Everyman's England by Victor Canning Page B

be somewhere a cottage like mine where hospitality is not a forgotten word, but a real, vital thing which breaks down all barriers and keeps alive a spirit which is all kindness and humanity.
    Someday I am going back to that cottage to drink tea again – if I can find it in the maze of grey villages with their short-spired churches and the spread of fields and valleys.

CHAPTER 8
FENLAND TOWN
    From Charles Kingsley I know all about Hereward the Wake and the Fens. Is there anyone who does not? Is there anybody who has read that saga of the last stand of the Saxons against the invading Normans, who has not felt in his heart a thrill of pride and a feeling of gratitude towards that corner of the land where dauntless men and women resisted the invaders, resisted and finally triumphed?
    William the Conqueror made an honourable peace with the last Saxons; but it was not the Saxons who had worn down his sallies and disheartened his armies – it was the fens, those grim, treacherous, sedgy wastes, which had conquered.
    And today the fens themselves have been conquered and enslaved. If you go to the district expecting to see acres of marshes tufted with spikes of reed, cut into deep waterways where monstrous pike lie in the shadows and squadrons of wildfowl nest – you will be disappointed.
    Except for a few patches the real fens have disappeared. Beet, corn, potatoes and peas have ousted the reeds and water-flowers, and the meres and swamps have been schooled into drains and dykes where the fish and wildfowl, their numbers diminished by time, still linger.
    The lonely figure that bends to the dark earth, taking his living from the fields, had ancestors who moved about the wild fens with their long jumping poles, living on the duck and fish; and the fat-bellied monk who stood beside the Ouse at Ely watching the grain-boats being poled towards the landing stages, has given way to an aesthetic-looking cleric who steps from his train on to the railway platform at Ely, holding a heavy, illustrated edition of Ecclesiastes under his arm.
    March means to you a month which comes in like a lion and generally does its best to go out like one, despite the old adage. March used to mean that to me until I went to the fens and discovered another; the town of March.
    It lies in the heart of the fen country, not far from the tip of the Wash, and it was to March that I went on a day in early spring, when that season was trying to emulate the royal colours of summer, handicapped by a less plentiful palette and an unaccustomed hand. The sky was a pale, washed blue, with a fluffy fringe of clouds circling the horizon in a faint, untidy halo.
    I walked along a road bordered by a deep drain, as the fen people prosaically name the rivers and dykes that cut the country into angular islands. Why a waterway, which is as good as a river in this district, should be called ‘Sixteen Foot Drain’ or ‘Twenty Foot Drain’ instead of having a name which is no more than a mathematical index to its size, is a mystery which has a solution in the minds of those able, but obviously unromantic persons who first reclaimed the fen country into arable land. To see the words ‘Main Drain’ running alongside a tempting stream of blue on a map is enough to make any walker unused to the names of the district, draw quite wrong conclusions and give it a miss.
    The drain that ran by the road was confined within banks as steep as a railway cutting, and brown with the dead litter of hogweeds. It flowed with a steady, purposeful motion towards the far meeting of sky and fields. The countryside might have been formed by some geometric titan. All straightness and sharp angles, an endless vista of flatness, broken now and again by a few elms or poplars, it is an area which forces you into an awareness of the sky, for there is little to hold the eye to the earth.
    To walk along the flat fen roads is agony, since you can see your destination an hour