Free Channel Shore by Tom Fort

suicide attempts. Two said they would try again. One was physically restrained from leaving hospital to return to Beachy Head. One said the attraction was that it was always available and required no preparation – all you had to do was keep walking.
    The first time I went there, it was a warm and sunny August bank-holiday afternoon. The car parks were packed, the paths were ceaselessly trod, the place swarmed with people doing what people do on sunny bank-holiday afternoons: sauntering, sitting, lying, playing with the dog, leaving litter, picnicking, going around in irregular circuits beginning and ending at the car park. Death seemed inconceivable on such an occasion, although most Beachy Head suicides do occur in the summer, and no one can go there without having it in their mind that they might see something dreadful.
    For some unaccountable reason, April is the least popular month. I don’t know about February, but the place has a verydifferent atmosphere about it on a dark late-winter afternoon with a surging grey sea and a sky bulging with rain clouds. I was alone as I shuffled fearfully towards the void and peered over. Below me the sea licked and sucked hungrily at the black rocks spilled along the foot of the white cliff.
    I would not say that, in general, I am particularly suggestible or prey to fancy. But I will testify that I felt a distinct and scary seductiveness in the emptiness above the devouring swell of the sea, a pulling at my being that terrified and entranced me. That boundary between land and air, between known and unknown, seemed haunted by the spirits of those who had jumped, calling others to follow.
    Near the bottom of the cliff is a cave – now blocked and filled by falls of rock – known as Darby’s Hole. This was probably excavated in the first instance by smugglers and used to store contraband. But it acquired its name from the eighteenth-century vicar of the inland parish of East Dean, the Reverend Jonathan Darby. After the smuggling gang was broken up by the authorities, he cleared the cave and on stormy nights would hang lanterns in the mouth to warn mariners in pre-lighthouse days of the perils of Beachy Head, and to provide a shelter for victims of shipwreck.
    There is no reason whatever to doubt the essence of the story. But legend can be very unkind to those unable to defend themselves. Somehow another version of Parson Darby’s motivation took root, an antique whispering game alleging that his real reason was to have a refuge from the nagging tongue of Mrs Darby. This ridiculous canard – why would anyone in his right mind laboriously maintain two chambers with a connectingstaircase just to have peace from his spouse? – has been endlessly recycled in guidebooks through the ages. For instance E. V. Lucas, a perfectly respectable essayist and literary bod, repeated it in his generally splendid
Highways and Byways in Sussex
without a thought for Mr Darby and his reputation.
    The boldness of Beachy Head and the wildness of its setting have moved many of poetical inclination, among them Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were apparently admired by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Her verses on Beachy Head are fairly representative of the genre:
    On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime
    That o’er the Channel roared . . .
[etc., etc.]
    To plumb something of the mystery of the place I suggest turning instead to a marvellous essay called
The Breeze on Beachy Head
by Richard Jefferies, a great haunter of the south coast whose short life, dogged by poverty and ill-health and filled with care and drudgery, ended at Goring, just outside Worthing, in 1887.
    Jefferies’ exploration of the spirit of the place begins with him looking out from the foot of the cliff: ‘There is an infinite possibility about the sea. It may do what it has not done before. It is not to be ordered, it may overlap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency unfathomable. There is something in it not quite