Psychogeography

Sizewell Again

Sizewell again. This patch of Suffolk coastline, psychically irradiated by the untold ergs of electricity generated by the two nuclear power stations, exerts a strange hold on me. I far prefer it to the environs of Southwold, further up the coast, which have become overwritten by scribes as various as P.D. James and W.G. Sebald. I lived inland of here for a couple of years in the mid-1990s but was forced to evacuate when the wife of the one local acquaintance I’d made invited me to ‘drop by’ her gift shop when I was next in Saxmundham. I was on the phone to the self-drive van hire company that very evening.

The two power stations — ‘A’, a humungous, four-square chunk of 1960s concrete, complete with outsize transom windows; ‘B’, a 1980s plinth of dark, yet iridescent blue steel, topped off by a vast golf ball of a dome — squat in back of the dunes, willing you to impose your own imaginative vision on them. I think the Supreme Ruler of the Entire Known Universe will probably take a lease on ‘B’ some time in the future, furnishing it with 100-metre-long smoked glass coffee tables and square hectares of quarry tiling. ‘A’ will become a charmingly recherché guest annexe.

The interzone between the fortified plutonium piles and the sea has been landscaped since I was last here, dinky hillocks skilfully mounded by British Nuclear Fuels, then planted with reed, furze and alien-flesh samphire. But off shore the two iron platforms which mark the intake and outflow of the power stations’ cooling system remain, streaked with rust and guano, capped by wheeling gulls. This plot of water is a few degrees warmer than the surrounding North Sea, so it attracts fish, fowl and fishermen, links in a strange food chain. The fishermen come mostly from the Midlands. Having headed in large numbers due east across country, as if summoned by some collective, phylogenetic impulse, they erect their little nylon huts on the beach. Here they sit until dawn, dabbling their lines in the Roentgen briny, sucking on filter tips and cans of Stella Artois, a peculiar temporary settlement of moody anchorites.

The beach has a visitor car park and a prefab tea shop dubbed, appropriately enough, Sizewell ‘T’; while drawn up on the shingle is the fag end of a centuries-old inshore fishing fleet, clinker-built and tar-caulked; but neither industry nor leisure can truly impose itself on Sizewell, where the collision between crumbling coastline and a human artefact with a guaranteed lethal half-life of tens of thousands of years induces a sense of exhilarating queasiness: deep time interpenetrating every grain of sand.

The small boys demanded an isolated camping spot, so their mother and I hauled our mishmash of equipment out along the beach, to where the BNFL land marches with the Minsmere Nature Reserve. Here, in a thicket of dwarf oaks, we erected our two-person tent. The campsite was soon invaded by many tens of hover flies, attracted by the gaudy flysheet. These curiously attractive insects looked like smallish bees redesigned by a contemporary jeweller: their flattened, angular abdomens had jagged markings, their compound eyes a grey sheen. Later, when we hit the beach, we found a positive wrack of them, lying dead above the tide line.

Darkness fell and the obligatory sausages were eaten, then it was back to the beach for a bonfire. The Matriarch pulled this off in fine style, arranging driftwood against a half-buried concrete dragon’s tooth with an artistry that would’ve caused Richard Long to tear his own heart out with envy and throw it, still beating, to the ground. The oily spars burnt green and purple, the slack waves rattled the shingle; we were snug in a little sitting room carved out of the soft night.

The following afternoon, heading back to the Great Wen, I turned the car off the road on to a track. I wanted to see a house that I remembered from ten years before. A perfectly nice dyad of farm labourers’ cottages, remarkable only in that they are tucked up in a dell within a hundred metres of the fizzing, popping hank of power lines that loop from the power stations to the first of the pylons, then march, seriatim, across the flat lands in the direction of Ipswich.

A decade before the house was untenanted, and it was difficult to imagine who would want to reside in this potential cancer risk; but now there was a young, well-spoken man, tinkering with an immaculate vintage motorcycle in the garage. We chatted a bit, and he laughingly acknowledged the preposterous character of the dwelling. Our six-year-old, sensing a toehold, chimed up from the back seat: ‘Excuse me, when we come back here again, can we visit your house properly?’ Sizewell, again.