Anyone visiting that thriving holiday resort of Dymchurch Sands to-day would be hard put to it to recognize the obscure village that it was in the days of Doctor Syn. However, if you will take the trouble, the mental trouble only, which will not disturb the peace, obliterate the bungalows which spring up like mushrooms in the fertile Romney Marsh, remove the obsolete wheel-less railway carriages which give camping shelter to so many happy families during the season, and pack up the enterprising little railroad whose express engines scream their way with such import across the Marsh, although one of them bears the name of Doctor Syn. Having done all this, you must then mentally demolish telegraph posts, loud speakers, electric lights and telephones, motor cars, aeroplanes, 'buses and the 'Bus Station. Then, down in your imagination with the teashops innumerable, leaving only those houses of call that are licensed to sell Beer, Wine, Spirits and Tobacco. Ruthlessly use a spiritual pickaxe upon every building that is not fashioned of mellow Queen Anne brick, Kentish rag and ship's timber. Rip off the concertina lines of corrugated iron and laboriously hang red tiles in its stead. Work your thoughts, and without asking permission from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, knock down the modern rectory and restore the white-washed, rambling parsonage with its red-tiled roof, and in order not to tread upon the corns of sainted rectors dead and gone, re-christen it The Vicarage. Having done all this, sit down and rest upon the mounting-block at the road entrance of Sycamore Gardens, which you have now transformed into a rough meadow, a farmstead and barn behind your back, and let your eyes survey the old church and the Tudor building of New Hall, then as now, the Court House of Dymchurch and headquarters of the Lords of the Level. One thing more is left for this your thoughtful restoration. Since you have hypnotised yourself back into a period with Trafalgar yet unfought, and Pitt's Martello Towers not erected, you must replace the stately Memorial of the War in our time with a grim symbol of Justice which preceded it upon that very site—a gaunt and creaking gallows, and you may tell yourself that the skeleton which swings there in the sea breeze was in its living flesh a sheep-stealer; a crime unspeakable and unpardonable in the summing-up of Dymchurch magistrates.
Now listen to the swaying rookery above your head, for these black-feathered carrion have inherited their lofty homes from ancestors who actually picked the flesh from the bones upon the gibbet, saw the black-coated figure of Doctor Syn and heard his resonant voice exhorting the congregation from the top deck of the great pulpit in the little church beneath them. And you can hear his story also from the gulls, for every day he would walk along the sea-wall, having discarded his clasped Bible for a brass telescope, and as the salt tang filled his lungs he would change his tune from hymns to capstan songs, especially one old shanty that he was for ever singing when his mind floated off across the ocean wastes:
“Oh, here's to the feet that have walked the plank—
Yo ho! For the dead man's throttle;
And here's to the corpses afloat in the tank,
And the dead man's teeth in the bottle.”
But never mind the screaming gulls as you sit beneath the rookery, for those birds are going to re-tell the story as their ancestors have cawed it down to them, repeating it caw for caw to their adventure-loving children and recapturing, like you, the 'good old days of smuggling'. They are beginning with the wreck of the good ship City of London that was driven ashore in Dymchurch Bay and, as you will hear, heralded, with thunder, lightning and mountainous waves, Doctor Syn's remarkable and uncanny return to Dymchurch-under-the-Wall.
