Fen Runners
BY JOHN PULLEN.
TILE fen country is not to everybody's liking. It is indeed something of an acquired taste. For what is called " impressive " scenery, for Nature in her more changeful and capricious moods, you must look elsewhere. Rocky slope, wooded hill-top, leaping cascade—the fens can show you none of these things. Just a wide expanse of flatness, treeless and hedgeless for the most part, but carved into a chess-board pattern by the intersecting lines of dykc and lode and driftway. Here and there, where the ground rises a few feet above the dead level, you will find a sleepy village nestling round an old grey church like an island (as it once was) in the midst of a waste of water. Otherwise the monotony—if that is the right word is unbroken. The dullest bit of country in the world ? Well, go there on some fine summer evening, and see for yourself. There is no painter like the sun ; and nowhere has he an ampler canvas on which to work, or greater scope for the deftest touches of his magic brush, for all the reckless profusion of his Titanic fancy. Watch the light dancing among the rushes, or glinting from the plumage of the water-fowl ; see it sweep onwards over the boundless plain, striking here a flash of emerald, there a touch of saffron or burnished gold, until all colours alike Melt at last into amethyst on the distant horizon, where the grey towers- of Ely rise majestic above the gathering haze.
Thereare seasoas.when you will finch the fens depressing. _ In midwinter, for example, they are not always at their happiest ; and they have an awkward habit, when in dismal mood, of infecting their neighbours with their own low spirits. The town of Cambridge, which stands sentinel over the district and used to sound her nightly curfew for the guidance of belated wanderers in the marshes, is specially liable to the infection. In spring or autumn she is radiant. Red creepers on crumbling grey walls, the first gleam of lilac and laburnum along the river banks : in either livery the old town is in the plenitude of her beauty. But January has a different story to tell. Cold mists, drifting in from the surrounding fiats, envelop the narrow streets in their unwelcome embrace. On the dripping trees, on court and cloister and garden-plot, on Gothic archway or Tudor gable an atmosphere of drab monotony and discomfort settles remorselessly down.
It has been so from time immemorial. The fenlands in the dead season were never more than half alive. There was but one magician that could quicken them into vita- lity, one Fairy Prince alone whose kiss could rouse the Sleeping Beauty out of her midwinter trance. A spell of hard frost changed the whole face of the countryside. Under its bracing influence the sleepy hollows shook off their torpor ; the villager forgot his ague and hibernated no more ; every waterway rang with a cheerful sound as the steel blades of the skaters struck its frozen- surface. " After the snow," wrote Charles Kingsley, " would come the keen frost and- bright sun.-and cloudless-blue-sky, and– the fen-man's yearly holiday, when, work being impossible,
all gave themselves up to play, and swarmed upon the ice on skates and sledges, to run races, township against town- ship, or visit old friends full forty miles away ; and met everywhere faces as bright and ruddy as their own, cheered by the keen wine of that dry, and bracing frost."
" We never get any skating nowadays " : that is a complaint often heard on the lips of the middle-aged. Is our climate really changing, or is it a mere trick of the memory that throws a semi-glacial mirage over the half- forgotten past ? Certain it is that, to those. who recall the Cambridge of forty years ago, memories of skating stand out pre-eminently. It seems in the retrospect that the ice was always with us ; that all roads led to Lingay fen, to the flooded meadows of Swavesey or yet further afield to the bleak levels of Littleport. There were winters—though rare, even in those days—when the Cans was frozen over and the journey from Cambridge to Ely could be made by ice. A most fascinating journey it was. If you were wise, you started early and took your time over it. No matter if more adventurous spirits, bent on covering the distance there and back before nightfall, hurtled past you as your pursued your leisurely course. There was no hurry ; .time, object, destination— these were mere idle abstractions. You could always come home by train ; and anyhow, what did getting there matter ? What did anything in the world matter except gliding silently on for ever—stroke after stroke—through the dreaming loveliness of the frozen fens ? " Five miles from anywhere—no hurry ! " so ran the legend of the old river-side inn where (again if you were wise) you stopped for luncheon. The genius of the place and hour revealed itself in those six simple words.
Forty years ago : one looks back upon it as the golden age of English speed skating. The sport was still deeply rooted in the fen country : it was racy of the soil. The veteran Turkey Smart—" father" of fen skaters—was no longer on the active list ; he had run his first race in the year of the Crimean war and his last some quarter of a century later. He rested on his laurels in his quiet Welney home ; but his stalwart nephews, Fish and Jim, still came to Lingay year after year to carry off the championship against all corners, and to maintain the fen tradition before the admiring eyes of half a county. There were other famous names as well : George and Isaac See—who came from Welney too, like the Smarts—Boon, Aveling, Tebbutt—but quo fessum rapitis, Fabii ? Enough that they were all great in their day and fought many a doughty battle at Lingay and Littleport. It was always an exciting moment at Lingay when the " fen-runners " —so we always termed them—made their appearance upon the ice. It was their habit, in the intervals between the racing heats, to sail superbly round the outer ring, while the rest of us, or such as felt the prick of ambition. pounded breathlessly after them in the desperate attempt to keep a place at their heels. The attempt grew more desperate with each succeeding round, but the lure was irresistible : young or old—schoolboy, yokel or town- bred artisan—all threw themselves into the mad pursuit. Even a grave University professor, who had been prac- tising figures all the morning, would forget his expert scorn for mere speed and join the flying proccision. Somehow, it made one think the better of experts—and of University professors.
You could buy cups of tea at Lingay which bore no resemblance, in point of taste, to cups of tea anywhere else ; also oranges, whose vendors invariably advertised them, in hoarse staccato, as " like wine." Why like wine, nobody ever discovered : they were not in the least like wine, or indeed like anything except sour oranges. But sour or not, they are part of the picture ; so are the cups of tea ; so is the row of willows just across the river, the
railway embankment at the bottom of the field, the line of beer barrels that marked the racing track, the flying figure of the champion as he plunged past the winning post, with his rival only a few strides behind him, between a double line of shouting onlookers. (See the professor again, shouting louder than anybody !) The picture fades away, as the early winter twilight deepens. Well, the happiest of days must come to an end ; let us slip off and have our skates unscrewed before there is a general scramble for the chairs. We have a two-mile tramp back to Cambridge before us ; but there will be blazing fires and cheerful faces at the other end, and at night the feu-runner's dreamless sleep.
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