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It was so wonderful having my parents visit in such a troubling time, its been so long since I have seen them.
There are v few photos of my parents, so finding one I'd never seen before, of them looking so happy is wonderful!
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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My write up to come. But for now, here is what my friend, Simon, has to say about the church:
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All along the East Anglian coast you find them, these medieval churches with their tall towers, and Kessingland has one of the tallest. Perhaps they served as beacons and marking points to ships at sea. Kessingland's tower has much in common with the one to the south at Walberswick. James Bettley, revising the Buildings of England volume for East Suffolk, suggests that the master mason was the same person, Richard Russell, and that it was probably begun in the spring of 1436 or 1437. Within twelve years it was broadly complete, an extraordinarily short time for such a vast structure, although there was obviously still work to be done. Peter Northeast and Simon Cotton transcribed a large number of wills and bequests towards Kessingland church, including several in the 1450s to the emendation of the bells and to the reparation of the bells and the like. These continued into the 1470s and 1480s, when Agnes Bramfeld, for instance, left 20s to the emendation of the bells, and as late as 1512 Margaret Childerhous left half a noble to the reparation and making of the bells, so as Simon Cotton points out it seems likely that over this period of half a century the ring of bells was being improved and added to.
However, there were also a number of bequests during this period to the tower itself. This may explain the remarkably rich west doorway, its two angels censing the enthroned Blessed Virgin, with two large image niches above. The rebuilding of the nave and south aisle seems to have proceeded along with the tower, and by 1467 Margery Whyte was leaving money to paint one panel of the candlebeam (which is to say the rood screen) and then in 1474 Thomas Bery left 6 marks to a glass window to be newly made and put in the chapel of St John, so we can assume that by then this great building was pretty well complete. All in all, the church benefited from a large amount of late medieval money.
Despite the replacement of its parapet with a brick top, probably in the 17th Century, the tower seems particularly impressive given that it stands against what is a fairly homely thatched church. This is because the church we see today is what little remains of the lavish display of those days. Time has not been kind to either Kessingland village or its church. The sea has come calling, as it has on so many villages around here, taking houses and lives. And it was the people themselves who took down the south aisle and chancel, finding them expensive to maintain, and in any case unnecessary for the new congregational liturgy of the Church of England. A large buttress from the west end of the aisle stands forlornly in the churchyard, and the date of 1578 on the current south porch probably tells us when this demolition occured. Something similar happened at nearby Covehithe and Walberswick. By the 1690s the church was in such a poor state of repair that it had to be largely rebuilt, and the north side dates mostly from this time. The south side was, as Pevsner puts it, restored to a more medieval appearance in the 1860s, and in 1908 Walter Caroe rebuilt the chancel. And yet, this continuing process of adapting and rebuilding gives the church a character all of its own.
Unusually for Suffolk you enter the church from the west, through that splendid doorway and under the tower. The interior that unfolds before you is equally as homely as its exterior, a long and inevitably fairly narrow space with brick floors that focuses on and leads towards Caroe's high, flattened east window, very much in the fashion of its time. The south arcade was filled in, and those windows in the Decorated style added in the 1860s (the work of Richard Phipson perhaps?), but several late 17th Century square, domestic windows survive on the north side. The reason is explained by a wall inscription: This Church was put Out and Rebuilt by the care of John Campe and Thomas Godfrey Gent. in the Year 1694, and Finished in 95. Campe and Godfrey were the churchwardens responsible for overseeing the rebuilding of the church.
Even if you had been transported here magically from the centre of London, you would know straight away that this was a coastal church, not least because of the jaunty ship's wheel set on the front of the pulpit. Another clue is the enormous list of names on the war memorials, most of the dead having served in the Navy. Up in the chancel, a plaque reminds us that it was erected to the Glory of God and in memory of parishioners lost at sea. This memory of the past is a deep one here, and the sum of it is still being added to. Fine new glass by that innovative artist Nicola Kantorowicz was added on the south side in 2007 in memory of the Kessingland driftermen.
The great treasure of Kessingland church is one of the best of the fonts made in the 15th Century to the traditional East Anglian design. Its great battered heavy bowl seems to melt like a ripe cheese, and the carvings depict seated figures, mostly women. Among them, the Blessed Virgin and St Ursula are identifiable. Around the stem is a sequence of bishops and saints. The glass in the east window is a fairly good scheme by Kempe & Co, presumably Caroe's commission, depicting the Crucifixion flanked by the Blessed Virgin and St John, with the Suffolk Saints St Edmund and St Felix looking on. The other glass is a sentimental rendition of the three Marys at the empty tomb by the Maile workshop.
A curiosity on the north wall of the nave is that there are two separate memorials to Robert Provo Norris. He was killed in the first South African wars of the 1850s at Waterloof, Kaffraria, today a suburb of Pretoria. One of the memorials was erected as a mark of esteem by his brother officers. The other was set here by his family, and notes that he died of a wound... received whilst gallantly leading his company into action against the Kaffirs, during the war then going on at the Cape of Good Hope. The late Peter Stephens, with whom I visited this church on one occasion, had spent some of his school days in South Africa, and noted quite how offensive the term Kaffir would have been considered there even in the 19th Century. Below them are two simple brass memorials to women of the Herring family, an appropriate local name. Benjamin Britten's opera Albert Herring got its name from a Suffolk grocer's shop that Britten passed regularly between Aldeburgh and Ipswich. One of the plaques remembers Millicent Herring, at rest Xmas Eve 1907.
I don't usually mention banners in churches, but some notable ones survive here, including two for the Girls Friendly Society. This was a movement begun in 1875 by Mrs Mary Townsend, and it was designed to befriend and support unmarried girls coming out of the countryside to work in service in the towns. One of the banners here has the letters TMF, short for Townsend Members Fellowship. The TMF was what the GFS girls moved on to when they were older. The Girls Friendly Society still exists as an organisation working with young women in some Anglican parishes, today known as as GFS Platform. What a lovely thing that they have survived. Simon Jenkins once said that Anglican parish churches were the greatest folk museum in the world, and to see these banners still in place certainly feels like a touchstone to the past of Kessingland parish, like so much here. To enter this building is to enter the story of an English coastal parish.
Simon Knott, April 2022
It was so wonderful having my parents visit in such a troubling time, its been so long since I have seen them.
There seems to be a time vortex that only exists in the mornings. This vortex makes any simple task take ten times longer than usual. All painfully leaving children running after their school bus and parents in such a hurry they drive off with their coffee mug still on the roof of the car. Mornings don’t have to be like this! Take back your mornings by helping get your kids ready for school on time with these simple, yet effective, parenting tips.
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Some images from my parents' time living in Singapore from 1962 to 1966.
The country and locations they knew have since changed largely beyond recognition (as evidenced by my own visit in 2012) so these photos make an interesting contrast and record of a bygone period.