My Island in the Rain by Ben Mallalieu

There isn’t a new Wight. Like the old joke about “where do you find a tortoise with no legs?” the island is pretty much where you last left it, which in most people’s case was a long time ago in the days before cheap flights when family holidays were spent in “sensible” places, usually the same place every year until the children became teenagers and complained. “But you always loved Seaview,” their mother would then say, rather sadly.

It still has that old-fashioned, Christopher Robin and sand between the toes air, but it isn't as good as Cornwall which in turn isn't as good as Brittany; the sea is still that particularly uninviting shade of gunmetal grey; overcluttered gift shops still sell undesirable objects made of seashells (exactly the same but now made in China) and display large signs saying “All breakages must be paid for”, perhaps their main source of income; and no one is any closer to solving the problem of what to do when it rains, which it usually does. There is something, possibly a waxworks, that calls itself 'The Brading Experience of a Lifetime', but if that is the ultimate that life has to offer then it might be best to call it a day.

At least the island has a tangible sense of history, the past is preserved like the fossils in layers of sedimentary clay on the south coast beaches: templar relics in the old inland churches; former TB sanatoria, unnoticed until you realise what they were, and then you see them everywhere. Queen Victoria came most summers to Osborne House for her holidays and has left a hefty legacy. But who was Victoria, and what exactly are Victorian values?

I grew up in an era when Victorian stock was at its lowest. “I'm afraid it's only Victorian,” people would say in a rather shamefaced way about a house or a piece of furniture much as they would say “I'm afraid it's only Cyprus,” when offering a glass of inferior sherry; Victorian paintings after Turner were almost worthless, and the era was condemned as an age of prudery and hypocrisy. Perhaps it was their affluent self-confidence that was so disliked by a generation that had to pick up the tab for two world wars.

The Labour Prime Minister 'Smiling Jim' Callaghan, as he was called by Private Eye, was probably no admirer of Queen Victoria but he too came to the island for his holidays. One summer in the early 1950s, my family unexpectedly ran into his in Seaview and he invited us for a swim at what I now realise was Whale Chine. He had been my father's mess orderly during the war, and in 1945, just after they had all been elected as Labour MPs, he and Hugh Gaitskell, an old schoolfriend, had taken my father to lunch to pick his brains about how they might become parliamentary private secretaries, the lowest rung on the ladder of political power. But their paths had forked, Callaghan rising as a party apparatchik, my father wandering out on a limb, a rebel and a romantic.

The bonhomie of the Isle of Wight meeting was perhaps more forced than I noticed at the time, a bit like the Bukharin family running into Stalin at Yalta, I would imagine. My mother took one look at the steep steps down the chine and went back to the car pleading vertigo, which was probably a bad move politically. My strongest memory of that afternoon was that Callaghan, like my father, did not believe in changing behind a towel, perhaps to show his contempt for “Victorian” values.

But Victoria herself had, I would think from reading between the lines, a very healthy sexual appetite. And on June 12, 1874, the Victorian country curate Francis Kilvert went swimming at Shanklin: “One has to adopt the detestable custom of bathing in drawers,” he complained in his diary. “If ladies don't like to see men naked why don't they keep away from the sight?” The following year on a beach somewhere between Sandown and Shanklin, he saw a beautiful girl who “stood entirely naked on the sand” and he wrote eloquently about her “budding breasts” and the soft, exquisite curves of her “rosy dimpled bottom”. Few modern vicars would dare write anything of the sort, even in their private diaries. The girl that Kilvert admired was probably about 14, which made it more more acceptable in those days, less so now. And nowadays nobody above the age of four or five stands naked on Shanklin beach, despite these supposedly more liberal times. The effect is claustrophobic and rather unpleasant.

But I still go to the island because, for reasons interesting but not worth explaining at length, we were there one New Year nearly 20 years ago in the company of an opera singer and her lute-playing husband and someone had said that I might be interested in an unusual garden on the most windswept corner of the island where nothing taller than a cabbage usually thrives; and, because I wrote about gardening at the time, we went and knocked on the door very early one morning, which was a bit cheeky. The house looked nothing special, a pre-war suburban London semi except that it wasn’t attached to anything and it was a long way from London, but the garden was something else. It had been made by a retired engineer and his wife and they spent an hour showing us round oblivious to the pouring rain. When we went inside he said: “You'll need something to warm you up after that,” and instead of the expected cup of coffee he handed me a full tumbler of rum; it was only 10 o'clock in the morning and I wished I'd known them all my life. But we often saw them and their garden afterwards, and later, when they had both died, their daughter took over the garden; and my wife and I and our children, now grown up, often still stay there in tents and get lost in the dark; and the garden keeps getting better every time we see it.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Oldie