Hubbard Flatlands

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-896-2
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

'Beautifully-written, and highly evocative of the remote Lincolnshire landscape, the Second World War and the two people whose loneliness brings them together for a life-changing time' Amanda Craig 'Compelling and beautifully intimate. A classic piece of storytelling' Toby Litt 'A haunting and lyrical novel' Maggie Brookes, author of The Prisoner's Wife In the depths of wartime, a friendship takes wing Freda is a twelve-year-old evacuee from the East End, sent to live with a farming family deep in the lonely landscape of the Fens. Philip is an artist and a conscientious objector, living in a remote lighthouse on the shores of the Wash. The two outcasts come together amid the wild beauty of the wetlands, beneath skies filled with migrating birds and crisscrossed by Nazi bombers. As the world is consumed by war, they form a friendship that will change the course of both their lives.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. She has published three acclaimed novels and numerous collections of poetry, and was commissioned to create London's largest public art poem at Waterloo. Flatlands was loosely inspired by Paul Gallico's classsic wartime novella The Snow Goose.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hubbard, Sue

Leseproben

I was twelve when i was sent to that cold place. I could never have dreamt that anywhere so lonely existed. In my mind’s eye it was always cold, though I arrived in September. A hot day, the sort of day for a picnic not a war. From the stuffy train we could see gangs of women in the fields dressed in old sun bonnets and aprons, weeding rows of potatoes and stacking bundles of hay. Land Girls in khaki drill. And above, the tiny dot of a skylark hovering, soaring up-up-and-up until it finally disappeared into the high wide blue. But still, what stays with me are the winter flurries of sleet over the tidal estuaries. The whalebone-coloured skies and frozen tidal creeks. The eerie honking of wintering geese as they lifted their strong-muscled necks and angel wings in the mist above the reed beds and frosted fields. Hands and toes chapped raw with chilblains. No, after Bethnal Green with its crabbed back-to-backs, its soot-blackened tenements, bustling markets and noisy pubs, I could never have dreamt that such a place existed.

Very few people lived there. A clutch of tenant farmers and poachers. Local oyster catchers plying their ancient trade. It was known as Black Fen. Black for the peaty soil and melancholy of the place. For its dark, hidden histories. A flat, flat land extending as far as the eye could see, with nothing to help a stranger distinguish one stretch of sugar beet from another monotonous field of swede or celery. With few hedges and even fewer trees, the bitter wind swept in from the Wash gathering up topsoil, depositing it in cottages, blocking dykes and ditches. Chilling the bones. The Fen blows they called it. Murky as London smog, it filled lungs, clogged eyelashes and turned mucus black.

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of that place. I knew only that it was far from home. Far from my beloved nan and the small world I’d grown to know during my twelve years living above that cramped hardware shop in the East End. Once, when wool was in demand, the Fens had been one of the richest areas in England. In medieval times exports from the Lincolnshire town of Boston were booming and the town paid more tax than any other except London, but by the time I was sent there, the area was down-at-heel, neglected and forgotten. Ancient villages and flint churches sat lonely as widows among the sad, flat fields of potatoes and sugar beet. When the local landowners first drained the marsh, the fen dwellers were bitterly opposed. Worried the drainage systems would destroy their fisheries, stop them catching the eels that teemed in their thousands in the waterways. Concerned that the reclaimed land would be given to the men who’d carried out the work, not back to those who rightfully owned it. Dykes were breached. Ditches filled, the peat shrank and water levels rose, so gradually the canals became higher than the land. Windmills were built to scoop up the water.

Now the dykes are several feet above ground.

With few roads it became a refuge for the lawless and the feral. Even the Romans thought the place ungovernable. Found themselves outwitted by the cunning Fen folk who strode across the marshes on tall wooden stilts. A skill they failed to master.

The Great Marsh. A place between somewhere and nowhere. Created by the gradual build-up of mud from the rivers that flow into the Wash. Neither land nor water, constantly flooded by salt tides. One of the last wildernesses in England. Grass and reeds, half-submerged meadowlands, mudflats and saltings appear stitched to the huge skies and wide expanse of open sea. And everywhere there are birds. At first, I couldn’t tell them apart. But slowly you taught me their names. Teal and wigeon. Redshanks and curlews. Terns and gulls. Greylag and brent geese. The black-tailed godwits and dunlin that swirled in their hundreds of thousands between their high-tide roosts and food-rich mudflats.

When I arrived, a shingle and shell embankment, covered in yellow horned poppies, formed a bulwark against the ever-encroaching sea. It’s still there but breached by many tides. The shape of the land has changed over the years. Bits have fallen away, become silted over. Where pink-foot and little tern used to fish, cows now graze. And, at low tide, the deserted lighthouse appears like a lost thought. Once a beacon shining out across the North Sea, warning ships from Jutland or coal vessels making their way down south from Newcastle of dangerous tidal currents and sandbanks, its rafters, now, are inhabited by bats and nesting owls. Its lantern dark.

I don’t live in that lonely place now. A lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges. Now I’m old. My life mostly behind me. I don’t expect anything else much to happen. I live each day as best I can. Try to be positive, despite the sciatica. Inside, I’m the same person I’ve always been. That’s the thing. The heart remains unchanged. It’s just the body that ages. But the longing remains. The longing for those moments all those years ago in that place where sea and sky met. Now the old woman others see bears no relation to the young girl I once was and still, inside, often feel myself to be. Mostly I’m invisible. Voices change when people speak to me. I call it their ‘wallpaper voice’. Flat and even, it papers over the cracks. No one really wants to know how I am, even if they bother to ask. Wrinkles have a way of making you disappear one line at a time. I’m just the lady in the green cardigan and sensible shoes. But life has its blessings if you choose to count them. And I have my story to tell. Each of us does. All of us are simply trying to make sense of a world we don’t quite understand. Dipping our toes into that black box of memories to answer those nagging questions: the whats, the hows and whys.

But I’m lucky. I have my health—apart from the pain in my leg—and mostly my mind. Though what happened seventy-five years ago is easier to recall than where I left my glasses. When it’s fine I go to Victoria Park, where I used to play all those years ago as a child, and sit on the bench. Watch the toddlers eating ice creams, the young boys doing tricks on their skateboards, the swans on the lake floating past in flotillas. Swans are the romantics of the bird world. They mate for life. I’ve always liked birds. There’s a robin that comes to the ledge outside my bedroom window. I save him my breakfast crusts. Robins are very territorial. He thinks he owns the place.

I like to watch the spray from the fountains make rainbows on the artificial lake. Sometimes I take my battered copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury with me in my handbag and sit there with a cup of tea. The book’s very worn now. The spine coming apart. I like Keats and Edward Thomas. I’m not so keen on more modern stuff. I enjoy rereading the poems I learnt as a girl, and know many of them by heart. As a child, Victoria Park was the only green space I knew. I’d never been to the country, except on a coach trip with Mum to Southend where I sat on a miniature clockwork train that ran round and round the edge of the municipal garden with its flower clock planted with golden marigolds, where fat-bottomed ladies in white skirts played bowls. I remember I had a strawberry cornet that dripped all down my blue cotton dress, and a donkey ride. By the time I got home, my bare shoulders were so red and raw that Mum had to smother them in pink calamine. Though that was the seaside, not the country. But still.

In summer, while Mum was minding the shop, Iris and I’d go to the park. Tuck our dresses in our knickers and paddle in the ponds, daring each other to go up to our knees without getting our clothes wet. We knew we’d cop it if we did. Sundays we’d hang around the men on their soapboxes. We hadn’t a clue what they were on about as they waved their arms, spat and barked about socialism and fascism. But we thought they were funny. There was a man in a torn mac with a sandwich board that said, ‘The End Is Nigh’. Another who claimed he was a prophet inspired by the Holy Ghost. But they locked him up in the loony bin.

During the war, the park was closed to the public. Used as an ack-ack site to target the Luftwaffe’s bombers looping back north after an attack on the docks, and a holding camp for foreign internees was set up just beyond the tennis courts. Even Signor Giuseppe, who ran the ice cream parlour in Bethnal Green Road, where he made his own ice cream with real lemons, got put in there before being sent to the Isle of Man. Another corner was used to launch barrage balloons, and another turned into an allotment. The railings were melted down for guns, and an air-raid shelter was built near St Mark’s Gate. But Mum would never go there.

You won’t catch me doing my business in a bucket in front of the neighbours. I’ll take me chances with the Hun, thanks very much, and keep me knickers to meself.

I was born into a family of shopkeepers. My grandfather’s name, D.W. Cooper, was written over the door in gold letters. The D.W. for Donald Walter. Though towards the end of his life everyone just called him Duck. I still have an old photograph of him with his big moustache,...