On the Ballot

"We are now trying to build a Labour Party branch in my village – seven members and counting – with the modest aim of making sure there is always a Labour candidate on ballot papers. More importantly, it is vital that other views are always heard, even in these conservative rural areas."

I wrote the above words in May 2015 in the aftermath of the general and local elections. Labour had lost the former, but had not even managed to put up a candidate in the latter in my area of Herstmonceux. That was when a small group of new, re-joining and established Labour members started to have monthly 'Politics in the Pub' meetings. These informal gatherings were open to newcomers as well and, from this, we managed to dramatically increase membership in the village. Of course, there were one or two high-profile national events in the Labour Party that local membership levels benefited from at the time, too.

Last year, we joined with a neighbouring area and managed to form the Heathfield and Herstmonceux Branch of the Labour Party. And this week, we have one of the original members of the group on the ballot paper in the East Sussex County Council elections in the Wealden East division, which covers Herstmonceux. Our branch also has one of its members standing in the Heathfield and Mayfield division and, across East Sussex, Labour is contesting all bar one of the council divisions. For a largely rural and conservative area, this represents progression.

In reality, chances of success in these elections is confined to electoral divisions in Hastings and Bexhill; but what is important is that we have been able to deliver leaflets, meet people on the doorstep and outside supermarkets, listen to them and communicate Labour's core message of our ambition for a fairer society and the need to protect essential services in health, housing and education.

In two year's time there will be another round of district council elections and, between then and now, we will be moving on from our original modest aim by working hard on the concerns of ordinary people at the most local level so that, next time around, we can represent them.

There are Labour Party candidates in the Wealden East and Heathfield & Mayfield divisions, respectively, for the East Sussex County Council elections on 4th May.

Over The Hill

When the marriage of Glaswegian folk and blues singer John Martyn, and his wife Beverley, broke up at the end of the 1970s, they were living in Heathfield. Interviewed in 1981 by Chris Salewicz of the NME, Martyn reflected on the fact that he had returned to Scotland whereas his wife still lived in the East Sussex town. “I don’t know how she can stand it,” he ruminated, “I suppose she has learnt to live with middle class ponces.” Hmm…

If that sounds as though Martyn was never at home so far from Glasgow, it could not be further from the truth. From the age of five, he had divided his time between his estranged parents’ homes north of the border and in the home counties. And in the first half of the seventies, Martyn and his own young family lived on the Sussex coast. Indeed, his time in Hastings probably saw Martyn at the peak of his creative and commercial powers.

Having already been an important figure in the British folk scene from the mid-1960s onwards recording as a duo with Beverley, Martyn’s sound took a distinctive turn when he experimented with guitar delay effects and a slurred vocal style, and teamed up with jazz bassist Danny Thompson. This new and unique sound was first fully heard on the 1971 album, Bless the Weather; but it was the next album that was his apotheosis: 1973’s Solid Air, with its title track dedicated to friend and regular visitor to the Martyns’ Hastings home, Nick Drake, was a huge critical and commercial success.

However, Martyn’s prodigious appetite for alcohol and drugs had become a central feature of his life and, on the beautiful Over The Hill, his paean to Hastings’ West Hill, he was at his most confessional:

Can't get enough of sweet cocaine, get enough of Mary Jane/Going back to where I come from, going rolling back home again/Over the hill

Although his lifestyle had caused the family’s life to become increasingly chaotic, Martyn was still self-aware enough to realise where his priorities lay:

Been worried about my babies, been worried about my wife/ Just one place for a man to be when he's worried about his life/ I'm going home, over the hill

The image of the troubled troubadour, returning home over West Hill, is a powerful one.

In an attempt at a new beginning, the family moved 15 miles inland to Heathfield in 1975. But what was intended as salvation was merely a postponement of the inevitable; by the end of the seventies, Martyn had left Sussex behind. He continued to record, perform and consume consistently throughout the following decades, until his death in 2009.

Once their young children had grown, Beverley also returned to music, latterly with this year’s The Phoenix and the Turtle album. And most recently, the young man who visited the Martyns’ hill-top Hastings home to stare out to sea for hours on end has propelled Beverley into the headlines. The ownership of early demo tapes, long in the possession of the Martyns, has been called in to question by the estate of the legendary Nick Drake.

Oh, Doctor Beeching!

Fifty years ago next week, Dr Beeching’s report, ‘The Reshaping of Britain’s Railways’ was published. The report’s recommendations, accepted by Macmillan’s Tory government, resulted in a third of Britain’s rail network, and more than half of its stations, disappearing by the end of the 1960s. The Beeching Axe, as it was popularly called, was the most decisive blow in the economic death of rural Britain.

Despite living in Forest Row, Beeching did not spare East Sussex. The Cuckoo Line, linking Eridge in the north of the county with Polegate in the south, fell victim to his axe. Those two stations survived, as they were connected to other lines, but the cuts sounded the death knell for the stations in between: Rotherfield and Mark Cross, Mayfield, Heathfield, Horam, Hellingly and Hailsham.

Named after Heathfield’s spring Cuckoo Fair, the defunct line south of that town eventually became the Cuckoo Trail in the 1990s after it was purchased by the county council and developed by the sustainable transport charity, Sustrans, as part of the National Cycle Network. Today, the trail provides 14 miles of footpath and cycleway, and has been extended down to Hampden Park in Eastbourne.

Although the tracks are long gone, there are still some signs that there was once a railway: some buildings, embankments and bridges remain and names –Station Road – betray the erasure. But for twenty years after the trains stopped running, there were even more solid reminders of the Cuckoo Line. Platforms, yards and siding sheds were all very obvious in the late seventies and early eighties when Chris Jennings was taking photographs of the remnants of the railway age. If you visit his website there is a particular selection of ghostly black and white images, shot on a sun-bathed day in Hailsham in August 1978, that show the abandoned railway about to be superseded by the overgrowth of nature.

Rural Rebellion

It is a late summer afternoon, the dog days of August; I am cycling up to Cade Street to pay homage at the monument to Jack Cade. It is a windless day and the earth is baking beneath a raging sun. I have half a mind to turn back; my water is already low and I still have the steepness of the road after Marklye. I fleetingly consider Flitterbrook Lane - a more graduated climb – but stay with my course. When I begin the steep climb, I know I have chosen wisely. The trees forming a dense canopy over the road, the sunlight penetrates only enough for the lightest dappling; and, of course, the air is cool. Halfway up, the canopy becomes sparser, so before I emerge into the heat again, I dismount and drag the bike up onto the bank. I sit in the shade and look back down the tunnel of trees, as occasional stray vehicles materialise, camouflaged by sun and shade, to disturb the drowsy, hazy hum of the afternoon. They don’t see me, in the hazel and blackthorn; Jack Cade should have hidden here. Cade had raised a rebel army that attacked London and the reign of Henry VI; double-crossed by the King, his fatal wounding as a fugitive near Heathfield inspired the revolts of Sussex men. The monument, looking down from the Weald to the sea, stands as a reminder: the city is the seat of authority, the rural landscape is where the spirit of rebellion resides.