In the years following the First World War, countless estates were broken up in the same way as Quilter's Bawdsey. The manor houses were either left to fall down or used for other purposes, as boys' boarding schools, approved schools, insane asylums, old people's homes, or reception camps for refugees from the Third Reich. Bawdsey Manor itself was for a long time the domicile and research centre of the team under Robert Watson-Watt that developed radar, which now spreads its invisible net through out the entire airspace. To this day, the area between Woodbridge and the sea remains full of military installations. Time and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes barracks, gateways and fenced-off areas where, behind thin plantations of Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hanars and grass-covered bunkers, the weapons with which, if an emergency should arise, whole countries and continents can be transformed into smoking heaps of stone and ash in no time. Not far from Orford, and already tired from my long walk, this notion took possession of me when I was hit by a sandstorm. I was approaching the eastern fringe of Rendlesham Forest, which covers several square miles and was for the most part reduced to broken and splintered timber in the terrible hurricane of the 16th of October 1987. Suddenly, in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened and a wind came up,
blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours disappeared in the greyish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in from the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out, through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short while ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken. When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down. — I walked the rest of the way in a daze. All I remember is that my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and that I felt as if I were walking on the spot. When at last I reached Orford, I climbed to the top of the castle keep, from where there is a view over the houses of the town, the green gardens and pallid fenlands, and the coastline to north and south, lost in the shimmering distance. Orford Castle was completed in 1165
and for centuries was the foremost bastion against the constant threat of invasion. Not until Napoleon was contemplating the conquest of the British Isles — his engineers audaciously planning to dig a tunnel under the Channel, and envisaging an armada of hot-air balloons advancing on the English coast — were new defensive measures taken, with the building of martello towers along the seashore, a mile or so apart. There are seven of these circular forts between Felixstowe and Orford alone. To the best of my knowledge, their effectiveness was never put to the test. The garrisons were soon withdrawn, and ever since these masonry shells have served as homes for the owls that make their soundless flights at dusk from the battlements. In the early Forties, the scientists and technicians at Bawdsey built radar masts along the east coast, eerie wooden structures more than eighty yards high which could sometimes be heard creaking in the night. No one knew what purpose they served any more than they knew about the many other secret projects then being pursued in the military research establishments around Orford. Naturally this gave rise to all manner of speculation about an invisible web of death rays, a new kind of nerve gas, or some hideous means of mass destruction that would come into play if the Germans attempted a landing. And it is a fact that until recently a file labelled Evacuation of the Civil Population from Shingle Street, Suffolk was in the archives of the Ministry of Defence, embargoed for seventy-five years as distinct from the usual practice of releasing documents after thirty, on the grounds that (so the irrepressible rumours claimed) it gave details of a horrifying incident in Shingle Street for which no government could accept public responsibility. I myself heard, for instance, that experiments were conducted at Shingle Street with biological weapons designed to make whole regions uninhabitable. I also heard tell of a system of pipes extending far out to sea, by means of which a petroleum inferno could be unleashed with such explosive rapidity, in the event of an invasion, that the very sea would start to boil. In the course of the preparatory experimentations, an entire company of English sappers were said to have met their deaths, inadvertently as it were, in the most appalling manner, according to eye witnesses who claimed to have seen the charred bodies, contorted with pain, lying on the beach or still out at sea in their boats. Others maintain that those who died in the wall of fire were German landing forces wearing English uniforms. When access to the Shingle Street following a lengthy campaign was finally granted in 1992 in the local press, it revealed nothing that might have justified the top-secret classification, or
substantiated the stories that had been circulating since the end of the war. But it seems likely, one commentator wrote, that sensitive material was removed before the file was opened, and so the mystery of Shingle Street remains. — Presumably part of the reason why rumours like this one concerning Shingle Street endured so obstinately was that, during the Cold War era, the Ministry of Defence continued to maintain Secret Weapons Research Establishments on the coast of Suffolk, and imposed the strictest silence on the work carried out in them. The inhabitants of Orford, for example, could only speculate about what went on at the Orfordness site, which, though perfectly visible from the town, was effectively no easier to reach than the Nevada desert or an atoll in the South Seas. For my part, I well recall standing down by the harbour when I first visited Orford in 1972 and looking across to what the locals simply called "the island", which resembled a penal colony in the Far East. I had been studying the curious coastal land formations at Orford on the map, and was interested in the promontory of Orfordness, which seemed to have an extraterritorial quality about it. Stone by stone, over a period of millennia, it had shifted down from the north across the mouth of the River Alde, in such a way that the tidal lower reaches, known as the ore, run for some twelve miles just inside the present coastline before flowing into the sea. When I was first in Orford, it was forbidden to approach "the island", but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there, since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research at that site. One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after I had had a look around. As we crossed the river in his blue-painted boat, he told me that people still mostly avoided Orfordness. Even the beach fishermen, who were no strangers to solitude, had given up night-fishing out there after a few attempts, allegedly because it wasn't worth their while, but in reality because they couldn't stand the god-forsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere, and in some cases even became emotionally disturbed for some time. Once we were on the other side, I took leave of my ferryman and, after climbing over the embankment, walked along a partially overgrown tarmac track running straight through a vast, yellowing field. The day was dull and oppressive, and there was so little breeze that not even the ears of the delicate quaking grass were nodding. It was as if I were passing through an undiscovered country, and I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly liberated and deeply despondent. I had not a single thought in my head. With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound. perhaps that was why I was frightened almost to death when a hare that had been hiding in the tufts of grass by the wayside started up, right at my feet, and shot off down the rough track before darting sideways, this way, then that, into the field. It must have been cowering there as I approached, heart pounding as it waited, until it was almost too late to get away with its life. In that very fraction of a second when its paralysed state turned into panic and flight, its fear cut right through me. I still see what occurred in that one tremulous instant with an undiminished clarity. I see the edge of the grey tarmac and every individual blade of grass, I see the hare leaping out of its hiding-place, with its ears laid back and a curiously human expression on its face that was rigid with terror and strangely divided; and in its eyes, turning to look back as it fled and almost popping out of its head with fright, I see myself, become one with it. Not till half-an-hour later, when I reached the broad dyke that separates the grass expanse from the pebble bank that slopes to the shoreline, did the blood cease its clamour in my veins. For a long while I stood on the bridge that leads to the former research establishment. Far behind me to the west,