An extract from To the Eel Island: An Evening Journey

… years ago, we remade this house that it will soon be time gently, graciously, to leave. It was two cheap labourer’s cottages run up for £25 or so in 1871, and we loved the hard labour of ‘conversion.’ (A pity that that word brings religious overtones.) We made this plot blessed with our vegetables and fruits, and hindsight makes it a demi-Eden. (It wasn’t: picking frozen sprouts in a wet gale from the north was just as much a part of the reality as the back aching from bending and digging, and hands sore from weeding.) My son and I built the stable where a succession of ponies lived. The sheds – all my building, often from reclaimed wood and things people had thrown out – are full of tools for this and that, tools some of which are smooth from the wear of the hands of the old man who lived across the lane and took my greenness in hand when I first came to this house. I shall probably never need to use them again, but I keep their edges sharp and oiled: just in case. (There is a young man with a family across the lane who might find a use for them…)

The saplings that I planted around the village, in places where tractors could not run over them or sprays reach, are now adults, and spread deep and gracious shade in these hotter summers. If I have done nothing else, I have planted trees. I am on good terms with over 70 of those that survive from my guerrilla planting. But now, as my shadows lengthen, it really is nearly time to stir my stumps and make ready to leave the old house in the village. The consequence is not unhappy: there is the delight of exploring with a mellow, more discerning, excitement another place, another, different, soil to grow things in, a place that you had visited many times before and thought you had known. But you now know you had not even scratched its surface.

On a clear day, looking north and a bit west towards Ely from the top of the hill behind the house in the village, you can see the Cathedral. Once, from that spot, across the marshy fen below you, you would have seen no Octagon, but the huge central tower the Normans built for the building Henry I had made a cathedral, seat of a new bishopric. (It fell down in 1322.) Before that, you might have seen the smoke from the burning of the Abbey by the Vikings. We fool ourselves if we think anything, despite any appearance of permanence, lasts.

August – the month I write this, looking out over the garden at Reach – won’t let you ignore that fact. The trees look a tired dulled green with all that photosynthesising since the bright hopes of spring. Last August, they were aging faster than usual:  it was arguably the hottest for longest this bit of country has ever known.  The trees found it hard, for there had been no serious rain since March.  We bank, don’t we, on the normal. But nothing is normal, even what has always been: Dame Fortune is changeable as the changing moon. That is her normality, constant only in her inconstancy. It was too hot during the day to go outside, to do anything outside – even though much work on the house and garden was needed. Milo lay stretched out wherever in the curtained house he could find a cooler bit of floor. He was out before 6.30 most mornings, on what in normal years one would call a perfect summer morning, flushing the rabbits – he has no hope of catching one – from their feeding in the parched grass, greeting his friends in the community of dogs, reading what passes for dog newspapers from the scents on the grasses and bushes. Full of youth and joy.

Will had combined the wheat on his field that climbs to the top of the hill. In snow, I remember, its westward slope lets you get up a good speed on langlauf skis: I wonder if I’ll ever do that again? They are still in the shed. To me, a stubble field on a clear summer morning, with the expanse of the Fen behind it, is one of the most beautiful of sights, one which I longed for years ago when caught for days in a failing tent on an Arctic icecap by a serious blizzard – and not sure that we would make it back to the coast and safety.  Funny that on a hot morning – the sun, still low, hit you like a blast when you came out of grateful shade – that cold memory, and remembered fear, should have surfaced so keenly… We walked, Milo obediently at heel, to the top of the hill over the soft crunch of the stubble, and stopped. Somewhere beneath our feet was the ghost of – well, what? You can see strange cropmarks, suggestive of some sort of building or structure, on aerial photos.  A little further away is a double ring mark, and I’ll eat my hat if it is not the ploughed out remains of a Bronze Age barrow. Nothing to be seen on the surface. Sometimes you feel the centuries of men’s lives in this little spot of earth pressing in on you, saying ‘notice me, don’t forget us, we were here before you’ almost like the momentary change of light and heat when a cloud passes across the sun. On this field a metal detectorist friend found a silver coin, minted in Egypt by Mark Antony when he was having that fling with Cleopatra. (There was a bit more to it than that, but let that pass.) How did it get to be here? Who, flesh and blood and bone, dropped it and regretted it?

Milo spotted a hare, lying close down, ears flat to its back, a hundred or so yards away downslope, and he was off, oblivious to the whistle. Well, let be: he’ll never catch it, and he will learn to be steady as he gets older. He was then only a teenager, and, as Rosanna says, in that stage when, like all young males, he stinks with the sloshing about of so much testosterone, and he couldn’t concentrate for long on one thing. (I remember when, decades ago, I was a schoolmaster in a boys’ school I insisted on the windows of the room being open all the time whatever the weather. I lost some popularity, particularly among the boys who sat near the winter windows, but the fresh air did dilute the smell, particularly acute after games afternoons, and often made worse by an overlay of Brut.)

But I blew the two short blasts on the whistle, again, and he did answer, and came panting up the slope. Good dog: a treat for that, and we set off down to the spinney in which I planted a couple of dozen trees God knows how many years ago. They are big now, and have pupped. Badgers live there. And rabbits. Milo likes whiffling about in there – we often go back – just as Hector the black Lab used to years ago.

At the edge of the field the combine had left a few square yards of wheat, full in the ear, still standing. It reminded me how in the old days, at harvest, before combines, when the corn was reaped and sheaves stooked, the poor could not go gleaning – and often gleaning produced for them a tidy sack of corn to help through the winter. As long as one sheaf was on the field, no trespass. After it was lifted, the field was open. The women and children – the men would be at work – would move, backs bent, picking up what the reaper had missed, and most farmers said good luck to them. But there were those mean-minded men who would leave a single sheaf there until the winter rains had come from out of the west, and the grain all spoiled and rotting that could have stilled a child’s crying for hunger in a thin February.

And so, back to breakfast, along the drove, back to another day of hiding from the heat, typing away in the study with the blinds down, at words nobody may ever read, hoping it will soon go cooler and rain will come, and knowing it won’t.  For we had weeks of this ahead, I guessed: rightly.

Copyright: Charles Moseley 2025