You might remember that over Christmas I read Charles Dickens' classic, Great Expectations. For some reason I had been led to believe that this was a Christmassy story. This is, quite simply, not true. Admittedly the opening chapter is set on Christmas Eve but that really is as festive as it gets... although this really only occurred to me after I'd finished reading the entire book...
That minor gripe aside, you know I love a good gripe (and that's grIpe not grope as some dirty minded friend suggested...), the reason for this post is that last weekend I quite accidentally found myself in the village that is said to have inspired Pip's home: Cooling, a village and civil parish on the fabulously named Hoo Peninsula.
It's not hard to imagine a young Pip coming across Magwitch amongst the gravestones in the grounds of Cooling's wonderfully dramatic St James' Church. If you take a walk in the graveyard, you will come across what are now called Pip's Graves - those of 13 babies that are referred to by Dickens in his opening chapter as "little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their [parents'] graves".
The main reason for my Saturday morning excursion to Kent was to have a lovely, if not a little brisk, walk on the North Kent Marshes. But you can't have a walk without lunch. That's just... the law. So an hour and a half later, a little more windswept, distinctly muddier and disastrously low on calories, my mum and I stumbled into The Horseshoe & Castle pub in Cooling. This, as it happens, was where I discovered the village's connections with Great Expectations.
Tucking in to rarebit next to a cosy fire, I noticed some writing framed on the wall. With St James's Dickensian associations, 'it is not inconceivable to assume that the public house [The 'Three Jolly Bargemen' from Pip's village in Great Expectations] is one and the same as the 'Horseshoe and Castle' that we know today'. Even less conceivable if it is in fact true that the pub was originally called 'The Three Barges'. Dickens really used his imagination there... Whether or not it is true, the pub certainly remains as 'homely and friendly' as its fictitious brother.
Musician Jools Holland also lives in the village. His house is actually inside the grand-looking Cooling Castle. Does that make Jools Miss Havisham...? I think so.
Great Expectations
Claire Tomalin on Dickens
Introducing...Charles Dickens
Visit The Old Curiosity Shop
The George Inn
Horseshoe & Castle
Main Rd
Cooling
Rochester
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