Sea bishops – fish creatures with episcopal headwear – were said to rise from the deep here in the sixteenth century and raise earth-shaking storms. In 1912 the Norfolk-based writer Lilias Rider Haggard wrote to her famous adventure novelist father Henry to say she’d seen a sixty-foot-long sea serpent next door to Covehithe, at Kessingland Beach. Down south at Orford in the twelfth century a bearded man was found in the sea and brought back and treated as a pet by the villagers: a fish-like figure with no hair on the top of his head as close to a sea scarecrow who has ever existed in folklore.
As Isabelle and I gazed back across the tilted farmland from the crumbling toffee-coloured cliff top to the village, I saw what I’d been hoping to see: a scarecrow, juddering in the breeze. There was no breeze, which made the juddering curious. Perhaps it was that phantom church breeze, escaped into the great wide open.
‘Tom, that’s just a guy with a metal detector,’ said Isabelle, who has better eyesight than me.
I missed living close to this bit of sea. I missed this long straight line of islandless shore with its old shingle monsters and its residual effect on the land beyond. I missed the unimpeded sky – not that I didn’t adore the impeded sky where I now lived. I missed more about this region: my friends, the way my existence here had seemed more effortless in many ways, less necessarily toughened up, although in others less challenging and less brightly, scarily alive. There was nothing to be done about it, though. History has proved that people can’t have two lovers – not successfully, not on a long-term basis where all three parties feel equally rewarded. I had to keep choosing just one. Besides, there was an almost-four-hundred-mile gap in the middle. It didn’t make the process of two-timing easy. On what might be seen as the plus side – although not if you are currently living in one of the buildings a hundred yards inland from Covehithe’s shore – my two romantic interests were getting closer every year. Visibly so, in the case of the eastern one today. The large amounts of polite nineteenth-century-holidaymaker graffiti scratched, with excellent calligraphy, into the church windows suggested a time when Covehithe might have almost been a small resort, rather than a dystopian non-village at the rim of the planet; there was even the mark of a visitor from Buenos Aires, dated 1889. Nowadays the church didn’t even bury bodies in its grounds, anticipating the deeper more forsaken place where coastal erosion would soon take them. As well as the desolate tree corpses, a boxy red-brick structure languished, smashed and part-submerged, on the beach. I took it for an old lookout shelter I once sat in, but the Suffolk artist Kate Batchelor later told me it was a septic tank, which I had definitely not sat in. On my last visit, in 2012, the tank had still been buried unseen in the hillside.
Back then the road through Covehithe ended in a jagged precipice over the shoreline, like a dismantled piece of unusually crude Scalextric track. That bit of tarmac, serrated by nature, had long since been washed out to sea. It was a beach with an unusually fluid exchange of eclectic paraphernalia. Plenty went out, but plenty came in too. As Isabelle and I walked south towards Southwold we found rounded glass pebbles, a sea-blasted lunchbox, various lengths and colours of old rope, a wristwatch. I remembered the second time I had come here, in 2009, when large planks were scattered all over the shore: strong-looking joists, good quality, probably fallen off a cargo ship. A group of men – opportunists in the timber trade perhaps or just people who, like me, really enjoy wood – were carrying the planks up the beach, one at a time, two men to a plank. The image had stayed with me, and I remember thinking at the time how much they looked like pall-bearers.
5
WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
‘Bees?’ asked a lady with a badge on her lapel as I entered Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum.
It was a busy Saturday morning at the museum and I’d estimate that only about 5 per cent of the foot traffic through the front doors during this small window of time was for the bee identification course I was due to attend in one of the building’s upstairs meeting rooms. Perhaps I just had a bee look about me. ‘Yes,’ I told the woman, confirming that I was some bees, and not having a problem with that. In his book The Twits Roald Dahl wrote that if people have good thoughts ‘they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely’. Possibly, in a not dissimilar fashion, a long period of musing about bees will bring something of the bee to your personal ambience: a look that somehow combines peacefulness, industry and dopiness in equal measure. I had been thinking about bees a lot recently, ever since the day a few months ago when a stranger had approached me in the countryside not far from my house and said, ‘Excuse me. Did you know two bees are having sex on your flares?’ and I’d looked down and seen that two bees were having sex on my flares.
What is the correct course of action when two bumblebees are humping on your clothing? Mine was to take a flyer for a local charity jumble sale from my rucksack, gently slide it beneath the
