Flaming Sussex

At about four o’clock, Miss Lizzie Walter, a teacher at the King’s Road Primary School, said goodbye to her young pupils. The children clattered out into the dark streets of the town, preparing for the night’s revelries – and Miss Lizzie Walter was never seen alive again.

Lizzie lived with her parents, respectable working-class folk, at 11 Saddle Street. Her father was a tradesman, her mother a housewife. She was young, intelligent, hard-working, good-looking. She liked literature, music and art. She was dressed that day in a double-breasted brown tweed coat, but wore no hat.

It is about a twenty-minute walk from King’s Road School to Saddle Street and normally Lizzie would have returned home by four thirty, but because of the Bonfire Night preparations her mother and father felt no anxiety regarding her failure to return. Bonfire Night in Lewes is a famous night of revelry. They assumed that she had met friends and gone to join the celebrations.

It was not until six o’clock the following morning, when they discovered her bed had not been slept in, that her parents raised the alarm – and shortly after when I found Lizzie’s body floating in the lido at Pells Pool.

We had, at that point, been in Sussex for less than twenty-four hours.

OF ALL OUR TRIPS AND TOURS during those years, our trip to Sussex was one of the darkest and most difficult: it was a turning point. We arrived, as always, intent on doing good and reporting on the good: we were, as so often, on a quest. We departed less than heroes. None of us could hold our heads up high.

The County Guides series of guidebooks, as some readers will doubtless be aware, but others may now well have forgotten, were intended by their once world-famous progenitor and my erstwhile employer, Swanton Morley, as a celebration of all that is good in England, volume after volume after volume of guides to the English counties, celebrating their variety and uniqueness. The County Guides – in their smart green uniform editions, at one time as familiar as the Bible or the old Odhams Encyclopaedia on the shelves of the aspirant working and middle classes – were hymns to the noble spirit of Britain. They were intended as uplifting literature – ‘up lit’ was the term coined by Morley in an interview in the short-lived Progress magazine in June 1939: ‘What this nation needs now is up lit.’

In reality, in every county we travelled to in those long years together, researching and writing the books, we seemed to encounter the very worst of human nature: downbeat doesn’t do it justice. Downcast, downfaced, downthrown and downright.

In Norfolk it was treachery, in Devon it was devilry, in Westmorland tragedy and in Essex farce, but in Sussex we encountered not only murder but mayhem and depravity: it was not just the burning of the crosses and the flaming tar barrels, the torchlit processions, the sheer anarchy of Bonfire Night in Lewes, it was the revelation to ourselves and to each other of our own terrible inadequacies. For ever after, Morley referred to The County Guides: Sussex as ‘flaming’ Sussex. (He had pet names for all the books, in fact: The County Guides: Essex was always Essex Poison to him, Westmorland was