Today is VE Day. 75 years since the end of war in Europe. It’s 3 days since we lost Dad.

Tuesday was queasily unpleasant. The carer had left the day before. Her time was well over due and there was nothing more for her to do. He wasn’t eating. Drugs were being administered by a syringe driver. Mum was hoovering. Ivy barked at the Hoover. I was getting angry with my computer, unable to complete the assignment that I was working on. Instead I’d gone outside to try to pump up the tyres on his bike. Puncture.

As I walked into the kitchen, Mum simply said ‘I think he’s gone.’ And so he had. Where his chest had been rising and falling intermittently, now there was no movement. His face was turned towards the window, his skin pale and soft like candle wax. The pallor of the dead. I couldn’t get it. Dad. Dead. Dad still there in front of me, but not.

We were grateful in the end that there was no one else here. Grace the carer had left the day before. The sibs arrived and we had a day of waiting: for the doctor to register his death, and the undertakers who came after tea. The sun continued to shine and Dad stayed where he was. ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ I thought.

None of us wanted to see him leave and the undertaker told us to wait elsewhere while they got him ready. We waited outside at the other end of the house on the little lawn beside the conservatory. The same lawn where we had had so many cups of tea and chats on the old deck chairs with stripey seats that he had got remade. Where he had many afternoon snoozes or a glass of wine. Where he sat calmly with his walking stick when he first got ill watching me carefully mow his lawn.

Eventually the man from the undertakers came round to see us and a couple of minutes later we heard him leave for the last time. My brother had already gone and my sister left soon after. When I walked back in to the room there was a perfect hollow in the middle of the pillow. The last reminder of him. I stared at it blankly and then smoothed it out.

And so I return to the path. This started out as a way for me to let off steam when visiting dad through the progression of his illness. It also replaced my infrequent walks along the SWCP which I knew I would have even less time to do.

Now he’s gone, there’s probably even more reason to carry on – to Lowestoft if I can – and since Sunday the government has allowed travel to take exercise. What else am I going to do? No one is going anywhere. We are in a state of lockdown for the foreseeable future. Besides, even if everything was as normal, I would be here looking after Mum and helping make preparations for the funeral.

So to Sizewell I return, to that huge grey block surrounded by the incongruously beautiful white dome behind it (Sizewell A and B respectively). B can be seen from miles around on sunny days, the light glinting off its dome looking like some futuristic mosque.

There’s a bit of activity here today. I give a local a shock when I sneeze. He has one of the cottages on the front. A few dog walkers on the beach. A man pushes a younger woman in a wheelchair along the path. I say hello to 2 people and get no reply.

There’s a big bank of clouds to the North over Southwold. Here and there vapour contorts itself into shapes. One moment a cloud has curved itself off the top of the main block like a cornice off a mountain. Moments later there is a perfect round hole of blue in a little bump of white. Like an eye. And then it’s gone.

‘I see Dad everywhere’, my sister said yesterday when she had come over yesterday. Perhaps it helps some people seeing reminders in nature. I don’t want to be reminded.

The path here is a track with dunes on either side. I can’t see the sea. I start to feel itchy and there is a greyness to the near world. I start longing for a change.

Before long the dunes peter out on my left and the lush greenness of Minsmere starts to unfold itself. Water. Meadows. I still can’t see the sea but am accompanied by its continuous, soft roar somewhere in the background like awakening and remembering a dream just departed.

Minsmere sluice is the next landmark and where I leave the path so that I can walk in a big square via Eastbridge. Although not much to look at there’s something a bit magical about this place. Swallows like to nest under the arches. And this is where the water from the reserve spills into the North Sea. Eels wait in the drains that meet at the lock here and wait til a high tide before they make their way out to sea and then travel 3000 miles to breed in the Sargasso Sea.

I think of them on a moonlit night queueing up readying themselves for such an epic journey knowing they won’t come back. Once they’ve bred they’ll die. Everything about them is mysterious.

I realise for the first time why the local pub at Eastbridge is called The Eel’s Foot Inn.

Once again I turn away from the sea and head inland across Minsmere Reserve. I kick myself for not bringing Dad’s ‘bins’ with me. He would love it here. I don’t try and comfort myself with idle thoughts about carrying him with me or feeling him beside me. Besides, he would hate such sentiment. I probably wouldn’t know what half the birds are called even if I did have the glasses. It’s a glorious day and the green cheers me. It’s what I love most about England.

The remnants of the old chapel passes me to the left, an original site for Leiston Abbey I read later but too prone to flooding. Thus the move inland at a later date.

There is a lot of water here and reeds too. I hear the intimate chirping of something in the reeds and guess it’s a warbler or bunting.

I enter one of my walking trances and soon realise I don’t remember much of what had surrounded me for the past 20 minutes. I cross from meadowland to arable and soon the path reaches Eastbridge. I can picture the pub but it’s not en route this time, not that I could visit anyway.

Time to turn South. The road is newly surfaced and the grey dustiness reminds me of August. Old red brick cottages and farmyards doze in the mid afternoon sun. Nothing moves.

Soon I’m turning onto a bridle way lined with horse chestnuts. There is no tree quite as spectacular as this at this time of year. With its thick, bright green leaves and little towers of white flowers they always seem so full of life magically transforming roadsides and fields at a time when countryfolk are crying out for the cold days to end and for the long days of Summer to begin. These trees are harbingers, hope bringers, crying out ‘Look at me – all is not lost!’

How much can the world change in so short a time? A new vocabulary has suddenly emerged: pandemic, lockdown, restrictions, Coronavirus, Covid-19. This is something which is affecting all of us and will do for many years to come. It is historic. A once in a hundred year event.

Having become used to the idea that coastal walking would be consigned to that box of banned activities due to the Coronavirus pandemic – like going for a pint or having a picnic – it was with wondrous surprise that I discovered last week I could drive to go for a walk.

It is fortunate that I was in Suffolk. Fortunate in so far as I can get to the coast in half an hour. Fortunate in that we seem to have experienced uninterrupted sunshine for the last month, since the early days of lockdown.

When I pulled into my well-used parking space on the dead end road in Thorpeness, I experienced the faint exhilaration of doing something that might be subversive, a bit like going for a midnight swim in a public swimming pool. Should I be here? What would I say if I were stopped? Would the residents look askance at someone who clearly didn’t live here?

Saying and receiving cheerful hellos to two old ladies, I followed the road which became a track which became a path.

And here I was again.

The change from walking close to home was intense. I’d forgotten how much I feed off the hugeness, the epic drama of the sea. Even if I was Prometheus on his rock, despite the eternity of pain, at least my mind would always be intrigued by the mysterious beauty of that other world.

And amidst these Covid days, a strange wave of ecstasy rolled over me until I spun around on my toes and shouted and pumped the air with my fist over and over like a tennis champ winning a tournament.

And as I walk and I taste the salt air and feel the wind and stare into the myriad ripples and creases and overlapping wavelets, something else quickly becomes apparent. Nothingness.

No planes. No boats. No ships. No one.

I’m aware of the constant sound of dry leaves in the windswept bushes along the coast path and the hypnotic swooshing of waves. Is this what’ll be left after we’ve gone? I try to recall Betjeman:

‘And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.’

A pandemic makes us all philosophical, sure, but you know it’ll be business as usual when this is all over.

The flat heath or common stretches briefly out of the top of Thorpeness towards the pill box where the path turns sneakily onto the beach. I am a little boy again running through this passage between two worlds desperate to see the sea.

Now I’m walking North across the beach, the path a sandy line that weaves between grey green sea kale that grows here. Before long the path starts to follow the sandy cliff line that runs parallel to the beach.

Some steps lead up to the left of the path towards a tiny and battered old wooden gate. I walk up the steps. A long flint covered house faces across a lawn towards me and the sea. Ness House.

Dating from the 19th century, at one stage this would have been the only building between what was then the small hamlet of Thorpeness and Sizewell Gap, long before the power station was even an idea.

The building is long and might have been grand once. It has shingle facing. With its large windows and lawn facing onto the North Sea, it reminds me of nostalgic love stories set over a seemingly endless Summer at the seaside during some indistinct golden age. I’m thinking of ‘The Camomile Lawn’ and probably something else whose name eludes me right now.

I can’t tell if anyone still lives here but there’s a faded, dilapidated look that suggests not. The paintwork is ancient and weeds grow extensively out of the window sills. I creep towards the house and notice a tall lamp in one room, piled up board games in another. I return quickly to the path, aware of invading someone’s privacy. Trespassing.

Later I find out that it’s no longer in private hands but is a centre for the physically and mentally handicapped. It might account for the air of faded grandeur.

The path continues following the beach northwards. The sea and sky are so expansive to the right of me that it feels like the end of the world and if I carry on I might just fall off the edge of it. However I know there’s a big surprise up ahead.

Great hedgerows of gorse start to border the path, bright yellow and smelling of coconut oil or the sex wax that surfers rub onto their boards for grip.

How relieving it is to be out here in all this space away from the smells of toilet, detergent and the congested breathing of my poor dying pa. How long now? No point guessing. He’s beyond talk, beyond comprehension, not even looking anymore. Just sleeping. And that is a blessing: no pain and at home. It’s what he and mum had decided from the beginning.

The gorse becomes thicker now, startlingly bright and there beyond is the behemoth so incongruous in this wild and windswept place.

Apart from the vast power station, Sizewell or so I imagine, appears to be little unchanged as to how it was a century ago. Tiny fisherman’s cottages with painted brickwork face east. A coast guard’s cottage with look out tower and a right angled window for a 180 degree view of the sea sits squat and blocky painted defiantly black. Several small fishing boats are pulled up on the beach now redundant as a result of Covid. I notice a fisherman pottering about. I expect there’s still mending and making that can still be done while ashore.

Two couples have met up in 4x4s in the car park and I say hello while at the same time half aware that they might be breaking restrictions. Who cares? Trust people to be sensible. I’m reminded of an old friend of mine who’s uncle – a huge discus thrower-like man – had a cottage in Sizewell. It was tiny and one of the closest to the power station. It was called ‘Why Worry’.

The days seem to melt into each other. I can’t remember the date. And 2020 isn’t done yet with having more surprises up its sleeve.

We are in the 4th week of lockdown against a previously unkown disease: Coronavirus or Covid-19 a new and deadlier form of SARS. Yesterday Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab (Boris Johnson is recovering from the virus) announced it will last another three weeks with the same rules: we can only leave our houses for one essential piece of shopping, once a day to exercise. We haven’t reached the peak yet – the time when the most amount of recorded deaths has been reached.

It’s a strange time. The situation makes many of us anxious. We all have become spacially aware. We have to stay 2 metres apart. Another person is a potential threat.

It is also liberating, this period of stasis. Travel has become impossible so our worlds have become smaller – we have become used to our ‘near worlds’. It is like a return to the past, when life was slower, simpler and more silent: very little traffic. Fewer cars, fewer planes overhead. These sounds have receded and birdsong is the primary sound, amplified by the start of Spring.

And here I am. Back with my devoted mother and dying father. Waiting. Waiting.

On Easter Day he started to vomit and was coughing uncontrollably. His feet and hands were cold. His breathing became intermittent. One breath, 2nd breath. Then nothing. Beat. Then the breathing starts again.

Grace – our live in carer – said he seems much weaker now. The signs seemed to show that he was about to ‘reach his terminus’ as Clive James once said. He died earlier this year.

Mum called me home. A strange day. Driving fast along the A303, M3, M25, A12. No one about. Something dystopian about it. Like a film where there has been some sort of disaster. Always the feeling that humans and the world they have created are somehow in retreat and the force of nature is returning.

It was like a Summer’s day. Hot. As I got closer to home huge black clouds appeared. Storm clouds which would give their rain in a sudden burst. Windscreen wipers frantically flipping from one side to the other.

When I got here it was raining slowly and warmly. Moody weather. As my sister said – ‘you couldn’t make it up.’

Dad looked so pallid. His skin grey like putty. He was wearing a T shirt of my brother’s noise rock band. He used to wear it when he was gardening. And propped up and surrounded by pillows – the same pillows we had when we were children, each one with our name on.

The one nearest to me was faded green. It has greenery, a woodland scene and an owl and the name James in the middle of it. I remember it. I breathe hard and walk out of the room into his study across the hall.

Then a feeling of relief, elation almost. Then my brother and sister sit or stand in the room keeping 2 metres apart from each other yet wanting to be close to him. All of us in silence, our eyes shining, watching him with our own thoughts, memories and prayers.

That was Sunday. Today is Friday. And again he’s pulled himself back from the cliff edge. Does he feel he’s getting closer and decides to resist it, to fight it. Who knows? There is no communication anymore. It’s amazing but it’s tiring, especially for mum. She’s admitted she wants to move on. For his sake and for our’s.

Every day feels like a weekend. Wake up and think what will I do today? The slowing of time. The sound of the bees. The sound of the wind in the lime trees. The slants of sunlight coming through the window creating big blocks of pale gold on the floor.

Waiting.

It’s only been 2 weeks since I was last in Suffolk but it feels like ages. The change in Dad is clear. He sleeps a lot and half coughs, half chokes now with the secretions in his mouth. Last time I was home when I said hello there was a delay of a few seconds before his face lit up with recognition and pleasure at seeing me.

There has been none of that this time. He looked at me blankly for a brief moment then turned away. It’s been 6 months since the diagnosis. 6 months when it was supposed to be 3. We are nearing the end.

I can hear mum reporting to him about his old pal’s 80th birthday party, which they’ve been invited to. There are pauses after each comment she makes. She is greeted by silence. She is now telling him about who all the cards are from next to the bed. I walk in. He is sitting up in bed staring at her and looks up at me but there is no spark, none of the glitter that used to live there.

It’s heartbreaking seeing mum be the ever dutiful wife.

Now she is showing him a replica Victoria Cross that someone has sent them for both of ‘their dedication and bravery’. She is explaining why it’s been sent.

‘For valour’

On a crisp, bright Friday I arrive at Aldeburgh beach. The sky is a dark metallic blue. There’s barely anyone about. One man fusses over his little dogs. A girl sits in her car looking into her lap.

The scene is completely serene. The light is stronger now, closer to a Summer’s evening but the light is turning a mellow gold. Imagine arriving from another planet and seeing the world on a night like this. Your little martian heart would break in two and you would never go back.

The sunlight seems made for the copper pebbles of the beach and the bronze of Maggie Hambling’s Scallop which hold its warmth, glowing with the softest fire.

I love the flat lines of this coast. I’ve looked at them and photographed them hundreds of times.

Beach. Sea. Sky. Simplicity and symmetry.

Upsetting this linear view, the roundness and fullness of the shell are reflected in the small pale sphere hundreds and thousands of miles above the earth, his face looking down mournfully, his mouth open as if sick of seeing the life and vibrance of his cousin around whom he must spin for all eternity.

Through the words carved out of the top of the shell I look at the sea.

‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned’.

I think of dad’s voice. Please, don’t let his voice ever be drowned.

I start to walk, as if in a trance, ignoring the path and pulled as if by the moon away from the shore towards the sea.

This particular part of coast has witnessed every twist and turn in my own journey. Winter walks. Summer swims. Mostly alone. Sometimes with friends. Sometimes with girlfriends – cavorting and laughing hysterically out there. A child, a teen, a man.

It is the hand mirror that I hold up to myself. The one and true constant. Fittingly it’s the place where my brother told me at the end of the Summer that there was nothing we could do for dad.

What had the doctor said? ‘We think 3 to 6 months. All we can recommend is good care in the community.’

The moon becomes gradually brighter as the blue of the sky grows darker. Aldeburgh is so low above the beach and below the sky it quickly recedes into the darkness. A vast luminous cloud rests above the stillness of the sea like a continent on a map. It catches a pale yellow of the dying sun and once again my heart seems to momentarily stop like a breath held in.

The crunching of the pebbles creates a slight echo like a tunnel from the depth of my boots. It’s a sound I know well.

I decide to veer towards the road, aware that I want to pick up the path from where I last left it near an abandoned red brick house next to the road.

The sun is setting, an orange splash above the marshes as the first houses start to appear in Thorpeness. One beach. 2 towns. And not much in between.

Like Aldeburgh no one is here. An odd dog walker. One man on his own in a house looking out to sea. Most of the houses are shut up for Winter.

Thorpeness was designed as a purpose built Summer resort at the start of the 1900s. Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie decided it should be his own idea of a fantasy holiday village for recreation and play. And a hundred years later it is much the same: a Summer holiday village. In Winter, a refuge for escapists.

The path follows not at all clearly the beach. Heading directly North with the silent houses watching on from the left out to sea.

The clouds have silently formed a broken ceiling so the Suffolk sky – normally so vast – has been blanketed. The space feels more contained. Almost cosy. Again I’m struck by how indistinct the towns seem on the shoreline, small shape silhouettes and the beach and sea and sky.

I was devout once. As a child. It was the way we were brought up. In recent years I’ve often wondered about if Mum and Dad really believe in God, heaven and all that stuff that the bible teaches you. As intelligent and progressive people I guessed not, that it was more tradition than true belief but I cannot tell and wouldn’t dare ask.

I always assumed Dad’s faith had less conviction but several times he has asked for the vicar to visit to pray with him and to give him communion. Isn’t this why we have religion? To make some understanding of the void that suddenly, inexplicably opens up in front of us.

I see a God in the scenery on an evening like this. Or is the God inside me and brought to life by the inspiration of nature? Whatever the case, I feel fortunate to have the ability for such an intense, visceral reaction to the near world. And what a blessing and a relief it has been through this period of trauma.

It’s now been 3 weeks since Dad got a UTI, 3 weeks since I was called home expecting the end. Now we don’t know what to think. My sister and brother and I had braced ourselves, made some sort of mental preparation (as much as you can) but we’re still waiting. Obviously nobody wishes it but it’s a strange sense of flux. We can’t plan ahead and we can’t start grieving but nor can we communicate much with Dad.

That’s not quite right. We do. I sat with him yesterday and cut and filed his nails, something which he was always so particular about doing when he was able. I sit facing him with his arms out in front, him watching me intently while I work away as I’ve seen women do at nail bars in London.

While I snip and file I talk about the forthcoming England v Scotland rugby match. I talk about the players – Kyle Sinckler, Jonny May. ‘Jonny May’ he repeats but it’s all he’s able to do. What is he thinking? The eyes don’t seem to communicate much either.

He has always been a mad keen rugby fan. I remember him bringing back 5 Nations (as they were then) rosettes from Twickenham – one for England and one for France each with their own motifs: the rose and the cockerel. They’re still up in my bedroom, the bedroom I sleep in while he lies still and silent down below.

He used to get so involved: when the England backs had the ball he would be shouting ‘Go! Go! Go!’ while he bounced up on down on the sofa which was normally followed by ‘Oh, for FUCK’s sake!’ as one of the players had dropped the ball. It was such an enduring memory of him. Never scary, just funny.

In those first months of the last months we had the good fortune of having The World Cup to keep him and us going. It was like a small gift from God. He was still all there back then in October/November but movement was difficult.

As Mum, me and Bro had Sunday lunch one day we had a sudden shout of distress. I rushed down the corridor to see what had happened. Again it was nothing to do with his own discomfort – it was his shock at England’s poor tackling. Afterwards I knew he would probably never have shouted like that about his own failing body.

We even had our own little piece of hallowed turf stuck between the cracks on the uneven patio at the back of the house. ‘Twickers’. He and a friend had got onto the pitch at the end of the match and either picked up a divot or deliberately dug out a square from the pitch and one of them stuffed into his pocket. I remember him telling us the story with pride and a good deal of self mockery.

He has started to cough more now, a result of the secretions that happen as a result of his condition. We were told that a rattly cough would be the sign of the end. Yet he had signs of that 3 weeks ago.

‘You sound like a rattlesnake’, mum said.

And now he seems to have made something of a recovery. It’s amazing. All of us are living in the moment.

I’m now working my way down the other side of the river estuary back out to sea. I follow the river, the Maltings receding into the background. After following the path once more as a bank that curves beside the river it’s not long before the path careers off to roam through Snape Warren.

From the small car park on the edge of the warren, I follow the path straight as it heads into Black Heath Woods. The light is beautiful today, a golden glow filtering through the pines bouncing off the black gloss paint of a fence surrounding a paddock, and lighting up the dark auburn coats of the red pole cattle who silently float between the pines. How in a moment we can have a glimpse of heaven.

The woods here don’t spook me like Tunstall. Like everything right now I keep telling myself it’s a state of mind. When I feel scared, or sad about Dad, or lonely I tell myself it’s just a thought. A thought that I don’t need. It’s not the woods, not the days spent on my own, not even the minutes I spend staring at dad when he’s asleep. It’s just a thought. And sometimes the thought just flits away, a tiny black moth floating up to the sky and the gathering clouds and beyond that into space.

The next part of the wood looks like it’s been designed by ‘some blind hand’. The silver birches curve oh so gently over the path, elegant waif-like models. A perfect almost arch that continues for as far as I can see until I see a dot of light at the end. Like crossing over to the other side. And all around the golden light on pastures and alighting on the odd sheep like the Golden Fleece.

Arriving at the other side is a change. Marshland. Dark, peaty channels and a raised path on boards that creates angled lines like wooden rulers placed end to end at skewed angles.

From here, I plonk along the boards surrounded by wetlands and bare, thin trees. Visible now and then between the trees is a bank which indicates the river is beyond.

There are a group of children playing a game. My bucolic imagining of a Swallows and Amazons scene is shattered by a gunshot from a shotgun very close to my left. I hope they’re aiming up.

Suddenly the woods end and the wide estuary spreads like a ruffled sheet to my right, curling and then twisting its way down to Aldeburgh. My next port of call.

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.

A cold and colourless day in East Suffolk, the wind rushing across the fields whipping the grass and the bare branches of the trees.

The lane lined with cottages that I walked down a couple of weeks ago is silent. There is no sign of life apart from a digger carving up a garden.

Now the path has left the coast, there is less beauty in the views. The sandy track winds its way through farmyards and cottages and my mind starts to wander. I bring up the small clusters of verse that I know. They all seem to be about life and death.

‘And death shall have no dominion, dead men naked they shall be one with the man in the wind and the West moon..’

‘What dreams may come when we shuffle off this mortal coil..’

‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time..’

It’s a Monday but I’m back here. Dad got a urinary infection yesterday and we thought it might be his final call. He couldn’t swallow and he was completely blank. Mum sent a group message to the family and, being in London, I decided to come back.

He looks pale and he stares at me but his mouth is turned down. No words. No smiles. None of the warmth that was always there. He stays in bed and we all hold our breath. Everything is on hold. Nothing can be planned. We can only live in the moment.

The last of the cottages – Suffolk pink like the one where I grew up – passes to my left with a miniature Christmas tree left by its bins turning yellow. Coal and blue tits come looping out of the hedgerow alongside the track one after the other as I get closer. Each one flies so quickly like a dead leaf in the wind only to land a few yards further on while another closer to my step comes rushing out and loops around the one before before the first has landed. And so it goes on, this whirling and looping like some game. It reminds me of a highland dance.

The track turns a bend and I can see Butley Church through some trees to the left. Stark and remote. The sand track now proceeds due North in a straight line. There are pigs in huts and bands of fir trees on either side. At one point a perfect lawn is suddenly stretched for hundreds of metres alongside the path and a silver strip beyond it is the Butley River. This is turf commercially grown to be sold for people’s lawns. It’s obviously suited to the sandy soil because there are swathes of lawn similar to it close to here. It’s so flat and so big 2 teams could play a proper game of cricket on it.

I keep on trying to hold on to the memories of how he was, not how he is now. He had a wonderful sense of ease with himself and with others. Wherever he was he was able to get chatting to people: when we were on holiday, or at occasions where he didn’t know many people or in church. He had this boyish enthusiam about life and a genuine interest in all people. I remember schoolfriends saying ‘Hey, your dad’s cool.’ And I guess he was.

I think about the times he used to take me fishing or camping when I was a boy. He and I camping in his orange tent on the moors at Midelney in Somerset. I guess it was 1982, only because I have photos of me in the England World Cup strip from that year beaming at the camera holding up a mud brown squiggle at arm’s length. It was an eel that I caught in one of the rhynes that managed to curl itself around the line and left slime all over my hands as I desperately tried to unhook it from that perilous, neat little mouth. Dad had warned me about the teeth. I was thrilled.

The track continues its pencil straight course past Low Farm. The view turns ugly and so does my mood. The land is being churned up by diggers while whole rows of pig houses with white flapping tarpaulin roofs have the air of a concentration camp. The wind also brings the smell of pig shit. I quicken my step missing the freshness and clean lines of the path when it does follow the coast.

I am relieved when the track meets a road and the landscape changes to marshland. The Butley River is coming to meet me meandering its way through reed beds to Butley Mill. The mill house is a beautiful red brick building all refitted to create a new home for someone. Butley Mills studios across the road is a nice contrast. Dilapidated red brick barns that seem all to be used as artist studios. Random sculptures are plonked around the plot. There’s a nice DIY feel to the place. The sort of place you feel like you could let yourself into one of the studios without it being an intrusion.

The path now joins the road and heads towards Chillesford. Looking back, I see the mills and Butley River surrounded by reed beds.

Shortly afterwards, the road reaches Chillesford and I peal off the path to take the road back to Butley.

Chillesford is a bit spooky today. It’s silent. No pedestrians, no cars on the road. The old school, now a house, is on the left and the last building on the way out of the village is the church set back about 200 metres from the road on a raised bit of land surrounded by gravestones.

This church is unusual for Suffolk because of its colour. It has a golden coloured stone which reminds me of the Ham stone churches of Central Somerset that get their stone from Ham Hill. Chillesford Church is made from Coralline Crag, one of only two churches in England to be built from this material. The other is Wantisden, less than a mile away. The quarry for the stone at Chillesford sits directly behind the church.

There’s something about the way it’s so exposed on its hill that makes it seem a bit bleaker, a bit rougher like we’re in a frontier town in the Wild West. Perhaps my imagination is getting too carried away but most churches in England here are enclosed either by hedge or by wall.

It’s not unlike when I went to Navan in Ireland and its surrounding area and was surprised by how several houses didn’t have a recognisable garden – the land stretched unhindered to the walls of the house.

On leaving Chillesford I walk the road for about a mile then turn off and walk across 2 fields to get to the road which heads straight and South East back from Butley village towards the smattering of houses near Carmen’s Wood where I started.

The sky is almost dark now and great dark clumps are moving from the South. I know that rain is due about 5 but there’s still a place that I want to see before I reach the car. After 20 minutes on the straight road I make out a dull orange glow through the woods to my right and the sound of a chainsaw.

Finally a small road turns off to the right signposted to Woodbridge and in a dip on the left of this road is the priory. Founded in 1171 by a justiciar to Henry II for the Canons Regular (or Augustinians) there is little of the old priory left apart from the incredibly well preserved 14th Century gatehouse which retains all of its features from when it was first built.

According to Wikipedia the gatehouse was built ‘to provide a grand entrance and accommodate important visitors.’ The entry also states how it is ‘one of the finest examples of Decorated Gothic architecture in Suffolk’.

Most impressive is the large heraldic display on the main facade with ‘5 rows of 14 chequered squares 35 shields of arms carved in high relief, with whimsical figures and grotesques crowding into their surrounds, alternate with carved fleur-de-lys set into flushwork panel. Sir James Mann identified the upper row as showing The Holy Roman Empire, France, St Edmund’s Bury, Christ’s Passion, England (before it became quartered with France in 1340), Leon and Castile, and Hurtshelve. In the second and third rows are English baronial families and in the fourth and fifth are East Anglian gentry’ (Wikipedia)

The Priory is now a wedding venue. There’s a long table with a white cloth laid out in the main hall. I’m rather pleased with this – that an old priory is still partly in use and not left in ruins.

It’s only a short walk from here across the field to my car. It’s almost dark and the wind is really up. This is Storm Brendan which hit the West Coast last night.

I want to ask Dad about Butley Priory. I know he would have an interesting anecdote about it but I can’t. I have to get used to this. Wanting to share, ask, listen but then remember I can’t. It’s time to see how he is. I reach the car just as the first spots of rain hit my jacket.

A cold day as I park the car on a sandy track leading to Boyton. The sun is low in the West and too weak to warm me. I think of Dad rubbing his hands to try and get them warm back at home. The tumour is slowly shutting his body down.

I pass one car in the small car park and go through the gate and past the wood that was full of cormorants last time. Today nothing.

That familiar feeling of comfort from being alone in the wild. I think about how strange that sounds – to be comforted by the company of nothingness – sea, sky, fields. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m swimming in the sea. Embracing the infinite. A reminder of how insignificant I am in the bigger scheme of things.

This morning I had done my final bits of Christmas shopping, visiting John Lewis in Martlesham and going from queues of traffic to queues of people at the cash tills. Now hear I am with no one, not a soul, and that familiar big sky.

The coastal path is on the same grass bank that I’ve been following since Shingle Street while the Ness is a constant pale brown strip across the river.

Boyton Marshes is on a corner of land which looks like 3 sides of a 50p piece with the Butley River coming from the North which then meets the River Ore arriving from the North East at one sharp corner.

Further up the River Ore is Havergate Island and beyond, Orford, and the start of the Ness with its lighthouse, pagodas and thin radio aerial towers.

The path now turns away from the sea to follow the West bank of the Butley River North West towards Butley. Everywhere is water. Little channels trickle into the river or the drains that crisscross the marshes. This is an RSPB reserve and is a home for lapwings, avocets and redshank, as I discover from their website.

The sun is now nothing more than a pale yellow smudge and my brother messages me to ask about presents for Dad. The last time we’ll do this. I suggest gloves that will go well with my socks to keep his extremities warm at night. That phrase ‘his body is shutting down’ rises up in my consciousness to haunt me once more.

For the umpteenth time I imagine his funeral and what I’ll say if I have to. It’s a relief to let the tears flow, streaked and dried by the East wind.

He is at home holding forth in his chair watching TV. I was shocked how much less he said when I got home on the 21st. So much can change in 2 weeks. It’s so quiet where it was once so noisy. I don’t think he even has the strength to laugh at stuff anymore. He stares at the TV and at me. Then back at the TV.

He wears slippers that have Velcro flaps to allow for his swollen feet. He has a rug over him. His glasses are on and his head is bent forward.

He seems more absent. The tumour is affecting his ability to make connections. His eyes seem to stare at the images but without seeing.

That bright spark that used to be there has all but gone.

Mum has fallen now into the role of full time carer. How strange it must be to be living with the love of your life (50 years they’ve been married – we celebrated their Golden Wedding in April) and then suddenly to be nursing him, helping him up out of his chair – him once so strong, now so weak, getting up with him 5 times a night to help him pee into a bottle. Last night she was up most of the night. She had to change his pyjamas and his sheets.

I wonder if she ever thought something like this might happen when she stood in that church half a century ago in her polka dot dress and veil, still so young, and repeated the vows ‘In sickness and in health’…’Til death us to part.’ And her still so loving, speaking softly to him ‘Peeka, my darling boy’ as she smooths his forelock of hair back over his head, just the way he used to before he started to forget.

She puts on a brave face but I can tell it’s tiring. Sometimes she sighs, emotionally and physically worn. Earlier she admitted ‘I’m not coping’. His deteriorating condition is too much for her to manage on her own.

One of the local clergymen had been here earlier and while he talked about the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, Dad slid further and further down in his chair so that he was almost lying down by the time they went. D instinctively being polite and and seemingly unphased while for them it should have been obvious that they had outstayed their welcome.

It took all of our strength to get him back into his chair and he’s barely able to move his feet now to get his legs close enough to the chair to be able to sit down in it properly.

I think of the way she has always made everything all right, the way mothers do. When I couldn’t sleep as a child, she would calm me, reassure me until the panic was gone and I’d be calm enough for sleep. For a long time in my life I was lulled into thinking everything will be all right and that I suppose that is a mother’s instinct. Everything is always ok.

But now it’s not.

Just now after the carer had come to help him up, help him wash and put him to bed mum just said out of the blue:

‘He’s still my Peeka but he looks so old.’ It’s true.

I reach the corner of this mini peninsula and, looking at the jetty and half dismantled red brick building, try to remember if this is Butley Ferry and when I used it. Was it with Dad? Probably.

We had walked together, fished together, skied together, gone on great holidays together. I assumed there’d always be more. We’d talked about it. In fact he was already planning his skiing trip to Austria in February as he’d done for years.

I remembered the last time we went skiing in Kitzbuhel. It was February 2013. Typically, he would always be up for the Apres Ski, him and the other old boys that he would meet up with every year. I think I was going through a weird time: I was having problems sleeping. I was stressed in my teaching job that I was doing at the time. So I didn’t want to drink and I sensed his disappointment. We had some drinks together at the little restaurant he liked to go to every night and it was fun – of course it was, but I was a bit absent. As always I wanted to do my own thing not just be with him all the time. How could I have known it’d be the last time?

Each little reminder of his imminent demise is a little stab in the heart. Every day I get a little reminder, normally when I first wake up and it takes me a few seconds to remember. Each time I recoil at the idea but I tell myself every time is one more thought that won’t take me by surprise the next time. I’m building my own defences like the thick brick and concrete walls that I walk past to protect myself from the final assault, whenever that will be.

Time to leave the river and turn inland wondering where we’ll be next time I pick up the path.

There’s a stark beauty to the Suffolk coastline. In fact many might question that it’s even beauty. In certain places on certain days it is the lack of definition – the emptiness – that is profoundly moving. Maybe it’s just my state of mind.

Dad would have walked along here, I’m sure. He loved walking and conservation. He spent many years working for The Suffolk Wildlife Trust. He’s Suffolk born and bred and there’s still so much I want to ask him. I’ve made several recordings of us chatting but there’s never enough time and often now he’s too tired.

I cast my mind back to August and the beginning of September.

At the start of the Summer holidays Dad seemed a bit distant, forgetful and prone to mental blanks. I wondered if he was just getting older. He’s 79 after all. After I went to Greece I’d hoped he’d be better and sometimes he was but then at others he would sit in silence with a faraway look in his eye which I hadn’t seen before.

In the last week of the holidays – the last week of August – we started to notice other little quirks of behaviour which were outside the norm: while Mum and I talked about my brother, he confused him for my brother-in-law. Was it his hearing? Was it dementia? And in the afternoon he would sit in his deckchair in the sun outside the conservatory looking at the ground and then look up at me – that intense gaze he’s always had, unflinching but also somehow now unknowing. There was something about those moments that I couldn’t bear and I’d leave the house and run away to the sea.

Incredibly we had arranged a family photo shoot for Wednesday August 28th, the first time we’d ever done something like this. It was a present from us children to him and mum for their Golden Wedding back in April. There we all were – Mum and Dad, the children, husbands and wives and grandchildren – now sitting in a row with champagne in the conservatory saying cheers to the camera. Then wandering round the garden swinging my little niece, her face alive or bouncing my nephew, still too young to comprehend the pathos of the situation. All of us in scenes of family joy, with genuine attachment, but with our minds somewhere else wondering what was going on.

And now here were Mum and Dad standing close together, holding each other in the vegetable garden , his vegetable garden with the runner beans that were too late because he’d forgotten to plant them until later in the season, and him suddenly looking old and frail and me having to look away with that feeling like something is caught in my throat and the now familiar heat in the eyes.

It was so lucky that we timed it then to have those photos but I suppose there’s no getting away from that will always be a reminder of the start of the end.

That same day – weird to think of it now – we had a meeting with mum about their lasting power of attorney but it was also a moment where the 4 of us agreed that it was clear something was wrong and that he needed to be checked out.

The following day – Thursday – mum got active and they started a whole round of tests at the GP. One day that week – I can’t remember which – he had been mowing and had fallen over. Was it the Thursday? I think it might have been. Then it happened again the following day when he was unlocking the church.

Friday was the last day of the Summer holidays (or the last day at home before going back to Bristol). It was always a sad day anyway – a reminder of the days of being a schoolboy and having to go away to a boarding school I hated. I was woken up by mum, her climbing the little staircase to the room next to the attic where I’ve slept since I was 7 years old.

She told me calmly that Dad had fallen over while trying to get out of bed and he couldn’t get himself up off the floor and she didn’t have the strength to help him up. My father, always strong and unphazed, was lying prostrate next to the bed. ‘Oh J, this is ridiculous’, he said to me with his face turned sideways on their cream carpet.

The GP decided that he had to be admitted to hospital and they called an ambulance to take him.  My last day of the Summer I watched him walk himself into the back of the ambulance, well dressed and handsome as he always has been, and sit down on the little seat they have behind the driver. I said goodbye and drove back to Bristol in silence.

Not knowing a diagnosis when you know something is wrong is dreadful. Your brain tells you not to think the worst when all along your brain is thinking the worst. And it really couldn’t have been much worse. Glioblastoma is a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer that affects or infects only 1 or 2 in every 100,000 people. But what a thing: by the end of my first week back at school they had spotted it, diagnosed it and it had grown to 6cm long in 2 months. ‘It is the size of an egg’ Mum told me over the phone. The image makes me feel sick.To think that throughout this lovely Summer, where I’ve felt so good about life and had such fun, that thing was quietly but rapidly growing, waiting to be discovered and then turn our world upside down. It would have started at the beginning of July when we first noticed he wasn’t his usual self.

I drove straight from school on Thursday evening 5 days after he’d first been admitted and still without a prognosis although we knew it was a brain tumour. Walking through the door I tried to sound chirpy: ‘Hi!’ expecting it to be mum on her own. This would be how it would be some day soon.

‘Hallo!’

Dad was home. That was a surprise. Mum caught me before I walked down the corridor to hug him. She looked frightened.

‘They’ve said he can come home but it doesn’t look good. He’ll explain.’

I sat on the sofa in the same place and the same room where we have gathered for almost 40 years: birthdays, Christmas,  parties for their friends or ours or just a place to be together to chat or watch TV.

They sat in armchairs one on each side of me and spelled it out between them, clearly worried how I would react.

‘It’s very aggressive.’

‘Treatment is difficult and could be risky.’

Pause

‘They say 3-6 months, possibly a year if they can operate.’

There is no noticeable effect on me. The room doesn’t start spinning. The clocks keep ticking. We keep talking as we normally would.

But everything has changed.

This is what countless generations of people who have come before have had to endure. The loss of someone close. It’s so simple, so obvious. It’s everything that I’ve read about or seen on stage or screen but nothing can prepare you for it. Already I see my life up to this point as an innocent, unknowing time. Who was the poet who talked about how we throw away our youth like toffee wrappers? What do we know about life? Nothing. How woefully unprepared we are for this entire misadventure. They don’t tell you these things in school but one day life will let you down and you won’t know how good something is until it’s gone.

****

I set off from where I ended up 2 weeks ago at the end of a dirt track next to the prison car park. There’s a strange satisfaction I get from arriving back at exactly the same place wondering how I was then and what has happened since. The continuity of the path and the passing of time. Arriving here once again I had driven through the prison buildings and fences of Hollesley Bay Colony with big signs ‘No access to inmates’ and not a soul about. No people on the paths. No cars in the car parks.

How I like this. The cosiness of being alone with my thoughts on a Winter’s day.

The greyness is strange, distorting the edges of reality. Sheep grazing in a field merge with their background. A ship out at sea, not far from the coast appears as a ghostly vast lego block, more like an upturned table than a ship. Sky, river and sea are all grey. The sky has such subtle changes of the same colour it is almost impossible to tell, let alone describe.

Trudging across Hollesley Marshes wrapped up in my thoughts I am immediately aware of the sea’s crashing out of sight to the East. It sounds like white noise in a wind tunnel. Something is making the sound bend. The bank in front of me hides the end of the land.

The greyness is manmade too. Sea defences appear at random, lurking on the edge of the path. Further back on the path near Bawdsey a whole pill box had ended up on the beach half sunk in the sand, its corners sticking up awkwardly and out at a strange angle. It’s now the sea that poses the biggest threat here.

I quicken my pace. It’s mild today but I want to get into the groove of walking and then the thoughts will start to become louder and clearer. It will clear the thoughts of home where Dad lies silent in his armchair.

I stick to the narrow spine of the grass bank that follows the river as it rushes down from Aldeburgh.

The only colour apart from the grass is a fisherman, bright orange in a wooden dinghy with an outboard turning around in the river far ahead in the distance.

The wind is to my back from the South and a slight change in the sky suddenly reveals some light above me. My mood changes. I have one of those moments. Time is frozen and I’m entranced by the wind and light. Not thinking, just feeling. It reminds me of hiding from the winter wind in a bush when I was little like a young leveret or bird. I feel the same now as I did then.

A transition. Something new. Simpson’s Saltings is a 25 hectare nature reserve consisting of marshland and beaches but is home to many important and rare species of plants.

I run down through the sea campion to the beach and jump into the pebbles turning south into the wind. There is something here that breaks the smooth lines of beach, water and plants. Upturned boats and a winch left for the Winter.

Onwards, Northwards. A boy runs past me and then stops behind another pill box on the path to get his breath back. Then shouting suddenly ‘Ella, Come on!’ before suddenly turning inland towards a line of trees although there is no path. I have a thought about the fearlessness of youth.

After the trees, I turn my back on the sea and cross a narrow channel parallel to the river. A transition and another Suffolk scene: a flat field stretching to a thin line of trees, skeletal dark forms filled with a mass of black birds silhouetted against the sky. My immediate assumption was that they were crows or rooks but, as I saw a flock coming into land, I realised they were cormorants with their white underbellies and yellow throats.

The great bird lover and writer Adam Nicolson has referred to the cormorant as ‘the most sinister bird in English literature’, a reference to the cormorant being mentioned in ‘Paradise Lost’ but also, according to Nicolson, ‘Aristophanes, Plutarch, Chaucer, Erasmus, Shakespeare: everyone has given this bird his evil part’. Being faced by this wall of black shapes sitting amidst the bareness of the trees in the fast fading light did produce a little rush in my chest. I carry on.

Like the last time I had the same incongruous experience of going from the wildness and openness of sea, beach, marsh, meadow to the starkness of fence, barbed wire, CCTV, prison block as the path passes the main detention centre at Hollesley.

Yet somehow there is a conjoining. It seems absolutely obvious that the prison – grey, austere, remote – should be here on this featureless East Anglian shore. There is a certain symbiosis to these 2 seemingly alien environments. They’re made for each other.

The light has all but gone apart from a pale patch over the Western horizon. Head bowed I arrive back at the car. Refreshed somehow I’m ready to return home to have a drink with Dad and tell him what I’ve seen and done. I know he’ll be polite and genuinely interested but it must tear him up – he, the wildlife lover, the explorer – knowing that he’ll never do anything like that again. How would you stop yourself thinking that it’s all downhill from here?

I always kick myself when I first arrive home and automatically ask ‘Are you OK?’ To which he always responds in the same frank, honest way with no pity for himself:

‘Not really.’