Life and times

The novelist has embraced her new life in Thanet – from winter sea swimming to soaring art

Novelist Maggie Gee

BRRRR. RAMSGATE, Thanet, midwinter. I am trying to balance on one foot on the damp, cold sand while dragging my thermal tights off over the other. Before me, a low tide crawls slowly in, like a sheet of used silver foil. Shivers crimp the flesh under my ribs. None of the people further up the beach have noticed me, but it still feels nuts to undress outdoors. There’s only one thing to be done: get under the water. I leave my clothes and pad off at speed into the shallows...

When you’re cold, things go into slow motion, and today the beach hides a dark secret. At first there’s only smooth sand under my feet, but 10ft into the water I hit a band of black flints, which get bigger and sharper the further out I go. I lurch onwards, slow, bandy-legged. Ouch, ouch. Naked skin getting colder and the sea’s only up to my thighs. Then a wave gleams towards me at chest-height. I lean forward, it lifts me up, and after a gasp the water is suddenly not cold at all, and I slide the prayer hands of breaststroke along the smooth muscles of the water.

I want to swim for ever, though at eight degrees, 10 minutes would be too much. I tingle for the rest of the day.

SITTING ON THIS SAME BEACH five years ago in the spring sunlight with a notebook and a thermos, staring out to sea, I wrote notes for my novel, Blood ,a black comedy-thriller set in Thanet. The country I describe is becoming more reckless and lawless, feeling let down by politicians and threatened by migrants, who slide in in small boats by night. Terrorist incidents are increasingly common, but in the foreground are even bigger problems – deep-seated injustices, neglectful, violent parents, and angry children. But the book ends hopefully, and that’s the way I feel about 2019, too, despite Brexit chaos.

THE MOVE FROM LONDON to Thanet, six years ago, nearly stopped my writing career – and that of my husband [Nicholas Rankin] – in its tracks. The cheery amateur removal men managed to lose one foot of my husband’s typing chair and all the bolts that held my Ikea desk together. Their expertise was actually in transporting art – they packed our pictures so indestructibly that most of them have never been prised out of their endless layers of tape and bubblewrap. Instead I’ve found new artists living nearby – Sarah Stokes with her bold, light-filled abstract oils, and sculptor Stephen Melton, whose painted bronze of a crane flies over the long table in our white living room. These artists have inhaled the best things about Thanet – eccentricity, originality, wide skies full of the varying light you only get with the sea on every side.

COLERIDGE, VAN GOGH and Hans Christian Andersen all walked our beaches. I have Coleridge’s poems open by my bed as I write. Like him, I enjoy Ramsgate’s ‘aery cliffs and glittering sands’. His idea of sea bathing was much more hi-tech than mine, conducted from the steps of a horse-drawn bathing machine. Winter sea swimming for me began by accident; one year I simply didn’t stop when the summer ended. Like Coleridge, who invented the verb, having taken the plunge, I love to ‘Ramsgatize’. Blood, by Maggie Gee, is published on 28 February (Fentum Press, £10). Order now for £8.99 plus p&p, at books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844-871 1514

I lurch onwards, slow, bandy-legged. Ouch, ouch. Naked skin getting colder