on Sea, from 1939 to 1971. Complex in character, his revealing and frank obituary in The Times described him as:

a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, an employee and biographer of Lord Beaverbrook, a politician of the left, a member of Parliament, a member of the Labour Party National Executive, a stylist, an unreliable man of undoubted distinction. ⁶⁴

The chief sources of information on Driberg are his own memoir, his unfinished autobiography, and Francis Wheen’s biography. ⁶⁵

Driberg was born in Crowborough, East Sussex, and studied at Christ Church, Oxford. After failing to graduate, he lived a precarious life in London. Taken on by the Daily Express in 1928, he became the newspaper’s diarist ‘William Hickey’. In 1938 Driberg bought Bradwell Lodge and moved there the following year; he lived at the Lodge until forced to leave under the pressure of debt in 1971. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1924, he was expelled in 1941 − possibly for political deviation, but perhaps because of some sort of link with MI5. In 1942 Driberg stood for election as an Independent under the leftist 1941 Committee’s Nine Point Plan ⁶⁶ when the parliamentary seat of Maldon became vacant. Under the peculiar conditions of wartime crisis he was elected with a substantial majority. Driberg joined the Labour Party in 1945 but stood down as MP for Maldon in 1955. After a spell working again as a journalist he was elected as MP for Dagenham in 1959, finally retiring in 1974, and was made Lord Driberg in 1975. In 1951 Driberg married Ena Binfield; his marriage appears to have been unconsummated and unhappy, and Ena left him in 1971. He died in 1976.

Driberg’s life was characterized by an angry rebellion against a restrictive and unhappy childhood, and in particular his mother by whom, according to Wheen, ‘his memory was possessed’. ⁶⁷ The punning title of Driberg’s autobiography ⁶⁸ refers with what readers of the book will recognize as his characteristic forthrightness to the significance in his life of religion, politics, and sex. ⁶⁹ Always a rebel, he held highly radical political opinions and highly conservative religious ones: Driberg suggested his high-church Anglicanism was intended, in Paul Barker’s words, to ‘épater the Evangelicals’, and his membership of the Communist Party from his youth was ‘part of the revolt against Crowborough’. ⁷⁰ The sex that he actively continued throughout his life to find ‘in the shadows’ ⁷¹ was a dramatic rejection of the values of a family home in which his mother had squeamishly warned him to ‘never let anybody touch your private parts’. ⁷²

Driberg’s much-publicized sexual interests require some examination, being of direct relevance to an understanding of his character. ⁷³ His preferences were for promiscuous and risky homosexual sex: ⁷⁴ a casual prostitute in his youth, in 1935 he might have been ruined over allegedly procuring two unemployed men, in 1943 he was caught having sex in public by a fortuitously sympathetic police officer, and in later years he had a number of partners provided for him by his friend the gangster ‘Ronnie’ Kray; all this was before the effective decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. In his autobiography Driberg promoted the Freudian interpretation of a suffocating influence of his mother as having made him a homosexual in revolt against the discursive foulness of the feminine. ⁷⁵ Indeed, he suggested that his mother was, quite literally, a haunting presence − claiming to have overheard in a conversation that, at her former home after her death, ‘They say she’s been seen . . . quite often’. ⁷⁶

Further, in his profligate spending, Driberg compulsively refused the constraint of his childhood home. Consistently spending beyond his means, at Bradwell Lodge he ‘entertained generously, with fine disregard for the class or moral repute of his guests’. ⁷⁷ With characteristic candour he noted of his ribald partying: ‘A psychologist might find here − in the fact that I live in a house too large for me and keep it open − some element of compensation for the restrictive and frustrating circumstances of my childhood.’ ⁷⁸ Yet, even so, despite his socializing, Driberg remained fundamentally alone. His Dictionary of National Biography entry suggested: ‘He had hundreds of friends and none to whom he opened his inmost heart.’ ⁷⁹

Life at Bradwell

Set in the marshes of the Dengie peninsula, on the edge of Bradwell, and at the end of a gated driveway, the cosy appeal of Bradwell Lodge to Driberg was substantial. His description of the Lodge’s isolation in what he called ‘a far corner of my Essex constituency’ ⁸⁰ prefigured the theme that Driberg presented at the opening of his memoir: ‘Anyway, I get my favourite seat on the bus − on top, back seat on left. This makes me feel much cosier. (Don’t know why − it’s like the back pew in church − maybe because one can observe without being observed.)’ ⁸¹ The Lodge was Driberg’s hideaway from the pressures of public life. Writing of his life there, he recalled how he found and fell in love with it: ‘I came; I saw; I was conquered’. ⁸² And he concluded: ‘I like the house, in its setting, better than anything else in the world.’ ⁸³ When forced to sell the Lodge, Driberg described the experience as ‘a terrible blow’. ⁸⁴

From Driberg’s desire for Bradwell as a location came a love of its setting, the surrounding landscape of dikes and marshes reclaimed from the sea. In his 1942 election address to his prospective constituents he claimed: ‘I have made my home for several years at Bradwell, in the Dengie Hundred, and I propose to live the rest of my life there’, ⁸⁵ and on his death he was buried there in the parish cemetery. The local landscape came to mean a great deal to Driberg. When describing his adopted county of Essex he wrote:

I personally prefer the part that is fairly flat, the coast so well described by Baring-Gould in his novel Mehalah and by Mr S. L. Bensusan, with its enormous Dutch skies, where you may walk for miles along a sea-wall track, raised between rich marsh pastures and mysterious saltings, and see no sign of human activity but the white fleck of a sail far out in the turbulent estuary. ⁸⁶

For Driberg there were also strange, haunting echoes of persistences in the landscape. With quite possibly mischievous ironic intent he showed Reynolds’s journalist Stanley Baron around the area: ‘“This is a part of the county” he said, leading the way along the sea wall, “where all sorts of odd things happen.”’ ⁸⁷ Strange things happened at Bradwell Lodge, too − with discomforting persistences of the past: Driberg told The Recorder’s Gerald Searle of unaccountable lights seen at night in the house’s belvedere, and absent footsteps echoing in its empty rooms. ⁸⁸

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Figure 4.

The ‘mysterious saltings’ of the Blackwater.

The isolated pastoral landscape of Bradwell was something that Driberg held very dear, but it was on several occasions compromised by incursions. Driberg treated some of these events in an abstract, proprietorial manner. When plans were announced in 1955 to build a nuclear power station at Bradwell, outraged, he complained that the estuary’s ‘solitude and serenity’ were endangered, and that it was ‘in the national interest that some few stretches of coast and country should be left unspoiled’. ⁸⁹ At the subsequent public enquiry he claimed that the power station would be an eyesore on ‘the only stretch of unspoiled coast left within 50 miles [80 km] of London’. ⁹⁰ Yet other responses reflected a more intimately sensuous relationship with the landscape. In his autobiography, for example, Driberg recalled how his first direct experience of war came when, in September 1940, he was picking his beloved mulberries with friends in the grounds of the Lodge: ‘Suddenly we heard among the leaves above us a pattering, as of raindrops from the clear blue sky. They were bullets: the Battle of Britain had begun.’ ⁹¹

Bradwell was, indeed, a strange place: the intervening 80 km made its location a world away from the combination of loucheness and grandeur that characterized Driberg’s life in London. The cosy feelings he was able to derive from its open (but isolated) setting made its landscape a safe refuge. But when the rupturing of that safety occurred, Driberg proved hugely active in its defence.

The defence of Bradwell

The East Coast floods of 31 January and 1 February 1953 proved a serious threat to Bradwell, a substantial unsettling of the landscape. The floods were a disaster of national significance, ⁹² affecting England from the Tees to Dover; at least 83,430 ha of land were flooded and 307 people were killed. ⁹³ They were the result primarily of the passage of a very deep Atlantic depression, the centre of which fell on 31 January below 968 hPa, combined with a particularly high set of spring tides on 1 February. The consequence was a tidal surge, which reached almost 2.7 m at Southend. The Times reported a total of ‘up to 30,000 acres [12,141 ha]’ inundated across Essex ⁹⁴ and, though Steers recorded ‘nothing of major importance’ in terms of flooding between Aldeburgh and Clacton, there were extensive floods in the marshes around Bradwell. ⁹⁵

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Figure 5.

Gated entrance to Bradwell Lodge.

Driberg was very actively involved in the response to the flood emergency. During the time, from 3 February to 17 February, he kept an improvised diary. ⁹⁶ These notes were subsequently written up as a document sent to Grieve ⁹⁷ and evidence from them appears in her account of the floods. ⁹⁸ Describing events, Driberg recalled that it ‘had been an exceptionally stormy Saturday night’, but that his first knowledge of the floods was on the morning of Sunday 1 February with the sight from Bradwell Lodge’s belvedere of a ‘gleaming sheet of water’ that had come ‘leaving a chaos of wrecked boats and other jetsam and still standing very high’. ⁹⁹ Serious damage to the Lodge was avoided and, evidently still relieved, he wrote on 24 February: ‘I am glad to say that Bradwell Lodge itself was quite unharmed by the recent flood, except for a lot of mud on the carpets brought in on soldiers’ boots. The house and village are on slightly higher ground, but looking out from the house we could see sheets of water only two fields away all round.’ ¹⁰⁰

Driberg’s diary shows that he worked seven days a week, often to bed late and up early: on 4 February, for example, he was touring Canvey Island until 3 a.m., followed by the first appointment of the day at 6 a.m. ¹⁰¹ A number of correspondents attested to his contribution to the relief of the disaster. George Ward, Under Secretary of State for Air, visited Bradwell on 10 February, was met and guided by Driberg, ¹⁰² and wrote: ‘I am certain that your help in co-ordinating the local effort is appreciated alike by all the civilians and service personnel working on the sea defences.’ ¹⁰³ On 8 March, Regional Engineer Macdonald wrote to Driberg’s secretary to thank him ‘for the vast amount of trouble he has taken’ in helping repair efforts. ¹⁰⁴

Driberg’s weekly newspaper column in the Reynold’s News and Sunday Citizen carried important details of his life at the time. On 8 February he described the ‘appalling’ devastation of the floods, but that he was encouraged by the ‘manifestations of the human spirit’. He continued: ‘In our part of Essex at any rate, civilians and Servicemen alike have worked and “mucked in” just as in the days of the blitz.’ ¹⁰⁵ The enormous efforts after the floods succeeded; the floods receded as a topic of concern. The following week he reported that ‘the waters have begun substantially to abate’, but returned to his theme of fraternity: ‘For once we are not each others’ enemies: we have a common enemy, the sea.’ ¹⁰⁶

The disaster over, Driberg was able to turn to future protection against inundation. In the parliamentary debate on ‘Flood Disasters’ on 19 February, he spoke praising the members of the armed forces involved in the response, considering the problems that flooding presented for agriculture, and commenting on the issue of sea defences. ¹⁰⁷ In this speech he quoted from The Times article citing Angell’s use of spartina at Northey Island, the annotated cutting from which he apparently read now preserved at Essex Record Office. ¹⁰⁸

The ‘mind place’ of the marshlands

The landscape of the Blackwater marshlands, and the boundaries imagined as having defined it, were anything but examples of solid dependability. The specificities of the entanglement of the marshlands challenged the primacy of that dominant understanding, its debateable ground demonstrating the emblematic characteristics identified by Howarth: difficulty, change, and contingency. ¹⁰⁹ Northey, the ‘wrecked island’, could be a place for fortified defence; Bradwell, which had been reclaimed from the sea, could still be subject to a ‘chaos’ of flooding. It was in the context of these social interpretations of complex material identities that Norman Angell and Tom Driberg struggled to create life geographies of their own. There, in a setting of inconsistent presencing, Angell and Driberg moulded mind places of a characteristic type.

Though a peace campaigner, Norman Angell was no pacifist, and he was capable of active self-assertion − as he had demonstrated in California when he showed himself prepared to threaten armed force if required. ¹¹⁰ Such an approach was entirely consistent with his subsequent ideas on self-defence, as he indicated in the final edition of The Great Illusion:

[W]hile nations were justified in resistance to brute aggression, and right in using force for the purpose, the power that they were building up, however great it might become, would not, given the political conditions, deter or prevent war, nor by victory establish conditions in which the commonly proclaimed purposes of war would be possible of accomplishment. ¹¹¹

A measured response to aggression, because it had a non-rational cause in ‘brute’ nature, was therefore perfectly justified; what was never justified, Angell believed, was the intemperateness that he saw in militarism.

For Angell the landscape of the wrecked island of Northey came to provide a true retreat from the intemperate irrationality of the world − a safe temperamental space of reason. Yet his concerns for safety, expressed in the patterns of his life geography there, indicate that he felt deeper, symbolic resonances in the marshland landscape. As Angell suggested in his postwar analysis of mass ideologies The Steep Places, ¹¹² those resonances seem to have drawn on the horror of what was for him the forbidden, the closed road of escape represented by the disorder of overwhelming passion. This issue was evident from the opening of the book, its title page alluding to the story of Jesus’s casting out of the devils in the country of the Gergesenes: ¹¹³

So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.

And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters. ¹¹⁴

Angell’s position was that the devilish passion of mass ideologies represented an equivalent threat of a fatal overwhelming: ‘Repeated past experience prompts the warning that the vital decisions which may be thrust upon us will not be made by rational judgement at all; that the simplest and most self-evident facts may be ignored, forgotten, submerged, in the passions which usually mark times of violence and revolutionary change.’ ¹¹⁵ Yet principled opposition to passion unavoidably involved great risk. Witness how, for casting out the devils, Jesus was mistreated by the Gergesenes:

when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts. ¹¹⁶

Such an undeserved response would of course have had bitter connotations for a man like Angell, who had tried and failed to cast out the devils of ideological passion and been forced to retreat to a location he acknowledged as a ‘remote island’ ¹¹⁷ off the coast.

Angell’s repeated use of the motif of drowning indicates an issue of great symbolic importance for him. His sailor’s fear of submersion, the overwhelming to the point of ‘absorbtion’ by disorder, and its implication for his felt experience of landscape, emerged in his writings − most significantly in his autobiography’s chapter on Northey Island, with its concluding ‘Après nous, le déluge’. His fear of ‘lowering the barriers’ to le déluge, the rising of the ghost of water, had a very real meaning in the context of everyday life on Northey. Angell’s years of struggling to mend his ‘wrecked island’, to turn back the destructive effects of the tide on the provisional land of its flooded outlands, were real struggles where the rupturing of safe boundaries was threatened by every flooding tide.

Tom Driberg was ostensibly a very different man from Angell; a man far from shy. Driven by the emptiness of his childhood, Driberg went out into the world to seek compensatory satisfactions in religion, politics, and sex. Yet, at the heart of this desire to be an integrated part of something whole and unconstrained, was a failure to free himself from the past, to make a new life reconciled with what had gone. Driberg’s response can be seen as driven by the complex relationship to ambiguity that is central to understanding his life and career. He was a man who, in Wheen’s phrase, ‘found his salvation in public lavatories as well as cathedrals’. ¹¹⁸ As an intelligent man, he was acutely aware of the contradictions within his own self and, as a sympathetic man, he was generous in his understanding of others in that same situation. This much was clear in the coup of his career as a journalist, his 1956 interview with the spy and Communist defector Guy Burgess. ¹¹⁹ Driberg’s experience allowed him to write with great insight concerning the story of Burgess and his fellow spy Donald Maclean:

it illustrated vividly, in the personal dilemma of two intelligent and gifted men, the plight of a whole generation caught in the confusions and contradictions of mid-century Britain, with its chronic lack of philosophic purpose and its ‘mixed’ − or muddled − economy. ¹²⁰

The intimately personal nature of this dilemma was clear to Driberg:

One phrase lingered in my mind from the millions of words written about Burgess and Maclean. They had been described as ‘split men’. Was this meant to be a term of reproach, or of contempt? . . . Every man in the Western world is, more or less, a split man: it is enlightened self-interest as well as good-neighbourliness to try to unite divided humanity and, in doing so, to ease private tensions and achieve personal integration. ¹²¹

The ‘debateable ground’ of Driberg’s life was one in which, in the private tensions of his personal life, as much as in his political life, he struggled for an integrated identity amid the ambiguity of compromised muddle. Bradwell was a place by which he had been conquered, and its landscape became a temperamental space where he could allow his passions to rule, though where he never ‘opened his inmost heart’. The cosiness of the marshland landscape made it safe for secretive odd things to happen there, and he loved the marshlands, with their mysterious saltings and solid sea walls. Yet Driberg proved himself unable to live a life there free from haunting shadows, and when the marshlands proved treacherous, with Bradwell Lodge threatened by engulfment, he responded with a most immediate vigour. However, while his efforts succeeded in recreating order behind the firm dike, the compulsion that surfaced in his generosity was eventually to leave him unable to save the Lodge. Keeping an open and expensive home, an act he himself suggested as a revenge, Driberg risked too much and was expelled in 1971, engulfed by overwhelming debt.

The instability of the ‘temperamental spaces’ established by Angell and Driberg in (and despite) the muddled marshlands were indicative of the frail, ambiguous life geographies that could be constructed there. They were reminders too of the impossibility of forever laying the ‘ghost of water’. As such, the lives of the two men highlight the different ways of making meaningful life geographies among the fragile and transient boundaries limiting the ‘very entanglement’ of landscapes.

Conclusions

The dominant identification of the Blackwater marshlands as a mixed landscape is a realization of the material nature of the marshes and their in-between manifestation in the social imaginary. The marshlands were in a literal sense ambiguous: at an undetermined site of contestation between land and sea, they were an entanglement open to the presencing of the past. The complex nature of that presencing was evident in the intimate life geographies of Norman Angell and Tom Driberg, and the negotiations that allowed them to form the temperamental spaces they made in the marshlands.

Both men came to the Blackwater marshes seeking spaces of freedom. Their accounts of those locations, with their concerns for notions of a ‘remote island’ or ‘unspoiled coast’ speak above all of the abstract. So, while Angell wanted ‘escape’, Driberg wanted ‘solitude and serenity’, and both men proved capable of thinking in the language of abstract space: the penthouse view of the world’s ‘fatal drift’ or the idea of ‘a common enemy, the sea’. Yet both men, in their different ways, sought the integration of intimacy and an inner life of peace based upon the laying of the ghosts of the past. In the marshlands, despite the landscape of sea walls and flood tides, troubled by the materiality of floods as much as by the meaningfulness of presencing, Angell and Driberg came to make connections between self and place that were manifested in the meaningfulness of particular temperamental spaces.

In the marshlands, the agency of the marshes and the contingency of the landscape provided intimate locations for Angell and Driberg in which notions of space began to turn to experiences of place. So, when Angell wrote of his desire to explore the East Coast estuaries, he had to think in practical terms of its landscape of shoals. Subsequently, he found that if he could not heal the world, he could at least begin to heal the island ‘wrecked’ by inundation. Equally, while Driberg had wanted the openness of a life where ‘odd things happen’, he came to enjoy the ‘rich marsh pastures and mysterious saltings’ and the pleasures of his garden’s mulberries.

The agency of the marshes − notably the incursions of flood, the rupturing of the real boundaries of the sea walls, and the forced mucking in of the subsequent response − provided substantial challenges to men whose escape to the marshlands had left them both, symbolically as much as literally, at the end of the road. Angell’s ‘island kingdom’ was bombed by ‘Jerry’, and the ‘great love’ of Driberg’s life was threatened by the rushing of the ‘gleaming sheet of water’. These were, above all, intimate challenges. The marshlands proved to be a landscape of marginal confusions and contradictions − a problematic confounding of any clear notions of the separated and the cleansed. With ambiguous entanglements that defied separation and cleansing, the marshlands represented the compromise of everyday, muddled reality. It was a landscape where the repressed ghosts of the emergent could (and did start to) begin their intimately mediated presencing.

The debateable ground of the Blackwater marshlands never proved stable. It was a place of queerness where odd things happened. As half-land it presented itself now as solid order, now as flowing change − and provided an ambiguous landscape in which struggle and identity were lived out in sometimes-desperate attempts at making meaningful lives. The results were places that had provisional meaningfulness: the work of life geographies that were only stable in being compromised by a never-stable landscape of incessant incursions. Those marshlands were, though, where intimate relationships were made − and where entanglements were negotiated according to the contingencies of circumstance. The uncomfortable ambiguities of the marshland landscape, and the muddled, compromised life geographies that Angell and Driberg attempted to make behind their unreliable boundaries, have implications for contemporary understandings of landscape entanglements. They indicate why it may be helpful to imagine the construction of meaningful places as a contingent process − the work of negotiating, of entangling, between real materiality, the cultural imaginary, and the personal symbolic.