Memories of Royal Terrace

I'd seen them as a child. A row of bright, white Georgian terraced houses facing over the slight escarpment of the southern face of the Southend gravel plateau and marking, with regal presence, the limits of the town and what came to be known as the sea-front.

Now, sixty years later, I was staying there on vacation. Their paladin balconies were still intact and adorned with splodges of red geraniums, but the white paint was much faded and the rooms and stairs were desperate for renovation. Time had not been kind and, without major care, this terrace would succumb to the vicissitudes of impermanence.

The scene from the balconies was like that of Southern France, the Antibes. The sea and Kent shore of the wide Thames estuary was framed by cypress and the greenery of the cliff gardens stretched down to the esplanade below. If you ignored the nightly, excited screams from the nearby amusement park, you could well have been in the idyllic watering spot so favored by Queen Caroline and other eminent Georgians that made this location "Royal Terrace."

At first light, as the gulls would wheel and scream their harsh good mornings, the insistent red and green lights of the safe channel on the far Kentish shore blinked their rapid insistence of good fortune while a little to the right the baleful red with a slower pulse, indicated the wreck of the Richard Montgomery, a sunken ammunition ship from WWII.

A walkway ribboned its way along the upper reach of the gardens sending off tendrils of walks down to the lower esplanade and pier. Just in front of our room was set a bench which could have played a part in a Beckett play -- at one time occupied by a tramp, then a man and his dog which continually nudged a ball over the edge and retrieved it in a sysiphian comedy, a courting couple, and to end the day a trio of loud drunks.

As for the amusement park, it extended either side of the pier and a mile further to the east where it terminated at the Kursaal and a line of seedy bed and breakfast hotels. I remember the Donald McGill saucy postcards on sale, "Happy" Harry preaching to bemused and slightly tipsy Londoners..."The sea of love is rolling in, rolling in, rolling in" he used to sing and the crowd would dutifully bowl pennies across the tarmac to him. Also, for the attention of the crowds were the "tip the lady out of bed" show, slot machines, lights, Never-Never Land, and the gambling casino. The seafront had, from Edwardian times, been a watering place for London's East End and was still as popular as ever with its attendant drunkenness and rude behavior.

The memories are fragmented now -- much has changed. Cherie, the tip the lady girl I knew in the '60s, must be seventy now, Never-Never land is no more, the cheap strings of lights are replaced with columns of computer controlled LEDs, Royal Terrace is so run down, and Donald McGill, noted by none less than George Orwell, long gone.

Long gone...