What of my identity? It is interwoven between marsh, fen and town but the world changes. My roots and ancestry is firmly in the Fens. The Elsdens did not travel far from Soham, where they can be found over four hundred years ago, to Spalding for nearly a hundred years. My mother’s lineage has a similar short area of travel around the Bourne area of Lincolnshire. One person upon learning that I had left the area kindly described my family as “a local institution” although I never actually felt this was the case. We were just like so many other local families, embedded in our home area. Whilst I still have a love of Spalding and the Fenland area and it is part of me, as the area has changed I feel less and less part of it. In December 2022 I moved to Amble in Northumberland. I am a migrant, or a local phrase that is sometimes used that I rather like, “an incomer”.
I feel that whilst Fenland and my home town of Spalding remained part of me, I increasingly did not feel part of it. Change, especially from the late 1990’s had transformed the area in many ways and I felt it had drifted away from me. Yet at the same time I am blessed that both my life experience has cut across the three environments of marsh, fen and town in different ways and now in different locations.
It is often the case that you never miss something until it is no longer there. Perhaps one of the most bizarre changes I have noticed is the absence of aircraft noise. The RAF featured greatly over the skies of my old home, whether it be the Red Arrows or the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight using Fulney Church as a turning marker or the latest jets of the RAF and our allies practising overhead. In Northumberland it is only occasionally I hear jet engines and perhaps a little more often helicopters.
When I lived in Spalding I loved to visit the marsh and hear the sounds of the curlew. Even at my home, in winter or early morning in the Spring it was possible to hear the sound of curlew. It is perhaps the single most identifiable voice of the marsh and fen that I could even hear beyond the wall of noise created by the A16 Spalding by-pass. Here in Amble I am no more than 10 minutes’ walk from the Coquet estuary and the curlew are even closer. Indeed, on a field of ridge and furrow on the outskirts of town over winter I saw well over a hundred curlew at one time. The noise is so distinct some of the local starlings have learned to mimic their call.
In Spalding the cry of the curlew was the call of the marsh that spread across the fen and fields to the edges of town. Now, luckily for me, the curlews cry is the sound of home.
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