GHOST TRAIL THROUGH EAST ANGLIA

Edward Pearce recommends an Easter

excursion to the landscape which was so right

for the dark art of M.R. James THERE are snowdrops in the wood at the cliff edge, also a grave — the mortal remains of Jacob Forster, departed this life 1796, aged 58.

A grave in a wood at the cliff edge has every echo of a ghost story, which it is, for this is Dunwich. The church, All Saints, and most of the churchyard, went onto the beach in 1918, one of a series of landslips by which the sea has been swallowing the town since 1386.

But the Anglian coast is generally dark and theatrical. The towers of great church- es like Blythburgh in Suffolk rear out of mists. Buildings most of the way round the coast are of knapped flints, durable and dark, part of the dourness of the coast. M. R. James, the ghost-story writer, would come here from Cambridge to this lower- ing but beautiful coast.

We started from Cambridge. James resid- ed there as Provost of King's, conceiving 'The Tractate Middoth' in the university library. We passed through unrec- ommendable, dull Downham Market, whose only points are a Victorian town clock and squat, 100-year-old outlying hous- es in yellow stone which could be called jolie laide. West of the Wash, the great wool church of Walpole St Peter dominates the landscape, and by a minor detour one may take in the pleasant town of Thetford with its gilded statue of Tom Paine. 'That evil man,' Peter Utley used to call him.

The Norfolk coast we try to trace in an impossible first day's swoop isn't all grim. King's Lynn, though pocked with develop- ment, still has the handsome space of its fine Tuesday Market, its Guildhall from 1420, 800-year-old St Margaret's, bits and pieces making up a Flemish look on its quays and those agreeable old hotels, the Globe and the Duke's Head.

It was from Lynn, as everyone calls it, that Eugene Aram, most intellectual of crimi- nals, was brought back from his usher's place and pioneer studies of Celtic and Mid- dle Eastern languages and hanged at York in 1759 for a murder committed 14 years before. More cheerfully, Denis Herbert managed an 18th-century theatrical troupe here while allegedly, as the lawyers say, con- suming 45 pints of beer a day. Moving on to Hunstanton should be anticlimactic, for Hunstanton is a smaller, later Scarborough, a custom-made resort. But I am a sucker for late-Victorian sea- side places. Scarborough, Tenby, Mablethorpe and Colwyn Bay are all built square and comfortably by proper crafts- men. Hunstanton is stone and flint rather than Accrington brick, but has the same substantiality and cheerfulness.

Holme-next-the-Sea along the coast is a remoter jolt. Writing about the Chilterns (`Umbria in Metroland', 3 February), I mentioned the Peddar Way in conjunction with the Ridgeway at Ivinghoe. This and its Buckinghamshire companion, the Ick- nield Way, finish at Holme where they once served a Roman port. For this is Iceni country, haunt of another ghost, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni and trouble- some native.

There were no hills here for her to rise in. Coward's remark, 'Very flat, Norfolk', is roughly true, though as you travel the Nor- folk coast the immediate backs of it are not the low and suicide-inducing plain of Cam- bridgeshire. They roll a little.

Blakeney and Cley-next-the-Sea are for the birds: flat marshlands inhabited by protected species and their protectors, pre-occupied souls in Barbours, cagoules and anoraks squelching through salt mud. After the recent destruction of birds and sandscapes off Pembrokeshire, one feels sympathy and can only wish them good luck, hoping there are Chinese chefs in Sheringham and Cromer to cope if any- thing spills into the Wash.

These towns are like Hunstanton, but tak- ing pride in their extreme blowiness. 'Very bracing, Cromer' is another crack about Norfolk, and true. It stands on the corner of England, full of nice Edwardiana, lucky not to have been blown away. One of the virtues of this coast is its small-scaleness. You can't `Cheaper water.' say that the amusement-arcade, kiss-me- quick element is excluded, but only Great Yarmouth is big enough to do a credible Blackpool act. But Hunstanton, Sheringham and Cromer have the pleasant ring of 1900-20 and belong on large LMS railway posters featuring girls with bobbed hair and beach balls, while Wells-next-the-Sea is made delightful by its green and the houses round it. It is almost a satellite of nearby Holkham Hall, itself full of grandeur and statuary.

Its builder, Coke of Holkham, said, 'I am the ogre at the feast. I have eaten up all my neighbours.' Improver, crop-rotator, above all encloser, Coke was an agro-Hobbesian, an early downsizer of the rural population who set William Kent and Capability Brown to conjure splendour from the small change of agricultural improvement.

The ghost theme renews in Suffolk though even here one should remember that the handsome tint of pink-wash cot- tages is achieved with pigs' blood. But there is only pleasure in lovely Southwold, HQ of James, Duke of York, for the battle of Sole Bay. Southwold is regularly used for films, though the Edwardian air it is hired for derives from buildings mostly built in the Regency or before. St Edmund's parish church is a clean, well lit place which could have made it to cathe- dral given luck in the ecclesiastical stakes.

Nothing has been wrecked, nothing noticeably developed. The feel is all light and cheerfulness. The haunters and devils keep to the south. Aldeburgh, home to Brit- ten and Pears, is very much the grim- mouthed 'Borough' of Peter Grimes and his workhouse boys. And Snape, home of the Maltings concert hall, is just behind. Exactly as this issue appears, the Spring Festival opens (4-8 April) for a four-day flurry of Monteverdi, Rameau and Charpentier.

Aldeburgh is Seaburgh in James's 'A Word to the Curious', where, a digger after the crown of Redwald, Saxon king of East Anglia, provokes a demon. Who would have thought to look for ghosts at Felixstowe, con- tainer port returning John Selwyn Gummer to parliament and with very little more antique than a Napoleonic martello tower? Here it was, however, that James conceived of Parkins playing golf with the anti-ritualist Colonel Wilson and finding the whistle of human bone. He blew on it, summoning the unspeakable thing which turned itself that night into 'an intensely horrible face of crumpled linen'.

A little south, near the Deben estuary, is Sutton Hoo. This is a tomb, probably of that very Redwald, 7th-century King of the East Angles who may have ruled from the East Anglian capital of Dunwich. This was 12 centuries before M.R. James buried his crown in Seaburgh/Aldeburgh, 11 before neighbours buried Jacob Forster securely in Dunwich churchyard and seven before that town began its long fall into the sea which, like Coke of Holkham, likes to eat up its neighbours. It seems right to end with another grave.