by Bill Bryson
‘I’m going to cover it,’ she said irritably, as if I were needlessly belabouring the point. ‘Look,’ she said, and scuffed some leaf litter over it, converting the dog’s deposit from a conspicuous hazard into a kind of faecal landmine. ‘There,’ she said, and looked at me with satisfaction, as if this had solved everything.
I stared at her for a long moment, with something like awe, then raised my walking stick high into the air and calmly beat her to death. When she was quite still, I rolled her ample, Barbour-clad body off the path and into the marshy reeds where it sank with a satisfying glug. Then I checked my map and resumed my walk, wondering if there was any place in Blakeney where I could get a cup of tea at this hour.
I like Norfolk. I lived there for ten years until 2013 and have grown convinced that there is nothing wrong with it that a few hills and a little genetic variability wouldn’t fix. As my son Sam used to say: ‘Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.’
If none of the county is exactly spectacular, parts of it are at least very fine and nowhere is that more true than along the north Norfolk coast. For the ten miles or so between Wells-next-the-Sea (and how pretty a name is that?) and Cley it is buffered on the seaward side by great expanses of salt marsh. These are intercut with channels, some quite deep, that fill with water remarkably swiftly when the tide comes in. It is very easy to lose your way in the chill and wispy fogs that sweep in off the North Sea and to find yourself stranded, very possibly engulfed, on a shrinking island of marsh.
North Norfolk is popular with second homeowners from London; it is often called Chelsea-on-Sea. But it was blessedly quiet after the West Country. The coast here has the best and most intelligent rural bus service I know. Some years ago, Coasthopper, the company that runs the service, got rid of all its slow, full-sized buses and invested in a fleet of small buses called Hoppers, with the promise that there would be a bus in each direction at least once every half-hour. Because it is so dependable, it has proved remarkably popular with locals and visitors alike. One of the drivers once told me proudly that it is the best-used rural bus service in the country. If you are walking the coast path, it gives you the flexibility to break the walk at any point if you get tired or the weather turns stormy. It also means that you can park your car at somewhere like Holkham or Wells, walk along the coast to Sheringham, then get a bus back to your car. That is what I was doing now.
Several attractive villages of brick and flint stand along the way, notably Blakeney and Cley, but I like to stop for lunch at a place called Cookie’s at Salthouse. Cookie’s is what in America would be called a crab shack, and it has been there for ever. It used to be filled with angry handwritten notices telling customers all the things they were not permitted to do. This included not seating themselves, not asking for a table until they had ordered, not requesting any deviations from the written menu, and above all not consuming anything not bought on the premises, including oxygen and sea views, if I remember correctly. I kept looking around for a sign that said, ‘Actually, Why Don’t You All Just Fuck Off and Leave Us in Peace?’
They seem to have calmed down a good deal at Cookie’s now and the signs are fewer and more restrained, which I can’t help feel is kind of a shame. I like a place that has a bit of spirit. Anyway, the food is great and very reasonably priced. You can berate me all you want if the price is right. I had a big plate of seafood and it was divine.
Beyond Salthouse the walk is close to the sea and over sand and shingle and along the tops of giant dunes for a couple of miles before climbing upwards on to big grassy fields seventy or eighty feet above the sea. It is all lovely. I was doing a very long walk – eighteen miles from Holkham to Sheringham – but the route was mostly flat. Just before I reached Sheringham, the air was pierced by a shrill whistle, loud enough to make me start, and off to my right a steam train passed, chuffing away and filling the air with a long chain of white smoke. This was the North Norfolk Railway. Even from a fair distance, I could see that the train was packed. Hundreds of happy people were on an eighteen-minute journey from Holt to Sheringham at a speed much slower than they had used to get to Norfolk, on a conveyance almost certainly less comfortable, and they were in heaven.
Very few things are more reliably astounding than the British when they are enjoying themselves, and I say this with a kind of cautious admiration. They have the ability to get deep and lasting pleasure out of practically nothing at all. Give them a form of transport that was becoming obsolete in the time of Clement Attlee and they will flock to it. Did you know, Britain has 108 steam railways – that is surely 106 or so more than any nation needs – run by 18,500 volunteers? It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as there are steam trains in operation.
And steam trains are only a small part of the Diversions No One Else Would Want. Britain also has a Water Tower Appreciation Society, a Society for Clay Pipe Research, a Pillbox Study Group, a Ghost Sign Society (which finds faded advertisements painted on the sides of buildings) and a Roundabout Appreciation Society. Are you following what I am saying? There are people who spend their free time, not at gunpoint, travelling around seeking out the most attractive and satisfying roundabouts. (How do they know when they have found one?)
I recently happened upon a website for the Branch Line Society, which exists to visit and celebrate little-used railway lines. Here is an extract from their newsletter describing a day out attended by 160 people – 160! – in 2013: ‘We took the Up Relief at Parson Street from the first available crossover and stayed “relief” through to Bristol Temple Meads where we took the Up Through, before reversing at Bristol East Jn and terminating in platform 9 only one minute down. With 302 miles and 61 chains under our belts, we waved our goodbyes to the train crew, stewards and passengers – and promptly started counting the huge pile of booking forms we had collated during the day for the Power Haul Tracker on 3rd November!’
It is that exclamation mark that brings joy to my heart. And this was just a tiny part of what they get up to at the Branch Line Society. Here are some of the other exciting days they have had: ‘Toton Centre to Trowell Junction’, ‘Thrumpton West Junction to Retford West Junction (High Level Platform 2)’, ‘Dinting West Junction to Dinting East Junction, avoiding Glossop’ (and who could blame them?), and my favourite of all, ‘Irk Valley Junction to Oldham Mumps’.
I can’t tell you what comfort this brings me. Any time I am feeling low, when I am tempted to think that life is pointless and empty, I go to one of these societies’ websites and read about their latest outings, and I realize just how rich my life is.
In Sheringham, I climbed on to a cheery Hopper bus and rode back to Holkham and collected my car. It wasn’t actually my car, but a hire car from Norwich, and I really didn’t want to have it at all, but there is no way to see East Anglia without a car. Then I drove back to Sheringham, parked with difficulty, and had a very modest look around the town on my tired old legs.
Sheringham is the nicest not-very-attractive town I know. It doesn’t have a superabundance of charm, I don’t think it has a single decent pub and not much in the way of restaurants, but it has a little theatre and a most commendable range of shops of the type that have mostly vanished from the rest of the world: greengrocer, fishmonger, a couple of butchers, a bookshop and stationer’s and a splendid ironmonger called Blyth and Wright that sells everything. A big part of the reason that Sheringham still has these things is that for fourteen years the town successfully fought to stop Tesco from opening a big store in the centre. But Tesco is nothing if not relentless and after much patient, fuck-you manoeuvring it eventually won. I had a look at the new Tesco and it was busy, but then so too was the High Street. I stopped in a shop – a real, independent shop – to buy a bottle of water and asked the proprietor if the new Tesco had made much difference. He nodded grimly. ‘It was already hard. Now it is getting bloody impossible. Come back in a few months and I guarantee
that a lot of the shops on this street won’t be here.’
‘That’s sad,’ I said.
‘Bloody tragedy.’
‘But then again,’ I pointed out, ‘your shop is kind of a dump, you didn’t say hello when I came in, and you give every appearance of being a miserable old git.’
‘You’re absolutely right. I really should try a lot harder, shouldn’t I?’
‘Much harder,’ I agreed. ‘But the sad thing is you won’t. You’ll just bitch away as if your failing business is everybody’s fault but your own.’
‘You are so right. Well, thank you for helping me to be a better shopkeeper and possibly even a better person. I hope you’ll come again.’
Actually we didn’t have that conversation. He just handed me my change without saying thank you or giving me the least reason for ever wanting to step into his shop again, cheerless prick.
I stayed the night in the Burlington Hotel, a large and dark establishment on the seafront for which I have an unaccountable affection. I have never been in the Burlington when I didn’t wonder if I was the only guest, but somehow it hangs in there. Perhaps my semi-annual visits are all the business they need. While grooming for the evening, I turned on the television just in time for the local news, which in this part of the world always means a report of a factory closure in Lowestoft. I am amazed that there are any factories left to close in Lowestoft, but they always seem to find another one. It is generally an obscure business that is the last of its type in Britain.
‘Britain’s last remaining kelp sniffer is to close its doors after 160 years,’ the newsreader will gravely intone. ‘Two hundred and fifty employees, some of whom have been with the firm since the eighteenth century, are being made redundant.’ The next night it will be Britain’s last remaining cockle flayer, flange trimmer, oyster chafer or other improbable-sounding enterprise. I didn’t catch the nature of the business on this evening because I was drying my hair with a noisy blower and turned it off only to hear: ‘Staff have been offered alternative employment at the company’s production facility in Ho Chi Minh City.’
Scrubbed to a pink freshness and attired in clean clothes, I had a drink in the hotel’s empty bar, followed by dinner at a nearly empty restaurant nearby, returned to my room and fell into bed and slept like a baby.
II
In the morning I woke to watery sunshine, and after breakfast in the Burlington’s large but empty dining room drove twenty miles down the coast to Happisburgh, a remote and lonely but good-looking village roughly halfway between Sheringham and Great Yarmouth. Happisburgh is dominated by a tall, lovely lighthouse with three red stripes. A sign in the neighbouring car park informed me that this was ‘the only independently run lighthouse in the Uk’. Now I am very sorry, but how can you possibly think that ‘Uk’ is correct? Why did you bother going to school at all? Why did your teachers turn up in the morning? Apart from this minor outburst of illiteracy, Happisburgh seemed to be an entirely agreeable place. It is pronounced, incidentally, hays-burra, or even just hays-brrrrrr. Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I’m not sure, but I think it is just something that happens when you sleep with close relatives.
Happisburgh rarely attracted the attention of outsiders until 2000 when the flint scrapers found there by archaeologists were dated to 900,000 years ago. These were the oldest human artefacts ever found this side of the Alps. The unexpectedness of this can hardly be exaggerated.
Nobody else in the world was this far north at that time. These were the most out-of-Africa people on the planet. That is a truly extraordinary fact. They had the whole world to themselves and they chose Happisburgh – and this was before it had a film evening on the second Tuesday of every month organized by the Coronation Hall Film Club. And people think Happisburgh is slow now.
Happisburgh was of course a very different place then. Britain was connected to the rest of Europe by a land bridge and Happisburgh stood where the Thames met the sea. Today the Thames enters the North Sea ninety-five miles to the south, but a million years ago this was a broad and nutritious estuary.
This stretch of English coastline has been fighting a losing battle with the sea for centuries. The cliffs along the seafront stand about thirty or forty feet high and are made of loose sand and little else. Signs of slippage are evident everywhere. Lots of houses have fallen into the sea over the years and more now are clearly not far off following. In some places, houses stand on the very brink of fresh cliff edges. Just by the car park, a steepish path led down to the sea, but the tide was in and the beach was under water. I went down as far as I could, but there was nothing to see, so I returned to the clifftop and followed it north towards a caravan park.
Just below the site was the spot where ancient footprints had been exposed the year before. A storm washed away a covering layer of sand and the footprints of half a dozen individuals, now permanently impressed in rock, were exposed to daylight probably for the first time since they were made in soft mud almost a million years ago. They are the oldest footprints in the world outside Africa. Archaeologists photographed and studied them, then allowed nature to cover them up again. The cliff edges are dangerously unstable, but I crept close and looked over as much as I dared. Directly below me, where waves washed against the cliff, was the spot where the footprints had been found. There was something eerily splendid in standing almost on the very place where people from a time before modern humans tramped about in an unimaginably distant past.
Happisburgh was also the scene of one of Britain’s worst nautical tragedies, in the winter of 1801, when one of its greatest warships, HMS Invincible, was driven on to a sandbank during a storm and broke up. Four hundred men drowned in the freezing waters. Nearly 120 bodies washed on to the beach and were buried in St Mary’s churchyard. I strolled up there now. St Mary’s is a striking church with a 110-foot-high square tower, which is pretty high but seems even higher against the big, empty skies of Norfolk. The church looks to be a safe distance from the shore, but at the present rate of coastal erosion, it has been calculated, the sea will claim it in about seventy years. Faced with this tragic prospect, the British government is doing what governments always do when confronted with a problem that doesn’t need an immediate solution: nothing.
I drove a dozen miles back towards Sheringham along wandering lanes, through lush and sunny farmland to the coastal village of Overstrand. It is hard to believe, but this was once one of the most fashionable resorts in Europe. On a summer’s afternoon in the early years of the twentieth century, a visitor to Overstrand might run into Winston Churchill, Ellen Terry, Henry Irving or Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It was called the ‘Village of Millionaires’. Lord Hillingdon, owner of Overstrand Hall, used the house for just two weeks a year but famously kept three butlers and an army of understaff on permanent alert in case he showed up unexpectedly, which he never did.
My interest was with a property called the Sea Marge and with the forgotten magnate who built it, Sir Edgar Speyer. Speyer was a German who spent most of his life outside Germany. He was born in 1862 in New York City to wealthy German parents, then went to England in his twenties to look after the family interests there. He made a fortune as a financier, built much of the Underground, and became a generous patron of the arts. When the Proms got into financial difficulties, he stepped in and saved it. He became pals with King George V, our friend from Bognor, took out British citizenship, was knighted for his services to the arts and was appointed to the Privy Council. He gave generously to hospitals and funded the Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott. When Scott died, he had a letter to Speyer in his pocket.
Speyer was, in short, a nearly ideal human being, except that it seems he wanted Germany to win all its wars and take over the world. This is, of course, occasionally a problem with Germans. Speyer’s house is a hefty edifice in the style of an Elizabethan manor standing on cliffs above
the sea. Rumours have often had it that Speyer signalled German ships from the terrace during the First World War. It is an appealing image, but a slightly preposterous one. For a start what would he tell them? (‘Bit rainy here. How you?’) He had no access to information that would be of special value to the German war effort and it was unlikely that he would expose himself to the obvious risk of being observed.
Speyer’s real problem was that he was Jewish at a time when even the most enlightened members of society tended to be at least lightly anti-Semitic. Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, spoke for his generation when, in noting the proliferation of Jewish businessmen in England, he remarked drily, ‘We shall soon have to set the Society column in Yiddish.’ Northcliffe loathed Speyer and persecuted him mercilessly. Eventually Speyer fled to America under a cloud of suspicion. A parliamentary committee stripped him of his honours and branded him a traitor, which in fact he was to the extent that he wanted Britain to lose the war.
The Sea Marge is now a hotel. I trespassed on to its grounds and looked over the garden wall at the sea, then wandered inside, wondering if anyone would challenge me, but no one did. There didn’t seem to be anything at all to recall Herr Speyer, so I wandered out again and went to have a look at the village, which was tidy and quite arrestingly normal.
It is a small miracle that it has survived as well as it has. Norfolk is the most out on a limb of English counties – it has no motorway or even much in the way of dual carriageways, and a generally appalling rail service. When we first moved there it was operated by a company called WAGN, which I always assumed was short for ‘We Are Going Nowhere’, and now it is in the hands of a Dutch company, but if there have been any improvements I haven’t seen them. The upshot is that getting to the east coast of Norfolk requires immense reserves of fortitude and time mixed with an eccentric desire to be on the east coast of Norfolk.