First of all, I’d like to apologise if the layout of this post seems odd, or amateurish – WordPress has upgraded, and formatting and layout has changed and I have yet to work out to arrange what I write as I want. For example, I can’t yet find how to choose my preferred font – a little thing, I know, but very annoying.
I shared this about our writing group a couple of weeks ago, and since then I’ve been doing some serious pondering on it: Each time we writers meet, we share what we’ve produced in response to a writing challenge – however, after a while the challenges seemed less challenging – probably as we became more proficient, so we now employ other strategies. We have written in an unfamiliar genre, we have taken a well-known story and re-written it for a different audience, we have focused on a particular aspect – place, character, voice, style, we’ve had workshops and we went wild writing . For February’s challenge, the poet Macaque has grabbed the writing prompt bull by the horns with this: “Right, you lot, settle down, pay attention The next theme will be to write a story involving the character Apeth Blunt (gender not specified). This is not to be a character study, but a story in which Apeth is a main character.
I remarked when I first shared this, that the challenge was right up my street – it was very open, and yet it was quite specific, and I have been pondering on it ever since, and at last an idea came to me in a rather indirect way. As well as actively pondering, I must have also been mulling it over subconsciously. For some reason I was looking up the village of Covehithe which is on the east coast and not that far from where I used to go on holiday with my parents and sister as children. I only came across the name recently, which was why I was looking it up, although I was familiar with the ‘-hithe’ part as I knew Clayhithe in Cambridgeshire, not far from where we lived. Hithe, which comes from Old English hyð, just means wharf or landing place – more famous in Rotherhithe, and Hythe.
Back to Covehithe – there may have been Romans in the area round the little place, certainly they came ashore along the coast of East Anglia, the name of which announces that the Anglo-Saxons were here too, including some who left a dug-out canoe for present-day archaeologists to find. It was still only a very small place when the Normans conquered the country, and from then the place continued through the centuries, although it’s been continually under threat, not from human invaders, but from the sea. Coastal erosion will probably see the end of the place:
The coastal cliffs at Covehithe are formed of glacial sands and other deposits. Loose and unconsolidated, they erode rapidly, currently at around 4.5 metres a year, although Environment Agency studies found that 75 metres (250 ft) had been lost between 1992 and 2006 at a rate of 5.3 metres (17 ft) a year. The main part of the settlement at Covehithe, around 250 metres from the current shoreline, is expected to be lost to erosion by 2110, possibly even by 2040. Any future attempts to protect Covehithe are thought to be unsustainable, and would likely increase erosion rates at the larger settlement to the south.
Wikipedia.
Pondering and mulling on our writing challenge of Apeth Blunt, I suddenly wondered whether it could be a place not a person – maybe a village which like the villages in East Anglia, has been subject to erosion and may no longer actually exist. But also supposing, supposing there was a family of Blunts (it is a surname – Anthony Blunt the spy, Emily Blunt the actress) who had ancestry in a village called Apeth on the east coast, which has either disappeared or is disappearing into the sea. My character who thinks of themselves as an Apeth Blunt is standing on the crumbling cliffs (not too near the edge – that would be silly) and pondering on the fate of their much-loved family home. Obviously something other than pondering must happen… but it’s a start!
Lois Elsden 