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peopled with ghosts and earnestly recounted legends. The Singing Swans of Wash Fen Mere; the Monk of Sudchurch; the Headless Ferryman of Staithe – not to mention the Brewer’s Daughter of Gildsey. How in the past the Fens attracted visionaries and fanatics: Saint Gunnhilda, our local patroness, who in 695, or thereabouts, built a wattle hut for herself on a mud-hump in the middle of a marsh, and resisting the assaults and blandishments of demons and surviving on nothing but her prayers, heard the voice of God, founded a church and gave her name (Gunnhildsea – Gildsey: Gunnhilda’s Isle) to a town. How even in the no-nonsense and pragmatic twentieth century, this future schoolmaster quaked in his bed at night for fear of something – something vast and void – and had to be told stories and counter-stories to soothe his provoked imagination. How he piously observed, because others observed them too, a catechism of obscure rites. When you see the new moon, turn your money in your pocket; help someone to salt and help them to sorrow; never put new shoes on a table or cut your nails on a Sunday. An eel-skin cures rheumatism; a roast mouse cures whooping cough; and a live fish in a woman’s lap will make her barren.
    A fairy-tale land.
    And the Cricks, for all their dull phlegm, believed in fairy-tales. They saw marsh-sprites; they saw will-o’-the-wisps. My father saw one in 1922. And when echoes from the wide world began to penetrate to the Cricks, when news reached them at last, though they never went looking for it, that the Colonies had rebelled, that there had been a Waterloo, a Crimea, they listened and repeated what they heard with wide-eyed awe, as if such things were not the stuff of fact but the fabric of a wondrous tale.
    For centuries the Cricks remain untouched by the wideworld. No ambition lures them to the cities. No recruiting party or press-gang, foraging up the Ouse from Lynn, whisks them off to fight for King or Queen. Until history reaches that pitch – our age, children, our common inheritance – where the wide world impinges whether you wish it or not. Till history performs one of its backward somersaults and courts destruction. The waters return. In 1916, ’17 and ’18 there is much flooding of fields, much damage done to embankments and excessive silting in the estuaries, because of the unavailability of those normally employed in the peaceable tasks of drainage and reclamation. In 1917 paper summonses call George and Henry Crick, of Hockwell, Cambs., employees of the River Leem Drainage and Navigation Board, to be fitted out with uniforms and equipped with rifles.
    And where do they find themselves, that autumn, separately but as part of the same beleaguered army? In a flat, rain-swept, water-logged land. A land not unlike their own native Fenland. A land of the kind where the great Vermuyden earned his reputation and developed those ingenious methods which none the less proved inappropriate to the terrain of eastern England. A land where, in 1917, there is still much digging, ditching and entrenching and a pressing problem of drainage, not to say problems of other kinds. The Crick brothers see the wide world – which is not a wondrous fable. The Cricks see – but is this only some nightmare, some evil memory they have always had? – that the wide world is sinking, the waters are returning, the wide world is drowning in mud. Who will not know of the mud of Flanders? Who will not feel in this twentieth century of ours, when even a teenage schoolboy will propose as a topic for a history lesson the End of History, the mud of Flanders sucking at his feet?
    In January 1918 Henry Crick is shipped home, an obliging shrapnel wound in his knee. By that time plans are already afoot in Hockwell to raise the war memorial that will bear, amongst others, the name of his brother. HenryCrick becomes a hospital case. Henry Crick limps and blinks and falls flat on his face at sudden noises. For a long time