Ghosts of the past

You find it in the vistas of skeletal metal gangways, the abandoned 18th-century forts, the squat oil holders and rusted pipelines, the pale reeds of the marshes, the barbed wire, the peeling housing estates, the lonely river paths. You hear it in the thick silence by the water, broken only by the wide river slurping and slopping against the embankment. There is something in the landscape of the Thames estuary that is curiously and powerfully uncanny.

But how can that be in the otherwise earthy county of Essex? This is one of the subterranean themes of Rachel Lichtenstein’s electrifying exploration of the estuary. What ought to be a grey stretch of post-industrial England is in fact rich in eerie poetry. During the middle of one howlingly stormy night, as the author huddles in her bunk in a pitching boat tied to the lower decking of Southend pier, the banging of hull against wood is accompanied by more frightening, hallucinatory noises — ‘the clamour of a great crowd of people crying out in fear.