TONIGHT - a powerful and evocative short story about growing up in the Fens. This was written by Alex Mitchell, and is reproduced here with his permission.
BACK TO THE FENS (part 1)
I liked living out in the Fen, near Christchurch, well
enough whilst I was still a kid – not that I had anything to compare it with –
but I became bored with it in my teens, about that age when you start to find
girls more interesting than tractors. The worst thing about being down our
drove-road was the difficulty you had meeting other people your own age, what
with the distances and there being no late bus service from Wisbech or March.
There wasn’t much choice of mates, girlfriends or future partners, not if you
didn’t want to end up as Joe and Doris Normal. We all kick against what we are,
where we came from, what we are headed for. Some kids’ parents had moved to the
Fens to protect them from the evil influences of the big city. The upshot was
that we became absolute suckers for every evil influence we could get our hands
on, probably more so than city kids themselves.
There didn’t seem to be a great deal to look forward to; no
proper jobs, not for we lads, anyway; no real prospect of getting a place of
your own unless you settled for being trailer-trash, stuck in a freezing cold
caravan in some farmer’s cowfield. The Fen villages were just fading away. The
smaller ones always had a kind of half-hearted or make-do appearance, like
temporary staging posts in some dead-loss location in the Wild West of America.
But now you could draw up a check-list and watch one thing disappear after
another; High St. shops, family businesses from way back, the train service
into town, the railway station itself, the late bus, then all the buses, the
secondary school, the primary school, the cottage hospital, the doctor’s
surgery, the public library, the banks, the police station, the vicar, then the
church itself, the Post Office and then, the last thing of all to go, the pubs.
We all knew of local lads, older brothers, whatever, who had
moved to the city, Peterborough or further away, to find a job and a place of
their own. They had a hard time finding work as a country boy with no local
contacts, nobody to pull strings or put in a word for them. You had to live in
a bedsit or whatever for years before they’d even put you on the waiting list
for a council place, and even then, the best you could hope for was a flat on
the worst crime & drugs-infested high-density estate on the outer edge of
the city. So there we all were, stuck, with no way out, or round, or through.
Whether you moved or stayed, there wasn’t much to get enthusiastic about.
In mid-life, most of us have learned to settle for things;
to make some kind of accomodation with life; we are less inclined to waste time
and energy kicking against the pricks. We look for compensations, accentuate
the positive, or try to. Visitors to this region tend to see the Fen during the
oppressive heat and drought of the East Anglian summer, when the landscape is
flat, boring and monotonous. In winter, the same territory, between and around
the Old and New Bedford rivers, serves as a flood-plain and becomes hauntingly,
if austerely, beautiful and mysterious. The view southwards from the bridge at
Welney, just along the road from here, is of the dead-straight, man-made river
stretching out far ahead to its eventual conjunction with the blurred,
misty-watery horizon between land and sky and the great red-gold ball of the
setting sun. Immense curtains of mist glide vertically off the rivers and come
rolling in from the water-meadows and fields.
At these times, the rivers, the
fields and the great dome of sky, mist and cloud merge and coalesce, the one
into the other; at first pink streaked with gold, then gold streaked with
silver, then silver fading into misty mauve, blue, grey, brown and, finally,
ink-black, all of it mirrored throughout in the great flat infinity of
slow-moving, near-static water, such that the fields and riverbanks seem to be
floating in suspension between water and sky in a shifting, evanescent mass of
refracted sunlight, mist, colour, cloud, river and sea. Areas of higher land
and clumps of trees are seen in the distance only as sinister black islands. As
day fades to night, a solitary individual - perhaps myself - stands on the
bridge, poised between water, mist and sky; no longer a creature of terra
firma, more a throwback to those pre-historic times when our earliest
ancestors, the first and most inquisitive of the amphibious fish-things,
flopped and slithered its way out of the water, through the mud and up on to
the land.
What is it that draws us back to the water, again and again?
Why do we feel such a sense of peace and tranquility here, and nowhere else
but here? Is this where the ancestral fish-thing in each of us feels most at
home? Or are there still fishy things deep in there now, calling us home?
The Fen villages stand on what used to be islands of higher
ground, surrounded until quite recently by marsh and fen. They were isolated
communities, cut off from the outside world by the surrounding marshland and
water. In the past, the Fens were a place of refuge for fugitives, outlaws and
persecuted religious groups. The Fen people were nicknamed “yellow-bellies” on
the basis of their aquatic way of life and because their ancestors were
supposed to have interbred with the water-dwelling local wildlife of frogs,
newts and toads. More to the point, the isolated character of the Fen villages,
and the difficulty of travel
ling from one village to another, meant that the
Fen communities were prone to in-breeding. This problem was eventually
diminished by the draining of the Fens for purposes of agriculture and, as in
other rural areas, by the advent of the bicycle, which allowed eager young lads
access to girls in more distant communities and to distribute their genetic
inheritance more widely in the process; but people still say that babies in the
remoter villages are born with webbed feet.
We young lads all lived for the weekends. Come Friday night,
the lads from the village and round about would get beered up at the Seven
Stars, then piled into their Ford saloons and Morris vans and set off for the
dance-halls in March or Wisbech, or perhaps Downham or Ely; wherever they had a
late licence. Most nights, you knew who would be there. There might be one
really lovely girl you and all the other lads dreamed about getting off with,
and there would be the others, honest, plain-faced country girls built for
endurance rather than style, broad of beam and sharp of tongue; too much like
your best pal’s mother to be taken seriously as girlfriend material.
