It's the sort of thing that afflicts the young: the child on an overnight school trip, the teenager backpacking abroad. You shouldn't feel longing for somewhere else, somewhere you haven't lived properly since you grew up. By the time you get to fifty-something, you should be above all that. This is my home now, my house in Wiltshire, large and rambling and untidy, which will probably hold the same place in the affections of my own children as the place where I grew up does in mine. I'm very fond of this village, the boys have lived in it almost all their lives, we have many friends here, I know its landscape and history intimately. I love the downs, the huge views that you could never get in Suffolk. It's wonderful to stand on top of Roundway and see the Priddy Mast, on the Mendips thirty miles away, or King Alfred's Tower above Stourhead, nearly into Dorset. On a clear day four counties are within sight. And there are no less than three World Heritage sites (Avebury, Bath and Stonehenge) within half an hour's drive.
And yet ... and yet ... I still sometimes dream of the Buck House, so called because it was originally an outhouse in the park where deer carcasses were butchered and hung, before my parents converted it as newly-weds. Just the other night, I washed the windows and tidied the garden of a house I haven't gone near for over a year, and woke feeling sad and nostalgic. Partly, I think, it has to do with the sea. We lived within sight of the Orwell estuary, a mile-wide, ten mile long inlet of water and mud that ends at Ipswich, and if you stood on one of the high points of the park (this is before the trees grew up) you could see the thin grey horizontal line that was the North Sea, out beyond the river mouth. On foggy winter mornings I remember lying in bed and listening to the Cork Lightship, snoring out on the sandbanks off Felixstowe like a vast slumbering animal. 'Uuuur-uh! Uuuur-uh!' When I was about six or seven, my grandmother moved back to Aldeburgh, where she had spent much of her married life, and lived in an old people's home, run by a relative, right on the sea front. We visited her every week for many years, so the ridged pebbles and grey, forbidding waves of Aldeburgh beach was the sea I knew best. We swam in it in the summer (I remember being slammed face down on the pebbles one rough day), hunted vainly for amber and cornelians, and resented the fact that there was no sand. Later, when we were older, Mum used to drop my sister and me off at Thorpeness Meare, a mile up the coast. This is a wonderful place, a huge boating lake like an inland sea, with islands, reeds, wildlife and places to moor and explore. Mum had rowed on it as a child in the 1920s, and it's the perfect place to play at Swallows and Amazons, or pirates (there's a fort, complete with cannon). We fell in regularly, but as the water is barely two foot deep, only our pride was ever hurt. Sometimes we walked back along the coast road (squelching a little), with the sea behind its high shingle banks on one side, the flat marshes on the other, and ahead of us the huddled houses of Aldeburgh, the remaining part of a town half lost to the waves. All along that coast the sea takes with one hand - from Aldeburgh, Dunwich, Walton - and gives to the other, the other in this case being Orfordness, that extraordinary spit of shingle, ten miles long, that shepherds the River Alde down to Shingle Street before allowing it to flow into the sea. The Great Flood of 1953, which happened when I was a baby, was a salutary reminder of how precarious life can be on the edge of the land. On one of our regular walks along the river shore, we used to play in the ruins of cottages that had been devastated by the surge of water coming up the estuary on that dreadful January night.
It's not just the sea that I miss. The hugeness of the skies above the desolation of the marshes: the birds calling on the river in the dark: the distinctive houses with their colour-washed walls, ridged tiles and dormer windows: the local accent, that even professional actors can't imitate (somehow it always comes out Somerset). And more specifically, the park at Orwell, a place where as a child I knew every stick and stone: the cork tree, with its fantastic bark: the pigeons cooing in the old trees around the swimming pool: the tantalising glimpses of Pin Mill across the river: the Buck House, long and low, covered in wisteria, surrounded by trees, a place so inextricably meshed with our family memories that no matter what happens to it in the end, it will always be ours.
I had always assumed that we weren't 'true' Suffolkers, but incomers: my father's family come from East London, and before that they were Protestant refugees from France. My mother's ancestors hailed from Northumberland, Ireland and, more distantly, Portugal and the West Indies. But when I was researching my family tree, I found that my great-grandmother, Dorothea Gooch, was descended from a very old Suffolk family who had gone to Northumberland to become ironworkers and engineers. The thought that a very small part of my DNA came from the people of East Anglia, of St. Edmund and the Wuffings, Boudicca and the Iceni, made me feel ridiculously pleased. Stupid though it may seem, now I know that the land of my birth really is my home.
And yet ... and yet ... I still sometimes dream of the Buck House, so called because it was originally an outhouse in the park where deer carcasses were butchered and hung, before my parents converted it as newly-weds. Just the other night, I washed the windows and tidied the garden of a house I haven't gone near for over a year, and woke feeling sad and nostalgic. Partly, I think, it has to do with the sea. We lived within sight of the Orwell estuary, a mile-wide, ten mile long inlet of water and mud that ends at Ipswich, and if you stood on one of the high points of the park (this is before the trees grew up) you could see the thin grey horizontal line that was the North Sea, out beyond the river mouth. On foggy winter mornings I remember lying in bed and listening to the Cork Lightship, snoring out on the sandbanks off Felixstowe like a vast slumbering animal. 'Uuuur-uh! Uuuur-uh!' When I was about six or seven, my grandmother moved back to Aldeburgh, where she had spent much of her married life, and lived in an old people's home, run by a relative, right on the sea front. We visited her every week for many years, so the ridged pebbles and grey, forbidding waves of Aldeburgh beach was the sea I knew best. We swam in it in the summer (I remember being slammed face down on the pebbles one rough day), hunted vainly for amber and cornelians, and resented the fact that there was no sand. Later, when we were older, Mum used to drop my sister and me off at Thorpeness Meare, a mile up the coast. This is a wonderful place, a huge boating lake like an inland sea, with islands, reeds, wildlife and places to moor and explore. Mum had rowed on it as a child in the 1920s, and it's the perfect place to play at Swallows and Amazons, or pirates (there's a fort, complete with cannon). We fell in regularly, but as the water is barely two foot deep, only our pride was ever hurt. Sometimes we walked back along the coast road (squelching a little), with the sea behind its high shingle banks on one side, the flat marshes on the other, and ahead of us the huddled houses of Aldeburgh, the remaining part of a town half lost to the waves. All along that coast the sea takes with one hand - from Aldeburgh, Dunwich, Walton - and gives to the other, the other in this case being Orfordness, that extraordinary spit of shingle, ten miles long, that shepherds the River Alde down to Shingle Street before allowing it to flow into the sea. The Great Flood of 1953, which happened when I was a baby, was a salutary reminder of how precarious life can be on the edge of the land. On one of our regular walks along the river shore, we used to play in the ruins of cottages that had been devastated by the surge of water coming up the estuary on that dreadful January night.
It's not just the sea that I miss. The hugeness of the skies above the desolation of the marshes: the birds calling on the river in the dark: the distinctive houses with their colour-washed walls, ridged tiles and dormer windows: the local accent, that even professional actors can't imitate (somehow it always comes out Somerset). And more specifically, the park at Orwell, a place where as a child I knew every stick and stone: the cork tree, with its fantastic bark: the pigeons cooing in the old trees around the swimming pool: the tantalising glimpses of Pin Mill across the river: the Buck House, long and low, covered in wisteria, surrounded by trees, a place so inextricably meshed with our family memories that no matter what happens to it in the end, it will always be ours.
I had always assumed that we weren't 'true' Suffolkers, but incomers: my father's family come from East London, and before that they were Protestant refugees from France. My mother's ancestors hailed from Northumberland, Ireland and, more distantly, Portugal and the West Indies. But when I was researching my family tree, I found that my great-grandmother, Dorothea Gooch, was descended from a very old Suffolk family who had gone to Northumberland to become ironworkers and engineers. The thought that a very small part of my DNA came from the people of East Anglia, of St. Edmund and the Wuffings, Boudicca and the Iceni, made me feel ridiculously pleased. Stupid though it may seem, now I know that the land of my birth really is my home.
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