One April morning in 1956 I made one of my planless walks from Slaughden towards Orford and with the usual elated feeling. There would be a wonder midway although I knew nothing of its existence. All I experienced at this moment was a tossing about of freedom. The sea was glorious and near at hand, the gulls screamed and the air was intoxicating. At Slaughden the Alde turned into the Ore, and the Aldeburgh Marshes became the Sudbourne Marshes. On the left were the Lantern and King’s Marshes. Orford Castle was the obvious destination but like a boy leaving the biggest sweet in the bag until last, I turned right towards Butley. Somebody had told me that Chillesford Church tower was pink because it contained lots of coraline crag. But what drew me would be the stunted oaks and the limited nature of things. And yet at the same time the grandeur of things, for Victorian aristocrats had shot over these acres. So I saw Hansel and Gretel Lodge, and dark entrances to country houses, and signposts to Hollesley where Brendan Behan would be a Borstal Boy. This walk would become a preface to a guidebook as yet unwritten. The poor soil of the Suffolk sandlings had made for skimpy farming but had provided the next best thing to Scotland for shoots.

Just below it there existed something else. Butley loomed large on my ‘Geographical’ two-miles-to-the-inch map. A rivulet wriggled in its direction. And so I came to the Thicks a little way on the right of the Woodbridge road. It would play a large part in my imagination. I took all my friends there, the poet James Turner, John Nash, the Garretts, Richard Mabey. ‘Yes,’ said Benjamin Britten, ‘I know it well.’ John Nash had told me that when he was painting he ‘liked to have a dead tree in the landscape’. Except that Staverton Thicks was not dead, only perpetually dying. And thus everlastingly alive. Although with no apparent struggle. It showed its great age and exposed its ageing, and one flinched from such candour. But why had no one cleared it and replanted it? What had happened? What was happening?

An early friend of John Nash’s youthful days was Sidney Schiff, the translator of Proust. Schiff had taken over as translator when Charles Scott Moncrieff died. John Nash gave me the first volume, Time Regained, which Schiff had given him. In it Schiff, who wrote under the name of Stephen Hudson, had put, ‘My dear John, I want you to have this book. Begin by reading from p. 210 to p. 274. If that means so much to you as I hope, begin at the beginning and read it slowly to the end. 30th March ’32.’

These sixty or so pages describe a soliloquy on the artist–writer’s life when, arriving late for a concert, he is put into the library until the first work is ended. His memory wanders back to the celebrated memory-providing madeleine and, although he is in Paris, to the Normandy coast, and takes in the decision to be either painter or writer. I had just read Sidney Schiff’s instructions. Fragments of the soliloquy in the Paris library fluttered through my head as I walked towards Orford and penetrated the strange wood. Passages such as ‘the large bow-windows wide open to the sun slowly setting on the sea with its wandering ships, I had only to step across the window-frame, hardly higher than my ankle, to be with Albertine and her friends who were walking on the sea-wall’ made me think of Juliet Laden and Peggy Somerville softly drawing in pastel the young people below, and how perfect it would be this very evening to be at Brudenell House telling them about my walk. I too was attempting to concentrate my mind on a compelling image, a cloud, a triangle, a belfry, a flower, a pebble. I wondered if I should make the lovers in my half-written novel walk this way. And then, thinking of Denis Garrett and his botanic company, I was startled when Proust includes him in these recommended pages – when the narrator says that his sorrows and joys

The writer envies the painter; he would like to make sketches and notes and, if he does so, he is lost …

John Nash sketched through a grid of lines and dotted in here and there ‘late afternoon’, ‘browning grey’, ‘still water’, as reminders.

According to his youthful armour-bearer it was among the young oaks of Staverton that St Edmund was murdered by the Danes, tied naked to one of the trees and made a target for arrows. This armour-bearer lived, like the trees, to be very old and thus he was able to tell this execution to Athelstan, who told it to Dunstan, who told it to his friend Abbo of Fleury, who sensibly wrote it down.

The Thicks was also the scene of a Tudor picnic, when Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Henry VIII’s sister, spread linen in its shade, drank wine, sang songs and ate – what? This story delighted me as a kind of alfresco masque; when I imagined a pretty site a mile or so from the shield-bedecked Augustinian Priory, and some spontaneous desire to make merry out of doors. But then I looked up the Duke – and what a monster! But a good-looking monster, one of the ‘new men’ of the Reformation who had gone from strength to strength without losing his head. I see him lying full length on the then thick summer grass, the oaks above as young as he is, and by his side his wife Mary who was once Queen of France. Henry was furious when they married in Paris without his permission, but calmed down when her enormous dowry for the first husband was returned in instalments. In Suffolk they called her ‘the French queen’, not the Duchess. She would have been buried in St Edmundsbury Abbey had not her brother pulled it down. But she can be found in a corner of St Mary’s Church near by, the woman who ate – what? – in Staverton Thicks.

Hugh Farmer, into whose little wood I stole so long ago, himself describes it in a Festival Programme Book. He lived there and his account of it is incomparable. He tells of his life there in A Cottage in the Forest. But it has never been the adjunct of a great house.

I thought of Saxon and Viking princelings. The Thicks has a partly thwarted Phoenix ambition, to die and yet live. But the thing is itself a form of dying. The long-settled condition of these botanic infirmaries, for they exist here and there where a tidying hand has not invaded them, are a requiem. The rich deep mould of their floor, the feeble barriers of guelder and hazel which let through the north-coast wind, the close canopy of undernourished branches which check full leafage, all these ‘disadvantages’ are time-protracting. For an oak, a holly, the chief enemies of existence are parasitic fungi, canker caused by sunburn, frost aphis of one kind or another – and lightning. They say that it strikes an oak more than any other tree. Once, cycling from Framlingham on a storm-black afternoon, I saw lightning fire an old oak in a park. It blazed up only a few yards away with a mighty crackle of dead and living wood.

Most of the Staverton oaks are so near death that they seem to be nothing more than gnarled drums for the gales to beat. Yet so tenacious is their hold on life that the twigs sprouting from them are still April green. And come August ‘Lammas’ growth will hide some shrivelled bole.

The mood of the Thicks depends on that of its visitor. I found it a contemplative, loving silence. Little or no birdsong. An absence of that rustling busyness created by small unseen animals. A carpet-soft humus deadened my every step. So soft was it that sparse forest flowers – sanicle shoots, wild strawberry, speedwell – can be trodden into it without injury. A sequence of glades has its own special senescence. It is like walking through an ill-lit gallery of sculpted last days. Except that here there is an endless putting off of last days.

As Staverton means a staked enclosure, what was it that was enclosed? And why were its ‘thicks’ left to degenerate when the remainder of the forest was not allowed to? Why was it allowed to do what it liked? Yet it feels neither cursed nor abandoned. It is like a woodland mortuary, yet not tragic. Its enigma lies in some destiny which we now know nothing of. For some reason it was intentionally untouched – and staved in. It is grotesque, part a wood from Gormenghast, part a lecture on death, part a ruin of miscegenation. Holly props up oak; ivy alone flourishes. Wild creatures for the most part avoid it. It is botany as departure – yet neither root nor leaf ever goes.