My geography teacher used to fly into a rage when we talked about right and left instead of east and west. The memory stops me from describing East Anglia as being on the right side of England–perhaps I mean in the other sense as well–though that is where it is, in the bulge that sticks into the North Sea, the roughly circular part that is like a face in profile and a head with a big cranium.
Why Anglia? The Angles, coming from that part of Germany still known as Angeln, settled here and split into the North Folk and the South Folk, becoming the Norfolk and Suffolk counties of East Anglia. Another county, Essex, comes from Exsessa or East Saxon, where the Saxons made a home in the south. These areas make up my East Anglia, the lips and chin of the face, its forehead, cheek and jaw, if you like, the Essex-Suffolk borders, and the Valley of the Stour, the region harboring a fragile coast that changes with the centuries as the sea erodes, the salt marshes and the forests pink with rhododendrons in the spring. Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, ruled these wooded valleys and broad estuaries at the time of the great Roman incursion into Essex 19 centuries ago. The invaders captured Camulodunum, which we now call Colchester, England`s oldest recorded town.
We are very near London, near enough that the hesitant visitor thinks of us as urban. But our portion of fringe of the Home Counties has never quite become commuter country or the outermost of outer suburbs. The people`s accent is so strong, the dialect so rich, that the local speech is often hard to follow. Edward Moore`s ”Dictionary of Suffolk Words and Phrases,” two inches thick, is as useful today as when it was published in 1823. Long ”a`s” as in ”plain” are pronounced ”ah”; the demonstrative pronoun replaces ”it”; and ”moon,” ”June,” and ”spoon” rhyme with ”ruin.”
On a wet day: ”That`s rahnin`,” they say. ”That`s mizzlin`.” ”We would have went up Nahlan` to theirs,” a woman remarks in the community shop, ”but they come dow-en here to ours,” meaning ”to our house.” It`s a kind of East Anglian ”chez nous.” Two men I know used to talk Suffolk in their London office when they wanted privacy, and they were as unintelligible to listeners as if they had been speaking Swahili.
Moor`s dictionary has a lot of words for rain: ”haze,” ”smither,” and ”smur,” ”dacklin” for a slight shower. But in fact it rains less here than in many parts of the country, and only the coast is cold. There is said to be something special about the quality of the light, due in part perhaps to John Constable`s ”white sheet” of a sky.
Two of England`s greatest painters were born on the Essex-Suffolk borders, Constable at East Bergholt, Thomas Gainsborough at Sudbury. If only we could claim J.M.W. Turner, too, we might formulate a theory about East Anglian air and genes. So proud are we of being the cradle of Constable that the Valley of the Lower Stour is known as Constable Country.
”But I should paint my own places best,” he wrote. ”Painting is but another word for feeling. I associated my `careless boyhood` to all that lies on the banks of the Stour.”
Many of his ”own places” remain as they were in his day, the Vale of Dedham, East Bergholt, Flatford Mill, Stoke-by-Nayland where he sometimes painted the church, ”the great red tower of Stoke,” not where it is but in what he thought were more picturesque settings. Before I lived here, I once passed a pleasant day of pilgrimage visiting Constable`s birthplace–the house itself is gone–then Flatford and Dedham, finally returning to London to look at the house in Lower Terrace, Hampstead, where he died, and the tomb in nearby St. John`s churchyard where he is buried.
Higher up the river at Sudbury, the house where Gainsborough was born in 1727 is a museum, and the street in which it stands bears his name. The young Thomas played truant from school to get out into the meadows and woods to paint. A story is told of his having forged his father`s name to a note asking the schoolmaster to ”Give Tom a holiday.” His father, when shown it, exclaimed, ”The boy will be hanged!” but very soon changed this to ”The boy will be a genius!”
Cast in bronze, on a plinth and holding his palette, Gainsborough stands in the marketplace forever painting the town. But no view of Sudbury from his brush exists. His famous townscape is of Hadleigh, the 15th-Century St. Mary`s Church, and the grandiose Tudor gateway known as Pykenham`s Tower, red brick with a secret chamber in one of its turrets. The heart of Hadleigh has changed very little since Gainsborough`s time. A shop in the High Street, still in use as a corn chandler`s and animal-feed merchant`s, has a mural from the 1600s preserved on an interior wall and a coat of arms of the same date above a window full of grains and cat food. This is part of Hadleigh`s charm, that it is a living workplace, in no sense a museum. The 15th-Century guild hall, half-timbered, is to my mind more beautiful than the oft-noted one at Lavenham. Once the meeting place for five cloth guilds, it is still a center for the community. Peace campaigners meet in a drafty hall with a ceiling worthy of a Tudor palace, while children rehearsing the Christmas pantomime pound about overhead.
Hadleigh is bypassed now. The traffic on its way to Ipswich and the container port at Felixtowe no longer passes through the town to shake loose bricks and studwork put up in the days of James I. Near where the new road passes over Aldham Heath stands the memorial to Rowland Taylor, the Maryan Martyr, executed for his faith some 430 years ago. ”For defending what was God`s,” reads the inscription, ”Rowland Taylor shed his blood.”
Dr. Taylor was arrested in 1554 for resisting the authority of Queen Mary I by refusing to re-establish Roman Catholic worship in Hadleigh Church. He was imprisoned in a dungeon under Lavenham guild hall and finally sentenced to die. A sad procession moved through Hadleigh, and Taylor distributed his last few coins to the poor who lived in the almshouses on the road to Aldham Heath. There, in February, 1555, he was burned at the stake.
A mile over the fields is Kersey, called the most beautiful village in Suffolk. Who decides these things? Kersey has a water splash that cars must pass through and where ducks swim across the road. Rocking horses are still made there in the craft workshop. Kersey gave its name to a kind of woolen cloth as did its neighboring village, Lindsey, and ”linsey-woolsey” was what the poor people of England used to wear. But the weavers` houses in Kersey are no finer examples of the type than those of Stoke-by-Nayland, and Polstead boasts the region`s finest small church, St. Mary`s, Norman and stout but full of light.
Polstead, too, is where the cherry orchards start. Elsewhere the fruits grown are apples and pears, but come to Polstead in the last week of April and ”see the cherry hung with snow.” The Polstead black cherry is a famous variety that reaches maturity in July. Then the fruit farmers put scarecrows dressed in suits and caps up in the trees. The first Sunday after July 19 used to be called Cherry Sunday and included a feast and dancing on Polstead village green, but that, like so many old customs, has died away.
The countryside is hillier here than further north, and the sheep have come back to the hillsides. For years the meadows were given over to growing wheat and barley, sugar beet, and the oilseed whose flowers turn the fields chrome yellow, a color almost too bright and harsh to look at. A farmer told me that white lupins are going to replace it, so we shall have a false effect of snow. Once this part of England depended on its wool trade, and in the 1400s ruminants outnumbered humans three to one.
At Lavenham an exhibition on the history of wool is permanently at the guild hall. St. Peter`s Church, big as a cathedral, was built from wool revenues. Lavenham is rather too much of a museum for my taste, too petrified in its past, as if all its beauties–the Priory, the Swan, the medieval streets, the falling house that never falls–had been dusted and lacquered and put under a bell jar. But Little Hall, a former dwelling and now headquarters of the Suffolk Preservation Society, pays for all, as they used to say. The hall is so old, dating from 1419, that on entering it we have to revise our ideas of what a domestic dwelling is and remind ourselves that there existed a time before rooms and stairs and fireplaces and glazed windows were thought of.
The River Stour rises in the west of East Anglia, in Cambridgeshire near Weston Green, and after some 40 miles becomes a tidal estuary at the Cattawade Bridge. On the way it flows through Sudbury in Suffolk and Bures, where it divides Essex from Suffolk and moves on to Nayland, whose name is a corruption of ”an island,” so called because a side stream flows off the river`s main course through the village center. Also in Nayland are a house built in 1510 across the middle of the main street; the White Hart Inn, said to be 600 years old; and St. Mary`s Church, which possesses one of Constable`s three religious paintings, the others being at Branthamm and Feering in Essex. The church is open to all, no fuss or pomp attached to this great painting. It hangs above the altar, an Italianate Christ blessing the bread and wine.
The Saxons of north Essex perpetuated their names in the settlements they founded. Langham is the hamlet of Lawa`s people, Lawford is the place where Laella had a ford, Dedham is Dydda`s ”ham” or village. The Mayflower had more men on board from Dedham than from any other village. Among them was Samuel Sherman, ancestor of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. This English Sherman is remembered in an inset in a window in Dedham Church, and his name is commemorated in Sherman Hall, the house that stands opposite the church gate. It was on this spot that one Edmund Sherman founded a school in 1599 to teach poor men`s children to read and write.
It was from Harwich that the Mayflower set out, calling at Plymouth on its way west. Harwich harbour is formed by the confluence of the Stour and the river from which Eric Blair took the pen name he was to make so much better known than the original–Orwell. On the Stour side, Mistley, whose name means ”the wood where the mistletoe grows,” and Manningtree look across the estuary towards Cattawade. Matthew Hopkins, England`s Witchfinder General appointed in 1644, came from here, as did another Maryan Martyr, Thomas Osmond, who died at the stake. At the head of the Orwell estuary lies Ipswich, full of fine churches spoilt by towers, which lately was given a lift toward distinction by a marvelous new bridge.
There must be few coastlines of England that man has interfered with less than that of Suffolk. From Felixtoweferry almost to Loewstoft, the green meadows and pine forests and heathlands come down to the sea. Not far from Aldeburgh is the Britten-Pears School of Music. Benjamin Britten lived here at Snape–he was born in Lowestoft and died at Aldeburgh–and wrote his opera
”Peter Grimes,” set in a mythical town on the Suffolk coast. As a result of his efforts, the Aldeburgh Festival was founded in 1947 and since has become one of the most important music festivals in Europe. But there are concerts at Snape, in the reconstructed maltings on the saltflats throughout the summer.
Low cliffs defend this coastline from the sea. The seabed moves, forming sand drifts like snow, and in places the swell seems to boil with strong currents.
The bird sanctuary of Minsmere rolls gently to the sea at Dunwich Cliff, purple and crimson and violet with heather for much of the year, and under the water, invisible, lies Dunwich, ancient capital of East Anglia, which the sea first began to take in the 14th Century, a quarter of the city having been lost in a single night. Gradually the rest was lost by erosion and flood so that now nothing but a small village remains, and divers are the only visitors to the churches on the seabed. St. Peter`s Church was lost in 1688, and its ruins are a long way out to sea. All Saints fell down the cliff in the early part of this century and now lies in a gully not far from the shore. More than a dozen other churches lie under the waves and the shifting mud and silt. And there are Dunwich men who will tell you that on certain days, when the wind blows this way or that, you can hear ringing under the sea the bells of East Anglia`s lost capital city.
The East Anglia Tourist Board is at 14 Museum St., Ipswich, IP11HU, Suffolk, England. Phone: 0473-214211.
