Managed Retreat

Managed Retreat

Marina O'Connell on Land

Graham Burnett on Music

Adam Easterbrook on Horror

Ron Bates on Essex

Ben Lambert on Orchards

Kayode Olafimihan on Eels

David Cleveland on Film

James Piers Taylor on Edge

Paul Kingsnorth on Rebellion

C.Fennel on Transition

Art by Claire White

Art by Steve Jordan

an occasional journal of the English orient Care of the Earth ­ Care of People ­ Return of Surplus

Time to make a managed retreat?

Along the eastern shore of Britain the line between sea and land has been sketched many times and any particular stroke we might consider now as definitive tells us more about our place in time than about the place’s place in space. Up and down the coast are fields re­claimed from the brine, drained, each one a little victory in a guerrilla campaign against the tide, fought for and barricaded in, fortified with bank and stone work. The war, of course, was actually lost millennia ago when climate change had worked its assault on the northern ice and a distant frozen fortification was undermined ­ releasing a tsunami across Doggerland, our Palaeolithic Atlantis, the fabled land bridge across which the first hominids had walked here. Since then the German Ocean, the North Sea, has provided our moat – a stretch of water separating the British archipelago from the continent to which it belongs.

At the Essex shoreline by Ashingdon, a man named Canute made his landfall and later, on another beach he would demonstrate the futility of the commands that men make against the tide – but elsewhere and elsewhen engineers have been put to work, going into the debateable lands: marshes, saltings and fens disputing the shared commoning rights of earth and water in favour of settler claims for sole and undisturbed use.

Yet disturbation comes from time to time, the empire of the oceans may neglect its outlying territories for decades or centuries, but when the wind is right and the Moon aligned its legions may take back in moments that which was removed from its realm over lifetimes. The great storm surge of 1736, the high tide and winds of 1791, the severe gales of 1881, the 1897 hurricane, the watersnoodramp of 1953 – only the most recent incursions and inundations remain in the collective memory of man.

Each time man’s response has been the same – re­build the dykes, make the walls higher, drive more reinforcements into the earth. But shows of strength are often shows of folly – defeat disguised as victory. In the River Blackwater millennia ago, when the tide receded from the mud on the southern bank and the causeway to Northey Island was revealed, the folly of man was also unveiled. The tale is related in the Battle of Maldon1, Old English verse telling a story of defeat by Norsemen after the over­reaching pride of the vanquished. Near the close of the poetic fragment that remains, Byrthwold a retainer of the fallen leader Brythnoth offers this counsel to his comrades: ‘Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant our spirits must be greater, though our strength grows less.’

On that same island exactly one thousand years later to the year, a new negotiation with the sea began – aiming at accord, at truce making. The

island’s titular owners, the National Trust, took down the wall, broke the bank letting earth and water re­enter discourse over the interior. The strategy was known as 'managed realignment', or more poetically (and preferably I believe) as 'managed retreat' – the giving of ground. These lands of debate, marginal to farming are sanctuaries to avian migrants, local waders, mudskippers, to the halophyte vegetation: matrices of seablites, suaeda, glasswort, kali. They also form a softer edge, a thumb smudge of the pencilled line, rich ecotypes: yes, and they also take the shock of high water, disperse it, and ameliorate its impact.

‘Our maps must be the kind sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain’ 2 During the last ice­age, the pressure of a glacial mass on Scottish rock tipped our Alban head seawards, with a resultant kicking up of the island’s feet, lifting the south higher in the air. Now the south is falling, while Scotland rises again. After the ice – the isostatic rebound, pushing the austral soils towards water. And the sea also rises; a changing climate, global weirding, jetstream meanderings, new ice melt in the frozen lands, thermal expansion of the ocean – their tidemarks etch a warning on an out of date Plimsoll Line.

And so along the eastern shore, lines are being redrawn again, and we might respond with earth­movers and engineering or we might instead try to work with nature, we could restore the buffers and thereby give ourselves more time to complete the heavier lifting required to remove the weight of industrialism from our backs. More time to quiet the fossil­fuelled chimneys, to capture carbon in the topsoil and sequester it in the trees, to re­inhabit our life­places, to make a world within the limits of the Earth.

The great challenge of the coming years will be navigating the course of 'energy descent'3, the precipitous ride down from the dizzy heights of the petroleum interval. We need to step aside from the excesses ­ as a people, as a nation, as a region, as a community, as individuals – before we are pushed back, knocked over, deluged all at once with coming troubles. In the volume Anticipatory History4 the authors remark of realignment that ‘the terminology might stink… but the possibilities of life without barricades is revolutionary’.

I believe we should make a managed retreat. ­ Captain Floud 1. Anon. Battle of Maldon modern verse translation by Douglas B. Killings.

2. Paul Kingsnorth & Dougald Hine Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (Lancashire: Bracket Press, 2009) 3. David Holmgren, Future Scenarios: How Communities can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change (Chelsea Green, 2009) 4. DeSilvey, C., Naylor, S. & Sackett, C. Anticipatory History (Axminster: Uniform Books, 2011)

James Piers Taylor on

Edge

As Gary Snyder says, be famous for five miles. Be famous to thin stretches of grass between abandoned buildings, be famous to that next of starlings just over the hill. That’s a kind of feathery heroism, and is a sweet gesture to our desire to be recognised in the world.

Martin Shaw1

space bears the essence of the notion of home’3 then how do we engage our lives in these places, how do we make our homes, how do we re­inhabit them?

A bioregion is a geographic area defined by natural characteristics, including watersheds, landforms, soils, geological qualities, native plants and animals, climate, and weather. These characteristics are continuous; in other words, when there are changes in these characteristics you’ve gone from one bioregion to another. Obviously these borders are soft and wide, as opposed to linear and sharp in the present geopolitical sense of ‘boundary.’ Bioregionalism includes human beings as a species in the interplay of these natural characteristics. It promotes an inhabitory attitude by which humans adapt themselves to the natural characteristics of a bioregion in an appropriate way.

Peter Berg4

Looking for the edges – where one thing becomes another – is the first part of mapmaking, but also of knowing home, of recognising place. To the babe in arms comes a universe of undifferentiated sensation, doors of perception thrown wide – but swiftly lines of belonging are drawn out and this part of the spectrum of sound, this range of the continuum of smell, this section of the visual field becomes: mother.

The American pioneers of life­place writing, the bioregionalists, look to a wider bios than our own – to a A little older and the child at play outside knows with more than human world. A world emergent from some detail the boundaries of exploration, of territory coalitions of flora, fauna and terroir – from affairs – of known and unknown. An eye is placed close between rainfall and topography, from birdsong and soil against the missing knot in a fence panel and the world profiles, migration paths and native ranges, from the beyond is secretly witnessed. In time, more becomes valleys where they talk like this to the valleys where they known, the initial pickets are moved outward – but talk like this. certain lines of demarcation remain: where the front door meets the exterior air, where the garden meets the In Managed Retreat we look to the east of what is street, where on a journey back one feels the return of currently know as England, to a terraqueous zone home. located somewhere between the tidal estuaries of Are we all displaced persons now? In the rich west claims are made to global citizenship, we affect to throw off parochial shackles, choosing instead a democratic cosmopolitanism, a universal Schengen agreement that dissolves all borders. It’s a grandiose claim that covers a rampant global consumerism and the leisure plays of a gadabout middle class. The year­round strawberry or the all­year tomato is a guiltless pleasure with all the sense of an all­day breakfast. Everyday.

Bangladeshi clothes washed free of smoke, Chinese tech with sweat wiped off, Israeli fruit rinsed of implications, and US hip­hop provided ghetto­free, New Zealand butter and Qatari gas returned to room temperature. Yet even with all this, the air we are breathing, the water from the tap, the earth on which we stand has not been entirely outsourced. As the post­ modern traveller begins their descent, glancing down at the approaching territory, some of it still looks familiar in a way that other lands do not.

Humber and Thames. The oriental margin is fudged from warpings, flats, carrs, fenlands, broads, salt marshes, intertidals, littoral zones and the drowned lands of the London­Brabant Massif. The western line is the subject of further dispute and debate, as the terra becomes firma: lines are unfixed, softer, wider. This isn’t really the kingdom of the East Angles or Danelaw, nor the eothen regions defined since for purposes of civil defence, economic planning, standard statistics, or government office. It’s not a Redcliffe­Maud province, nor is it the European Parliament constituency.

As to what it is… well the stories gathered here begin to tell something of that. They find particularities of place, ‘local distinctiveness’5, and tell them to form continuities between past, present and future, they try to reweave patterns of place that have been unpicked. So our edges here are frayed, moths have got in and left ellipses, and some places are darkened by damp.

1. Martin Shaw ‘Foundational Stones Towards Mythtelling’ (2013) Every day people follow signs to some place which is not their home 2. John Berger, ‘Ten Dispatches about Place’ in Hold Everything but a chosen destination… On arrival they come to realise that they Dear; Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (Verso, 2007) are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed.

3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1992) John Berger2 4. Peter Berg interviewed by Richard Evanoff, ‘Bioregionalism in Japan’ From: Japan Environment Monitor ­ E­Mail Edition, But if we have life­places particular to each of us, in Issue #97 (4), (June 1998) what ways might we pivot and draw the arc of its 5. Sue Clifford and Angela King (ed.s) Local Distinctiveness: compass about us – it is surely not, after all, a circle.

Place, Particularity, Identity (Common Ground, 1993)

Nor likely can it easily be contained by borders of jurisdiction or political authority. Places we recognise ourselves as being part of, which we parcel together as common, are associated more by discernments of the heart and apprehensions of the hands than by determinations of the head. If ‘all really inhabited

"there is only one way to escape the alienation of present­day society: retreat ahead of it" Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text

Managed Retreat was conceived, collated and designed in Essex ­ contributions came from across the county; nobody got paid. Ads were provided gratis. James Piers Taylor was the editor. I ripped the 'occasional journal' thing off The Land. We still hope to broaden our oriental compass. It was put together on a 4 year old Mac latop running OS X 10.5.8 and using the free open source DTP programme Scribus, aided by some video tutorials off youtube. Some text and image editing was done in 'borrowed' copies of Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac and Adobe Photoshop CS3 ­ though frankly you could have done it with OpenOffice and Gimp. It got printed as a 'digital tabloid' by www.newspaperclub.com on FSC certified paperstock. Check their FAQ for the SP on CMYK, Dpi etc. If I can keep this under 16 pages it's gonna cost about £400 to print 200 copies about half of which are going to be given away to contributors, fellow travellers & friendly creatures.

If you paid for it, a thousand blessings. Please read contents before composting.

Re­use & Re­cycling Everything is © the author/artist/photographer unless otherwise noted – please care about the people and ask before reusing.

Pages 2,3, 11, 20, 24 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution­NonCommercial­ShareAlike license (CC by­NC­SA) and made available as return of surplus.

Images Front & 21: paintings by Stephen Jordan 2, 11, 20 & Back: photographs by James Piers Taylor 8 monoprint of eel by James Piers Taylor 4: images courtesy of Marina O'Connell 6: photographs by Ben Lambert 7­9: images courtesy of Kayode Olafimihan 12­13: artwork by Claire White 14: images courtesy of David Cleveland & East Anglian Film Archive 16­18: photographs by Graham Burnett except 17 Red Square photo courtesy of Ian Staples & Jon Seagroatt Everything else borrowed from history

The title ‘Land settlements in East Anglia’ conjures up images of early settlers arriving in boats from Europe thousands of years ago. But as recently as the 1930s parts of rural East Anglia were settled by families from the industrial North East of Britain arriving into newly formed colonies. This colonisation was sanctioned and funded by the government, and the use of the word colonisation was theirs.

this internal migration was envisaged as a stepping­ stone to moving people to colonise New Zealand, South Africa and Australia.

In the 1930s Britain was suffering from the Great Depression. Similar to the current recession this was caused by a banking crisis, it put millions out of work and caused many small businesses to go bankrupt. At that time there was no welfare payments and many families went hungry and cold. Unemployment in the minefields and industrial areas of north east England was running at a massive 70%. Shockingly payments and handouts were kept to a minimum as it was thought to make people lazy; no matter that there was no work to do. Families suffered massive hardships and starvation and homelessness became a common sight.

At the same time rural England was undergoing a crisis as well, farming was not profitable, and people had been leaving the land to emigrate to the British Empire’s foreign colonies since the 1880s, or had moved to towns and cites to earn a living in industrial trades. The old traditional ways of farming with horses and hand skills were beginning to change with the introduction of tractors, and nitrogen based fertilisers (a change famously recorded by Ronald Blythe in Akenfield). In 1930 a coalition nationalist government was formed to deal with the crisis (is this all beginning sound familiar?). The Government

decided upon a radical and unique social experiment.

They decided to ‘re­colonise’ parts of England with the unemployed from the English north east, and from Wales, places where the unemployment rate was highest.

The phrase ‘colonisation’ is quite surprising today; in the context of our own times it is difficult to imagine that the rural south of England would need colonising.

But at this time the countryside was emptying fast and

The Government created the Land Settlement Association (LSA), which was granted money from the government and the Carnegie trust, and with this they bought up 21 farms across the country. These purchases were then sub­divided to create over 1000 homes; each equipped to run as a smallholding of between 4­10 acres. Those in East Anglia were based on fertile soils and in places with fantastic microclimates for horticulture. They are still to be found at Ardleigh in North Essex, Newborne in Suffolk and Abingdon in Cambridgeshire. There was much discussion at the time as how to how to create effective colonies; should the holdings be part time, on less than 1 acre, should they be in the north east, should they be larger units of 50 acres, or the mid way size of 4­10 acres? Would they be economically viable or would they just be displacing others from food production and re­creating the cycle of unemployment? In the end they decided upon the model of colonies of 50 to 80 holdings, each of 4­10 acres and with ‘compulsory co­operation’ at the core of the system. This meant that if you took up a tenancy on one of the holdings you were obliged to trade through the central organisation, it was thought this would give them an economic edge.

The holdings were set up as market gardens growing salads, vegetables and fruit with a small amount of livestock in the form of pigs and poultry. They were equipped with tools, outbuildings, stock and glasshouses and, importantly, a home. An Estate

Land Settlements in East Anglia

by Marina O'Connell

Warden co­ordinated the production, and marketing through a pack house. There was a central store supplying the equipment necessary: bags, string, fertiliser and so on. Most colonies had a central farm to bring on the plants or piglets needed to stock the units and men and women were offered work on these to earn wages to bump up the takings from their own holdings. Each Estate also had training advisors on all aspects of production, including the demands of pig raising, tomato growing and outdoor fruit. Miners and their wives applying for resettlement and a tenancy on one of the holdings were interviewed for their suitability by the LSA staff.

Men who had had an allotment were preferred and after selection they were given 3 months of training on site. Only then could the whole family move down to join the husbands in their new homes.

The change must have been phenomenal; from underground all day to over ground, employed to self­ employed, and not least: from the north east to the south east with all the cultural change that that involved. One thing that did not seem to change however was a deep class division between workers and authorities, and a patrician voice dominates LSA documentation. The newly styled self­employed growers were required to clock on in the pack house

Marina's smallholding on a former LSA site in Lawford, Essex.

to make sure they got up in the morning at 8.00 am, and this could be some miles away from their home.

Their takings were held back by the co­op and given out like wages so that it did not get spent all at once, or worse still drunk in the social club. I interviewed a number of people who were children at the time of their family’s move from the north east to these settlements. They all speak about how their mothers in particular thought they had arrived in ‘utopia’ or ‘paradise’. Others found it more difficult to reconcile attitudes formed in the open friendly communities in the north, where they were regularly in and out of each other’s homes, with the contrasting quiet reticence of the southerners that were their new neighbours. At Newbourne it was the social space of the pub in the village that eventually broke this barrier down.

The turnover rate of tenants on the holdings was high with an average of 50%. This rate lowered the closer the re­settlement was to the tenant’s original home however, suggesting that these moves could be a huge cultural wrench for close­knit families. Secondly, it was very difficult to earn a living from 4 acres of land.

Often the families were living on an income lower than their unemployment allowance had been in the mining villages. Although now of course they had

access to the food they were producing, they were encouraged not to eat it, as technically it had to be sold through the co­op to generate an income.

With the start of the Second World War, the national demand for coal and food increased and this changed the emphasis of the land settlements toward maximising food production on exisiting holdings rather then re­employing and training more miners.

Tenancies that came vacant were offered to farm labourers who wanted to get a step up onto the farming ladder. This intake of people were more skilled at growing than the miners and for the next 30 years the LSA ‘brand’, as it became known across the country, did very well. In the 1950s the ownership of the LSA properties was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and slimmed down to just 10 estates and 500 growers. These focused on horticulture and the out of season production of vegetables and salad, alongside some production of flowers. By the late 1970’s the collective LSA brand provided around 78% of the salad in the UK wholesale markets. The LSA’s became more inclusive at this point, although to hold a tenancy the produce still had to be sold through the pack house so the ‘compulsory co­operation’ was still in place. The growers themselves sat on the boards of directors, and decided upon the cropping programmes. They pioneered early and out of season production of salad crops using mobile glasshouses, and heated state of the art glasshouses. However at the end of the day the holdings were owned and leased by MAFF and it was they who made the final decisions. As such a large producer of salads the LSA facilitated the rise of the supermarkets in the UK, who could centralise their salad requirements with the LSA co­operative. The supermarkets also worked closely with the growers to create new products such as Cos lettuce, the ‘exotic’ salad leaf we now take for granted, and Gardeners Delight tomato, the production of which was pioneered by the growers at Foxash estate to supply the supermarkets.

Growing up and living on the holdings at this time has been described by many as ‘idyllic’, children had the freedom to roam collectively, and they could easily earn money for things they wanted like bikes and boats. At Foxash the social club hosted an annual summer fete, a summer show with prizes, bonfire night, football matches, and darts nights.

The growers would regularly meet up at the stores on a Friday morning for a chat in a stark contrast to the isolation experienced by many farmers and growers today.The growers worked collaboratively together sharing knowledge and information about growing techniques because they were not competing with each other. If their neighbour did well then so did they. On the other hand if a grower did not do so well and ran up debts these had to be borne by the LSA as a whole and these costs of the debt, though not the debt itself, was carried collectively.

In 1973 when the UK joined the European Economic Community, cheap imports of food started to arrive from Spain and the Netherlands, the supermarkets became more demanding and pushed the prices they paid down. The LSAs started to lose their profitability. When I listened to the growers

who were producing at that time, they spoke of how inefficient the LSA had become with 500 growers supporting 500 staff that ran the organisation, many of which were not trained in food production and did not really understand it. In the end the LSA experiment was sold off by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the early 1980s and deemed an economic failure. Detailed discussion with growers around at the time however, suggests that this interpretation is actually far from the case. They were, in a way, a victim of their own success; their initial support of the supermarkets had allowed the domineering growth of the four big players that would subsequently demand cheaper and cheaper prices. In the long term it was this, coupled with inefficiencies in selling the crop, which created their demise. These issues had begun to be addressed, but by then the Thatcher government had been voted in. The sell off was partly ideologically driven, a piece of the wider privatisation agenda. The government announced the sale on the radio in early 1982, before they had even told the tenants themselves. The tenants were given the option to buy their holdings, which many did, but some had run up debts because of falling profitability and were unable to raise the necessary funds. The tenants took the government to court collectively and won a settlement for breach of contract because of the fast sell off programme. At this point the remaining LSA growers formed their own co­operatives on each of the estates. But the price pressures from supermarket and imports continued and in order to stay in business the growers had to become more efficient and larger.

Today, 30 years on, the last remaining viable growers are leasing out their glass to ever­larger companies that grow for the supermarkets. As the holdings gradually went out of business and sold up, they stopped being productive market gardens. Now on the Foxash site out of 80 holdings there are approximately four small­scale local/niche organic growers and seven high­tech glasshouse growers ­ all slowly leasing their glass out. The rest are used as gardens or horse paddocks or have become derelict. These estates will continue to evolve but it is no longer an economically viable prospect to return them to market gardening – the cost of buying one does not stack up against the income that might be earned from running them as market gardens.

In the next 30 years, however, East Anglia along with the rest of Europe will be facing the dual crises of peak oil and climate change and a return to low carbon local food production will be inevitable for food security. The Transition Town movement is exploring how to re­ localise and de­carbonise food production. The LSA model created in the 1930s would be ideal way of doing this in practice, allowing younger people access to land and housing without them needing a huge amount of capital. Supported marketing would allow people to concentrate on growing and could re­create the local infrastructure needed for local distribution of food. This could in turn create resilient local communities with greater food security. Ironically the issue of how to create resilient communities is currently being explored by the Carnegie Trust, initial supporter of the LSA, in partnership with the Transition Town movement. It is difficult to imagine any politician proposing such a radical solution to food security in these times but then I expect the miners in the 1930s might have thought the same.

Read more about the LSA: The editors, 'Salad Days: The rise, fall and possible rebirth of the Land Settlement Association', in The Land, No. 11, Winter 2011­12 Land Settlement Association archive held by Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) University of Reading Colin Ward, 'A Century of Land­Settlement in Essex ', in Talking Green (Five Leaves Publications, 2012)

we support The Land do

you? www.thelandmagazine.org.uk

An Orchard in the era of Climate Change Words by Ben Lambert A 15 Acre Orchard in the North of Essex, Crapes is over 90 years old, we have almost 300 varieties of heritage apple, as well as plums, gages, pears, medlars, quince, soft fruit and veg plots. I've been working there for about 8 years now and as my interest in deep ecology and forest gardening has grown I've started thinking more about how the orchard functions.

As the climate changes the weather seems more extreme and perhaps not so suited to apple growing as it once was. Whether it will stay like this or not is moot. What's clear is that we need to change the way we do things to give the trees the best chance of pulling through such unpredictability. In 2011 we had only 550cm of rain, compared to a whopping 960 in 2012. The land has gone from bone dry to a sodden quagmire.

However, in the end the solutions to both problems are the same.

By 2011 we'd almost stopped using herbicide under the trees altogether realising that it was better to have something growing there (even if it be grass) than bare soil, that wouldn't have a hope of holding on to much moisture, especially our fine sandy loam. It works the same for the opposite, the land will soak up excess rain much better if there are roots and organic matter in the soil to soak it up like a sponge.

We are not technophiles, but neither are we technophobes, so we have just bought a piece of machinery that will enable us to mow right under the tree canopy. Now we can keep back the woody weeds like oak, brambles and wild rose that so persistently pop up between the trees, thanks to the birds that like to perch on the apple branches as they nibble their seeds or nuts.

Without the use of herbicides however, we will get grass growing right up to the trunks. This is less than ideal as grass interferes with the trees underground, preventing their feeder roots from coming close to the surface. Well timed cutting at fruit set and just before or after harvest will help this, but in the light of forest gardening we know that what we need to do is establish plants that co­exist under the canopy in harmony with the fruit trees.

Forest Gardening in a commercial context calls for a slightly different approach, but the principles remain the same. We don't have much of a market for perennial veg/salads or unusual fruit, although that could change. At the moment we are focusing on propagating plants that will help strengthen the trees to their full potential whilst creating the optimum soil ecosystem beneath them. Things like comfrey, with long taproots which weave themselves past the apple roots and draw up minerals from deep in the soil. Or mint which spreads quickly, attracting beneficial insects and protecting the trees from fungal and bacterial disease with its strong aroma.

Forest gardening in an orchard context. An apple tree at Crapes under­planted with a herbaceous layer of mint, comfrey and lemon balm.

However, with 15 acres to cover establishing individual perennials can be a slow process. So, we will also be broadcast sowing seeds of both perennial and annual plants such as borage, clover and chicory, which will cover the ground quickly and benefit the trees in various ways. This seed will be sown either after our newly acquired chickens have cleared a section of ground, or into the mulch we hope to create by cutting with the new mower. Additionally to these methods we will also work with what we've got; based on the assumption that any herbaceous plant that’s not grass is preferred, we will let perennial 'weeds' such as thistles and rosebay willowherb spread freely. Again, keeping them in check with the new mower. Because we have 15 acres we aren't desperate to establish plants with immediate uses to humans and so anything that will create mulch, attract beneficial insects or prevent grass from taking over is good in our books and the less work we have to do to get them there the better.

The trees have long memories.

The curved branch of a heavy crop, years gone by.

The scars of '87 or pondered pruning cuts.

They watched without eyes as the landscape changed around them. For miles around, relations lost to the axe, the flame, the chain.

Less flesh and wood. More metal and smoke.

They weep now, as the soil blows past without a care in the world, as the earth is winded by 12 tonne machinations.

Times get tough, but they hang on, the roots hold. The bud forms, the flower comes, will the fruit set? There's always next year. Or the year after that...

Children of the Sargasso Sea Kayode Olafimihan

You have to watch for the signs. Towards the end of September or maybe October, look for a storm. It will be night­time and it will be in the dark of the moon – cloud cover will not suffice. The river will be full, running fast from rain.

They make their way out of ponds and lakes, across wet fields, along ditches and streams, heading back to the mouths of rivers, through the estuaries, and out to sea. They’ve changed: their bodies now fat­ laden, 28% or more of their mass, their eyes enlarged and turned blue. They have dark grey­ green backs and snow­white bellies. And they’re going home. But first they pause for the cellular changes to complete. They need to adjust to saltwater and over a ton per inch of pressure in the depths of the open sea. Finally, their stomachs atrophy and, relying on stored fat, their journey begins in earnest. The silver eels leave our shores on their epic 3,000 mile swim back to where they were born: the Sargasso Sea. They’ve come to the place where they originated when ‘the American and European continental shelves were joined in the middle of the Atlantic.’1 There, somewhere in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle, deep below the Sargassum seaweed rafts that give the sea its name, they mate and a new generation of the European eel, Anguilla Anguilla, begins. No one knows how many but every female lays from 2­10 (some say 20) million eggs. Within hours, the eel eggs metamorphose into transparent, willow­leaf­shaped larvae just a few centimetres in size. Then the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift carry them on their odyssey back here for spring. By now they’ve narrowed into thin, noodle­ like cylinders: transparent glass eels who darken into elvers.

They arrive a welcome feast in the breeding season: a particular favourite for otters, water voles, herons, kingfishers, bitterns, cormorants and various fish – and some humans too! Some stay in the coastal salt waters, others remain in the brackish estuaries while the most intrepid wait for the right warm spring tide to ride up the freshwater rivers at night and spread throughout our waterways there to mature into yellow adult eels. Some years they would come up the Thames for example ‘in such tens of millions they made a black margin to the river on either side of the bank.’2 Over the last couple of decades, however, there has been a 90% plus crash in the numbers travelling upstream. ‘Eels used to represent more than 50% of the standing fish biomass in most European aquatic environments, participating significantly in the food webs.’3 Now the European eel is on the IUCN red list for endangered species. Alan Cleave, the last eel fisherman left in Maldon Angling Society, remembers fishing with his friend’s Dad in a gravel pit in Maldon and catching an eel every ten minutes in the 1980s. They’d cook them up and exchange them in the East End for beer. Now he is lucky to get three bites in six hours.

The reasons for this drop in numbers are unclear. It is thought to be due to a ‘combination of increases in man­made structures acting as barriers to migration upstream, a reduction in freshwater habitat, pollution, fisheries, changing oceanic currents and exposure to the parasite Anguillicola crassus.’4 However, there are still many mysteries about eels: ‘the key to reproducing eels in captivity has yet to found. Eels live their lives on their terms, or not at all.’5 It is still the case that no one has seen an adult

eel in the Sargasso Sea nor witnessed them breed there. We still don’t know why some eels reach sexual maturity in 5 years while others remain in lakes and rivers for 30 years or more, nor how they find their way back to the Sargasso Sea. Indeed, eels being eels, this year the elvers have unexpectedly and inexplicably arrived in Britain in numbers to rival the 80’s.

A Europe­wide and North African Sustainable Eel Group has been formed from an alliance of conservationists, fisheries and scientists to investigate and respond to the situation. Most of its resources are targeted at immediate conservation efforts such as unblocking migratory pathways; adding eel passes to dams, flood defences, sluices and other concrete barriers; screening turbines and pumps; and recreating habitat and nursery areas while restocking the rivers and wetlands from which elvers are now obstructed. In a welcome, though belated, recognition of the law of return, it is now required by EU law that eel fisheries put at least 60% of the elvers they buy back into suitable habitats where they can grow to maturity. Restrictions are also now in place managing the numbers of adult eels that can be caught.

One of the group’s most innovative initiatives is an Eels in Schools project launched by Richard Cook who runs the Severn and Wye Smokery. The son of a traditional eel fisherman himself, he wanted to ensure that future generations, who may not be reliant on eating eel, don’t forget their existence.

The Smokery funds the project, providing schools with a tank of elvers in the summer term. During this time the children feed the baby eels until they are ready to be put into a nearby waterway. This year fifty schools are participating, including schools in Essex, Suffolk and London. In this way, although ‘the fishing way of life is withering away…the communities decay, the old skills are lost, and the tradition is dumped in the heritage museum’, at least some kids have the opportunity to have a direct personal experience with elvers who in turn enter

wetlands from which they are otherwise blocked.6 The children also learn about the ecology of eels: their remarkable life cycle and their place in our freshwater ecosystems as a keystone species.

That ecology extends into the history of our involvement with and dependence on them. Eels are one of the omega­3 rich foods that were so crucial in the brain expansion and growth of the nervous system of early humans. They are depicted in Palaeolithic cave paintings in France and their bones are found in middens across Europe from prehistoric through to Roman times. Large quantities have been excavated in Roman Colchester, trapped from the river Colne as the eels migrated seawards. Aerial photography has also revealed remains of Anglo­Saxon wooden weirs off Bradwell and Mersea Island.7 In the Domesday Book eels are recorded as the most common rent in kind after grain and later, the stone for Ely Cathedral was paid for with them. Throughout the Middle Ages they were the most common fish eaten by the poor – and just as popular with the rich. As Richard Schweid, author of Eel, has written, ‘Eels are fascinating and wonderful creatures. We need to treat them with due respect and gratitude for their role in providing an ancient source of protein for our own species.’8 They haven’t just provided food. Eel skin leather was used to make shoes, ropes, whips, flexures for flails, door hinges and membranes for filtering liquids. According to Tom Fort, ‘The men and women of the Fens made garters of it and swore that they helped keep off the ague…Strips of skin were dried in the sun, greased with fat, placed in a linen bag stuffed with thyme, lavender and marsh mint, then buried under the peat for the summer, before being dug up, greased again, polished with a smooth stone and declared ready to be tied around Fenland legs.’9 In Essex and the Eastern counties generally we are gathering living history with the kids to help them get more involved with their surroundings and local tradition, folklore, old family custom and knowledge about eels. Through that they can perhaps discover, as some children to their surprise already have this year, that granddad or great­ grandma used to eat eels and even knows how to cook them. From there they might go on to learn that in the recent past eels were the hugely popular fast­food of the working classes in London, with stalls and Pie and Eel shops (also known as Pie and Mash) selling jellied eels all over the city. The shops haven’t gone. They are still dotted around London and East Anglia where they can be found in many towns. Or they might get to talk with an old fisherman who remembers such sayings as: ‘when the daffodils are out, the eels are about’ that tipped him off to prepare to bring in a writhing harvest. Or maybe they’ll learn about the tradition of eelskin wedding rings from one who still knows how to make them.

Then there’s always the old northwest European story of The Little Shoe, native to the east England settlers of the Danelaw and Viking incursions: an old Cinderella­like tale that hinges on the intervention of an eel not a fairy godmother.10 The story follows a familiar pattern: a teenage girl mistreated and mocked as a menial by her step­ mother and two step­sisters. They force her to work from dawn to dusk doing the dirtiest, most degrading household tasks. But her magical helper turns out to be an eel, who pops up his head from the pool where she weeps, dancing snake­like to and fro to keep upright in the water. It is he who

comforts her and conjures a magical, shining dress in place of her dingy drabs. And as for the eel, well he would like four bushels of the ‘white gold’, salt, thrown into the eel­pond every year.11 She agrees and off she goes…

It is she of course whose foot fits the shoe and who after a year – and a day some say – is wed. She’s living in a castle, a fine lady now, her skivvying days long gone. But the salt! She forgets. She reneges on her promise. She’s far too well off now to give a thought to the eel. But regret follows her ingratitude, for when she gives birth the stepmother seizes the new born, cuts off its little finger and throws the child to the pond: and thus it goes – once, and a second time and then a third.

All three children lost to the pond. Finally, distraught, she remembers the eel, goes weeping to the pond and calls on him. Eventually the angry eel appears but there is nothing he can do till she fulfils her pledge. So she gives the salt and he fetches her three children – but each still with a finger missing. Though, after all is said and done, that has to be preferable to the step­mother’s fate: death by being rolled in a spiked cask!

Our ‘heroine’ forgets. Perhaps so have we. And then again perhaps, with the help of the story, we can start to imagine beyond the management of resources or conservation causes and remember our indebtedness to eels – and perhaps similarly consider the rest of the natural, who are the root of our lives. The story seems to suggest that we forget what we owe the non­human at our peril and at the cost of a future for our children. It begs the question: what are we prepared to give back.

Maybe this tale can stimulate old ecological understandings, what Martín Prechtel has called, ‘the natural function of a much­atrophied organ of human obligation that says we must give gifts to nourish and keep alive what gives us the gift of life.’ Maybe we are being reminded: ‘It is our nature to give gifts.’12 Maybe; or maybe not. One thing is for sure, we have a date this summer at an eel­pond in a vineyard in Essex just up the road from the latest school to want to raise eels. We’ll be there with some elvers. Will anyone bring some salt? Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

1. Richard Schweid, Eel (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p35 2. C.J. Cornish, The Naturalist on the Thames (London: Seeley and Co., 1902) 3. W. Dekker, West Sutherland Fishers Trust report, p19 4. Richard Schweid, Ibid., p16 5. Zoological Society of London fact file on the European Eel 6. Tom Fort The Book of Eels (London: Harper Collins, 2002), p331 7. C.P. Clarke, Collins Creek, (Essex Archaeology and History 24, 1993) p209; B. Crump & S. Wallis, Kiddles, (Essex Journal 27 (2), 1992) p38–42 8. Richard Schweid, Ibid., p159 9. Tom Fort, Ibid., p52­53 10. Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty­ five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap O' Rushes, abstracted and tabulated. (London: David Nutt for the Folklore Society, 1893) p40 11. Our word salary derives from the Latin phrase ‘salarium argentum’ (salt money) which referred to payments of salt made to every Roman soldier 12. Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive, (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012) p377

A mature European eel.

‘Elver Dave’ with his elver fishing net, who catches elvers for the Eels in Schools project

The arrival of elvers at Purleigh Primary School in Essex, a project participant

Sustainable Eel Group is a Europe wide conservation and

Life circle of eel drawing by Salvor Gissurardottir (Wikicommons)

science led organisation working with partner bodies and individuals to accelerate the eels recovery.

www.sustainableeelgroup.com Severn & Wye Smokery Severn & Wye Smokery has organised an active educational and restocking programme for eels, including the Eels in Schools scheme and engagement with the Sustainable Eel Group. http://severnandwye.co.uk/eel­campaign

JPT: 1066 has a totemic significance in our historical consciousness; it's seen as the birth of the nation – a view especially promulgated by the political right. Your novel The Wake seems to follow your other work on ‘England’ by seeking a deeper Englishness, predating Norman invasion and counter to its cultural influence. Why did this period of history attract you?

their history both from the jingoistic right and the multicultural left, and who also make it very clear that they want nothing to do with the far right or any of the idiots on that part of the political spectrum, the better for the nation as a whole. It’s quite possible to have a sense of place and ecology and tradition and continuity without sinking into hostility to outsiders, and I think more of us need to make that clear.

PK: I’m not sure whether 1066 is regarded as the birth of the nation by the political right especially. Is that the case? It seems to me that this strange view is widely held across the spectrum: on the school curriculum, for example. Knowing what I do about it now, it seems astonishing to me. It’s as if the birth of France were dated from 1940, after the Nazis invaded. The English nation had existed for centuries before the Norman invasion.

JPT: In the American environmental movement the native peoples of the continent have provided, for the descendants of European settlers, a mythic/historical source of ideas of how those lands might be inhabited. Ideas ranging from banal and ill­considered appropriations to more sensitive appreciations like those of Gary Snyder.

What mythic role is there for English indigenes, from Palaeolithic traversers of the land bridge to the Anglo­Saxon people? What are the dangers in dancing with this narrative?

I think this strange sense of injustice, even about something that happened thousand years ago, is one of the things that interested me in the period and perhaps led to me writing this book. The English know so little about their early history. Until I started reading up about this period, I had no idea that there was a decade­long guerrilla resistance movement to the Norman invasion after 1066. Why don’t we know this? Why aren’t English children taught about it in schools? Whenever I come across something that appears to be hidden I’m immediately attracted to it.

JPT: There seems to be a pattern in early texts of the British Isles like The Battle of Maldon and Y Gododdin of holding cultural identity in the face of defeat ­ but with 1066 we are encouraged to identify with conqueror rather than the conquered, to follow a continuity of Kings. The feudal division of property post Norman victory seems to have established the concentration of land ownership that still haunts the country today. What kind of conversations do you think we can have about that today nearly a millennium on?

PK: It’s a fascinating question. You’re absolutely right, that we have been encouraged to internalise our oppression. If you wanted to think psychodynamically about it, you could perhaps argue that the imperialism which the English became so good at later in their history was a subconscious reaction to the violent suppression they themselves had suffered in the 11th century. Perhaps this is taking things too far, but it continually fascinates and pains me that the English still seem to believe that 1066 was the founding date of their nation rather than the date of its conquest, which is what it was in reality.

What kind of conversations can we have about this now? Well, I’m glad to see that we’re having one here.

We are in an interesting period of history in England.

I would say there are currently two identifiable mainstream narratives about English history, neither of which I agree with. Firstly there is the traditional Toryish tub­thumping version of Englishness, the England of Wellington and Churchill and great battles and kings and conquests. This is the history of the powerful, seen through the eyes of their court chroniclers.

Then there’s the alternative which the liberal left has posited in recent decades, which is an attempt to demolish Englishness as a narrative altogether and replace it with a historically spurious ‘multicultural Britishness’, in which everything and anything of value to the English is relentlessly ‘deconstructed’ and they are left without a national story to call their own. This is a history built on guilt and shame, and it has little to offer beyond that.

Paul Kingsnorth on England, the Fens and his new novel The Wake.

I think both of these stories have run out of steam.

I’d like to believe we are at a historical moment during which the English can begin to discover a different narrative of their own history, a narrative that is genuinely English, which accepts continuity and tradition, but which also sees us as a people who need to reclaim their sense of self from a dominant ruling class which still runs the country today. Of course, this is probably a naïvely optimistic thought!

JPT: Ideas of political and poetic ecology such as reclaiming our sense of place, acting locally, re­inhabiting our landscapes all support a more regional focus and therefore an engagement in England with English (rather than British) identity. This ecological Englishness is a concept you have written passionately about, and something which I also resonate with. We have some suspect fellow travellers though – from the Kinship of Husbandry through to post­war British fascist organisations and curious ensembles like English Green and Albion Awake… How do you navigate this landscape? What are the paths to English identity that avoid the nationalist trap?

PK: I like the phrase ‘ecological Englishness.’ I think this is crucially important, and in all honestly I think we worry too much about these ‘fellow travellers’. It often seems to me that the left uses the threat of ‘giving succour to the far right’ to conveniently avoid discussing these issues at all.

That’s not to say this isn’t an issue: of course it is.

Narratives of place and belonging are very easy to hijack in that way. But I just don’t think it’s very difficult to make it clear where you stand. I do that myself in Real England. In fact, I think is vital that more of us do that. The more English people who talk about place and belonging, who reclaim

PK: The meaning of indigeneity in the modern world is a fascinating question, and its one I seem to have been stumbling across a lot lately. We had a discussion about precisely this question at last year’s Dark Mountain Festival. I had been talking about the English road protest movements of the early 1990s, which in some ways I thought were a fascinating example of a modern, indigenous English resistance movement. But a woman in the audience suggested that people in England could not really call themselves ‘indigenous’, even if their ancestry here went back to 1066 and beyond, because indigeneity is not simply a description of how long people have been somewhere, but an indicator of how they live there.

I thought that was a very interesting point to make.

Take myself: I can trace my family back in this country nearly 1000 years, and there are clear indications that they went back further than that. In that sense, I can certainly call myself a native Englishman, and I’m happy to do so. But could I call myself indigenous? If I think of my friends in West Papua, in New Guinea, for example, I don’t think I could call myself indigenous in the same way as they do. Not because they have inhabited that land longer than the English have inhabited theirs, but because they inhabit it very differently.

I live a modern life, as the product of an industrial machine, and I could be living much the same life in America or France or Brazil or more or less anywhere now. In that sense, I am in this land but not of it, and that applies to all of us children of modernity. Perhaps indigeneity is really about intimately understanding a place and its stories. If that is the case, there are very few indigenous people left in Europe. And if that in turn is the case, I would come back to the point you made earlier about an ‘ecological Englishness’, which seems to be simply another way of talking about the same thing. How can we be a people that inhabits a place; really understands it, feels part of the bioregion, behaves as if it were only one of the species here? That’s an ecological way of living, and that’s also an indigenous way of being. I aspire to that, though I will never get there.

JPT: When you know something of the novel’s subject matter its title The Wake immediately evokes the guerrilla Hereward ‘the wake’, leader of local resistance to the Norman Conquest, most famous from the fictional rendering in Charles Kingsley’s novel. But other associations are brought to mind – the wake as that which comes after, aftershocks, the trail of a boat in water, the remembrance of the dead – and also wakefulness, of those who are alive to what is actually happening, watchful. What does the title mean to you?

PK: Well spotted! I chose the title for its multiplicity of meanings. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t say any more. I want to avoid the trap of explaining this novel, not least because I’m not entirely sure where parts of it have come from myself. I don’t think works of fiction should be easy, or even necessarily possible, for the rational mind to access in full. That’s part of the joy of creating, and hopefully reading, them.

of our time is that this rampaging industrial machine is now running on its own steam. Democracy can’t contain it, and neither can any other peaceful means we know of. What to do?

Everybody has to find an answer to that question. My novel tries to explore some of the ramifications of trying to answer a similar question a millennium ago. It’s one that has run throughout human history.

JPT: The extract from The Wake published in the first Dark Mountain journal has an evocative setting above a drowned forest, where old ideas are also submerged. The terraqueous terrain of the Fens, the setting for the novel, is known as the historical refuge of Hereward and his fellow resisters – is that the only reason why you chose this area? What contribution has the particular quality of Fenland made to the novel? How does the conflict of wild and ‘tamer’ inform the novel?

PK: I chose the fens for a number of reasons. One of them was that in the Anglo­Saxon period there was a particular class of free landed farmer, known as ‘sokemen’, who were only found in these Eastern counties, and these people seem to have the qualities that I wanted represented by the main character of the book. Then of course there was the presence of Hereward, and the fact that the wild strangeness of the fens seemed to provide me with the kind of natural environment I needed. This story is as much about place as it is about people.

JPT: Recently you have written about the ‘dark ecology’ of Ted Kaczynski, and of the attraction people are finding in the ideas of Deep Green Resistance. An increasing number of concerned individuals are pondering how to act in the face of a rampaging industrial civilization that is apparently un­tameable by regular democratic means and set on murdering most of the more than human world. Some no doubt will choose a path of violence, against property at least, if not people – and you have expressed your own concerns about this. What role(s) do you think the guerrilla will play in the action and imagination of the environment movement this century?

PK: Well, what is a guerilla? What is a terrorist?

These are descriptive terms for people who use violence that is not sanctioned by the state. Of course, before the rise of the state and its claim to a monopoly of violence, these concepts were meaningless in these sense we understand them now.

I’ve not doubt that some people will use violence to try and prevent the worst excesses of industrial society. And why shouldn’t they, given the excesses that society is responsible for every day? Before anyone easily objects to this they should look very hard at where their meat has come from or the source of the gold in their wedding ring or the coltan in their smartphone. We are all enmeshed in violence every day. The stark reality is that most of the time somebody else does it for us and we don’t see the results. Of course, recognising the extreme violence that fuels the everyday workings of an industrial society does not give us carte blanche to do anything we like in the name of opposition to it. This is one of the problems I have with Deep Green Resistance. I think they romanticise violence. I also think their strategy and tactics are unworkable, and their ideological position is way too hard left for me. Still, at the very least they are asking questions that most people are not prepared even to look at.

I think we all need to develop an ethical position on this question. The great moral and ethical dilemma

Hereward cutting his way through the Norman horde. illustration from John Cassell's History of England (1865).

who is thu who is thu i can not cnaw what is angland to thu what is left of angland i spec i spec i spec no man lystans excerpt from The Wake.

Paul Kingsnorth's novel The Wake is 'a story of the collapse of certainties and lives; a tale of lost gods and haunted visions, narrated by a man of the Lincolnshire fens bearing witness to the end of his world.'

It's published by Unbound: http://unbound.co.uk/books/the­wake You can read more of Paul Kingsnorth's work at his website: www.paulkingsnorth.net/

INCIVILIZATION The heroic deeds of Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve.

But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question not difficult to answer.

In the first place, they have been fewer in number. The lowlands of the world, being the richest spots, have been generally the soonest conquered, the soonest civilized, and therefore the soonest taken out of the sphere of romance and wild adventure, into that of order and law, hard work and common sense, as well as—too often—into the sphere of slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed. The lowland populations, for the same reasons, have been generally the first to deteriorate, though not on account of the vices of civilization. The vices of incivilization are far worse, and far more destructive of human life; and it is just because they are so, that rude tribes deteriorate physically less than polished nations. In the savage struggle for life, none but the strongest, healthiest, cunningest, have a chance of living, prospering, and propagating their race. In the civilized state, on the contrary, the weakliest and the silliest, protected by law, religion, and humanity, have chance likewise, and transmit to their offspring their own weakliness or silliness. In these islands, for instance, at the time of the Norman Conquest, the average of man was doubtless superior, both in body and mind, to the average of man now, simply because the weaklings could not have lived at all; and the rich and delicate beauty, in which the women of the Eastern Counties still surpass all other races in these isles, was doubtless far more common in proportion to the numbers of the population. from Hereward: The Last of the English (1 865)

By Charles Kingsley

'To know when to retreat; and to dare to do it.'

The Duke of Wellington, when asked for his opinion on the best test of greatness in a general.

Quoted in William Fraser, Words on Wellington, (1889).

Creeksea cliffs The River Crouch is walled in by flood defences for most of its stretch and there are few places where you can observe the unobstructed process of erosion. Here is one, the Creeksea Cliffs, on the north shore between Althorne and Burnham­on­Crouch. These are clay cliffs tumbling into the river, bringing trees along with them and revealing untouched flint cells to the sky. It's a fossil haunt too apparently, the source of shark teeth and ray fangs, arrowheads and more. We beachcombed for pottery fragments and interesting shells. Near the eastern extremity lay a lamb corpse, its face eaten off.

ˈ

ə

Much has changed in farming practice in East Anglia over the last century, but an invaluable record of how land has been worked in the region is captured in a number of films held by the East Anglian Film Archive. Amongst these are a series of films documenting the farming year made in the 1930s by Mary Field for Gaumont British Instructional Films.

Farming in Spring, Farming in Summer, Farming in Autumn and Farming in Winter were filmed on two farms in Suffolk between 1935 and 1936 and were made for classroom use. Among the locations was Wood Farm at Sibton near Peasenhall, a heavy­land holding of about 120 acres, tenanted by Flloyd Peecock; and a combination of light­land farms near Leiston known as St. Mary's Abbey Farm, Lower Abbey Farm, and Upper Abbey Farm. The tenant here was Arthur Rope, then in his 85th year, although the day­to­day management of the 1,000 acres, farmed as a single unit, was in the hands of his son, Mr. G.A. Rope. Richard Rope, Arthur's grandson, has been able to add information to scenes in the films and name many of the people.

Farming in Spring opens with the young cattle being let out of the yard and leaping for joy in a meadow with St. Mary's Abbey ruins in the background.

Some of Abbey Farm's 30 men then get to work. Mr Carey cleans out the yard, loading the manure into a tumbril, which is taken to a field where individual heaps are made at regular intervals. The manure, or ‘muck’ as it was generally known, is then spread by hand by Mr Spall and Charlie Websdale ploughs it in with a pair of horses pulling a Ransome's TCP plough. Back at the farm, Lacey Smith and Jack Ford prepare food for the sheep. It is taken to the troughs and poured in by the head shepherd, Harry Self, and the sheep rush forward to eat. Will Walker is seen doing some spring ploughing, while Eddie Clarke shows how a sheepfold should be made out of wheat straw and branches from a hedge. A drill, made by

emerging beet plants, removing extra ones so that the remaining plants are regularly spaced with room to grow. This is also called singling, and was necessary as the seed was multi­ germ before the days of the mono­ germ beet seed accurately sown. A thick crop of oats, tares and beans at Sibton is cut for making into silage, followed by Flloyd Peecock with tractor and mower cutting a rather thin crop of hay. The hay is left to dry, then turned with a swathe turner to dry some more.

Finally the hay is made up into cocks as a precaution against rain.

↑ Drilling with three men. The drill was made in the works of

James Smith of Peasenhall. ↓ Charlie Websdale ploughing with a pair of horses. From

Farming in Spring (1936).

up in stooks, or shocks as we call it’. Basil from Essex remembers it with a different term. ‘And you set it all up in traves, some people call them stooks, but we call them traves, and leave it there. And when it was properly dry you could cart it then. They used to say you can cut oats and leave them in the field until they had heard the church bells ring three times ­ that was three Sundays — then you could cart them’. After a suitable time, carting began. Jack continues ‘And then in come the horse and waggons, pitch it up on to the waggon, take it to the stack. Make it into a stack. It had a size bottom about — for a wheat stack — 13 yards by 5 yards. You'd put straw or dried grass on the bottom, keep the corn from getting damp, and you built your stack — which is a skilled job and hard work.’ Basil remembers, ‘All stacks were thatched. There’d be a real thatcher. That was a skilled job, that was a trade years ago that was.’ Jack continues ‘I rather pride myself on my thatching. You want the know­how if you want to keep the water out. That’s what you are up there for, to keep the water out. I'm afraid sometimes when we'd been a long harvest, we didn't be too particular and used to be getting home. Most people would look to find their rent out of that harvest. They got the noble sum of £7 at the end of about a month. £4 of that would go for the rent. The team man probably didn't have to pay any rent, he used to get house rent free.’

Next in Farming in Autumn comes sugar beet: the beet are pulled up using a knife with a small hook on the end, and knocked together to get the earth off, and then the leaves are chopped off. These will be used for cattle feed. The beet are put into heaps, then heaved by hand into a horse­ drawn tumbril which takes its load to a convenient point by a gate where the contents are tipped out and loaded by hand again into a large waggon to be taken to the railway station. Finally a bowler­hatted gentleman on a Fordson tractor ploughs a field — the only sign of a tractor in all these four seasons films. Farming in Winter opens with threshing

Filming the Furrows

James Smyth of Peasenhall, is filled with seed, and pulled by three horses and worked by three men, one to guide the drill by walking alongside operating the steering lever, one sitting on the seed box to look after the horses, and the third walking behind to make sure the grain was going down into the ground properly. Harrowing and rolling scenes follow, then a sequence of broadcast sowing by William Aldred.

Farming in Summer shows some of the 19 sows then kept at Upper Abbey Farm in a section dealing with the care of stock. Two old sheep shearers, the Palmer brothers of Kelsale, who were shearing contractors travelling around Suffolk, are seen at their trade, followed by a sequence of dipping ewes. A horse drawn hoe made by Garrett's of Leiston is seen working through the new sugar beet crop, followed by ‘chopping out’. This manual job involved a man with a hand hoe slowly going along the rows of

by David Cleveland Farming in Autumn contains the busy harvest period: cutting maize, carting beans, the corn harvest, and lifting sugar beet. The wheat harvest sequence, filmed at Sibton, is particularly well covered. First two men scythe round the edge of the field to make way for the binder, and one of them ties the loose wheat with a straw bond, a length of straw wrapped round the sheave and neatly twisted to hold it together. The reaper binder, then goes round the outside of the field in the path made by the scythers, and continues to cut the field in ever decreasing circles. The sheaves, lying on the ground in the wake of the binder, are stood up in shocks, stooks or traves, depending on what part of East Anglia you come from. Jack Leeder, from Norfolk remembered in 1974 ‘After you had cut it you set it

the stacks at Upper Abbey Farm. The tackle used, which belonged to the farm, consisted of a Garrett of Leiston portable steam engine and a 1917 Garrett threshing drum, with an elevator made by E.R. & F. Turner of Ipswich. The old­fashioned portable engine continued in use until the Second World War, and the threshing tackle on into the 1950s. Next the mangolds (mangelwurzel), or cattle­ beet as they were known, are taken from a ‘clamp’, an open­air storage heap covered with earth, for slicing and feeding to cattle. The mangolds are fed by head stockman Lacey Smith into a root cutter driven by a Fairbanks Morse petrol engine.

The roots and other ingredients are mixed together on the barn floor. Finally the bush draining sequence is seen in some detail. After the hedge is cut to provide the brushwood, a network of trenches is dug across the field to be drained, using specially shaped tools as the trenches get deeper. Each of these tools is shown, sometimes in close­up, so that we can see how it worked.

The bottom of the trench is smoothed with a curved tool, which is also cupped, forming a channel along which the water runs. The brushwood from the hedge is pressed into the trench just above the channel, preventing the earth from falling down and blocking the waterway when the trench is filled in. At the edge of the field, where the water runs into a ditch, two or three drainpipes are put in. Finally there is winter ploughing with a Ransomes’ YL horse­ drawn plough. Throughout these films equipment and tools are seen in the hands of men who used them. Today, they can only be seen hanging in museums or shown at events where traditional methods are demonstrated. The proper use of a cumbersome hay knife is seen when Flloyd Peecock cuts slices of silage out of a stack to feed the cattle. ‘The silage has now set into a thick, solid mass, like plug tobacco, brown and juicy. It smells extremely strong but the cattle love it’, says the commentator Mr A.O.D. Claxton, who was deputy secretary for education in East Suffolk, an authority on the Suffolk dialect, and ‘expert collaborator’ for the films.

The farm worker lived close to his work, often in a tied­cottage connected to the farm. He would have a garden to grow vegetables, and there would be a shop and pub within walking distance. Children would go to the local school, which might be in the next village, and many had to walk there, and home again before it got dark in the wintertime.

Some of the luckier children had bicycles. Life in the countryside was organised. This is demonstrated in another film, Farm Factory, released in November 1936. This compares a farm, Upper Abbey Farm, with that of a factory, by way of layout and organisation of the workforce. The management structure of the farm is shown, with G.A. Rope at the head, and his assistants Lacey Smith, head stockman; Will Walker, head fieldsman; and Harry Self, head shepherd, underneath. They in turn had field hands to help them. Growing different crops to keep the land in good order, and replenishing the earth with manure from livestock, was part of the cycle of keeping the land healthy.

the orders for the day. Then the foreman used to come up to the yard where we were, and give us all the orders to carry out. Stockmen, horsemen or anyone used to have the day's orders. We used to do our best to early out whatever he say.’‘It was seven o'clock in the morning till about half past four at night with a little time off for dinnertime’ adds Herbert Smith. Charlie Websdale recounts ‘We used to have to depend on the old bike to get round the farm. When I was a'ploughing I used to ride the horse there, get off, and get to work, then take him and ride home.’

Films Were Made Volume 1 ‘The Region at Work’ A look at films and film makers in the East of England 1896­1996, with chapters on: Industry, Farming, The Coast, Transport, Wartime, & Regional Television Since 1896 people have operated motion picture film cameras in the East of England recording and making films in the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Only a fraction of the films made have survived, but those that have show us what life was like, what film makers were making, and what we were watching and doing. These may be local films, home movies, cinema films, television films, educational films, publicity films etc. This book looks at some of these films and the people behind them, and is based on films preserved in the East Anglian Film Archive. This is a unique and wonderful research collection of material reflecting local history in the form of moving images of the past.

Hardback A4 size, 282 pages, 422 illustrations (28 in colour)

Mary Field at work for Gaumont British Instructional.

All the films were photographed by George Pocknall and Frank Bundy, and directed by Mary Field. Mary Field, a trained teacher, became a filmmaker ‘quite by chance’ after taking an interest in films during her academic studies in Imperial History. In 1927 she joined Harry Bruce Woolfe at British Instructional Films, famous for its Secrets of Nature films which it began making in 1922. Short films of about ten minutes each, these were studies of plant and animal life made for cinema distribution, which specialised in micro­ cinematography. In 1933 British Instructional Films was taken over by a feature film company, and Mary Field and Bruce Woolfe then joined a newly formed organization: Gaumont British Instructional Films. Their main output at GBI, as it was known, consisted of films on biology, geography, hygiene, physical education and science, together with a new series of nature films entitled Secrets of Life. A sister company, Gaumont British Equipments, made 16mm and 35mm projectors available to educational institutions, places where GBI films would be shown. Mary Mary Field released eight films in the series.

Field's eight farming related films were widely Besides the four seasons films, there was distributed. They were made on 35mm film and Wheatlands of East Anglia in 1934 (explaining why prints were available on this gauge. 16mm East Anglia is particularly suitable for growing reduction copies were made for schools that had cereals) followed by Town Settlement (which looks at one of the new 16mm sound projectors and silent Saxmundham, and its place in the farming versions of the films with inter­titles were also community) and, in 1935, This Was England. Farm available for those that could only afford a silent Factory and the four seasons films were released at 16mm projector. All these films may now be the end of 1936. In 1983 the East Anglian Film viewed for free online at the website of the East Archive made a compilation film from this Mary Anglian Film Archive: www.eafa.org.uk.

Field material called To Plough To Sow, assisted with a script by the folklorist and oral historian This article is adapted from David Cleveland’s George Ewart Evans. This film included Films Were Made, a magisterial two­volume book interviews with surviving farm workers of the on the films and filmmakers of the East of Leiston farms ­ Jack Ford, Charlie Websdale, and England between 1896 and 1996.

Herbert Smith. Jack remembered vividly what the days were like. ‘The farmer used to come out in the morning, the foreman used to see him and get

Available upon receipt of cheque for £30 from David Cleveland 48 High Street Manningtree Essex C011 1AJ

Still no­go the Yogi Man ­ C. Fennell When the bunting has faded from pastels to pasty hues and the floral patterned tablecloths have gone over.

When the cupcake stand is chipped by more than vegan chocolate.

When apple day faces a third fruitless season and the cob oven chokes on concrete loaves.

When flaccid fruit is thrown against an attempted acoustic ditty.

The fete worse than death, the farmers’ market full of marked men the swap shop which declines in quality with each turn of exchange.

Community currency currently combusted as kindling.

No cars to share bicycles in need of repair and not a workshop on maintenance for six weeks.

Then sing me your song with its words reaching forward.

Then teach me world café, way of council, open space technology.

Then lead me on a walk of forage and tell me the story of this land.

Then we’ll take our socks off and stamp the clay.

Then we’ll send the little ones on scavenger hunts, get down on our knees to save seed and discuss the benefits of the Steiner School system.

Speak of the consciousness of the heart & the gut, of living with the seasons & the light of the days, of the secret life of plants, the secrets of the soil, animal communion, mystical re­union.

How the homebrew is bubbling in the demi­johns sauerkraut fermenting in the crock jars kefir growing and dividing in a kilner honey­bees dying in a top­bar hive the fox among the chickens the big man throwing his weight around again.

Blues of the

Friday 21 December 2012. Following a Xmas party for the Service Users at Project 49 (at which the Tuppenny Bunters have played a set of covers and festive tunes that include Lionel Bart's 'Consider Yourself' and Kate Bush’s 'Wuthering Heights' ), we finish work for the holiday season. After locking up, a small group of us go in search of a celebrational drink, wandering round the corner and down to Clifftown Parade, overlooking the twinkling lights of Southend Pier and the occasional boat making it's lonely way down the Thames Estuary from the ports of Tilbury, Canvey and Corringham out into the cold darkness of the North Sea. A colleague says that one of the bars has a 'Two for One Happy Hour' offer on, but when we get there the place is empty, so we decide to move on. We stand around for a bit wondering where to go, and I tentatively suggest The Railway Hotel. It's not to everybody's taste, but is only a three minute walk away and will be less rowdy than the high street pubs. There's a reasonable sized crowd when we get there, but it's by no means packed, and the atmosphere is friendly and festive. A bunch of local musicians are jamming some R'n'B numbers in the corner, and there's a fair few children present, most whom are locked into their own worlds on hand­held DS consoles and Playstations, although a few are dancing to the music with their mums. I clock local guitar legend Wilko Johnson standing at the bar having a quiet drink, and discreetly point him out to my colleague...

“Who's Wilko Johnson?”

“You know, out of Dr Feelgood...”

“Who? Never heard of them!”

I explain that Wilko was the driving force behind Dr Feelgood, arguably amongst the most important influences on the mid 1970s music scene . Their stripped back to basics R 'n' B sound (in an era when R 'n' B meant R 'n' B) paved the way for the punk explosion that followed a year or two later at a time when the industry was dominated by overblown 'prog rock' and over­produced 'West Coast' groups like The Eagles and Loggins & Messina... Chris continues to be unimpressed. I shake my head, reflecting that this must be rather like spending the afternoon drinking with a Liverpudlian who is unaware of the significance of The Quarrymen . We get our drinks and find a seat. Whilst my colleagues and a couple at the neighbouring table are trying to sort out a mix­up with a pizza order I hear some familiar jagged guitar tones, and wander over to catch an impromptu set from Wilko, who has joined Dave Woodcock, Geoff Bloss and Dave Dulake on the 'stage' for a version of Long Tall Sally . It's a magical moment, the last time I saw him was playing to a crowd of a couple of thousand at the 'Village Green' festival in Chalkwell Park in the summer, when he was a barely visible dot on a stage several hundred yards in the distance.

This afternoon there are about 20 people watching him recapture a bit of his psychotic, mania­on­wheels, guitarist as machine gunner stage persona. I feel deeply privileged to shake the man's hand when he puts down his guitar and walks back to the bar.

Graham Burnett's Thames Delta Psychogeography Report Number 1; Rhythm, Blues, Punk and Booze...

WILKO Sunday 23 December 2012. Two days later I'm at The Cricketers in Westcliff with James Taylor, Claire White and Ron Bates having an Xmas drink and discussing the Managed Retreat project. I'm still enthusing about Wilko's spontaneous pub performance, and we agree that an article exploring the connections between the Thames estuary and the very particular music scene of South East Essex would make a good piece for the magazine. It would centre on Wilko's own thoughts about the musical, natural and cultural history of Canvey, Westcliff and Southend­on­Sea. Ron has a mutual friend and reckons it wouldn't be too difficult to fix up an interview. I'm fired up by the idea and have too much to drink, eventually making my way to a 'Beatles Convention' at The Railway, featuring Daves Woodcock and Dulake and a roster of Southend's musical regulars, that I barely remember being at until I check out some footage that I later find on my Flip Camera...

Wednesday 9 January 2013. Less than 3 weeks later, the news breaks that Wilko has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and is refusing chemotherapy treatment. He is reported to be 'in good health with no symptoms' at the time of writing, and is planning to go ahead with a tour of Japan and series of 'Farewell' gigs in March before his health begins to fail.The news is a huge shock to the musical community in South East Essex and beyond, and the chance of an interview for Managed Retreat doesn't seem so likely now. I decide to reconfigure my article into

something less structured and specific, a kind of personal psychogeographical drift through the time and space surrounding the human­made soundscape of 'The Thames Delta' that has been part of defining this bioregion, as well as my own relationship with the town I have lived in since 1969. Rather than providing a linear history, this is an attempt to capture a less definable and fragmentary 'essence' of a musical landscape in which the figures of Wilko and The Feelgoods float as almost shamanic presences amongst places like The Kursaal, Canvey Island, Southend Sea Front, The Top Alex, Focus Youth Club, Two Tree Island and The Queens Hotel.

The Feelgoods were of course at the heart of the 'Pub Rock Boom' with which South East Essex is often associated, but there are other narratives to be captured and recorded, those of cultures and musics that were in fact oppositional, contrarian or just plain indifferent to much of what The Feelgoods perhaps unwitttingly spawned ­ the stiffling conformity of unoriginal third rate R 'n' B bands playing in practically every bar in the area ­ as they in turn were to the prog rock pomp and TOTP blandness they reacted against.Some of what I've used is from documentation, albeit through the often less than objective lens of local fanzines and contemporary interview recordings. Some of it is from personal recollections and fragments of conversations, and as such may be subject to false memory syndrome – did these incidents actually happen as I remember them (if indeed they happened at all??) ­ what versions do others have of these stories and events that have an equal claim to be 'The Truth'? What follows is part of a work in progress, a tugging at just a few threads in a very dense and rich tapestry, and is inevitably To Be Continued....

Thames Delta Canvey Island

“Standing, watching towers burning, at the break of day” Dr Feelgood, 'All Through The City'

Permaculture Association

“I was born here, which means I was born below sea level. I think this effects the consciousness profoundly. It's a kind of submarine consciousness I think, and, urm, I live up on top of the hill now...Because of the flood you see, 1953. People used to use this flood as a kind of historical reference point, like The War. 'Was that before The War, was it after The War?' Here of course it's 'Was that before The Flood? Was it after The Flood?' Biblical stuff.”

Wilko Johnson, 'Oil City Confidential' “1953. I opened my bedroom curtains at the age of 6. I saw a rowing boat going by, which I thought was a tad odd. Our neighbour was screaming at us through the wall, and we realised at that time that we had been flooded.”

John Martin, 'The Big Figure', 'Oil City Confidential' Jools ­ “If I was to go to Canvey Island – I like that part of that Essex Coast – A magical, strange place – What would you recommend I go and see?”

Wilko ­ “Well you should go up onto the sea wall, and look out across the Thames Estuary, cos it don't matter what time of the year, or what the weather or anything, it is always beautiful, it moves me every time I see it. I been all around the world, I've seen some beautiful places, but... The Thames Estuary...”

Jools ­ “I would agree with you, it's one of the most beautiful, magical places there are” Jools Holland interviewing Wilko Johnson on 'Later with Jools Holland' 30/9/2011

Savage Heart Part 1 "Urm, we've been invited to play the Southend Pier Festival. It's kind of unique 'cos its right at the end of Southend Pier, just over a mile long, so we'll basically be playing in the sea, could be quite an interesting show. But Southend's also got a special significance for us because there was a whole kind of rock n roll scene that came out of the 1970s that had an influence on me personally, such as Dr Feelgood, Kursaal Flyers... It's also connected to London by the A13 which played quite an interesting role in our lives" The Jim Jones Revue, 'Savage Heart Pt 1' Southend Sounds 76 March 6 2013 – Sad news. Alvin Lee dies unexpectedly following complications during routine surgery. His was one of the very first live performances I ever saw, in early 1976. He was the 'headline act' at an open air festival organised by SAGA (Southend Action Group for Arts) at Southend Football Ground a few yards away from my house. The 'compere' for the event was John Peel, and also on the bill were Fairport Convention, Budgie, Magna Carta (who I don't think actually played), The Dave Bromberg Band and The Micky Jupp Band. A few weeks before the festival some local Christians came knocking at at our house with a petition calling to have it banned as there would be 'naked people fornicating in the street', which I quite liked the sound of. My mum told them to clear off and take their petition with them.

Disappointingly, No naked people fornicated in the street before, during or after the festival to the best of my recollection.

The Top Alex 86­Mix, 7/3/1981 ­ “Another music in the same old kitchen; A few months ago I was moaning about The Top Alex being a hang out for unimaginative old R'n'B musicians: These days I generally wish it would return to being that rather what it has now become most weekends: A haven for boring shitty old heavy metal bands with such macho, oppressive monikers like Basstile (sic), Torture, Crusifiction (sic) and others which I can't be bothered to recall.... Tonight however made an extremely welcome change as (relatively) new local band 86­Mix made their second public performance since changing their collective title from Dark Deeds On A Lonely Bridge.Nervousness was apparent at the beginning of their set, which is understandable playing in such a traditionally reactionary venue, but this seemed to vanish as quite few members of the audience began to take an interest in this new local talent. However it must be noted that a majority of the jaded old head banging regulars soon disappeared off to the bar, presumably they felt that their safe little rut was being threatened... However they needn't have worried for long as the very clever bouncers prevented them from playing a second set later on with hinted threats of physical violence, or so I am told as I had to leave by this time... Numbers performed which particularly stick in my mind include 'The Party', 'DDLB', 'Your Current Hero' and 'Watch This Film', which vocally bears a slight resemblance to The Fall's 'Like To Blow'. Indeed The Fall make a useful reference point when trying to describe 86­ Mixes' sound, as do various other influences, reggae, Gang Of 4, Captain Beefheart, PiL, Joy Division, etc, although the end product of noises is definitely their own.An interesting and maybe even danceable alternative to the usual old dull, reactionary rockism which infests the Southend music scene like a case of terminal cancer, watch out for their future gigs...” Gig review, New Crimes fanzine issue 4, 1981

Ian Staples & Jon Seagroatt at the Tech College

Red Square “Comprising of Ian Staples (electric guitar), Jon Seagroatt (bass clarinet) and Roger Telford (drums and percussion), the group played extremely loud and intense free­form jam sessions supporting other like minded musicians such as Henry Cow, Lol Coxhill, etc.

Red Square also played regularly at The Queens, a dilapidated hotel in Westcliff­on­Sea, where, according to a local urban myth, their set drowned out a concert by Cliff Richard, who was playing half a mile away at another venue” Red Square, 'Thirty Three' album sleeve notes, FMR Records Ian Staples ­ A couple of other things I've remembered ­ Red Square put on an event called The Spontaneous Arts festival round 75, 76. David Toop amongst others did something at it and the event took place in 3 different places. Dave Goldwater also had a band with Trevor (Not Taylor, I can't remember his surname ), that was heavily influenced by Red Square. Red Square also played a few times at Zero 6 much to the consternation of the audience” Graham Burnett ­ was it Trevor Phillip? I still occasionally bump into him in the Cricketers and see his brother Audi around alot, he's always taking photos of gigs in The Railway. Also do you remember John Shaw? Lived in Wenham Drive and played the soprano sax, had wild corkscrew hair and John Lennon glasses, he used to lend me his Albert Ayler records and albums of sitar music.

Ian Staples – YES, that's right I just couldn't remember his name yesterday. He came to the Red Square gig when we played in Southend a couple of years ago. It was really good to see him. I can't remember John Shaw but I think Jonny does.

Facebook discussion, Jan 2013

Adam Easterbrook on a Dunwich horror

Focus Youth Centre Sickies/Sinyx/Icons, 15/12/1980 ­ “Sickies were on first... I can imagine a scene from The Roxy back in '76 bearing a strong resembalance (sic) to this sort of thing... Under rehearsed, half formed songs occasionally emerging from the general quagmire of noise, shouting and feed back. Bits and pieces I did recognise included a very undisciplined 'Janie Jones' and I think another Clash song, but I can't remember what...This was the second gig The Sinyx had played without Vints, who has left to join The Nihilist Corps and in my opinion they played very well considering stand­in drummer John Dee had only joined that evening. As usual they went down very well with the crowd, playing all the old favourites, '925', 'Mausoleum', 'Bullwood Hall', etc.Next on were The Icons, who only did about 2 ½ songs before the whole thing collapsed into a slanging match between them and The Sinyx.

Something about Paul Brunt putting Filf's guitar out of tune or something. Anyway the outcome was that The Icons refused ever to play again (and subsequently split up) and The Sinyx began a radical transformation of group members, which should be finally gigging in March...”

Gig review, New Crimes fanzine issue 3, 1981

The Stripey Zebras “As a teenager I felt very different from other people and owing to my sexual orientation felt very much an 'outsider'. However when I joined the Stripey Zebras, literally not being able to play a note on the bass guitar, I felt accepted and even a little pleased to be 'outside' society. I felt comfortable with like­minded people and began to feel a bit more comfortable and confident with my gay sexual orientation. I felt free to contribute my inherent campness and it was accepted ­ to a point. I remember being delighted when I saw Alien from The Sinyx wearing eyeliner and despite being an obvious heterosexual man could be rather fey and camp on stage, a true inspiration. In the Southend Music 'post punk' scene I felt part of something and realised that sexual orientation was no big thing...”

Stephen Dobson in conversation with the author, Jan 2013

There was nothing there to drink It was all a poxy stink Where? At the sore eyes party, at the sore eyes party There was a hot fire It made us all perspire I didn't like the atmosphere And I wished I wasn't there Where? At the sore eyes party, at the sore eyes party Steve Pegrum The music was so bad Robert Foster: “What was the community like?”

The worst I've ever heard Steve Pegrum: “In Southend I guess a central focus was always We had to leave early the High Street and in particular an area in the local precinct But no­one seemed too sorry called ‘the flower beds’. Through the years, many generations Where? At the sore eyes party, at the sore eyes party” of Southend’s alternative youth would congregate there, and 'Sore Eyes Party', The Stripey Zebras, 1980 it’d be a great place to meet up where you’d exchange information on what gigs were coming up etc. You could then Two Tree Island walk down the High Street to Nasty’s or Projection records to Summer 1977 – I have very vague recollections of an open air 'festival of free improvisation' at which Martin Hardy, Steven Gee get the latest releases and maybe a fanzine, then walk to and I apparently performed 'experimental music' using acoustic clothes shop Graffiti’s and then pop into a pub. Different guitars and ad hoc percussion instruments. Martin's memories are nights of the week would have different events – the local also hazy, but he says he has photographs somewhere. I asked Jon youth club ‘Focus’ was brilliant on a Monday and would be a Seagroatt and Ian Staples of Red Square if they were involved with major punk gathering point for many years. 90% of all the putting on this event, but they reckon it was nothing to do with local bands passed through there. You’d have the main club them. Possibly it was organised by a group who were based around up the road in Rayleigh – Crocs, where they’d have an 'It's Surreal Thing', a squatted shop opposite The Cricketers that alternative club night on a Saturday, and during the week would put on big name bands as well as local acts. In ’77 The served as an art gallery, music studio, gig venue, meeting place and information exchange. The mainstays of this collective were a guy Queen’s Hotel in Westcliff was a major punk haven, putting called Martin, who gave me a Stockhausen LP, and another guy on The Damned + The Adverts, 999, Generation X and called Stefan, who claimed to have been present in the studio when Slaughter and The Dogs. The venue would continue well in 'Never Mind the Bollocks' was being recorded, and to have witnessed to the ‘80s until it was eventually burnt down. There were Chris Spedding playing Steve Jones' guitar parts on the album. Also many great local pubs that were punk friendly, such as The involved in IST were a bunch of lads from Southend High School Cliff and my own favourite, The Grand in Leigh­on­Sea.” who'd put on a concert of 'avant garde sounds' at the Balmoral Robert Foster: “What are you favourite memories of the Community Centre in Salisbury Avenue, and who we'd connected time?” with via a hand written poster we'd stuck up on the shop notice Steve Pegrum: “Taking the first tentative steps in PVC board appealing for 'like minded musicians who are sick of Dr trousers and ripped up blazer down the High Street and Feelgood, pub rock and boring R'n'B. Influences include Soft meeting up with other local punks, whilst simultaneously Machine, Derek Bailey and Tangerine Dream'. avoiding any of the local people whom hated punks and wanted to kill you (there seemed to be many in the early Bank Holiday weekend August 1979 – Equally opaque are our days!). Realizing that others felt the same as you – playing recollections of the Scooter Rally held on the Island at the height of early, shambolic and ecstatic gigs with the Bleeding Pyles – a the Mod Revival. Martin thinks he remembers that “there was a ska terrible but euphoric racket! Speaking to other punks and beat band playing in the tent. For whatever reason (drink fuelled I getting a sense of ‘solidarity’. Making the first forays to think) it got ugly in there and one guy had a broken bottle smashed London, then getting the milk train back from Liverpool into his face and there was blood everywhere. I went back to my tent, Street. Early erotic encounters in the doorway of the local as did some others”. I don't remember this at all. However, indelibly Wimpy Bar. Going to Crocs and dancing to an amphetamine etched into my consciousness is the image of a well known local sulphate inspired inner beat that seemed to fuse perfectly skinhead stripping naked apart from his pork pie hat and shinning with The Cramps and Iggy singing The Passenger. Getting up the central pole of the marquee whilst The Leepers were playing... our faces immortalized in local photo booths at Woolworths.

Running through the underpass and into the eternal night…”

The Spread Eagle December 1981 – We organised a gig featuring bands associated with New Crimes fanzine at the Spread Eagle pub in Victoria Avenue. Booked to play were Stripey Zebras, The Get and 86 Mix from Southend, Cold War and What Is Oil? from Hornchurch, and The Apostles, a heavily political punk band from London that took themselves very seriously. Their uncompromising lyrics advocated Direct Action, class war and armed confrontation with 'The State', and their record sleeve artwork included instructions for squatting empty council properties and how to make home made incendiary devices.When I booked the venue, which was only a couple of hundred yards up the road from my house, I told the pub landlord it was going to be ‘a pop concert’, and that ‘rock bands that young people like' would be playing. On the afternoon of the gig he rang me in a state of panic as The Apostles and their entourage of hardcore anarcho­punk squatters who’d come down from Stoke Newington and Hackney were camped out on the pavement outside waiting for the pub to open (it was back in the days when licensing laws meant pubs had to shut after lunch and reopen in the evening), and I had to give somewhat nervous assurances that everybody would behave themselves…The gig was a huge success however, and despite the landlord’s misgivings about The Apostles and their followers he ended up on stage with them jamming along on drums, and finished up the evening by inviting his teddy boy mates up from the bar downstairs and doing a few rock n roll numbers…

The found­footage film is a small but burgeoning sub­ genre of horror cinema, the most famous being the lower­than­low budget The Blair Witch Project, which took the world by storm back in 1999. Other films have followed in its path, some adding successfully to the genre; the post 9/11 Manhattan dinosaur disaster movie Cloverfield (2008) & Spanish zombie film with a twist [REC] (2007) being two of the most prominent to date.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is generally accepted as being the first to utilise ‘found­footage’, an odd coupling between 1970s ‘snuff movie’ urban legends & the home video camera (an initial premise best exploited in 1993’s Man Bites Dog). But it wasn’t until the influential but little known The Last Broadcast (1998) & the ensuing worldwide interest resulting from Blair Witch that the found­footage film as a genre really began to take off. These range from the sublime but diminishing creeps of The Paranormal Activity series (2007 ­ present) & the deft daftness of Norway’s Trolljegeren (2010), to a raft of predictable demonic possession/exorcism­gone­wrong films like The Last Exorcism (2010) & The Devil Inside (2012).

British additions to the genre are scarce to the point of non­existence, which seems at odds with the country’s reputation for being one of the most haunted in the world. Michael Axelgaard and Matthew Holt’s Hollow (2012) attempts to redress this, with a film that tries valiantly but ultimately fails to escape from the long dark shadows of its more successful predecessors. Beginning with a Police evidence caption (a technique first seen in Cloverfield) from the fictitious ‘East Anglia’ force, Hollow follows a small party of fairly unlikeable young people heading into the wilds of Suffolk for a weekend visit to a dead relative’s cottage. Fortunately for us, one of their number has seen fit to bring along his video camera to record this trip to the English countryside.

So far, so clichéd.

Close to their accommodation is an ancient hollow tree, large and forbidding, around which many local myths have accumulated, relating to a number of deaths over the centuries. According to legend, the tree has an uncanny ability to entice lovelorn couples to hang themselves from its creaking branches, like so much unhappy strange fruit. I really wanted this film to work and, occasionally, it does. The East Anglian locations are a nice touch, especially the area around the lost village of Dunwich, a strip of coastline well known to fans of M.R. James, as well as the legends regarding Black Shuck.

There are a couple of pleasingly effective set pieces (an ill­advised cliff top search and a walk down a lonely country lane in the middle of the night both work well), but suspending one’s disbelief for the duration of the film is difficult. Sadly, some of the acting is as wooden as the titular tree, which really lets Hollow down. The main characters are all either disagreeable or unbelievable, making identification with any of the protagonists unlikely from the viewer’s perspective. When the inevitable occurs, it’s hard to really care.

Which is a shame because East Anglia, with its rich history of witches, black dogs and spectral visitations, is surely one of the best English locations for a truly scary horror movie. Unfortunately Hollow is not that film.

The east of England in the Gough Map of 1360.

Something of Prydain in 1065.

Under the viking 'yoke' at the end of the first millennium

A Vision of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson They want to build an airport in the estuary sink earth into water to meet air descending and the element of fire will live in their machines providing thrust and lift.

And the machines will float against the sky like debris across our eyes and the exhalation of their furnaces will echo down to us and feathered wings must be displaced likewise seal beaches and wrecks and they'll skywrite their gases in trails and von Karmann forms but their message will remain hidden an undecoded script penned fast across the firmament in dissappearing inks.

The Estuary in Winter

When Country Life published a guide to the English counties in 2003 and compared them, they gave Essex 0 out of 10 for landscape value. These paintings are an attempt to challenge that cruel criticism of Essex culture and landscape.

Southend­on­Sea has given Britain a unique voice, and a language: Estuarine. Southend’s proximity both to London and to the English Channel, makes it a 'borderline territory', on the edge, in which it is always wise to look to the past and to the future: to Eastend jollies, to metropolitan values as well as to utopian ideals.

Stephen Jordan

ESSEX IS this super abundant wetland edge (receding), a raised walkway separating salt from fresh to brackish dyke waters intermingled by sluices. Environments for residents and migrants in their seasons. Inside the edge is drained but endangered by rising seas, inundating surges from history and of uncertain futures. Fishing, farming, ancient woodlands (some saved by petition), hunting parks, the inland low hills, rivers, watersheds, islands made from glacial deposits, sands, gravels and brickearths ­ the soft edge of this archipelago of 5000 islands.People of origins when the edge connected across the now sea, left shellfish deposits. Rivers saw seaborne visitors, raiders and battles. Peasants revolted, artists and anarchists communed, plotlands came at the margins ­ some left for a biodiverse synthesis of domestic and wild until the balance emerged decades later.Flat and open to winds and light, sunrises on horizon over sea. Land with a sometimes arid designation, suitable for fruit and seedsmen, the rivers trading ­ traditional and illicit: customs and military posts, and industrial hinterlands. Estuarine speaking ‘boys and girls’ diluting the local disappearing ‘Dengie type dialects’ in the “anthropecene” era that sediments out polymer wastes.

ESSEX IS AND IS MORE was prompted by Essex mentions in recent nature writings and Robert Mcfarlane talking at the Royal Geographic waxing lyrical of Essex and its wildlife as the conclusion to a round the archipelago writing investigation of ‘is there wild in these islands?’.

References: Robert Macfarlane The Wild Places, Dennis Hardy Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England, Richard Mabey Weeds; L. Dudley Stamp County Survey 1939; Oliver Rackham Woodlands of south east Essex; Roger Deakin Wildwood.

Go to Dunton Plotlands (Langdon) Visit www.scrumpin.org.uk.

Ron Bates gets his feet wet in Essex WALLASEA WHO'S RETREAT/ RESTITUTION/ RECLAIM ?

We can look to prior maps of our rivers, creeks and marshlands to gain an idea of what could be called the ‘advance’ ­ the drainage. The Chapman and Andre map of 1777 illustrates the extent of marsh around the Crouch /Broom Hill (the Roach) rivers area and about Wallasea Island in particular. The first Ordnance Survey of 1819 confirms this as desolate habitat, used mostly for wildfowling and seasonal pasturage. The present OS however shows the seawall edged containment of previous marsh from the tidal flows, the land now drained, agricultural.Wallasea is one part of a grand extension of reclaimed sea and marsh that snakes around a coastal and riverine region that has been ravaged by intensive farming. But Wallasea is also a place where the tide is turning, land offered back – but Industrially.

It’s not been permitted a natural self­ managed reclaim breach, as at Old Hall, here instead the corporate mind of environment and conservation has required a £4m construction site approach. Yellow machine orange flashing lighted moulding of tunnelled waste from the city, to ‘scape the land before a breach is permitted. There will be ‘apps’ to this new with centre creation, its regulated bike tracks, walkways, trinket trove proofs of attending and not so junky refreshments, with occasional kayaking of the nearby tidal flows. Why so bitter that it will provide habitat so that the surrounding abundant seasonal and permanent flora and fauna may wish to move to it. This once quiet edge of land, this drained isles sea wall a Canvey sized walk around that homed good numbers of adder, corn bunting and birdsfoot trefoil with harrier aloft weaving the dykes. This goes, the elemental walkway goes.

Corporate management comes with value added ‘finance’ speak, selling this as real wild

zone so buy into it, visit it.No self managed retreat to be seen to develop in nature`s way over time, retreat to the prior to drained landscape.The Thames Roach Crouch Blackwater edgeland seawall walkway, wild on one side ­ brackish dyked boundary ­ to intensive inland agribusiness the other.

Meades’s ‘Joys of Essex’ film talks of the Hadleigh Colony’s jetty silted out of use.

Hadleigh Castle previously had a jetty for boat approach, shows how much retreat is to come to our tectonically tilting downwards­eastern edge of these isles.

"Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps." from Walking (1863) by Henry David Thoreau.

Advertisements Page Other publications you may enjoy An Antidote to Indifference a tributary of caughtbytheriver.net The Cunningham Amendment Anarchist art & entertainment ­ a restricted circulation. We'd prefer to print ourselves like this. Post them money ­ £3 say.

TCA Room 6, Tangleford House, The Street, Bawdeswell, Norfolk NR20 4RT The Idler an annual periodical that campaigns against the work ethic and promotes liberty, autonomy and responsibility. idler.co.uk

Permaculture & Forest Garden Design Permaculture diploma tutor, Permaculture courses.

Design & Illustration

The Land an occasional magazine covering issues relating to land rights, rural life, agriculture, sustainable development and land access. www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/

Permaculture courses and books promoting positive solutions for sustainable ecological living.

http://spiralseed.co.uk/

Films Were Made Volume 2 ‘Local History’ A look at films and film makers in the East of England 1 896-1 996

The Apricot Centre for sustainable living

with chapters on Educational films, Sponsored films, Making Films at Home, with six chapters on films made in the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.

A small eco-venue in North Essex, on a 4acre organic fruit farm nr Manningtree. We research/provide training & projects for the community on the theme of sustainable living - People, Food, Energy & the Land.

We offer courses on the farm, and work in schools on similar themes. The Apricot Centre & organic farm is a living demonstration of the transition principles it actively promotes.

You can call us on 01 206 23045 or email info @ apricotcentre.co.uk.

Acid mods w/acoustic guitars, or well-dressed psychfolkies? Who cares? We look mint & sound even better.

So bin offthe quiff, lose the deck shoes & TIGHTEN UP

www.apricotcentre.co.uk/

Hangover Sq, London · facebook.com/ofarrowehill

Not on the Isle of Grain not in the estuary You can close Southend too if you like

No Sizewell C in fact no Sizewell thanks.

No new nuclear at Bradwell we don't want the waste either

The East Anglian Film Archive, the first Regional Film Archive in England, was established in 1 976 as an educational resource for the future by its visionary first Director, David Cleveland, who ran it until his retirement in 2004.

The collection comprises about 1 2,000 hours of film and up to 30,000 hours of videotape. The content mainly relates to the East of England region (Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk). It also includes collections of national and international scope. All of the material is intended to be for educational and cultural use. www.eafa.org.uk

“Films Were Made – Local History”, the companion volume to the book p.1 3, this puts non fiction films made in the region in the context of local history and their value as research material. The motion picture films in the East Anglian Film Archive are now being digitised in house for wider access, though since the Archive was formed in 1 976, the films have been used extensively on television and at film presentations in the region.This book is a must for all those who want to know what a regional film archive is all about, and for local historians and television researchers who want to know what exists, and has been made, about each county in the East of England. They will be surprised by the huge range of films and variety of content, as well as learning about the film makers themselves. The East Anglian Film Archive contains an astonishing look back at the last century, and what was filmed.

Hardback A4 size, 352 pages, 500 illustrations (1 8 of which are in colour) Price £27 Available upon receipt of cheque for £30 from David Cleveland 48 High Street Manningtree Essex C011 1 AJ Want to stay in touch with Managed Retreat?

Visit: managedretreat.blogspot.co.uk Send parcels, carefully concealed cash & incenidary ideas to: James Piers Taylor 22 Saltcoats South Woodham Ferrers Essex CM3 5LE SSAE guarantees reply.

Come, Brethren of the water, and let us all assemble, To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble; For we shall rue it, if''t be true, that Fens be undertaken And where we feed in Fen and Reed, they'll feed both Beef and Bacon.

They'll sow both beans and oats, where never man yet thought it, Where men did row in boats, ere undertakers brought it: But, Ceres, thou, behold us now, let wild oats be their venture, Oh let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter!

Behold the great design, which they do now determine, Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermine: For they do mean all Fens to drain, and waters overmaster, All will be dry, and we must die, 'cause Essex calves want pasture.

Away with boats and rudder, farewell both boots and skatches, No need of one nor th'other, men now make better matches; Stilt­makers all and tanners, shall complain of this disaster, For they will make each muddy lake for Essex calves a pasture.

The feather'd fowls have wings, to fly to to other nations; But we have no such things, to help our transportations; We must give place (oh grievous case) to horned beasts and cattle, Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle.

Powte's Complaint (c.1611) by an anonymous author and sometimes attributed to the 'Fenland Tigers', this ballad was included by William Dugdale in his History of Imbanking and Draining (1662).

The skies give succour or they withhold it; and whatever their whim, for the countryman the eternal promise is still vivid in the soft rainbow that spans the fields. For the rainbow over the battered ark, like Adam's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, is one of the several Bible stories that come very near the heart of things for him.

He it is who still actually bears the burden of Adam's fall from grace, and for him the rainbow is still knit with the hues of god's mercy.

I remember coming upon a memorial tablet in a Fenland church commemorating the floods that had devastated the district in the years 1613, 1614, and again in 1670.

Surely, complained the author of the quaint rhyme: 'Surely our sins were tinctured in grainne.

May we not say the labour was in vaine, Soe many washings still the specks remaine.'

In the face of such continued punishment out of the relentless skies the rainbow itself seemed little better than mockery. But not for long. The countryman know better than that.

'Heavens face is clear, though the Bowe appeare Reader nere fear: there is no arrow neare.' from Miles from Anywhere (1944) by C. Henry Warren.

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed (except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has in fact made the landscape.

Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere, rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are not conspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy people, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather a gross man, believes these races of reeds are his.

But if he is a man of sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, he says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of increase. We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their cargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his neighbour’s land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his showers elsewhere. But the great thing is the view. A well­appointed country­house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his­ ­he had the pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But the bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to death. from Rushes and Reeds (1914) by Alice Meynell.

"that diverse were set on work by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden to make trenches for the draining, that 300 persons came to the workmen, and Harrison, Gibson and Moody threatened to kill the workmen: and Brown, Stockwell, and William Scott told them if they would leave their work that would appease the multitude; or else they might go on at their peril: that labourers were hurt; 8 wheelbarrows, 180 deal boards, planks, many shovels, spades, pickaxes, and other materials and instruments were burnt. That one Mr Hawthorne was thrown into the river, and kept in with poles a great while; that they cried out, "Drown him! Kill him! Break his arms of legs!" That James Moody, Harrison, Henry Scott, and Edward Gibson did cry out, "Throw him into the river! Break his arms and legs!" Others were beaten with dry blows, Hawthorne's face was hoodwinked with a cloak or coat, and so cast into the river, and Richard Scott and others laid hands on him, and struck and beat him; but bid them not to duck him over head least he should be drowned, but rather to break his arms or his legs, and so let him go; and some of the rioters poured water in at the necks of some of the workmen; and one run at the deponent with a drawn knife and cut his clothes, and some cried out, "Cut his throat!

Break his legs!" and made them swear never to come there again. They set up a gallows and threaten to hang such of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden's men as would come thither again. The women assembled themselves to the number of 200 in 1629 diverse days and times, and threw down banks and works, and burned instruments and tools." from Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (1886) edited by S. R . Gardiner.