Saturn in Suffolk
A Sebald pilgrimage
Because I was on Rosslyn Hill before I realized that I had left my phone, and because I imagined the moment when, trapped in a fit of vertigo on the cliff at Covehithe, where the swallows dive horizontally into holes under my feet (or, less Sebaldian, suffering a full rupture of my Achilles heel outside of Dunwich or the consequences of a forgotten landmine in Orford Ness), and I would come to truly lament the absence of a phone — I went back home to get my phone and missed my train to Norwich by three minutes.
Bianca, bless her soul, took pity on me in the ticket office in Liverpool Street Station. Or perhaps she simply wanted to flex her magnanimous status as a superior before the officer-in-training who had told me “even if we wanted to, there is nothing we can …” But Bianca could, and Bianca did, and I was on the next train, just a half-hour delayed on my pilgrimage to the Suffolk coast and the heart of my long fascination with W.G. Sebald.
It had been fifteen years since I first read The Rings of Saturn. Or fifteen years since I last read it. I’m not sure how many times I have read this strange meditative travelogue — a blend of despair and delight in the exploration of collapse and decay. The pages of my original copy are more dog-eared than not. But I had brought a virgin copy with me. I opened it somewhere east of Stanstead.
I was glad that I had waited until I was en route to invite him along — Sebald. I had planned my itinerary by online cross-referencing: Barbara’s Hui’s litmap with booking.com with google earth. I had three nights, I reckoned. I would take the train to Somerleyton and from there, like Sebald, walk to Lowestoft and to Southwold and perhaps — if I didn’t step on a landmine or rupture a tendon or tumble from the cliffs of Covehithe — to Orford before taking the train home from Wickham Market.
But now, because I had forgotten my phone and missed my train and was taken pity on by Bianca, my new outbound journey would have three legs: London to Norwich; Norwich to Lowestoft; and Lowestoft to Somerleyton.
At Norwich I changed trains. The connecting train felt it could have been the one Sebald rode in 1992. I wasn’t sure if it was a diesel engine, but it hugged the rails as it moved, and it made the noise of mechanical parts. We were in sunlight moving across green wetlands, and there were bends on the route. The track, the train, and the canals on our right, were the only crossings across an endless marsh. In spots I saw dark, overturned earth in long rectangles and thought beetroot?
For a long time afterwards we traveled in a fug that made the passengers eye each other sheepishly.
At Needham Junction we slowed to a walker’s pace and when the fans or motors or cogs of the train (which could not be walked through car by car, making it feel as though we were traveling in a festive event train, a single merry coach conveyance) shushed, the conversation of the passengers became suddenly audible, as if they had been cued by a conductor of another sort. It was a nice sound, a homey sound — I remembered I was travelling with my fellow man and not just with the ghost of Sebald, who was, himself, a phantom hunting phantoms.
After the bend across the river, it was flat on either side of the train. The sun was still bright, the clouds too low on the horizon to block it. A single powerline cut across the march — a new parallel — though it sagged crookedly, perhaps because of the natural weakness of its foundation or perhaps under the weight of dozens of perched birds on its wire. There was not a single space on the wire for another bird, and so a miasmic cloud hovered above in the spooky fashion of synchronized swarms. Swallows? Sparrows?
Sebald would have known.
At Somerleyton, the single burnt-orange carriage humming with motors and voices did not slow down. I saw no sign of the Hall through the woods beyond the platform. As had been the case in 1992, there was no station and no people. I opened the book to its pixelated approximation of Xanadu standing in for the lost grandeur of Somerleyton and to the picture of the vexing yew maze and the demented quail, and knew for certain that none of it was there, beyond the trees and that I would not return this afternoon. For I had missed my train and was now, at 1pm, pulling into Lowestoft.
As I said, it was good that I had not started re-reading Sebald’s account until I had planned the broad outline of my walk. For had I read beyond the single sentence on the enthusiast litmap — After I had taken my leave of William Hazel I walked for a good hour along the country road from Somerleyton to Lowestoft — I would have arrived at Sebald’s horror towards a town decimated by the Thatcher era. A town so emptied, depressed, shut down and mean, that there is no sign of an end to the encroaching misery.
That was 1992, of course. But as I stepped out of the station I recognized it immediately. I recognized it more surely than I recognized Lowestoft’s heyday, which Sebald proceeds to examine like salt in the wound. Even in sunshine, the suggestion of Thatcherite Lowestoft was stronger than that of Benjamin Britten’s, advertised on the slightly tatty pier where there stood a closed chippy and an ice cream palace and a royal navy yacht club.
I made my way from the Central Station, precisely as pictured on p. 48, to Heile Bakery. Inside was the fluorescence of generations of mothers and daughters who had never left Lowestoft and served buns and teacakes from the bakery’s long glass case. There were probably eight of them — women and girls working efficiently, their hair tucked under odd white-mesh fedoras the likes of which I’ve never seen as standard issue for bakery attendants.
The girl at the register was perhaps new, or perhaps dumb, or perhaps terrified that this was what life had in store for her. The tables, which lined the wall across from the counter but broke out of single-file towards the back of the dining room, were almost entirely occupied by senior citizens. There was one child, a chubby little girl with long red hair who was out with her nan. She couldn’t wait to finish her bun before going back to the counter for a second one. I watched her half sitting, half standing at the table, one foot swinging in an Ugg style boot, the other planted on the floor so that she could half-sit, half-stand over her plate of buns, and thought of the profound differences between greedy little girls and greedy little boys … and the perversions therein.
And so the good people of Lowestoft (I felt quite sure I was the only interloper among them) ate toasties and egg-salad and drank tea from the standard issue aluminum tea pots of places like Heile’s Bakery, (which I have just confirmed on its website, has been serving Lowestoft for over thirty years. Since before, that is, 1992.)
I ordered a toasted cheese and a toasted teacake and ate the teacake first since it was prepared first. I watched the elderly ladies taking a break from a day shopping with their granddaughters, and the man with his betting form and thought that what I would bet was that that Max Sebald once had a sausage roll and a pot of tea at Heile’s. It seemed inconceivable that this place would not have pulled him like a tractor beam.
When the woman brought me my sandwich she greeted a teenage boy coming in who sat at the table next to me. Pretty soon, the stupefied counter girl came and rested a hand on his table and I realized the boy was waiting for her shift to end.
When I was done eating I buttoned up my coat and took up my backpack and went out onto London Street, where the town became interesting. A series of narrow streets, passable only on foot or bicycle or cart, slid down to the sea. They were, and maybe still are called stokes. A plaque suggested it was a Norse word. There was a Herringhatch Stoke and a Malterers Stoke and a Gowings Stoke and am Orwell Stoke. I followed one of the stokes down to Christ Church — Britain’s most easterly church, said the sign. I read about the flood of 1953 — the nail in the coffin for a fishing industry in decline. The sign also told of the “Beach Village — a close-knit community and hive of industry packed with fisherman’s homes, smokehouses, picking plots, rope sheds, boat builders, fish merchants and pubs.”
And stokes, I thought.
I walked back up to the High Street and found, of all those everyday establishments, only the pubs. But also candy shops — quite a few. And a tattoo shop and several luncheonettes and more than enough barber shops for one town. In the window of one of them I saw a mother with her five little boys, all of them freshly barbered, save the one in the chair. He sat on phone books — and I wondered if those phone books dated from 1992.
It was February and it was a Wednesday and I was in Britain’s most easterly province, and while it was, yes, bright and cold and easterly and provincial, it was no way desolate. I stood on the High Street and looked down a walled stoke to the coast and the sheds and storage and siding of a new industry — renewable energy. It was the giant turbine that (the Christ Church sign had told me) was known as Gulliver in these parts.
I continued walking north and after a time recognized the two young people walking in front of me as the counter girl from the bakery and the boy who had come to fetch her. She had changed out of her uniform. The white mesh fedora was gone. Her hair was down and she wore a plum colored coat with a fur hood. I was thinking about how she had spending money, because she worked at Heil’s Bakery, and what she might do with it now with half the day left and her young man. But they didn’t stop off anywhere. They walked close and I followed them until they turned into an uniform stretch of two-story, semi-detached residential life, where I stopped and marveled that this was their life, their teenage life, with or without pocket money, and as always, its utter normalcy seemed exotic and eerie to me.
Leaving them to their curtained afternoon I came across a beautiful lighthouse perched on the main road to Yarmouth on the border of a steep municipal park. I went behind to take some pictures, since there was a “To Let” sign at the gate. I saw its klieg light turning in its squat glass tower and wondered what reason might I find to rent a working lighthouse in a public park in England’s easternmost town.
With a view of a caravan park on the beach.
In an art shop selling rather terrible seascapes, an old man with a nice face and a hacking cough told me that the Suffolk Coast Trail I was looking for “didn’t ring a bell,” but he was from Yarmouth and didn’t go down that way.
“Ask me about Norfolk,” he invited. Then he recalled that there might be a tourist center on the Pier. If it was open. “Nobody comes to Lowestoft until May.” When I said I was sure it started somewhere nearby and that it carried on all the way down to Southwold and beyond, he said “Beyond Southwold? There be dragons.”
On the way to the tourist office I was waylaid by a nice Portuguese girl who wanted me to do a consumer marketing taste test inside the church. I’m not sure why I agreed except that it was cold and she looked cold out there with her clipboard and she told me she had to get fifty people to try the two brands of chicken breast and mixed salad and vanilla ice cream if she was going to get paid. The ice cream was alright and she was very sweet and I was outside again in about fifteen minutes, but when I arrived at the tourist office it had closed ten minutes earlier.
So I checked into the Wherry Hotel and into a closet –sized room with a window looking out on to Oulten Broad. I lay down on the single bed and wondered when I had last slept in a single bed in a hotel.
There’s a lock outside the carpark at the Wherry Hotel. It has a sign: Danger. Deep Water. Though it didn’t look it. No access. So I didn’t. The moon was muffled behind high clouds. Brighter were the lights, neon blue, of the Vindaloo Restaurant down the road and the slot machines in the hotel lobby behind me. I didn’t try either of those. Back inside as I searched for the stairs to my room I discovered, from the hotel’s decorative photographic touches, that a wherry is a small boat with a large sail. And the giant fish the size of three men? A herring? A mackerel? Why is it that both those fishes were always, in my mind, small creatures you might pop into your mouth whole and slimy?
Sebald would know.
