Gateway to the East

Grunty Fen has long been a source of mystery. For years it lurked in the dusty lumber-room of memory, unvisited and all but forgotten, its faint miasma lingering slightly, if unpleasantly, until all that was left was the name, only the name. Like Adelstrop, you might think, as immortalized by Edward Thomas; though until recently, all the two places had in common was that once, long ago and for a short time only, each boasted a small, branch-line railway station.

Now, however, Grunty Fen has acquired its own brand-new patina of fame, thanks to the work of another gifted writer. Though arguably not quite in the same class as Edward Thomas, Christopher South is, like him, a countryman and one with a real, all too intimate knowledge of the land of which he writes. My own connection with the fen came about by means of a couple of serendipitous accidents, the kind of thing that the old Fenfolk apparently describe as ‘hadnabinfers’. The best way to explain this useful concept is to illustrate it. If it hadnabinfer the prospect of the mother of all family rows, Grunty Fen would have meant less than nothing to any of us. This is how it happened. One summer’s day, long ago, we were setting off on holiday to Norfolk, as we always do. We love Norfolk, and its glories never pale. We feel about it as did Noël Coward when describing it, appreciatively, as ‘very flat’. On this occasion, the picnic was packed and the car stuffed full of people, general clobber and the dog. We always used to take a picnic on such a trip, and we always had a problem finding the right spot in which to stop and enjoy it. That day, the driver was being unusually difficult about the best place to choose, or – which is nearer the truth ‒ to have chosen, and to have just swept past. A mutinous atmosphere was developing, with hungry people complaining of low blood sugar and intimating that at this rate we’d have reached the perishing sea before he could make up his mind. Exasperated, in rural Cambridgeshire he just pulled the car over and stopped. Wiping condensation from the windows, we saw a sign informing us that we had reached Grunty Fen. As an Adelstrop moment, it was disappointing. It wasn’t actually raining, but it was dank, overcast, very muddy and generally lowering. Instead of willow-herb and meadow-sweet, there were nettles and brambles burgeoning from ditches. And it was silent: there was nothing to suggest that the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire had made any effort to fly towards the east, let alone sing. Clearly, there was no prospect of enjoying a dejeuner sur l’herbe, but we splashed out and, sheltering from a brisk wind straight from the Urals, ate our picnic glumly upright in the lee of the car. The dog made a perfunctory contribution to one of the smaller puddles and we all got back in and drove on. Later, we discovered that we had inadvertently arrived at Grunty Fen during the rainy season, which lasts from June until April. From then on we occasionally looked out for our favourite grim picnic spot, but it was never there: in a wide landscape of unrelieved boggy places, no trace remained of the sign. We began to wonder if the whole thing been a hallucination. Or was it like Brigadoon? Did it materialize for one day only, every hundred years? And yet something kept the memory alive until, tootling as usual up the A10, on came the second great hadnabinfer. If it hadnabinfer the fact that I was the radio reviewer for the Independent on Sunday at the time, we’d have been listening to improving things on the wireless, but that week I had decided to write about local radio, and we had tuned in to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. By this stage we had given up on picnics, because of all the stress; we’d enjoyed a good lunch at a pub and were ready for anything. What we hadn’t expected on the radio was the voice of a man known as Dennis of Grunty Fen. Immediately the memories came squelching and gurgling back. ‘Whey’, he was asking rhetorically, as we tuned in, ‘is the fen sile black?’ He answered himself, and his reply made perfect sense: ‘As you’d realoise, if you’d ever lorst a welly trying to crorss a peddle, it’s because the fen suck.’ Dennis was the true voice of the fen. He lived with his ancient grandmother in a disused railway carriage and rode a bike decorated with three feathers by virtue, he claimed, of being Banjoist to Her Majesty. His cheery banjo songs extolled local joys, like driving traction engines or riding on a tandem with his fioncy, Maudie (he took the back seat, ‘’cause she loik to steer’), or finding treasure in skips, though the treasures of the fen were generally doors, sinks, buckets and anything else you can make of corrugated iron. His Sunday radio chats with the hapless journalist Christopher South were held in his old Riley, which doubled as a chicken-coop. Such popularity did they achieve, during the seventeen years they were broadcast, that vicars were said to have changed the times of their services just to accommodate the audience. Alas, Dennis wasn’t entirely real. He was the enduring creation of the versatile musician and comedian Pete Sayers, who died, too soon, in 2005. The Grunty Fen he celebrated bears only a slight and passing resemblance to the area that once proudly bore its name. Yet such was his impact that tourists would set out in search of Dennis from other, rival cultural hotspots like Cambridge and Ely, only to be wilfully misdirected into ever boggier patches of fen by its few bona-fide residents. In the end, these poor souls grew so tired of hearing colourful stories of shenanigans in the carrot-scrubbing sheds and sparrows in the organ-pipes of St Judas that they decided to remove the sign we’d seen, and to rename the place, respectably, Red Fen. However, Grunty Fen has once more risen from the mire, in the form of two excellent little books by Christopher South. The Authorised Guide to Grunty Fen covers all you need to know about this enchanted spot. There are instructive chapters on everything from Archaeological Epochs to Currency, Offal, Weather Lore and, most usefully, Health Risks, of which the most enduring and pernicious is the virulent green flux. The Fine Arts Society, we are told, flourishes, regularly inviting interesting speakers whose recent subjects have included ‘The Stately Bungalows of East Anglia’, ‘Making the Most of Mash’ and ‘New Ways with Old Buckets’ – this last reflecting a strong local tradition of ladies using buckets instead of handbags, often decorating them saucily with lace. The section on Industry features the ‘plunder-truck’. Like the Cornish wreckers who once lured ships on to rocks, the plundermen set up false lights and diversion boards to entice articulated lorries off the A10 and down impossibly narrow lanes, before swooping and ransacking their loads. This creates, we are told, a certain unpredictability in the fen economy, which has suddenly to digest such heterogeneous hauls as several thousand novelty chopsticks, catering packs of prawns or side drums. Some items take longer to find homes than others. Miss Edwards at the Post Office is still advertising ‘Sink tidies for all occasions’. Another chapter is devoted to Cuisine. Local specialities include vintage spam fritters, a variety of RKPs, or road-kill pies, and, most inventively, brawn horns. These are made when the cream-gun at the bakery breaks down, and there is a sudden glut of empty pastry horns. The resourceful ladies of the Women’s Institute import truckloads of pigs’ heads from Poland, indulge in frenzied flensing and boiling, and sell the resultant delicacy: they have already raised enough to buy an angle-grinder maintenance kit. If you’d rather treat yourself to an evening out, the ‘Gladlen’ transport café has a line in Gladys’s mink pasties, made from fur-farm escapees. Hygiene is important to her husband Len, who wipes the tables before, after and often during each serving. Using Jeyes fluid for the purpose obviates the necessity of (ever) changing his cloth. Mr South’s latest book is Who’s Who in Grunty Fen which offers a chance to get to know better some of the colourful personalities who inhabit this far-flung and little-known district. Many of them have already gone to their eternal reward. One such is the entrepreneurial livewire, Rufus Flack who, aged 17, inherited a flooded gravel-pit at a time when the curative waters of Bath, Tunbridge Wells and Harrogate were attracting many rich visitors. Thus was born the Grunty Spa, whose waters could cure everything from acne to xylophonist’s wrist – everything, alas, but the green flux, against which visitors, unlike local people, had no antibodies. Undaunted, Flack reinvented his pit as a font, for the mass baptisms required by the various sects also springing up at that time. Resourcefulness is the Fenfolks’ most impressive quality. Take Yvonne Starveling, for example, a war heroine who left a good career as an agricultural bodice-trimmer in Ely in order to make knitted parachutes from every available source, even sacrificing her last pair of lisle stockings to the cause. And consider Philip Tuke-Traylen, a gentle campaigner, who believed that orthography could solve the problem of the low esteem in which the fens were held. Philosophers, philanthropists and physicians achieved their status because ‘instead of being spelt with an “f” they begin with “ph”.’  Howled down with cries of ‘Philanderer!’ and ‘Pharisee!’ he went to live in Philadelphia, but was ultimately interred in Grunty Fen under a stone describing him as ‘Phenman’. The danger in writing such a vade mecum is succumbing to the temptation of overdoing it and descending into intolerable whimsy: the joy of these books is that – however batty they become ‒ they carry the reader along into their heavenly absurdity by means of a ridiculously convincing seriousness. In 1980 a magnificent reference book was published named The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, based on such earnest and solemn guides as Baedeker. In his Foreword, Alberto Manguel lists the criteria for inclusion, and ends with an appeal: ‘We take this opportunity to ask our readers to inform us of any suitable places that have escaped our notice.’ Many editions later, I would respectfully like to suggest Grunty Fen as suitable for inclusion in the next. It fulfils all his requirements, and then some. What’s more, most of the work has already been done for him.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Sue Gaisford 2016