How I learned to love living near Beachy Head

Living next to Beachy Head is like keeping a loaded shotgun on the kitchen table. You know what can happen, if you’re desperate enough. The famous sheer white chalk cliff near my home is 500 feet high. The view from the top is spectacular, looking out across the English Channel. The sky is so big and the horizon so wide that you can see the Earth curve. It is absolutely gorgeous up here, but watch your step, because the lush downland grass just disappears, suddenly. Gulls swoop and soar through the void. Stumble and fall over the edge and it will take about five seconds to get to the rocks and the waves below. Five, four, three, two seconds of regret and the last second of your life.

Thirty or 40 people go over each year, by accident or design. The Samaritans have a big sign in the car park to say that they are: “Always There, Day Or Night.” Pick up the phone, it’s better to talk. Those of us who live in the nearby town of Eastbourne hear the coastguard helicopter clattering overhead or see the lifeboat pushing through the waves and know they’re looking for another body. So when I first moved here 16 years ago, I was wary of the Head. All that has changed.

Now it has become a place of wonder for me. A place to wander and think, breathe deep and remember. A place to celebrate the joy of being alive. For that I am grateful to a pair of friends called Ali and Mark, who are no longer with us. They changed my attitude to Beachy Head and I walk there now to remember them, with thanks.

Ali Adeney Lawrence was a beautiful woman, a mother, a wife, an artist and a campaigner in Hackney with a strong sense of community. She was a magpie who loved to make art from shiny objects, turning junk into treasure with her skill. She came down with her soul mate Chris and her children Kirin and Asha when my wife Rachel and I first moved to the coast in 2003. We wanted to bring our children up by the sea, and frankly we needed to be able to afford a place big enough to accommodate our recently-arrived triplets, which meant London was out. Ali came and saw immediately that Beachy Head was special.

“This is a thin place,” she said, recalling the old phrase suggesting somewhere the boundary between heaven and earth collapses. Ali was a Christian, it was the sort of thing she said – and it was just a comment on a holiday kind of day when we all played on the beach and the stones shone in the sun – but it rang true. Then Ali died.

She didn’t choose it. Cancer took her in 2007, at the age of 40. The grace and dignity with which she faced death was breathtaking, but when they carried her out of her home in a wicker coffin we all still bawled. I took to walking up by Beachy Head to remember her on days when the sea sparkled like diamante, which she would have loved. And Ali is part of the inspiration for the character of Rí, an artist who appears in the novel I am about to publish called The Light Keeper.

I’ve been writing it ever since we moved down here, inspired by her comment to look for a way to respond to this stunning landscape. So it seems only fitting that Rí is an artist who makes beautiful art from scraps of silk and bits of junk. At the start of the book she has bought an old former lighthouse called Belle Tout, right on the edge of the drop. This is a real place, now renovated at great cost by a couple called David and Barbara Shaw and offering luxury bed and breakfast, with a stunning 360 degree view of the Downs and the sea.

As I began to write, I was also working on a collection of poems with my friends Mark Halliday and Martin Wroe. Mark had one about the Old Testament character of Sarah, who laughs bitterly when a stranger says she will have a baby in her old age. “It would take a miracle / for the promise to swell inside you …”

This must have led to my character Sarah, a young teacher who has been told she will never have children. At the start of the book she has run away from her husband Jack, while she waits to find out if their last-ever shot at IVF has worked. I know from experience what a terrible wait that is. But as I tried to write about it nine years ago, the death of Mark drove me once again to the Head.

He was 46-years-old. A poet, a teacher in York, a musician, a husband, a father. I felt happy when I was with him and also challenged to write better, be calmer and live more generously. Mark was an award-winning performance poet who could make a classroom of kids howl with laughter one day and bring an audience of adults to tears the next, with his skilful writing about cancer, the treatment and his love for his wife Mary and their children.

One poem promised that if there was another life, he would wait by the entrance until they came to join him too. When the news came through that he had gone on ahead, in 2010, I didn’t know what to do but walk. Hard and fast, as if walking could burn off the rage. Out of the door and up the street and onto the Downs then higher and higher as if searching for something, until I found myself on the cliff edge again. The thin place. Somehow, feeling closer to him.

“Are you OK, mate?” The voice came from nowhere. A stranger appeared at my side, dressed in a red sweatshirt. The Beachy Head Chaplains are volunteers who patrol the edge at all hours, in all weathers.

In 2014 I was the only journalist ever allowed to go on patrol with them, for a Telegraph article. Readers responded with donations that kept the Chaplains going for a long time, saving hundreds of lives. But all that was to come on the day Mark died. “No,” I said. “I’m not OK at all.” And the chaplain listened to my sorrows and said kind things. It helped. So I hope he doesn’t mind that I created a fictional group in The Light Keeper called the Guardians, who also patrol the edge. One of them gets up to no good. The Chaplains are nothing like that, in real life. They’re good people. I see them often as I walk up on the cliffs at Beachy Head, which is not at all the gloomy place you may have been led to believe. It is astonishingly beautiful.

And now, thanks to all the walking and the passing of the years, it is for me a place to remember Ali and Mark and be grateful for the gift of life. So when a chaplain stops me and asks if I’m OK, mate, I can say: “Yeah. I really am.”

The Light Keeper by Cole Moreton (RRP £16.99). Buy now for £14.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514