myth, mourning & memory
“The natural characteristics of Thorpe Mere have been greatly altered since this description was written. In 1912, ‘improvements’ were commenced, with a view to increasing the amenities of Thorpeness as an ordinary seaside resort. Bungalows have multiplied; an artificial lake has been created, and the marshy areas of the old Mere have been drained. Ornithologists will deeply regret the passing of this famous bird-resort, whose attractiveness to bird visitors will be greatly impaired.”20 So read the editor’s footnote to Fergus Ogilvie’s comments on Thorpe Mere on “improvements” undertaken by Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, Fergus’ older brother, who inherited the lands and house in 1910. Where his younger brother saw mudflats rich with value and life, he only saw emptiness and a development potential inspired by utopian visions of William Morris and Ebeneezer Howard. Glencairn designed and built a dreamland holiday getaway for wealthy visitors from London who resided in buildings pastiching all historic English vernaculars, transforming his brother’s cherrished wild mere into a vast managed boating lake dotted with islands named after mythical locations in children’s stories. “Little is known of the early history of Thorpe, except that formerly it had a chapel, St. Mary’s, which was standing for some time after the Restoration, but is now demolished.”21
Map of Thorpe Mere, Suffolk by H. Balfour, 1920
The North Sea, by the author, 2011
So states Chapter 1 of the guide to Thorpeness, as the area had by now been renamed, published in 1912. I wonder how hard history was searched, the still existing fishermans’ cottages had residents in who had been there for generations before the new mock-architecture and mock-history of Thorpeness surrounded them. The older native cottages of defensive and robust coastal-Suffolk vernacular were swallowed into the fog of Ogilvie’s developments, occluded behind new houses, completely removed or simply hidden by newly planted trees which “in a few years should form a pleasant screen of foliage”.22 De Certeau later wrote, “what can be seen designates what is no longer there… that [a place] is composed by these series of displacements and effects among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these moving layers.”23 Four years ago I fell to the ground outside the modern art museum in Barcelona, catching my shin on a marble ledge. Resolutely, I carried on around the gallery and only later noticed the swelling and bleeding, a wound that can still hurt, and on occasion bleeds. While grinding my way over these shifting pebbles each pang brings a sharp Proustian involuntary memory of that holiday, and I am immediately taken to the door of the gallery in Catalan sunshine. Even now in this cold winter fog, I walk on, mentally located somewhere between the monochromatic endless horizon of Suffolk’s coast and the sun-drenched Ravel district in Barcelona. Today the sea is calm and though it’s offered a continuous soundtrack to my route it’s one that’s seeped deep into the unconscious rather than dominated the soundscape. Here though, I listen. The pebbles underfoot a staccato rhythm to the rolling and ever-changing subdued roar of waves forcing up the shore then, stone by stone, dragging Suffolk into the water. Composer Harrison Birtwistle wrote La Plage: 8 arias of Remembrance in response to Robbe-Grillet’s short story, a piece of horizontal music picking up the rhythmic motifs, turning them to sound, and I feel somehow part of an ever-changing ambient composition at this moment, subtle sounds overlaying one another. It’s the sea which asks to be listened to most though, and it’s fitting that this same stretch of beach I now tread was that which Benjamin Britten visited daily. It is also the same stretch which was once filled with 47