GEDNEY DROVE END

There always was an edge-of-the-world emptiness about the place. Even the siren call of the wind and the great spaces of sky seemed to be trying to lure you into the unknown. Some of the local names had a Dickensian spookiness about them, too: Black Barn, Crabs' Hole, Boat Mere, Leamlands, and Bleak House. And in the days immediately after the War, when our gang of bikers was happy to lean into the pedals for the full and breezy ten miles (to get there and back) there was the added macabre attraction of the then deserted Ship Inn, which sat by a sea bank frowning and somehow menacing. In those days, then, Gedney Drove End was a place-name to be spoken about only with a lowered voice, in case parents heard where we had been, and worried about it.
Present day residents of GDE, who could well love the place, might find this description grossly unfair, and it may be that it is. Indeed, and not having been there for thirty years, for all I know the village has become a trendy retreat for a monied elite. But I doubt it. GDE was more about farms and grittiness, and about fields, cropped and harvested within sight and sound of the sea and the pounding waves of the Wash; the calls of gulls, and acres of creeks and saltmarshes and linear grassy banks.
This was the main attraction for us. The military had gone, and the signal and control towers, skeletons by this time, had been stripped of equipment and left. Derelict concrete pillboxes, now empty and stinking, sulked away the hours on the sea banks, their observation slots still watching the saltmarshes for an enemy which would never come. So we pushed our bikes along this particular sea bank, leaned them against a pillbox, and drank our bottles of lemonade. Then, emboldened, we took off our shoes and slopped into the nearest jigsaw of creeks and fished around looking for bullets and souvenirs.
There were plenty of them. During their hurried departure at the end of the War the military didn't bother to take a lot of the stuff away. Instead, they dumped it, in the creeks. Valves, bits of wireless equipment, cables and bullets. Rifle bullets, and sometimes short belts or clips of automatic weapon bullets. We would fish them out, wash them in seawater puddles, and the bravest of the brave would then put a few of them in their saddlebags. They made good swaps, I seem to recall.
Otherwise, GDE was all breezy wholesomeness, full of the smell of the sea. The creeks and saltmarshes stretched towards the Wash, the wind blew in from faraway places, and the menace of the racing tides was kept at arm's length because we kept close to the banks. Sometimes, though, we collected samphire or sea shells, or went as far as to explore larger bits of debris the military had left behind. And we loved it.
Later, of course, RAF Holbeach bombing range - just a mile or two north-east of GDE - came into its own, and jets screamed overhead. And still do, for that matter. Then construction workers moved in to build a circular offshore trial bank (to test sea defence methods, some said; to check the viability of an offshore nuclear power station, claimed others). The trial bank is still there - from the air it looks just like a handbasin plug, thus earning for itself the affectionate moniker The Plughole - and I hope Gedney Drove End is still there, too.
We need edgy places like this, places where sea and sky meet in breezy confusion.