Fenland Diarist

During the 1960's, Sybil had started to collect her mother's and father's memories of growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens. 1967 saw the publication of this collection.

Fenland Chronicle, the recollections of William Henry and Kate Mary Edwards is acknowledged as a fine account of this isolated community and 'one of the most readable accounts of a particular geographical area ever written' (The Independent).

Riddled with Fen words and sayings, folk lore and customs, the stories as remembered by her father and mother, are an important social archive. They illustrate how intertwined were the lives of this close knit community who occupied about five hundred acres of land known as Lotting Fen.

The children, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts in the Edwards 'clan' were a formidable people from a long line of Fen Tigers who supported each other and overcame all manner of difficulties in their lives and work to survive in this flat landscape criss-crossed with dykes and ditches and drains.

Documenting life on the Fens continued when, in the 1980's, Sybil started writing memories of her own childhood in the days prior to the First World War. Published with a nod to the style of Walter De La Mare, it is not an autobiography or a memoir but a recollection of people, places and stories in fictionalised form ending when Sybil was 5 years old.

'.....in the days before modern transport connected us to the outside world, before telephones or radio, before the advent of mains water or electricity, when there was no lighting but an oil lamp in the main living room, and only candles besides, and no light to see by outside in the darkness but a flickering storm-lantern lit by a candle. When the only water available, even to drink, was the brown peat stained water from the dykes.......'

Into this yesterworld, we hear of.......

• Plough-witching antics on the second Monday of January.

• Old Oamy the beautifully spoken tramp with a secret box.

• Ice Skating on the frozen fen.

• Aunt Harriet's Lodger who turned out to be a spy.

• Rain, more rain, flooded fields and community who survived.

• Nature and wildlife on the edge of Holme Fen nature reserve.

• A Zeppelin overhead and a near miss bombing.

• Encounters with Old Oamy and the secret of his box.