Friday, March 13, 2009
Suffolk

Leaving my window open and using ear plugs to drown out traffic noises worked like magic! I awoke at 6. 30 am after a very restful sleep just a couple of minutes before the alarm on my cell phone went off. It seems as if a cooler temperature in my bedroom will keep me asleep longer! Within 45 minutes, I was on the bus headed to King’s Cross to the NYU hostel at NIDO where the coach arrived very shortly to drive us to Suffolk.

Spring was in the air though it was a tad chilly and I felt underclad in my denim jacket–should have worn something warmer. Once we left the city limits behind, the landscape changed. The fields were flat but fresh new green grass is emerging everywhere and though the trees are still free of foliage, it is very pretty out there in the countryside and I am glad we’re entering into a new season of renewal. It is still a wonder to me how quickly spring comes to Europe. What a blessing indeed!

Delving into Dedham:
Two hours later, we were in Dedham, a tiny little town that Time forgot. Peter, our driver, parked in the main street and we were set free to poke around for 45 minutes. I had read about this lovely place in The English Home magazine a few years ago and I had saved the clipping and brought it with me to London. Using that as a rough guide, I wandered first into St. Mary’s Church which appears in some of the paintings of John Constable whose world we had arrived to explore. The church is notable for a window which sports the initials E.S. referring to Edward Sherman. Three notable Shermans are associated with American history including the famous General Sherman who led the troops during the Civil War. As in all Norman churches of the region, it has a square tower with a clock face and the stone cladding gives it a very picturesque look.

Down the High Street, I delved into a few of the stores (The Shakespeare Art Gallery was particularly enticing) which held the kind of decorative domestic items tourists find attractive–pendulum clocks, pottery, framed art–that sort of thing. Most of my students had made a bee line for the Essex Rose Tea House where they sat down to cream teas. I went into the Dedham Arts and Crafts Center where a variety of stalls offered all sorts of hand crafted items from baskets and quilts to jewelry and soft toys. Then, I walked towards the Stour River and took a look at a few ducks bobbing in a pond.

Architect and art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner wrote, “There is nothing to hurt the eye in Dedham” and he was so right. Indeed, the town is a lovely collection of narrow meandering streets that radiate from the one main road that runs through it past the church. The exteriors of these houses have exposed beams and quiet pastel shades with the color pink dominating. It soon became obvious to me that pink is the preferred color in these Suffolk towns and villages. It is referred to as ‘Suffolk Pink’ and is visible in varying shades from the softest baby pink to deep, almost magenta, tones. We saw a lot of it in East Bergholt and then in Lavenham which were some of the other towns we visited.

I simply could not stop taking pictures of the charming nooks and crannies that make up this attractive town. The Sun, a well-known hostelry had a distinctive sign but did not open until later in the day for lunch. When we’d had a look around the village, we did one of the things that the English most love–took a long walk along the banks of a river.

Messin’ Around On the River Stour:
One of the most memorable walks I have ever taken was along Port Meadow in Oxford along the River Thames in the company of my friend Annalisa Oboe, about two summers ago. We had walked all the way from Oxford to the Lock and then rewarded ourselves with drinks at the famous Trout Inn at Wolvercote, a 17th century free house that was used as one of the settings for an episode of Inspector Morse mysteries. Well, I have to say that this walk today, taken in the company of 16 of my students, will also stay in my memory for a long time.

To begin the walk, you start along Bridge Street in Dedham and walk towards Flatford Mill. This means crossing the beautiful little wooden bridges and stiles that span the river and the surrounding meadows. The pathway is narrow and follows the natural curves of the River Stour, which is much smaller and narrower than I imagined. It cannot be more than a mile and a half before you see the rooftops of Flatford Mill. Were I walking alone, I know I would have covered it in about a half hour. But with a group and with the pictures I stopped to take, of swans and then of mallards in the water–it took over an hour. The fresh green of the fields and the total quiet and serenity of the rural landscape was very appealing indeed. Occasionally, we saw a flock of ducks fly into the air. It is obvious that the migrant birds are returning for the spring season and it was lovely to be a part of it. These were the very tracks along which John Constable walked in the early 1800s and to have traversed over lands that have proven to be so inspirational to him was very special for me.

Arrival at Flatford Mill:
At Flatford Mill, where we arrived a whole half hour behind schedule, we were met by Edward Jackson who is Head of the Constable Arts Center there. He was to be our guide for the next hour and he started us off by taking us inside the lovely red brick interior of Flatford Mill where Constable spent the early years of his life with his parents and younger brother. Mr. Jackson illustrated his introduction to Constable with a slide show in the library that explained the evolution of his most famous paintings including the iconic Haywain, the setting of which can easily be seen on the shallow bank of the river outside.

We then walked to the spots themselves that Constable sketched and used as the backdrop of some of his most celebrated works. I was so excited to be in the very spot in which he created these canvasses–his little studio was right in his home. Later, when his parents died and he came into a little money, Constable moved with his wife and family to London where he accepted commissions for portraits that were his bread and butter. But, clearly, it was the rural scenes he most remembered from his boyhood while messing around his father’s mill that inspired his most enchanting works. And it is these venues that art-loving visitors come to see today.

Off for lunch to East Bergholt:
Then, after I had bought a few postcards from the National Trust shop in the premises, we boarded the coach again and arrived at the tiny village of East Bergholt where, for a short while, the Constables also had a small home. This little place was the perfect venue for a meal and at the Red Lion Inn–really the only little place at which one could get a bite apart from the Fountain Tea Room which offered only teas and scones–we sat down for a proper meal. I ate a ‘huffa’, a rather odd sort of name for a hearty sandwich that contained steak and mushrooms and onions and was made tasty by my addition of some brown sauce.

East Bergholt is an equally delightful place to get lost in. It has a church that lacks a tower. Apparently someone had a dream in which the devil appeared and said that he never wanted to see a tower on the church. Each time a tower was constructed, lives were lost in the process and a point arrived at which the villagers decided to abandon the idea of constructing a tower and left it unfinished. And that it how is stands today.

The Post office and a couple of other small stores are the only other shops to be found in the entire little place. Small pink homes and a few red brick ones grant the village the air of a quiet rustic hamlet, the sort that visitors to Suffolk love to see.

On to Lavenham:
We had barely an hour to finish our meal, however, before we had to get back on the coach again for our ride to Lavenham. We thought it would take about half a hour but we had a diversion in the road and having to change routes, we took more than an hour and almost missed the guide who was waiting for us there, Jim Robinson. However, after we had parked our coach, Jim began his tour and showed us some of the most interesting and unusual buildings in this medieval town.
Like Dedham, Lavenham is exceedingly picturesque. Almost all of the buildings here are ‘listed’, that is to say, they are protected by strict conservation laws, some of which make it impossible for current owners to make any changes at all, inside or out. The town is, therefore, frozen in time, standing as a silent sentinel of the past when homes were constructed with thick timber beams and filled in with stucco plastered brick.

The most important building of all in Lavenham is the Corpus Christi Guildhall–this is not a trading or crafter’s guildhall but a religious one. Mr. Robinson explained that in the Middle Ages, people paid money to a priest in a guildhall such as this one, whose sole job was to pray for all the poor souls in Purgatory! This guildhall, clad in exposed timbers and thin whitewash and sporting the original leaded windows passed into disuse after the Reformation. It is only in recent years that it has been refurbished to appear the way it once did when it was the most important building in the town.

From this point, Mr. Robinson took us to so many different structures, each of which had some interesting architectural details to which he pointed. We learned that Lavenham was once a leading producer of a thick hard-wearing fabric called serge. The cloth weavers’ guild was powerful and wealthy and it made Lavenham the sixth richest town in the country. Traders vied with each other in building homes to show off their new prosperity and it is these structures that have been preserved, most dating from the 16th and 18th centuries.

We also learned about pargetting, for instance, the decorating of the sides of the houses with all sorts of designs that were set into the stucco while it was still wet. We learned about the fashion that led to the scraping away of the plaster that exposed the timbers that give so many of the medieval structures their individual look–this was not how they were originally constructed. The plaster was stripped away when it became fashionable for the owner to expose the number of timber beams that made up his house. We also learned about the Mullet–the five pointed star that is associated with the court of Henry VIII and which is evident on the steeply sloping sides of the roofs. So many of the Lavenham homes seemed to be falling under their own weight. There were so many of the higgedly-piggedly cottages of fairy tale illustrations and the striking colors of ochre, pink and white that stood in uniform height along the streets making the entire town seem so very quaint and old-fashioned.

I certainly wished I could have browsed in more stores but I only had the time to buy a post card really quickly before it was past four and we found that we had to return to London. I did walk towards the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul to get a picture and then off we went. We said goodbye to Mr. Robinson and boarded the bus back, hitting awful traffic en route so that it took us almost three hours to reach King’s Cross.

Suffolk was striking beautiful and I am so glad that my first venture into this territory was so pleasant. I found the village people very friendly and very eager to interact with my students. They were so pleased that their quiet unspoiled villages are the center of so much scholarly attention. They recommended other villages that we should see and Kersey was suggested as a rural favorite. When Peter drove through it, I did find it very appealing indeed and I can see why so many people settle down in B&Bs for a few nights in this area.

Suffolk might best be described as a patch of green fields closely knit together by a serene river that flows through it and story book villages and medieval towns that remain distinctive for their old-world architecture and narrow rippling streets. It is easy to see why these natural backdrops inspired the work of some of England’s best-known artists such as Gainsborough and Constable and why they have been preserved, as if in aspic, to continue to delight each successive generation.

For if you enjoy walking or even just sitting by a river and watching it flow gently past and if you enjoy doing nothing more strenuous than whiling away time in the warm embrace of Nature, then this is indeed the place for you. I know that if I get the chance to return to Suffolk, I will not refuse the opportunity to walk by these delightful byways again.

At the end of the day, when I was in the midst of writing this blog, my door bell rang. It was my neighbor Tim whom I haven’t seen in ages–as I have been traveling so much. He stopped by to invite me to supper at their place on Tuesday–an invitation I would ordinarily have leapt at as Tim in a chef par excellence. But, alas, I am leaving that morning for Italy, so will have to take a rain check. Instead, we have decided to go out for an Italian meal on Sunday–probably to Carluccios which is a favorite of Tim and Barbara (and has become one of mine as well). Tim stepped inside for a chat and over a glass of wine, he entertained me with his inimitable wit and humor. I am very much looking forward to Sunday when we will catch up together.