Ghost Species

Justin knew Methwold Hythe very well, since he had been working there on and off for nearly a decade. Justin is a photographer who is fascinated by people of East Anglia – rabbit catchers, reed cutters, eel fishermen – whose rural ways of life have been brought to the brink of extinction by changes in the landscape. He calls them ‘the forgotten people of the flatlands’, though he also thinks of them as ‘ghosts’. He has taken around 14,000 photographs, all on colour slide film; of these, he is satisfied with about eighty, and he is proud of perhaps a couple of dozen.

Among his different types of ghost, Justin is most interested in East Anglia’s family farmers – the agrarianists and smallholders who still muddle by on a modest acreage. Until the twentieth century, the agrarian tradition in East Anglia was strong: thousands of family-owned farms existed, worked by people whose craft and local knowledge had been acquired over centuries and passed down through generations.

But then, in the first half of the 1900s, came the mechanization of British farming. The application of the internal combustion engine to agriculture meant that the horse was usurped by the tractor, that the boundaries of the village exploded and that the number of people required to work the land was enormously reduced. When the drive to maximize productivity began in the years before the Second World War, the flatness of East Anglia made it an ideal landscape for conversion to big-field or ‘prairie’ cultivation. Now, very few small farms are left in the Fens. Those that have survived are islanded by the landholdings of the mega-farms which now dominate. The rest have vanished: driven to extinction by competition with agribusiness, by the tangled demands of farming regulation, by climate change and by the lack of a younger generation willing to take over their running.

A mile or so west of Methwold Hythe, on Broad Drove, Justin stopped the van by a high hedge of hawthorn and ash trees. ‘Let’s walk from here,’ he said. The wind was still strong, and it stunned the skin of my hands and face. I followed Justin down a muddy track, past a blue boiler-suited scarecrow that was sitting astride a rusty bicycle, and into a ramshackle farmyard. There were five big barns, a mobile home and a lean-to shed on to which twenty-four spanners had been screwed so that they spelled out A W VINCENT. Two of the barns were open-fronted and they were filled with a slew of objects: rusted pitchforks, seed drills, grease tins, pieces of timber, tyres, an old refrigerator and enamelled signs from the 1940s and 1950s exhorting you to feed your dog on shapes! and buy goodyear: signs of the times! Nailed to the outside of one of the barns was a series of what looked like metal ribcages. They were, I realized, the latticed iron seats of old tractors and drill machines, polished to a shine by years of use. The only new thing in sight was a tractor: bright scarlet, black-wheeled and shiny. It seemed incongruous, like an outsize child’s toy.

This was Severall’s Farm, a twelve-acre smallholding farmed by Arthur Vincent and Henry Everett, both in their sixties. They knew Justin well and didn’t mind him walking their land. Down by one of the stripfields, we found Arthur. He was pulling and banding leeks. ‘Cold work,’ he said. ‘I used to swear I’d never be dealing with winter crops, only now I don’t have a choice.’

‘Just head on out, go where you want to,’ he said, waving south. So we walked on, past a spear-forest of dead Jerusalem artichoke stems, ten feet high and bristling in the wind, and past a derelict barn – a ‘tabernacle’, in the language of the Fens – whose roof was being prised off by fingers of ivy. Past acres of muddy field containing stripped Brussels sprout stalks and smashed carrots.

Out by the southern hedge boundary of Severall’s Farm, we discovered a rural riddle. Two blue plastic children’s chairs had been placed facing one another, as though their occupants had once been in conversation. Nettles had grown into and through the lattice of the seats, binding them into place. Here, as at the tabernacle, the impression was of the wild Fen reasserting itself: fingers of vegetation reaching up to draw these human structures back down into the ground.

Near the chairs, we found a hole between two elder trees and ducked through it, then made our way north-east up the hedge line, into the wind and towards the Hythe itself. We flushed out a pair of deer and they raced off in synchronized bounds, before dropping down into the cover of a shallow dyke. The white winter sunlight lit up the east-facing sillion of the ploughed fields. I had the feeling that comes from keeping to the edges of an open landscape: hints of a poacher’s nerves; the excitement of concealment and faint subterfuge.

Away to our south, perhaps 300 yards across a field ploughed into corduroy lines, the field boundary was defined by a row of big old ash trees, their trunks and boughs shaggy with ivy. I thought of H.J. Massingham, the English writer who flourished between the two world wars, and who was, like Adrian Bell and Henry Williamson, motivated by an anxiety at the disappearance of rural English life. Massingham’s response was a series of politically unsteady but often beautiful books about nature and the English countryside, which advocated the preservation of the social unit of village, of small-scale husbandry and of rural crafts and skills.

Massingham was an eccentric figure, and among his eccentricities was a loathing of ivy, whose presence he saw as a sign of uncared-for land. ‘The axe,’ he said of ivy, ‘is the best approach to it’, and he took to carrying a hatchet with him while he walked. In the end, however, it was ivy that did for Massingham. In 1952, out clearing ivy from trees near his garden, he fell on to a rusty scythe that was hidden in the undergrowth and wounded his leg. The wound turned septic, the leg had to be amputated and Massingham died soon afterwards.