My father was friends with a remarkable woman called Francesca Wilson, who, besides being one of the first women to graduate from Cambridge University, worked at the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Francesca had a ramshackle cottage in Walberswick, a village on the Suffolk coast where we went for holidays when I was a child and which had a reputation for being mildly raffish and bohemian dating back to the interwar period. Other early adopters included members of the extended Freud family, and Eric Blair’s parents settled for retirement in adjoining Southwold, which is why the writer took his nom de plume from the nearby River Orwell.
This part of the Suffolk coast is a low-lying landscape of sandy heathland and reedy marshes. Along the shingly shore from Walberswick you reach the remains of Dunwich, a large port in the medieval period, that long since slid beneath the erosive waves. And beyond, the great greige concrete block of the Sizewell nuclear power station. When my first marriage broke up in the early 1990s, I went back to live near Sizewell, looking for the bucolical and the peace to write, but also in search of the lost times of the late 1960s and early 70s, when I had come to a certain kind of consciousness in these weird environs.
I say weird, because Creek Cottage – as Francesca’s establishment was known – came complete with its own hermit: an architect who’d had a nervous breakdown and read me passages from the Diamond Sutra over green tea. Weird, also, because if you walked along the creek from the cottage, after you’d passed the kids crab fishing with strings baited with bacon, you might well sight a coypu or two – strange giant South American rodents that had escaped from captivity and found a home in the marshes. And weird because the social ecology of Walberswick – when I look back at it now – seems redolent of those permissive times, when boundaries of all sorts were being broken willy-nilly.
The inconceivably long and sunny days I spent running wild with other holidaying kids merged, subtly, with the inconceivably long and sunny days I spent dropping acid with hippies on permanent vacation. At some point, I stopped going to Walberswick with my parents – instead, I hitchhiked up the A12 from London, and camped on the beach by myself. Here I met Bob, an ex-RAF man, grown exceedingly hairy, who taught me how to shoot a rabbit with a .22 airgun, gut it, and jug it, together with beach-combed samphire grass in an old biscuit tin buried beneath a beach fire. After we’d eaten the rabbit stew, we’d snaffle down acid blotters and look up at the crystal of the darkening empyrean, while Bob acted as our guide, taking our astral bodies on walks through the village.
Returning 25 years later, Walberswick’s air of raffish bohemianism had given way to Boden-catalogue embourgeoisification. WG Sebald’s anonymous alter ego passes this way in The Rings of Saturn, and, confronted with the monstrous solecism of a new gastro pub, I felt just as disembodied. If only Bob had still been there, to talk me down.
- Phone by Will Self (Viking, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.64, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
