Borderlines
Introduction
What is so special about the Waveney that it should warrant a book devoted entirely to its elusive appeal? It has, over the years, attracted little attention and that, of course, is part of its charm. Those guide books that do exist provide a useful ‘source-to-sea’ inventory of towns and villages aimed primarily at the tourist industry. Borderlines attempts something different, a journey through a unique cultural landscape inspired by the subtle beauty of this most unassuming river.
It has little of the Stour valley’s stage-set perfection, a landscape that inspired the paintings of Gainsborough and Constable, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty where nothing is natural, where the 21st century seldom intrudes and Colonel Blimp keeps watch over his colour-washed domain. The Waveney villages are, by contrast, often rough at the edges, and the towns, caught between the conflicting demands of growth and conservation, still come alive on market days. The river, flowing on through a ribbon of watermeadows, keeps its own counsel but manages to be more accommodating than its southern counterpart. From his perspective in the Waveney headwaters Richard Mabey acknowledges its idiosyncratic appeal:
Our river . . . is neighbourly, intimate, often impudent and it’s conjured up a landscape with the same quirky qualities. This was always a place of smallholders and artisans, of commons and lokes, of generosity to non-conformists and incomers.
This sense of improvisation, of making things anew inside the template of the old, is what keeps the Waveney a living river. . . . This is a gypsy of a river, twisty, colourful, eccentric.
The Waveney has its own artistic legacy in the work of two quite different painters; the everyday scenes of horse fairs and the river bank at Mendham where Alfred Munnings grew up, and Mary Newcomb’s unique view of the natural world and village life that took shape just upstream at Needham in the 1960s. She was followed, a decade later, by a heady mix of artisan potters, poets and playwrights, backwoods thatchers, basket weavers and all manner of performance artists who came in search of a few acres and the freedom to pursue an alternative lifestyle. The result was an outburst of creative energy and community involvement that found expression in the legendary Barsham Fairs, the Greenpeace Fairs, the campaign to save Bungay’s Fisher Theatre and the writing of Roger Deakin, part river god and presiding spirit.
More peace-loving than politically motivated, the hippy counterculture that arrived in the valley inherited a non-conformist tradition rooted in the age-old class struggle between the rural poor and their masters. Sporadic outbursts of social unrest began in the 1830s with incidents of machine breaking in the villages around Diss. It erupted again in the Roydon Riots of 1893 provoked by the landowner’s attempt to enclose the last few areas of common land in the parish. When the chapel-going socialists, Annie and Tom Higdon, arrived at the village school in Burston they were confronted by a similar alliance of farmers and the established church. In 1914 Annie Higdon’s dismissal on a trumped-up charge brought the pupils out on strike in a spontaneous act of solidarity. It turned into the longest strike in history and the Free School built on the green is a memorial to the villagers’ fight for freedom and the focal point of today’s annual Trade Union rally.
During the agricultural depression of the1930s farmers, faced with the prospect of laying off workers and even bankruptcy, threatened to withhold the outmoded tax they were obliged to pay in support of the clergy. In an interesting variation on the class struggle the Wortham Tithe Wars, spearheaded by the redoubtable Doreen Wallace, saw the farming community in open revolt. It is unclear whether the decision to publish a communist monthly – the Country Worker – in Diss, was in response to the continuing Burston strike or the presence of Mosley’s Blackshirts at Wortham Manor during the Tithe War. Renamed the Country Standard, the publication was, however, moved to Cambridge the following year.
East Anglia has seldom featured prominently in any discussion of regionalism and the English novel. The heaths that once covered much of Breckland were no match for the wild Bronte-haunted moors of Yorkshire; and the crumbling cliffs lack the romance of a windswept Cornish headland. Landscape, always such a dramatic element in the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy, is a more subtle presence in the east as admirers of L P Hartley’s novel The Go Between (1954) or Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) will testify. Each region is imbued with a distinctive sense of time and place but, in an age of ‘creative writing’, individual brilliance has become less apparent. Occasionally a novel like Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016) shines out of the mud but we still look to the poetry of Crabbe as the true measure of coastal desolation.
It could be argued that the absence of a dominant figure has enabled literary talent to flourish across the region. There is certainly no shortage of East Anglian writers, some choosing to make their home in the Waveney valley. Though limited in extent, the place has seldom been parochial in its influence. Over the years, it has offered sanctuary to writers from far and wide; to a penniless Breton émigré leeing the French Revolution; a young Canadian deserted by her muse; and to the Jewish playwright Arnold Wesker whose ‘kitchen sink’ drama Roots was inspired by the local community in Redenhall. More recently Louis de Bernières fled the capital for a Georgian rectory near Bungay, having sold the film rights to Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994).
The countryside around Diss was used by Doreen Wallace for many of her novels published between the wars, as well as Terence Blacker’s contemporary ghost story Revenance (1996) that unravels in the fictional village of Burthorpe. Two short stories occupying much the same territory – Ruth Rendell’s ‘Weeds’ (1991) and Blacker’s ‘The Vendor’ (2003), explore the tensions brought about by an influx of weekenders seeking refuge in the countryside and a reassuring escape route on the main line back to London. It was this same railway that brought John Betjeman to the town in 1963. He feared for this ‘perfect small English town’ as the place expanded and cottages were left to rot.
Some writers, like the Norwich-based academic W G Sebald, were just passing through. His work of ‘prose fiction’, The Rings of Saturn (1995) is a ‘philosophical tramp’ along the Suffolk coast, a circuitous route that begins in Somerleyton and ends back in the Waveney valley beside Ditchingham Hall. Diana Athill had spent an idyllic childhood here in the 1920s, an age of innocence and privilege recalled in her memoir, Yesterday Morning (2002), and it was here the diarist A.C.Benson recalled meeting Rider Haggard during a weekend shoot on the estate in 1902. Haggard was already a famous author with a string of gungho adventure stories to his name, several volumes on the state of agriculture and A Gardener’s Year (1905) based on his days at Ditchingham House. All were written in his study looking out across Outney Common to Bungay where his books were printed.
Haggard’s devoted daughter Lilias has left an affectionate portrait of her father in The Cloak That I Left (1951), an anecdotal type of Life Writing used to good effect in her accounts of two local ‘characters’ – the poacher Fred Rolfe in I Walked By Night (1936) and odd job man George Baldry in The Rabbit Skin Cap (1939). This kind of rural literature is often associated with the work of Adrian Bell who had moved to a farm in Redishall – ‘Grunsham Magna’ in autobiographical novels like Apple Acre (1941), his portrait of an English village in wartime. On retiring to Beccles he continued to write ‘A Countryman’s Notebook’, the weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press he inherited from Lilias Rider Haggard.
While living in the Stour valley Bell had met Alfred Munnings and it was here in the elegant surroundings of Dedham House that Munnings began An Artist’s Life (1951). Unlike Bell and other metropolitan expats he was born and brought up beside the Waveney, in the mill-house at Mendham. As he sat down to write, childhood memories came flooding back; of days playing in the river and a world of heavy horses captured on the page and in some of his best loved paintings of horse fairs and Bungay Races.
In the 1950s George Ewart Evans had begun to record this traditional way of life – what he called a Prior Culture – before it disappeared completely. On moving to Brooke in 1968 he set to work in the Waveney valley uncovering aspects of the hay trade in Bungay, the seasonal migration of workers to Burton-on- Trent and life on the Haddiscoe marshes in Where Beards Wag All (1970). Most remarkable is the version of the frog’s bone ritual recounted by Albert Love, an old horseman living in Wortwell.
This dying breed of countryman had already emerged as Sam Mann in Arnold Wesker’s play Roots (1958), one of the new working class dramas to light up the London stage in the ‘50s. Wesker had found himself in the Waveney valley, where the play is set, purely by chance. While working at the Bell Hotel in Norwich he had met Dusty Bicker, a vivacious country girl. They were soon married and went to live with her parents at Beck Farm in Redenhall. Drawing heavily on the Bicker family – Dusty becomes the central character, Beatie Bryant – and on the local dialect, Wesker lays bare the tensions between custom and change; between remnants of the prior culture and the effects of mass entertainment on this rural community.
Wesker’s time in the Bell Hotel coincided with the arrival of the artist Mary Newcomb and her husband at Mill Farm, Needham in 1950. Here beside the river they attempted to earn a living from the land and the pottery they established making traditional slipware, one of the many craft ventures that sprang up in East Anglia at the time. Having trained with wildlife artist Eric Ennion at Flatford Mill, Mary continued to paint and by the time they moved out of the valley in 1970 her work was beginning to attract attention in London. An artist of true originality, in tune with the seasonal rhythms of the countryside, she produced a series of magical paintings inspired by her time beside the river, always alert to what the poet John Clare called the ‘small, unnoticed trifling things’.
With her gypsy wagon and alternative lifestyle Mary Newcomb anticipated the hippy counter-culture that created the celebrated Barsham Fairs and led to a brief revival of Bungay Horse Fair in the early 1970s. Under the Albion banner a series of green fairs sprang up in and around the Waveney, in a spirit of free association and creativity that found expression in the animated trails of the Company of the Imagination. The fairs even had their own newspaper, the Waveney Clarion, distributed to like-minded Romantics determined to put down new roots in the countryside.
Blessed with an acute observation of the natural world Mary Newcomb also heralded the arrival of two leading nature writers in the upper Waveney. Roger Deakin was among those taking flight when, in 1969, he left a job in advertising for a derelict farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common. He set about the onerous task of rebuilding Walnut Tree Farm while holding down a teaching post in Diss and helping to publish the Clarion. His patch of traditional Suffolk countryside became increasingly important as a wildlife refuge when all around the land was being decimated by modern agriculture practices. The battle to save Cowpasture Lane, a landscape feature of great antiquity, became a cause celebre elevating Deakin to the status of eco-warrior, a position enhanced by his wild swimming classic Waterlog (1999). His campaigning spirit and backwoods lifestyle are revered by his many admirers who see Deakin as a founding figure of today’s environmental movement, a green man for a new age.
It was Deakin’s presence in the upper Waveney that persuaded his friend Richard Mabey to move from his home in the Chilterns. Mabey, the father of today’s new nature writing, was suffering from clinical depression following the completion of his magisterial Flora Britannica (1996) and with Deakin’s support he sought refuge on the edge of Wortham Ling. So began a voyage of recovery exploring the scrubby wasteland on his doorstep and venturing upstream to the source of the Waveney at Redgrave Fen. Mabey’s imaginative reconnection with the natural world and a slow return to writing are described with disarming honesty in Nature Cure (2005). As life returned he felt able to move out of the valley to a new home in Roydon with his partner Poppy where he continues to write.
Writing down the Waveney
A retrospective
Among the proliferation of books on the English countryside that appeared in the early 20th century, the ‘Highways and Byways’ series, written in the picturesque style of the time and illustrated with spidery pen-and-ink drawings, proved among the most popular. The majority were devoted to individual counties but for some reason Norfolk and Suffolk became the subject of a single volume. As the ancient border between the two counties the Waveney had seldom received the attention it deserves and William Dutt’s East Anglia (1914) passed up the opportunity. Apart from a brief mention of Bungay Castle the whole of the Waveney valley, indeed a large chunk of south Norfolk and north Suffolk, is ignored completely as the author hurries on to more familiar territory; the watery landscapes of the Broads and the coast.
To rectify the omission Granville Baker’s Waveney appeared ten years later, the first book to acknowledge the valley as a distinct entity. Brought up in Beccles the author was a military man who spent much of his working life abroad – previous titles include The Walls of Constantinople and A Winter Holiday in Portugal. Closer to home Waveney appears to have been a solitary exercise in the ‘plashy meads’ school of scenic exploration popular between the wars, when homesteads were ‘cheerful’, the fields ‘smiling’ and the river flowed with ‘unruffled serenity’. Granville Baker adopts the ‘source-to-sea’ approach to his subject with dutiful descriptions of villages and market towns strung out along the valley and lengthy digressions into medieval history.
The name Eric Pursehouse may mean little to the wider reading public but among elderly residents in Diss and the upper Waveney valley he is still fondly remembered as the headmaster of Diss Grammar School in the 1950s. Following his retirement Pursehouse immersed himself in local history, a mixture of archival research and personal recollections which led to the establishment of Diss Antiquarian Society and a series of articles in the local press on topics as diverse as the Great Fire of Diss, Dickleburgh Friendly Society and the Lopham Linen Industry. In 1966, two years after the author’s death, the articles were published in Waveney Valley Studies with a short introduction by Doreen Wallace, novelist and former teacher at the grammar school. The collection is concerned primarily with historical events in the town and surrounding villages and, while geographically more limited in scope than its title suggests, these ‘Gleanings from Local History’ remain a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in the area.
The sequential gazetteer format is one adopted by two books, forty years apart, that share a common title, cover much the same ground and are both by authors raised in Bungay. A mixture of local knowledge and personal recollection gives each a distinctive flavour, full of insights in addition to the more familiar territory of dynastic power struggles, great houses and ancient churches. The first of these, David Butcher’s Waveney Valley (1975), has the authentic feel of lived experience growing up in the 1950s. Days recalled swimming or fishing in the river and fruit picking in the holidays are enlivened by the ‘eccentrics’ and gypsies who still inhabited the lanes around Bungay. Impressive too is the author’s inside knowledge of the pubs, many now closed, that were once such a feature of village life. Downstream, Butcher’s route veers off via Oulton Broad to Lowestoft and an account of the town’s fishing industry, a topic he has gone on to explore in a series of acclaimed books on the subject. The Waveney Valley (2015) is the latest offering from Christopher Reeve, another local author with an impressive back catalogue on aspects of Bungay history and the town’s Black Shuck legend. It too is both well researched, informative and beautifully illustrated.