18 March

Friends told us not to go. Snow is coming, they said, winds are coming in from the arctic. You’ll freeze. But it has become something of a Mother’s Day tradition for us, to go to the coast on this blowy Sunday in March and eat fish and chips. So off we went, with the clouds scudding across an azure sky, the car seeming to drive itself, blown eastward by the Wind God with his puffed out cheeks. We must have misjudged our timing, today, because the queues for fish and chips, or outside any of the chi-chi little cafes that line the main street of this resort, are horrendous. This town, tired and forgotten not so very long ago, is newly fashionable, and the squeals of weekenders vie with the screams of the seagulls. We go to a farm shop and buy bread and cheese and apples, and to a garage for crisps and chocolate, and hunker down behind the sea wall on the beach, wrapped in hats and fleeces, a wild north wind whipping hair across our eyes and stinging our skin. We walk unsteadily across the beach, our ankles aching in the shingle, a slate sea growling along beside us. There is little visible drama on this coast, none of the coves and cliffs and rock pools of the west, nor the miles of dunes and golden sands of the northern beaches of my childhood. There is romance and history, here, though; the cold North Sea distinctly menacing in its insistent march to eat up the land, the marshes and creeks eerie and empty. We walk along a dyke across the top of the salt marshes, making slow progress against the wind; one step forward, two steps back, the breath sucked out of us, our voices lost. On one side wild fowl arch into the sky and soar above this haunted march, where a village once stood, on the other we hear the sloop and clink of tethered boats, some filling with choppy sea water as we pass.

This stretch of coast is schizophrenic; it starts off full of kiss-me-quick resorts with fun fairs and candy floss, those places so beloved of small children, to the consternation of their parents. Further north old fashioned fishing villages emerge at well spaced intervals, miles of heath and salt marsh between them. Some are prosperous, now, popular with London families seeking a more ‘authentic’ way of life (are they trying to survive against the odds on profits from fishing, or watching the sea erode the farming land, I wonder?), but I concede that there is something reassuringly old-fashioned and Enid Blyton-esque about the place. The fisherman’s cottages and Victorian terraces are colour–washed in sea-blues and the traditional Suffolk pink, the shops catering for the demands of Londoners.

Other places have been bypassed by fashion, for no reason that I can see, and still sport their hairdresser’s salons with French names and peeling paint, empty shops and rows of pebble-dashed bungalows. All these Saxon thorpes and tons and hams still have their ancient tithe barns and moot halls, some newly thatched, others sunk so deeply into the earth they have half-disappeared.

We drive back, half-frozen but exhilarated, trying to reach home before the sky darkens and the promised hailstones arrive. We do, just, but part of us has stayed behind, listening to the song of the sea.