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traffic of the dead: furs, cabin trunks, porters. There are mesmerizing patches of sunlight on the bald stone flags that it is impossible not to acknowledge. We move slowly, talk in whispers: a cathedral of evictions.
    We followed the tunnel down to the Gravesend Ferry, theTSS
Edith
. Everybody wants to get away. The officers from Tilbury Fort chose to live on the other side, among the decayed Regency splendour, where there was some remnant of life and society. Their ‘pressed’ men were either invalid, or had to be locked at night into their barracks to prevent them from deserting.
    No time, on this excursion, for the World’s End; a low tumble-down weather-boarded building, once the baggage store where troops crossing the river left their equipment. Tables for stripping the drowned. We skirt the pub and its stunted orchard, reluctantly; passing on, to enter the Fort by the ashlar-faced Water Gate.
    Immediately the shades press on you. The lack of any ordinary human presence makes the survival of this enclosure remarkable, and daunting. The tourist feels responsible for the silence. The cobbles of the parade are beaten fears. Bone faces crowd the upper windows of the Officers’ Quarters. Sand spills from the water pump. Someone has placed a dead bird in the mouth of the ceremonial cannon. In the chapel the caretaker inscribes the names of the Jacobite prisoners who died at the Fort, hidden from sight in the tunnels of the powder magazine. Spent weapons, hostages. Highlanders brought by sea from Inverness, for eventual transportation. A museum of madness and suffering set into a vicious – but disguised – pentagon. Redoubts and ravelins spike the surrounding swamplands: the Water Gate can empty the moat and inundate these outlying paddy fields.
    There is a scratching mockery in the movement of the caretaker’s quill, as he columns his pastiche ledger with real names.
Cameron, Macfie
,
MacGillivray, MacGregor
. The east wind courses through brick-work passageways, caponiers, and ramps; outflanking the petrified weaponry.
    Among the cabinets of gas masks, mortars, knives, and bandage boxes is a map that illustrates the lines of fire between Tilbury and Gravesend, as proposed by Thomas Hyde Page in 1778. The river at its narrowest point, eight hundred yards, shore to shore, is tightly laced by invisible threads: a stitched vulva. The onlyentrance to the heat of the city is denied. A pattern is woven over the waters; which remains unactivated to this day. And, therefore, most hazardous.
    The only blood shed in anger was during a cricket match. An Essex batsman, his wicket flattened, held petulantly to his ground, demanding that the strength of the breeze be taken into account. The incensed Kentish outfielders sprinted to the guardroom: most of them moving for the first time that afternoon. The skipper snatched up a rifle, and shot the defaulter where he stood. An elderly invalid, intervening with the garrulous wisdom of his years, was bayoneted through the throat. The sergeant in temporary charge of the Fort, while his officer promenaded the terrace of the Clarendon, was butchered in his nightshirt on the balcony of the Sutler’s House: prefiguring that famous icon of General Gordon, waiting on the steps of the Governor’s Palace at Khartoum for the spears of the fanatics, children of the Mahdi, redeemer at the end of time. (In an earlier incarnation, as Captain Charles Gordon, the stern Bible-puncher had commanded the Royal Engineers at Gravesend – where a small plaque honours him for his devotion to ‘the poor and sick’ of the town.)
    The men of Kent escaped from this horror across the river. The Essex ten, claiming a moral – if pyrrhic – victory, ran off over the drawbridge into the sunken levels.
    A photograph, promoting the glories of the station concourse at Tilbury, before the reconstruction, features a newspaper kiosk, with the day’s headlines clearly