The Easternmost Sky E-Book

Juliet Blaxland

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 411

Beschreibung

New from the author of The Times nature book of the year 2019The Easternmost Sky describes country life and living with coastal erosion, in the recent past, the present and the relatable future. By exploring how climate and social changes are affecting coastal Suffolk, and zooming out from the local to offer a more global perspective, Juliet Blaxland forecasts with wit and imagination the future we will all have to adapt to, in Britain and across the world.'A joy to read.' -Ben Eagle

Leseprobe

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Sandstone Press Ltd

PO Box 41

Muir of Ord

IV6 7YX

Scotland

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © Juliet Blaxland 2021

All photographs © Juliet Blaxland

Editor: Moira Forsyth

The moral right of Juliet Blaxland to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-913207-56-4

ISBNe: 978-1-913207-57-1

Cover design by Two Associates

The Easternmost House was dedicated to ‘all the people who have been physically involved in the making of the British landscape in the past, and to those who still live and work in the countryside or on the land today’, followed by a long list of rural jobs, starting: farmers, fishermen, shepherds . . .

The Easternmost Sky is also dedicated to those who still live and work in the countryside or on the land today . . . but to these I would now add other key workers, including but not limited to: crop pickers, greengrocers, village shop and corner shop workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, till and checkout workers, lorry drivers, van drivers, bus drivers, train drivers, petrol station people, postal workers, warehouse workers, factory workers, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, power and power-cut-repair workers, sewage workers, rubbish collectors, cleaners, ambulance drivers, paramedics, surgeons, doctors, nurses, vets, emergency services, armed forces, care workers, pub and kitchen workers, and anyone similarly essential not yet mentioned.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks go to the many people who have helped either in the living on the edge or in the conveying of the spirit of the place to a wider world, in no particular order: Jane Graham Maw and Jennifer Christie of Graham Maw Christie literary agency, Bob Davidson and Moira Forsyth of Sandstone Press, John Lewis Stempel, Andrew Gimson, Mary Miers and Richard Hopton of Country Life, Mary and Johnnie James of Aldeburgh Bookshop, India Knight, Janice Turner, Simon Heffer, Jilly Cooper, Patrick Galbraith of Shooting Times, Emma Barnett of Radio 5 Live, The Reverend Richard Coles of Radio 4 Saturday Live, and closer to home, Lesley Dolphin of BBC Radio Suffolk, Kevin Burch, Wendy Holden, Emma Shercliff, Abbie Clements of Halesworth Bookshop, Irene Pitcher and Steph of Southwold Books, John Barber, Peter Boggis, John Uden and Ivan Moore, Tony Westlake and Stephen Westlake at Easton Bavents, the Benacre estate, everyone at St Margaret South Elmham and the ‘Old Rec Oval’, and easternmost of all of us . . . Bob the Coastal Engineer.

DISCLAIMER

Several of the more rural places mentioned in The Easternmost Sky are individual private farms or old agricultural settlements of only a few houses, rather than villages in the conventional sense. Please be aware that there are no public ‘facilities’ – car parks, shops, pubs, cafes, loos, bins etc. – in these places. (See below for places with car parks, shops, pubs, loos, bins etc.)

Some of the farm tracks and land marked on maps may be signed as having no public right of way or no public access, usually for reasons such as being part of a network of SSSIs, conservation areas and national nature reserves. At nesting times some of the beaches may have roped-off areas which are intended to help protect vulnerable ground-nesting birds (terns, plovers, avocets etc.) from unintentional disturbance by dogs, walkers, riders etc.

The beaches, tides, creeks, estuaries, marshes, broads, bogs, reedbeds and crumbling farmland cliffs along this coast are also inherently dangerous to humans, dogs and the unwary.

Emergencies

Lifeboats

Dial 999 and ask for the coastguard

Erosion

Stay away from the bottom of cliffs to a distance equal to the height

Cold water

RNLI advice is to ‘float to live’, i.e. float on your back if you fall in

Dogs in sea

Dogs usually save themselves, but owners trying to rescue them often don’t

Cows

Make no eye contact, and let go of dogs if cows become protective of calves

The Country Code

Please

Leave gates as you find them and respect signs, footpaths etc.

Leave animals alone and do not feed them

Keep dogs on short leads near livestock

Take litter home

Leave no trace

Suffolk coast places with car parks, shops, pubs, cafes, loos, bins etc. (north to south): Kessingland, Southwold, Walberswick, Dunwich, Minsmere, Sizewell, Thorpeness, Aldeburgh, Snape, Orford, the Suffolk Punch Trust at Hollesley, Felixstowe, Pin Mill.

Where laws, statistics, places and/or cultural norms etc. are referred to, they relate to what was current at the time of writing. Some of these facts, places, norms etc. may change over the lifetime of a printed book, especially one about and written during a time of great change.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Author's Note

Influences

0 – December: Beginning at the end

1 – January: Demolition and dismantling

2 – February: Earth to earth

3 – March: Skylines

4 – April: Spring Gaiety

5 – May: A clod washed away

6 – June: The water will come

7 – July: Strawberry fields

8 – August: Honesty boxes

9 – September: The fat of the land

10 – October: Pigs in the park

11 – November: Venison and venery

12 – December, again: Fields of sea

Tailpiece

Organisations, people and books

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The recurring theme of The Easternmost Sky is ‘adapting to change’. It was written on the Suffolk coast, in a place known for its farmland, its nature reserves and some of the most startlingly visible coastal erosion in Europe. By exploring how climate change and social change are already affecting this agriculturally important part of the world, it is possible to imagine a very different landscape, to glimpse what is to come and to understand how these changes will affect us all in the near future. The Easternmost Sky

INFLUENCES

Powers of Ten and Easternmost Sky thinking

For the purposes of introducing what might be called ‘Easternmost Sky thinking’, please imagine for a moment that you are one of several people sitting around the table at an informal lunch in the garden of a cottage on the edge of an eroding cliff. The sun is out, and we are at roughly the easternmost edge of England, the easternmost edge of the whole of the UK. The sea crashes constantly onto the beach at the bottom of the cliff, although we have all become so used to the sounds of sea and susurration that we no longer notice it.

The table itself is big and old and has a certain shipwreck chic about it. The food is Mediterranean in spirit, but most of it was grown within sight of the house, with only a few food miles and zero air miles involved in bringing it from the fields to your fork. The mood is of a picnic, but without any of the inconveniences that so often plague picnics in real life (as distinct from picnics in story books). There is none of the ‘sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea’ disgruntlement that niggled John Betjeman’s Cornish picnics. Not here. This picnic scene is important, because it is the reference point of the whole of what follows. The lunch table is point X on the globe, and each of us here is a ‘picnic man’, at rest at distance 0.

Powers of Ten (1977), by Charles and Ray Eames, is the book which sparked the idea for The Easternmost Sky and provides an ongoing visual and conceptual hook on which to hang it. Powers of Ten is a flipbook based on a short film about the effects of thinking at scale and distance, and of notionally or literally ‘zooming in and out’ in a manner now familiar from Google Earth. Powers of Ten holds as its central reference point an aerial photograph of a man asleep on a picnic rug in a park in Chicago. There is also a woman on the picnic rug, but she is less clear in the photo, so it is ‘the picnic man’ who is the point of reference. ‘The picnic man’ is at rest at point X, at a notionally neutral reference distance of 0. The film examines the effect of adding a 0, zooming out x10, x10, x10, and so on . . . to x10+23. It doesn’t really matter how many times we zoom out, because repeatedly zooming out, any number of times x10, quickly takes us into outer space.

Taking Powers of Ten as the generating concept, the lunch table in the garden of the clifftop cottage is our personalised and updated reference point, our equivalent of the picnic, placed at X on the globe, which is now in 2020s Suffolk and not 1970s Chicago. The picnic man represents ‘us’, any of us, all of us, you, at rest at 0 distance in space.

Our lunch in the clifftop cottage garden gives us somewhere specific to use as an anchoring point, relatable in scale, distance and detail, point X at distance 0. The cottage is our former home, described in The Easternmost House. Starting at close-up ‘picnic man’ range in the cottage garden, I can then notionally zoom out a bit to explore and guide you around the Benacre estate of 7,000 acres (where we now live) which includes a significant area of productive farmland, as well as wildlife habitats and protected national nature reserves. I then zoom out to the whole UK crumbling east coastline and the 461,400 acres of farmland estimated to be lost to the sea in the foreseeable future (which I explain later), zoom out a bit more and see how this fits into climate change . . . and so on.

The Powers of Ten film then zooms back to the original Chicago picnic man, now zooming in x10, x10, x10 . . . to x10-15, which takes us into the molecular level of the man, which is where we can return to the intensely local, in terms of farming, then food, at which point our private decision-making about what we eat starts to affect the wider world.

Powers of Ten first fascinated me as an architecture student and has continued to do so for years. It is the conceptual hook on which I hang a particular view of the world, which for the purposes of brevity and in this specific context is called Easternmost Sky thinking: zooming out and back in, thinking at scale and in 4D, meaning including not only the vastness of space but of time as well. One of the characteristics of Easternmost Sky thinking is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and while the evidence of coastal and other change is explored, it can be zoomed in and out of at will, from a layman’s viewpoint rather than that of the dedicated climate scientist. The Powers of Ten film is easily found on YouTube (just search for Powers of Ten) but I still have my old copy of the Powers of Ten flipbook, so can happily flip in and out and pause on an image in a more satisfyingly analogue way than the film ever could . . .

To me, the most interesting frames of Powers of Ten are the ones where we can comprehend the vastness of our situation, yet scale is still relatable. This is the core of Easternmost Sky thinking.

The knowledge acquired during the life and writing of The Easternmost House, in particular on the subject of living with coastal erosion, has led to The Easternmost Sky as an exploration of ‘adapting to change’, especially change which is nature-related and imminent. The starting point of my experience of living in a rural area affected by ongoing coastal erosion leads naturally to an examination of other aspects of change, including ‘coastal change’, climate change, changes in food, farming and landscape, and associated social change. All this of course is not confined to rural life: such widespread change impacts on all of us.

Those of us living on the crumbling edge of the land may be seen as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the canary down the coal mine, or the prophetic dove foreseeing the coming flood. The Easternmost Sky may be read as the gentle warnings of a rural futurologist, but it is also a portrait of the modern countryside in an urban age.

Beginning at the end

Everyone has a cliff coming towards them. The difference is that we can see ours. The thing about it is, though, that when our part of this nature-wrought and romantic place goes, the memory of life here will go with it. Where once Chuffy the brindle greyhound bombed about the beach, and Cockle the cockerel gently heralded the dawn with his rural sounds, and our Skyline hens laid beautiful blue eggs, and our vegetable garden thrived, and we loved the place so much, one day, where all that had been, there will be only a particular volume of sky over the sea which will hold all these memories in its air, and the people on the beach below will not know.

0

DECEMBER

This extract from the last page of The Easternmost House closes a book about life in and around a house on the edge of a crumbling cliff, at the easternmost edge of England. On a map, the place is marked as Easton Bavents, but on the ground it isn’t really a findable ‘place’ now, as most of it has been lost to coastal erosion. This non-place used to be the easternmost parish in the whole of the UK, before its nose, Easton Ness, fell into the sea. This final paragraph imagines an unspecified time in the future, without the house as it sits there, loved and lived in, threatened with coastal erosion but still standing strongly against the waves and the weather.

The local forces of nature and the greater uncertainties of climate change were by then encircling and gathering around their prey, but without yet having delivered the final coup de grâce. That happened earlier than we had expected, only a few months after the book was published.

The house in question (actually a row of three but always referred to and appearing as if one) was a testament to the good work of the Victorian, or late-Georgian, cottage builders who must have laboured hard against the clifftop elements to build it; yet even as soon as these unknown people had completed their admirable work, the mighty natural forces of its destruction were already mustering, unseen and unstoppable, in the churning sea close by.

For more than twelve years, we lived in this windblown house, at the end of a farm track which leads only into the sea. The farm track looks as if it wants to continue for a mile or two, but it has been hacked off roughly and many times by the wind and sea and erosion. In the summer of 2015, an innocuous enough event happened, for a community accustomed to centuries of coastal erosion, summarised in a sentence broadcast on Radio 4’s iPM: ‘The house on the edge of the cliff was demolished this week, which means we are now the house on the edge of the cliff.’ We felt suddenly more vulnerable without the buffer of another generation, or of another house between us and the abyss.

That summer, it seemed as if we had plenty of time. Sunny lunches around the shipwreck table in the garden were habitual. We hadn’t yet started zooming out and thinking about the bigger picture.

We are environmental evacuees, by which I mean that Nature caused us to move house when we would have preferred not to. I believe the term ‘environmental evacuee’ will become more common in the near future, affecting many people in the UK and across the globe, as climate change and the movement of water predictably causes places to become unviable, eventually to be decommissioned and abandoned, more of which later.

We were forced by coastal erosion to move from a house and a place we loved. This was a foreseeable process, but nevertheless a sad one, and it represented the end of an era, not just for us but for the house and the wider world, locally and further afield, who took an interest in the story. The immediate territory of The Easternmost House (the house and the book) was and is almost at the easternmost edge of East Anglia, where the land pokes out into the North Sea on the map, to the north of Southwold in Suffolk, amid constantly changing natural boundaries of reedbed, river and sea.

The territory of the life which follows our evacuation, and of The Easternmost Sky, is centred around the old shipwreck lunch table in the garden of the house, zooming out to include the wider territory of Covehithe and the Benacre estate, Britain’s ‘easternmost estate’, currently an area of about 7,000 acres but losing about thirty acres of land a year to the sea. The estate extends approximately from the Hundred River just south of Lowestoft to the north, to the Easton Bavents ‘low’ and reedbeds to the south, bounded by Henstead to the west and by the sea to the east. Benacre estate land dovetails neatly with the territory of the Easternmost House, the latter sold off by the estate in the 1920s. The high point of the Benacre estate is by a wood called Easton Home Covert, which acts as a natural pivot between the two tracts of land. With typical Suffolk logic, Easton Home Covert was always referred to as Benacre Woods when viewed ‘back to front’ from the Easton Bavents vantage point of the Easternmost House.

Our natural range reaches other rural territories inland, especially the ‘empty quarter’ beyond Halesworth on the map, a collection of remote hamlets known as The Saints, where my childhood home, known locally as ‘the Old Rec’ (rectory), is still a personal epicentre. All of this feels like ‘my patch’. Further afield, some of my extended family are farmers in Norfolk or involved in the racing industry orbiting around Newmarket. This area is characterised by ancient land-based and sea-based preoccupations.

This easternmost patch of England may seem globally trivial and geographically tiny, but it is agriculturally important while also being geologically fragile. The east of England is home to some of the most productive farmland in the world, as well as having the fastest rate of coastal erosion in Europe. The land that produces our food is falling into the sea. This is not some abstract calculation of arable acreages or wheat and barley yields. You can literally pick seawater-washed onions and parsnips off the beach between Benacre and Covehithe after a local cliff fall. Wheat and barley are somehow less relatable than bread, beer and biscuits, so people tend not to notice when the ‘combinable crops’ are washed away, which they are, bit by bit, all the time, every year. Visitors, unused to the sight of recognisable ‘supermarket crops’ on the beach, often find it amusing. What this means when looked at from a more ‘zoomed out’ global food supply perspective is less amusing. This lovely but unfashionable part of the world is therefore something of a bellwether. Our crumbling cliffs are a good place from which to peer into the future of food and farming, among other things.

The experience of environmental evacuation is still unusual enough to attract the curiosity of the press, but is likely to become more commonplace. Pedestrian would be an insensitive word to use in this context, given the fact that millions of environmental evacuees will almost certainly be walking across continents before the end of this century, if not this decade. Bangladesh and Myanmar are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, but so is Suffolk and much of eastern England.

Living with coastal erosion becomes quite normal, if you live with it all the time. For months or even years on end, it may be barely noticeable, and people can live a pleasantly healthy coastal life with no disruption at all. But the erosion is always there in the back of your mind, lurking, waiting to make its presence felt, or more pertinently waiting to make its absences felt: the visible absences of tree, hedge, farmland, dune and cliff.

‘How long have you got?’ became our familiar variation on the ‘How long have I got?’ directed at doctors tasked with delivering uncomfortable diagnoses. People often asked us this question, even at the beginning of our time on the crumbling cliff when there was still plenty of land and time left, for the time being. The truth is one can never know, so the cliff-dweller and the doctor concoct a plausible estimate, based on science, observation, averages, means, medians and a keen eye on recent changes to any of the above. Then they take a stab in the dark in order to satisfy their inquisitor, and say out loud something like, ‘Well, given current conditions and based on my previous experiences of these conditions, you (we) could reasonably expect perhaps five years, but I must emphasise that while the prognosis is foreseeable, and in the long term ultimately fatal, there may be unknown unknowns, good and bad, so you may have a longer or shorter time.’

At risk of stating the obvious, nature is by its very nature unpredictable. Long periods of stability can be followed by sudden cataclysmic events: structural collapse; pandemic; eruption. ‘All I can advise is to make the most of the time you have . . .’ Just as in the back of your mind you know that your dog will probably die about twelve years from when you first meet, but you don’t like to think about it as it would spoil the everyday joy of being with the dog, so the cliff-dweller, or the patient, keeps ‘everything as normal as possible for as long as possible’, like in the film Love Story.

Until one day, the sudden cataclysmic event happens.

It is probably wise to mentally rehearse the certainties in life, the things we know will happen unless something worse happens to us first, to acclimatise and imagine the scenes before they occur in real life. The death of a dog, of a parent, then another parent, a partner or spouse, the end of the reign of a stabilising monarch, the evacuation and demolition of a much-loved house before it is lost to the sea. These are all imaginable scenes.

It is less easy to imagine the exact circumstances, such as the time of day, the time of year, the weather, amount of warning, the reactions of other people around us, or the googlies we neglected to imagine in the first place.

People have to move house for many reasons. In the twelve years we lived in our clifftop idyll, in a magical parallel world of light and sky and water, many terrible things happened to friends ‘in the midst of life’. Any of these terrible things could so easily have happened to us: untimely deaths by cancer (several people, of our generation and younger); complete spinal cord neck injury as a result of an accident with a horse causing catastrophic tetraplegic paralysis; circumstances leading to suicide (two people); and various unexpectedly sudden and/or untimely deaths by natural causes such as heart attack, asthma and drowning.

Taken within the context of this sobering emotional landscape of the Something that Might Happen to us all, to have to move only as an environmental evacuation due to coastal erosion may be considered literally the best reason to have to move from such a house, akin to a marriage being put asunder only by Fate’s chosen scenario re ‘til death us do part’. But we always wondered in the back of our minds how it would physically happen, and as we gradually entered the endgame, our observations became more wary. Our visual assessments and pacings became more frequent. The elephant, or rather the woolly mammoth whose fossilised bones were potentially being purloined from the newly exposed face of our crumbling cliff with every tide, had entered the room.

How does it happen? Who decides? Do they just let the houses fall into the sea? Who are ‘they’ in this context anyway? Who pays for the demolition? Is there any compensation? What will happen in the future when many more people may be evacuated for environmental reasons? How much warning or notice is given? Where will you go? We had airily answered these questions whenever they were asked, or whenever we asked them ourselves, without ever really knowing the answers. Without the specific circumstances, you can only plan in principle, when the realities and details are infinitely variable, just as they are with death. There are echoes of that oddly fascinating aphorism, ‘Man anticipates all, save that which befalls him’.

The prospect of such upheaval seems appalling, yet it stalks the seasons. Perhaps one more summer. Perhaps one more Christmas. Not because we particularly care about Christmas, but because it is a noticeable landmark date, a visible buoy to steer towards, a marker of change in mood and season, a harbinger of imminent spring. One more summer was always the imagined end point, since it would seem sensible for the farm to maximise their rent, and to demolish the house (or houses) in late summer or autumn, perhaps August or September, after the various enterprises of the summer holidays, and after the barley harvest on the ever-diminishing arable land of the farm, but while there was still plenty of daylight and time, and a probability of working in the sunshine.

So, as another August and September crept quietly past, with no mention of any of the e-words, no exceptional erosion events or environmental change necessitating evacuation, we hunkered down for another winter. October was ‘unremarkable’, a reassuringly uneventful word familiar to anyone who has ever had the opportunity to read a post-mortem report, as in, ‘The liver was unremarkable’. ‘Unremarkable’ roughly equates to no news being good news, nothing to see here, or failure of this particular organ probably didn’t cause the demise of the person in this particular body.

In the context of living with coastal erosion, with a cliff edge which has gradually moved from being a hundred-plus paces away when we first began pacing and counting, to fifty paces away in 2015, to twenty paces away in the summer, to really quite near now, ‘unremarkable’ is good. It is the erosion equivalent of ‘in remission’, but not the same as ‘all clear’, and certainly not ‘cured’.

In early winter, when the landscape still felt autumnal, on 4th November 2019, there began a sudden phase of deep scouring of the beach at Easton Bavents, exposing great dark lumps of flat peat and signs of reedbeds under the usual sand and shingle. The ‘seaside’ was suddenly stripped away to reveal a glimpse of our ancient ancestors and their archaeology. The beach level dropped by a metre or so, varying all the way along the coastline but still serving as a warning. The churning waves kept churning, and bit by bit the cliff was nibbled away, noticeably. At that stage the loss of land became alarmingly evident, even to seasoned cliff-crumbling-watchers accustomed to startling change. Where before it was normal, within the unusual definitions of normal in this context, in early November our landscape appreciably altered.

At the top of the cliff, a small tree here, a scruffy bramble hedge line there, fell onto the beach below. Individually these didn’t amount to much, but they were mini landmarks: the sentinel tree; the chicken house tree; the bramble hedge; the wild yellow lupin on the edge, and so on.

Local people used to fish for bass (sea bass) off the beach, parking their cars on a particular patch of grass between the houses and the cliff-edge, before they enjoyed a dark night or an afternoon of quiet solitude in private communion with nature and their own thoughts, the whole arrangement a typically rural system of loose connections, official and unofficial permissions, friendships and mild antagonisms, tolerated trespasses, erring and straying, and the exercising of ancient rights to the foreshore. For all the years we lived there, this was a habit of the place.

Then one day, our friend and ally Wild Nature paid a final visit and put an end to this quietly convivial co-operation. The indifferent sea advanced as usual, gouging out trenches at the bottom of the cliff, exposing the ineffective old concrete sea defences which had marked the bottom of the cliff when we first arrived. The waves carved downwards and inwards.

After only a night or two, the erosion destroyed the unofficial farm car park, carving a line diagonally from the now-abandoned chicken shed and run I had once laboured to rebuild from dereliction, to the corner fence post from which all our visual assessments and scientific pacings of land loss over the years had been measured. The erosion sliced across the productive vegetable garden I had created while Giles, my husband, had been on tour with the Army in Afghanistan in 2010. That summer, I lived entirely off that patch of land for six months, eating courgettes, tomatoes, lettuces, herbs and eggs in various combinations, and only going shopping for more varied and interesting ingredients when other people came for ‘lunch and a swim’ in the horrendously freezing North Sea, or invited themselves to stay for a weekend, as people tend to do if you live in a cottage by the sea.

The unusually active and violent phase of erosion in November 2019 removed in one great swoop all the land, and therefore the time, between us and the sea. But it could not be seen as ‘destructive’ any more than the work of a beaver could be seen as ‘destructive’, since it was just nature eating away at a cliff, the cliff to become sand and beach and seabed, everything changed but not absent, like the beaver’s leaky dam. There were faint echoes of the basic science learnt at school, ‘matter is not created or destroyed, it just takes a different form . . .’.

Coastal science professionals, such as the National Trust’s flooding and coastal erosion specialist, Phil Dyke (also a nominative determinism specialist), are always careful to use their preferred phrase for the often personally devastating effects of coastal erosion: ‘coastal change’. If ever you overhear someone talking about ‘coastal change’ rather than (or in relation to) coastal erosion, you can infer that they may well be a coastal or climate scientist. They will probably know better than most what they are talking about, and what is to come in the near and far future. They will also have a good idea about what is realistically possible or wise to do about it, and what is not. Often, the same professional water-people who use the phrase ‘coastal change’, will also use the phrase ‘managed retreat’. What this phrase actually means in practice is that in the foreseeable future, certain places will be overwhelmed, inundated, lost, abandoned.

Easton Bavents is one of the places where ‘coastal change’ becomes very evident as the cliffs crumble and are washed away. Easton Bavents is often cited as the best location in the UK to find Pliocene mammal remains and fossils (the Pliocene epoch being approximately 5.3 million to 2.5 million years ‘BP’ (‘Before Present’, according to the professionals), and the only publicly accessible site where mammal remains from the Norwich Crag can be found. The never-ending process of erosion ironically allows these remains to be simultaneously appreciated while also creating the circumstances in which the fossils and bones are lost and washed away.

The menagerie of interesting animals found in the far cliff at Easton Bavents includes, but is not limited to: gazelle (Gazella anglica), beaver (Trogontherium), walrus (Alachtherium cretsii), horse (Equus robustus) and ‘hound’, i.e. wolf (Canis etruscus).

The author of The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell, brought this book to my attention when Venice suffered unusually high acqua alta and extreme flooding on and around 13th November 2019, around the time of our own coastal erosion coup de grâce. I record these dates here in case they later seem significant in the grander scheme of things. Potential environmental evacuees are a tribe who tend to keep an eye on the global situation, not just their own patch, watching with interest anything untoward that is nature-related, and we share the common camaraderie that all people and peoples do when threatened by a foe beyond our control.

It strikes me that the author of The Water Will Come has slightly shot himself in the foot with the title, since the entire thesis and/or hypothesis of the book is encapsulated in those four words. Like Snakes on a Plane, you comprehend the entire situation straight away, and also that it is likely to escalate exponentially. In the blink of an eye, the whole scenario seems clear. The Water Will Come. Yes, it will. There are maps and computer models, areas described as under threat and those which are due to be formally de-commissioned, but in the title The Water Will Come alone, we can immediately grasp the gist of the situation.

The point is, everyone has a ‘cliff’ coming towards them. Whether in the form of melting ice caps, higher sea levels, flooding and water lying more permanently in our estuaries and flood plains, or some other ‘unknown unknown’ natural phenomenon, an Act of God, or even the Wrath of God, has visited almost every generation and every century in the past, and will surely visit us, sooner or later. The flooding in Venice coinciding with our exaggerated phase of coastal erosion seemed to be a warning of sorts, of more and greater to come. We might not call these natural phenomena ‘the Wrath of God’ these days. But it is slightly sobering to note that the phrase ‘Act of God’, or its fellow, ‘force majeure’, still enjoys a working conversational usage and valid legal meaning in British law.

However accustomed people may become to living in a landscape defined by perpetual change, whether from coastal erosion or flooding, sandstorms or snow-melt, it is still fascinating and slightly alarming how swiftly such sweeping natural changes can occur, and how vast and permanent their legacy. Many of us on the Suffolk coast have seen storms and tidal surges where a whole dune has disappeared overnight, or a salty lake was created in the reedbeds in one tide, so we are seasoned and habitual change-accepters, normally without much ado.

To return to Powers of Ten and Easternmost Sky thinking, and the idea of zooming out to see the bigger picture, there is a famous photograph called The Pale Blue Dot, taken from Voyager 1 on Valentine’s Day in 1970. Within that tiny blue speck is all of us, Earth, home, all our troubles, all our history, all our art and architecture, all our joys, all our collective hoards of string and elastic bands, all our drawers of rarely-used kitchen utensils. This ‘vast scale’ view of Nature puts our crumbling cliff and our coastal erosion crisis into perspective. From further away, it all seems so trivial, an unnoticed blip in the grand scheme of things.

Unless, just possibly, our erosion, and the apparent recent acceleration of its processes, might be seen alongside the finger in the wind, the dove returning to the ark, the tip of the iceberg . . . as an early indicator of something greater, something unseen, some as-yet perhaps unimagined ‘change’. Then, it might not be so irrelevant. It could be a localised but important indicator that, without our witnessing it, would have gone unnoticed. On the other side of the world, a butterfly may be beating its wings.

We are now bona fide environmental evacuees, in the sense that we were eventually and inevitably forced by nature to move from a house in which we would otherwise have lived for the foreseeable future. It is exhausting to refer to Nature with a capital N all the time (as in Byron’s ‘I love not man the less, but Nature more’ etc.), and comforting to tone it down to the more tameable ‘nature’, although at certain key moments the capital N gesture serves to heighten the sense of Nature’s indifferent power, and by contrast, our ludicrous, almost comical, powerlessness in its orbit. Ants.

We knew this would happen, eventually, at some point, just as it is predictable that the people of low-lying areas of Bangladesh and other identifiable places will also be forced by nature to evacuate. For many, it will be devastating. At best, environmental evacuation was, and is, and will be, hugely inconvenient and disruptive for many people, including us, largely because of the unpredictability of the timing. If we all evacuated earlier than we needed to, millions of perfectly decent houses or ‘homes’ of various kinds would be unnecessarily wasted and abandoned, and that would leave its own unwelcome environmental (and economic) footprint.

We chose to live in an existing house that had been there a long time, knowing that it would ‘one day’ be taken by coastal erosion, and we didn’t mind. We knew we would one day just have to move and adapt, and we did, but the speed and ferocity of the conditions in which we eventually did move were startling, and rang distant alarm bells in my mind about the enormity of nature’s sweep.

Fate and Nature played their part in the timing of our eventual environmental evacuation. After 200 years or so of the cottage existing and being lived in full time, all year round and in all weathers, by an unbroken chain of farm workers and long-term tenants like us, it was on 4th December 2019 that we received our formal two months’ notice to leave ‘by 4th February 2020’. On 5th December 2019 we received verbal notice of demolition and on 6th December 2019 we received written notice of imminent demolition.

Having a 1/365th chance, meaning in racing and bookies’ terms long odds of 365 to 1, of any given date being the date of the house’s ‘death’, it was place-appropriate and an incredible coincidence that the date of formal demolition notice happened to be 6th December, St Nicholas’s Day, the saint of ‘our’ church. The church of St Nicholas, Easton Bavents, was once the easternmost church in the whole of the UK, hence Easton Bavents being the easternmost parish, but it fell into the sea in about 1666. It seemed quietly fitting and precise that in the run up to Christmas, St Nicholas’s Day should be the exact date when the sea formally claimed the old trinity of cottages.

The Christmas symbolism was further enhanced when three wise men from Southwold came to say goodbye to the cottage where they had been so happy as children in the 1940s and 1950s. They told us how in winter they walked home from school in Southwold, aiming for the cosy lights of the cottage in the distance, following their own little ‘bright star’ in the east. They also told us, with a degree of amused relish at the memory of rural Suffolk’s attempts at high drama, that when Easton Bavents babies were born up there on the cliff, one Mrs Flowerdew was summoned to deliver them. The older children were ‘taken for a long walk’, up to Covehithe and Benacre, a country mile or three to the north up the beach, with plenty of extra ‘time-buying miles’ available in the circular walks and ample footpaths and byways of the Benacre estate, depending on the anticipated ease of delivery of the baby, and perhaps the previous experience of the mother (and Mrs Flowerdew). Although a mere rural anecdote and enjoyable memory, this story was also satisfying as a modern Nativity scene, evidently sent by Fate to occur during the closing-in phase of Advent, when the waiting is over and the Baby Jesus imminently due, in the twenty-first century.

At any rate, it added a certain ancient folkloric appropriateness to our Christmastide plight.

I hadn’t felt so moved by the spirit of Christmas since feeling the mysterious weight and hearing the scrunching sound of the full stocking on the end of my bed as a child on Christmas mornings, when the magic still hung in the air. As children at the Old Rec, our stockings were always one of my father’s gigantic shooting socks, knitted by Granny. And they still are. These giant stockings of thick wool in earthily rural colours have survived both their creator and their wearer by several decades, and this is after several decades of use. They are still deployed for duty as stockings at Christmas, and they are one of the few objects from childhood that hasn’t disappointingly shrunk as we have grown bigger. These socks still seem comically giant.

Who makes the decision that this or that house must be demolished, its people displaced? How does it physically happen? How much notice will you be given? Where will you go? The perennial questions seemed more immediate now. We had naturally kept a weather eye on the presumed time we had left, based on our previous observations and measurements, and conversations with occasional experts who came to make more official measurements on behalf of officialdom. Those habitual pacings-from-the-post showed clearly that the edge of the cliff was coming closer, yet the timescale never seemed ‘imminent’. Up until recently the pacings had been done largely out of interest and curiosity rather than for any real need to start actively making plans. Coastal Erosion Prediction is an imprecise science. ‘Erosionology’ follows unpredictable patterns of prolonged stability followed by intense activity. The official consensus had been until recently that we still had a year or two left.

How it actually happened was quite sudden. It was a Wednesday, 4th December, when we received our formal written two months’ notice to leave, which would have been annoying, as long-term tenants of the farm, but was entirely reasonable, legal, and logistically doable. Two months would in theory be plenty of time to find another house via the most obvious property websites and/or tapping up a bit of local knowledge, friends, estates and so on. We might not like whatever house we could find, or its location, but we would find a house or an abode of some kind, and we’d be lucky to be able to move into it, and it would have to do. We rued the fact that our time actively loving the place where we lived was probably over. That privilege already seemed episodic, as if we had experienced by chance something dreamlike and other-worldly, then had been rudely awakened from an ethereal trance, and would now have to reintegrate back into the grit and grind of the normal day.

The following day, on Thursday 5th December, we had verbal notice of demolition and the need to leave, not in two months’ time but imminently, now. The Coastal Engineer, who up until now had been a distant figure, talked about but never met, and probably part of what I might refer to as ‘officialdom’, had apparently paid a final fatal visit and found that we were now officially nine metres from the cliff edge, and as such ‘our safety was paramount’. Although we had nothing yet in writing, it was suggested that the house would have to be demolished ‘as soon as possible’.

On Friday 6th December, we received our formal written notice of demolition. Later that day it was suggested that we should try and move out ‘at the weekend if possible’. Then we were told that the water was going to be cut off.

With the best will in the world and a lifetime of local knowledge, there are not many people or households who could move everything out of their house with a day or two’s notice after twelve years. We had had enough foresight to have thinned out some of our clutter, and had stacked boxes in the brick shed. Considering that until recently we had been told we had another year or two, this was quite efficient. But we had also looked after my mother-in-law for the last four years of her life, and had absorbed a whole lifetime’s worth of her treasures. While many of these treasures were beautiful, useful things like antiques and paintings, furniture and bookshelves, we were also overwhelmed with china and books and unknown ‘old things’. Moving out at two days’ notice was not a realistic option. Moving out in two months seemed hard enough. Even with the local knowledge of auction rooms and removals firms, and with a fleet of friends’ horseboxes accessible as a last a resort, it would be a mammoth task to pack and move in such short order. Plus, we had nowhere to go.

It is worth mentioning that we were in what I am the first to admit is the enormously privileged position of having family (my mother) living not far away, in a remote old house with outbuildings including a barn in which we could have put at least some of our furniture and other things. These spatial privileges are slightly more hard-won than they might at first appear as, since my father died in 2003, and longer if you count working house-sitting holidays since 1997, I have been helping my mother remain in her own home (my childhood home), by on-and-off doing many jobs that other people might assume were done by paid workers: feeding sheep, lambing, planting, pruning, picking, strimming, amateur building maintenance, painting outbuilding doors, and so on. The enjoyable ‘job’ of keeping my mother remaining in situ at the Old Rec also involves helping to host and man various annual events held there, most notably a garden open day and a week of cricket. Nevertheless, I wholly concur with the view that access to such space is itself a great privilege, even though I do not personally own one brick or acre of the Old Rec and its curtilage.

Moving into the Old Rec as a permanent solution to our imminent erosion-enabled homelessness was not a realistic option. Even if eventually we might need to do so, it would only ever be if we became specifically necessary and helpful to my mother (for instance in her dotage), at her invitation, perhaps with me working the kitchen garden and growing vegetables for the comrades in the newly-formed family commune. We had to find a house, a lorry and storage space, and soon.

I searched Rightmove, which to be fair must be praised as a saintly presence at such times, as it immediately yielded several perfectly liveable houses within our chosen area and price range, if not a single one with any sense of remoteness. One cottage was up a track, but with the landlord living cheek-by-jowl next door, and with quite a number of unusually draconian rules. This was by far the most appealing, and I made an appointment to view it.

I also contacted the local estate offices (as in country estates), all of whom would have cottages and farmhouses in various sizes, with the added appeal of likely remoteness, but probably would not have any available. I had long ago put us on notional waiting lists, but without a clear idea of when we would need to move, and it seemed unlikely that this fatalistic foresight would ever bear fruit at the time we needed it to. People in estate cottages tend to be long-term tenants, and estates tend to bend over backwards to keep their long-term tenants for many years.

One of the more specific ways of attracting and keeping long-term tenants is allowing (or perhaps encouraging) all manner of livestock and gardening eccentricities, hence the many dogs, ducks, hens, geese, guinea fowl, ponies, donkeys and so on seen in the gardens and small paddocks around these estates, although Sandringham famously has a ‘no cats’ policy on all its tenancies. The success of all country estates has always been their focus on the long term, so the quirks of long-term tenants tend to be tolerated.

With Benacre, Somerleyton, Henham and Sotterley estate offices alerted, I eyed up alternative rural removals transport ideas in more detail. Horseboxes, farm vehicles and possibly manpower were available in theory through friends. At an absolute pinch, perhaps we could call on the Household Cavalry, off-duty (Giles being ex-HCav). Coming out of our farm track at Easton Bavents preoccupied by such vehicular thoughts, I had to wait while an enormous Peddars Pigs lorry hurtled past on the road, and I bore it in mind as a potential removals van. This is what adapting to change meant in practice. I was already mentally assessing pig lorries and seeing alternative uses for all sorts of things.

In the not-too-distant future, I genuinely believe that we might have to collectively become more adaptable, because of unseen natural forces, probably connected with climate change and rising sea levels, but also possibly connected with unknown unknowns. Adapting to change might turn out to be the defining feature of the human condition and the cultural landscape in the twenty-first century. I genuinely foresee a time in the coming decades when great events of Nature may cause us to have to put aside petty political differences and work together, valuing both the intellectual expertise and the physical competence that may save us and get us out of trouble. Climate scientists and removals lorry drivers may rule the roost in this quite easily imaginable future.