Falling for the flatlands
Thomas Leveritt
Every joker with a country pile has been holding himself a festival lately. So why not join? As chance would have it, my friend Hugh has such a setup in Suffolk — a few hundred acres over by the coast, with a wonderfully elegant little Jacobean hall as its capital, a delight to behold. Unfortunately the hall fell into Victorian hands 150 years ago, and was disguised as a thundering neo-Gothic palace, redbrick primped and ruched with Portland stone and Renaissance epaulettes. Those Victorians, fanatics for fancy dress.
Nonetheless it’s a picturesque place — Broads country, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. Plenty of water meadows, mixed birch and oak forests; high hedges; the flint churches of defunct plague villages alone in cereal fields; stately women on dawn hacks sending birds beeping out of coverts. Some sheep in the middle distance plotting devious new ways to get outside the wire and kill themselves, a few herds of novelty cattle. Lush parkland. A wonderful, magical place, that Hugh has recently taken over the running of.
‘Why don’t we take all this,’ says Hugh waving a hand at the horizon mid-January, ‘and turn it into the Somme? The chins can park their A3s here, have their tents broken into here, we’ll put the live tent in the Stable Yard. By the Monday the drive will have turned into that drainage ditch I’ve always wanted.’ The British have always taken their landscaping seriously. Now there’s a whole new paradigm for Capabilities Brown: where for example, do you put the portaloos? Bearing in mind that wherever you do, you’ll be combing crap out of the brambles for the next six months. And then where do you put the elite portaloos? Because even festivals don’t feel right without a class system. And room also needs to be found for dance and chillout tents, the St John Ambulance, Polynesian dance troupes, fireand water-work displays, food and glowstick stalls, and the whole assorted yurt-and-teepee-based Children’s Crusade that comes with these things.
Luckily, there’s plenty of space. Suffolk is ideal for a nanofestival. Having spent a lot of my life romancing Norfolk, I’d always tried to avoid sitting next to Suffolk at dinner. Mentally it’s been in the same sort of bracket as Oklahoma and Chad: the county left once all the other counties have taken their pick of the available land. A place only a mother could love. Apart from Betjeman, but then Betjeman could write about the North London Railway with fiery passion.
But then in this last year Suffolk and I started seeing more of each other. Tentatively at first. I spent some time in Newmarket painting portraits of horsemen under protestant-blue skies, London anxieties dissipating among equine swimming-pools and 4 a.m. reveilles. It’s hard not to fall a little in love with a place when you get up before the mist does. Then I narrowly survived a triathlon at Fritton Lake, where I’d somehow assumed I’d pick up the crawl as I went along. Then suddenly everyone was talking about Suffolk; even in Afghanistan, dust-choked, I met a war correspondent who sucked at a cigarette and dreamt aloud of moving to Stowmarket country. No less a man than the Provost of King’s, a man who really should have known better, shook off the dust of Cambridge and moved to Halesworth. ‘But that’s a damn difficult place to get to,’ I thought, and the penny began to drop.
It’s like when you learn a word and then it’s everywhere. Everyone wants some: those with cash to snap up the underpriced farmhouses around Attleborough and Diss, the strapped to Lowestoft and Gorleston to take advantage of regeneration deals. The older generation to the Aldeburgh coast, for an agreeable soundtrack while the credits roll.
Meanwhile my own dates with Suffolk were coalescing into something of, if not a ‘journey’, then at least a ‘character arc’: sleeping off a wedding in an Elveden graveyard; kissing a girl on a roof; bareback-riding with under-10s across potato fields in perfect magenta bloom; the low September sun lens-flaring off a lake and across the stirring silhouette of my girlfriend; losing a few rounds of Escape & Die to the sheep; making friends with smoker exiles outside A-road pubs in the bitter Christmas cold; and all against a year of party-blasted dawns imprinted straight into the amygdala, a misty North Sea radiance fading up over crumbling cliffs....
A wonderful place to smooth the wrinkled forehead. In its plainness a fierce bulwark against the extremes and ghastliness of the world: no hooting cities, high-school massacres, flooding rivers; no ghettoes, national debates, mainline derailments. Even Radio 4 reception’s a bit patchy. Not even steep and stunning scenery, nothing to make you wail or knock the breast, just plain square buildings with shingle roofs, and a gable or two on special occasions. Which doesn’t change the fact that its arable flatness makes it essentially wipe-clean, a perfect place for letting the 32-year-old darlings blow off some puppy fat before setting out on their lives.
Thomas Leveritt’s book The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money is published by Harvill Secker.
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