FEN MEMORIES

The diarist Samuel Pepys described the Fens as a 'heathen place,' and Daniel Defoe noted there was a lot of water and, more often than not, fogs. Other members of the literary fraternity have also made use of the atmospheric potential, including Edward Storey and Graham Swift. Even Dorothy L Sayers allowed Lord Peter Wimsey to linger hereabouts and become sucked into a 1934 saga of churches, bellringing, and fenland murder and mayhem.
Of course, there is a lot less water about now, thanks to modern drainage, but a general feeling of loneliness and wateriness is still inescapable. It drips off every map, lives on in place-names (Lakesend, Walsoken, Outwell, Ten Mile Bank, Welney, Sluice Common, Salters Lode, Fen End, The Smeeth, Well Creek, etc) and has even spawned an ancient technical language: leam, sluice, lode, cut, roddon, channel, level, dyke, eau, hyde, drain and drove.
It seems to me there are at least three sorts of fen: the salty creeks of the Wash basin, the brown tones of marshland, and the black peat fens, further inland. We lived in marshland, and by and large, and other than home and home town, I disliked it, hated its raw-toothed scruffiness, its straight-line fields and drains and messy farms. On the other hand, there were moments when the great openness of the all-embracing sky and low horizons plucked a nerve or an emotion. It always was a question of balance, and now that nostalgia has taken over from immediacy I can think again of those vast, threatening spaces with rather more affection.
In a sense this balance, and indeed the fens and marshes themselves, seem directly related to the region's perennial flood/tide conundrum. If these fertile lands are to be used for agriculture and not left vulnerable to waterlogging, then they have to be drained. And if they are drained, then they will gradually sink and begin to erode.  
The situation remains the same today. Inches can measure the difference between fertility and flooding, and always there is the brooding knowledge that if rainfall and river levels, high tides and high winds ever do combine - as they have, and doubtless will again - then only banks and sluices stand between safety and inundation.
So the fens (and marshland) exist in a world of their own - albeit greatly changed from Vermuyden's day - where the centuries have bred hard-working, resolute, independent people who know the real price and value of things, and created a no-nonsense landscape of huge fields, waterways, long roads, grassy banks and lonely farms which can, and sometimes do, hint at some future disaster.
As some of the most fertile land in the country it is also some of the most heavily cropped. When I began work in Spalding in 1951 I remember being told that a family, working hard enough to develop frost-knotted hands, could earn a living from a greenhouse and ten to 15 acres of land. Not a good living, but a living. Since then, changing times and agri-business have made inroads into the economics of smallholders, but the fertility - save the occasional fen blow - remains. Wheat, potatoes, vegetables, celery, apples and sugar beet. The spirit of the old 'fen tigers' remains intact.
As a youthful cyclist I recall these fieldscapes and vistas which, at the time, suggested nothingness. Huge skies, tall church spires, and winds that came out of nowhere to buffet and jostle and cajole. And mud. Oceans of it. And solitary trees, and no cover when the rain came. Hated it then, as I have said. Look upon it a little more kindly now.
But I would never go back. Not to live there, anyway. And yet by some means, and after all these years away, it still feels as though I have a little mud left on my boots.