Woodbridge - 'On the town'

A wilful, tearing, exasperating day – the wind hurled me up Market Hill and flung me into the King's Head Inn. Black beams inside, and six old men playing rummy. 'It's not normal Woodbridge weather,' says one, 'something wrong about this wind.' 'It's ordinary Suffolk wind,' agreed another, 'not a proper Woodbridge wind.' They go on playing rummy, all squat Suffolk men, big-nosed, with small feet tucked under an oak settle.

`They know what's what,' a burly chap told me at the bar, 'Woodbridge has got a climate all on its own.' He stood me a pint of Adnams, explaining how the Deben estuary, and a half-turn of the Orwell estuary, and a hill or two between, magick this mile of Suffolk coast into tranquillity. Outside, the southern gale shrieked on. 'You've chosen a peculiar day,' he abjures me, tilting the ale under his jib of a nose, 'you've hit on queer weather, and I should know – I'm Darky Grimmer's grandson!'

The six old men mumbled assent. 'Darky Grimmer my grandad, and my dad too, they bred Suffolk Punches. What, you've never seen a Suffolk Punch?' Disbelief mingled with pity on his open-air face. 'Well, they're a lovely red, that's the main thing. Some people find the Suffolk Punch thick in the leg, but personally, I think it's a lovely horse.' Rumbles of agreement rose from the inglenook. 'Suffolk Punch is the prettiest horse anywhere,' declared a very old gent in a cap put on backwards against the draught, 'and Woodbridge has got the best climate in England.'

`She'll find out for herself,' cried Darky Grimmer's grandson as the gale plucked me from the King's Head (its timbered side lurching half-seas over) and blew me down–hill to Thoroughfare, where everyone in Suffolk seemed to be shopping at once. A scent of warm cinnamon, buns baking, buns beaming with perfection, drew a queue into Wright's. 'Oh, there's a posh new sign, The Cake Shop, but we all know it's Wright's. Old Wright retired, so his sons carry on.' Beyond the warm ambit of buns, another tang took over: kipper and sole in Jacobs the Fishmonger. `Lovely sole,' said young Mr Jacobs, presiding over the marble slab, 'fresh caught in Lowestoft. Sorry I can't introduce you to Mr Jacobs senior, because he's at a rehearsal. That's typical Woodbridge. Dad's head of the Deben Players, our dramatic society. We've got more societies than anywhere else in England. I'm a member of the Suffolk Horse Society, and a Friend of the Tide-mill and a protector of birds. I bet you don't leave here without someone enrolling you into some damn thing.'

It wouldn't be hard. Woodbridge really is a poppet, a little poem of a town. Birds get the best view of it, gulls gusting up the Deben estuary to perch and yammer on St Mary's church tower. A great tower, glinting high and flinty, which lifts above the hill where Woodbridge hugs an arm of river creek. Wherever one goes, there is a glimpse of silvery steeple. 'You ought,' said the Rector, 'you really ought to see us from the top!' Up I slog, past the eerie white of cobweb and gull droppings to emerge - heaven! - in the high sky amid 15th century parapets. How did they do it, those medieval craftsmen? Ice-cold flint flashed, out and fret against creamy limestone. Suffolk has no building stone: it had to be brought by sea, from the Wash. Yet this tower is only one of a hundred such in Suffolk. Far below, I could trace the original street pattern of Woodbridge in the plain-and-purl knit of roof-tops, subtly dark red tiles laid in Georgian times on steep-pitched rafters, and the twist of Jacobean chimney stack. Then downhill, down Quayside, to the white thicket of masts and the brown river twining seawards.

`D'you sing? enquired the Rector as we battle through the gale, 'our parish choir needs fresh blood,' looking at me hungrily; `I'm afraid the Bach Choir, our rival, pinches our best members!' Inside the church porch stood a lattice-work cupboard stacked with loaves. 'For the poor. John Sayer made a bequest of bread, about 300 years ago, and we just carry on. Of course we're always glad of new donors, potential bell-ringers . . .' pursuing me past tombs, the wind rattling yew, the sky unleashing. I went quietly and hid in a tea-shop. But there was too much to explore...

Rain slid me downhill to Quay–side, boats, paint and rust aglitter like drowned armour. Here is another time, another town . . . Udebryge, or Wudebrige, or Wode–bryge. So they spelt it in the Domesday Book. And centuries before Domesday the name must have been Saxon : Woden's bryge, borough of the great God Woden. Down by the estuary, millenia drop away. The trim brick town recedes, church and chapel retreat behind those secret windings of the Saxon shore. Even the railway sign looks absurd: 'Woodbridge' indeed - prim intruder on Woden's country. While I stood, the tide began turning, water snaking and sneaking inland between ribs of packed silver mud. Foot by foot rose the water, a dozen feet over mud smooth as dirty marble. This way came the Saxon invaders, their ribbed keels nosing up on a full tide. Just across the water, on a heathy ridge called Sutton Hoo, they had buried their mighty chieftains.

Momentous unbaring of the Dark Ages, the burial ship weighty with treasure -thrilling to imagine it there on the opposite bank. But how do I get across? 'Walk,' said a boatman shortly, 'when the tide's out. Not today ma'am, you picked the wrong wind today.' It flattened us both against the boat-builder's shed. But on the Ordnance Survey map `ferry' was marked connecting Woodbridge and Sutton. 'Sometimes it do go, and sometimes it don't,' the boatman imparted in a casual bellow, 'last I heard, the ferry gave up. Anyhow, there's nothing at Sutton.' I shouted something about Saxon treasure. He fixed me with a look of scorn. 'Been dug up, years ago. British Museum took the whole blooming lot.' I tried to explain how the intricate gold ornaments had so fascinated me, caged in glass at the Museum, that only by actually going to Sutton Hoo – he motioned me aside, in the lee of a yacht. 'Don't you go snooping round there; archeology people don't like it. They went and dug up what we always knew about. Ask anyone in Woodbridge. My dad'd take us rabbiting and he'd say, there's a boat 80 foot long under that mound.' Slow derision overspread his features. 'British Museum should ask us here; we know there's another boat buried. We should know – been building boats since the Armada.'

Loath to leave after that tantalising revelation, I put up for the night at 'The Bull'. It proved the kind of comfy coaching inn where breakfast will keep you cheerful all day. Here Tennyson stayed when he came to visit Edward FitzGerald, most renowned of the 'Woodbridge Wits.' How incongruous, think I (drying my socks at the log-fire) that FitzGerald of all people should have spent his entire life pottering about in this corner of Suffolk.

`Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught the Sultan's turret in a Noose of Light.'

Old Fitz never saw a sultan; the nearest he got to Persia was Yarmouth dock. Nevertheless, how fresh, convincing and delightful is the Omar Khayyam he conjured out of musty manuscripts. A Suffolk wind blows through the couplets. FitzGerald had toyed with translation for years, in his mock-serious way. He'd take a trunkful of Greek and Persian on his jaunts, often catching the wrong train through absent-mindedness. `. . . as usual bungled between two railroads and got to Bedford,' he writes in a letter of 1857, 'put away almost all books except Omar Khayyam which I could not help looking over in a Paddock covered with Buttercups and brushed by a delicious Breeze,'...

Old Fitz lived in a variety of houses around Woodbridge, all abnormally draughty. Oh weather, such weather – his letters are chockful of it. 'The extraordinary fine season has killed heaps of people with influenza,' he noted cheerily, in 1844. And, ten years on, 'Even this Woodbridge, with its capital Air and self-contented Stupidity (which you know is very conducive to long Life) has been wheezing and coughing all the very mild winter.'

Heavens, think I, sniffing the breakfast breeze next morning, what's Woodbridge up to now? A radiant sky lured me out. The gale had howled itself over to Holland, letting a few galleon clouds scud above the gabled, curly Shire Hall. `Didn't I tell you?' shouts a burly fellow buying caulis in the market, `you'll see proper Woodbridge weather.' Of course, it was Darky Grimmer's ebullient grandson. 'My grandad lived to a hundred on account of the climate – nicest bit of climate you'll ever find.'

Sun dappled the dark red brick down Angel Lane (its real name, imagine) and freckled the apricot fronts on Cumberland Street. One lovely house outdid another. 'I'm lucky,' said Mr George Arnott the auctioneer, 'I live in my grandfather's place.' Arnott and Calver have a little office on Church Street, traffic grinding outside the window. `We'll just pop next door,' Mr Arnott sped down the uncarpeted office stair, went along the crowded pavement, opened his big front door into a high-ceilinged, Georgian hush. `Oh, it's family furniture,' deprecating; he walks past a peerless walnut dining table, scruffy Victorian armchairs, 'have a look at the garden, now that is something.' Doors open to a long, murmuring lawn, more like a meadow, misty with lilac and a spume of white cherry in the far hedgerow. 'That's typical of Woodbridge; lots of people have a country garden, hidden behind the main road. We do our best to keep the town unaltered; but things are changing. The Woodbridge Book Club might peg out; it's limited to twelve members, you see, who all dine once a month on roast beef. Who can afford roast beef nowadays?' Despair puckered his bald, sunburnt dome. 'Of course, when the Book Club began in 1760, roast beef was regular fare. FitzGerald belonged, naturally; here's a book he gave to my grandfather, "Sea words and phrases." FitzGerald loved sailing round the coast to Aldbro' – he sat and read Homer while a good rough soul did the work.'

Modest Mr Arnott forbore mention of his own volumes on Suffolk, showing me instead the work of another Woodbridge man, Thomas Churchyard, who paid his bills in paintings. 'Here's an oil painting of our Tide-mill on the Deben; you see, the mill hasn't filtered in two centuries – but we've worked hard at restoring it.' I couldn't help smiling at the painter's name. 'What's wrong with Churchyard?' demands Mr Arnott, pained. 'Fine Suffolk name – lots of Churchyards about even nowadays.' We fingered over a note-book of pencil sketches, minute and exquisite. each smaller than a postcard, evoking a lost tranquillity. Mr Arnott opened the big front door, and we step from 18th century stillness into the roaring today. 'Perhaps you'll join our Preservation Society?' he shook hands in haste, `Sorry I must be off, a Governors' meeting I'm afraid; have you seen our Almshouses on Seckford Street? Finest Victorian almshouses in England - wish I had time to show. you round!'

Sun and the tingling air made me loath to leave. The scent of bread lured me along Thoroughfare - impossible to resist Wright's bakery. Reckless, I bought a huge cornucopia of lemon cream, and avoided thinking about the long haul home; then couldn't resist Woolworths, which must be the very last Edwardian Woolworths, sprouting on iron pillars. Reluctant I turned back to `The Bull' on Market Hill, and passed by Suffolk Seed Stores. Or rather didn't pass, enticed inside by a loamy, leathery smell. Two elderly gentlemen await trade, their sunburnt ears like brown jug handles. They watch me hover among garden implements. I had a violent urge to buy a rake. Can they please suggest a souvenir of Woodbridge? `Rose bush,' declared one, 'Woodbridge roses are famous all over the world.' 'Course the lady knew that,' put in his partner, chiding. `There's quite a variety of bush,' he went on implacably, 'there's your floribunda, there's your damask "Omar Khayyam". . .' Really, the Omar Khayyam rose? They gaze at me in frank dismay. Hadn't I ever seen that famous rose? 'Blush pink,' mutters one, 'strong perfume,' adds his partner, explaining how this variety originated from the Persian damask rose planted on FitzGerald's grave near Woodbridge. `She won't get far with one bush,' objected his partner, 'she'd better have a dozen. She needs a dozen to make a show.' Mesmerized, I comply, writing out a cheque, remembering the verse

`So bury me by some sweet Garden-side ... that ev'n my buried Ashes such a Snare
Of Perfume shall fling up into the Air,
As not a True Believer passing by But shall be overtaken unaware.'

Gerda Cohen

* This article first appeared in In Britain magazine a number of years ago. Though it is out of date in some respects, it has been left unaltered in order to preserve its completeness. It won first prize in a Periodical Publishers' Association award scheme.

** See the Suffolk Holiday Cottages index for information about cottages in Woodbridge or nearby.