| I WAS trying to remember when I first came here, as Vicki steered us through the holiday traffic. It would have been when little houses on South Green cost £400 and were not called The Bolt Hole.
The North Sea is a steady azure until it is within sight of the horizon, when it turns to skimmed-milk blue. The day is fair. The cannon point towards the invaders. The visitors are semi-dressed in pretty clothes, and there are some fine dogs. How delicious it is to be here after the A12 crawl. How could George Orwell have detested it? We park the car in a meadow, and go in search of Ian and Joachim, who are, we trust, cooking.
Southwold is having one of its white and gold “Nelson” days, with whipping flags and well-scrubbed humanity, and the white lighthouse standing idle. I imagine English Impressionist girls crowding the bridge and holding on to their hats. After lunch in the harbourmaster’s cottage, we wander across the common and pick each other the first blackberries. The public benches are deserted, as everyone is on the beach.
“See that house?” says Ian. “It was built for retired servants.” Authorship has taken a hold every few steps. See that house? It is where Agnes Strickland and her sister Elizabeth, whose name never appears, wrote The Lives of the Queens of England. I look her up. “Her somewhat flat writings were extremely popular, perhaps because of their use in teaching.” I see these Victorian ladies putting down their pens for an hour for a gusty stroll to Walberswick, their maid banking up the fire for their return.
There is a kind of concealed strenuousness about the Suffolk coast. Maybe it was about keeping warm — not to mention solvent. Or possibly it was the wind perking one up. But a lot got done — although at this Bank Holiday moment, nothing whatever is being done, and the ambulating sloth, the prostrate bodies, the faint calls create a lovely watercolour rest. It is as though the Mayor of Southwold has appeared in all his golden glory at a window and decreed, “Do nothing!”
Naturally, there are shrieks when a brave soul enters the sea, although Ian does so without a cry. But then he comes from Norfolk. Mostly, people sit outside pubs, deep in conversation. I thought that I would like to sit in an ocean-fronting window for a week, turning the pages of a novel, looking up, looking out, with a good cat for company. But the evening comes, and the Bank Holiday ends, and a few homing gulls wail their way along the River Blyth, and Vicki says, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live here! What do you think?” It is a question we all ask after a day out.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the grass needs cutting, and the white cat needs adoration. And something has to be said at matins next Sunday, Trinity 15. St Paul is in Corinth, staying with some fellow tentmakers, a man and his wife. They were Jews who had been driven out of Rome by the Emperor Claudius, and, having suffered for their faith, they were in no mood to change it for that being preached by their lodger, no matter that he belonged to their trade. Eventually, all three of them sailed away to Ephesus.
What would have been happening on the Suffolk coast then? Well, the sea would have been baring its claws to scratch at the land, and no one would have been swimming, that’s for sure. |
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