21st-Century Yokel

the mind of anyone who’s ever heard it. Aptly, as I drove past Dunwich Heath, Stone Angel’s ‘The Bells of Dunwich’ kicked in, although ‘kicked’ wasn’t really the word. It floated in on a ghostly tide. Underwater sounds. Sounds as smudgy as the light let in by an M. R. James story. Even if the bells had been ringing right now under the sea and I had listened very closely, I doubt I’d have been able to hear them above Poseidon’s violent whistling breath. Extreme weather warnings had gone out across the UK the previous evening. In other parts of the country people were mocking them as a false alarm. Not here. A tree was down, blocking the main route to the beach, although because of the angle at which the trunk had fallen and the ivy overwhelming its limbs my initial impression was that a lane I’ve travelled dozens of times had vanished into thin air. This was not the part of Dunwich most associated with the supernatural, but it was a junction I’d often thought of as singularly enigmatic and eerie, perhaps the nearest to an archetypal blues musician’s Devil’s crossroads as you’ll get on the Suffolk Heritage Coast. Arriving at it on foot one early-winter evening in 2011 I’d come face to face with a huge stag, the two of us staring each other out for what felt like an eternity. During those thirty seconds or so I felt like I’d crossed some sort of metaphysical divide. In another incident flavoured with arguably no less paranormal excitement two years prior to that, I had happened upon an unmanned table of home-made jam in some woodland on the other side of the road.

Now, in 2016, I took the longer route around to the deserted beach car park. Miscellaneous fragments of tree and bin and fence were flying through the air, and everyone who was outdoors – essentially me, a bold crow, a man hurrying towards the village pub and a woman wrestling with her weekly rubbish – looked like they’d just had their eyeballs pressure-washed. I hadn’t planned to come here in the middle of the most destructive storm of the year, but for appropriate historical ambience I could not have chosen a better day. Is there another part of the English coastline that has been more altered by strong weather over the last thousand years than the four-mile stretch from Walberswick, a couple of miles north of here, to Sizewell, a couple of miles south? It’s doubtful. In the early 1300s Dunwich was one of the major ports of East Anglia, but over the next six centuries the sea staged a series of devastating attacks on it, bringing the coastline over a mile further inland and destroying all of the town’s original eight churches. The last one crumbled down the weakened cake-like cliffs in the 1920s, its final standing buttress being removed and placed safely in the graveyard of the current, relatively modern (1832) church on the furthest side of town from the waves. Despite the place only having around one hundred residents, a trace of the fish trade remains. ‘Do you have any Dover sole?’ a man in the queue ahead of me once asked at the beachside fish hut. ‘I’ll just check,’ said the man at the counter, disappearing around the back in the direction of the beach. ‘You’re in luck,’ he said, upon returning thirty seconds later. ‘The boat has just come in.’ In the 1800s it was still not unheard of for herring to be used as currency in nearby inns.

I could easily have stayed overnight with friends in Norwich or south Norfolk, but I checked into a B & B up the road, in the neighbouring village of Westleton, alone. It seemed the M. R. James thing to do. I used my debit card to pay for my room, not having any herring to hand at the time. I noted with pleasure that the B & B had the Jamesian name of the Crown, instantly evocative of an item another James protagonist, in Warning to the Curious, finds buried near the eastern seashore. ‘Brian is finding it difficult under the table with his legs,’ said a talkative woman at breakfast with a strong West Midlands accent. Everyone in the room except me had a strong West Midlands accent, which of course made perfect sense, us all being only 179 miles from Walsall if we stuck to major road networks. It was a ridiculous thing I had done, coming double that distance from my own home in Devon to stay in this place amid holidaying strangers, but the ridiculousness was freeing. I crossed the road to a second-hand bookshop in a converted chapel, where a lovely man in apparent nightwear sold me five books and loaned me three more, and his impossibly polite adolescent assistant offered me a cup of tea. When I came back the following day to return the loaned books the shop was deserted, but there was a stick and a dented sunflower-oil can next to a sign reading BASH CAN WITH STICK TO GET ATTENTION, an instruction that came across as much as a recommended life philosophy as a retail-themed instruction. I bashed it, and the lovely man appeared, again in apparent nightwear. It turned out he’d been to school ninety yards from where I now lived. I didn’t find out if he also wore apparent nightwear back then.

In 2003 I had viewed a house for sale directly across the heath from the bookshop that I couldn’t afford, motivated by the regular optimistic thought of my late twenties and thirties that I would imminently become a person who wasn’t constantly scrabbling around for next month’s mortgage. The man who showed me the house, which seemed to have last been updated in the less auspicious part of 1974, had not lived in it; it had belonged to his late father. He confessed