East Anglia Looks Startling in Pink

Whether I was in Clare or its neighbor, Stoke-by-Clare, when I first saw the raging pink houses, I am not sure. But the color won’t fade from memory: more livid than salmon, it was; more embarrassing than a blush. I thought of the pink of bubble gum, and then the pink of my grandmother’s corset.

In these sweet Suffolk villages, that pink seemed as startling as late-night party makeup at the breakfast table. It cropped up in hushed neighborhoods of random purple doors and yellow gates.

That’s the way it is in East Anglia, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of place to the north and east of London. The gaudy paint may be an antidote for the flatness of the land; for the endless marshes, fens, broads and other watery words that link this bulge of England to the Netherlands, just across the North Sea.

Like the Netherlands, East Anglia has dikes and windmills, mills that pump to keep the low land dry, and mills that grind grains. In tiny Bardwell and again at Saxtead Green, I stood in the shadows of these white-bladed warriors as they slashed through the air and moaned at the long, setting sun.

East Anglia, a kingdom from the Saxon days, includes the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of Cambridgeshire. The region has gone its stubborn, self-reliant way since the Industrial Revolution passed it by. No big factories. No urban sprawl. Nothing to mar the old-fashioned villages with their wide town greens and soaring medieval churches and air of secrecy.

Hundreds of timber-framed farmhouses survive from the 16th Century. Sandringham, the most rural and private of Queen Elizabeth’s estates, is hidden in parkland near King’s Lynn. The rounded northeast coast is an arc of sand dunes, shaped by a steady wind.

In the Middle Ages, East Anglia was a major contender, the rich and powerful center of the wool industry. The weaving village of Lindsey gave its name to the soft fabric called lindsey-woolsey. Its winsome neighbor, Kersey, is known in the trade for turning out a sturdy cloth for menswear. Worstead is a Norfolk village.

At the wool museum in the wondrous, half-timbered Guildhall at Lavenham, a town made picture-perfect by the undergrounding of overhead wires, I read a tax list from 1523: London was the wealthiest town in England then; East Anglia’s Norwich was second, little Lavenham was 14th.

That wealth is the reason for the multitude of ancient churches that tower 100 feet and more above even the most humble of East Anglian villages. They are the landmarks in this mountain-less land, the prime features on the horizon.

Many of these Norman monuments have bumpy exteriors of inset gray flintstones, the only native rock. Others have slick walls that shine like black baroque pearls.

From Norwich, one sun-splashed morning, I drove the back lanes to Wymondham (pronounced Windam) and parked in the shade of a willow tree near the thatch of the Green Dragon pub. The town was quiet at midday, as if holding its breath. Then I heard a ripple of bells, the waterfall sound of change-ringing that is endemic to this part of England.

The music poured from the Abbey of Wymondham, a bold mishmash of architecture that reflects an unsettled history: pocked flint below, herringbone above, a 12th-Century nave, an octagonal tower--all encircled by gravestones and ancient monastic ruins.

A woman in the bookstore allowed herself to brag about the gold altarpiece, the oak hammerbeam ceiling--with its 70 carved angels--and, of course, the bells. “Our tenor bell is especially fine,” she said, cocking an ear. “They are practicing for two weddings later today.”

But I did not wait. Curiosity about East Anglia drove me on to Swaffham, where I parked behind another ancient church. At the entrance was the cloud of a nuptial party: white veils, white flowers, white gloves and little girls in poofs of organza.

It was Saturday. The town was in the throes of a lively market and auction: hares and T-shirts, confections and cheeses, herbs and parsnips, antiques and bygones--which are somewhat less old. The town sign showed a picture of a peddler in a green jacket.

“That’s the Pedlar of Swaffham,” a tea shop proprietor said as she poured steamy Lapsang Souchong. “The legend is that he went to London--some say to do himself in--and he met a stranger on the London Bridge. The stranger told him to go home and dig in his garden and he’d find a treasure. And he did, you know, and he thought it was a miracle and that’s why we have such a fine church.”

Superstitions are nursed in East Anglia; legends grow. This is the lonely land that inspired Ronald Blythe’s stark portrait “Akenfield,” and was the haunting setting for P.D. James’ murderous “Devices and Desires.”

Not many travelers venture beyond Cambridge, at the western edge of East Anglia, or beyond the cloud-stacked country south of Ipswich, where the landscape artist John Constable lived and painted. Fast roads are few.