A few years ago I read a novel called ‘What I Was’
with my third year students. It was a book for teenagers, a coming-of-age tale
set in East Anglia, the story of the friendship between two very different boys
in the 1960s. I don’t remember much of the plot, but there is a passage that
got engraved in my mind: the two boys are rowing on a boat on a clear Easter
day; the sea is calm and they can see the remains of a lost medieval city underwater.
The sea is actually one of the protagonists of the
book and the story reaches its climax during a storm that floods the cabin
where one of the boys lives. Thirty years on, it will also have claimed the
hateful school where the other protagonist felt like a prisoner. The beach
where most of the action takes place is a place full of mystery – cold and
menacing.
When I read this book I wondered whether this place
was real or just a product of the imagination of Meg Rosoff, its author. I
recently discovered the truth.
A few weeks ago Pam invited us to spend a few days in
Suffolk. She and her family have a cottage in a very small village, Walpole,
and she suggested that we could stay there and use their bicycles to move
around the region and discover its treasures.
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| Tug of war in Walberswick |
There are plenty of cycling
routes, and on the first day we embarked on a seven-hour trip that took us as
far as Framlingham, where we finally stopped to have a beer in the pub near the
station.
On this first excursion we went through yellow fields and green woods,
passing almost inhabited places with a church in the middle of nowhere. On the
second day, however, we decided to set towards the coast. We had been told
about a mysterious town called Dunwich and immediately I knew it was the place
the book talked about.
Dunwich was the capital of the Anglo Saxon kingdom of
East Angles. It was an international harbour and in the 13th century
it had eight churches and about five thousand inhabitants. Between 1286 and
1362 a series of storm surges (or meteotsunamis) destroyed most of the harbour
and the town. In the 19th century there were less than 250
inhabitants and only one of the churches remained, the one that was claimed by
the sea between 1908 and 1919. Nowadays, Dunwich is just a couple of streets
and it has only 50 inhabitants. However, it’s still a town, not a village.
There’s a museum and a cafe on the beach, where you can have the typical fish
and chips or drink a cup of coffee before going for a walk along the cliff (you
are warned to be careful, because its edge may collapse into the beach when you
expect it the least).
The cliff eventually leads to a wood that hides the
remains of the Greyfriars priory. What really impressed me the most was the
lack of people around, even in the middle of July, the absolute silence only
broken by the cries of the birds coming from the nearby marshes.
Going back to the beach, the weather suddenly changed
and it started to rain. It felt so different from the scorching sandy
extensions full of holidaymakers of Southern Spain (I must confess I have
always hated going to the beach in Malaga: too much sand, too much heat, too
much noise). Here, in this desolate landscape I felt I could walk forever. The
rain stopped eventually and we started moving towards the marshes, following
the opposite direction. First we came across a family who were brave enough to
adventure themselves into the sea (we had brought our swimsuits but we found
the sea too menacing and turbulent).
Later on we came across a man standing next to a
fishing rod. His daughter, a twelve-year old girl was lying comfortably inside
a bivouac, drawing pictures on a notebook. They told us that the weather was
nice enough to spend the night on the beach. Maybe they expected to listen to
the bells of the churches of the ghost town, as the legend says.
We continued our silent walk. The prevailing colour
was brown: you could see it in the sea and in the stones, different shades that
combined with the traditional white, black and grey. The only noise was the one
from the sea and the crushing sound of the pebbles under our shoes.
Walking along this barren place, I thought it could
very well become a metaphor of the dementia process. This condition is
progressive and it erodes not only your memory but y
Last Tuesday we had dinner with Anita Berlin in a
really nice place near the Thames. Anita told us about all the different
projects she has in mind to give shape to the history of her family. Anita’s
mother, Carmen, who lives with Alzheimer’s, has an amazing history. To give you
just an example, she was one of the persons who were saved by Angel Sanz-Briz,
the Angel of Budapest, during the II World War. Anita has the original
documents. She also has a little diary she found recently, which contains a
list of books, some of them crossed out. Carmen, who spoke four languages and
had a passion for words, can no longer speak. This little notebook will allow
Anita to discover more about her mother through the books she read or wanted to
read.
Marine archaeologists have managed to reconstruct the
map of the old city of Dunwich. Anita is also an archaeologist of submerged
treasures.
Photography: Lorenzo Hernandez www.photolorenzohernandez.com
