Springtime on the Suffolk Coast
Walberswick on the Suffolk coastline.
In spring, it is hard to beat the Suffolk Coast for old-fashioned Englishness. The tea shops shut at 4pm. Big jars of sweets, awaiting families heading for Southwold beach or crabbing in the Blythe estuary, look forlorn in Squire’s tea room window. South of neighbouring Walberswick reeds are still cut for thatching. Morris dancers appear on May Day.
In Suffolk there is no church from which you can’t see another church – or so it is said. Yet “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” are as thin on the ground as butterflies and squashed hedgehogs. The words are taken from George Orwell’s wonderfully titled essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, a 1941 morale-booster, post-Dunkirk, as Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. From 1932, Eric Blair lived intermittently with his family at the top of the High Street in Southwold, a prickly presence, somewhat out of place.
View of Southwold beach seafront from the pier. Southwold, Suffolk, UK
In 1993 John Major, with a divisive vote nearing on the EU’s Maastricht Treaty, drew on Orwell for another booster speech. The then Prime Minister assured the Conservative Group for Europe that Britain would ”survive unamendable in all essentials” within the European Union. Forget Jerusalem’s dark satanic mills: we were, and would remain, “the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers”. Not nearly demotic enough — even then — for the tone of reassurance demanded of politicians in times of crisis today.
But change has come. Beer (here, Adnams bitter, fresh from Southwold’s brewery) is a pleasure routinely taken cooler today. The “green suburbs”, and many green fields, have been far from invincible in the face of Sizewell C’s invading construction army — invincible so long as the money doesn’t run out. New housing, mostly beyond the means of local people, growing numbers of workers, new roads, vast car parks and outsized trucks with police escorts, are the first wave. But John Major’s ”dog lovers” have multiplied, their dogs shouted at and happily ignoring them; some with up to three animals in tow. And do people even know what his “pools fillers” might have been? Football pools — do they exist online today?
The beauty of Suffolk’s coast hasn’t aged. South of Dunwich, the great spread of wetlands, with swaying reedbeds in the National Nature Reserve with their promise of bitterns and otters, the heathland yellow with gorse, skylarks trilling you away from their nests, woods with deer and misshapen muntjacs at dawn and dusk. Terra divina with memories of war. The pillboxes and the anti-tank traps, the forbidding forts, once ready for Napoleon, are still there, now just grim. So is Orford Ness, with its nearby World War II radar stations, its atomic bomb and museum, testing site for the strength of the weapon’s outer casing.
Dunwich, Suffolk, UK – August 21st 2024 – ruins of Dunwich Greyfriars Monastery Priory
For anyone who has lived in Africa near the equator, where the sun is switched off at 6pm and you can watch a vulture in the garden at Christmas, the seasons in Suffolk are a joy. From January, a floral sequence keeps pace with the months: snowdrops, then daffodils, and bluebells, and daisies, bursting buds on the trees, grey goes to green, and cherry blossom. You can pretend the resident robin is joyfully greeting you on arriving home (and ignore it is telling you to get off its territory). And the rabbits begin re-appearing, plus locally bred pheasants. No gentle tinkling of cowbells in Suffolk, just gunshots, a one-hour fusillade from the gun club on some Sundays rivalling the church bells. And pig noises, and pheasants’ flapping as they take off on suicidally-straight trajectories: very different IQs but a shared limited life expectancy.
Next, by way of other local treats, is the long anticipated food sequence: asparagus, followed by strawberries and raspberries. At Aldeburgh – expensive – fish straight off the boats is available, and cheaper kippers from a beach-side shack that smokes anything that moves in the sea. The fish and chips is good too but, eaten on the promenade in the open air, likely to be shared with aggressive seagulls.
View of the pastel coloured buildings on Crag Path facing Aldeburgh Beach.
As spring turns to summer, the near-deserted winter streets and the empty holiday homes will have filled up. Time for London journalists short of a story, and canny visitors from Hackney, to find their way to the beautiful stretch of Covehithe with its terns, curlews and sand martins, well cared for by bird lovers.
You can also attend the August Fête in affluent Walberswick, holiday home for TV and movie celebrities, actors and directors. The fun isn’t so much the fête but watching the celebs pretend, with the best will in the world, that they are “ordinary villagers” having a nice time. The celebs’ glitter is welcome, unlike in the Walberswick of 1915 when the resident, but unrecognized celebrity, the Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was put under house-arrest, suspected because of his accent and odd dress of being a German spy. Those were the days when the village had up to 300 boats and watchful working women, leery of strange newcomers, processed prodigious herring catches.
Beach huts on sandy shore by the sea at edge Southwold town near Walberswick in Suffolk East Anglia
In the summer you can cross from Walberswick to Southwold by a little ferry. The tide is ferocious, as if someone has taken the plug out of a full bath. Or you can walk west over a narrow bridge and back along the Southwold side of the harbour crammed with yachts and boats at anchor. No-one ever seems to take them out, status symbols pleasant on the eye.
Walberswick sits on the Blythe estuary, an expanse of river which meanders past Blythborough’s 12th century priory church. Courtesy of Augustinian monks and the medieval wool trade, the church is the size of a small cathedral. In the roof above its high aisle is a line of angels with perfectly carved swans’ wings. Too high for the Puritan Taliban to tear down.
An aerial view of the estuary of the River Blyth at Walberswick in Suffolk, UK
A few miles away upriver at Wenhaston, a medieval “doom” painting also survives on eleven planks of wood once topping the church’s rood screen. (Under Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, all church paintings were ordered to be white-washed.) The Wenhaston “doom” was thrown out but discovered in the late 19th century after rain washed away the white paint, exposing the picture of the Last Judgement. Some of the detail is delightful. The Archangel Michael stands between Heaven on the left, Hell on the right, holding the scales of justice, its two pans weighing salvation. On one, a single pure soul outweighs two devilish-looking souls sitting on the other. To the left are a king, queen, bishop and, perhaps, a scholar, each equally naked approaching St. Peter who holds the key to Heaven. A message of equality and mercy to a largely illiterate congregation.
View along the River Blyth, Wenhaston, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom
Perhaps this is mere nostalgia, but you sense that, along this most easterly bump in England’s coast, something of John Major’s “unamendable” Britain of bygone years survives. It’s a Britain that badly needs amending today.
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