Cliffs of Despair

Tom Hunt

Seventeen months after my brother-in-law put a bullet through his brain, I found myself standing atop the highest cliff on the south coast of England, wondering what it would be like to jump. Inland, sheep and cows grazed on hills dotted yellow with cowslips. Crows speckled red slate cottage roofs and strips of plowed earth. Below, the channel sheared the last of the hills into jagged cliffs flecked with flint. A fierce wind blew from the west. It was the edge of England, but it felt like the edge of the world. For a few, Beachy Head is the edge of the world: the cliff face may be the last thing they see during their six second, 535-foot plunge onto the rocks below.
    One hundred yards from the edge of the cliffs sits the Beachy Head Pub, a “family-style” pub that is, literally and figuratively, the pub at the end of the road. It is what drew me to Beachy Head. After first reading about the pub four years ago, I was captivated by the image of “suspicious ones” drinking alone before departing for the cliffs. I imagined it at night with lit windows and shutters buffeted by coastal winds. When my brother-in-law took his life, the pub became an obsession, and on the anniversary of his death, I booked a flight to London. Six months later, on a blustery March evening, I arrived at the Eastbourne train station, took a two-mile cab drive to the entrance of Black Robin Farm—one of four working farms in Beachy Head and the only one with “self-catering bungalows”—trudged down a long dirt drive past an inquisitive donkey and horse, past the main farmhouse, to a brick bungalow softened by darkness and rain. During my stay, I would walk most nights a meandering mile to the pub, where I ate and drank alone in a corner. Sometimes I imagined my brother-in-law eating and drinking alone in a corner. The two of us, eating and drinking alone in a corner.
    I traveled to Beachy Head believing I was searching for a deeper understanding of suicide. i soon realized that suicide was rarely the impenetrable mystery I wanted it to be. My brother-in-law’s suicide was not difficult to understand, nor were most of the Beachy Head suicides I researched. They were, to my mind, rational conclusions. I came to Beachy Head not so much to understand suicide but to wrap myself up in it—to be piqued by suicide stories and the prospect of encountering a “suspicious one,” to touch the heart of darkness in a beautiful land, to shiver at the touch, the way one shivers at a good ghost story or car wreck. Lacking the requisite hopelessness to kill myself, I basked in other people’s hopelessness. In a quiet room in the Eastbourne Police Station, I read lustily and piled the Sudden Death Reports like discarded husks. By the end of my visit, I was the suspicious one. I half-wondered if I was drawn to Beachy Head for the same reason that a mechanically-gifted child is drawn to tools and gadgets. Did my appetite for suicide betray a hidden “aptitude” for it—an aptitude that was content to express itself vicariously until that day when I returned to Beachy Head under different circumstances to take my life?

Derived from the French beau chef (“beautiful headland”), Beachy Head is a four-mile bulge of white chalk coastline stretching from Eastbourne—a Victorian resort town referred to by the locals as “God’s Waiting Room” for its preponderance of retirees—to Birling Gap, a hamlet that was a popular smugglers’ haunt in the eighteenth century. Beachy Head is the sea-sliced eastern end of Kipling’s beloved “blunt, bow-headed, whale backed Downs,” a sixty-mile chain of chalk hills formed when the African continent bumped into Europe some 50 million years ago, folding and lifting the chalk sea bed over a period of 30 million years.
    At the foot of the last of the hills of the Downs, in the village of Meads, the South Downs Way begins, a 100-mile path that meanders the length of the Downs from Eastbourne to Hampshire. During my first morning at Beachy Head, I took the path to the peak of the cliffs in gale force winds, the type of winds that blew William of Normandy and his conquering fleet past Beachy Head to Pevensy Bay five miles east a thousand years ago. The cliff face along the eastern half of Beachy Head is broken into broad slopes and ledges covered with thickets of gorse, hawthorn, and blackthorn, and mats of ivy and cow parsley. The South Downs Way and its subsidiary paths wander up and down these slopes. At Cow Gap, a section of Beachy Head where the cliffs drop to little more than grass covered chalk dunes, one can walk down to the beach. West of Cow Gap the cliffs rise steadily and the brush covered slopes give way to the bald, green Downs pocked with rabbit and badger holes, dotted with sheep droppings, chalk, and flint. The climb is steep, the wind ferocious, and the emerging view of the lighthouse at the foot of the 535-foot sheer white chalk cliff spectacular and alluring. As I draw closer to the peak, I ignore the Danger: Cliff Erosion signs, the low wire fence cordoning off unstable edges, and the wind, which, in 1835, blew off a Coast Guard officer as he peered over the cliff edge to examine a wrecked ship. I hold on to my hat for a look at the rocks below.
    I think how easy it would be to jump—a good lean would do it—and how impossibly courageous. I try to imagine falling through the air, seeing the rocks loom closer, thinking, In a few seconds I will be dead. To move beyond fear to relief at the prospect of breaking one’s body on the rocks below would require a degree of mind-numbing despair that is beyond my imagining. As I watch the surf rub against the rocks and consider the crumpled remains of a blue car on a ledge to my right, I wonder how many people who jump ofT Beachy Head change their minds in midffight, and I try to imagine the terror of living for a few seconds with that regret. Slack-kneed, I edge closer and crane my neck as far as it will go, straining for a view of the sheer vertical as if I had been drawn into a powerful vacuum created by the emptiness hanging over the sea. As the novelist Louis deBernieres wrote, “This beautiful place openly invites you to die.”
    People have been falling from Beachy Head for centuries. Legend has it that in the seventh century, a shipwrecked Christian missionary named St. Wilfrid observed the natives throwing themselves off the cliffs to placate the angry Gods for years of crop failure. In 1538, a local priest was believed to have been thrown from the cliffs after practicing sorcery. The first documented death off Beachy Head is found in the Eastbourne Parish Register of 1600: “James Wykker that was slain by a fall from the cliff.” In 1750, exciseman Thomas Fletcher fell while pursuing smugglers along Birling Gap, the western edge of Beachy Head. There was an average of three deaths a year in the nineteenth century, increasing to half a dozen a year by the middle of this century.
    Dr. John Surtees, Consulting Chemical Pathologist at Eastbourne District General Hospital and author of a book on Beachy Head, studied Beachy Head deaths between 1965 and 1989 and concluded that of the 250 deaths during that period, 236 were almost certainly suicides, far higher than the official count of 134. Between 1990 and 1995, there were 103 deaths, almost all of them suicides. About twice a week, bartenders, cab drivers, or passers-by alert police to potential jumpers. These numbers have earned Beachy Head the reputation as the most popular suicide spot in Europe, if not the world.

Why do so many people make their quietus at Beachy Head? Some believe the cliff top to be haunted by evil spirits that beckon unsuspecting victims to the edge. One mythical tale imputes the suicides to a black-robed monk who lures victims to their deaths. Local resident John Whalebone claims he was approached by a strange robed figure on the cliff top one misty afternoon: “I was walking along the cliff top in a normal mood when this old man appeared from thin air. He looked me straight in the eyes and pointed to the cliff edge. I went the opposite way as quick as I could.” Some apparitions are more benign, such as the young woman in the gray dress believed to be the ghost of a Victorian suicide. She was last seen in 1978 by three evening walkers who described her walking along the cliff edge and suddenly vanishing. The ghost of a farmer’s wife allegedly pulls a similar vanishing act, walking three steps to the cliff edge before disappearing with a baby in her arms.
    I visited Kevin Carylon, the “High Priest of British Witches,” to get his take on the paranormal forces at work on Beachy Head. As a white witch, Kevin traffics in positive forces only, though the plastic devil’s fork propped on the front step of his two-family Hastings fiat and the two black cats lounging on the doormat might suggest otherwise. Inside, Kevin’s wife Sandie leads me into a small, disheveled office where I wait for Kevin to finish a tarot card reading and where Gemma, a girl of thirteen or fourteen dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, waits for her mother. Glass jugs with air-locks, and boxes filled with vervion, benzoin, and other magical herbs occupy one corner of the room. Magazine and tabloid articles—”The Witches of Suburbia: They Don’t Sacrifice Babies nor Worship Demons, but They Like Nothing Better than to Cast a Spell to Heal the World”—cover a walL Photographs show Kevin in a red robe performing a healing ritual in front of Stonehenge and Sandie in a white, wind-blown robe, raising her arms in supplication. An article from Un Geller’s Encounters, a magazine for paranormal enthusiasts, describes how Sandie first met Kevin at a tarot card reading when her marriage was falling apart, and married him fifteen months later.
    Soon a thin, timid-eyed woman, Gemma’s mother, emerges from the adjoining room, followed by Kevin, who welcomes me into a large room with a comfortable couch. Kevin looks more like a recently retired quarterback than the pointy, raven-haired witch of my imaginings. His hair is blond and surfer-scraggly, his eyes light blue, and the hiked sleeves of his dark gray sweat jacket with its partially unzipped front reveal a solid infrastructure of columnar wrists and expansive chest.
    While Kevin takes Gemma’s mother to “the circle,” a limestone ring of positive energy in the backyard, I familiarize myself with the trappings of a modern day witch’s den: the burning incense and New Age music; the bookcase filled with videos (Poltergeist, Friday the 13th, Schindler’s List) and books (Stonehenge, The Complete Book of Herbs, Oils and Brews, The X-Factor, The Lord of the Rings); the various crystals, candles, and mortars and pestles on top of the space heater in the fireplace; the dried flowers, melted candles, and sword and skull meticulously arranged on the mantle; the black iron kettle on the floor, and the pieces of ivy decorating the walls. When Kevin returns, he calmly explains that, yes, he believes there is an evil force atop Beachy Head that draws people to the edge. Many people who walk along the edge say they are aware of an evil feeling that bids them to jump. Others have described a feeling of walking on an invisible path reaching out to the horizon. “The feeling up there,” Sandie adds, “is so spooky it’s awful.” Kevin believes that “lay lines” or energy lines running east from Stonehenge and the Long Stone at the Isle of Wight, and west from Kits Coty, an ancient burial site in Kent, converge at Beachy Head and create negative energy that might lure vulnerable people to the edge. “It seems as if people attuned to a certain mental frequency, whether happy or sad,” he writes in his newsletter, “can be summoned to this ancient site of sacrifice and end up as a self-offering to some ancient force.”
    As I rode the train back to Eastbourne, I wondered how the ghosts of cliff jumpers past would feel about their fatal plunge being ascribed to invisible lines, frequencies, and forces. Would they feel that their pain had gone unappreciated? That they had been denied credit for one of the few successes in their lives? It seemed to me that these people did not need lay lines and black robed monks to draw them somnambulently over the edge. When their world was on fire, their hopes and self-regard in ashes, they made a beeline for the nearest, most certain exit. Beachy Head offers that certainty and accessibility. It is difficult to botch a suicide attempt when falling 535 feet onto a rocky beach. Nobody has survived such a fall. The coast road runs within fifty meters of the highest cliffs; at one point, where cars drove over until earth- works were raised, the road is less than ten meters from the edge. In most areas, the cliff edge is unobstructed, and those short stretches of fence that do exist are spindly wire affairs easily stepped over. When one considers the entire Beachy Head package—lethality, accessibility, physical beauty, and prestige—it is little wonder some people stalk Beachy Head as they would a calling. One young woman told an acquaintance before she jumped, “I’ve always wanted Beachy Head.”
    What kind of person wants Beachy Head? I met with Dr. Surtees in a tutor’s office at Eastbourne District General Hospital, hoping that he could give me an answer. Given to chronic knee-bouncing, feet-shifting, and darting glances, Dr. Surtees possesses a bird-like intensity. His face is a collection of perpendicular lines—tidy mouth, aquiline nose, and narrow eyes—in constant vibration. According to Dr. Surtees, people who jump off Beachy Head often have made previous suicide attempts. Of the over ninety percent who have a diagnosed mental illness, seventy percent are depressive, eight percent are schizophrenic, and five percent are chronic alcoholics. The ratio of male to female suicides is 3:2. Male victims tend to be between 15–44; female victims between 35–60. Of the 250 Beachy Head deaths between 1965 and 1989, nine were foreign nationals: three Germans, three Americans (a transplanted American and two New Yorkers), a Frenchman, an Austrian, and a Dutch boy. The cliffs were especially popular among the unemployed (20), clerks (14), students (io), housewives (10), and engineers (8). At the end of our conversation, Dr. Surtees looked at me intently and said, “We all react to different types and degrees of stress, but given extreme conditions we are all capable of mental upset.”
    Yes, I thought, as I walked out of the hospital into a cold rain, no one is immune to despair. But how many people are capable of killing themselves? Under what circumstances would I kill myself? If I had an affair with one of my students and lost my family, my career, my reputation, and my self-respect, would I be able to live with my shame? If I became a quadraplegic, unable to play tennis, write, feed, and clothe myself, would I be able to adjust to such a restricted life? What feelings would I kill myself over? Loneliness? Grief? Betrayal? Shame? Self-loathing? Hopelessness? I don’t know. And I suppose that should be my answer to all of the questions in this rain-splashed parlor game: I don’t know. I can’t know. I can say with more certainty that it is difficult to imagine Pope John Paul, Nelson Mandela, or anybody else who devotes their lives publicly to some higher purpose killing themselves under any circumstances. They seem to have little regard for anything that derails service to God or country, including their personal pain. I imagine that my best defense against hopelessness and depression would be to embed myself so deeply in something larger than myself that I would forget myself. But how many of us are capable of doing that?

Michael Davey works in a small office that adjoins the front desk of the Eastbourne police station. His calming voice, easy laugh, and soft blue eyes seem drawn from a deep well of sincerity, as does his gift for the felicitous remark—good qualities to have when you spend much of your day talking to family members of the deceased. As one of Eastbourne’s coroner’s officers, Davey investigates by his estimate 820 deaths a year—and he has been at it for twenty-four years.
    To the left of Davey’s desk stands a tall, green metal file cabinet that contains the coroner’s files or “Sudden Death Reports.” A look through the files reveals that almost all of the 1997 Beachy Head suicides had some form of mental illness and fit Dr. Surtees’s suicide profile in most other respects. There’s the fifty-three-year-old woman who had obsessive-compulsive disorder, attempted suicide at Beachy Head once before, was an informal patient at a psychiatric hospital shortly before she jumped, and was upset because her benefits had recently run out; the thirty-one-year-old man who had been deeply depressed for twenty years, suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and had visited Beachy Head five years before intending to end his life; the sixty-six-year-old former competitive badminton player whose arthritis prevented her from engaging in any physical activity and who lost her father and several close friends over the last four years; and the twenty-seven-year-old man who had suffered depression since the age of fifteen, had cut himself off completely from his family, and had, according to his social worker, “struggled with his internal world of anger and hate, yet wanting love.”
    A few victims had no history of depression, functioned at a high level in good jobs, and were well-liked but had recently experienced severe emotional upsets. In one well-publicized case, a thirty-three-year-old private school music teacher whom the headmaster described as “very energetic, enthusiastic highly responsible in terms of all his school duties,” jumped off the cliffs the day after the police discovered a stash of child pornography in his room. In another high-profile case, a forty-three-year-old accountant for a large bakery, “a good and lovely man” who according to a co-worker “never came across to me as being anything other than his normal happy-go-lucky self,” jumped off the cliff with his three-year-old and eleven-month-old sons after having brutally assaulted his wife with a baseball bat, bringing to mind Freud’s insight that “no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others . . . .“
    The Sudden Death Reports, filled with witness statements from loved ones, coast guard officers, police constables, cab drivers, bartenders, and tourists, as well as pathologists’ reports, postmortem photographs, suicide notes, and psychiatric evaluations, are a litany of despair. Nothing could prepare me for the postmortem photographs of an eleven-month-old child—the skin peeled away from the body to reveal the broken bones beneath, the blue, bruised face—or the suicide note from a son to his father. As I got up to leave, I asked Davey if he is much affected by the grief he witnesses daily.
    “I suppose you get used to it after a while,” he said. “That’s horrible to say. I am still affected by the death of a child.”
    He then remembered that two Beachy Head inquests were scheduled for the following Monday and invited me to attend.

In England an inquest is performed in the event of an unexpected death. To determine its cause, the coroner’s officer prepares a Sudden Death Report, which is passed along to the coroner, who delivers a verdict at a public hearing. Beachy Head verdicts usually fall into four categories: “accident,” “misadventure,” “killed himself/herself,” and “open.” Examples of accidents include the forty-one-year-old furniture representative who parked his car at the cliff top, ate his lunch, then drove steadily over the edge, having lost his sense of direction in the gathering mist. Or the thirty-six-year-old woman who stumbled over a loose sandal strap and fell 400 feet. Examples of misadventures, accidents caused by foolhardiness, include the taxidermist who slipped off the edge while looking for birds’ eggs on the cliff face “in spite of warnings,” or the man who climbed down the cliff face to fetch a snagged kite. Occasionally, an “unlawfully killed” verdict is delivered, as in the case of the wife of a millionaire, a “devoted mother” and “happy person” who drove off the cliff eight years ago with her five- and two-year-old daughters strapped into the family’s Ford Orion.
    Most of the verdicts, though, are either “killed himself/herself” or “open,” which means the cause of death cannot be proved. Of the 250 Beachy Head deaths that occurred between 1965 and 1989, the coroner delivered suicide verdicts in 134 and open verdicts in ioo. Because British law requires that intent be proved beyond a reasonable doubt and that the presumption always be against suicide, a verdict of “killed himself/herself” is rarely delivered without a suicide note, an eyewitness to the jump, possessions left on the cliff top, or a verbal expression of intent. Evidence of intent is often difficult to find. Only twenty percent of victims leave suicide notes. The same percentage are observed jumping. In one case the coroner delivered an open verdict in the death of a man who a week previously jumped out of a window; a few days previously cut his wrist so deeply that he needed intensive therapy and a blood transfusion; the day before was prevented from leaping off a roof and drinking an overdose by his friends; and minutes before his death ran toward the cliff edge. When his friend attempted to grab his coat, he responded, “For God’s sake, let me go. I am a mad brute. If you don’t let go you are coming with me.” In defending the open verdict, the coroner said, “At no time on the cliff did he say he was going to take his life.”
    The coroner is guided not only by the law but by his heart. In medieval England, “self-murder” was considered a felony (felo de se). The suicide was tried posthumously by a coroner’s jury, and if he were found guilty, the Crown seized his assets, often reducing the victim’s family to poverty. The corpse of a suicide was denied a Christian burial and was often desecrated, in some cases buried naked at a crossroads with a wooden stake through his chest and a stone placed over his face; in other cases, “drawn by a horse to the place of punishment and shame, where he is hanged on a gibbet and none may take the body down but by authority of a magistrate.” To avoid such unpleasantness, coroners often took advantage of a loophole in the law which exonerated those who were declared “non compos mentis” or not of sound mind. Though the last recorded defilement of a corpse of a suicide occurred in 1823, though the laws concerning the confiscation of property were repealed in 1870, though no one has been sent to prison for attempting suicide since the Suicide Act legalized suicide in 1961, the social stigma of suicide still exists, tainting family members already burdened with guilt. As a result, coroners are charitable in their verdicts, sometimes transparently so. At one inquest, the coroner said that he believed an eighteen-year-old man who fell from the top of a parking lot most likely killed himself, but after reviewing the alternative verdicts asked the family, “Would you prefer it if I brought an open verdict?”

Among gabled and terraced townhouses in downtown Eastbourne looms the Law Courts, a concrete block hollowed into hearing and waiting rooms. In Hearing Room #3, four journalists, two police constables, a pathologist, and two fortyish, blond-haired women rise as Michael Davey announces Eastbourne’s jowly, hunched coroner, David Wadman, who seats himself at a long table beneath the magistrate’s seal on the front wall. Thus begins the inquest into the death of David Williams, whose body was found at the foot of Beachy Head on January 28. We hear from the pathologist that the victim died from “multiple fractures to the trunk with damage to internal organs and hemorrhage, injuries which would have been fatal instantly.” His sister reveals that her brother, with whom she had a falling out last August, suffered from depression and her mother from manic depression. He was a postman for seventeen years but quit seven years ago to take adult education classes in English and computer programming. He had started a temporary job as a data entry clerk the day before he died. A female friend, the woman who identified the body, testifies that the week before David died, he asked her for a job reference. As the sister sobs at her seat, the friend discloses that David had recently expressed his suicidal feelings to her, had talked to the Samaritans, and was upset with himself for not having the courage to kill himself. When David’s company called her asking why he hadn’t shown up for work, she said she feared the worst. The police constable testifies seeing the victim’s body winched to the cliff’s edge and discovering seven pounds, a bank account book, and a donor card on the victim’s possession. The coroner then summarizes the findings, and noting “a list of written particulars” that were found in one of the pockets of the deceased, delivers the verdict that David Williams killed himself.
    As the pathologist, police constables, friend, and sister file out, I watch the four journalists scribbling away and the sister dabbing her eyes. What does she think about her brother’s life being torn open before strangers, her grief a detail for journalists? What will she think when she reads the newspaper account citing her mother’s manic depression and the donor card in her brother’s pocket? Because I am closest to the door and feel as if I’m intruding on her pain, part of me wants and expects her to say, “What are you doing here?” And what would I say to that? That I’m here because my brother-in-law killed himself? That your grief looks familiar because my wife heaved and cried after I passed her the phone at 6:00 in the morning? That I have some idea of your second-guessing, confusion, assumed responsibility? We knew it was possible, likely even, that Conrad would kill himself. He was paranoid, lonely, full of self-loathing, and he owned a gun. We stopped visiting because it was just too creepy—the gun in the house, his ranting, his self- exile to the basement (we later learned that he was acutely aware of our absence and blamed himself for it). It never occurred to me that in giving so generously throughout the year before his death—I received his tennis racket, CDs, and boots—he was slowly giving away his life before taking it. I thought he was simply renouncing the materialistic life. Later, when we tried to find a note, I realized that he was not so much giving his life away as he was trying to erase all signs that he ever existed. His hard drive in the basement read like a ghost town, an eerie and endless scroll of “file deleted 12:10 PM, Wednesday, October 2, 1996,” perhaps his last piece of housekeeping six days before his death. His bedroom was barren. Having witnessed his angry and hallucinatory departure from their bedroom and heard the click of the gun seconds later, my mother- and father-in-laws’ memories of him are, of course, undeletable. The blood, the frenzied cries, the cradling of his damaged head, the corpse lifted onto the stretcher, the eternal separation.
    I want David Williams’s sister to identify with my experience as an affected family member. If she asks, “Why are you here?” and I immodestly cover all the bases of my brother-in-law’s suicide, perhaps I will be relieved of the guilt of being at her brother’s inquest. But her mind is elsewhere, and seconds later she is gone, and minutes later a new set of principals file in—a mother and father, a pathologist, two police constables, and an eyewitness—for the inquest into the death of Robin Simon Carter. The pathologist testifies that the victim suffered “severe head and chest injuries with multiple rib fractures.” The father testifies haltingly, as Mrs. Carter sobs in her seat, that he last saw his son the Tuesday before his death when he dropped him off in town to catch a bus. His son had been living at home while pursuing media studies at a local college. He liked The X-Files and Un Geller magazines and had just spent a book voucher given to him for Christmas. His suicide was “out of the blue.” The eyewitness, a middle-aged man, testifies that on his way home from work, he pulled off the coast road into a parking lot to talk to his brother on his mobile phone when he heard a knock on his passenger window from a young man wearing a rucksack, black denim jeans, and jacket who wanted to know where the sea and cliffs were. The police constable testifies that at 0030 hours he saw a helicopter land at Eastbourne District General Hospital and unload the body of a young man with “short, mousy-colored hair, a black cardigan jacket, black jeans, and a black nylon rucksack.” His teacher provides written testimony that Robin was quite intense and didn’t seem to fit in. The other students called him “rat boy” because he was from the village of Ratby and always wore black. He was one of the best students during discussion periods and frequently stayed after class to talk. He wanted to be a journalist for a paranormal magazine and had recently written an essay about the lure of doom at Beachy Head. “I never felt Robin was totally happy,” she writes, “and on some occasions I saw that he had a fiery temper. . . . After the Christmas recess, he didn’t return to college.” The coroner then summarizes the findings, reads a passage from Robin’s suicide note (“The pain inside me is too much. There is no real reason for me doing this, but there is no real reason for me not to. . .“) and delivers the verdict that Robin Simon Carter killed himself.

The job of recovering the bodies falls largely to the Coast Guard’s volunteer rescue and recovery team, which has included at various times an entertainment manager, cab driver, carpenter, doctor, small business owner, office manager, and minister. As station officer-in-charge from 1973 to 1993, Garry Russell and his volunteer squad saved twenty-one persons, recovered more than ioo bodies, and rescued fourteen dogs. In 1980, Russell received a British Empire Medal for his bravery. During my visit to his tidy Coast Guard apartment, he proudly showed me the medal, as well as a framed letter of appreciation from Queen Elizabeth II. Dressed in blue sweatpants and a green sweatshirt, surrounded by the work and rewards of his hands—a flower garden in the backyard, framed photos of award acceptances on the living room walls—Russell has the proprietary and vaguely restless air of a putterer who has yet to figure out how to spend his retirement. Thick-chested, ruddy-cheeked, and bushy-browed, he resembles an oversized leprechaun.
    Russell explained that when a body is discovered at Beachy Head, the police notify the Coast Guard who dispatch a ready-packed rescue trailer to the cliff’s edge and winch the body up using a derrick. If the person is alive, the Coast Guard uses a helicopter. In some cases the police use their own helicopter to recover bodies from the base of the cliff, as I witnessed during my third night at Beachy Head. It was dusk when I arrived at the scene, forty minutes after a forty-three-year-old artist from London jumped. Five of us, two young men from Brighton and the young couple who witnessed the jump, watched from the cliff top as the police helicopter hovered over the Channel, scanning the shingle with a searchlight. After thirty minutes of searching, the helicopter settled onto the beach. A paramedic hopped out, scrambled over the rocks, placed the body in a body bag, and dragged the body bag back to the helicopter, which flew off to Eastbourne District General Hospital. There the pathologists tore open a body that was likely bruised, bloodied, and striated with chalk filled gashes—a body that looked more like a dead animal than a sleeping human being. To see the damage that a 535-fOot fall does to a human body, as Garry Russell would soon show me, is to be rid of any illusions that human corpses are somehow spared the ravages—the dismemberment, the spilling guts, the maggot-laying flies—visited upon the corpses of other animals.
    The recovery I witnessed seemed fairly routine, yet recovery work is full of hazards: sharp rock projections, flint-frayed rope, gale-force winds, equipment failure, and massive rock falls, the result of waves undercutting the base of the cliff. Russell described one rock fall that left a pile of rubble higher than the 112-foot lighthouse at the base of the cliff and a smaller rock fall that disabled him for thirteen weeks. Human error is another hazard. Once one of Russell’s auxiliaries lost the turns on the winch, causing Russell to plummet twenty feet before six other auxiliaries grabbed the line. It isn’t surprising that Russell has little sympathy for the people who jump off Beachy Head. “Sorry to say, you get a bit hard after a while,” he said. “I always looked at it that they were over there of their own accord and they were putting other people’s lives at risk to get their bodies back. I’m afraid I don’t have any thoughts or feelings for them. The only thing I dreaded was picking up a kid.”
    Toward the end of my visit, Russell showed me a video of a recovery operation: “Here’s one of my blokes trying to extract a body that has been washed ashore between two boulders. . . . It’s a Sunday afternoon. The body has been one and one-half miles out to sea, dead for days. . . . Here he’s trying to remove the small rocks around the body so he can pull the body out from between the two boulders. As you can see, he’s not having much luck. The body’s dead weight and trapped by the small rocks washed up by the sea. Here it comes. He’s got it. . . . You can see the laceration across the stomach. He’s lost his shirt. The sea undresses you. . . . He’s looking in his pockets for identification. . . . Now he’s putting the body in a body bag, big canvas envelope lined with polyurethane I designed . . .
    As I listened to Russell, I understood why, in response to a BBC reporter’s observation that the best place to take one’s life would be on a sheer portion of the cliff, Russell replied, “No, the best place is in bed with a bottle and a packet of pills.”
    Fortunately for Russell and his crew, many potential jumpers are intercepted en route to the cliffs by a watchful cab driver or bartender, coaxed from the cliff edge by a courageous police constable or Coast Guard officer, or consoled out of jumping by a compassionate Samaritan. Russell himself recalls talking to, and finally putting his arms around, a young man with girlfriend trouble who was standing on the cliff edge holding a bottle of Scotch. Once he snuck up behind a young mentally ill woman who was slowly retreating from the persuasions of an approaching police constable (PC) and “lassoed her around the neck.” PC Ivan Huff saved a sixteen-year-old girl by grabbing her ponytail as she lept over, and PC Julie Bettis sat on the cliff edge for thirty minutes talking to a distressed woman until her colleagues were able to reach the woman and pull her to safety.
    Manuel, a young Portuguese cab driver, told me that last year he drove a young lady to the Beachy Head Pub ostensibly to meet her husband for a drink. When he picked her up from the pub a half hour later, she said she had been walking along the cliff edge and had come close to jumping (apparently, she and her boyfriend had come to Eastbourne for a little away time in an attempt to patch up their relationship, but soon after their arrival, her boyfriend left, sending her into depression). As he drove her back to her hotel, he helped her put things in perspective. Two months later, Manuel’s boss received a letter from the young lady, thanking Manuel and telling him that she was home getting her life back together.
    In one highly publicized incident, cabby Stephen Hill talked to a man near the cliff’s edge on a dark, windy, cold evening after the man had just ordered Hill out of his cab at gunpoint. The man eventually gave himself up to waiting police officers after throwing the gun, apparently a blank stage gun, over the cliffs. Ironically, Hill had taken the same man to Beachy Head the previous year and managed to talk him out of taking his life then, too.
    Another cabby, Peter, told me that one cold evening he picked up a Londoner in a pinstriped suit and briefcase at the Eastbourne train station. After he dropped him off at the Beachy Head Pub, the man proceeded toward the cliffs. Peter punched in the special code cabbies are instructed to use when they suspect they have a jumper, put on his hazard lights, got out of the cab, and followed the man to the cliffs yelling, “What are you doing? The pub’s the other way!” When the man replied that he was going to jump, Peter caught up to him and held him until the police came to take the man away.
    When I asked Peter if he knew of many cabbies who had driven jumpers to Beachy Head, he replied, “Oh, yes. Come down to the office. We’ll tell you lots of stories.” According to a spokesman for one taxi firm, “. . . often Eastbourne taxi and private-hire drivers are the last people in contact with people wanting to commit suicide at Beachy Head, and over the years a large number of drivers have been instrumental in saving people’s lives.”
    The Beachy Head Pub is frequently the preferred destination for suicidal passengers. It has the feel of an old Sussex barn: mobiles of roosters, sheep, pigs, and horses, and antique lanterns dangle from thick oak beams; wooden rocking horses, spinning wheels, and burlap bags marked wool and flower seed sit on slatted platforms that hang from the ceiling; dried flowers, ceramic plates with fruit and flower designs, and old framed photographs of the Downs line the brick and wood walls.
    The bar itself is an ostentatious display of luminous pump handles with the Murphy’s, Boddington’s, or Manchester Gold label; overhanging colored glass cabinets with gleaming upturned glasses; and bottles of translucent liquors perched on their pour spouts in wooden racks against a backdrop of silk drapery. On any given night one might find clusters of giggling German schoolgirls on holiday, a child celebrating a birthday with family and friends, an elderly couple quietly sharing a meal, or a person sitting alone lost in thought.
    After witnessing the helicopter recovery of the body of the forty-three-year-old London artist, I followed the police to the pub parking lot, where they searched the victim’s car for a suicide note, and then to the pub itself, where they threaded their way through the crowd in search of a night manager or bartender who might have seen the victim. It was a surreal scene, these uniformed constables with their crackling radios moving urgently through a space so thick with the clinking languor of a weekday evening that it seemed to blot them out. Either they’d become such a familiar presence in the pub that they registered as a peripheral blip in the consciousness of the diners, or the diners chose not to see them so that they could drink and eat unencumbered by the tragedy that had just transpired outside the pub’s darkened windows.
    Getting the waiters and bartenders, past and present, to discuss their experiences dealing with jumpers proved to be quite difficult. Whitbread, the brewery that owns the pub, does not allow pub employees to discuss the suicides. James Cunningham, the previous manager of the Beachy Head Pub, and current manager of another Whitbread-owned pub, was under similar orders. I did, however, befriend a young Beachy Head publican named Steve who told me that the night after my first visit to the pub, the police had taken away a young man who had been sitting alone in a corner crying and who later admitted to police that he had intended to jump.
    Eighty yards from the cliff edge, at the corner of the pub’s parking lot, stands a phone booth with a large sign that reads, The Samaritans—Aiways There Day and Night—Phone 735555 or 0345 90 90 90. The Eastbourne Borough Council installed the phone booth across the street from its present location in 1976 after intensive lobbying by the Samaritans. At night from a distance, the lit phone booth looks forlorn, and its occasional occupation sharpens the senses and feeds the imagination of a midnight walker. As you draw closer, you wonder, “Is this a jumper?” You look for signs—sagging posture, crying, averted eyes—and you conjure a scenario: the woman was just dropped off by a cab; she feels she doesn’t want to continue living but isn’t quite sure she wants to die; she walks toward the cliffs and stops, then walks back toward the phone booth, calls the Samaritans, and says nothing as the Samaritan listens at the other end of the line, as the police arrive in response to the cabby’s phone call and take her away, restoring you to your senses, to the silhouettes of rabbits running on the crest of the downs backlit by the orange lights of Eastbourne below.
    From this phone booth I called Nancy, the director of the Eastbourne Samaritans, who seemed wary of my intentions but agreed to speak with me in her downtown office. Several days later I found myself in a small room with a small woman in her early forties whose first question “Are you suicidal?” shot through the surface of her stillness like an arcing fish, eliciting a stream of confidences: “No I’m not suicidal, at least not that I’m aware sometimes it’s hard to know when you’re unhappy. . . . My brother-in-law took his life a year ago last October, I suppose that’s partly why I’m here, although I don’t trust my motives entirely. . . .” As I listened to myself babble on in confessional mode, I realized that Nancy was in her Samaritan mode, repeating and confirming what I was saying, reading my body language, waiting. I felt protected by her listening.
    When I finished with the disclosures, Nancy told me about the beginnings of the Samaritans—about a priest named Chad Varah who, in the 1950s, officiated the funeral of a fifteen-year-old girl who killed herself shortly after she began menstruating because nobody had told her about menstruation. So affected was Varah by the young girl’s death that he began counseling suicidal people in his church. So many people came to see Varah that they often had to wait outside, where parishioners served them tea. After talking with the parishioners, some of the visitors no longer felt they needed to see Varah. It was then he realized that ordinary people who listen well can provide the necessary solace to people in distress. Gradually, he built an organization that today consists of over 23,000 people worldwide who volunteer their time to listen to suicidal people. Last year the Samaritans received 13,387 calls from people considering suicide and had i, 156 face-to-face visits. Some of the people who, in the eyes of vigilant bartenders, cabbies, and cliff- top bystanders, present a danger to themselves, are taken into police custody where they are given the opportunity to call the Samaritans; others place their calls from home or from the phone booth next to the pub. “Conversations at Beachy Head are often very lengthy and sometimes we invite people to the center and stay up all night with them,” said one Samaritan volunteer. “If they ask us, we will travel to the headland to talk to them. . . . One must wonder what is going on in the mind of people who travel long distances to end their lives on the headland.”

Walking across the coast road toward the cliffs, it is difficult to lose yourself. People often look to ocean vistas to empty themselves, but I did not find Beachy Head such a place. It is beautiful, but I was constantly on the lookout for potential jumpers, and because I assumed everybody else was too, I suspected I was the object of someone’s suspicion if I walked too close to the cliff edge or assumed too wistful an air. During my first morning at Beachy Head, I had the Downs to myself until a man pulled into the car park and walked to the cliff edge. I watched him, and as he retreated from the cliff edge and I drew closer to the edge, I sensed him watching me. We weren’t strolling; we were patrolling each other, an oppressive situation. I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax until I knew his intentions. So I was reassured to learn upon introducing myself that he was Richard from Yorkshire who visited Beachy Head four or five times a year because it’s such a beautiful place to take a walk.
    There was a firm basis for my hypervigilance. During my two weeks at Beachy Head, three people took their lives: on Thursday night the London artist; on the following Tuesday night, a fifty-nine-year-old teacher; and on the following Sunday morning, two days before my departure, a twenty-four-year-old man. Had I arrived at the cliffs forty-five minutes earlier Thursday evening, I might have witnessed the suicide of the London artist.
    As unnerving as it was to consider such a possibility, it was, I’m ashamed to admit, a prospect I half-hoped for. Being on guard against a stranger’s suicide was, for me, as heart-quickening as the anticipated entrance of a woman whose affections you hope to gain. Walking along the base of the cliffs one afternoon, I noticed a speck of a person standing on the cliff edge near Devil’s Chimney, a notorious suicide perch. As I stopped to train my camera on the person, I imagined his every movement—his moving away from the cliff edge and then back (“he’s not sure he wants to jump”); the turning of his head (“he wants to make sure no one’s looking”)—to be full of portent. I imagined the person falling through the air and my good luck at getting the fall on film. Call it what you will—blood lust, morbid curiosity, a sickeningly self-serving impulse—it made me profoundly distrustful of myself. My brother-in-law had taken his life, and here I was, my camera at the ready, hoping to get a suicide on film.
    Leaving Beachy Head, I was more attuned to its history than to my anxious expectations. I lingered over the crumbled foundations of watch towers, radar stations, and military barracks, and the long trenches beneath the hawthorn and gorse. I imagined a succession of invaders—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Germans—scarring the Downs with torches, iron plows, and incendiary bombs; and a young German pilot escaping from his flaming Messerschmitt 109, shot down fifty-six springs ago in the fields behind my farm-house bungalow. I remembered that the Beachy Head Pub was bombed in 1940 and burned to the ground in 1966 and 1994; that the jackdaws, butterflies, and cowslips survived periodic infusions of insecticides and commercial fertilizers, as well as overcultivation; and that ninety-nine percent of the now ubiquitous rabbit population was wiped Out forty years ago by an outbreak of myxomatosis. And I recalled the stories of the people who came to this indomitable place indomitably determined to die: the young man from London who took an overdose of drugs, jumped from an apartment building, and threw himself in front of a train in a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts that cost him an arm and a leg, and then threw himself—artificial limbs and all—off the cliffs of Beachy Head; the twenty-four-year-old man who fell more than sixty meters in an unsuccessful suicide attempt and later explained, “When it takes four hours to get dressed of a morning, an hour to eat anything and two hours to go to the lavoratory, when your parents are getting on and when even the Ministry recognizes your situation with an Invalidity Allowance, you come to the decision that you have to think of something”; and the woman who drove her husband’s car over the cliff because she was distressed by her broken marriage and wrote in a suicide note addressed to the coroner, “I fully intended to take my life. My mind is in perfect balance and I know what I am doing.”
    The seemingly irrational, impulsive suicides of spurned lovers and disgraced businessmen are few at Beachy Head. The large majority of the victims spend the bulk of their lives struggling with depression and hopelessness on psychiatric wards, in modest one-room apartments, or among alienated family members. When they come to the cliffs, they know what they are doing. Knowing what I did about their lives, I left Beachy Head with a deep respect for what the cab drivers, bartenders, police constables, Coast Guard officers, and Samaritans cannot take away from the people they hope to save: their tenacious will to die, to forge from the passive, mangled syntax of their lives, a concise declarative statement.
    “We don’t try to talk people out of jumping,” said Nancy the Samaritan. “We listen. We don’t take away their self-determination.” Some of the people saved by a vigilant cabby or publican will try again. And for the foreseeable future, they will have a clear run to the cliff edge. A fence would be ugly, say some, or impractical (it would fall into the sea every few years), or ineffectual (they’d simply climb over).
    I am quite certain that my brother-in-law, who sculpted a bodybuilder’s physique, read widely and deeply, and composed music throughout his adolescence, saw no prospect of restoring his life to the way it was before he began to break into a sweat at the sound of a clicking furnace or creaking floorboard. So he started packing up his life as neatly as he had arranged it before it fell apart. Folding and labeling and discarding in the privacy of his parent’s basement, he must have felt like his old self again: goal-driven and self-possessed. Those who jump off Beachy Head may feel that they, too, are reclaiming, for a brief moment, a self that once knew clarity and purpose.
    The night before I took the early morning limousine to the airport, I slept down the hall from my brother-in-law’s bedroom, where traces of blood are still visible on the door frame. I left my in-law’s house in firm possession of my life and found myself eighteen hours later near a crumbling cliff edge trying to regain my footing. Vertigo is a cliff edge cutting through to the heart of the soul. Standing by the edge, I sensed as never before my potential to make a mess of my life, and it made me nauseous. At such times, imagining myself falling through the air felt less like a flight of fancy than a rehearsal. And the late nights at the pub, the two of us eating and drinking alone in a corner, less a dinner out than a communion.

Tom Hunt teaches writing at the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut, and is writing a book about Beachy Head.

“Cliffs of Despair” appears in our Winter 2000 issue.