Cliffs of Despair: A Journey to the Edge

1 The Last Stop Pub
A bearded man with black-rimmed glasses sits on the edge of a towering cliff, staring vacantly at a sea glimmering with the last remains of sunlight. Clouds drift above his head like barroom smoke. The stiff Channel wind ripples his lightweight jacket and shivers his scruffy hair. He presses his hands against the spongy turf, leans forward, and studies the rocks below. The foam-marbled sea has receded, leaving pools of water around the chalk rubble scattered across the beach. Thirty feet behind the man, a woman in a bulky sweater gazes inland, a male companion by her side. Sheep and cows graze on hills dotted with yellow cowslips. Crows speckle red slate farmhouse roofs and strips of freshly plowed earth. A rabbit emerges from a nearby gorse patch and scampers across the cliff top. The woman's eyes follow it to the man, whose hands now grip the cliff edge. His back is framed by a pewter sea. He raises his head, turns, and flashes her a heart-stopping smile.

He turns back to the sea. The woman taps her partner's shoulder. They whisper and watch. Abruptly, the man stands and takes a large step away from the edge, as if suddenly repulsed by it. He glances at the woman. This time he isn't smiling. She averts her gaze and affects a casual stroll. When she glances over her shoulder, the man is back at the edge, peering over. She and her companion confer. They watch the man take a step backward. He begins to pace along the cliff top like a mad professor contemplating a problem. Then he stops, strides to the edge, and stands perfectly still. The woman and her partner turn to each other and make a decision. When they turn back to the cliff edge, the man is gone. I round the corner of Eastbourne's town hall, on the fringe of the city's business district. My shadow stretches El Greco-like across the last bit of flatland for sixty miles, toward a smartly dressed woman closing her shop across the street. Hunched by a backpack stuffed with microwaveable Indian dinners, bananas, bread, and beer, I turn and begin the steep two-mile ascent to Beachy Head, a borough of Eastbourne known for its majestic chalk cliffs and for the number of people who jump off them. The hill is the first in a chain that ripples across most of the length of the south coast county of Sussex, and it is interminable. One besotted English scribe compared the South Downs to the soft, gentle breasts of a sleeping girl; fully freighted, jet-lagged, and hungry, I feel like an ant lugging an oversize crumb up the backside of a Rubenesque nude. I trudge past charming homes tucked behind flint walls, and cross traffic intersections as confusing as exchange rates. What do the passing motorists think when they see a flagging, disheveled man with a backpack walking toward a famous suicide spot? It's my fifth day in England, and already I'm beginning to wonder if the fifteen hundred dollars I withdrew from my retirement fund to finance this trip was a good idea. I'll think differently, I hope, after a hearty dinner in my cozy bungalow at the farm on top of the hill.

I hear a siren. Seconds later, a police car careens around the corner, and I think, "Beachy Head." I pick up the pace. The grade steepens as Meads Road becomes Beachy Head Road, barren woods replace houses, and the sidewalk turns to a dirt path dotted with chalk. Minutes later, the top of the hill comes into view. I lean in to the steepening grade as though gravity were a headwind. Soon, crossing onto the coast road, my body straightens, and I'm blasted by gale-force winds. The hill protects Eastbourne from the foul weather blowing east, and now I'm at the top of it, exposed. I pass a sign for Beachy Head and stop at a smaller sign announcing the entrance to Black Robin Farm. I gaze down the dirt drive and imagine taking off my sneakers, cracking open a beer, and watching television in my brick cocoon. I turn and look down the lonely coast road. I tell myself I have only a mile to go, if, in fact, there is anything to go to. I keep walking. The coast road inclines gently and, running as it does along a ridge, offers a unique view of two different worlds: to the east below, the shimmering orange lights of a Victorian seaside resort; to the west, undulating hills and dusky farmhouses. The road humps, blocking the southern view ahead, but soon enough I see the Beachy Head Pub and flashing police lights. I run. Past a farm, past stunted sycamores, past a couple in a parked car. Approaching the driveway to the Beachy Head Pub, I slow to a stroll so as not to look like the ambulance chaser I am.

A roadside phone booth installed by a local suicide-prevention group casts a faint glow on the sign planted next to it: the samaritans-always there day and night-phone 735555 or 0345 90 90 90. At the driveway entrance, another sign, this one sprouting from a pole, announces brewers fayre at beachy head. A floodlight illuminates the pub's entrance, and the lights of Black Robin Farm glimmer in the distance beyond. I cross the road and pass a woman in a baggy sweater who leans like a felled tree into the tangle of her partner's arms. I step onto the windswept Downs and plod toward the cliff edge, toward the din of helicopter rotors and two bystanders silhouetted against the sky. A police radio crackles across the cliff top. Some hundred feet away, a constable, backlit by strobes of red and blue, paces in front of a patrol car. I join the two men. We watch the chopper hover over the Channel. I step up to the cliff edge and look down. The chalk boulders scattered along the shore look phosphorescent in the spray of searchlight. Despite the long drop, my legs remain steady; darkness falls the space with substance. I step back and ask what happened. The larger of the two men turns to me. His nose is as ruggedly askew as his wool beret. He tells me, "Someone jumped about forty-five minutes ago. The police've been searching for, oh, I'd say twenty minutes now." He says his name is Shane; his friend is Simon. I glance at the sea. The helicopter looks like a confused dragonfly, making several passes over the beach, banking back to the ocean between each pass, and hovering there before trying again. Simon watches, mesmerized, his leather flight jacket drooping over narrow shoulders. "On holiday?" Shane asks. "Yes." The truth is too complicated. I shift my gaze inland, but there isn't much to see at dusk. "It's beautiful here -- a lot more open than I expected."

"It's like the stereotypical English flowing countryside. You know, makes you want to have a cup of tea, stiff upper lip, and let's go beat the Germans again." I nod in agreement, though actually the land only makes me want to look. The chopper continues to jab and feint above the Channel. "Loud, isn't it?" I say. "It's as much a part of Beachy Head as the wind and orchids." Shane turns to me and smiles. "It's a crowded sky here at Beachy Head: jackdaws, gulls, wheatears -- and the police helicopter." "I think they found it." Simon points below. The chopper lowers onto the beach. Two figures emerge from the hulk in a concentrated beam of white light. They clamber across floodlit shingle, stopping at a huddle of boulders, and there the light lingers. One of the figures spreads out an orange bag; the other reaches behind a boulder and tugs on a dark clothed body, flopping it onto the bag. They pack it, drag it, and shove it into the helicopter. When they're aboard as well, the chopper lifts and turns, rippling the sea with its wash. I say goodbye to Shane and Simon and head across the cliff top, galvanized by this anonymous death. I negotiate clusters of gorse and stop at the top of the coast road embankment. Across the street, two police constables examine a car in the pub's parking lot. One appears to be taking down the license plate number; the other peers through the windshield on the driver's side. Then they head toward the pub, and I follow. Brewers Fayre at Beachy Head, also known as the Beachy Head Pub, is a sprawl of contiguous ranch-style buildings a hundred yards from the sea. It was called the Queen's when it opened as a restaurant in 1880 and the Beachy Head Hotel when eight bedrooms were added in the 1890s. After World War II, it was a jumble of shacks where the fare was, according to one local, "an unending supply of mince followed by bread-and-butter pudding, with no choice, of course." It burned to the ground in the fall of 1966, the result of a kitchen fire fanned by gale-force winds, and again in 1994, nine months after being purchased by Whitbread, one of England's largest breweries.

Undaunted, Whitbread built an enlarged restaurant and pub on the charred site, as well as a quaint museum showcasing the area's natural wonders. In summer, camera-toting tourists pack the pub's picnic benches, and children invade its candy-colored playground as an ice-cream truck idles in the parking lot. But the pub has a darker side. In some circles, it's known as the Last Stop Pub, a place where "suspicious ones" go for a little Dutch courage before heading to the cliffs. The pub's employees are instructed to keep their eyes open for solemn, solitary drinkers, and to suss out their intentions. Sometimes they call the police; other times they follow them out the building and, if necessary, physically restrain them. I'm about to witness one of the pub's post-suicide rituals. The constables remove their hats in the entryway. They pass a pinball machine, then veer toward the bar, radios crackling. Two men turn on their stools. The bartender looks up as he draws a pint of ale. He doesn't wait for the officers to ask the usual question: the manager, he offers quietly, is working the till. The constables continue on, and I follow. I stop at a dessert display some fifteen feet from the till and scan the dining area. Potted plants, antique lanterns, and ceramic mobiles of farm animals dangle from thick oak beams. Spinning wheels and burlap bags marked wool and flower seed sit on slatted platforms chained to a timber-frame ceiling. Silky pop music floats above tables occupied mostly by couples focused unwaveringly on their plates or each other. It's a surreal scene, these strapping police officers with their staticky radios moving urgently through a space so thick with the clinking languor of a weekday evening that it seems to blot them out. Either they've become such a familiar presence in the pub that they register as a peripheral blip in the consciousness of the diners, or the diners choose not to see them so they can continue to drink and eat, unencumbered by the tragedy that just transpired outside the darkened windows.

I peer into the brightly lit showcase of waxen cakes and pies, then cast a sidelong glance at the till. A ruddy-faced man with a dish towel slung over his shoulder listens to the constables and nods. He abandons his post and disappears with them through a doorway. They emerge minutes later. One of the constables utters a grim "We'll be in touch." I stop at the bar, order a beer, and find a corner table. I molt my backpack and sit down, affecting a pose of self-assured watchfulness. A waiter walks by carrying a birthday cake to a table of giggling German schoolgirls. "Will you be having dinner, sir?" I turn to see a young man clutching a coffeepot and smiling politely. steve is pinned to his shirt pocket. "No, I don't think so." "Right."He glances at my backpack. "On holiday?" "A working holiday." "What do you do?" "I'm a teacher." "A professor?" "No, a high school teacher." He nods, like one of my students pretending to get it. Steve, if you have a few hours, pull up a chair, and I'll attempt to explain why I'm here, try to explain why, while my winter-worn prep school colleagues spend their spring break lounging on tropical beaches, I'm indulging in England's suicide package. "I'm here to research the Beachy Head suicides." He seems momentarily stunned by my admission. "Really?" I nod. He glances at the bar, leans forward, and lowers his voice, as if he's about to tell a dirty joke. "We get some suicides coming here, you know. You probably saw the police come in." "Yes, I did." I pause. "Have you come across any yourself?" It's a long shot. Months before my visit, the pub's previous managers, a married couple, made the mistake of describing on national television their encounters with suicidal patrons; they're now laboring in a Brewers Fayre on the outskirts of Eastbourne. When I phoned the couple, James Cunningham said they couldn't talk about their tenure at the Beachy Head Pub unless I got Whitbread's permission. He gave me the number for the brewery's public relations representative, who told me that an interview with the Cunninghams regarding their employment at the Beachy Head Pub would not be possible. The waiter says, "I haven't myself, but some of the other waiters have. We're not supposed to talk about the suicides, though." I decide not to pursue it. I ask for another beer, forgetting that I'm supposed to get it myself; he takes my glass anyway. I watch the birthday girl open her gifts as her friends break into periodic bursts of laughter. I can see why Whitbread doesn't want it known that the pub's employees watch for suspicious ones or that it offers its conference room for mass police interviews, as was the case when a member of a school group accidentally stumbled backward over the cliffs. To know the pub's hidden curriculum is to experience it differently, to see a vaguely sinister quality in the sepia photographs of men in top hats, in the wooden rocking horses, in the teeth-baring laughter. Not the kind of dining experience Whitbread has in mind for customers in a family-style pub.

Steve returns with my beer. "So people in the States know about Beachy Head, do they?" "Few Americans know about Beachy Head, actually."He tilts his head in surprise. "Really?" He clasps his forearm with the hand that once held a coffeepot and a pint, as if grasping things is a compulsion. "How did you find out about it?" I discovered Beachy Head on the back page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It was the title of the article that caught my attention: "Keeping an Eye on the Suspicious Ones." It began, "The last line of defense falls to bartender James Cunningham. Drawing pints of ale as coastal winds whip and swirl across the barren Downs outside, he keeps an eye on strangers in his cliffside pub, especially those who eschew the bar stools or fireside to sit alone in a corner." I read on, utterly captivated by the incongruity of a pub situated near a world-famous suicide spot. I pictured a timber-frame hovel with brightly lit windows and rattling shutters. I imagined an entire community affected by the suicides, and I wanted to know how. What was it like for the cabdriver who suspected he had a suicidal passenger? For the rescue worker who discovered the body? For the police officer who delivered the news and for the family members who received it? I'd read accounts of living in war zones; what was it like living in a suicide zone? I cut out the article and filed it away with my other unfulfilled writing intentions. Two and a half years later, my wife and I were awakened at dawn by the heart-quickening sound of a ringing telephone. It was Moses, my father-in-law, informing me as best he could that his youngest son, Conrad, had shot himself in the head. "He's dead" are the only words I remember exactly.

I now found myself asking the same question from a different perspective: What is it like living in a suicide zone, in that place in the mind that borders on self-destruction? Is suicide an act of madness or reason? Of ambivalence or resolve? Of courage or cowardice? Why do people do it? After Conrad's death, the pub grew larger in my imagination, as if it somehow contained the answers to these questions. On the anniversary of his suicide, I booked a flight to London. Six months later, on a tempestuous March midnight, five evenings before watching the helicopter recovery, I arrived at the Eastbourne train station, took a cab to the entrance of a working farm a mile from the cliffs, and trudged down a long dirt drive, past an inquisitive donkey and a dark farmhouse, to a brick bungalow where I fell asleep in clouds of frozen breath, wondering what I'd gotten myself into.