How John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Visits Dungeness in Kent

There can be few places as bleak or fascinating as Dungeness, where abandoned railway carriages once provided shelter for families with little money. Their history echoes the desperate poverty of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Today, these humble refuges have become luxurious holiday homes, an extraordinary transformation from places of necessity into playgrounds for the comfortably affluent.

by Chris Harris

There can be few places in Britain quite like Dungeness. A vast, bleak, desolate expanse of shingle, battered by the wind, overlooked by two lighthouses and a nuclear power station, and populated by an extraordinary collection of buildings that look as though they have been deposited there by some architectural accident. Amongst them are old railway carriages, many now incorporated into expensive, architect-designed homes. But their origins tell a rather different story, one that takes us across the Atlantic to the dust bowls of Oklahoma and John Steinbeck’s extraordinary novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

We’ve come to Dungeness for a few days and are staying in one of these converted railway carriages. It is now part of a beautiful holiday home, complete with designer fittings, a lovely bathroom and all the comforts of modern life. But sitting here, listening to the wind howling across the shingle, I can’t help wondering about the people who once lived in these things, long before anyone thought of calling them desirable holiday accommodation.

That neatly brings me to the Joad family. Published in 1939, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of an Oklahoma farming family who lose their land during the Great Depression. Drought, dust storms, mechanisation and the banks combine to drive thousands of tenant farmers from their homes. These weren’t people looking for a change of scenery. They were desperately poor, dispossessed and hungry, with virtually nothing left to lose.

Steinbeck’s great achievement was to make us understand what absolute poverty does to people. Not simply the absence of money, but the gradual stripping away of dignity, independence and hope. The Joads are decent, hardworking people who want nothing more extraordinary than somewhere to live, enough food to eat and the opportunity to earn an honest  living. They eventually find themselves living in a railway carriage.

Towards the end of the novel, the Joads move into a disused railway boxcar in a cotton-picking settlement in California. They share it with another family, the Wainwrights. It offers them something approaching stability, a roof over their heads and the possibility of earning enough to survive. By the standards of their recent existence, it represents an improvement. But when torrential rain floods the settlement, even this precarious refuge is lost.

Thousands of miles away, something remarkably similar was happening on the Kent coast. Following the First World War, particularly during the 1920s, redundant railway carriages began appearing on the shingle at Dungeness. Railway workers and their families were among those who acquired them, taking advantage of the opportunity to establish relatively inexpensive homes on land owned by the railway company.

Some became holiday retreats, while many others were adapted into permanent residences. In an age when decent housing was beyond the means of many working people, an unwanted railway carriage offered the possibility of a roof over their heads at relatively little expense.

Of course, the circumstances were not identical. The Joads were victims of mass displacement, agricultural collapse and economic exploitation on an almost unimaginable scale. The people who settled at Dungeness were not necessarily refugees from such catastrophe. Some chose the location for its isolation and freedom, while others were motivated by the practical economics of obtaining somewhere affordable to live, but it was still poverty-stricken, to put it mildly, where every penny counted and proper food was scarce, and Dungeness is hardly an environment swamped in trees for fire fuel.

Imagine arriving on that bleak stretch of shingle in November, with the wind whipping in from the English Channel, and discovering that your new home was a redundant railway carriage. No insulation, no central heating, no double glazing and precious little protection from the elements. The gaps around the doors and windows would have invited every draught that swept across the peninsula. Water had to be obtained, sanitation arranged, and cooking and heating somehow managed in a structure never intended for permanent occupation. Sitting in Dungeness now, the wind has not stopped and it is bitterly cold.

Throughout The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads are repeatedly forced to improvise, to make something out of nothing. Their possessions become fewer, their expectations diminish, and the definition of a decent home changes according to what they can afford. What might once have seemed unthinkable becomes something for which they are grateful.

The same principle applied to those who made their homes in the discarded carriages of Dungeness. A railway carriage was not designed to accommodate a family, any more than the Joads’ boxcar was intended to become a home. Yet with enough determination, ingenuity and hard work, both could be transformed into somewhere people might survive.

There is also something profoundly unsettling about the geography of these two stories. Steinbeck’s characters travel west across the vast American landscape, seeking a better life, only to discover that California offers little escape from their poverty. Dungeness, meanwhile, sits at the very edge of England, a lonely, windswept peninsula where the land seems almost to surrender to the sea.

Here today, many of the carriages survive, testament to the extraordinary transformation that time has brought to Dungeness. The railway carriages that once represented cheap accommodation and practical necessity have become architectural curiosities, incorporated into some of the most desirable and expensive properties on this remarkable stretch of coastline. Architects have celebrated their unusual proportions, designers have restored their wooden interiors, and holidaymakers now pay substantial sums for the privilege of sleeping in them.

What was once a symbol of having very little has become a symbol of having rather a lot.

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Welcome to Denham, a fictitious Sussex village where behind respectable doors, well-tended gardens and familiar faces, things have a habit of going badly wrong.

Obsession, ambition, deception, jealousy and petty rivalry run through this collection of tragi-comical and satirical short stories. From poltergeists and lottery winners to cricket club feuds and environmental disasters, ordinary people embark on discovering just how quickly an ordinary life can unravel into an extraordinary mess.

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