Another Country Diary #31
With thoughts on flat places.
18/6
On UEA campus, the thatchers are at work. The Enterprise Centre building is having parts of its thatched walls repaired or replaced. I’m not sure how difficult or different it is to thatch on the vertical, whether there is a difference in the spars they use, or whether they need to adopt a distinct style, but before my meeting I watched the thatchers sorting their bundles of bright reeds.
Long dusks and hot nights. The bats wheel and jink in silhouette against the dark blue corners of sky visible through the large windows of the kitchen. When I go out to shut up the hens I find them arrayed on the meshed roof of the run. I don’t blame them for refusing to enter the close confines of the hen house on such a night. They’ve been doing this for the last few nights, and each night I dutifully scoop them into my arms and deposit them back in the locked safety of their wooden home. For the last two days we have found one of the Araucana hens outside in the morning. A Houdini hen who had somehow escaped without disturbing the bolted doors. Tonight the mystery is solved. This hen had been roosting elsewhere, not on the mesh roof but inside an old hutch with a collapsed roof that is awaiting disposal.
20/6
For the last two days I’ve attended a symposium called ‘Writing the Fens’ that has been organised by my wonderful colleagues, Rebecca Pinner and James Wood. I’m not able to attend everything, and miss the keynote by Noreen Masud, but I manage to attend most of the papers. I’m struck by the way the Fens, but more generally the flat and empty places of the east Anglian landscape, the sandy brecks, the wide open beaches, the miles of saltmarsh, the remaining fen land, comprise a strange and mesmerising landscape. These are landscapes prone to sudden transformation, from land to water and back again. There is an instability to them, and strangeness of scale that is brought on by the flatness of the horizon. The wet landscapes, the fens and marshes, the wet sands of estuaries, play with sky and light in ways that can mislead the eye. Distances morph and objects shape shift. The stand of trees on the horizon turn out to be a stand of osiers, no taller than a man. Agricultural machinery sheds seem to float on the vast seas of the fields like container ships. Walking in such a landscape can lead to mistakes over distances. What seems like a walkable village, in line of sight, becomes a trek of hours.
Last year, towards the end of winter, we ended up driving across the Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Fens, roughly from Ely area over towards Elvedon. I can’t be sure of the exact route. It was dark and the satnav guided us that way to avoid a blockage on the A11. What seemed like a shortcut took on epic proportions. The long straight roads were elevated next to deep drainage ditches. It was tempting to put your foot down, but the roads were also bouncy and unpredictable, patched and potholed, liable to shrug a car off the road. Our route took us through a series of villages with watery names. Upwell. Isleham. Fordham. Despite the straight lines I had the sense that we were being led astray, further and further into a hinterland. The route kept changing and updating on the satnav, as if the software was also thrown off by this place, unable to find a stable lock. Car lights miles distant, seemed much closer as they cut across the empty landscape. The lights of an airbase, or a service station, glowing like a beacon in the edge of the vast wet emptiness. The villages we passed through seemed time-slipped. Cottages in which tv’s flickered 1970s news, where radios crackled the home service, where candlelight moved between hung game birds. Old dimly lit pubs. All times bleeding and layering into one. At one point we passed a vast wooden construction, a crook-barn-like construction, an evangelical church of some kind, looming through the night like an ark awaiting the return of the sea. We felt a sense of strange release when the satnav eventually spat us back out onto the A-11.
My little anecdote above, with its slightly uncanny or eerie elements, probably unconsciously draws on a literary imaginary, a set of cultural constructs about the Fens—a landscape where the strange and monstrous might lurk in wait for the unwary stranger. But I would also argue that the landscape itself does possess qualities that affect the outsider in particular ways, confusing and disorientating with its open expanses, its large skies, its strange horizons, and its watery portals. When pilots used only to flying according to visual flight rules encounter conditions such as heavy haze, fog, nightfall, or unusual terrain, they can become deprived of the natural, visual references they usually use to orientate themselves and to know whether they are climbing or banking or diving and so on. It is almost as if this kind of spatial disorientation occurs, at least momentarily, when outsiders enter landscapes such as the fens, where many of the expected visual references are stripped away.
The eerie landscapes of East Anglia have figured in my own writing, particularly in short stories. My story, ‘In the Marshes’ (2015)1, tells of a widower with two young daughters who has retreated to the rural landscape of his childhood. Waiting for him there is the memory of the disappearance of a childhood friend who it is assumed drowned himself in the marshes. Strange things begin to happen. The eldest daughter is befriended by jackdaws who bring her gifts, small objects, which she collects. The dead seem to be communicating through the landscape and the wildlife, resurfacing. I didn’t have a particular landscape in mind when I wrote the story. It was in part a fusion of my Dorset childhood home with the commons and watery places found in the East of England. My story ‘Dazzle’ (2018)2 is set on the East coast, and is more consciously based on Brancaster beach. I was drawn to this place, which is often empty of humans in the winter, and is bounded by saltmarshes and inlets. When the tide is low the sandflats stretch out into a far distance, shining like bright mirrors. Dry sand blows in waves over the wet, forming tiny dunes, an out of scale Sahara. When the tide comes in, it rushes. People can be caught out. In ‘Dazzle’, a birdwatcher who is having an affair away from the quiet tragedy of his marriage, dazzled by light and water and sky, is drawn into a visual illusion, or a kind of time loop, in which he drowns attempting to rescue the image of himself drowning. In both stories the landscape is a very active agent in the way it shapes the psychological responses and actions of the characters. There is something about East Anglia’s landscapes that has got under my skin and shaped my writing as it has many others.
I suppose that might be discussed in relation to psychogeography. There can be little doubt that the landscapes of East Anglia have evoked a set of literary responses that are marked by hauntings and eerie evocations. The poet and lecturer, Andrew McDonnell, discussed this in the final panel of the session, pointing to a number of writers, such as MR James, Jon McGregor, and Daisy Johnson who locate uncanny fictions in these landscapes. James has been a particular influence on my own writing. His story, ‘A Warning to the Curious’, makes use of the wide open fieldscapes and coastal edges of East Anglia (in this case a thinly disguised Aldeburgh), as its protagonist, Paxton, is surveilled by a supernatural figure, a figure in the landscape who is always glimpsed, seen in ‘with the tail of my eye’. It is a story that is also aware of the long history of the region, with the haunting triggered by the disturbance of a long buried crown of a Saxon king. Jon McGregor, in his story ‘In Winter, The Sky’3, uses the village Upwell (aforementioned) to consider how the past might well up from such a watery, interstitial landscape. It is a story in which the dead won’t stay buried, and in which the trauma of the past must be confronted. It is also a story that acknowledges the increased likelihood of inundation in a changing climate, the apocalyptic trope of the flood bringing a moment of revelation. It is a story in which the vast skies of the fens bear witness and pass judgement. Both stories seem to capture the sense that there is more than meets the eye to these landscapes, that there are things kept out of sight, pushed from view. The pastoral becomes a site of disturbing tension and unease.
It can, of course, be the political that is haunting the tail of the eye, and a number of the panellists at the symposium pointed to the region’s history of enclosure, land drainage, and migration, as well its early-medieval reputation as a site of impenetrable safety and retreat, as expressed in the tale of Ely’s folkloric hero, Herward the Wake, or in the stories of local saints, such as Æthelthryth, the Abbess of Ely, or Guthlac, the hermit saint of Crowland. The draining of the Fens was an, now increasingly forgotten, environmental disaster that changed the habitats and biodiversity of the region. This is also a landscape now highly vulnerable to changing sea levels and extreme weather events, making it, along with the rest of the soft low lying coastal regions of East Anglia, an increasingly charged setting for writers seeking to explore environmental themes.
After the symposium I sit in the café at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts and write this entry. Through the huge glass windows I have a view of closely cut grass that drops away as if from a ha-ha wall (though in reality the turf covers the roof of the lower floor and instead of a wall there is a bank of windows, part of the Avenger’s HQ of course)4. Beyond the drop, a view of the woods that surround the broad and the River Yare. The sky above. A troop of primary school children in pink Hi-Viz tabards are following the sculpture trail, sharing clipboards, and walking in line behind their teacher.
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About ‘This Party’s Over’
On ‘This Party’s Over’ I publish my creative non-fiction, personal essays, place writing, and a country diary. My ‘Another Country Diary’ pieces are my most regular posts (about three a month).
The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial, oddball in its specificity.
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Another Country Diary #30
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In his collection This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.
I am so pleased to have discovered this through India's Knight's post. You draw the landscape so well.
I recently finished reading The Great Level, by Stella Tilyard, about the drainage of the Fens. I thought she described the disorientation the fens can create well - and imagined them as they were prior to drainage with what felt to me some accuracy. Your thoughts here also made me realize that almost all my short stories that have a supernatural element to them are set in Norfolk or Cambridgeshire, something I hadn't consciously done; they just seemed to belong there.