The Rings of Saturn

by W. G. Sebald

  From Woodbridge to Orford, down to the sea, is a good four-hour walk. The roads and tracks pass through dry, empty stretches of land which, by the end of a long summer, are almost like a desert. This sparsely populated part of the country has hardly ever been cultivated, and, throughout the ages, was never more than a pasture for sheep reaching from one horizon to the other. When the shepherds and their flocks disappeared in the early nineteenth century, heather and scrub began to spread. This was encouraged as far as possible by the lords of the manors of Rendlesham Villa, Sudbourne Hall, Orwell Park and Ash High House, who had in their possession almost the whole of the Sandlings, in order to create favourable conditions for the hunting of small game, which had become fashionable in the Victorian age. Men of middle-class background who had achieved great wealth through industrial enterprise, wanting to establish a legitimate position in higher society, acquired large country mansions and estates, where they abandoned the utilitarian principles they had always upheld in favour of hunting and shooting, which, although it was quite useless and bent only on destruction, was not considered by anyone as an aberration. In the past, hunting had been the privilege of royalty and the aristocracy, and had been pursued in parks and chases established over centuries especially for the purpose, but now anyone who wanted to transmute their stock market gains into status and repute would hold hunting parties at their estates, several times a season, with as much ostentation as possible. Beside the name and rank of the invited guests, the respect that accrued to the host of such parties was in direct proportion to the number of creatures that were killed. The management of the estate was thus governed by considerations of what was necessary to maintain and increase the stocks of game. Thousands and thousands of pheasants were raised every year in pens, to be let loose later into the huge hunting preserves, which were now lost to farming and made inaccessible. As their rights were curtailed, the rural population not engaged in rearing pheasants, breeding gun dogs, as gamekeepers or beaters or in any other capacity connected with shooting, were forced to quit the places where they had lived for generations. As a consequence, in the early years of the twentieth century, at Hollesley Bay, just inland from the coast, a labour colony later known as Colonial College was established, from which those for whom there was no future went out to New Zealand or Australia after a given time. The Hollesley Bay premises are now a borstal, and young offenders can be seen at work in the fields nearby, always in groups and wearing luminous orange jackets. The pheasant craze was at its height in the decades before the First World War, when Sudbourne Hall alone employed two dozen gamekeepers, and a tailor for the sole purpose of keeping their livery in trim. There were times when six thousand pheasants were gunned down in a single day, not to mention the other fowl, hares and rabbits. The staggering scores were punctiliously recorded in the game books of the rivalling estates. One of the foremost shooting domains in the Sandlings was Bawdsey, with more than eight thousand acres on the north bank of the Deben. In the early 1880s, Sir Cuthbert Quilter, a business baron who had risen from the lower classes, had a family

  seat built on a prominent site by the river estuary, reminiscent both of an Elizabethan mansion and of a maharajah's palace. Erecting this architectural marvel was a demonstration for Quilter of the justice of his claim to status, a demonstration quite as unyielding as the choice of his heraldic motto, plutôt mourir que changer, which refuted all bourgeois compromise. At that time, the craving for power in men of his kind was at its most acute. From where they stood there seemed no reason why things should not go on in this vein forever, from one spectacular success to the next. It was no coincidence that the German Empress was taking a convalescent holiday across the river in Felixstowe, which had become a desirable resort in recent years. For weeks, the royal yacht Hohenzollern lay at anchor there, a visible token of the possibilities now open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Under the patronage of their imperial majesties, the North Sea coast might become one great health resort for the upper classes, equipped with all the amenities of modern life. Everywhere, hotels mushroomed from the barren land. Promenades and bathing facilities were established, and piers grew out

  into the sea. Even in the most abandoned spot in the entire region, Shingle Street, which now consists of just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages and where I have never encountered a single human being, a spa centre by the grandiose name of German Ocean Mansions designed for two hundred guests was built at the time, if one can believe the records, and staffed with personnel who were recruited from germany. Today there is no more trace of it. Indeed, there seems to have been all manner of ties across the North Sea between the British and German Empires at that period, ties that were expressed first and foremost in the colossal manifestations of bad taste of those who wanted a place in the sun no matter at what cost. Cuthbert Quilter's Anglo-Indian fairy-tale palace in the dunes would doubtless have appealed to the German Kaiser's artistic sensibility, since he had a pronounced penchant for any kind of extravagance. Likewise one can picture Quilter, who added another tower to his beachfront castle for every million he added to his fortune, as a guest abord the Hohenzollern. One imagines him, say, together with gentlemen from the Admiralty who had also been invited, at the gymnastic exercises which preceded Sunday service at sea. What daring plans might not a man of Quilter's ilk have evolved, egged on by a likeminded man such as Kaiser Wilhelm—envisaging an open-air paradise extending from Felixstowe via Norderney to Sylt, to keep the nations fit; or the foundation of a new North Sea civilization, if not indeed an Anglo-German global alliance, symbolized by a state cathedral, visible far and wide across the waves, on the island of Heligoland. In reality, of course, history took a quite different turn, for, whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner. War was declared, the German hotel employees were sent back home, there were no more summer visitors, and one morning a zeppelin like an airborne whale appeared over the coast, while across the Channel train after train with troops and equipment rolled to the front, whole tracts of land were ploughed up by mortar fire, and the death strip between the front lines was strewn with phosphorescent corpses. The German kaiser lost his Empire, and the world of Cuthbert Quilter too went into a gradual decline. His means, which had once seemed inexhaustible, dwindled to such an extent that maintaining the estate no longer made any sense. Raymond Quilter, who inherited Bawdsey, entertained the holidaymakers at Felixstowe, who were now of a somewhat less superior breed, with sensational parachute jumps onto the beach. In 1936 he was obliged to sell Bawdsey Manor to the nation. THe proceeds were sufficient to cover his tax liabilities and to finance his passion for flying, which meant more to him than anything else. Having surrendered the family property, he moved into the former chauffeur's quarters, but would still stay at the Dorchester when in London. As a token of the special esteem in which he was held there, the Quilter standard, a golden pheasant on a black ground, was hoisted alongside the Union Jack whenever he arrived. He was accorded this rare privilege by the establishment's reserved staff because of the reputation for chivalry he had enjoyed ever since he had parted, without regret, from the estates his great-uncle had acquired, since which time, apart from a modest amount of independent capital, he had owned nothing but his aeroplane and a runway in an isolated field.

  In the years following the First World War, countless estates were broken up in the same way as Quilter's Bawdsey. The manor houses were either left to fall down or used for other purposes, as boys' boarding schools, approved schools, insane asylums, old people's homes, or reception camps for refugees from the Third Reich. Bawdsey Manor itself was for a long time the domicile and research centre of the team under Robert Watson-Watt that developed radar, which now spreads its invisible net through out the entire airspace. To this day, the area between Woodbridge and the sea remains full of military installations. Time and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes barracks, gateways and fenced-off areas where, behind thin plantations
of Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hanars and grass-covered bunkers, the weapons with which, if an emergency should arise, whole countries and continents can be transformed into smoking heaps of stone and ash in no time. Not far from Orford, and already tired from my long walk, this notion took possession of me when I was hit by a sandstorm. I was approaching the eastern fringe of Rendlesham Forest, which covers several square miles and was for the most part reduced to broken and splintered timber in the terrible hurricane of the 16th of October 1987. Suddenly, in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened and a wind came up,

  blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours disappeared in the greyish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in from the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out, through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short while ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken. When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down. —I walked the rest of the way in a daze. All I remember is that my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and that I felt as if I were walking on the spot. When at last I reached Orford, I climbed to the top of the castle keep, from where there is a view over the houses of the town, the green gardens and pallid fenlands, and the coastline to north and south, lost in the shimmering distance. Orford Castle was completed in 1165