Boxing Day

Boxing Day included a wonderful walk in Richmond Park, where the deer refused to be phased by entire families on brand-new shiny bikes or by squawking green parakeets. It won't be long before someone produces Christmas cards featuring parakeets on snowy twigs or wearing Santa Claus hats.



We strolled back past Latchmere House, a building with quite a history. Once the substantial private home of the Dysart family (remembered locally in an eponymous avenue and a pub), it was then a hotel, and then, at the end of WW1, a mental hospital for combat-fatigued officers. In WW2 it was Camp 020, a detention and interrogation centre for enemy agents captured by MI5. Now it's HMP Latchmere House, currently housing 207 adult male prisoners who have progressed through their sentences to a point where, with not long to go until their release dates, they are given privileges (eg. keys to their own rooms) and responsibilities (most are expected to go out to work every day). I find myself reflecting on what the original occupants of the building would have thought of the various subsequent ones, and about the very different Christmases which must have been spent there.

Otters on the River Stour?

On a walk along the infant Stour yesterday today I noticed some sizeable holes dug into the soft earth of the bank. They looked as if they were in regular use, and, bending down, I found what I thought might be otter spraint. It consisted of small soft green pellets in mucus. I knew spraint is meant to have a very distinctive smell, so I sniffed it. The smell was unusual but not unpleasant and my partner's verdict was that it was "herby".

When I returned home I googled otter spraint and found a surprising amount of information. People variously claimed the smell as being of musk, or newly-mown hay, or jasmine tea or - more prosaically - of fish. What I should have done was to pull the pellets apart and try to find tiny fishbones, just as one can find the bones of small rodents in owl pellets.

Our walk took us past the remains of Clare Castle and Clare's former railway station, across the Stour and so round in a loop towards home.

Buzzards above Suffolk

Yesterday, cycling along a small lane, I suddenly heard a loud - and close - sort of coughing call, It sounded a bit like Kehaar the gull in Watership Down. I looked up, and there, on top of the nearest telegraph pole, sat a big, heavy-shouldered bird that for a split second I thought was an owl. I stopped too sharply and it took off and flew slowly above me, repeating the same harsh sound. It went out of view and I continued cycling.

When it appeared again, I decided to make the same call back to it. Amazingly, it hesitated and circled, and paused above me (admittedly quite a long way above, but close enough for me to see the distinct white patches near its "fingers"). I've had considerable success with singing to seals but I hadn't really expected to get any response from a buzzard. After half a minute or so it flew away and I cycled on, but then another one appeared and followed the first.

We saw buzzards above our garden in south Suffolk this summer and have heard it said that there are an increasing number of local sightings, so I'm just hoping we see a pair on Christmas Day.

Companion to Owls

Companion to Owls is my third novel, set in the Cambridgeshire fens. It's about a family which belongs to a community of Huguenots working on the drainage of the fens in the late 16th century.

Getting reviews and marketing books is quite a task, so when - only yesterday - I received this comment about it from Kevin Crossley-Holland, a writer whose work is closely connected to East Anglia, I was delighted. He wrote:

This novel has a quiet shine to it. It is beautifully researched, unblinking, always kind. Sharing the lives of a Huguenot family living in the Fens, and see-sawing between their snatches of happiness and their tears, one comes to feel that, yes, this is how things really were.


If you'd like to read an extract or know more about Companion to Owls, have a look at my website and post a few words about it.

Seeing

A stunning walk today. A clear sky, chilly enough to freeze puddles but not me, shoots of wheat peeking through the earth, a family of deer standing by the hedge and watching me more still-ly than I can ever stand and watch them. Suffolk at its best.

As I walked I was reflecting on a chance meeting I had yesterday with a woman who had only one eye. I hadn't even questioned why she was wearing dark glasses indoors, but after we'd been talking for a little and I'd mentioned my contact lenses, she told me that she lost an eye several years ago as the result of cancer. She took off her glasses to show me, and there was her ordinary eye and her other eye socket neatly covered with skin. If I had tried to imagine it, I think I would have thought of something more disturbing than this simple, almost business-like arrangement. I hoped that if I or any one I loved were to find ourselves in that situation, we too would be able to go beyond sadness and stoicism to the quiet dignity and positivity she possessed.

Gulls flew off from fields, and a heron stood by the river. The moon was up there, pale and not quite round. Bushes of scarlet rosehips reminded me of the wild roses that were here last summer and would be here again.

So much to see. So much to feel.

Every Man His Own Gardener

This year, for my birthday, my brother gave me a book published in 1707, price 4 shillings. He had its leather binding repaired, and it's beautiful. Under the title - which doesn't appear on the cover (apparently no books of this period had anything other than plain covers) - but on the frontispiece, it says

Being a New and much more Complete,

Gardener's Kalendar

Than any one hiterto published.

Containing,

Not only an Account of what Work is neceffary to be done in the Hot-houfe, Green-houfe, Shrubbery, Kitchen, Flower, and Fruit Gardens, for every month in the year, but alfo ample Directions for performing the faid work, according to the neweft and moft approved Methods now in practice among the beft Gardeners.

The author is one Mr Mawe, Gardener to the Grace the Duke of Leeds.

As it's December already I thought I should have a look at what he recommends gardeners should be doing. I particularly liked what he had to say about The Hot-Houfe:

Continue every morning from about four or five o'clock, to light the Hot-Houfe fire, obferving, as faid last month, never to make the fire too ftrong fo as to render the heat of the wall of the flues anywife violent, for that would prove of bad confequence to the pines and other plants.

You are likewife to obferve, as advifed last month, that in very fevere weather the Hot-Houfe fires muft be continued night and day.

And the perfon that attends the fires, fhould always, the laft thing before he goes to bed, examine tham to add more fuel if it is wanted; no fuel is fo proper for this purpofe as coals or cinders; but wood, turf or peat will do, tho' nothing is fo fteady and lafting a heat as the two former; but in fome parts thefe can not be had but at a great expence.

The top glafs of the Hot-Houfe fhould at this feason be covered every night with a large painted canvas cloth, fuch as might be made out of a large fail-cloth; and this fhould be made to roll upon a pole that fhould be, if poffible, the length of the Hot-houfe, and near three inches thick or thereabouts; and that fhould be contrived, by the means of pullies and a rope, to draw or roll up, and let down, at pleafure; which is much more convenient than large unwieldy fhutters which I have seen belonging to many Hot-Houfes, and which require almoft an hour's work every day to take down and put up.

The pines and other plants in the Hot-Houfe will ftill require to be now and then watered.

I presume that by pines Mr Mawe means pinepapples? Let me know if you think or know otherwise. Meanwhile, after reading the section on the Kitchen Garden, I realise I ought to be looking over my colliflower plants in their frames.

Enclosed waters of the Cam and the Great Ouse

I found this map recently in a secondhand bookshop. It covers territory close to the fens in which I've set my latest novel, Companion to Owls. It opens out longways for several metres, so I stretch it out on the floor - and it's printed on both sides. It was no longer in its original transparent wallet when I bought it, but inside the envelope it came in there were some typed notes with essential details for anyone navigating the Cam and the Ouse.


For example:

St. Neots

Keeper Mr Davis, River Field Bungalow, St Neots, approximately 300 yards upstream on right bank.

Approaching lock from downstream there is not much depth of water and boats should keep well to the left of the island. Boats can be tied up on the left of lock looking upstream if the gates are closed. There is limited depth of water over cill.

There is also a set of instructions entitled Passage Through Locks, the last one of which reads:

An average fee of 2/- each way seems to be usual for all these locks, but this is not an official toll. If a Keeper has to flood before craft can enter lock, it is suggested he be offered an
increased fee.

In Companion to Owls, Mathieu, the son of a Huguenot family, becomes the sluice keeper at Stanground, near Peterborough, not so far from Huntingdon where this map was printed.

Let me know if you'd be interested in seeing a section of the map. Or if you know - or knew - Mr Davis of River Field Bungalow.

Eels

Eels are - or at least were - a feature of the fens and the broads and all the watery places in East Anglia. Occasionally, in pubs, you can find basketwork grigs and photos of eel-catchers, and in Ely Museum there's a display and a film about how eels were caught.



But I've only just come across The Patron Saint of Eels by Gregory Day. It's a strange story. The narrator (and author) is an Australian, and the book starts with him lying in bed and hearing "the strangest slushy sound, a sound I'd never heard before". He discovers that thousands of eels have been displaced by floods and the local ditches are teeming with writhing, wriggling, glistening bodies which cannot free themselves. The reader is introduced to Nanette, a long-time friend of Noel the narrator, and then Fra Ionio appears. A mysterious 18th century yet contemporary monk, Fra Ionio cares for eels, and he soothes them by speaking to them and striking a small bell. As the story unravels it becomes clear that it is not only the eels who need help. Both Noel and Nanette have unresolved areas of their lives, and Fra Ionio helps them to value their environment and become more spititually aware.

The Patron Saint of Eels is a slim volume, published by Picador in in Australia. ISBN 0 330 42158 1. It won Gregory Day the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal in 2006.

Thames

I am an eclectic and disorganised reader who usually has several books on the go. Currently one of the ones I'm savouring is Peter Chasseaud's Thames, The London River.

Thames is a minature version of the text of a large-format privately-produced artists book laid out with maps and phographic images. I bought the little one (for about £12) because the handsome and heavy one costs about £600, but I'm really enjoying the one I have. It's a poetic progression from the river's estuary to its source, a description threaded through with historical, nautical, architectural, literary and artistic references, a litany of evocative placenames. Here are a few lines:

Rounding the Isle of Dogs, run south into Blackwall Reach,
under the astromomers' Polaris alignments.
a quiverful of zero longitudes cut the snaking umbilical
down the west side of the Greenwich peninsula, west into Greenwich Reach
close-hauled again, beat northward, past Deptford, Millwall and Rotherhithe into Limehouse Reach.

At the back of the book Peter Chasseaud lists the shoals, deeps and reaches of the Thames and they sent me running to my box of maps to find the names of the ones off the East Anglian coast.

And they too please me enormously:

Cockle Gatway
Hemsby Hole
Caister Shoal
North Scroby
Middle Scroby
Yarmouth Road
Middle Cross Sand
South Cross Sand
Corton Sand
Gorleston Road
Barley Picle
Lowestoft North Road
Lowestoft South Road
Pakefield Road
Newcombe Sand
Stanford Channel
Holm Sand

Peter Chasseaud can be contacted at peter@parvenupress.freeserve.co.uk