Peter Vansittart chose to open his memoirs with the following passage:
"1923. I was three.
A White Horse lay bare and solitary, cut into a hillside. It changes
whenever I return to it, like a book, painting, friend, but remains fixed in my imagination, a
reminder of the multiple transformations that enthuse life. All is provisional. Memory
contracts and enlarges as if in a dream that does not cease in the morning".
It is a reminder of the process by which landscapes persist in the memory alongside
the countless
personal secrets that helped to awaken us as children. Reflecting on life at the start of his sixth
decade, Vansittart’s ‘Horse’ of the tribal Celts,
which marked their ownership of the Wiltshire
Downs, had always existed parallel with his life without breathing or eating. In days of shadow and
sun, it made the landscape move mysteriously, and was more real to him than an actual white
horse assiduously cropping the pastures. He reflected on the power of the notional layers of
landscape that launched his childhood as a ballad, beginning with the White Horse, reaching ever
outwards to eventually reach the mythical landscape of Troy.
It is commonplace that landscapes produce persistent images of a headless rider, the
rustle of
trees on a windless day and giants, and silver ponds, where light sharpened by reed and bullrush,
wavers around children forever stooping for sticklebacks, tadpoles, and minnows. Water provokes
imagination, as it does the world over, particularly the sea’s
edge, moody and restless, gnawing at
a soft coast.
At a county level notional landscapes are more than the sum of their physical and
biological layers.
Each exists in the mind with its dialect and turns of speech —
'calm as a clock', 'strong enough to
trot a mouse', 'chanceways', 'eel-babby' with flavours of sky, tree, soil, its architecture, old tales,
jokes and harbours; traditions, cricket teams and, until mechanization, its particular harvest
stocks.
However, miniature frontiers to landscapes are everywhere. They entail changes in
the texture of
the air, as the blind must feel by a brief change of temperature that tells them they are passing a
pillar box or an open door. And within each subdivision of the land are further and mysterious
worlds, of tramps and gypsies with their secret signs, marks, lore, their ghosts and legends; lands
of shifting boundaries, other angles of perception, tied very loosely to plain geography.
We therefore brood over the landscapes of the old gardens of childhood: a churchyard
dark with
yews, a decaying wall, sunswept roses, the butterflies above petunias. Old griefs return to old
landscapes, instances of bad behaviour, of life gone wrong and loves with forgotten names. Remote
corners of rural England knew their own versions of bloody games of shin-kicking and mass-
football, cock-fights, and rat- catching.
Ipswich museum exhibits the swivel-guns and iron traps, used to maim poachers. Gallows
Hill so
often balanced Mill Lane, and April fields lie against an ever-present shadowy backcloth of pitiless
game- laws, wrongs of enclosures, tithes that burdened ‘Primrose
Meadow’, atrocious hedge-births
and ancient horrors. There are still metal plates on bridges stating that damage would entail seven
years transportation. The 1381 Suffolk peasants lynched Lord Chancellor Cavendish at Lakenheath.
Some miles away is the edge of Breckland, a lonely, sometimes eerie region; an ancient Celtic
forest and flint-knappers' land, which long sheltered outcast communities too violent for the
authorities to resist. In the Breckland public houses, until about 1950, it was the custom to offer
any stranger a drink out of your mug. If he refused, as many American airmen did, he was forced
outside to redeem the insult in a fight.' Here, insists local tradition, originated the legend of the
Babes in the Wood and, possibly somewhere near, were the palace and grave of Boudicca, 'the
Victorious', the Celtic, Icenic warrior. At the other end of the county is Hadleigh, where the Danish
king, Guthrum, is said to be buried, commemorated in urban Guthrum Street. At the treaty in 878,
East Anglia passed to his rule, after he had accepted baptism from his old enemy Alfred the Great,
who became his godfather.
One Suffolk chronicler, Julian Tennyson, mentions the Aldeburgh fisherman, Joseph
'Posh'
Fletcher, though barely literate, reciting his verses to Edward FitzGerald.
Man that's born of woman;
Has very little time to
live;
He comes up like a foremast
top-sail;
And down like a flying
jib.
Did Fitzgerald of Boulge respond with the second verse of his ‘Rubaiyat’?
Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky,
I heard a Voice within
the Tavern Cry,
"Awake my Little
ones and fill the Cup
Before Life’s
Liquor in its Cup be dry."
Incest may still survive on remoter East Anglian farms and hamlets. Maria Marten was
murdered in
the Red Barn by a local squire, the crime betrayed by her spectral voice, and recorded on
parchment bound, after his execution, with his own skin. In her book on East Anglian folklore, Enid
Porter mentions children dragged through brambles at sunrise against whooping-cough, and
hanged by their hands to cure nose-bleeds. Live spiders were swallowed against rheumatism, and
late nineteenth-century builders still mixed animal blood with mortar, for a new foundation.
The dead have a reputation for remaining active. At Polstead ('Place of Pools') a
ghostly rector
drives a headless horse, and in 1980, a new rector and his young family were ejected by a
poltergeist. His successor at the Old Rectory confirmed a real though harmless presence.
Polstead Church, twelfth-century, some distance from the village but deferentially close to the Big
House, has a parish register containing some Mayflower names. A Hanoverian black drummer-boy
haunts Blythburgh. A pub at Bildeston, where a seventeenth-century magnate minted his own coin,
is known for its ghosts: two Victorian children, a grey woman, a man who stands at the bar in a
trilby. An Archdeacon of Sudbury is seen headless at Icklingham, on the site of his own murder.
Suffolk has particular spectres: the donkey-headed, velvet- skinned Shock, visible only to those
born at 4, 8, or 12 o'clock; and the white, gleaming monster named ‘Galley
Trot’.
Then there is the townscape of Lavenham, all black beams and white plaster, where
once the
Flemish weavers brought their 'mystery' and commissioned their sexually explicit murals. The wool
dealer, Thomas Spring, financed the great perpendicular church. Arthur Mee, scourge of pre-war
childhoods, wrote of this church:
'On the pier caps of the
six bays of the nave are Tudor flowers and crowns of East Anglian
kings . . . above, a gallery of twenty- eight standing figures, monks, pilgrims, saints, holds
up the huge beam of the roof, shaped from single oak trees.'
This is an understatement. The visitor may enter a past festooned with moon-language
and arcane
symbolism of feudal crests, carved leaves, and the great medieval menagerie of winged lions,
dragons, tailed jesters, wild acrobats, alarmed children, and tree climbers. The choir sports the
misere carvings of a peasant carrying a pig, a woman with animal head instead of legs, her man
with its tail, a camel rider, a woman fiddler aped or jeered at by a cripple playing the bellows with
his crutches, a stork and spoonbill tugging at a fellow's hair. Outside, old walls display the mitred
fleur de lys of St Blaise, patron of wool- combers and healer of sore throats; and the shields, boars,
mullets (five-pointed stars) of the manorial lords, de Vere, once rivals of the Clarences,
Cavendishes, Bigods, and de la Poles. More words and skills, now becoming esoteric, revive at the
Guildhall: 'pargetted'', 'spandrill', 'ribbon-carved'.
History provides the incessant chatter of landscapes. Chelsworth was granted a charter
in 962, by
King Edgar. In Holy Suffolk dwelt Mrs Girling, founder of the Shakers; she guaranteed them
immortality, which hitherto, she explained, had been possessed by herself alone, though her death
at fifty-nine may suggest error.
Julian Tennyson tells of George Borrow, striding through Oulton. For an hour on end
he would
fascinate a dinner party with some wild and wonderful tale of romance; ten minutes later he would
insult his hostess to her face and march storming out of the room, to walk like a madman to some
pub a dozen miles away, there to soothe his anger with three pints of ale. Footmen quaked at his
mighty knock, maids trembled as they thrust a dish before him. No one could foresee his next
move — a thunderous laugh, a bellow of disgust, a glare of silent
and appalling fury.
Stories follow stories; at Brandeston, Matthew Hopkins, seventeenth-century Witchfinder
General,
tortured the old parson, John Lowes, into confessing diabolism, then, before hanging him, forced
him to read his own burial service.
A strange tale was told of Bloody Mary, at Framlingham Castle before her accession,
bearing a
child, half animal, which she smashed to death. One of the most alluring medieval Suffolk tales is
from Woolpit, where harvesters discovered the Green Children, boy and girl, who emerged from
beneath the earth, speaking an unknown language and declaring that they were from the twilight
land of St Martin, and had been attracted to the brighter world by the bells of Bury St Edmunds.
In our walks through fields and lanes we cannot help but be silent detectives, reconstructing
bodies
from footprints. Walks produce small treasure; the doubloons and pieces-of-eight now transmuted
to small brilliant insets of life.
At the seasides of Aldeburgh, Bawdsey, Orford Ness, Dunwich, the waves do their best
to live up
to what Virginia Woolf wrote of them. Dunwich, long broken, all of it now under the sea, once
supplied 60,000 herrings a year to the Saxon kings. Old prints show a cottage, crooked as if
wounded, was perched on Dunwich cliff, almost the last of a great medieval town, soon to topple
and join those long at one with rock and fish and tide.
In Suffolk, the traveller is almost submerged by Celts and Romans, Danes and Saxons,
Bretons,
Flemings and Dutch who have scattered their identities far and wide. A windbreak may be claimed
as the oldest human structure in Britain, older than dolmen, long barrow, coiled terrace and stone
circle. Ilia's Place, now Monks Eleigh, from a feudal connection with medieval Canterbury, was
earlier owned by the giant Saxon hero, Brynoth, described in The Battle of Maldon:
Thoughts should be braver,
hearts bolder,
Courage the keener, as
our strength dwindles.
Here lies our leader,
all hacked down,
Hero in dust. Long may
he wail,
That man who now thinks
of fleeing the battle.
