Idyll

Norfolk was perfectly lovely, like a Wodehouse without aunts or entanglements. There were the joys of conversation and cookery. Fish chowder; Moroccan lamb stew; summer pudding; greengages out of hand. And most gloriously, damsons and cream. (The plums are very early this year.) There were books floor-to-ceiling, chairs and couches made for reading in, and in the great barn, a windowsill of books chosen just for me—Wodehouse, of course, and philology. There was tea-making gear in the guesthouse, and a thoughtful packet of dark chocolate digestive biscuits.

Idling was pleasant. So was gadding about.

We went to a concert by the Classic Buskers at Binham Priory: they’re Michael Copley on over “40 woodwind instruments ... ranging from recorders, flutes, panpipes, crumhorns and ocarinas to a Pico Pipe and a rubber trout” and “Ian Moore on one small but perfectly-formed accordion, either pink or yellow." They played serious and silly musics with Flanders-and-Swannish patter, as the windows drowned in blue.

The Priory itself is flint. It has benches with poppyheads, handworn through centuries of sermons; an elegantly sinister parish bier—pure Edward Gorey—and marvellous fragments of a rood screen, a palimpsest of brilliant mediaeval saints, painted over in 1539 with texts from Cranmer’s Bible, and upwelling through the Word.

Strolling about the town carnival, I particuarly enjoyed watching the collectors for charity dressed up as cows on stilts. Eight-foot (vertically not Sleipnirically) skinny Holsteins, complete with udders jiggling like pink jellyfish. No one does silly like the English. Bless.

One afternoon, we visited a local workshop of glassblowers, and I got to try my lungs at the blowpipe. I blew a lump of molten glass—just turning barley-gold—into a vast eccentric sphere, an ill-tuned planet. Alas, it had a bubble’s life. It shattered. I so wanted to blow a keepsake piece—my own bauble—but that would have taken several days to cool and temper, and packing would have been unfeasible. Ah well.

Then we prowled about a most enjoyable restoration scrapyard, in search of windows for the barn. Anyone want a toad-crossing sign?

East Barsham Manor is so very very Private Property, overgrown as Aurora; but one can try to catch glimpses of a rose-red Tudor hall adream amid deep foliage. The leaves are very much awake: they dance and sparkle. But the great house sleeps, as in legend.

If you have £2.75 million, it’s yours.

Then home by a whirl past Walsingham and the little round jam-pot jail that I put in Cloud & Ashes.

Even on my last day, on the way to the train, we picnicked at Castle Rising, and saw Seahenge (or at least its black timbers) in King’s Lynn.

It dates to the spring or summer of 2049 BC, to very threshold of the Bronze Age: the timbers were felled by over 36 bronze blades, among the first on these islands. I love that there’s just one forked bole in the circle, like a Gothic door; and that it had a second tree before it, like a watcher or a sported oak. All fantastically writhen, all black as time. Does Gormenghast have a seacoast? The great upturned oakstump at the heart of it, roots writhing at the sun, looks as if it were executed by a paranoid Bright Carver.

What I loved most was Blickling Hall. There are stories in that. I’ve long mourned that J. and S. can’t read my books with any pleasure: they’re fantasy-allergic. But to my great delight, they really liked Cry Murder! and fell eagerly on Exit. At long last, I'm writing in a style and genre they can thoroughly enjoy. S. (who taught me at Cambridge) always thought that Hopkins was my fatal Cleopatra. Ben is an excellent corrective to my preciosity, she said: the first Horatian among English poets. So for Ben’s sake, we thought we’d do a Jacobean house, and chose Blickling Hall, which was fabulous.

And so not Augustan.

Its magnificent yew hedges have secret paths inside, so that small children (or an acrobatic adult) could wriggle down endless tunnels in the green dark, and emerge Elsewhere, fiercely scratched. There are portraits; parterres; a branching staircase, grandiloquently heraldic (Boleyn bulls rampant); kitchen premises, worthy of a mini-series; oak overmantels with carven grotesques and flights of blue-and-white china; a Dutch marquetry cabinet in a bedroom with Chinese wallpapers.

Beyond all, the Long Gallery is a library.

It shelves ten thousand books, which the National Trust is only now cataloging--who knows what might be found? And just as we came in, a careful volunteer was dusting a map of Ben’s Paris, which I took as a sign. (She had no end of trouble folding it back into its folio—which I hope is not an omen.)

Above all, that Long Gallery has the absolute best plaster ceiling that I've ever seen, 123 feet of emblematic iconography. It wove itself zodaically into the story that I had in mind; it echoed and re-branched. Sheer ecstasy.

There was even a rhinoceros for Ben!