The Lotting Fen Child
Sybil Marshall was born on a farm in Lotting Fen before the outbreak of the First World War. Generations of her family had lived and worked on this land and one of her books ‘The Silver New Nothing’ is a collection of autobiographical narratives of her childhood. The stories range from a regular visit of a tramp, skating on the flooded frozen fens, happenings during the disastrous flood of 1912 to the tale of an intriguing stranger posing as a Naturalist who their aunt had for a lodger but turned out to be a World War 1 German spy!
The snapshots below are taken from The Silver New Nothing by Sybil Marshall 'Edwardian Childhood in the Fen '.
'This book is made up of scraps from the past. it is not an autobiography, because it comes to an end when I was five. It cannot be graced with the title of memoirs, because most of the incidents do not concern me. I know about them only because I heard them related over and over again, and lived among the people they concerned.'
As you read these scraps from the past, scan the Lotting Fen Map and try to identify the people, the places and the incidents.
We had a lovely hot summer that year, and the harvest was early. Dad worked for his mother, who was the farmer; but he had a bit of land of his own at the back of our house as well. In his 'spare' time he looked after and ran one of the many mills that pumped water out of the dykes and into the main drains, from the drains into the rivers and from the rivers into the sea. There wasn't much work for him at the mill in the summer, when he was needed most on the land; and when he was needed at the mill, in the bad weather, he could be better spared from the farm. So it worked out alright that way, and he could do both jobs.
Page 90
Uncle John was coming home across the fen from where he'd been working. I don’t know what he'd actually been doing, he had his old turfman's heart shaped hodding spade over his shoulder, with its broad blade glinting bright as silver in the sunshine. Mr. Misseldine (the lodger) was with him and we rushed out to meet them both when they were still four or five hundred yards away from the house. While we were talking, Uncle took his spade down and leaned on it, and Tod as usual began hunting about in the grass for wild flowers. She suddenly sprang back and yelled 'Uncle John!Here's a snake!' We all dashed to see it! And were in time to watch it wriggling away - there was no mistaking the tell-tale V-marks of the adder all down it's back.
Page 72
Our Aunt Harriet and Uncle John lived a good way from us, right in the middle of a huge stretch of fen that had never been drained properly. So, it was a real wilderness of a place, and dangerous as well to anybody as didn't know their way about it. Some time in the past somebody had cut three long, wide canals ( we called them dykes) right across it, and though they were never cleaned out now like other dykes they were still full of water about five feet deep in winter and in summer they dried up to thick, black oozy mud. You couldn’t see 'em for the coarse grass and reeds and things that had grown up round them, and if you once stumbled into one of them in winter the chances were pretty high that the Hookey Man ( who as all fen children know, lives in all the dykes and drains) would get you and pull you down.
Page 52-53
Then came a night when it rained faster than ever, and one of the banks of the main drain got carried away by the water, in spite of all the scradging the gangs of volunteers could do to build it up. Then water simply poured out of the gap in the bank, all over the fens; and when we got up in the morning it was as if we were living on an island in the middle of a swamp. Not all the land was under water, but a lot of it was, and out at the back of our house, a little way away, a field of our neighbour's corn that hadn't been carted stood up to the bands of sheaves in the flood. In front of the house the land rose a little, and it was a bit drier that way. We could get out and on to the the high road, as well as to the only shop, with care.
Page 97
We went two or three times a year to tea with Aunt Harriet, though so far we'd never been allowed to go by ourselves because of the Hooky Man. We loved going over there in the summer though, because the fen was a mass of of wild flowers- forget-me-nots and yellow irises, toadflax and jonquils, cat's tails and feathery rushes; and down in the drain and the cuts we'd look for flowering rush, that we called 'hen and chickens', yellow water-lilies and arrowhead. Then there were a lot of butterflies that you didn't see anywhere else, and at night huge moths that Dad said were very rare, and bred over in the fen because they were undisturbed there. Of course there were all sorts of birds as well, and we always tried to find a last year's nest of a reed warbler, so that we could cut the three reeds it was attached to and take it home to put in the bamboo flower-holder that hung in the corner of our front room.
Page 54
Tod and I had finished our tea, but Dad's second bit of news held us all on our chairs as if we’d been glued there. Biggin Fields was about the only bit of grassy land for miles and miles around us. It lay between us and our nearest shopping town, and now and again Mam sent us there to get her live yeast for bread making. It was five miles each way round by the high road, and she wouldn’t have expected us to go if we hadn't had our bikes; but there was a shortcut through Biggin Fields, and in the summertime we loved to walk to Ramsey that way. Ramsey had been built hundreds of years ago on a bit of land that stuck up high and dry above the fens all around it, and Biggin Fields, though still flat, was on the edge of this high bit...….Now here was dad telling us that Biggin Fields was going to be turned into an aerodrome! We had heard of course about the flying machines we were using in the war against the Germans, and Dad knew somebody who had actually seen one once; but we were soon going to have them flying right over us and settling on land that joined our own grandmother's fields. It simply couldn't be true.
Page 58-59
It went on raining- day after day, night after night.After the weeks of long sunny days we had weeks of long wet ones. The dykes filled, and Dad had to begin going to the mill at nights, pumping. The corn that hadn't been carted when the weather broke still stood in the stocks, wooden with rain, and what corn hadn't been cut at all lay flat on the ground, matted together. On one or two afternoons the August sun broke through the clouds, producing a steamy heat that was the very worst thing for the the farmers, because it meant that the grains of wheat and oats and barley all began to sprout in the ear. Little white shoots grew out from the growing corn, and from the stocks, as if they'd all got suddenly old, and their hair had turned white overnight. Dad spent more and more nights at the mill. as the days went by, the dykes and drains grew full till the water was level with the land and Dad and all the other pumping millers around had to stop with their mills day and night, to keep the water from overflowing the banks and flooding the fen.
Page 96
It was white nearly till the end of February, and then the thaw set in, and where there had been snow, there was now water. The dykes and drains couldn't deal with it fast enough, and then the bank of the river blowed, and the hundreds of acres of fen flooded , especially the low bit between the river and the main drain. It was just a sheet of water stretching away as far as you could see into the distance, with only a reed or two sticking out here and there, as bleak as it could ever be. Ah, it was lovely to live in the old fen when a frost set in after a flood. It's a pleasure nobody knows these days, since the new ways of draining keep the fen from being flooded. Skating on a river or a drain is alright, but it isn't the same as having a square mile of ice you know is nearly solid under your feet. On a river or drain, there would always be a few weak places where somebody had kept breaking the ice to dip water for the house or farm. When the dipping holes got frez over, they made skating dangerous, because if you got in under the thick ice there wasn't much hope for you. Nobody could help you because if they came over towards you the ice round the edges of the hole broke away with their weight. If there didn't happen to be a pole or a clothes prop handy, there wasn't much anyone could do.
Pages 35 and 39
The road shone out in front of us, sparkling as the moon caught the granites. On each side of the road, the wide grass verge sloped downwards to the dykes, and beyond the dykes on each side the fen stretched away, it seemed forever. There were a few houses scattered here and there, with the lamplight shining out of the windows, but none close at hand by the roadside. just ahead of us was a five barred gate standing open and inside the gate, the other side of the sleeper bridge that spanned the dyke, was a hovel where the smallholder kept a few of his implements. The inside of the hovel was in shadow, but we'd been by it enough times in the daylight to know exactly what was in it. Tod quickened the pace, and I knew without her telling me that she'd thought of Aunt Harriet's tale, as well. Then she stopped and clutched my arm, gasping for breath. 'Jed' she said, in a terrible whisper that frightened me of it’s own accord 'There it is!' I looked where she was was looking, and sure enough, from the side of the dyke a white creature was moving. We stopped dead in our tracks and clung to each other, as the animal lifted itself clear of the dyke side and moved silently across the grass.
Page 30
'It's a BOMB!' dad said, and clawing out of his chair, he rushed outside. Tod appeared from nowhere and we all followed Dad on to the doorway, and from there down the path to the gate that led to the fields. The bomb was still burning, throwing it’s awful, flaring glare for miles, it seemed, over the flat land, and up into the sky- and there, moving slowly and sedately across the deep, moonlit blue was the long, dark shape of a Zeppelin. It was so low you felt you could have hit it with a stone. We could see it as plain as if it had been broad daylight. When the postman came walking up the road from Ramsey, he brought more news with him (as he usually did). The Zepp had dropped its load of 'hexplosives' about five miles away, as the crow flies. A train had been travelling down the main line towards London, and the fireman had opened his firebox, ( so 'they' said- although how they found out is is still a mystery) to coal up. The Zepp's crew had seen it, and tried to bomb the line, as they had missed the aerodrome that was their real target. They hadn't hit the line either, their bombs landed in a farmyard and killed five pigs.
Pages 195 and 198