That switch between light and dark which I’d never got quite right in my written novel was seamless in this physical lived one: it was often funny, but it could be scary too, and neither quality ever jarred with the other, because that’s what living in this part of the country, really living in it, was like. Upon leaving Buckenham Castle and returning the key to John, I stalked off on one of my regular routes, my coat dusted with the persistent mansize cobwebs of early-medieval flint. It was a great walk, an unassuming favourite, past old marl pits and wild ponds and through intensely adhesive ploughed mud which made your boots twice as heavy as they were when you started walking (a common phenomenon that has given rise to its own East Anglian word, honkydonks). Scarecrow country did not come much more prime than this. I’d found many of my best ones here or nearby: a sexless helmeted figure who somehow managed to be more futuristic space horse than person. A mechanic not totally unlike John, but with green, not blue, overalls and a head formerly containing turps. Another who, due to barbed wire and young crop conundrums, I’d never been able to get close enough to photograph clearly; even though I’d tried my best and dropped my phone in a stream as a by-product; and who was preserved as nothing more than a grey banshee cotton blur soothsaying about a coming ecological unkindness with empty billowing non-arms. My route took me via Old Buckenham church, whose early-1600s font is described in the 1958 Shell Guide to Norfolk as featuring ‘hairy animals’. In the graveyard I said a silent hello to a tombstone inscribed with the name Richard ‘Dick’ Cocking. I knew nothing about Richard but always took it as read that he had lived abundantly. I passed a stile that made me think of the habits of rats, not because I’d seen rats near it, indulging in their habits, but because I’d once talked to my parents about the habits of rats as we climbed the stile. Stiles and gates had that effect, I had discovered: you recalled something that happened when you climbed a stile or opened a gate, but on thinking harder it was something that had happened at another time that somebody had merely told you about when you climbed the stile or opened the gate. In early 2013, when my friend Russ and I opened a gate at the edge of Tyrrel’s Wood while walking near Pulham Market, Russ had not brought his football mate who lived with a pet wolf and permitted it to accompany him to Norwich City’s home games; Russ just told me about his football mate who lived with a pet wolf and permitted it to accompany him to Norwich City’s home games. I only met his wolf-owning football mate in a Norwich pub later. Regrettably, I never met the wolf.
Two miles south-west of Old Buckenham, November started to call time on its meagre excuse for daylight. Unseen pigs I passed in stone sheds grumbled good-naturedly about the state of affairs. Unseen pigs in stone sheds in Norfolk and Suffolk always sounded restless, like pigs in a disaster film just before apocalypse hits. Later, when I’d moved far away, to the other side of the country, unseen pigs preparing for apocalypse would become one of the sounds that distinguished East Anglia from elsewhere in my mind. Another was its silence, which has a different timbre to the silence in the rural west, or the rural north, or the rural south. My walk finally took me back behind Buckenham Castle, to a lonely space occupied by New Buckenham’s graveyard, a more orderly cemetery than Old Buckenham’s (although neither village is anything close to ‘new’, almost everything in New Buckenham is orderly and compact, where Old Buckenham is scruffy and sprawling) but a less welcoming one. Being lonely and being alone are frequently two extremely different sensations and, despite the cemetery’s loneliness, I did not feel entirely alone as I walked through it. On my solitary Norfolk and Suffolk walks, particularly in the chillier months, I would often feel this ‘followed’ sensation, have the impulse to spin round to see who was behind me. I had walked in plenty of topographically threatening environments in other parts of the UK countryside but never had the same impulse. It sprang at least in part from that peculiar silence, combined with the vastness
