From faithful Fen man to man about town: What it’s like to live in a city for the first time, aged 84

Transplanting a tree, getting all its roots clear of the nurturing soil of years and settling it in its new home is always tricky. A step into an unknown. Will it thrive? Just so with people: all my long life I have been a countryman, and I actually rather dislike towns and feel out of place in them. Yet here we are, uprooting ourselves from the tiny village to which I came, sixty-odd years ago, when most of its families were connected in some way with working the land. Nowadays only one is, and we have re-planted ourselves in that little Cathedral city on a hill we used to see across the flat Fen. That city is Ely, 14 miles northeast of Cambridge and my beloved Reach which was, for many years, my home.

Some towns do have redeeming features, like the ones I enjoyed visiting as a boy, Kendal and Fleetwood. My criteria are: a) an ironmonger, b) a seedsman, c) a good butcher who hangs beef properly, and rejoices in their sausages and pies, d) a good bookshop, whose staff might actually read books, and are ready to chat about anything, e) a market and a space where people, unmolested by cars, can pass the time of day. For f), allotments, and, g) if possible, a decent church where they take music seriously. (And, one hopes, religion.) Preferably, too, it should be somewhere where you can feel a long past nudging the present, where you are aware of the lives of people who came before you, who thought so differently, whose world circled a different sun. This little city of Ely has all those things, and more, and our house, full of its memories, when it was new two and a half centuries ago, looked across the lane to open fields that would not suffer enclosure for another half century. For centuries cows went down the lane to graze in summer in the common fen.

What do we miss? Well, our own rich loam for vegetables: our allotment is on unforgiving clay. We miss being able to take our Labrador straight out of the back door into the fields and lanes, and the young wood the village happily and communally made. We miss the trees I planted, and the fields where I used to shoot for the pot, and the memory of other things now long ago. And we miss people. But Ely is still a town where nobody looks at you strangely if, as you pass them in the street, you say, country fashion, ‘Grand day!’ (if it is). Where in the market you can buy vegetables that are not overdressed in plastic. Where the butcher sells occasional squirrel (delicious with garlic and cream) and goat, no-nonsense rabbit (when there is an ‘r’ in the month), and pheasant in season. And wild venison. There is a market stall selling fine coffee where people gather and sit around for the cheerful daily grumble about politics and whatever, and another stall odorous with cheese. And there is the sheer joy of having the Cathedral, one of Europe’s great buildings, seven minutes’ walk away from our front door.

I have written a lot about my decades in the Fenland, in To Everything a Season, and about the Lancashire Fylde I knew as a youth, in Between the Tides. This move to Ely demanded not only that I properly, at last, get to know this town and its past, but also write about it: why it is there, who are the ghosts that nudge you — from the mysterious Hereward defying William the Bastard to Oliver Cromwell, from a sea of Bishops and a forest of Deans to those poor men who were hanged after the Littleport Riots in 1816: riots caused by desperate hunger.

Why Ely is there was easy enough: the town grew around the great Abbey, which was there because its foundress Etheldreda — once England’s most prestigious saint, and, as it happens, great-niece of the Raedwald buried at Sutton Hoo —had been given the entire rich Isle as a wedding gift by her first husband Tondberct. He had it because he was ‘Prince of the Girvii’ (so Bede calls him), they were a people who had made this bit of higher ground their stronghold in the fastness of the Fen. To get the feel of this new place I wrote a book about Etheldreda’s mental and material world, so drastically different to ours — but that led to more ambles down many byways of anecdote and history, colouring in the mental outline of the city. And, I would give much to be able to tell Cromwell what I thought of him, or once more to drink Steward and Patterson’s ale at the Cutter Inn by the river as the last of the working boats chugged past.

Getting to know the Cathedral well, at all times of day and night and year, gives a lift to the heart even on the dourest of days. Getting to be a regular at its musical events, and joining the vigorous community of its services — these were joys that have become waymarks in my weeks. For buildings and their beauty, as well as what happens in them, affect people profoundly, and physical environment subtly influences how people imagine themselves.

I once asked some young folk, just about to leave The King’s School, what they would remember most about their time there. One said, diffidently, as if expecting the others to laugh: ‘Well, going into the Cathedral every day.’ But no: vigorous nods of agreement. Why do we erect such ugly, tawdry, gimcrack buildings to put our young folk, and ourselves, in? What does that say about how we think of them and ourselves? What are we doing? Treat people as mere statistics and they will live down to that vision.

The grandeur of the Cathedral is only a dozen miles from the ugly, now almost ignored, little church in my old village (which I did come to love, and I mowed its churchyard for decades). Of a summer evening, as we come out of Evensong and see before us the way home across the Green, one of the psalms I would sing as a choirboy in the church in my beloved Lancashire often comes to my mind: ‘This shall be my rest for ever: here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.’

To the Eel Island: an Evening Journey by Charles Moseley is published by Merlin Unwin. It is available to purchase on their website.