Some evenings in Southwold are misty. Even in July. Between the Adnams’ offices, a Wesleyan chapel, and the high wall of the brewery. Behind the cannon and benches looking out to sea. In front of a sweetshop which has been there ever since I was a boy.

Past low cottages and low flint walls. Past shops and a green. In the fading light you can see down Cumberland Road to St Edmunds Hall where Henry Blofeld talked about his life in cricket, preceded by Gilbert and Sullivan records played at a deafening blast.

The pier stands ghost-like in the half light, and stars are just visible above the sea. The air is caught tonight. Only the faintest murmur defies it. My walk along a potholed track began with the Sun already low as I looked down Pier Avenue and North Road.

Perhaps there was a petrol station with a wide rough corn coloured concrete forecourt. I can see it now in the evening light as I remember standing in the middle of that quiet road as a child. I could see two boys who lived with an angry father.

The younger had cycled to Ipswich to see his mother in hospital. I imagined the father, hard muscled, a roll neck jumper tucked behind a high thick buckled belt, waiting for the boy on the small bike. North Green and Field Stile Road.

And my own parents, on our summer holiday, knitted cardigans with arms folded, or hands clasped in front of them. I can see the path separating the houses from allotments or a dark shed behind. How I ran it’s length, afraid, on an evening like this one.

Towards the boating lake, darkening towards Easton Bavents, where houses are lost in the soft cliff. Over a hedge, in a carpark, the canopy of a merry-go-round, Martin Loads and Sons. The day is almost lost among the figureheads and in the high dormer windows.

Quiet now. Quieter, even than the regular shush of shingle muffled by the beach huts.

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