Out on the Fen

When I first moved to Cambridge in December 1986, I stayed in a rented room and looked out for a flat or small house for sale in the local newspapers. Just think how archaic that is now! You would do all that searching on the internet nowadays. Anyway, in a weekly free newspaper, I think called the Town Crier, I encountered a regular column entitled View from the Fen, by Michael Jeacock.

Jeacock was from Derbyshire, where his father, Robert Jeacock, had been first a coalminer and then a policeman. He had worked on the Daily Express in Manchester and London and had somehow ended up working as a freelance journalist and living in Swaffham Bulbeck in East Cambridgeshire, around halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket. He took a great interest in his adopted home of Cambridgeshire and with his wife Janet wrote a guidebook to Cambridge. He was a country boy, deeply conservative in his instincts, and Conservative with a capital C when it came to politics.

I don’t think I would have liked Michael Jeacock, I would probably have disagreed with him about almost everything, but I liked his column. It often had the tone of a name-dropping newspaper diary, something like Nigel Dempster’s Daily Mail diary in the 1970’s, but the names dropped were not of the social calibre of Princess Margaret or Jerry Hall, they were local chaps who had recently achieved a coup in a dominoes tournament in The Boot in Dullingham, or told an amusing anecdote in The Black Horse in Swaffham Bulbeck. His column often focussed on aspects of agriculture in the fens, very appropriately in my view. I don’t know if it is still the case, but when I arrived in the East of England in the 1980’s, around 6% of the population here worked in farming or food and drink production, three times the proportion in the country as a whole.

Michael Jeacock died in 2007. There were two reasons why I enjoyed his column in the Town Crier, both related to shared experience and attitude. First, we had a common interest in the ordinary, in aspects of everyday life: the gang down the pub, trips to the dump, or recycling centre as it is now called, a day at the races at Newmarket. Second, for both of us, the East of England was our adopted home and we both developed a great fondness for it, despite being outsiders.

I love this part of the world despite, or maybe partly because of, its eeriness. I have already held forth on the atmosphere around the North Norfolk Coast, but here in landward Cambridgeshire there can be the same ghostly unease. Those flat fields stretching for miles, and that massive sky, can be quite unsettling. If you get the train from Ely to Peterborough in winter when the floodplain of the Ouse Washes is waterlogged, you have this eerie sight of mile after mile of water, the fields all several feet below the surface and the occasional telegraph pole breaking the surface.

And there are some very lonely places. I recall in my househunting days in January 1987, arriving to view a house in Little Ouse, a single row of red-brick houses out on the fen a few miles north of Ely, at around nine o’ clock in the evening. I had had a good hour of driving along pitch-dark, deserted country roads to get there. The hamlet was not large enough to boast streetlights. It was very dark, with a huge black dome of starless sky. I could vaguely make out some dim lights in windows in the row of houses, and there was a red telephone box looking as foreboding as a gibbet at a crossroads a few yards from where I had parked. I had just read Graham Swift’s disturbing novel Waterland, set partly in the fens. I had to screw my courage up considerably just to get out of the car.

A few years ago, I wrote a short story called Tigers in Red Weather. It’s not a supernatural story, so I haven’t found a publishing outlet for it, but it does start with the following vignette, which was very much inspired by my adopted country.

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I was in the passenger seat and Lena was driving, coming home to Cambridge from a weekend away, late one Sunday night in October.

‘Tell me a story,’ she said.

‘Let me see,’ I pondered, ‘Is a ghost story all right?’

‘Yes, but not something horrible.’

Inspired by our current situation, in a car on a dark night, I made this up as I went along.

“I was alone in the car, around eleven o’clock on a moonlit Autumn night. I was driving south from the North Norfolk coast. I occasionally passed a vehicle travelling northbound. Very few people seemed to be going in the same direction as me. No red rear lights ahead. No headlights in my rear view mirror.

But then I did see something in my rear view mirror. In the moonlight there seemed to be a human figure running in the same direction as my car. The road wound and I lost sight of the figure. Travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, that would be the last I saw of him or her.

But I was wrong. On another long straight section of road, there the figure was again, and it seemed a little closer in the mirror. God, he was thin. Of course, it couldn’t be the same person. I drove on, paying little attention to what was behind me. I switched on the radio, but the reception was dreadful, I would catch a few sentences of news, then crackling and rushing would take over.

I was driving through forest, and my headlamp beams glanced off tall trees on either side. The figure in the rear view mirror was closer still, and definitely the same painfully thin person. And now I realised who he was. I drove faster, to try to shake him off. There are people from my past that I do not want to meet again.

I reached the outskirts of a town, with a dual carriageway bypass endowed with orange street lights. The figure in the mirror was no longer visible. I breathed more freely and drove on, at some speed. The bypass ended and I was back on country roads. And there was the emaciated figure in my mirror again, running so fast that he was gaining on the car. And I could see his face. I accelerated recklessly, driving faster than I could ever have imagined doing on this sort of road. After a minute or so, the figure was no longer in the mirror. Thank heaven. Is revenge such a strong motive?

Then I realised why the figure was no longer running along the road behind the car. He was sitting in the passenger seat beside me.”

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Sorry, no jokes this month. If you want to read the full story of Tigers in Red Weather, let me know and I will send it to you. Have a great summer, everyone.