Uncle Ted's Lucky Escape

One of the things we still do well in Britain is cold, filthy wet weather during the winter months. Nearly a year ago, despite being away from Lincolnshire for over thirty years I felt strangely reassured by the driving force of a February downpour as I edged along the fens from Sleaford towards the Witham at Tattershall.  Many midlanders regard the fens as flat and featureless but I still think this area holds much fascination. Enormous tracts of land criss-crossed by dykes like wounds cutting into the rich, dark soil.  Clusters of cottages and farm buildings standing out like islands on the horizon encircled by rook laden trees. You may spot the occasional water-tower or derelict windmill in the distance to one side of the road or, on the other, a chimney stack rising up above the line of the dyke bank where long ago some old beam engine puthered away pumping water up from a network of field ditches into the main dyke. After rounding the bends at Anwick, you spot the massive keep of Tattershall Castle sticking up like some giant lego structure and I know I’m in familiar territory. Yet this isn’t home anymore. So much has changed. The village in which I grew up isn’t the same anymore. The winding road of little shops and white pantiled cottages in the centre of the village has all but gone. Sykes’ lane by the side of the old Primitive chapel down which we pelted to Newstead’s chippy has been obliterated by extensions to the village car-park, an expanse of tarmac all but removing the heart of the place. My old home on Dogdyke road, may still be there but it looks so different. The pebble-dash walls that gave the cottage the appearance of having a bad rash have recently had ‘treatment’ and now appear rather drab and grey. It looks quite exposed since the Virginia creeper has been removed that once covered most of it like some green shroud. The Methodist Church next door, a hive of activity in my day, now stands empty and forlorn, testament to falling congregations I suspect. But I’m wrong, the faithful haven’t gone altogether. A laminated card on the peeling church notice-board says they are now to be found worshipping in new premises in the former doctors’ surgery. I later discover from my brother, still a village resident, that the doctors have in turn moved over the road to spanking new premises on land which forty years ago served as the wood-yard. Of course some bits of old  Coningsby do remain intact, the fine church with its massive tower and huge one-handed clock face still dominates the landscape. The tall bow windows of what was once Blackburn’s ironmonger’s shop have fortunately escaped the developers’ hand. Yet here is not our intended destination, for today we’re only calling in to pick up my brother. We are venturing a dozen or so miles further on, skirting the edge of the fens near Spilsby.

I was actually born in Spilsby, well just outside, but they haven’t seen fit to put a plaque up as yet. Their most famous son remains Sir John Franklin, polar explorer and discoverer of the North West passage. Such was his claim to fame that he merited not just a plaque but an impressive stone statue at one end of the market place. Spilsby today is a rather sleepy little town. The market has virtually disappeared yet with its raised pavement terrace and rectangle of neat Georgian town houses and shops the place retains much local charm.   Some blame its downfall from busy market town on the building of the by-pass in the late 1960s. It certainly succeeded in removing lots of the heavy traffic heading to and from the east coast from the town centre. Traffic was choking the place making life miserable for locals trying to get about.  However, the town’s changing fortunes were not our main concern for we were turning off a couple of miles back along the Boston road onto the fen lane that led down to Toynton All Saints.

 In the last 100 years the cluster of villages along this escarpment played a key role in the lives of my mother’s family. None of the villages are or ever have been very large. They contain few buildings of any great architectural merit and few of their inhabitants have ever made the pages of the Lincolnshire Echo let alone Who’s who. They simply represent the first areas of settlement as any traveller crossing the Boston Fens makes their way north into the Wolds.  Mother’s home was in East Keal, or more accurately a mile or so north of East Keal to the far side of Marden Hill. From the 1920s the family lived on a small farm which years earlier had been the site of clay workings and a brick furnace. Although she had moved away in the early 1950s, after she married, her brothers and sister remained in the area. Uncle Ted retired from farming several years ago to a modest bungalow a couple of miles away at Toynton close to his son’s home. It was to the small Methodist chapel adjacent to his bungalow that we were heading for a surprise party. Nothing too elaborate, a few friends from the village had been invited alongside a dozen or so relatives who had been alerted to the fact that he was turning 90. And it was clearly a surprise. He had been enticed from the warmth of his fireside on a damp Saturday afternoon by the promise of a trip to a local garden centre to buy a few bulbs for his back garden. Instead he had been waylaid by his nearest and dearest only to be dropped a hundred yards or so round the corner of the lane at the chapel door. If the embarrassment of being taken by surprise was not enough on entering the room he was greeted by his daughter who ceremoniously pinned on him a badge proclaiming ‘Birthday boy.’ 

Arthritis may have taken its toll on his joints over the years but Uncle Ted remained very much the life and soul of the gathering chatting about his life in the local farming community. I had sent several enlarged snaps of family members past and present which had been conveniently arranged on a table by Ted’s side to help the reminiscences flow. Not that he needed much prompting. He was soon regaling us with stories of catching poachers down on the west fen, driving herds of beast to the Spilsby market on a Monday three times a year and attending the local sheepdog-trials at Skendleby Hall. His best story was, however, commemorated on the magnificent birthday cake that his daughter in law, Angela, had made especially for the occasion. The square cake was surmounted by a raised area of icing representing the slopes of Marden Hill behind Brickfield House, where Ted had spent most of his young life. Next to this lay a kidney shaped slab of pale blue icing portraying the Clay Pit that, fed by springs, provided  fresh water for the all the farms’ stock.

Plum in the centre of this stood two plastic figures of heavy horses sporting full harness and another of a man. Those of us unfamiliar with the tale thought it was simply depicting some romantic impression of a bygone era. It was soon revealed to us that behind it all was one of Ted’s favourite tales. With a little prompting he revealed to everyone that when he was just 15 he had been sent out by his father on a cold winter’s afternoon to fetch the horses in from the Bolingbroke end of the West paddock back to the stables, so as to be ready for the blacksmith who was expected the next morning. Ted had duly gone out and to his fathers surprise arrived back through he kitchen door some 45 minutes later. Expecting that the job should have taken him the best part of a couple of hours his father asked him what was he playing at leading them in at a gallop with all their gear on. Ted said he hadn’t but that he had managed to bring them in quicker by taking a short cut through the pit field and had in fact led them across the frozen ice of the clay-pit lake itself. His Dad had told him to “give o’er” and that he was pulling their legs as it was impossible to lead two heavy horses, each weighing the best part of a ton, over the pit, “frozzen with ice or not.” Ted  said that if they didn’t believe him they’d better go and look for themselves because the hoof prints were still there in the ice across the top of the pit to prove it. It was not a short cut he ever took again.

    



The Brickfield Pit