Dick crouches by the lean-to. As well as silt, Dick smells of oil. He holds up some bit of engine to inspect. Dick has big powerful hands. But I cannot see his eyes.
And Dad walks. And in walking, as he passes the cottage, he steps perceptibly to one side, round the spot on the concrete where …
To and fro; up and down. His figure, on the river-bank, looms darker against the fading sky and takes on for me some of that pitiful charisma Dick too can exert. He must imagine I’m up in my room, nose buried in my books. For if he knew I wasn’t, his head would be turning and his neck craning in even greater fretfulness. He’d be searching along the river. For he’s one of those who believe that sorrows seldom come singly, and he’s already witnessed, this morning, one father and his drowned boy.
To and fro. Perhaps he’s thinking, on this day when there’s so much else to think on, of the old conundrum of his two sons. How one pores over books, one over motor-bikes; how one is a moron, and one has brains, will be a clever man. He doesn’t guess how the brainy one is hiding from the brainless one.
Because the brainy one’s scared.
About-turn. Pause. Flex leg. Rub knee.
And then something catches my eye amongst the rushes. Perhaps it has just, that very moment, drifted there, or perhaps it has been there all the while. A bottle. And since it is a habit if you live by a river to fish out the debris it brings down, I reach out, hook one finger into its neck and retrieve it. A bottle. A beer bottle. A bottle of thick dark brown glass, but not a sort of bottle that is seen any more around the Fens – or has been seen for over thirty years. Label-less, undirtied, with a slender neck and an upright, slim rather than squat appearance.
All this I observe before, as darkness gathers, I take the bottle and carry it along the river-bank, to below the sluice, from where it will float down to the Ouse, and
even, perhaps, in time, to the sea. An old-fashioned, but quite unmuddied, beer bottle, with round the base, embossed in the glass, the words: ATKINSON GILDSEY.
6
An Empty Vessel
B
UT there’s another theory of reality, quite different from that which found its way into my fraught after-school meeting with Lewis. Reality’s not strange, not unexpected. Reality doesn’t reside in the sudden hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this and for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History, and its near relative, Histrionics …
And did I not bid you remember that for each protagonist who once stepped on to the stage of so-called historical events, there were thousands, millions, who never entered the theatre – who never knew that the show was running – who got on with the donkey-work of coping with reality?
True, true. But it doesn’t stop there. Because each one of those numberless non-participants was doubtless concerned with raising in the flatness of his own unsung
existence his own personal stage, his own props and scenery – for there are very few of us who can be, for any length of time, merely realistic. So there’s no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for presence, for feature, for purpose, for content.
And there’s no saying what consequences we won’t risk, what reactions to our actions, what repercussions, what brick towers built to be knocked down, what chasings of our own tails, what chaos we won’t assent to in order to assure ourselves that, none the less, things are happening. And there’s no saying what heady potions we won’t concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.
Once upon a time the future Mrs Crick – who was then called Metcalf – as a result of certain events which took place while she was still, like some of you, a schoolgirl, decided to withdraw from the world and devote herself to a life of solitude, atonement and (which was only making a virtue of necessity) celibacy. Not even she has ever said how far God came into this lonely vigil. But three and a half years later she emerged from these self-imposed cloisters to marry a prospective history teacher (an old and once intimate acquaintance), Tom Crick. She put aside her sackcloth and sanctity and revealed in their stead what this now ex-history teacher (who is no longer sure what’s real and what isn’t) would have called then a capacity for realism. For she never spoke again, at least not for many years, of that temporary communing with On High.
But it must have been always there, lurking, latent, ripening like some dormant, forgotten seed. Because in the year 1979, a woman of fifty-two, she suddenly began looking again for Salvation. She began this love-affair, this liaison – much to the perplexity of her husband (from whom she could not keep it a secret) – with God. And it was when this liaison reached a critical – in the usual run of
liaisons not unfamiliar, but in this case quite incredible – pitch, that your astounded and forsaken history teacher, prompted as 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 Mary
Metcalf. 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, beside
the 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 wasting an acre of land, kept also a small herd of Friesians which roamed every summer up and down the margins of the Lode, and sent their milk to a dairy in Apton. Thus it was not only mother’s milk but Farmer Metcalf’s milk which Dick and I drank when we were boys. And it was her father’s milk – but, alas, never her mother’s – that Mary Metcalf grew up on.
For Mary was a farmer’s daughter. Her father owned the fields, thick at that moment with creamy-flowered potatoes, which she could see if she looked to her left, across the narrow ditch dividing pasture from ploughland. And away in front of her, hidden by poplar spinney and twisting banks, lay Harold Metcalf’s brick farm-house and clustered farm buildings, looming abruptly and starkly amidst the flat fields, as is the manner of Fenland farms, and in no way nestling or huddling like the farms of picture-books. A Polt Fen Farm had existed since the days when Thomas Atkinson drained Polt Fen, and the Metcalfs, who built the new farmhouse in 1880, were the second family to own it.
Polt Fen Farm, like many farms of the region, was not large but made up for size with intensity of yield. Harold Metcalf employed three permanent hands and an additional contingent of cursing raw-fingered temporary labourers during the long and malodorous winter beet
harvest. But now, in the summer of 1943, neither permanent nor temporary hands, excluding the lame or one-eyed variety, were available. Instead, into Farmer Metcalf’s farm, as into other neighbourhood farms, fluttered coveys of Land Girls, in boiler-suits and dungarees and tightly fastened head-scarves, their forearms growing muscular and sunburnt, their urban decorum evaporating in the summer heat. Broken-down trucks ferried these creatures from their hostels in Apton and Wansham to the scenes of their labours, to the leers and jeers of the local inhabitants. It was said that the land girls brought to our Fenland byways an atmosphere of subversion and simmering sexuality. But simmering sexuality – as you may well know, children – is always there.
Freddie Parr claimed that he had enjoyed the utmost favours of one of these female migrants – an auburn-haired beauty called Joyce, whose well-formed rump, upturned as she worked in the fields, Freddie spent many hours watching from the banks of the Hockwell Lode. And it was true that after they shed their initial ladylike airs, the land girls would often wave to us local kids, tell us their names and share their field-side lunches with us (though they persistently declined our invitations to bathing parties in the Hockwell Lode). And it was even true that this same auburn-haired Joyce used to wave with smiling condescension at Freddie in particular (for perhaps she was touched by his moony attentions); and only stopped one day when she saw that Freddie (who was barely fourteen at the time) was not only vigorously waving back with one hand but with the other doing something of unmistakable import in the region of his trouser buttons. After which Joyce was seen no more in the fields around Hockwell.
So, doubtless, Freddie Parr was lying.
And now, in any case, Freddie Parr was dead.
And the land girls, anyway, were not for us. At night, healthily exhausted, they were swooped up by roaming
airmen from the bases, whom bad weather kept from their missions. And if the girls gave themselves readily to these heroes of the skies, then it was not for anyone to protest and was even regarded as proper, since these same brave fliers might be dead tomorrow.
But Freddie Parr was dead too.
Farmer Metcalf had no idle fancies about acquiring for the length of the war a temporary harem. A grave, reserved, hard-headed man, he regarded the land girls as replacement labour and made no concessions either to their sex or to the patriotic motives which brought them to his acres. Nor did he look upon them as fit companions for his only daughter. For years, with the earnestness of a good beet- and potato-grower secretly emulating the role of gentleman-farmer, he had discouraged all tendencies on her part to help out either in the fields or in the farm-yard, to become the archetypal farmer’s daughter – dung on her boots and straw in her hair. With a view to her becoming a cultivated and elegant lady, an embodiment of everything above beets and potatoes, he sent her, at his own expense, to the St Gunnhilda Convent School in Gildsey.
For Harold Metcalf was not only a farmer with ambitious notions but also a Roman Catholic. That is to say, he had married a Catholic wife, a fact which might have had no effect on the dour disposition of Harold Metcalf, were it not that Mrs Metcalf had died, in the second year of their marriage, and in remaining faithful to her memory – Harold never remarried and those land girls could not snare him – he conferred the articles of her faith on his daughter. Thus ‘Mary’ became this daughter’s inevitable name, and thus Harold Metcalf would have turned her, if he only could, into a little madonna, who would be transformed, in due course, into a princess. And Mary might have met her father half-way over this arrangement, which, in effect, was that she should be a distilled and purified version of her mother, had she known at all what her mother had been like. For Mary’s
mother had died in giving birth to Mary. And perhaps it was this common factor – the absence of a mother – that (among other things) drew her and Tom Crick together.