Big skies and brambles

27 Aug Big skies and brambles

Five days in Suffolk. Rental cottage. Truanting from the finely-tuned rituals of domestic-pandemic life. On holiday for the first time in ages. Feels adventurous. Though not entirely – we took all our groceries with us.  Also took a bottle of cleaning fluid (1-part chlorine to 100-parts water), not quite trusting to the lengthy COVID-19 cleaning regime in place at the cottage, a regime neatly tabulated over three sides of A4 paper, ticked and signed by the cleaner with the double-barrelled name. Belt and braces. The cleaning, I mean, not the cleaner – though who knows what kit she wears to work. 

Sweet old higgledy-piggledy cottage in need of some fresh love, feng-shui and someone dispassionate and, ideally, unrelated to the artist to whittle down the selection of box canvas oil paintings which are pinned up all over the walls. Yes, in every tiny corner. I find I can only take so much of interlinking squares rendered in depressing tones of sage, artichoke and school dinner gravy. They don’t ‘speak’ to me. The kitchen is the crossroads of the place.  Such a biomechanical and organisational challenge, that, despite its small scale, there’s a lot of walking about to complete the full set of actions needed to make a cup of tea, especially if you take milk. Head injuries are a constant risk what with low doors and weird roof angles. Sudden turns must be avoided. Makes you realise how small people were back in the day when School Cottage was, indeed, the teacher’s cottage. My nesting instinct begs to sort this little cottage out but on a 5-night trip there are other priorities.

Like taking to the footpaths that criss-cross fields and woods and shores and marshes. I hardly knew Suffolk but spent five days falling in love with it, with its big skies, generous landscape and countless footpaths. This time of year it’s like walking through a Constable or a Gainsborough, the wheat fields in the foreground, the dark trees in the distance, the endless sky. I have never seen as many footpath signs nor walked such well-cared-for paths. These are often by the edge of fields recently harvested. The farmers are busy this time of year, toiling in their huge tractors with wheels as high as me. Most of the harvest is in now leaving behind endless fields that bristle with wheat stubble like a five-o’clock shadow that glows corn-golden in the sunshine. The architecture of haystacks mesmerises as if there is some separate code for each farm: rolled-up into stooks or pressed into rectangular bales then stacked high like a Lego tower or clustered in wide monolithic wedges that stand in a shorn field like a lone shipping container on an empty wharf. 

In the corner of a field beside a stand of elegant trees that, regretfully, I can’t identify we come across a network of brambles (blackberries in the English vernacular) easily accessible and perfectly ripe. We load up our sandwich box with the precious fruit. I feel the flesh yield gently as I ease each bramble away from the little plug at its centre and a story crackles through the projector in the cinema in my head. A trip in the car, a picnic by the side of a quiet road. I’m six, maybe seven years old. I’m wearing grey cotton shorts and a pale sweater. I must be careful not to get the sweater stained. I wander along a hedgerow clutching an old plastic ice-cream tub. The sweet pleasure of scavenging food directly from nature, sticky purple-pink fingers, scratches on legs and arms from reaching for the big, fully-ripe one that’s just too high or too far, holding the precious harvest on my lap as we drive home still high on the excitement of the adventure, astonished at the colour that oozes so quickly from these supple little fruits as my mother unloads them carefully in the kitchen, rinses them, heats them slowly, coaxing them to blend with delicately peeled apples, slipping the mixture between sheets of pastry, pouring custard from the old brown jug. A feast. 

We walk through forests of mixed deciduous trees grown so tall in their search for the sun that the lower branches are bare. Light filters through onto a bracken floor. The air feels smooth and clean as it sighs against our skin. We register the forest names – Tunstall, Rendlesham, Sandlings – and imagine their origins. We trudge the length of Dunwich Beach toiling through the deep, smooth pebbles speechless at the incalculable number of them banked high on the shore. We amble near the river, a marshland with reeds and ferns so dense you can barely see your feet hides mounds and dips of pale mud. We watch dragonflies flit effortlessly above them while we struggle to keep our balance. I slip. We laugh and agree there is no sensible way through. We walk near an estuary, the sand from its banks blown out onto the paths and roads smudging the boundary between land and river. 

It’s healing this journey into the quiet country and away from the regimental disciplines of recent everyday life. Of course, we take some of those disciplines with us but they feel less cumbersome in an unfamiliar place. They are less confining, less repetitive. The big Suffolk skies seem to take a weight from my shoulders, a weight I didn’t know was there until it was lifted for a while.