Going home always brings up memories. Some good, some bad, some almost lost.

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I used to watch him working when I was a kid.

 

I’d hide on the stairs and peek through the metal railings.

 

The steps were cold, bare concrete, painted dark red to hide the splashes that spilled on the floor, but you could see all the colours from the ink on the metal, spatters of fuchsia, yellow and blue.

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There wasn’t much art or colour living out in the fens, so the inks seemed brighter. If you didn’t grow up in the fenlands, they can seem like an alienating place.

 

We didn’t get many visitors because there’s no reason to pass through, and there’s nothing to see.

 

The gravestones in the little church were hundreds of years old, but the surnames etched on them were the same surnames as the fen folk who lived there when I was growing up. No one came in, and no one left. I’m not sure I really left. Not all of me anyway.

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The flat fields stretched for miles with nothing to block your view. The skies were equally wide reaching, and in the winter we called them ‘set in’, which seemed an apt term to describe the endless and oppressive grey overhead.

 

The kind of skills that seemed so commonplace to me growing up, I’ve never seen anywhere else.

 

They were skills deeply furrowed into the soil of the farmland and the drainage dykes that no outsiders ever saw. The fenland was sinking, even then. 

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The industrial farm equipment seemed enormous. It was sheltered from that endless sky in corrugated metal sheds surrounded by hay bails wrapped in black plastic.

 

Everything seemed immovable and inexplicably intriguing. I must have been about seven. The only movement you saw over the fens on winter days was the occasional barn owl, floating out of the darkness like a pale spirit before disappearing off into vast open space.

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He didn’t have a farming job, which always led the fen people to eye him, and me as his daughter, with distrust.

 

He was a printer from Liverpool, and had bought a plot of land in the fens as part of Maggie’s drive for entrepreneurial Britain, but land in the fens was going cheap for a reason. It was dying, like the industries in it.

 

The paint spattered railings led to his office, which was also the dark room. There were always papers, negatives and crunchy sheets of acetate with weird diagrams drawn on them lying around.

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It was when the X-files was on TV and me and my little sister used to sneak into his office and rummage through the towering filing cabinet looking for secret documents from the FBI about alien testing. She must have been about five.

 

The cold steel barns in the distance filled with that sleeping machinery seemed like a place for otherworldly secrets. 

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At night, miles of flat earth and no lighting between the tiny villages meant an endless sky of crystal sharp stars and complete blackness, with ruler straight horizons full of murky, looming silhouettes and a silence and darkness that city kids will never know. 

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We never found proof of aliens, but it didn’t matter. We found plenty of documents that we didn’t really understand, and watched for the occasional flicker of light from distant machinery in those cold dark barns, and that was adventure enough.

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The darkness in the fens to this day makes me feel as small and lost as I did at seven years old. It still holds secrets I will never unearth, but as an adult, it’s like a black canvas of silence that echoes your most deeply buried memories back at you; memories normally drowned out by the noise and the lights of the city. 

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His printing workshop had been built out of the old bricks from the outhouses. The house had once been a grain store he told me.

 

It backed onto the river but there was now a road where the old grass banks had been. You could still see the outline of the huge arch on the wall where the barges came in to unload the grain. When we moved in, there had been three outhouses in the yard.

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One was used for killing the pigs, and there was a big iron bath in there. The other was used for hanging the meat up when it had been salted. There were huge rusting iron hooks nailed into the wall that cast long shadows on the crumbling brickwork. I used to imagine the pigs being killed and their blood being drained into the bath.

 

I wondered if once that floor had been painted red to hide the splashes, too.

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The last building was an outside toilet, old, broken and disused for years. The ceiling had fallen part way in and now swallows had made it their home. All the rooms were dark, musty and damp with brick floors that had worn down in places from long forgotten footfall.

 

The bricks were permeated with damp and the salt was rising out of them, crystallising on their surface. Some of the bricks had big holes whittled into them, smooth indents that looked like tiny caves worn down by the sea over time.

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That was the sparrows he told me, because they liked the taste of the salt.

 

The garden was always full of sparrows, pecking at the brickwork and bathing in the dust. There were a lot of buildings like that dotted around the fens, crumbling and lost, haunted by the barn owls. Once they would have been used by the farm-workers, but there weren’t many of them left anymore.

 

The farmers that remained lived miles out of the tiny villages, in solitary houses that stubbornly resisted the elements of the fens. They seemed lost and forgotten, guarding the skills passed down over lifetimes inside their crumbling barns. 

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When he knocked those derelict old outbuildings down and forced the swallows to search for a new home, all that was left was a huge pile of rubble in the garden. It didn’t look like it had ever been anything. The pile of rubble remained like a ramshackle mountain outside the house for what, at seven, seemed like a lifetime.

 

When I said I missed the old outbuildings, he said that time moved on, and new skills had to replace the old. 

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I used to climb to the top of the rubble and build forts out of the bits of broken brick and make mud pies. I was always dressed in scruffy clothes, dungarees and second hand jumpers, because I was always covered in old dust.

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Although the swallows were gone, even more sparrows appeared than before. Armies of the tiny brown birds pecked at the rubble as if they wanted to crumble the pile into the earth for good, and rolled around in the dust like they were taking a bath. 

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He used the old bricks that weren’t too full of holes to build the printing studio where I hid on the stairs. He took the hooks and the big iron bath to the farm life museum in the village, a little building down the road with a thatched roof.

 

It was full of antiquated machinery from old industry that people from the village had donated. I was sad to see the hooks and iron bath go because they were fun to play with on top of the rubble, but he said they were just taking up space.

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One of the ironmongers from the village had made a beautiful cast iron fence for the small entrance. The metal curled skilfully to depict ears of barley and corn entwined with poppies, the leaves from one of which formed the latch to the gate.

 

There must have been a lot of effort in the making of it, though hidden away as it was behind the entrance to the village pub that shut down years ago, only a handful of people, mostly the villagers, must have seen it. ​

 

The museum had a guest book which I wrote my name in when I went to visit the old iron bath. Though the book was perched proudly on the desk in the doorway, there were few other names and I doubt there were many more by the time it closed down. Unless you were from the village, you would never have known it was there.

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Although the print studio was new, you could always smell the age of the brick. It mingled with the smell of melting plastic, white spirit and ink. It sort of stung your nose, but was pleasant anyway. When the red light was on in the darkroom, all the colours looked black. The force of the water that rinsed the ink into the plastic bath he’d screwed into the wall was terrifying but I loved it anyway. 

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The noise of the powerful spray from the hose against the fine mesh of the printing screens in that red room mixed with the smell of the chemicals was like a surreal dream. So I hid on the stairs and took it all in. The chemical smell was like the taste of pink pear drops.

 

As I sat watching in the darkroom, slowly the typeset lettering would appear on the wet screen, translucent and glistening, like magic.  But that’s when I was a kid. 

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Much later, as a teenager, I used those same pink peardrops to get high. I wanted to do something new, and by then, the filing cabinets full of secrets didn’t interest me anymore.

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He was getting older and he wanted to pass on what he had learned, but me and my sister had other plans and wanted to learn new secrets.

 

Things were being produced in China he told me. He needed to do things on the computer, but he didn’t know how.

 

He sold the huge industrial camera from the darkroom to the small art college in a town nearby. After a while there was less ink, less Perspex and the X-Files went on for too many series to be fun anymore. I helped out on weekends if I was bored. It was helping him out, or drinking vodka down the playing fields, waiting to leave.

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The splashes of colour were still there, but they weren’t as bright anymore. I didn’t know how the machinery worked, not really, even though I had watched so closely.

 

I was only a kid.

 

I hadn’t understood my foundations any more than the sparrows that had happily chipped away at the brick. 

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When I had to come home years later after he'd died, the fens looked different, but nothing had changed. The fields were still there, as flat and hard as they ever were. There were still only derelict buildings interrupting the vast skies and spirit level horizon. 

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His new office looked like an old outbuilding again, the old bricks whittled away once again. The machinery stood still, covered in white sheeting & old dust.

 

The screen bath was still anchored to the wall in the darkroom, but was now a dumping ground for incomprehensible faded diagrams, offcuts of plastic, and other odds and ends whose secrets were now lost and buried in the ground. 

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The dust would need to be disturbed eventually, and the machinery moved. It was taking up space, and there were new skills to be learned. But for the moment, everything laid still and quiet except for the echo of well furrowed memories against a dark canvas of wide reaching sky.

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But the fens have no memory.

 

They are a clean slate, unfeeling, offering no protection from the elements. You could try and impose your own memory on them, but it would just blow away like the dust on the fields and be lost, or caught, useless, in the old barns and crumbling buildings under the vast open sky.

 

It’s hard to leave a mark in time or place other than a recognisable name on a stone, and I’m not sure how much that means.

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I thought later about sitting on the red concrete stairs watching him work. I thought about how much skill it must have taken, and about how difficult it must have been. I couldn’t explain that I understand now that trying is hard, and that it doesn’t necessarily change anything, it just passes the time until things move on.

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I couldn’t explain to anyone that my memories were as redundant as the gathering old dust.

 

I felt like a different type of person somehow, but I was still a person looking through colourful railings at something magical I would never quite understand.

 

I wish I had tried then to understand better, but I was only a kid.