A Town Explores a Book 2023
JUDE MONTAGUE
This year the St Leonards-on-Sea readers’ festival focussed on Mary Seacole’s autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. Mary came from Jamaica, the daughter of a Scottish Lieutenant and a Jamaican healer who used traditional herbal medicines. She called herself Creole and was proud of her black ancestry and of “the Scots blood coursing through [her] veins”.
She went out to the Crimean Peninsula in the 1850s with the army and set up a hotel in Spring Hill where she catered for the soliders and supplied medicines. This and other adventures are recorded in the book she wrote on her return to England, bankrupt. Published in 1857, it was the first autobiography to be written by a black woman in Britain.
There have been so many events and artistic outputs created in response to the book for this festival that it’s impossible to mention them all here, but there’s a good selection of new additions this year. It’s the first time the Wellbeing Hub of Four Courts has been a venue for activities. On Sunday 15 and Saturday 16 there was a music stage and a fair with a foraging table of what’s in season in the hedgerows.
Meanwhile, through February and March, an ambitious schools engagement project took place with a phenomenal output of bunting, illustrated by many of the students. The Outdoor Art Trail included a bench shelter designed by Margarita Novikova, looking at the botanical value of our wonderful landscape. And interactive musical instruments have appeared in Gensing Gardens as part of the Smiling Landscapes exhibition by team: Yasmin Aishah, Esme Fisher and Frank Moon. I love the little British Hotel – a toy house is always a treat – decorated with Mary Seacole’s words “The welcome warmth within”.
One of the best-loved aspects of the festival are the appearances in town windows of displays created by artists, shopkeepers, public houses. They were my first introduction to this community festival, and I particularly remember the year examining Edward Lear’s poetry, as he is such a long-term favourite of mine. I felt a warm glow to see all those owls and pussycats popping up all over, like enchanted mushrooms. This year the face from the book, Mary Seacole herself, is less well known but I got to know her through Loulou Cousin’s beautiful cardboard portrait hung in the King’s Road Fish Bar, and the books propped up in the Bookkeeper shop window.
I was glad to see two Ukrainian harpists returning to create music with violinists Cai Jones and Sam Brown, and one of the highlights for me was visiting Archer’s Lodge on Charles Road for a live music performance considering the complexity of Mary Seacole’s relationship with her own heritage. There I did and saw things I never had before, just as Mary Seacole did in her amazing international adventures, waving a fish shadow-puppet in the projections of the sea, going on her journey. The musicians had worked with percussionist Suresh Donapudi of Afrodesi and it was great to see Sam Brown playing the djembe, bringing the drum’s voice back into Mary’s story.
I contributed from my own workshop on Kings Road with an exhibition that looked at the news reportage reaching the British Isles from Crimea in the 1850s, focusing on Roger Fenton’s famous war photograph, The Valley of the Shadow of Death. A very well-known early photograph of war, I decided to reproduce it as a cyanotype and exhibit it with multiple layers in a compound wall, which invited people to meditate upon its landscape. Local musician Andy Beresford read Tennyson’s famous poem about that infamous blunder The Charge of the Light Brigade, with the backdrop of Hastings’ underpass symbolising the deadly valley.
Hastings’ connection to the wider world, past and present, has been very much part of this year’s A Town Explores a Book, as arrivals from many other lands.become members of our community here.
This year the festival ran from 1-18 April, and was conducting workshops and events with schools throughout February and March. Find out more about A Town Explores a Book on its website atownexploresabook.com, and on social media.
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