Shifting baselines #2 - Edna's Fen

You want to know what the fen was. Well. Sit you down, then, my bor, for it is not a short telling, and my old legs will not stand at it.

You come in off that road out there thinking you have seen the fen, and I will not be unkind to you, but you have seen no such thing. You have seen a table. Flat and black and drilled straight as a hymn book, beet one field and potatoes the next and the celery under its fleece, and a great sky sat on top of it all like a lid on a pan. And it is a wonder, in its way. There is no richer dirt in all of England than this that you drove over to get to me. They will tell you that, and it is true, and I will not have it said that I stood in my own doorway and called it worthless, because it feeds half the country, this black land, and my own father got his bread off it and I got mine. But it is not the fen. It is what they made where the fen used to be. There is a difference, and I am about the last one round here who can still tell you what the difference is, so you had best listen while I can still get it out.

My grandmother had it off her grandmother, who was a little maid when they let the water out of the mere. You will not know the mere. Whittlesey Mere, that was, the great water, biggest lake in all the low country, wide as the eye and shining, with sails on it of a Sunday and skaters on it come the hard winters and more wildfowl over it than you could put a number to. They drained it dry the best part of two hundred year ago now, when the old Queen was young, and where it lay is beet and wheat like all the rest. My grandmother's grandmother stood and watched the water go and watched the fish die in the mud of it in their thousands, gasping, and the great copper butterflies going up off the docks in a cloud, and no one there thought to keep a single one, for who keeps a thing there is so much of. They are gone now, the great coppers, clean gone out of England and never come again, and that is where they went, out of these fens, the last of them, into the drying mud of the mere. She never forgot it, the old woman. She would tell it and cry, my grandmother said, an old, old woman crying for a lake nobody else could so much as mind was ever there. And I used to think, when I was a girl, what a soft old thing, to cry over water. And now I am the old woman, and I understand her right down to the ground, and there is nobody for me to tell it to but you.

Mind, you want to understand what manner of people we were, afore the pumps. Slodgers, they called us. Fen slodgers. It were not a kind word in the mouths of the upland folk, but we took it and we kept it, for it were ours. We lived off the wet. My people were eelers and fowlers, not farmers, not then. There is a reason the great town down there is called Ely, and it is not a pretty reason, it is eel island, the island in the eel-marsh, for the eels were that thick a man could near enough walk on them of a back-end night. We caught them in grigs, the long traps, and we ate them and we sold them and we paid our very rent to the church in eels, barrels of them, hundreds of thousands of them in a year off this one fen. You will not catch a bucketful now. They are down, oh, more than nine in every ten of them gone in my own lifetime, the eel, and no one can rightly say the whole of why, and that is a grief I keep quiet, for who round here weeps for an eel. But I mind them thick in the dykes. I mind it.

And the fowl. Lord above, the fowl. My grandfather kept a decoy, a curl of secret water with the pipes coming off it, and he would take the wigeon and the teal and the mallard off it by the sackful in the back end when they come down out of the north to the washes. When the washes flooded of a winter, the whole low world went under, all silver and moving, and the sky itself seemed to come down and settle on it, whistling. Punt gun, some of them used, a great long gun laid flat in a little boat, and one shot of a frosty dawn would take you fowl enough to carry to Cambridge market. It sounds a slaughter to you, I daresay, and maybe it were, but there were that much of it, that much life, it seemed there could be no end to it, no more than you would think you could empty the sea with a ladle. Well. We found the end of it. Or our grandsons did.

The bird I miss the most you will never in your life have heard, and that is the whole sorrow of it in one. The butterbump. That is our word for him, the bittern, though we had a dozen words, bog-bull and mire-drum and butterbump, all of them trying to get at that sound. For he had a voice, my bor, and I do not mean he sang. He boomed. A great slow foghorn note come off the reedbed of a spring dusk, three mile it would carry over the flat, boom, and then the pause, and then boom again, till the hair stood up on your arm. My mother said it were the very voice of the fen talking in its sleep. We ate him too, I'll not lie, for he carried his own fat and basted himself in the roasting and the old cooks prized him for it, and that is half of what did for him, and the draining did the rest, for he must have his reeds and we took his reeds. By the time I were a grown woman there were near none left in the whole of Britain. Eleven. I heard a man off the wireless say it, that there were but eleven of them left that could boom, in all the country, the one year, and I sat down at my own table and I wept, for I thought, that is it then, that is the fen's own voice gone dumb, and I have outlived it.

Now here is a thing I will give you, for I promised you I'd tell it straight and not just moan. The bird come back. He did. They dug the reeds back in, down Lakenheath and Ouse Fen and the like, out of old carrot fields and gravel pits, clever young folk with their heads screwed on, and the butterbump come booming back out of eleven till there's near three hundred of them now, more than in my grandfather's day even. So it can be done. That is worth the saying. A thing can go down to eleven and be fetched back, if there's the will and the wet ground for it. I have lived to hear the boom again, an old woman stood out on the wash at dusk with my heart going, and I will tell you I cried at that and all, but it were a different sort of crying.

But the land itself, my bor. The land. That is the one I cannot see the mending of. You did not feel it under your feet coming in, but you were walking on a thing that is leaving. This black earth is peat, and peat is nothing in the world but the fen that could not rot, ten thousand year of reed and sedge laid down in the wet and kept, because the water kept the air off it. And the minute we pumped the water away, the air got at it, and it began to burn away, slow, cold, invisible, like a candle you cannot see the flame of. It sinks. Every year a little lower. And when the wind gets up in a dry spring it lifts the very dirt off the fields and carries it away in a black cloud, the fen blow we call it, the land itself going off downwind in the air, into the dykes, into your teeth, gone. I have seen the day turn dark with it. I have seen a man lose the seed and the soil both in one afternoon to a wind.

If you want it proved, and I am past the age of arguing, you go over to Holme and you look at the iron post. They drove it down into the fen back before that old Queen died, drove it right down till the top were level with the ground you stood on, moored to the clay below. And now you go and stand at the foot of it and look up, and the top of that post is the best part of thirteen foot above your head. Four yards near enough, of a man's own height stacked four times over, that the ground has fallen away and left the post standing in the air. That is not the sea rose. That is the land gone down. That is four yards of fen that got up and blew away and rotted off into nothing in the time between my grandmother's girlhood and now. The lowest ground in all Great Britain, they say it is now, down there below the level of the sea, and only the banks and the pumps keeping the water out, day and night, for ever, or till the day we cannot any longer, and the whole low country wants to be sea again, as once it was.

So that is my grief, if you want it plain, and it is a queerer one than most. It is not only that the birds went and the fish went and the great shining mere went. It is that the ground is going. The very floor of the world is walking out from under my feet, four yards down and still sinking, and one day, not in your time nor your children's but one day, there will be no black gold left to grow the beet in, for it will all have gone off on the wind, and the water we have fought two hundred year will come back and take its own. And I cannot even be certain we were wrong to drain it, that is the devil of it, for the food it grew fed millions and kept the poor of this land alive. I will not stand here and pretend the bog should have stayed a bog and we all starved genteel in the reeds. But we spent a thing we cannot make again. Peat is not a crop. You do not sow it back. Ten thousand year to lay it down and two hundred to burn it off, and no more coming.

And nobody minds. That is the thing that gets under my ribs of a night. A young lad drives that beet lorry down the drove and he is a good lad, and to him this flat black shining farmland is the fen, is the whole of it, is how it has always been and how it is meant to be. He never heard the butterbump but the eleven year they nearly lost him. He never saw the washes white with wigeon nor a great copper go up off a dock nor a decoy worked of a frosty dawn. He cannot grieve what he never had. It looks to him like the plain and settled world. And I cannot give him my eyes. That is the cruellest turn of it. I can give him the words, butterbump and slodger and grig and the mere, but the words are like the iron post, they stand up in the air pointing at how far down the thing has gone, and he looks at them and he cannot see the water they are standing in.

So I will tell you what I told that lad, and then you can go, for I am tired. I told him, leave a wet corner. Wherever you get the say over a bit of ground, you leave it wet. Let the reed stand in the dyke. Let the far field flood of a winter and do not curse it. Dig out an old clay pit and let it fill and do nothing to it but watch. For the butterbump come back out of eleven on nothing more than wet ground and reed and folk minded to leave it be, and if a bird can come back out of eleven then a body has no right to sit and say it is all lost and done. It is not all lost. But it will be, every scrap of it, if the last few of us who can still mind the water hold our tongues and take it down into the black earth with us. So I do not hold my tongue. I sit in my door and I tell it to whoever the wind blows in. And now I have told it to you, and you must carry your bit of it on, my bor, for I shall not be here to tell the next one.

Go on with you now. Mind the dyke in the dark.