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