Saturn in Suffolk
A Sebald pilgrimage, day 2
If there had been a bus to Yoxford I would have missed it.
I was playing games on the pier — whimsical, satirical, mechanical penny games (for a pound or two each) on the Southwold Pier.
For £2 I went on a narrated deep dive where I witnessed “another sad cargo of illegal immigrants trudging along the seabed,” along with “those fish who tire of the bright lights and leave for a more tranquil underwater village of sunken beach cottages, only to be plagued by estate fishes distressing all the inhabitants.” I was sitting in an antiquated submersible kitted out with puppetry and primitive dioramas and a recorded track. The virtual journey ended with a sighting of “the last carp — followed by a pack of scientists and paparazzi.” I also allowed myself to be brainwashed for 40p.
So that’s where I was — out on the pier enjoying the standard tat with a twist. Salt water taffy boogers and all that. I had walked six hours to join the families on the pier, families on February holiday in Southwold. They had come down in cars from their catered cottages. I had clambered over an unstable structure of a willy-nilly seawall — the beach being relatively unencumbered until there at the very end, when suddenly there was a concrete minefield and warning signs not to traverse it, but there was no real alternative but to do so.
I spent the last of my change on tea in the tearoom on the pier. It was served by a strapping young man in a pink and purple striped polo and a tattoo on his forearm. When I was done, only the lovely white lighthouse on the top of the hill was in full daylight. The sun had come out and was slipping down the hillside town, which was lovelier than I had imagined, since, after all, I had only W.G. Sebald’s Saturnine view as a preconception.
I wandered in search of the Sailors’ Reading Room, which I didn’t find, and for Gunhill, which I did find but which did not compel me to sit in its shade. I spent some time in St. Edmund’s church because its unstained glass and its verticality asked me in. When I came out it was 4:30, and I realized I had once again overshot business hours for a Suffolk coastal town visitors center in February and would have to figure out a bus to Yoxford on my own.
I went into a sweet shop (which, like the lighthouse of Lowestoft, was for sale) and the very sweet sweet shop lady, between selling her fudge and lemon-lime drops to the families on holiday, called every taxi in the environs, until I finally said, “well if there IS a bus to Yoxford I don’t want to miss it,” and I hurried out to the High Street, past the brewery to the bus stop and asked the first driver who came along how I could get to Yoxford. He made it apparent that I wouldn’t.
An old woman who was closing up the shop next to the bus stop was watching these proceedings. She was whiskered and standing by. She called her Bill and left a message. If I could give a bit for the petrol, she suggested. But then my phone rang and it was one of the taxis that the sweet shop lady had called, and Keith said he’d be right along. The whiskered woman in her three sweaters lingered until I assured her all was well. Finally she climbed onto her bicycle, which was white with fake flowers and made to leave. I looked the way she was going which was very much in dusk and a steep hill for the traffic and I asked her to please be careful. She said, “I’m alright for 67,” and smiled. She had perfect false teeth. So I took her picture.
Only when she was gone with the sun and it became quite cold waiting for Keith did I look in the window of the old woman’s storefront and see that she was the proprietor of the Southwold Train Shop. I examined the interior through the window and recognized a treasure that, had I not been in a hurry to find my way to Yoxford, I would have wandered about feeling inadequately interested. For it was a store that had assembled the historic, the vintage, and the collectible with the up-to-date informative and cheap. A legitimate, special store, in other words, that would have delighted my grandfather and which, certainly, Sebald also had discovered and spent time in. He would have certainly consulted my whiskered guardian before writing about the narrow gauge train once meant for a Chinese Empress but instead put into service, for a time, for the Great Northern over the River Blythe.
All this was at the end of the day — the Thursday, February 18, when I walked from Lowestoft to Southwold, as planned, but ran out of gas some miles from Yoxford, inland, where I had booked a bed.
The morning’s first mile I had spent just getting to the coast through Lowestoft’s suburbs, and avoiding the industrial parks. I had walked for twenty minutes in drizzle that hardly counted at rain, past houses unshuttered but blind, when a view of an uneasy sidling of residential and infrastructure emerged … and though it doesn’t appear in The Rings of Saturn, it certainly is of its eerie orbit. I snapped it with my phone –the water tower of Stradbroke Road. I’ve since seen similar structures — on the outskirts of Bristol perhaps, but this first encounter, early on my Sebald walk struck me as concrete nod — a sign I was on the correct path.
At Pakefield I came out into a churchyard looking onto the sea and turned on my music to celebrate. Down on the beach in the distance was, I felt certain, the huddled caravanserai of lonesome fishermen from The Rings of Saturn’s p. 51. But on closer inspection found that they were just boats under tarp, not shelters. I wondered whether to assume that the hope Sebald ascribed to the taciturn fishermen that there was a world beyond, had just gone inside to watch box set series on TV.
But there were actual caravans all down the coast. The first caravan park was just below Pakefield church where a sign directs you back up onto the cliffs to a long-loved and erratically decorated cluster of non-mobile caravans, cottages and hodge-podge shelters including a train car that is now lived in by an elderly gent who reads the paper with his coffee in a sunroom off its deck, ignoring the backpackers in his midst on a 10’oclock Thursday. The path pushed me further from the sea at that point, through newer turnkey bungalows lacking all style, décor, soul or coffee. But I wasn’t bothered by their ugliness. On the contrary, I felt glad that here was a rare coast developed for the most affordable.
I felt less generous towards the democratic shore when I came out of the holiday caravan park and into a McDonald’s parking lot, and the rain began in earnest. Inside the McDonald’s (which, I’ll give it, was startlingly clean) I affirmed with the map. There was nothing for it but to follow a longish stretch of highway to yet another holiday caravan park with egress to the beach, which, the nice folks at reception told me, I would walk nine miles to Southwold.
“Good luck with that” said a man in a day-glo vest, not unkindly.
Back on the beach I put my music on the Bulgarian chorus and forged ahead into the greybeige and south. I didn’t turn inland again until Benacre, where there was not a soul. The woods and fields were a welcome sight by then, as was the occasional sun. Also the fruit and nuts in my bag. It’s true — trail mix is never so delicious as on hour four of a trail. I carried on, now with Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” and healthy fortification and birdsong and mud and cows. After another hour spent on the perimeter of Benacre Reserve I came to a tree trunk shorn of all its limbs, in the very center of which has sprung a new sapling. A bit later I came to the pig farm and recalled Sebald taking a rest near a large sow. They weren’t napping today though, and they lost interest in me as soon as the feed truck came lumbering into the field. I had never seen enormous sows run. It was a sight — a porcine stampede.
At the far end of the farm, but still in the zone of its stench, I came to the magical Covehithe Church within a church. Like the amputated tree, this was an ancient church that, some centuries after its founding was gutted. The outer walls were left, open to the elements and the stones reused to make a smaller chapel within, more to size of the much diminished population. I went into this chapel, which was cold and empty but clearly very much in use. I sat in its new pews, older than any in America, and put a coin in the money box left for visitors who felt inclined to pick up any of the bits and bobs in the foyer — marmalade, books, a postcard or tea cozy.
Back outside I scanned the cliff for the spot where Sebald had been overwhelmed by his vertigo and then followed the path back down to beach for the last leg to Southwold.
I walked on and on, the lighthouse still distant. After a time, a single brick appeared in the wet sand. Further, a portion of a brick wall emerged from the sand. Still further, when Southwold and its lighthouse were quite attainable, the beach had become strewn with debris — a battlefield of the sea taking civilization. The erosion was a catwalk. And finally I arrived at that mad, last-gasp climb over inexorable destruction, the sucking sea at my back, my ipod plugged securely, my hands slick with the green slime. The signs still upright amid the boulders and concrete and pocked charred masses that I wished some geographer might identify, reading No No Don’t Climb These. The same sign that I had attended at 10am and at noon but that now, at 4pm and meters from the promenade at Southwold where at last the cliffs were indeed quite insurmountable, I had no choice but to ignore and I climbed the boulders and barriers of concrete rubbish to arrive at a carpark and 250 bright colored cabanas named “Auntie Bong Bong” and “Life’s a Beach” and “Tout Suite.”
In a word, Southwold.
Yoxford, in the last of the sunset, from the back of a car after an eight hour walk, is lovely. My hosts were a couple — two men who had moved to the country five years earlier, bought a 300 year old farmhouse, furnished it tastefully and now let rooms. One of them makes breakfast and the other answers the phone and serves tea. They were waiting for me in the drive and, by way of greeting, I told them all about the diabolical clawmarks on the church door down the road left by a large black dog, the manifestation of Satan. I knew about the dog from Keith the taxi driver, who took the paranormal to heart and told me many such tales on the way from Southwold to Yoxford. Keith was also a socialist. A superstitious socialist. He wore the round rim glasses and leather cap of a Bolshevik intellectual and conceded that the black dog might also be a manifestation of social outrage against the tyranny of a church that engaged in too much witch hunting and virgin deflowering. He had less socio-economic rationales for the freakiness of Orford Ness and the apacolypse of Dunwich, we also discussed on the road to Yoxford. My hosts (whose names I never did catch) expressed some surprise at this revelation. No, they hadn’t heard about the satanic dog.
After resting a bit, I wandered down in the dark to the town for dinner. I passed the church again and noted that it was well and good spooky. A gothic stone monster under a bright moon, its graves half-rising and crooked as bad teeth on either side of an iron gate with its incongruous sign “Welcome to St. Andrew.” The bells were going mad and proceeded to clang out of any perceptible rhythmic design for another twenty minutes as I ate in a pub down the road called the Griffin.
The Griffin’s barman was delightful. A solicitous young man who had done a short stint in the navy and who, when not attending to me, talked politics at the bar with the locals. He figured migrants come to England because it’s the safest place in Europe. He also figured that Britain has much more than finance going for it — it has the best carmakers and architects and …
But I couldn’t hear his further thoughts more because of the foursome who sprawled on the couch before the bright fire playing a dirty drinking game. They were two young couples on a double date and had monopolized the best spot, for the most part quietly and respectfully, aside from the hot mess who was well on her way to getting drunk. It was she who had insisted on the drinking game that required her phone and a lot of sex questions. The male half of the quorum were unenthusiastic. They, it seemed, had never met before and were now quite insistently being asked to publicly disclose if they had ever licked an arsehole. Oh — how she exclaimed and cursed and reveled in her shameful confessions, the pretty girl who was drinking gin and sliding towards the loo on stockinged feet. Oh yes — many times she had done this and that nasty thing, and so, must drink. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was drinking water and murmuring, “no filter,” as she directed her girlfriend to get her a double so that she would get “wankered.” Such a pretty girl in her ponytail and leggings and college sweatshirt, I thought. And so foul.
And I wanted to say, “sweetheart, you are making yourself appalling.”
When the barman came around and asked if I wanted coffee or a pudding I could only smile and shake my head as the pretty girl blurted: “Have I farted during sex. Oh loads of times.” But the sweet barboy just turned to them and told them, as he stoked up the fire, to spread the word to their mates that the Griffin had wifi, because “young people don’t want to play darts and pool when they can sit in front of a fire and snuggle with broadband, am I right?” To which the girl answered, “Oh I hate clubbing. I hate going to clubs with the pervs and having to say ‘don’t touch my bum.’” The barboy nodded, understandingly, and if I weren’t so exhausted I would have invited him to play pool with me.
Instead I trudged back up hill to my bed and my hosts. The church silent now. But still I saw black dogs everywhere. The next morning, when I told my hosts about the mad bells at the church they said, “Oh — that was us. We were practicing.”
Of course, because what else will you do in Yoxford once you’ve put fresh sheets on the guestbeds? Snuggle up in front of a pub fire with a pervy girl and her broadband? I think not.
