COUNTRY LIFE
The Fens
The Fens, now so much in the news, have always had an evil reputation. They make a remote, desolate country, once stricken with its own terrible low sickness, bitterly bleak, with great sombre distances pricked only by spiky pollard willows, windmills and an occasional church spire. It is some of the strangest country in England. From Ely cathedral (stricken itself with crazy crackings from sinkages and said to be built straight on flat earth, without foundations) the land looks, on a winter day, in some way unearthly and abandoned, as though the sea had washed over it and back again. Its villages, except where the hideous local brick is used, are charming, and they get still more charming as you go up the river, out of Cam- bridgeshire into Huntingdonshire, where the cottages are the prettiest coloured in England. Brick and slate give way to plaster and reed-thatch, the plaster colour-washed in all sorts of shades from deep terra-cotta through strawberry and petti- coat-pink and stone and cream to white and even blue. It is very curious that in Holland, in the same kind of country, houses are similarly coloured. This craze for colouring goes on right down into Bedfordshire, where it ends with abruptness on the edge of the stone country. It is one of the most charm- ing things in English rural architecture, a delightful expression of gaiety in a countryside which, almost perpetually water- washed, has no natural brilliance of colouring at all. * * * *
The Hundred Foot Drain The fight against flooding in the Fens is something which has gone on, unceasingly, throughout the history of civilised England. Scores of drains, sixteen foot, twenty foot, forty foot, cut across it, on the map, like crazy slashes of blue pencil, and from Earith to Downham Market runs what still is, to my mind, one of the most remarkable engineering feats ever performed on the English countryside : the great Hundred Foot drain, as straight for thirty miles as though laid by a ruler. Begun by Charles I and finished by Cromwell with his prisoners of war, it is still in advance, both in scale and utility, of anything ever attempted since. It is a colossal achievement, as you realize most fully when you see that it runs, in parts, almost the height of a house above the surrounding countryside. And here, once, it was possible to prove and was proved, by the simple experiment of watching a ship sail down that long straight stretch of water, that the earth was not flat. It was the only place, inland, in the whole of England, where that experiment could have been performed. From the latest reports it is clear that the whole Fen situation is very desperate indeed ; the Hundred Foot Drain is said to have broken its banks at one point, and the affair has become not only a local but a national disaster. It is more than time that the control of the area became national, too. The Ouse Catchment Board, hampered by lack of funds, works nobly ; but the Fens are watered not by one river, but by half a dozen. * * * *
The Upper Ouse
Out of the Fens, higher up, the Ouse runs through sleepy idyllic country, still flattish, never in any way spectacular, but still some of the best country of its kind in England. The river turns and doubles back in its course, with broad slow sweeps between primrose woods, squat-churched villages and water- mills. Never navigated here, except by the pleasure boats of summer afternoons, it nourishes a wonderfully rich flower life. Its water lilies are a great delight. They dam the stream, in midsummer, with great swan-white stretches. They conjure a multitude of similies : they are so simple and perfect, both in colouring and shape, that they defeat and tangle metaphor. Closed, not yet free of water, they come up exactly like creamy- green buds of magnolia, unwrithing themselves from stems that are like a tangle of water-snakes. Half open, more yellow than white, more stamen then petal, they are like white China peonies. Full open, in full sun, they shine from a distance like nothing so much as a vast frying of eggs turned out in the great olive platters of the leaf-pads. It is a simile of shocking banality, but it springs spontaneously to mind, and the spontaneity of siralies is everything. Then, closer, they are like great cups of milk-white glass, the bright concentration of stamens almost luminous, in the sun, with pollen-fire. They look very unreal then, unreal and unattainable, not flowers so much as modellings of flowers. They have a kind of touch-me- not artificiality about them, an unearthly and visionary fragility. * * * *
The Parish Council Though the work of parish councils is something which very rarely gets into any but local papers, the parish meeting is often a piece of rare sport for the countryman. Such- was ours on March 15th, when the old council retired and the new was elected. Sport was promised on the question of preserving open spaces. Some land presented to the parish by a wealthy landowner had, it was felt, been misused. The retiring chair- man received a fairly rough handling and looked relieved, in the end, at being deprived of so tough an office. I complained bitterly and forcibly about the unnecessary cutting down of certain trees ; a paper-worker felt that public money had been ill-spent ; a gardener jumped up and asked Mr. Chairman what did we pay rates for, &c., &c. ? The result was that the paper-worker, the gardener, and myself found ourselves on the new council. For me it was an honour. Unlike many townsmen who bluster and blunder into village life on the assumption that village people have, without exception, turnips on their shoulders, I have always had a great respect for rural intelligence. It is a mistake to force oneself into village life. Countrymen, at heart, despise the townee squire who crashes his way on to parish councils, lets the money fly and in the end cannot or will not keep it up. There is nothing so cold as the scrap heap of village opinion. * * * *
Trespassing A correspondent writes : " Is it not a fact that trespassing is not an offence, that damage must be proved and that one is perfectly within one's rights if one offers the sum of three- pence to the landlord or his representative ? " The answer is, I think, no. This very pretty theory is commonly held, but its chances of working out in practice or of being upheld in a court are, I fancy, very small indeed. First, trespassing itself is an offence—" to enter upon another man's land without lawful authority is in itself a tort actionable without proof of any actual damage." Secondly, although the forcible removal of a trespasser is itself an assault, it may be justified if the force used can be proved to have been reasonable. Thirdly, as the Week-End Book so well advises, it is better, when asked, to go and go gracefully, while the time and the going are good. This is the soundest advice of all, though I never act upon it myself, and those who contemplate an Easter in the country might do worse than bear it in mind. But they would do well to bear something more important in mind : namely, that it is now an offence, in most counties, to uproot and take away the wild flowers and ferns of the district. In certain cases it is even an offence to pick the wild flowers of the district. And though I have never believed that the mere picking of bluebells, for instance, was one of the causes of their extermination, the wholesale uprooting and plucking of wild flowers seems, of all forms of vandalism, perhaps the most stupid. * *
Natives from Seed
This uprooting of wild flowers is never worth the candle.
Bluebells can become, in gardens, as great a nuisance as couch-grass. In soil that suits them they increase with great rapidity, forming masses of bulbils that are a nightmare to eradicate. In any case they may be bought, by those who like them in cultivation, for as little as ten shillings a thousand. The little wild daffodil may be had for the same price. Prim- roses may be raised with absurd ease, and in many colours, from seed. Brooms (uprooted, they never live) are almost as easy, and will grow to ten feet in two years. Anemone pulsatilla, that delicious but now rare native, almost like a silver-haired mauve tulip, is always best when left alone, and it will flower well and easily in one year from seed (sixpence a packet). All the native geraniums, the charming pink G. lancaarieuse included, are easily raised and just as cheap. Shore flowers and marsh flowers are rarely happy in gardens. The striking native yellow horned poppy becomes, in fat soil, away from its native shingle, less like a poppy than some flabby silvery cabbage, and sea-pinks a hiding place for slugs.
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H. E. BATES.
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