he was by the challenging remarks of a student called Price, ceased to teach history and started to offer you, instead, these fantastic-but-true, these believe-it-or-not-but-it-happened Tales of the Fens.
Children, women are equipped with a miniature model of reality: an empty but fillable vessel. A vessel in which much can be made to happen, and to issue in consequence. In which dramas can be brewed, things can be hatched out of nothing. And it was Tom Crick, history-teacher-to-be, who, during the middle years of the Second World War, not knowing what repercussions, what reactions, and not without rivals (though none of them was God), was responsible for filling the then avid and receptive vessel of Mary Metcalf, later Mrs Crick.
But on the afternoon of July the twenty-sixth, 1943, he was about to know what repercussions.
7
About Holes and Things
F OR at four o’clock on that same afternoon, after I had assisted in retrieving the body of Freddie Parr from the River Leem but before I had plucked from the same river a certain brown bottle, I was riding on an ancient bicycle along the narrow, pot-holed but otherwise dead-flat road which runs between the Fenland villages of Hockwell and Wansham, to meet, at an appointed time and place, the fore-mentioned MaryMetcalf. I had taken the main Gildsey to Apton road, which runs eastwards, close by the lock-keeper’s cottage at the Atkinson Lock, following the south bank of the Leem. But I had not turned left – which would have been my quickest, and my usual route – on to the road which crosses the Leem by Hockwell bridge and heads northwards to Wansham and Downham Market, but continued along the Apton road a further quarter of a mile, wheeled my bike across the footbridge which spanned both the river and a line of the Great Eastern Railway, and thence, by a circuitous route, involving travelling along three unnecessary sides of a rectangle, regained the road to Wansham. I had not crossed the Leem by the Hockwell bridge because on the other side of the bridge, only a little distance from it, yet hidden by the raised banks of the river, a line of trees and a bend the road makes on the northern side, was a level-crossing. And the keeper of this level-crossing was Jack Parr, Freddie Parr’s father.
All of which meant that, what with the troubled events of the day, I was late for my rendezvous.
But Mary was not late. She sat in the hollow of sheltered ground formed by an angle in the banks of the man-made waterway known as the Hockwell Lode. To her left was a line of sunken, vivid grass, dotted with clumps of rushes and marsh weed, marking a silted-up drain, and to her front and right (masking her from me as I strode with my bike along the top of the embankment) a group of those trees so characteristic of temperate flatlands – poplars. Perched on an outwork on the landward side of the Lode bank, which formed the termination of the defunct drain, were the remains of a windmill. That is to say, the tarred, cracked wooden shell of the mill’s lower portion, no more than six feet in height, devoid of its internal workings, open to the sky, but preserving still, minus its door, the tiny access-way through which the mill-man had once ducked to enter. And leaning against the derelict mill, on top of the mill emplacement, besidethe weed-choked brick culvert and rusted cog-wheels which once conveyed water from the old drain up to the Lode, sat Mary, in a red-check skirt, knees drawn up to her chin and clasped in her arms, waiting for me to appear.
The silting up of the old drain – when abandoned in favour of a new pumping station to the north – had left the adjacent land wet and spongy, fit only for summer pasture. So Mary shared her vigil with a score or more of munching cows, which cropped the lush grass and released their splatterings of dung between her and the poplar spinney. The cows belonged to Farmer Metcalf, whose chief business was beets and potatoes; but who, not
Children, women are equipped with a miniature model of reality: an empty but fillable vessel. A vessel in which much can be made to happen, and to issue in consequence. In which dramas can be brewed, things can be hatched out of nothing. And it was Tom Crick, history-teacher-to-be, who, during the middle years of the Second World War, not knowing what repercussions, what reactions, and not without rivals (though none of them was God), was responsible for filling the then avid and receptive vessel of Mary Metcalf, later Mrs Crick.
But on the afternoon of July the twenty-sixth, 1943, he was about to know what repercussions.
7
About Holes and Things
F OR at four o’clock on that same afternoon, after I had assisted in retrieving the body of Freddie Parr from the River Leem but before I had plucked from the same river a certain brown bottle, I was riding on an ancient bicycle along the narrow, pot-holed but otherwise dead-flat road which runs between the Fenland villages of Hockwell and Wansham, to meet, at an appointed time and place, the fore-mentioned MaryMetcalf. I had taken the main Gildsey to Apton road, which runs eastwards, close by the lock-keeper’s cottage at the Atkinson Lock, following the south bank of the Leem. But I had not turned left – which would have been my quickest, and my usual route – on to the road which crosses the Leem by Hockwell bridge and heads northwards to Wansham and Downham Market, but continued along the Apton road a further quarter of a mile, wheeled my bike across the footbridge which spanned both the river and a line of the Great Eastern Railway, and thence, by a circuitous route, involving travelling along three unnecessary sides of a rectangle, regained the road to Wansham. I had not crossed the Leem by the Hockwell bridge because on the other side of the bridge, only a little distance from it, yet hidden by the raised banks of the river, a line of trees and a bend the road makes on the northern side, was a level-crossing. And the keeper of this level-crossing was Jack Parr, Freddie Parr’s father.
All of which meant that, what with the troubled events of the day, I was late for my rendezvous.
But Mary was not late. She sat in the hollow of sheltered ground formed by an angle in the banks of the man-made waterway known as the Hockwell Lode. To her left was a line of sunken, vivid grass, dotted with clumps of rushes and marsh weed, marking a silted-up drain, and to her front and right (masking her from me as I strode with my bike along the top of the embankment) a group of those trees so characteristic of temperate flatlands – poplars. Perched on an outwork on the landward side of the Lode bank, which formed the termination of the defunct drain, were the remains of a windmill. That is to say, the tarred, cracked wooden shell of the mill’s lower portion, no more than six feet in height, devoid of its internal workings, open to the sky, but preserving still, minus its door, the tiny access-way through which the mill-man had once ducked to enter. And leaning against the derelict mill, on top of the mill emplacement, besidethe weed-choked brick culvert and rusted cog-wheels which once conveyed water from the old drain up to the Lode, sat Mary, in a red-check skirt, knees drawn up to her chin and clasped in her arms, waiting for me to appear.
The silting up of the old drain – when abandoned in favour of a new pumping station to the north – had left the adjacent land wet and spongy, fit only for summer pasture. So Mary shared her vigil with a score or more of munching cows, which cropped the lush grass and released their splatterings of dung between her and the poplar spinney. The cows belonged to Farmer Metcalf, whose chief business was beets and potatoes; but who, not
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