Saturn in Suffolk
A Sebald pilgrimage, day 3
I was not too late, but too early for Dunwich.
Fellow guests at Yoxford offered to drive me back to the coast and I took the offer, understanding that getting caught short in Southwold was a sign that I had given the Suffolk Coast Trail short shrift.
And so, gaining the time and energy that the fifteen-minute lift afforded, I was surprised that it was, nonetheless, already 10am when they let me out in bright sunshine on the beach at Dunwich. For at that time yesterday, I was just emerging from the McDonald’s parking lot, under the impression that I had walked hours and miles, when, in fact, it had only been hours.
The beach at Dunwich was rocky. Loosely, roundly, myriadly. I had the impression that it faced the wrong way. Now, of course, I wish I had stayed on the beach and oriented myself, or confirmed that the disorientation had to do with the wetland behind me — fed by the very river that silted up and doomed the medieval town of Dunwich even before the devastating storms of 1285 and 1328 that undercut its mighty defenses and began its inexorable descent into the sea. In retrospect, I assume that my feeling that the main street, where today there is an inn and some guest cottages and the Dunwich museum, should run parallel to the ocean rather than the wheat colored marsh, was because the city was indeed oriented to the river that is now undefined — as amorphous as the plot in the ocean which experts, said Keith the superstitious socialist taxi driver, have been unable to pinpoint in their readiness to excavate ancient sunken Dunwich.
But I didn’t linger on the beach with its clattering stones. I hurried to the museum and its relics of a sunken city that had captured my imagination fifteen years ago in the pages of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. But the museum, it turned out, was open from 2–4pm. I was too early. And if I waited, I would never make Aldeburgh by nightfall.
I paced the road like the demented Somerleyton quail. How? How after fifteen years and all this way had I arrived too early to not be too late?
Of all the vague haunting that Saturn have left in their orbit, the specter of sunken Dunwich has stayed with me most amorphously and indelibly. The intangibility of Dunwich in its present reality, its inability to convey what was lost — for Dunwich is a tiny, quiet, pleasant hamlet with a smattering of hardy holiday makers in their muddy boots or their retirement togs, loading the boot of a car or waiting for breakfast at a rustic long wooden table — that complete un-recoverability of the story, (for I couldn’t even judge which way to look for the cliff from which the last of Dunwich’s dozens of great churches, monasteries, and merchants houses toppled); all this made the temporary closure of a museum that couldn’t possibly banish this elusiveness — very nearly tragic. I stood outside its closed doors, thinking of how they still can’t find it, a mile off the coast, but the coast that is not the coast that it was, and so there was no way to recover it, to touch it, to grasp it to … now that the museum was closed … gawk at its black and white traces. Until 2pm.
There was a phone number on the museum signs and to my surprise a man came out of the driveway holding a ringing phone. To tell me that the museum was closed. I pled my case. He was unmoved. He was having car troubles. He stood in the driveway with his jumper cables and apologized. I pressed, almost whining, and he wouldn’t be budged, so I began to leave on the track up through the ruins of the monastery (built long after great Dunwich sank into the sea), but I couldn’t shake it, and I went back, thinking I would offer a generous donation, for just ten minutes. But he had already gone away. And so for the third time I went up the track, distracted by my loss and therefore failing once more, at the top of Dunwich’s only remaining cliff to fully survey the spot where it might have slid into the sea.
That night, still disappointed, I reread The Rings of Saturn:
“One cannot say how great was the sense of security which the people of Dunwich derived from the building of these fortifications. All we know for certain is that they ultimately proved inadequate. On New Years Eve 1285, a storm tide so devastated the lower town and the portside so terribly that for months afterwards no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began. There were fallen walls, debris, ruins, broken timbers, shattered ship hulls and sodden masses of loam, pebbles, sand and water everywhere.”
I thought of how Sebald would have pulled this description from the clippings and documents and articles of the Dunwich museum. And then I thought that I had recently seen such a sight: the northern beach above the seawall at Southwold. I remembered the debris from the day before that had made me wish for someone to categorize, definitively, the origins of each cell of flotsam and strange porous cement sponge that looked, for all the world, as if it had washed up from a volcanic isle to block my path and, like the water tower of Sandbroke Road, confirm that I was on a pilgrimage into the disorienting dissolution of built environments.
And all of this brought to mind a flyer I had seen posted at the inn in Dunwich. There would be a talk in the Dunwich Reading room that Sunday:
From the Greyfriars ruins, the Suffolk Coast Trail wound through a wooded suburb and back across a main road onto Dunwich Heath. This was a proper heath, but far from the bewildering landscape on which Sebald panicked in a hopeless roundabout, trapped on a sandy path that went nowhere but back on itself. On the contrary — I marched straight across, headed for the outsized swell Sizewell’s nuclear dome. I tried several time to capture the startling sight, but no matter how many times I snapped it on my phone, the result put the dome further than it appeared in fact from the flat upland heath, which I crossed via a path that had been purchased for the Neptune Coastline Campaign by the customers of Pizza Express. I wondered how many of those customers were aware of their purchase.
At the end of the heath I descended again to the beach. Here the beachhead of loose rocks, tortuous to walk on with a nagging Achilles heel, was paralleled by a wide packed-sand track, with a third, raised trail, in between the two. In short — a delightful walking stretch. I put my ear buds in and turned on music that was a 21st century throwback to 1970’s Topanga Americana and enjoyed the sun, the Minismere Reserve stretching to my right, and in the distance, the ever-closer dome of Sizewell that, in this particular confluence of sunshine and population (plenty of people enjoying a holiday Friday, lent or no lent, Nepal or no Nepal), was more of a benign beacon than a threatening overlord blighting the coast that a massive extraterrestrial nuclear power station really ought to be.
Indeed, as the path wandered in and out of bracken and bushes stood sentinel, I felt that I was on the yellow brick road to Oz. A sign appeared, instructing me to leave the area in case of the unlikely event of a radioactive event. The next sign advised me to be on the lookout for the rare Black Redstarts, of which just 100 pairs breed in Britain and which tend to nest in the two Sizewell power stations.
Its loud song will help you locate the bird, which is usually perched with its long tail quivering on top of a post or building.
The population of black redstarts, the sign said, increased after WWII, when the birds colonized bombsites around London. The birds, it continued, are attracted to industrial sites, and though as a rule I dislike most birds, I felt a certain affinity for these birds that thrived in the swing sites of industry and destruction. Or rather, I assumed Sebald would.
On the grassy lawn immediately in front of the reactor’s dome I lay down. It was the first time in two days that I had rested mid-route. I was tired. My muscles hurt, my back ached, and I rather hoped to see a rare black redstart perched somewhere nearby, its tail quivering at the threat and promise of radioactivity. There were no black redstarts, but there were many friendly dogs taking their families on walks across the sunny shore of Sizewell. I lay back and watched the clouds make formations: a top hat above the bald dome of the power plant.
The trail from Sizewell to Thorpeness may have been the most pleasant stretch of my walk. I had put the hippy California music back on and disengaged my mind from all but the lyrics, and so made southerly progress down a stretch of Suffolk along with the phantasms of strawberry wine and Fresno and heaven and earth colliding. It was hardly the mindset of Benjamin Britten, but the coast was not his that day — this was a coast of sunshine and white gulls. The water sparkled and from my high vantage on a narrow wooded trail high on the cliff (there had been no diversions from the dunes since Dunwich Heath) I could see forever north and south the fugue-like patterns of small waves coming in. I was surprised not to see Europe, and there were few trawlers. Instead there were benches on the precarious path and I was reminded of the sad short benches of yesterday, abandoned when the trail was diverted away from the eroding cliffs, but still visible from the beach, cowering on the cliffside like relics of contemplation.
Here in the sunshine below Sizewell you could sit on the very edge of the cliffs and enjoy the view. But I didn’t, for I still wanted to reach Aldeburgh in time for a 4pm concert and I did not yet know that in fact Aldeburgh’s Peter Pears music hall was another twenty miles inland at Snape Maltings.
The humanity of this stretch was eccentric. The cliff was sheer, yet construction continued right up to its eroding edge — first a crew putting up a cement block wall, a modest boundary for what would surely be another humble caravan park, the contents of which seemed unlikely to last more than three seasons due to the erosion, and yet, someone had seen fit to construct and profit by. I stopped for a moment, watching the brick-layer, a cigarette clenched in his teeth and a spanner in hand and wondered what could be the purpose of his low wall? Would it protect the caravans from interlopers on the trail? From bracing sea winds? Surely not the waves, which would hardly reach the encampment before the cliff itself came sliding down to the sea. And I concluded that the only purpose of the cinderblock wall could be the far-sighted goal of providing more detritus that would in time, be strewn across the beach below to remind trekkers of the ineffable efforts and inexorable force of nature.
I continued down the path, which was sometimes bowered in gorse, to the next building, which was prefaced with a queer sign saying that “having left behind the Bay of Sole, to the south was visible the Wardens.” I supposed the text was taken from some guidebook, but then it became clear that the Wardens was the large elegant mansion dead ahead and that the trekker should keep out of the Wardens, a facility for the disabled, old folks and mentally impaired children. There were none in sight, but again I was impressed that such regarded real estate and such a handsome old building would be reserved for those of no means. The path dipped romantically under a derelict arched brick bridge leading from the mansion to a private stairwell to the beach. I tried in vain for a better view of the estate and pulled out my phone to capture the quiet gothic out-of-time-liness of the spot but my phone, as ever, failed me.
I walked on certain that here, too, Sebald may have waxed Kubla Khan and that somewhere on the premises there may be a demented Chinese quail.
When again I hit the beach level I discovered that I was in pain. I am a good walker, but at two dozen miles in two days that was no longer true. The clouds had rolled in and the wind had turned on its full strength — direct, unabated and loudly pushing the way I could not. What’s more, the beach was again round-rock laborious, and I just couldn’t get on. Especially not with the exuberant families whose quick sprints to the shore ran perpendicular and in every other way at odds with mine. After about a half hour that felt to be two I lifted my head from the wind’s onslaught and decided to see if it was easier walking on the rocky ridge above me. When I arrived at the shingle I saw what lay on the upper beach — a smooth wide firm causeway leading to a large parkway in the direction ahead of me and to … Thorpeness behind me. I had overshot it completely, blinded by the shingle ridge and the pain and the wind.
Which meant, of course, that the town ahead of me was Aldeburgh after all. I pressed on the remaining impossible distance and was terrifically relieved to find that the Wentworth Hotel is just about the first building you arrive at when entering Aldeburgh from the north. I staggered in, confirmed that the Peter Pears concert hall was nowhere near, barely mounted the steps, and fell exhausted onto the bed.
As I had the previous two nights, I fell asleep so early that I was awake well before light. I lay in bed listening to the wind shake the hotel like a ship. I felt quite entombed in my small bed and Sebald haunted me, as he always does and will.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald headed inland (via Yoxford, as it turns out) from Dunwich Heath and eventually walked all the way to Orford Ness. Much as I had hoped to reach that abandoned zone of cataclysmic experimentation, I wouldn’t be able to follow him, it was clear. I could walk again, it was true, but Wickford Market, where I was to catch my train, was still some miles away and there was Aldeburgh to see. I tucked Rings back into my bag with one chapter left and went downstairs for breakfast. Over coffee and a baked kipper that made me feel quite exhausted with the world, I wondered whether, a year from now I would be taken into hospital in Norwich “in a state of almost total immobility,” or if I would set off again to walk the countryside of Suffolk “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me…”
I didn’t miss the train to London. I didn’t miss it because the bus I took from Aldeburgh to Wickham Market arrived in Wickham Market two hours before my ticketed departure to London via Ipswich, Ingalesgate, Westerfield and who knows what then.
So that even though, when I debarked from the bus at Wickham Market only to be kind by a passing local that the Wickham Market train station is miles away in Campsea Ashe and I trudged off to a roundabout a stretch of highway into horizontal rain, I nonetheless arrived at the train station just in town for the Ipswich bound train that ran one hour ahead of my ticketed train. And so I ended my long walk, walking … right to the end.
And with one final regret: I should have gotten that Scotch egg in Aldeburgh, which I passed by, thinking that I would have time to kill in Wickham Market - a town, it turns out, without pubs or train stations but full of rain.
