Isolated farms protruding from black earth. Rows of trees propping up the sky, the endless sky, as flat as the land, reflected in the endless water. The incessant wind makes the anguished trees lean to escape. Dykes, marching forward in parallel ranks. Even the seagulls following the plough seem compelled to keep in straight lines.
A road darts from infinity towards nowhere in particular, pauses briefly on the point of tumbling into a ditch, turns five abrupt right-angles in the space of a quarter mile, and hurries on to nowhere else in particular.
Everywhere is empty. Tiny stations dropped randomly about the fenland seem deserted, as if the last traveller had migrated, like the swallows, to warmer climes. Perhaps we're on the moon? No, they say there are mountains on the moon.
Peterborough -- the makings of a city. Everywhere is "under development", nowhere quite finished. Even the station, with its modern buffet, has a half-built footbridge, while its lavatories would have been familiar to Dickens. The riverside park looks pretty, though.
Beyond Peterborough the land rises and folds, almost as high as the train, and bare fenland gives way to sweet little meadows and small copses of hawthorn. It is too good to last. Gravity catches up with us and overtakes us, until the highest object in sight is a farm gate. Gates keep things in or out. What things? In or out of where?
Into the Lincolnshire fens now, seeming larger and flatter even than those we have left. Power stations loom out of their self-created murk, thrust their busy electrons into thick wires, and retire gracefully like alien beings. Their legacy? More straight lines, of pylons and cables this time, but sometimes bending in obtuse angles round wholly imaginary obstructions.
More ponds and meres lie here, still, reflecting the clouds and sky so clearly that they might be entrances to some underworld. Diving ducks draw regular ripples in the pool-sky. Long smoke-smudges from distant brickworks announce their pollution.
The very place-names sound strange and remote: Brough (brusque cough by a chough?); Goole (grey oily pool?); Melton Halt (the train stops, no-one gets in or out); Kingston-upon-Hull (which king? why -upon-Hull, surely it's -upon-Humber?).
Suddenly the amazing spectacle of the new Humber bridge catches everyone's attention. Only the towers and top suspension cables are completed; the roadways rear impatiently at each side waiting for their central span. If the number of people working on the bridge is any criterion, the world will end before the bridge.
A grey Hull taxi engulfs me, leading me by strange routes (which are surely at least three times as long as they need be) to my place of business. Boring business, wouldn't a telephone call have served the same purpose? Then back to the station in another taxi, tired, so tired of travelling.
The journey home seems to last forever. Clinging coils of white mist surround the train as it speeds into the gathering gloom. Events merge into a dozing half-recollection of places. "Please do not flush the station while standing on one's head under the seat." No, I really can't have read that.
Out of the dusk rises the apparition of Ely Cathedral, lit by one last expiring ray from the sinking sun. Even the stones of that great building seem exhausted by the effort of standing still for so long. At last Cambridge arrives, leaving only the marathon walk the length of its station platform to complete my fen journey to Hull and back.
Please email me at: JLD1@cam.ac.uk if you have any comments.