St Peter’s Theberton & St Peter’s Holton.

St Peter’s Theberton.
In one corner of the churchyard there is a single gravestone, sunk low and inclined towards the sloping ground. Below bare overhanging branches and a darker tangle of trees. In the cold light, over the tumbled fences, I can see white cottages and a rotary clothes dryer in one of the stepped gardens. In spring, this side of the churchyard is covered in bluebells. Inside the church there are exquisite pew end angels in supplication, and a magnificent stone carved Norman doorway. St Peter’s Theberton stands near a minor road from Yoxford to Leiston. This is now the principal route for construction traffic for a new power station at Sizewell. It is restricted to 30 miles per hour.

St Peter’s Holton.
Holton St Peter’s church stands on a low rise which climbs to a wide plain stretching north towards Spexhall, with a paint factory and a food processing plant in Sparrowhawk Road. From the churchyard you can see down the deep cut of a road on one side, and the UPVC window frames of a housing estate on the other. Garden fences and flourishes of poppies in the summer. The church stands slightly above a haunting Victorian vicarage. A modern version is almost hidden by trees looking like it was built in the 1970s. Between the church and the road there is a wide meadow. The church is on one side and a primary school on the other. I think there are still fetes or sales of work held there. I remember buying a ragged boxset of Bach Partitas one Saturday morning fair. A dirt track bends round the field in front of the church and provides a car park for worshipers.

I can remember the brick and corrugated iron building of an airfield hospital beyond the woods to the East. Now there is barely a trace. A collapsed concrete road passes at a distance and leads to an air raid shelter covered in brambles and girded with trees. As the road bends sharply in Sotherton, across a field, I watched a deserted barn slowly collapsing during the years I drove to Great Yarmouth. Just past the corner house and the people we have lost contact with.
There are freshly dug graves in the churchyard. Dark earth and bright tight bunches of memorial flowers. Perhaps they are for children. I can see a basketball net and a bedroom window. A Union Jack, limp on this summer evening. The round church tower is meticulously repaired with flint in light mortar. Inside the church, I remember there used to be embroidered banners commemorating the Mothers Union. I thought of those banners during a parents’ meeting with the Police in Wenhaston church hall. We still find it difficult to talk about the choir leader who took his own life off the Orwell Bridge.