17 The Airfield

James Hamilton-Paterson

 

Debach and Boulge stand at a conjunction of Suffolk’s light and heavy land. To the north-west lies ‘the ol’ clay’, to the south-east the sandlings, and the sea. Here, there and everywhere black plantations thrived for the shoots. One winter a plantation was bowed to the ground by an army of rooks. The sandlings shade off all that is emphatic in our landscape. But the old clay never stops declaring its presence. ‘Loving-land’ the old farmworkers used to call it as it clung to their boots.

Debach airfield hung on to signs of its wartime inhabi tants. I sometimes found letters in a rolling American hand in its concrete crevasses. The saluting base had sockets for all the flags. Now learner drivers sped where the bombers took off. When James Hamilton-Paterson and I became friends in the Sixties I discovered that he was fascinated by aviation. This was made known to me, not on Debach airfield but in my own garden. We were clearing a patch in which to grow vegetables when we began pulling out thin sheets of what looked like tin. Then we exhumed what seemed to be old clocks. And then we knew what we had found – a Spitfire.

Neighbours said, ‘Oh, yes, poor lad. He flew off early one morning from Woodbridge and hit your elms – which cut his head off! His head was up the tree and his body was still strapped in the cockpit!’

James and I washed the instruments in the sink and stacked the Spitfire sheets against the garage.

He and I were introduced after he had won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford. He sat on the bench above the moat – ‘I think I could be happy here.’ He had just returned from searching for Che Guevara in South America. Everyone I knew was searching for something or somebody, the Maharishi, the Beatles, Flower Power, whilst I did not seem to be searching for anything, and was thought to have found it. But I hadn’t. James Hamilton-Paterson and I were not seekers at this time other than after the means to exist. He sat in his room and wrote children’s novels, and eventually, elsewhere, a masterpiece called Playing with Water which he dedicated to me.

Seas, oceans, not Suffolk ponds, would preoccupy him. Aeroplanes too. We walked the Dallinghoo Wield and he would fill his pockets with tin shirt buttons lost by farmworkers, also fossils; pouring these finds out on the kitchen table. I re-read Playing with Water because amongst all his books it ‘holds’ what we were then before either of us became what we are now. He was – is – tall, fair, patrician and unprovincial. Free of those things which have tied me to a small scene. Debach, the tiniest place imaginable, stays expanded by his friendship.

They were digging up Sutton Hoo again when I was there and I would cycle over to watch the amazing sand ship taking shape; the sand prow, the sand ribs, the sand keel. The sand destination. Once when the archaeologists had rigged up a vast plastic sheet against some likely rain and had taken their shirts off, the Saxon galleon looked as though it was in full sail and would reverse its voyage up the Deben and carry its memory of garnets, gold, harp, standard and banqueting silver to Scandinavia, leaving us with just a hole in the gorse.

Arrow-straight roads run to the sea from here. The featurelessness of them creates a kind of calm. The sandlings is a land specialising in departures and in returnings. Alun Lewis, stationed here during the last war, found it more than he could bear:

James Hamilton-Paterson and I borrowed his mother’s car to savour Dunwich. I knew exactly what Dunwich tasted like but it was all new to him. The cliff was sprigged with yellow bones where the final churchyard was crumbling into the waves. James found a perfect white and pale-gold skull, emptying the fine sand from it and placing it on the back seat. Five years later his mother rang to ask, ‘I’ve found a skull in a biscuit tin. What shall I do with it?’ I buried it in my wood. No rites, other than tenderness. No sea sounds. My mulch filled the whirled hollow of its ears. James sent me a seahorse from the Philippines in exchange. We had an investment in fragments.

I wrote:

And there is Shingle Street from which Irish labourers brought countless stones to make the runways. The stones there exist in such mesmerising quantities that, like stars, one must stop counting or weighing and even thinking in numbers. A mile from my house the bombers trundled over them on their death runs. Pre-war maps directed us to brick-lined moats, shadows of cottages, suggestions of paths, hints of population. Perhaps two thousand years of agriculture and rural habitation all smoothed out. But the same air. The same plants. The seasonal birds coming and going as they did above the Western Front. And a handful of things which only Edward FitzGerald might recognise.

James and I went to Aldeburgh, of course. Went all over the county. He was bemused by my Anglicanism, I was unnerved by his detachment. If I can see a long way in East Anglia, he can see continental distances, ocean depths – and flight paths. He is a master of minutiae and of great things. Also, like me, solitary. Debach became our interpreter, this hamlet, shorn now of its crowning glory, the elms. I try to go this way to Aldeburgh – to anywhere past Ipswich. The church is now a house, and the family which live in it garden among graves, and look out on fields which have shed their concrete. But Dallinghoo Wield retains its old surface on which curious objects still linger. French’s Folly has changed its name once more. But Debach is not a name one can do anything about. It clings to its post.