Writer-insighter – Page 19 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

It’s happening again

Once upon a time, I thought I knew things. Now I think I never will. And that quite often, actually knowing things isn’t what’s wanted at all.

It happened writing Hereward. Charles Kingsley, the Victorian author of the Water Babies (a hundred plus years before Martin Amis wrote Dead Babies, but Kingsley could usefully have borrowed the title save for the fact that nobody then would have bought it, most families being knee-deep in them) wrote Hereward’s story up as The Last Englishman. You can see the tabloid headlines:

Plucky Brit Brexit Rebel Defies Normans

Except Hereward wasn’t the fantastic Pure Brit of racist fiction. Because there’s no such thing. He was a Saxon, whose people came from Denmark, Holland and Germany, which is why it’s called Saxony, which is near where the Queen’s family come from too.The Normans came from Normandy, but not even a hundred years before that, they came from Denmark too.

Chin up, fantasists. I’m sorry if this is news to some of you. Big boys don’t cry.

Hereward’s cousin was the King of Denmark, one of the Sweynes. One of the more confusing thing about writing about those times was the appalling shortage of names they seemed to have. If you weren’t called Leofric then Sweyne was pretty much compulsory, unless you went down the Aelf-suffix route. From the Other World, the land of faery. Yes, as in Aelf Garnett. Satire doesn’t change.

Hitler's left-hand man. — Hitler’s left-hand man.

On Sunday I started writing Double Vision, based on the tale of Rudolf Hess.

How about this for a fiction plot?

It’s 1941. The British Army has been hammered at Dunkirk, the year before. Get your flags out, because plucky Britain Stands Alone. America’s not in the war yet because it didn’t suit it. Russia’s still best mates with Germany, or thinks it is. Hitler’s deputy steals an airplane. He flies a rectangular course over the North Sea for no clear reason and seems quite proud of this in his interrogations.

He eventually parachutes out to land a little south of Glasgow in Scotland. He announces he’s called Captain Albert Horn and he wants to see the Duke of Hamilton. He has the idea that the Duke (serving in the RAF quite nearby) will talk to people like Lord Halifax who will lever Churchill and the King into peace negotiations.

He’s bundled off to Trent Park interrogation centre, then the Tower of London and finds himself in the dock at Nuremberg with something of an uncertain future.

For reasons unclear, a spitting-furious Hitler doesn’t hunt down and kill Hess’s family, which he could have done in half a breath. As he threatened to do to Goering’s family, when Goering asked if it was ok to carry out the order Hitler had given him previously.

Hess refuses to speak in his own defence. The Allies hang most of the people in the dock. But not Rudolf Hess, architect of the final solution. He didn’t recognise someone he worked with daily. He refuses to see anyone in his family for 20 years.

He claims he has stomach aches. Herman Goerring (head of the Luftwaffe, sentenced to death) falls about laughing at Hess in court. His wife notes that his voice has got deeper in 20 years, when the opposite is normally what happens. Everyone else in Spandau Prison is let out in 1966. Not Hess. He’s the only inmate there for another 22 years.

During this time a British army doctor treating him claims the patient’s medical records don’t match the historical record of what happened to the Rudolf Hess who was shot through the lung in 1916.

It’s not the first time that someone has said that the Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg trial isn’t the same Rudolf Hess who sat next to Hitler. Goerring sat next to him and said it first, in court:

“Hess? Which Hess? The Hess you have here? Our Hess? Your Hess?”

Clearly one of the lighter moments at the Nuremberg Trails. — Clearly one of the lighter moments at Nuremberg.

Eventually a 93 year old man who couldn’t move his arms higher than level with his shoulders ties a noose with electric cord and hangs himself from a window catch 1.4 metres above the ground.

A British nurse who arrived to find the body said that she wasn’t the first person there. She gave that honour to two people she was very specific in saying were dressed like American soldiers. She did not say that they were.

Except it’s not a fiction plot. We’re told that’s exactly what happened, with no logical inconsistencies whatsoever.

I don’t know what happened, or who he was, or whether he went insane, or whether it wasn’t him at all. But I’m finding out I don’t know. I think it’s important.

Double Vision

In 1941 Hitler’s deputy, the man second in rank only to the Fuhrer himself, did quite a strange thing. He flew right to the end of the fuel in the tanks of a twin-engined plane he’d been flying, right over Germany, the North Sea and most of Scotland and parachuted out to land in a field near Hamilton.

He announced himself to the farmer who held him at bay with a pitchfork as Captain Albert Horn and said he’d come to talk to the king. The farmer’s exact words are not recorded.

In 1945 Hitler was so annoyed with Goering asking if he should act on the order Hitler had given him that he ordered that he should be rounded-up and shot, along with his whole family. So it was a little surprising that Hitler’s reprisals against the Hess family were nothing at all.

Sitting in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, Goering fell about laughing at Hess sitting next to him. Hess, for his part, totally failed to recognise someone who had worked with him daily. His wife had trouble recognising him although his handwriting matched pre-war Hess papers. This was the man who designed the final solution. Goering was sentenced to death and killed himself with cyanide. Hess was imprisoned for life. Over forty years later and although crippled with arthritis, he officially hanged himself with a piece of electric flex suspended 1.4 metres off the ground. Not high, but high enough for a man who couldn’t raise his arms above shoulder height.

Fourteen years before this suicide a British Army doctor made a quite astonishing assertion. He claimed that in his professional opinion, as someone who had seen more than enough bullet wounds in a medical career in Northern Ireland, whoever was the last prisoner in Spandau jail definitely was not the same person who had been shot through the chest in 1917, the way the records said Hess was.

If he didn’t believe it to be true then it was an odd thing to say, given it would finish his career in the Army and any future one in medicine.

I don’t know what is true and what isn’t in this story. Captain Horn, who didn’t seem to exist, made great play on his flight plan, flying rectangles in the North Sea, but seemed vague on why he had. What was more certain was that Horn asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, who he seemed to think had access to a network of British aristocrats who would one way or another side with Hitler and bring the war to a close.

Not entirely surprisingly, Hess/Horn found himself bundled off first to Warwick Castle en route to Trent Park interrogation centre, then to the tower of London, then to Spandau for the rest of his life. The very few people who ever saw him again had mixed reactions to him. His wife was surprised that his voice had got deeper. Not least that as men age their voices get higher. His interrogators worried that the prisoner was so unstable that he might well kill himself, which wouldn’t look good on their watch.

What was un-arguable was that there was a network of sympathisers with Hitler, which it didn’t suit anybody in England to be reminded of at the time. The Earl of Halifax, tipped for the Prime Minister’s job was a major figure arguing for an agreement with Mussolini. Prime Minister Chamberlain was instrumental in the annexation of Czechoslovakia. When Unity Mitford had a crush on Hitler and shot herself in Munich she magically and inexplicably to many turned up for treatment in hospital in England. Her sister Diana was more successful, marrying Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Union of Fascists.

Reading about Unity Mitford today, I found some odd similarities with what her family said about her after the shooting and what Hess’ family said about him, when eventually, after years, they were allowed to see him: “Not only was her appearance shocking, she was a stranger, someone we did not know.”

Her sister continued “We brought her back to England in an ambulance coach attached to a train.” As one does, in the middle of WW11. It happened all the time, obviously. If they’d just stuck an Enigma machine on the train as well then it would all have been over by Christmas.

Every word of that is true. Hardly any word of that is remembered in a world where every plucky Tommy had the backing of the whole country behind him.

Every time I read it I think of Johnny Rotten kneeling at the edge of the stage, somewhere in America on a tour he hated, sneering “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” I do. So it seems do the Pathe News archivists, who have put inverted commas around Hess name on their website.

In another, rare colour recording, Hess disconcertingly talks of what he would have wished if he had known he would meet ‘ a fiery death.’ The kind you might meet in an airplane for example. Which is odd, given he was never in the airforce at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO6Zk5qkYcA&feature=youtu.be

Hess’s story stuck in my mind for years. It’s just so odd, with so many loose ends, or apparently loose ends. Yesterday I decided, out of the blue, to write a version of it. The first two scenes are done, in a single afternoon’s work, even if that did turn out to be an eight-hour stretch.

It was and will be worth it. Writing it feels right. It’s about the only thing about the story that does.

Tropes and memes

The SOE agents were trapped. Each man saved the last bullet for himself. They dumped the magazine, put the bullet in, put the magazine back in the gun, pulled back the slide, then put the gun to their head.

I kept thinking ‘why?’

Not ‘why were they going to kill themselves?’ Compared to a cosy evening with the Gestapo I could understand that. A friend used to work in a building in Amsterdam the Gestapo were said to have taken over on Prinzengracht. Nobody liked being in the cellars. Even 60 years later, in broad daylight.

Why eject the magazine? It’s just a waste of time and effort, when in the circumstances, with half the Wermacht pounding up the stairs, time was something none of them had a lot of. If you leave the magazine in the gun and pull the slide back, you can drop the only bullet you’re going to need now straight into where it should be, let the slide push it to where it seats on the throat of the barrel and get on with meeting your maker.

But you’d have to know that. And you’d have to sacrifice the trope of re-loading the magazine one bullet at a time, which gets done three times in the film to calm the character down. More than not volunteering to be parachuted into Czechoslovakia in the first place. More than the first person you meet phoning the Germans. More than his mate legging it into the woods and getting away. More than taking his truck and not only driving it straight to where you’re hiding

More than his mate legging it into the woods and getting away. More than taking his truck and not only driving it straight to where you’re hiding-out, but leaving the lights on in broad daylight for unspecified reasons.

More than taking pictures of the admittedly rather handsome red-haired woman helping you and keeping them in your wallet, presumably to save the Gestapo some time beating the crap out of you to find out who you know. Which they’ll do anyway, to keep in practice.

More tropes. More Things You Have ToHave In Movies.

Tasty Resistance Girl With Attitude

Your gun’s dirty. Clean it.

Feisty powerful woman – check. Explanation for how come it was, given it was straight from stores and had never been fired – well…….. let’s get on, shall we?

Like taking the guns apart and putting them back together. Like putting them all on the table while you’re looking at the map, for no discernible reason I could see. Other than That’s What You Do In Movies Like This. Don’t they know there’s a war on? They do now.

There was plenty I liked about Anthropoid. I liked the fact that the book I discovered a couple of years ago had been made into a film, not least as it was basically true – two men were parachuted into Czechoslovakia, pretty much everything did go wrong and they still managed to kill Reinhard Heydrich in the street, the architect of the final solution, number three in the entire echelon of Nazidom. And obviously the Nazis were not best pleased by this turn of events, with rather less than hilarious consequences.

I liked more the sheer volume of the soundtrack, the massive roar of noise you’d actually get if someone opened-up with a machine-gun in a stone church, compared to the sanitised-for-your-convenience pop-pop-pop of Hollywood sound mixes. I liked the white noise after explosions, exactly the way your ears would react if you’d been close to a grenade. I liked the way it looked as if bullets actually hurt, not because I’m a sadist but because it made the point that None Of This War Stuff Was Nice, something glossed-over in lots of films. Where Anthropoid had a weakness in that respect it was glaring – it only looked as if it hurt the guys fighting the Nazis. When the guys in the stalhelmen and feldgrau bit the dust it didn’t look much more painful than any old YouTube episode of Combat, made for a generation who ‘d done this stuff and now wanted to kick back with a beer in a recliner chair and talk about the time Joe did that thing with the doozy that time in Yerp.

It was an OK way to spend a couple of hours. Go and see it. Revel in the period clothes, haircuts and rather becoming thin-ness of the main characters. And thank whoever you thank you weren’t born then.

Rabbit Ears and Rudolf Hess

Once upon a time I knew Trent Park quite well. In one of the periodic disaster periods of my life I took up running. I was living in Harringey, where although people ran to catch a bus or if they’d stolen someone’s purse, it wasn’t really the thing to do, back then.

Trent Park was pretty much the nearest big green place that wasn’t Finsbury Park and after saving some random girl from a flasher there (no, really. One morning on the way to work, since you ask) I didn’t much want to run there. Ditto Oak Hill Park where they dumped the body in Antonionionioni – I give up. Italian film-maker. Blow Up. Or so people said at the time.

trent-park

It meant going all the way out past Cockfosters, up Cat Hill where John Betjeman once taught at a school on the top, up out into the open fields of Middlesex. Just before the boundless promise of the M25 you turned right into parkland. Which was. Hidden behind the screen of trees and picnic areas was an old house that was something to do with the University of Middlesex. It’s now going to be sold off as what used to be called Yuppie flats. But before that, like the equally unlikely Warwick Castle, Trent Park was briefly home to Rudolf Hess. Debate-ably.

Radio 4 seemed surprised to broadcast, along with Helen Lederer, that as I’d found out twenty years previously, during WW11 important German officers and Rudolf Hess were taken after capture to Trent Park, not for a walk or a run but for a chat. Obviously, they didn’t give much away. Until they were back in their cells, when they did, unaware that it was now possible to listen-in on conversations using this new-fangled microphonic technology.

Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy. To say he was important was something of an understatement. According to the official record, one day he decided to steal an airplane and fly to Scotland to have a chat with the Duke of Hamilton, who he thought might have a chat with Lord Halifax, who might have a chat with Churchill, who might call the war off. Nothing implausible there, obviously. Nor in the fact that this act of unarguable treachery wasn’t repaid by the liquidation of the entire Hess family, which was pretty much standard practice in Germany at the time. Nothing personal.

The debate over Rudolf Hess was always whether or not it was him at all, not least that the British Army surgeon detailed to look after him in Spandau Prison where he spent the last half of his life was adamant that the man he was looking after simply didn’t have the injuries that Rudolf Hess had received in France in 1917. Notwithstanding too that the old man’s voice had deepened with age, according to his wife, who didn’t initially recognise the man she visited, an odd exception to the rule that old men’s voices generally get higher as they age. If, of course, it was the same man.

There was nothing at Trent Park to tell the visitor any of this. Nothing to tell the students there that some of the people who’d stayed there were if not the architects of the Final Solution, had at least helped it on its way.

None of that was visible at all when I ran there. I remember the dew on the grass. The pink of rabbits ears on a hill with the sun behind them. The long drag back down to Green Lanes. The headline about Steve Marriot burning to death the year before. The church hall where a friend once saw The Who, before they were famous. According to Wikipedia today, Blow Up wasn’t filmed in north London at all. History changes. Trent Park too.

Behave, baby!

A tale for children

I never got on with Philosophy. I thought I would, but the world changed one summer and something broke, although what it was I never knew.

The Georgian terrace at the end, beginning, middle and all other points of the universe.

I’d been to a uni interview back in the times when that seemed to fill weeks, choosing what to wear, what book to take. What book to be seen to take, sometimes, although quoting Horace Greely didn’t get me into Sussex to do English and American Studies, not least as the interviewer didn’t seem to have actually heard of the father of American journalism, not that long after American journalism had removed a President instead of making a lawyer’s daughter’s arse a celebrity in its own right. I took my paperback Nietzsche to a uni bar and talked about him based on the extensive insight I’d picked up reading it on the train, the way students are supposed to. And when I went there that autumn I signed up for the additional Philosophy courses.

We didn’t do Nietzsche. The first lecture started with a little discourse on kibbutzim by the Head of School. I was in my estimation at least, something of an expert on the topic, having at least lived on one for the past few months which it became very obvious the lecturer hadn’t. Philosophically perhaps it may have been better not to mention it. At least not with an audience of 200 people. But hey, open discussion among equals was supposed to be what kibbutzim were all about. As he should have known.

The second lecture asked us why dolphins weren’t invited to lectures, given they could speak, then asked us how we knew that once the lecture hall doors were shut we wouldn’t be gassed. I’d spent the summer with people who pretty much never did assume exactly that, given that millions of their parents had been before they decamped to the Negev desert. I suspected the dolphins would have been first irritated then, like me, wondering if there wasn’t something they could do on a sunny afternoon with less bullshit involved.

Maybe they did parallel universes later in the course, after I’d taken my black needle-cords, alpaca sweater and red Kicker boots elsewhere. BBC Radio 4 did this week. It wasn’t much better. I still didn’t see the point.

Apparently, there are or could be or some other Schroedinger-type condition where there are and aren’t an infinite number of parallel universes. All at the same time, or possibly no time.

I wasn’t listening that closely. Because listening, I thought what I thought back in that lecture hall: haven’t these people got anything else to actually DO? Who pays them? And why? Anyway, an infinite number of universes. Limitless numbers of everything. In literally, no time at all. Apparently, this stuff is useful to someone.

Anyway, an infinite number of universes. Limitless numbers of everything. In literally, no time at all. Apparently, this stuff is useful to someone.

And the day went on and philosophy didn’t bother me again and Nietzsche still didn’t get read and Facebook somehow did instead. Someone had posted a recipe I liked. I hadn’t imagined her as someone who could cook although I’d eaten food she’d made. It was fine. Just that some people you think ‘cook’ and some people you think other things about.

Cook. It wasn’t something I’d thought about. Someone who could talk, smoke, walk with, make you think, yes, all of those things. All of those. But Mother Aga wasn’t a role I’d seen her in.

You have to be able to cook if you’re a vegetarian, she said. Unless you live in Bath.

And suddenly the image of living as vegetarians in Bath roiled up in my mind like billowing white clouds over the sea on a summer evening. In fact, it didn’t. It filled my mind entirely, like a paradisiacal vision of eternity. The more so because in that parallel universe, or maybe this one, if not no, this one, we do. In another, we always have. In another, we always will. In another, we invite a 25 year-old Kate Bush and Debby Harry round for a bi foursome every weekend.

And none of it true and almost certainly, in this universe, not going to happen. Apart from the vegetarian thing. One out of three ain’t bad, as a post-Austerity Meat Loaf might have said. But maybe I’m still not quite getting the point of Philosophy. Unless it’s for making the day appreciably better every time I think about pretend things.

Suddenly it was summer

When I hear it, when I hear that music, those electric piano notes, pressed by real fingers, back in the ludicrous days when a musician actually had to write a song or play an instrument or sing themselves, roughly in tune, without Simon Cowell to recite the reality TV mantra that ‘you’re the best, you’re so talented’, back when then was then and all that meant, there was this song.

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air
You better watch out
There may be dogs about
I’ve looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.

I couldn’t have written it better myself, even though it was years before anyone invented Jordan. They just didn’t have the technology in those days. And thi9ngs weren’t what they seemed. I went to university later, when people still talked about ‘the revolution’ while ignoring totally the one going on outside their own window. We had The Sweeney and Orgreave. Eeeh, young folk don’t know they’re born these days…

animlas

There was always this song, then. Or that song. When there was no such thing as streaming, when the most far-out thing you could do was haul a cassette recorder around with you, on a strap, music wasn’t as much a thing as it is now. It was more of a thing.

iutt-sl54

There was Top Of The Pops on Thursdays, on one of the only three TV channels that existed. There was Radio One, which was what people in garages listened to. And there was Luxy, Radio Luxembourg. And that strange thing from Keynesham, sometimes on an expedition into the Long Wave or Short Wave dials. I can’t remember which and it doesn’t matter anyway. Old, d’you see?

We didn’t have as much music. We had so much more of it. Without the massive choice, everyone knew the same music. And naturally divided into camps. Apart from Abba. Everyone, but EVERYONE didn’t much like Abba, except for Mums and Dads.

10cc was for what used to be called getting it on, which was pretty much the same as getting off with, but more comfortably, usually. If you couldn’t make it happen by half-way through the second side of The Original Soundtrack then you were definitely doing it wrong.

But Animals was something else. Especially the Sheep track. See what I did there? I know. Anyway, I was going to say that was then, but it really wasn’t. Whenever I hear those first few bars it’s summer.

It’s summer and I’ve got long hair and a Triumph motorcycle and a girlfriend I don’t want and haven’t got the girl I do. I’ve got a boat to sail at school and a friend I didn’t know then was going to be with me all my life, thankfully. I’ve got a bed with an actual eiderdown, which is hideously heavy, because although I’ve seen duvets with my own eyes, there’s certainly none of that foreign nonsense in this house, which I’m regularly told I treat like a hotel. This house where I’m forbidden to have a bath more than six inches deep, in case I use all the hot water and how am I going to wash my hair every day if I don’t, in a world where the only alternative is those stupid rubber things you put over the taps, the ones that come off when they get hot so you suddenly get a head full of cold water.

I’ve got a pale yellow sink in the corner of my room and a metal trunk under my bed. I’ve got a desk for homework under the window I leave open for my old cat to come through, up over the bench and the oil tank and the garage roof, the route we share when I get home after Lights Out and Taps has been sounded, which they may as well have been, some time around 11.

I hear that music and I am back there, where the army’s artillery barrage flickered all over the night sky every summer from the training ranges 20 miles away. Where I could hear someone’s Norton Commando winding out towards the crossroads five miles away towards the hamlet where the girl I didn’t have lived in an old vicarage.

I never got a Norton Commando, or an old vicarage. Nor sadly, her. But I can listen to that music now and any time, suddenly it’s summer. And somehow I’ve got all of that and more.

The sweet spot

Saturday and a new job starting tomorrow. One I’ve wanted to do, one that I’ve been angling for for a year since asking on the off-chance. The heat of the year is gone and the wind moving the blinds is cool on my skin.

This is my time of year, the time I was born. The time, literally this year, of going back to school, but not the school I went to and not the lessons I had to sit through.

Not too, the roads I used to know to get there, nor my friend I used to hitch to Bath with. Nor Limpley Stoke hill covered with trees, nor Bath itself, where the head-shops sell Agas now.

I bake bread about three times a week. Sourdough depends on a lot of things, but on its culture largely. I think too, on the temperature. And right now, it’s sourdough sweet spot temperature, not too cold, not too warm. I make it because bread from shops is never my bread. There are breads I like as much, but not many of them.

The recipe is always the same. 300g of flour and pretty much any flour will do. 200g of water, weighed into the bowl. Olive oil, salt. And the culture. And maybe a little more water. After a day, when it’s bubbling, another 300g of flour, knead it just a bit and give it another day. Then bake it.

The culture’s been going since August Bank Holiday 2012, when I got back from my friend’s house in Dorset and started writing Not your Heart Away. I haven’t stopped. And I haven’t stopped baking, either. I’ve been doing both this morning.

Where I grew up I was told that nobody would want to read anything I wrote. Some people have different parents. Ones who know what people want to read, for example. They were wrong, but it’s taken a long time to get that message out of my head.

I finally know what I’m doing. People do read it and more will. And today, this Saturday with a hint of chill about it, the weather just right to let you know that with hot comes cold, with summer comes winter, that lets you know that the season of hitching through foggy Wessex valley bottoms in a maniacally driven blue Mazda truck is also the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, that lets you know that being there, then, was a precious gift, that my friend is and was and will be too, this is a sweet spot.

The bread’s come out just right. Maybe this morning’s writing has, too.

…but is it art?

We all know what happened in 1066. Guillaume won at Senlac. Oh come on, you did know that. Just the same way you didn’t really think Jesus had Palestinian friends called Timothy and Mark. Oh. Well, sorry to be the one to break it to you.

Anyway, arrows, battles, and the country lost by the same trick as at Maldon not even 70 years before. It always worked. Both times the invaders had got themselves bottled up where they could be dealt with, the Danes/Vikings at Maldon on an island in the Colne/Blackwater and the Normans, who were also Danes and Vikings who’d been kicked out of Denmark for being too violent (try to keep that one in mind. Vikings who were too violent for Viking sensibilities) cooped up at the bottom of a hill so they had to attack upwards. Which is N times more difficult when you’re wearing armour and can’t put your shield above your head and in front of you at the same time.

Both times the Saxons’ sense of honour screwed it for them. Both times the Danes/Vikings said ‘if you were real men you’d have a fight on the flat.’ Unbelievably stupidly, they did. And lost. Twice.

But arguably a bigger loss was to art. Like maybe a lot of people, I just assumed that until about 1400, artists just weren’t much good. I’ve seen Greek and Roman pottery where someone obviously knew how to make an image that actually looks like a person, but until deep in the Middle Ages all I’d seen were cartoonish two-dimensional finger-painting. I mean, look at the Bayeux Tapestry.

Now ok, it was made by the Bayeux W.I. but by any standards, the level of art isn’t exactly great.

The Tring Tiles, 300 years later, weren’t much better. They’re fun and funny for quite other reasons. It isn’t just the fact they seem to have come from Tring church and ended up being sold in the antique shop there years and years ago, presumably sold off by the vicar. Funnier is the fact that the tiles show a series of not-very-Biblical stories. Or maybe they are. Either way, in each story the young Jesus acts like someone young. His teacher slaps him for either not paying attention or for Holy Smartmouth.

He makes little pools at the side of the river and a bigger kid comes along and smashes them up. So Jesus superpowers him dead until Mary comes along and makes him bring the bully back to life or no supper. Jesus’s friend’s dad reckons Jesus is a bad influence and locks his friend up so he can’t go and play with the Messiah, who promptly miracles him through the keyhole. If you think I’m making this stuff up, think again.

They’re fun. Bonkers, but fun. And the most believable, human, Man made God stories I’ve ever heard. Or seen. But there’s the issue. The artwork itself can’t really be called all that good.

I thought that was just the way it was. Dark Ages, the handy thing to blame for everything after Rome fell. They forgot how to draw? I can’t believe that and my walk around the British Museum yesterday told me it obviously wasn’t true. I can’t claim to have discovered Carolingian artwork (or can I? I’d never seen it before…..) and it was a revelation.

Accurate representational art from the 800s. And 200 years later we get the cartoon 2D of Bayeux and 300 years after that the same again from Tring. I can’t channel Brian Sewell, maybe unfortunately. But I’d really like to know how art became less realistic before it became more so. And why.

They called it Martlesham

I came within thinking distance of dying today. As in thinking ‘hmm, this is a distinct possibility. Glad I made a bail-out plan. Now let’s see if it works.’

Boat stuff. I had two things to do, and only took oooh, most of the day to mostly do one and half-do the other. When I checked the boat yesterday I found water in the bilge -about a foot of it. Nothing that hasn’t been there before and rainwater rather than river water, which is good because the leaking through the hull has stopped, but bad because the roof leak hasn’t gone away. Whoever put the grab rails and winding blocks and all the other deck furniture on the the coachroof (no, I don’t know why it’s called that either. Cabin roof. Better, isn’t it?) used screws that went all the way through. So does the water when it rains. Well done, that man.

That should have been easy. Take out the old pump and float switch and put new ones in. Would have been one answer, but being thrifty and prudent I had to convince myself they were both irredeemably shagged, so had to work out which wire fed which, and of course they’re under water so I couldn’t see what colour they were until I thought just chop them out and replace anyway. Which I did. And found, of course, that the exit hose wouldn’t fit the new pump and neither would the adapter. It took over an hour to think of how to fix this. Answer 1 – Gaffa tape was rejected in favour of Answer 2 = superglue. Eventually.

Then the new pump stopped working. For reasons unknown. I think I tripped the push button cut-out when I shorted everything. Because water. There don’t seem to be any actual fuses, just this push button thing. Worst case, 12 volt shock. I thought that wouldn’t kill me but I didn’t get a shock anyway, somewhat surprisingly.

Task two was to go onto the river bed and dig a hole around the rudder. It’s a drying berth. That means when the tide is out – and there’s around 4 metres of tide to go out – the boat sits on the mud of the river bed. Because the Folkboat rudder is where it is and the shape it is, it dug itself a hole in the mud, four and a half tons of boat settled on it and in a month it snapped the tiller.

I made a new one, but that month has also warped the rudder to one side. Instead of lashing the tiller straight at the next high tide, thinking what’s done is done and leaving it be I went over the side. But I wasn’t entirely stupid. For once.

I put the boarding ladder over the side first. I wore waders. I considered carrying a whistle and wearing a lifejacket. And didn’t do either. More to the point, I tied not one but two lines to the boat and to the jetty and draped them where I could get at them if I sank into the mud.

I sank into the mud.

But that’s ok, I thought, because I’ve got waders on, and the boarding ladder, and these two ropes. Which was all true, except I was up to my left knee and past my right knee and I couldn’t actually get out. Every time I got a leg a little bit higher the other leg sank deeper. It went on for a bit. Getting deeper. People had to live like this for four years in Flanders. Usually they did it for two weeks at a time or until they got shot or exploded. But frankly, I wasn’t thinking about them today. And that’s not just all me, me, me. This was a bit serious.

The only way out was to jettison the waders and climb back up the ladder, pouring sweat, having achieved nothing at all apart from nothing. And realising how you could actually get a heart attack doing stuff like this, because it was massively, massively draining and I couldn’t and still can’t quite work out why. But it was. I could feel my breath getting short doing it. Four hours later I ache pretty much all over, even after a hot shower.

But I got out. I didn’t die, from drowning or a heart attack. I found almost a metre of plywood in the bow I’d put there for General Purposes and these definitely were. I dropped it over the side near the boarding ladder and climbed down again, in the wellies I’d stupidly forgotten were in the starboard locker anyway and stood on the plywood to recover the waders, only getting 90% muddy in the process. I tried to dig the mud out from around the rudder but water kept flowing into the hole even though it was pretty much Low Water. I couldn’t see where I was digging and each shovel full was heavy as a very heavy thing and I thought: ‘Actually, this is stupid.’

And it was. I gave up. It took another hour to get all the mud off the waders and the ladder and the plywood and the ropes and me and just about everything I could see, apart from the swan I was worried was going to attack me when it came over to where the hose was. I was hit by a swan once when I was a boy. I literally didn’t see it coming until it did. It didn’t break my arm as advertised, but it wasn’t fun.

I wasn’t looking forward to a renactment today. But this was an old swan and a swan well used to people as it lives in the boatyard and it doesn’t bother the boatyard people and we try not to bother it, moving slowly and not towards it. Turned out it was just thirsty and wanted a drink from the puddle of water spilling off the muddy ladder, less than three feet from me.

I got the pump and the float switch mostly wired up, even though I ran out of rubbish connectors and had to Manfix it with twists and insulating tape. The push-button cut-out didn’t. The solar charger does. I’m going back tomorrow to stow the hopefully dried-out ladder and lines and lash the tiller again, and make sure everything’s ok. Which it will be. Just so long as I don’t go walking on the river bed again. There’s no future in it.

In plain sight

Once upon a time, a lot of East Anglia was like this. As far inland as Cambridge, an hour’s drive from the coast certainly was. You could get a boat up there from the sea. You can still get sizeable boats into Norwich, or at least as sizeable as 151-foot long Swedish gunboats, like the one the Sea Scouts use there. No, of course not as a gunboat. Not even in Norfolk.

It’s not so much a different world as a forgotten one. The water speared deep into the land. It still does, but we can’t seem to remember.

The biggest Saxon church I ever saw. — The biggest Saxon church I’ve seen. In the Peterborough diocese. Hereward probably knew it.

But people did. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, we’re told that pretty much that was that. Except it wasn’t. In February 1067, dead king Harold’s mother lead a revolt in the West Country. Then there was a revolt in Northumberland, lead by Morcar, Earl of one of the four Saxon kingdoms. That failed too. Unlike Harold’s mother, Morcar got away. He came down south and around 1070 joined up with the last English leader, Hereward. Just ten miles north of Cambridge they hid in the marshes surrounding the Isle of Ely.

A man called Belsar was given the job of fixing Hereward once and for all. He lead his men to what was probably a much older camp on the edge of the marsh commanding a track to the Isle itself. Being Norman and convinced of the supremacy of shock and awe tactics he built a wooden causeway across the marsh to stage a direct frontal assault on the last of England. And as often happens with shock and awe assaults, things went a bit differently to the plan. If there was one.

It sank. The weight of the assault force sank the causeway. There wasn’t anywhere to go. The men on it couldn’t escape sideways because they needed the causeway across the marsh in the first place. But it was sinking. They died. Personally, I think the causeway might have had some help in sinking from Hereward and his men. But I don’t know.

I found it and walked the causeway last week. The fen was drained back in the 1600-somethings and there isn’t any marsh there any more. There isn’t any malaria now either, which is nice.

I was trying to feel some of the atmosphere of the watery fens. The snag was I was at least three hundred years too late. The track across what definitely wasn’t marsh any more was just another drove road, the kind of boring nothing-made-of-mud I remembered from childhood holidays on the Somerset Levels. Some kids got to go to Spain. We got Congresbury. It wasn’t the same, really.

I dumped the car what I hoped was far enough away from the four people living in a caravan surrounded by their own crushed plastic bottles and the ashes of their fires and their refuse in bin bags and carpet offcuts used to smooth out the barbed wire fence keeping people out of farmland around Belsar’s camp. I walked past the four separate fly tipping dumps in what for two thousand years was a major arterial route through this part of the country, the most direct route from Cambridge to Ely, where the monks lived. Where Hereward hid out. Where his relation, the king of Denmark, came over by boat to help out, and while he was there, to help himself to the loot from the sacking of the abbey at Peterborough.

Past the 1960s farmhouse at the end of a metalled road cutting through Althred’s Causeway. Out onto the flatlands again, putting up a heron that lumbered into the sky like the awkward little dinosaur it was and forever is. All the way across the bone dry, drained, boring track. Everywhere was flat. Until you start to notice the places that must have been islands in the marsh, little places mostly under an acre that stand ooh, some of them six or seven feet above the fields around them. And you wonder what was there. Or when.

Because what definitely happened is that after the wooden causeway sank, Belsar’s, or maybe Belasius’s, death squad got hold of a witch. They built a wooden tower and stuck her in it with orders to scream curses at Hereward. I mean, hey, we’ve all been on the end of that. Some of us, anyway.

Hereward sneaked through the marsh and not being someone who appreciated women going on and on and on at him at volume, set light to the tower before he disappeared back into the marsh.

The atmosphere had changed. It was six or seven miles out across the moor to the Isle of Ely. I met a huge dog but more interestingly, I learned something I knew long ago, how hard it is to see someone who doesn’t move. Two boats came along as I was crossing the river. I just kept still, in plain sight. Not a nod, a wave, not a hint that they knew I was there. An old lesson other people practised at that place, almost a thousand years ago.