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When she had flitted away once more I rose and crossed to the semi-circular bay window. Outside was the beach, somewhere between the darkness and the light, and nothing was moving, neither in the air nor on the land nor on the water. Even the white waves rolling in to the sands seemed to me to be motionless.

    The following morning, when I left the Albion Hotel with my rucksack over my shoulder, Lowestoft had reawoken to life, under a cloudless sky. Passing the harbour, where dozens of decommissioned and unemployed trawlers rode at their moorings, I headed south through streets that were now congested with traffic and filled with blue petrol fumes. Once, right by Lowestoft Central station, which had not been refurbished since it was built in the nineteenth century, a black hearse decked out with wreaths slid past me amidst the other vehicles. In it sat two earnest-faced undertaker’s men, the driver and a co-driver, and behind them, in the loading area, as it were, someone who had but recently departed this life was lying in his coffin, in his Sunday best, his head on a little pillow, his eyelids closed, hands clasped, and the tips of his shoes pointing up. As I gazed after the hearse I thought of that working lad from Tuttlingen, two hundred years ago, who joined the cortège of a seemingly well-known merchant in Amsterdam and then listened with reverenceand emotion to the graveside oration although he knew not a word of Dutch. If before then he had marvelled with envy at the tulips and starflowers behind the windows, and at the crates, bales and chests of tea, sugar, spices and rice that arrived in the docks from the faraway East Indies, from now on, when occasionally he wondered why he had acquired so little on his way through the world, he had only to think of the Amsterdam merchant he had escorted on his last journey, of his big house, his splendid ship, and his narrow grave. With this story in my head I made my way out of a town on which the marks of an insidious decay were everywhere apparent, a town which in its heyday had been not only one of the foremost fishing ports in the United Kingdom but also a seaside resort lauded even abroad as “most salubrious”. At that time, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of hotels were built on the south bank of the River Waveney, under the direction of Morton Peto. They met all the requirements of London society circles, and, as well as the hotels, pump rooms and pavilions were built, churches and chapels for every denomination, a lending library, a billiard hall, a tea house that resembled a temple, and a tramway with a magnificent terminus. A broad esplanade, avenues, bowling greens, botanical gardens, and sea- and freshwater baths were established, as were associations for the promotion and beautification of Lowestoft. In no time at all, notes a contemporary account, Lowestoft had risen to pride of place in the public esteem, and now possessed every facility requisite for a bathing resort of repute. Anyone who considered the elegance and perfection of the buildings recently constructed along the south beach, the article continued, would doubtless recognize that everything, from theoverall plan to the very last detail, had been informed and shaped by the principles of rationality in the most advantageous way. The crowning glory of the enterprise, which was in every respect exemplary, was the new pier, which stretched four hundred yards out into the North Sea and was considered the most beautiful anywhere along the eastern coast of England. The promenade deck was made of African mahogany planking, and the white pier buildings, which were illuminated after nightfall by gas flares, included a reading and music room with tall mirrors around the walls. Every year at the end of September, as my friend Frederick Farrar told me a few months before he died, a charity ball was held there under the patronage of a member of the royal family to mark the close