Read an Excerpt
“Hello from the cliff-top in Scarborough.”
Richard Whitely had just begun a live news broadcast from outside the Holbeck Hall hotel when the scene behind him dramatically changed. There was a brief, low rumble as a huge section of the building broke away and fell from sight over the cliff edge, a cloud of brick dust billowing in its wake. He turned to point at the scene, momentarily flustered.
“Holbeck Hall, a building here that has stood for 110 years, as you can see losing its battle, its grim battle, to cling on to the crumbling cliff.”
The report cut to an aerial shot of the hotel, the remains of it hugging the cliff edge above a great scoop of missing land. Following a night of torrential rain, a 200m wide landslip had taken place, causing 27,000 square metres of soil to take on the consistency of damp sponge cake and slither down towards the beach. This was in June of ’93. Our family had been living in the small town of Withernsea on the same stretch of coast for less than a year and for us, Holbeck Hall was big news. I watched this report with no small amount of concern.
*****
I would go on to use this situation as a handy way of geographically pinpointing Withernsea for people who had never heard of it.
"It's near Bridlington," I'd say. "Waxholme? Hornsea?" Mentally tracking the coastline for somewhere they might be familiar with. Summoning names of resort towns that are more likely to be mistaken for Dickens characters than places where you might stop and build a sandcastle. Eventually, getting nowhere, I’d plump for disaster.
“Do you remember that hotel that fell off the cliff?”
“Oh, right!” they’d reply, lighting up with recognition. “You’re from Scarborough.”
The demise of Holbeck Hall was a reference that no one loaded with sympathy or fear because generally, no one thinks about the problems of the Northeast coast. This is because no one thinks about the Northeast coast at all. Chances are, if someone has previously looked at that part of the country on a map, it would have been to see where Hull was, then decide not to go there.
Withernsea is another 18 miles further out from that decision, away from the city and along winding rural roads clotted with unremarkable housing and industrial fruit farms. Driving there from the west, the traffic changes from a dense flow to a sputter, as cars choose other locations, the roads eventually becoming so empty you could fool yourself into thinking that you’d slipped back through a portal into the 1970s. Withernsea is not on the way to anywhere, or a region that anyone just passes through, it’s a destination. If someone does accidentally end up there, it’s likely because they’ve washed up on the beach having first fallen from the Humber Bridge. So, a lack of interest in the area is completely understandable. Had my family not moved there, I wouldn’t have thought about it either. But once we did, its fate was pretty much all I could think about. Of standing on the edge of it when the whole place gave way. Falling to my certain death. The collapse of Holbeck Hall did not help matters.
*****
I’d moved to Withernsea in the summer of ’92, and wasn’t due to start college until the autumn, so I had no friends and a lot of time on my hands. To fill my days, I’d swim in the sea then walk the cliffs and beaches, trying to calibrate myself for this next stage in my life. And while I did, it was tough to ignore the regular changes in my surroundings. I might sit on a clifftop tuffet and ponder the bleakness of my existence then, revisiting the same spot a week later, discover that it had shuffled several feet down the face. It seemed clear to me that the cliff edge was heading, apparently determinedly, towards our home. I mentioned this to my family and to my mothers’ new colleagues at the pottery works in town, but no one seemed to be talking about it.
“Don’t be soft,” my mother told me, keen to nip this panic in the bud. “You think too much, that’s your problem.”
This reaction just made me feel like a character in a disaster movie. Someone who was able to see an incoming threat that no one else could see and was dismissed as unsound. The problem, it turned out, was that I just hadn’t been speaking to the right people.
