A Child Of The Fens Remembers

A Memory of Ramsey St Mary's.

I was child of Ramsey St Mary's in the period 1939 to 1960. My family lived in the last 'grey pebble-dashed' council house going north out of village (3/4 of a mile from Ponders Bridge). My father's name was Harry Stafford Jacobs and my mother's Francis Ellen Jacobs. As well as myself, there were four other children, George, Bernard, Claude and Pearl. Anything about this area, particularly so Whittlesea Mere, interests me greatly. As a youngster, I fished all the waters around the northern end of where Whittlesea Mere was in the nineteenth century: Blackham Bridge, Tibbitts Bridge, PondersBridge, and Glassmore Bank.

IT REALLY WAS A MAGICAL PLACE

The reflections of a boy from the late 1940s and early 1950s who lived on Herne Road, Ramsey St Mary’s

“I learnt about Whittlesea Mere from my father when I was very young. He told me if I looked across ‘the Herne’ towards the trees of Holme Fen from my front bedroom window, I would see the very tall chimney at a place he called Johnson’s Point. This chimney, he said, was the smokestack of the pumping engine that aided the final draining of the mere in the 1860s.

Bevill’s Leam, sited to the northernmost point of where Whittlesea Mere was in the mid nineteen hundreds, where I did almost all my fishing as a youngster. I experienced idyllic days of self-imposed solitude at the sites known locally as Blackham Bridge, Tibbitts Bridge, Pondersbridge, and Glassmore Bank. In the long hot days of summer, this river was the most beautiful and magical place imaginable for any receptive young mind. With crystal-clear waters of the river sparkling as if diamonds in the bright sunlight my mind would drift into a magical land as I watched my homemade red-topped float on the river. Covering most of the ‘clearer’ parts of the river margins, and sometimes right into mid-river, in abundance, were giant white water lilies with bright green shiny leaves as large as dinner plates. At the river edge, grew dense swathes, sometimes up to twelve foot in width and hundreds of yards long, of dense tall reed, yellow water iris, and reed mace - my friends and I called these cattails. As late spring departed and the high temperatures of high mid-summer - June to September - becoming the daily norm, it was now a plethora of different insects began to arrive in there hundreds, even, thousands. From nowhere suddenly there would appear a funnel or football like cloud of thousands of the tiniest of these annoyances dancing and flitting across the surface waters. Resting on the lily pads or lightly skimming the surface waters, many kinds of damsel, caddis, and dragonfly went about their business. The smallest of the dragonfly, the tiny blue ones about an inch long, were as numerous as flies around a wet cowpat in a grass meadow. Amongst the thousands of insects flying around, the occasional large, beautiful, and bright green/blue dragonfly with huge bulbous eyes would dart in staccato manner as it hunted for food. These were magnificent insects with a body up to four or more inch long and a wingspan of around six inches (us young boys had the belief these were ‘stingers’ and we should leave them alone). A shiny jet-black moorhen, with a bright red beak, clucked away as it moved hide-and-seek style amongst the reeds or made nifty tiptoe steps across on of the large lily pads. There would be the occasional ‘plop’ as a water rat (water-voles really but we kids called them rats) entered the water from the riverbank. Appearing, as from nowhere, a mallard would break the absolute silence as it landed, feet splayed, on the waters of mid-channel. Occasionally, a pair of beautiful white swans, some with tiny cygnets, would serenely float by. Watching a fully-grown swan take-off from a river was something to behold; it was as magic and you never thought it would get airborne no matter how fast it pattered frantically over the water surface. Graceful swallows and swifts endlessly twittered as they dove from height and, then, at the last moment level out to skim across the dead-flat water surface, in an endless search for insects. I wonder where the offspring of those pigeons - the ones I often disturbed as a boy as I climbed underneath the bridges at Blackham Bridge, Tibbitts Bridge - roost or nest now horrible metal things have replaced those beautiful black wooden structures of yesteryear. In addition to all these physical wonders of fenland, there was the wonderful silence and serenity of everything. One fortunate enough to experience these simplistic things was brought back to reality only when the quietness was broken by the chug-chug of a single tractor working in some way-off field across the fen.

Yes, times were austere and opportunities few in those years just after the second world war, but childhood for me on those lovely summer days when I was fishing alone on the river bank could be wondrous. My hope, in the few words I have just written, is I have given the reader just a smidgen of an idea of what magic there could be for a fen child in a summer of the late 1940s and early 1950s.


Terry Jacobs – an eternal fen boy now living in the great city of Sheffield