Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  John brews up tea on a gas stove, and we sit round a table flicking through some of the books on the shelf, which include Scolt Head House by J. A. Steer, published the same year as the hut was built. There’s a fading photo on the wall of a group of naturalists who came here in the late 1920s. John says the little boy in shorts squatting at the front of the group was later killed in the war. Two ancient conical red fire extinguishers sit, half rusted, in a corner. Their brass plungers have never been used, and probably wouldn’t work by now anyway. The brick fireplace and flint chimney, an elegant, tapering cone, both have the stamp of the Arts and Crafts movement, of Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. So do the patterned bricks and flints in the yard before the hut, and the pair of slender, weathered, carved oak pillars that support the porch roof.

  Leading off the main room, with its elevated views inland over the marsh to flint churches and glittering creeks, are three pine doors, dark stained, with artificial grain stippled in. We open them and go exploring. All three lead to narrow bedrooms like cabins, or monks’ cells, with just a minimal bed or bunk and a mattress barely wide enough to balance on. They are made up with the pale-blue blankets and cellular coverlets I remember from visits to aunts in the 1950s.

  The biggest, or least tiny, of the bedrooms contains a double bunk and a single bed. They’re more like elongated cots, and turning over in one’s sleep might be hazardous. Each of the other two cells has a single bed. The one I choose looks out west along the north shore of the island towards Hunstanton and the Wash. On a clear day, you can see all the way to Skegness, if that is your choice. The greyness of the sea and the narrowness of the beds give the hut a distinctly bachelor, not to say monkish, atmosphere. But every inch inside is boarded with graceful tanned and seasoned pine, whose resin has somehow pickled it into a lovely amber that accentuates the knots and emphasizes the grain. I think the look and aroma of the pine improves the hut’s potential for cosiness no end, and even begin to fantasize about long winter nights curled up under the blue blankets with a book, until I remember curling up is out of the question.

  John Brown says he thinks the hut feels spooky; somehow haunted, and not an easy, comfortable place to be. Adam, Harry and I take a heartier, more down-to-earth approach and say it’s just a bit damp and needs a good airing. ‘Light a fire in here,’ we say, ‘and dry out those blankets and sponge-rubber mattresses. Then cook some bacon and eggs, or sardines on a spade in the embers, open a bottle of whisky, and you’ll soon feel differently about the place.’

  With Professor Steers’s book on the island spread out on the table, and more tea, we are already beginning to steam up the windows and generally settle in to the hut. The book contains a remarkable series of line drawings demonstrating how the island has shifted its shape and position over the years. A fixed line drawn east–west from A to B kept on intersecting different parts of the restless island from year to year in response to the longshore drift and other currents, freighted with pebbles, tugging at the island this way and that. Adam says this is just the kind of book he would like to write: the product of months and months of staying in the same place, concentrating on the details of its geology and natural history, doing some proper research into a phenomenon such as the life of this island. I think this is just the sort of hut I would like to inhabit for a spell, with a good stack of dry firewood and the North Sea raging outside across the dunes.

  Outside again in the fine, drizzling rain, we climb to the highest point on the island just behind the hut and gaze down over the marshes and the long beach across the sea to the northern horizon the pink-footed geese have so recently crossed in their migration. Descending to the beach, we follow it to a place where a crashed and long-buried Lancaster bomber has recently begun to reappear, washed out by the eroding sea. Harry finds part of a gun turret. I kick away the sand and reveal the cellular structure of a wing. Adam follows it, scraping away more sand, and finds a copper cable encrusted with green and blue leading to a wing-tip light. We find we are standing on a buried fuel tank. I think of the dead pilot and crew, and feel a curious Lord of the Flies shiver about our discovery. At the far northern end of the beach we come across a dead fulmar and marvel at the size and ferocity of its beak.

  We now adjourn to the other warden’s hut on the island, where Neil, whose job it is to watch over the island, lives from May until October, keeping an eye on the terns that nest in the shingle beach. Hardly a soul comes here, even on the warmest summer days, so Neil’s life is not a hard one. He has just left to winter in India, migrating every year to watch birds in his favourite haunts. This is a much smaller, simpler wooden hut with only a bedroom and a living space. John tidies it and brews more tea. Neil collects rainwater off the roof in a water butt, and solar panels provide power for lights, TV and radio. He hardly ever leaves the island all summer, depending on John to bring over supplies from the mainland when he brings over the boat to go cockling at low tide. So there is always shellfish too. This hut has an altogether different, lived-in feeling. It is relatively dry and full of odds and ends that suggest a less Spartan way of life: a small TV, a double bed, even a fridge.

  The tide is dropping dramatically and we have to slide the boat down over the mud into the ebbing channel. With just enough depth to get over the sandbar, we reach open water and make for the Staithe.

  Back home at North Creake, Harry cooked us all a huge breakfast and declared that we must visit John Lorrimer, the original discoverer in 1998 of the controversial ‘Seahenge’ – a vast ancient wood circle on the inter-tidal zone of Holme beach.

  Further south, at Aldeburgh, I go down to the black-tarred pine fishermen’s huts on the beach to buy fish and find a living counterpart to the trees at Holme. On a radio somewhere inside a voice gives out the weather forecast and wishes everyone good fishing. I buy a pound of sprats to cook on a shovel in the fire later on. The fisherman, his tattooed forearms silver with fish scales, wraps them in newspaper. I walk north up the beach towards Thorpeness and Maggie Hambling’s controversially sited giant bronze oyster shell. ‘Hear those voices that will not be drowned,’ she has written in bronze across the shell, quoting from Peter Grimes. Sure enough, quite a few voices have been raised in Aldeburgh against the siting of Hambling’s sculpture in so commanding a position, and will not be drowned.

  In the dunes behind the big shell there’s an unobtrusive natural memorial to all the drowned fishermen of this coast, just keeping its head above the shingle, surviving against all odds. In its quiet way, it is more spectacular than The Oyster. It is an apple tree, growing miraculously out of the barren-looking pebbles in a low crown only three to four feet high but seven yards in diameter and thirty in circumference. The tree is something of an iceberg: most of it is invisible, overwhelmed by the invading dunes. It is only the topmost branches you see in leaf.

  I keep puzzling about that tree, buried up to its neck in the shingle beach like a daddy. It can’t quite see the sea. If it grew another ten feet, it could peep over the top of the long ridge of shingle that sweeps from Aldeburgh to Thorpeness. It grows in the shelter of a bunker, a hollow in the dunes of shingle and sand that protects it from the winds of the Ural Mountains that whip across the muddy North Sea. The sheer withering intensity of the wind must prune the budding twigs relentlessly, so the tree takes the one course of survival open to it: it creeps ever outwards, crouching low and close to the shingle, creating a pincushion of densely branched fruiting spurs. I have met people gathering apples from it in summer, a little too early and too green, so as to beat the competition and ripen them in the fruit bowl. I want to pick an apple to identify but am too late, beaten by the eager Aldeburgh scrumpers. Outside the seasons of its blossom and fruit, most people would pass by the tree, mistaking it for a scrubby goat willow like those on the marsh that backs the dunes. George Crabbe used to go there and botanize, and lick the wounds inflicted by the scornful, bullying fishermen of Aldeburgh, who, having known him as a boy, scrubbing out barrels in the town, des
pised him, first as a doctor and later as their curate. He seriously thought about throwing himself in the marsh, but decided instead to go to London, where he received the generous patronage of Edmund Burke and began to make his way in life.

  No doubt the salt spray of winter gales must provide the tree with an anti-fungal dusting to help keep it healthy. A hundred yards inland, looking over the marshes just the other side of the road to Thorpeness, is the derelict cottage whose orchard, once much further inland, may originally have contained this tree. As the North Sea has eroded more and more of this coast, it has edged the shingle bank further and further inland, burying the orchard and stifling all the trees but this one. Somewhere down below, where the shingle sits on the chalk, the roots are finding fresh water, perhaps from a spring. It must count as one of the hardiest apple trees in Britain, and grafts should be propagated. And even if Crabbe lived too long ago to have known this particular tree, he must surely have known the orchard. The Crabbe Apple deserves official recognition by the town.

  Back at Holme, where this part of the East Anglian coast seems always to have been a numinous other-world, half in and half out of the North Sea. You still find trees under the sea, and their hulks are washed up in storms. Eight thousand years ago a great forest stretched all the way from here to Holland and Germany. Even from inside a car, a week later, approaching it feels like a pilgrimage. It is the threshold of big skies and intense reflected light as well as water: when you eventually stand on the beach facing north, there is nothing but sea and ice all the way to the North Pole.

  John Lorrimer had caused an archaeological sensation when he at last persuaded the county archaeologists to come and look at the circle of oak timbers surrounding the up-ended two-ton stump of an oak he had first noticed as he walked on Holme beach at low tide on 17 August 1998. The timbers were emerging from the peat beds created by an ancient wood, now gradually exposed by the sea’s erosion. They appeared very tentatively at first, like men peering over the rim of a trench after a gunfight. Twelve months earlier, John had found an exquisite Bronze Age axe-head and several bronze buttons at the same spot and felt a strong hunch there was something very special about this particular patch of the enormous beach. Yet it took him over a year to convince anyone that the wooden ring that began to seize his imagination as it took more and more shape from tide to tide was anything other than the wishful thinking of an amateur archaeologist.

  John and I drive up to Holme through heavy rain, bumping along the track behind the sand dunes to the nature reserve, past thorns bent nearly horizontal by the on-shore wind. We park by the warden’s house and climb into full waterproof kit before venturing on to the beach along a path that winds through a squat forest of buckthorn. The savagery of the tides here has all but washed away some recent breakwaters built of coppiced hazel and woven hurdles, a brave attempt to defend the retreating dunes.

  The receding tide is already revealing banks of peat and rows of posts standing up a foot out of the mud; they run a hundred yards or more in great V-shapes to form the open mouths of funnels facing inland. These were Saxon fish-traps that would catch the shoals as they swam out with the tide. We can even make out delicate fragments of the wattle of hazel that was woven between the posts, which had the orange glow of alder.

  Holme beach is so littered with shrapnel from the wartime gunnery range, miscellaneous wrecks, and the crashed hulks of Heinkels and Hurricanes that metal detectors are quite useless, even dangerous. The only way to find things is to walk the vast beach over and over again, seeing what each new tide reveals.

  Passing close to Grime’s Graves, the Peddars Way would have been a natural route to take if you were a trader or pedlar carrying knapped flint tools to the coast. As a pilgrimage way, it is one of our English answers to the rather hillier route across southern France and Spain to Santiago de Compostela. I still can’t help feeling like a pilgrim whenever I go up to the luminous Norfolk coast, even by car.

  Mary Newcomb

  Every now and again if you’re lucky, exploring a wood, sitting by a river or looking out of a train, you may experience what a friend of mine calls ‘a Mary moment’. Such minor epiphanies, often apparently unremarkable in themselves, will lodge in your memory and may be recalled in their essentials long afterwards. They are the distinctive subjects of the Suffolk painter Mary Newcomb: a flock of goldfinches dispersing, a magpie flying up from a wet road, a football match seen through a hole in an oak leaf eaten by a caterpillar. These are all actual titles of paintings by Mary Newcomb. Such poetical vignettes are essential to the particular effect of these deceptively modest pictures.

  Mary Newcomb belongs firmly in the greenwood tradition, peering unnoticed from behind leaves like the Green Man at things that are very often half hidden themselves. In the Newcomb world, people and plants sometimes surreally hybridize, as in Girl at the Garden Centre in the Rain, in which a woman, mostly hidden beneath an outsized green-and-black striped umbrella, has grown into an umbellifer. And in Lady with a Bunch of Sweet Williams, a woman standing in an exuberantly flowering meadow, hidden from the waist up by her giant posy, seems to have burst into full bloom in sympathy. Such chameleon impulses in many of the paintings come close to a visual expression of Andrew Marvell’s lines in ‘The Garden’: ‘Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade’. They have a notable affinity with poetry. Mary is an admirer of John Clare, whose words ‘I found my poems in the fields and only wrote down what I saw’ describe very well how she paints, and the connections she notices between, say, pylons and cobwebs, or butterflies and bits of torn paper. Indeed, the notes in her diaries are very often written without punctuation in a style that strongly suggests that of Clare as well as the stream of consciousness she wants to express.

  I appreciate Mary’s pictures in a way that must be informed and biased by my affection for the part of the world where we have both lived through the poignant closing years of what might be called the old rural Suffolk: the northern stretch of the county broadly defined by the valley of the River Waveney. In her evocation of the natural, mainly rural life of Suffolk, Mary Newcomb is comparable with two other artists of the borderlands, John Nash and Ronald Blythe, whose work is based on their relationship with the Stour Valley along the southern margins of the county. The setting of some of Mary’s work in Ronald Blythe’s book Borderland seems an entirely natural collaboration. She delights in simple, vernacular structures or machines: rowing boats, bicycles, weather-vanes, telegraph poles, bird boxes, lighthouses, windmills, church towers. ‘They serve a purpose. They have a point,’ she writes in her diary. She also loves to travel, in the old, unhurried way on trains, steamers or on foot, and records her excursions in paint.

  When Mary and Godfrey first came to Suffolk, they lived at Needham so close to the Waveney that one night two dog otters fought each other right under their window. ‘They were on their back legs, teeth in each other’s necks, and balanced by their tails,’ Mary wrote to me in a letter. ‘In the morning I saw their bloody trails in the dew on the marsh, going in different directions.’ They farmed in a small way along a stretch of river bank with goats, hens and cows. Mary would get up early and paint from five until seven and then do farm work for the rest of the day, scrubbing eggs clean with cold water or milking goats. Now they had moved to Peasenhall, a few miles inland from Walberswick, where they also lived for a while, and I have driven over with the East Anglian painter Jayne Ivimey, an old friend of Mary and Godfrey, for tea.

  The house is at one end of the village, with a walled garden and a homemade wooden aeroplane on a pole as a weather vane. The first thing that strikes you about Mary is the calm depth and steadiness of her clear blue eyes. She walks and stands stoutly, with definite steps and great certainty about everything she does, looking remarkably young for a woman in her eightieth year. She wears her rich dark-brown hair, which has never turned grey, neatly cropped. Mary Newcomb bears the air of someone who has worked hard, and to some purpose, al
l her life. Everything about the house suffuses it with a lively spirit of curiosity and inquiry. There is something of or by Mary in every room of the house except Godfrey’s, which houses his beloved Philip Suttons. Godfrey, says Jayne, is a man of sudden strong enthusiasms: the saxophone, the penny whistle, the spinning wheel.

  Mary has been painting rooks. ‘A Brooding Rook in its Heaven’ is the working title of her new work in progress. On the floor beside the canvas are half a dozen of the birds drawn in charcoal on sheets of paper, and on the wall is another one, standing confidently, bald beak raised aloft, about to caw. The poetical titles always come first. They are like haiku. And there is something Japanese about the clarity and profound simplicity of Mary’s work. This has not come about through any deliberate study of such things. Mary has simply arrived quite independently at similar conclusions through her own original route. Every so often, as we have our tea, a live inhabitant of the rookery beside her garden comes down and pecks about on the lawn.