A Holiday and an Enchantment

I managed to pinch a few days to run away to sea this week.

We set off on Sunday evening, roaring down the A12 into Suffolk. Aldeburgh was our destination. Jason and I get wild enthusiasms for certain places from time to time. We spent several years returning to Porthmadog in North Wales when the children were small. A few years ago we had a fierce love affair with Hay on Wye and now we are enamoured of Aldeburgh.

When I was small, my parents discovered Southwold, further along the coast. This was in the Eighties when the pier was still in ruins and the town was a thing of faded grandeur. The huge houses on the front looked like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake and the dray horses from Adnam’s brewery clopped about the streets as if the Twentieth Century was a thing to look forward to rather than be a part of. We would stay at old fashioned b&b’s, replete with candlewick bedspreads and strict instructions to stay away all day between breakfast and dinner.

Eventually we progressed to renting houses. The one my parents loved most and which they returned to again and again, long after my brother and I were grown up, was The Blue House, a wooden shack out by the harbour. You walked out a set of French doors, through the garden gate, straight onto the beach and into the sea. It was a house that felt more Scandinavian than English. There was a big, open plan living space with a huge, enamel tiled, pot bellied stove in the middle. Window seats and mismatched chairs, piles of books and newspapers drifting like the dunes outside. It was shabby chic before the term referred to chalky paints and faux French furniture.

All summer we trekked in and out from the beach, barefoot and sandy, the wooden floors forever crunching underfoot. Crabbing lines spooled in buckets by the back door, waiting for trips to the harbour. Swimming costumes draped about the back garden, which was only distinguishable from the dunes by virtue of a wall and a gate.

When my children were small I took them for their first English seaside holidays to Southwold. It became a rite of passage.

And then I fell out of love with Suffolk for a long time. Perhaps there were too many memories. It began to feel like a place where I was forever running into my past.

Last year, Jason and I wanted a winter break for a few days. We craved windswept beaches, fierce seas and a bit of wildness. East Anglia fit the bill nicely and rather than the now, stylish delights of Southwold, we decided Aldeburgh would be an interesting place to stay. This has been our third visit.

The holidays we take here could not be more different than the holidays of my childhood and parenting days. It’s not just that I can sleep whenever I want, or read great swathes of my book uninterrupted by man or beast. Or that I can eat whatever I want, wherever I want, whenever I want. All of which is splendid and not to be sniffed at.

It’s that I spend hours, wandering up and down the beach, in the rain, or a howling gale or in the dark. I sit on benches and watch the breakers rolling in and listen to the satisfying churn and hiss of the pebbles in the waves. It’s the joy of doing nothing in an entirely satisfying way. I love to watch the huge skies pouring into the sea at the horizon. The wide, open spaces of the marshes and common land that go on and on. The estuaries, threaded with rivers and tributaries that split and split again, fracturing the land until everything is a patchwork of sky and land and water and sometimes you can’t tell one from the other.

It is so easy to feel small in these places. Standing on the beach, watching the shingle curl to Orford Ness, the land whittles to a sliver of a moony curve. It’s nothing more than a spit, dwindling into water and I perch on it with the whole vast arc of the sky above me. Existence is stretched thin in places like these. A jab of your finger could tear the air and let a new reality shimmer into the space in front of you, as ethereal as a soap bubble and just as easily broken.

I walked to see Maggi Hambling’s Scallop sculpture one afternoon. On the beach between Aldeburgh and Thorpeness, it is a tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten, who lived nearby. Cut into the top is a line from Peter Grimes’ ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned.’ It is a piece that resonates with something deep inside me. I’m not a fan of Britten so I don’t come to it for him. It’s altogether more personal for me. It’s a talisman. A thing of power.

We visited Snape Maltings yesterday afternoon, which is also a place associated with Britten. There are several sculptures in the grounds, one of which is Barbara Hepworth’s Family of Man, which sits on high ground, looking out across the reed beds that stretch away into the far distance. The river Alde cuts down one side, snaking narrow fingers of water through the reeds. Invisible birds crash and burrow through the shivering grasses. The sun was sinking as we arrived and bands of pink streaked the sky, shimmering down into the gold rustle of the reeds. The figures were sentinels, marking the space between worlds. I was so moved by them.

I have been thinking about these sculptures and others I love; Anthony Gormley’s figures at Another Place, and of course, Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage at Dungeness. They are more than just art to me. They are way markers to different spaces in which the normal rules don’t apply. They allow you, for as long as you can stand or spare, the opportunity to glance into something other, a new thought, a different mind, a possibility, a chance.

To me, they are a spell.