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of the Fens. While Jacob Crick spears his last eels by Stump Corner and listens not just to the creaking of his mill sails but to the creaking of his ageing bones, Thomas Atkinson buys, little by little and at rock-bottom prices, acres of marsh and peat-bog along the margins of the Leem. He hires surveyors, drainage and dredging experts. A confident and far-seeing man, a man of hearty and sanguine, rather than phlegmatic, temperament, he offers work and a future to a whole region.
    And the Cricks come to work for Atkinson. They make their great journey across the Ouse, leaving old Jacob at his solitary outpost; and while one branch of the family goes north to dig the Eau Brink Cut, another goes south, to the village of Apton, where Thomas Atkinson’s agents are recruiting labour.
    And that is how, children, my ancestors came to live by the River Leem. That is how when the cauldron of revolution was simmering in Paris, so that you, one day, should have a subject for your lessons, they were busy, as usual, with their scouring, pumping and embanking. That is how, when foundations were being rocked in France, a land was being formed which would one day yield fifteen tons of potatoes or nineteen sacks of wheat an acre and on which your history teacher-to-be would one day have his home.
    It was Atkinson who put Francis Crick in charge of the new steam-pump on Stott’s Drain. When I was a boy a pump still worked on Stott’s Drain – though it was no longer steam- but diesel-driven and manned not by a Crick but by Harry Bulman, in the pay of the Great Ouse Catchment Board – adding its pulse-beat to that of many others on the night I learnt what the stars really were. It was Atkinson who in 1815 built the lock and sluice two miles from the junction of the Leem and Ouse, christeningit the Atkinson Lock. And it was another Atkinson, Thomas’s grandson, who, in 1874, after violent flooding had destroyed lock, sluice and lock-keeper’s cottage, rebuilt the lock and named it the New Atkinson. A Crick did not then become lock-keeper – but a Crick would.
    Yet why, you may ask, did the Cricks rise no further? Why were they content to be, at best, pump-operators, lock-keepers, humble servants of their masters? Why did they never produce a renowned engineer, or turn to farming that rich soil they themselves had helped to form?
    Perhaps because of that old watery phlegm which cooled and made sluggish their spirits, despite the quantities of it they spat out, over their shovels and buckets, in workmanlike gobbets. Because they did not forget, in their muddy labours, their swampy origins; that, however much you resist them, the waters will return; that the land sinks; silt collects; that something in nature wants to go back.
    Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? If you are an Atkinson it is not difficult. If you have become prosperous by selling fine quality barley, if you can look down from your Norfolk uplands and see in these level Fens – this nothing-landscape – an Idea, a drawing-board for your plans, you can outwit reality. But if you are born in the middle of that flatness, fixed in it, glued to it even by the mud in which it abounds …?
    How did the Cricks outwit reality? By telling stories. Down to the last generation, they were not only phlegmatic but superstitious and credulous creatures. Suckers for stories. While the Atkinsons made history, the Cricks spun yarns.
    And it is strange – or perhaps not strange, not strange at all, only logical – how the bare and empty Fens yield so readily to the imaginary – and the supernatural. How the villages along the Leem were