Postcard from... Norfolk

By Rachel Alcock-Hodgson:

On my first morning home I wake up to the wide open view. Morning damp, not quite mist, hangs from the heathery drifts of bare trees beyond the fields. The purple and lichen green of the branches picked out in the golden light. The birds are in full throttle, twirling blackbird song layering over the thrum of wood pigeons. I step out, and begin to try and breathe the fresh coolness in, but it can’t quite calm my jangling brain, or ease the pressure on my chest.

The following days are defined by forcing my thoughts to settle and appreciate small pleasures - walks round the fields, bike rides, sitting in the sun looking out of the window and drawing. I have left the city and work to give myself headspace to negotiate a rush of crippling physical anxiety I had been hit with a couple of weeks earlier, seemingly from nowhere. This gives me the double edged luxury of time to appreciate where I am, but with a mind that I can’t keep on the straight and narrow, and routinely dives off into eddies of existential dread where my future is mundane, monotonous and always pointless.

The peace and quiet that penetrates bit by bit hustles with non-human busyness. I watch the negotiations at the bird feeders, blue tits shuttling back and forth between the feeders and the cover of the big half-pruned bay tree, nuthatches hanging upside down, squirrels making off with as much as they can carry.

Bike ride number one is my first lycra-clad ride in too long. By the house, the air is tangy with salt - surely we are too far from the coast for it to be from the sea? But mum can smell it too when I call her out. Neither of us have smelt this here before. As I ride, the rhythm of the exercise makes space for spring to dawn on me. Heading out of the village, the hedges are alive with jittering sparrows. The views I cycle through are full of wide, wet, ploughed, brown-pink fields, ready to sprout. Rich and solid, something in between the red of Devon soil and the black of Lincolnshire. Kestrels hang, fluttering at the edges. When one swoops low, its red-brown back is a softer reflection of the fields. 

Dense clumps of acid yellow primroses hug the ground, clustering at the bottom of trees on the verges. Near Happisburgh and its red and white lighthouse, there is the hazy, vanilla smell of daffs, and as the road winds and sinks down through sheltered banks, strong wafts of wild garlic. I remember that I love the feeling of battling the wind for miles and miles then turning the corner and my bike taking off and the tarmac starting to hum.

There’s a comfort in navigating by place names I know, not needing a map. Knowing the landscape feels like I am part of it, connected to those who have gone before me and walked the footpaths and lokes that crisscross the fields and squeeze in between gardens and houses.

Buoyed up by this, ride number two starts with us - my dad, mum and me - pootling out into the chill dusk. We are heading towards the landmarks of my childhood, Witton Woods, Bacton Gas terminals, Happisburgh lighthouse.

Even before we had quite set off en famille, mum started to give us a guided tour, accompanying the first pedal strokes with an anecdote about the post-man who’s just driven off and his ‘lunchtime liaison’, then telling us who lives in every house and what lies ahead at every cross-road. Uncharacteristically, and surprising myself, I don’t default to grumpiness (‘I know where we are mum!’), instead letting myself listen. I have the obvious but startling realisation that my connection to this place is not just an innate one with nature, or general countryside, it is also because of the web of community my mum has spent 30 years working hard to create. Resting into the familiarity of place and people, feels like leaning back into a hot bath.

On Sunday, mum and I walk. We end up on the hill above the village in the wind blasted churchyard where my maternal grandmother is buried. Her stone is dull stormy grey. Tall, blunt and asymmetric, conspicuous above the others. It commemorates her achievements in blocky capitals: her Merit award from the Royal College of Physicians, her ‘Dr’, and her specialism, rheumatism, in Greek. Very her. And very different to the usual ‘in loving memory’ and family lists, on smoothly curved and polished granite. 

My grandmother never lived here. Her name is Scottish, via New Zealand, worlds away from the generations of Hannants and Dixons that populate the graveyard. Though her family connections aren’t listed, she is here because this is where my mum chose to be. We sit sheltered on the grass, bathed in warm spring sun and feel held by the generations beneath us. My tangled feeling of family connection and connection to the land all the more significant.

We end the day by gardening into the dusk, bonfire cracking and smoking like on the busy Sundays of my childhood. I enjoy the methodical and companionable progress of weeding, listening to the woodpecker jackhammer a hollow tree, and a blackbird’s aria. We stay out until the birds leave and the cooling shadows overtake the warmth of the sun, finally going inside quietly contented with the day. 

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Rachel Alcock-Hodgson lives in Edinburgh, but has roots in Norfolk. She is a walker, climber, swimmer, knitter, mender of anything, gardener, cyclist and reader. She did an English Literature degree a few years ago, and is getting back into writing after a pause - having realised that it’s an important part of her understanding of the world.

This story was published previously in a different form by Mxogyny.

Definitions: Loke is a Norfolk word for a short, narrow lane. Used in the countryside and towns.