Over Easter, 1958 my family - fresh from three years in Hong Kong - took their first English holiday at the caravan park in Aldeburgh. Every morning I used to walk through the back field to the dairy with a jug to collect our daily milk. The caravan itself was such fun. My brother, sister and I slept in the back with my bed being the dining table with a mattress stored under one of the seats. My parents bed pulled down from a cupboard. There were outside toilets and a washing area but no baths or showers. We sailed on the mere a Thorpeness and swam in the cold sea.
It would be a reasonable comment to make that we would not have noticed Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, E.M. Forster, John Nash, Imogen Holt or even Ronald Blythe had they passed us by in the High Street, at the Church or on the beach. We were rather embarrassingly blissfully ignorant of what was going on in Aldeburgh. We were on holiday.
So reading the beautiful prose of Blythe (this his 19th non-fiction book) about his time here from 19955-58 has been an unremitting joy. You can feel the wind and the sea on almost every pages. I doubt if there has been a better chronicler of things Aldeburgh and Suffolk this past sixty years.
Buy. Read. Be surprised.