Back in Suffolk for the whole week. It still feels touch and go with him. The doctor came to visit and told us it could be another week or could be more. He can’t be sure. I try to sit with him and tell him things and he looks at me but there doesn’t seem to be much recognition in his eyes.
Today I wander North on the Suffolk Coast Path through Tunstall Forest. There is nothing ‘coastal’ about the path now but soon enough it’ll return to the sea near Aldeburgh.
Chillesford is quiet again like when I was last here but sunnier today. I cross a couple of fields before I start to see the ubiquitous Scots pines of Tunstall Forest. The Forest stretches from Chillesford and Sudbourne in the South almost as far as Snape in the North.
During the great storm of 1987 Tunstall suffered huge damage losing thousands of trees. I remember driving through it not long after and pine trees had been snapped in half like match sticks. Whole swathes were laid flat. A replanting programme that was started soon after ensured that Tunstall would recover and was given a greater variety of trees.
I remember clearly that night in October 1987. I was in my first term at public school in Berkshire, a place I never took to and eventually which my parents took me away from as I was so unhappy.
In one of the many games of compulsory rugby we had to play a boy had tackled me and then fallen forward with his knee onto my shoulder breaking my collarbone. It was for this reason that I ended up in the Victorian ‘San’ at school with just one other boy from the lower sixth.
The matrons were as austere as the asylum-like building, the latter made up of bare walls and long corridors with rooms off each side. I remember the most fiercesome of the matrons was thin, frosty and unsmiling with an awful short fringe which looked like she’d been in a prison camp. We called her Hiroshima. I don’t think sympathy came into her vocabulary.
The night of the Hurricane I remember I’d been reading ‘Rats’ by James Herbert. Not the finest choice, I admit, but a book that was incredibly popular with us teenage boys back then. That had already made me slightly unnerved but when one of the doors started opening and slamming in the corridor and the trees started creaking and eventually branches started to crack and break sleep became an impossibility. For some reason I think I had a radio next to my bed and I remember being comforted by the strange poetry of the shipping forecast as the gale swept over the san and the school grounds. Ever since the shipping forecast has always brought me a sense of calm.
I remember the end of that first strange year at public school Dad took me to North East Scotland at the start of the Summer holidays. We stayed in Helmsdale with a widow who had lived in the village that I grew up in.
It was a fun week. I’ll never forget the excitement of getting the sleeper train from London to Inverness. I was listening to U2’s ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ and ‘Burning from the Inside’ by Bauhaus. For years afterwards listening to ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ would remind me of the pale blue interior and the little bunks where we slept.
The excitement of sleeping on a train is incomparable: the hypnotic sound of the carriage on the tracks, imagining the fields outside and the landscape changing as we headed further and further North into the wildness of the Scottish highlands.
I remember waking up early and we had stopped. When D pulled up the blind we were at Perth and we were changing engines. Was it because we had crossed the border and we now had a Scottish train to take us onwards? It’s what I imagined at the time.
We stayed with Liz on the side of the Helmsdale valley overlooking the town. We tried fishing on lochs and in the river. We watched the locals perched on rocks dangling a fly in the pools when they thought the fish would be running.
I remember D’s old camping stove (again) and him making tea with Carnation condensed milk. He wore a green and red squared Norwegian fisherman’s jumper. He looked rugged and handsome although everything was always a bit shambolic with D and holidays. We got rained on and drenched and got our fishing lines in an almighty tangle and I don’t think we caught much but it was fun. We always remembered it afterwards. I was 13.
There’s always been something I find a bit spooky about forests. Doesn’t everyone? From Hansel and Gretel to The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ to The Blair Witch Project there seems to be a universal fear of forests. There’s something ‘other’ and claustrophobic about being surrounded by trees. It can often trick the mind into seeing things that aren’t there.
As the path narrows and becomes lined with silver birches I remember being on the Isle of Mull when I was about 12 probably only a year before the unforgiving night of the hurricane in 1987. I was with friends walking along a path at dusk. A pale shape hung ahead the only light looking thing in the gloom. For all the world it looked like a body in a bag or perhaps we just convinced ourselves of this. It was only when we got closer that we saw it was the pale trunk of a silver birch that had somehow lost the top half of its trunk.
As always with my walks the transitions are often the best moments, those sudden changes which often take me by surprise. The narrowness of the path leads onto a stone track with Scots pines all around but not as closely packed as they are at the start. The sun suddenly comes out, somehow brighter than it has seemed for weeks. Looking upwards through the treetops I imagine myself in Greece or another faraway part of Southern Europe. When all this is done, when this strange phase of our lives is over then I can start to make plans again.
The Slow Walker 