Written for the Observer magazine in 1997, to accompany photographs of seafront houses near Dungeness, Kent.

Sometimes the sun just glares down at you, almost too much to bear, and sometimes the mist will roll in so thick and fast that you can’t even see down to the shed, and it’s only the sound of the waves against the shingle that tells you where you are at all. It’s a lonely spot, really, not what I imagined, but at least you know there’s the neighbours, always someone next door. And of course we’ve got each other.

The road runs straight for miles and miles, along the edge of the beach, straight as a Roman road, and all the bungalows sit side by side and face out across the shingle and in the distance you can just about see the water, if the tide isn’t low. Sometimes you’ll get silence for half an hour or more, complete silence, not even a car going by, and all you’ll hear is him rustling his paper or flushing the toilet or rummaging around in that cupboard of his. When the mist comes in you get the sound of foghorns from the lighthouse, I don’t know how they make them so loud, it was dark the first time I heard it and it made me think of the all-clear but it doesn’t remind me of that any more, it just sounds like itself.

We both like the silence. We’ve got used to it. There’s no need to talk much any more, we’ve said all we’ve got to say. He knows I don’t like the way he runs the hot water then puts the plates in the sink and just leaves it to go cold, but he does it anyway, so what’s the point. I’ve told him a thousand times and I’m not going to tell him again. There are things that used to get on your nerves, things you thought you’d strangle him for, and in the end it doesn’t matter. What it comes down to in the end is you and him, him and you. Like it or leave it. And we’re neither of us going to leave it, now.

We don’t even argue about the name any more, though we used to, all the time. Ours is the only house without one, but we couldn’t decide. He used to sit at the front table all day, looking out at the beach, and then he’d give me lists of things like Sea Symphony and Saltaire and Plain Sailing and Stone’s Throw. It’s nice to give a house a name, if it’s something you’ve been waiting for all your life it shouldn’t just be a number, but I didn’t want any of that flowery stuff. Why don’t we call it Loggerheads, I said once, because we’ve been living at Loggerheads ever since you retired, but he didn’t see the joke. I still think it was quite a good name.

We do laugh about it sometimes, though, and that’s the important thing. Just the other day the mist was worse than it had ever been, but we went out for a stroll anyway and we were halfway across the beach and we couldn’t see more than a yard ahead of us, it was like the whole world had just upped and disappeared and I said, It’s a good job we didn’t call it Sea View, isn’t it. And we both had a laugh at that, but that was the day I heard the foghorns again and then out in the distance, it must have been miles away, there was an answer from one of the ships and it took me back, made me think of something, it sounded like the pedal on a church organ and I could remember crouching there, tiny I must have been, and her legs, it must have been Mum’s legs, her legs in stockings when she played, I’d forgotten all about that, hadn’t given those days a thought, not for years, but that sound made me think of them, brought it all back, and for a moment what with all the mist and greyness I had quite a turn, didn’t know where I was, thought I might have died or something, but then I heard him breathing next to me and I remembered and it was all right.

© Jonathan Coe 1997

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