TY - JOUR
AU1 - McMillin, Laurie Hovell
AB - The fact is, once you start on a job like this, you never know where it’s going to end. It’s all piecemeal work. Stop it up in one place and it breaks out in another.  An engineer in the Fens in Dorothy L. Sayers’novel, The Nine Tailors Before the internet, my elder brother Bobby used to claim that our father’s family—the Hovells—descended from French nobility, the DeHautvilles: Hautville/Hovell. This claim seemed somewhat at odds with the English meaning of our surname, however, which suggested more humble origins. hovel=/ˈhɒv(ə)l/noun 1. a small squalid or simply constructed dwelling. “people were living in rat-infested hovels” 1.1 archaic An open shed or outhouse, used for sheltering cattle or storing grain or tools.1 In any case, our family’s status as farmers and blue-collar workers in Wisconsin seemed proof enough that we lacked true blue blood.2 Eventually, Bobby traced the paternal family line to East Anglia and a village called Upwell. There, starting in the twelfth century, lived a lord name D’Hauvill. Maybe my ancestors worked for him in this area known as the Fens.3 The Fens are a low-lying area in the eastern part of England that extends north from Cambridge out to the sea. Once mostly marsh filled with sedge, reeds, eels, and waterfowl, the Fens are threaded with slow-moving, flood-prone rivers. In the old days, the inhabitants navigated the water-logged terrain with boats and stilts. The 1,200 square miles of the Fens have been cobbled together over the centuries by a continuing process of draining and pumping and re-engineering. Indeed, as the novelist Graham Swift writes, “The Fens, for all their seeming desertion and power to haunt, are an entirely man-made landscape. They have been claimed from water. Water is always trying to claim them back” (vii). Today, the flat black earth that stretches out for miles to the Wash at King’s Lynn is sliced up by canals and straight-line rivers and planted with wheat, potatoes, beets—the richest soil in England, they say. This is where one of my ancestors, Thomas Hovell, came from, leaving his work as a laborer on someone else’s farm for the promise of land and work in America. Thomas Hovell left the Fens in 1858 and eventually purchased land in western Wisconsin, a place from which Native peoples had only recently been “removed.”4 Thomas acquired hilly farmland not far up the road from where my siblings and I grew up, and where my widowed mother still lives. Thomas is buried in the same cemetery as are my father’s ashes, just two country roads over from my parents’ farm. Most of my natal family still lives near this place. I left Wisconsin after college, traveling to India again and again, studying in Sri Lanka, making my way to Tibet, Nepal, China—hungry for other places. While staying in London for a semester in 2018, I do a lot of long-distance walks, trying to track down a writing project. The country is crawling with footpaths, and I take advantage of the Ridgeway, the South Downs path, the Cornwall coastal path, a cliff-limning trek in Wales. These are all scenic areas, known for their dramatic landscapes: idyllic rolling hills, dramatic seacoasts, Roman, Saxon and even Paleolithic ruins and constructions. The Fens are not such a place: No one goes there to enjoy the land. As a fictional walker declares, “Beastly country it is…. I’m not doing my hiking thereabouts, I can tell you” (Sayers, 318).5 The people of the Fens have a similarly unflattering reputation for being superstitious and insular, with characters formed as if by slow-moving silt. Back in 1610, William Camden wrote that Fen-dwellers are “[a] kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell, rude, uncivil, and envious to all others whom they call upland-men” (qtd in Harris, 15).6 Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play Fen offers a bleak view of what nesting layers of exploitation and oppression can do to a community, turning them violent and suicidal by turns. As the protagonist of Graham Swift’s Waterland said of his Fenland forebearers, an “old watery phlegm [had] cooled and made sluggish their spirits” (24). So the Fens are not on my list of places to walk. But when I propose to my husband, TS, that we make a trip to Germany to see where my mom’s family comes from, he agrees, but says also, “You better go to the Fens.” TS knows me—knows I have questions about home and belonging, and also that travel spurs me. And so I wonder: what would going back to the Fens now tell me? How am I supposed to feel about it? TS and I’d actually been to the Fens twenty years before, with my brother. We were in London for a semester, and Bob had come over on a genealogy trip. It was Bob’s first trip outside the United States: He was propelled off his farm by a desire to see the fatherland. TS chauffeured us to the Fens, me heavily pregnant and with a 2-year-old in tow, and we poked around old churchyards on a September afternoon, surveying the flat land from which Thomas Hovell came. I enjoyed the hunt for names, ages, addresses, and cross-references in old volumes in the Cambridgeshire Records Office—but only for a day or two. That visit was enough genealogy for me. I didn’t have the itch like my brother did, and I didn’t really understand what the search for names and dates to fill out the family tree meant to him. Thomas Hovell, after all, was only one of many ancestors, which also included an abundance of women whose names kept getting lost to marriage, as well as a set of German forebearers. My solo trip to the Fens two decades later wouldn’t be the same kind of genealogical search as my brother’s. But maybe I could piece something else together. It would be worth working through some of this family stuff. And the Fens are right there, after all, a short train ride away, potentially thick with meaning and memory. I check my calendar, find a day a week hence, and do a crash course in Fens and family history. I want to walk as much as I can, though this area is not known for its grand views. It’s flat, flat, flat. And though there are footpaths, walking seems not to have the value it does elsewhere in England. Nonetheless, I download a guide to short walks in Norfolk and check out Google satellite to confirm that you can walk, mostly, along the canals and rivers that stripe straight through the land. What I find there is like the layers of silt washed back when the waters recede, sedimenting, bogging down, turning finally to strata of peat. The night before I depart, TS and I watch an Agnes Varda documentary for a college class he is teaching. The Gleaners and I begins with the history of gleaning in France, the historical practice of collecting bits of grain left after a harvest. From there it moves on to present-day gatherers of post-harvest potatoes, apples, and grapes and then to the gleaners of outdoor markets, dumpsters, and curbside refuse. From these gleaners of food, Varda connects the line to artists and assemblers—including the documentarian herself—who make spaces and art out of what is left behind and left around.7 Varda’s subjects remind me of my nephew Larry, who was himself a gleaner. Larry not only collected metal for resale but salvaged all kinds of things, stacking them all up in his parents’ garage (until he and his possessions had to move out) and then strewing stuff all over on his grandmother’s (my mother’s) farm. For a time, he lived in an old camper/ice fishing shack behind my mother’s barn, collecting bicycle parts, old TVs, chairs, hoses, old glass, antiques, and treasures. He often said in defense of his collecting habits, “It’s still good,” an expression that suggested his exasperation with the way most of the world tossed useable things aside, the way we all wasted. He would reuse coffee grounds, for example, creating tinctures of caffeine with which he doused toothpicks or which he drank to stir himself from the mood-altering and sleep-inducing drugs he had to take for his mental health, as mandated by the state of Wisconsin. I thought Larry would appreciate the gleaners, and he was much on my mind, in any case, as the one-year anniversary of his suicide was approaching. I take a train north on a sunny March morning. I think of Varda as we pass through a recycling center outside Cambridge, with cans and bottles in piles for processing. Nearing Ely, with its famous cathedral towering over the flat land, I see the famed black peat soil. There is a dank stench that I take to be “the smell of the Fens.” The drainage ditches, it seems to me, don’t line the small fields so much as create them. The landscape is dotted with cranes and dredges, for, as Swift suggests, the land is never finally reclaimed: it’s always in the process of becoming reclaimed. Drainage has long been a part of the cultural history of the Fens. People in the Fens had drained the land in a piecemeal way at least since Roman times (1st c. CE); in the Middle Ages, inhabitants of the area collaborated on drainage efforts for their own needs. Lands were largely held in common then, and, in addition to gathering fish and fowl, locals worked the land and waters for small scale agriculture and pasturage. 8 During the reign of the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, however, a set of powerful agents, most of whom came from outside the Fens, undertook a broad-scale and coordinated effort to drain the land and thus “improve” it. Starting in 1632, drainage turned into a land grab that benefitted the wealthy. The Great Level—also known as the Bedford Level—was engineered by the Dutchman Cornelius Vermuyden and supported by Charles I and the Fourth Earl of Bedford, along with other “adventurers.” In exchange for their water management scheme, the entrepreneurs would all gain large tracts of land through the process of enclosure. In essence, drainage and enclosure took lands away from commoners and reassembled these small holdings together into larger areas that could be fenced off and worked year-round—that could be owned and appropriated by the powerful. Vermuyden used local laborers and also brought in workers from France and Holland, promising to complete the job in six years. But the project faced many engineering and logistical issues. Numerous commoners opposed the drainage and enclosure scheme and carried out acts of resistance, sabotage and active protest. A tract by a Fensman from 1646 questioned the very idea of the Fens as a wasteland waiting for improvement (Lindley, 6). The undertakers have alwaies vilified the Fens, and have mis-informed many Parliament men, that all the Fens is a meer quagmire, and that it is a level hurtfully surrounded, and of little or no value: but those which live in the Fens, and are neighbours to it, know the contrary. (The Anti-Projector) The ideology of the Fens as wasteland, the tract suggests, is an expeditious one—an argument belied by the experience of those who had pieced lives together there for centuries. Despite local resistance, the schemes continued: the Fenland was “reclaimed” from the waters, patched together, resewn, and re-appropriated by the process of enclosure. Those who benefitted from enclosing the Fens—landowners, lords, investors—couched their efforts in terms of taking what was useless and making it useful. This “internal colonization” both pushed people off the land and made them wage laborers (Lindley, 4).9 By the eighteenth century, most local folk were forced to work for someone else on the land, such as it became: some of the richest peat soil in England, ideal for growing wheat, barley, and potatoes and other foodstuffs. My ancestors were among these laborers.10 Instead of being part of the nobility, they were an unsung people. Outside the Downham Market train station, a portly taxi driver looks me over—a middle-aged white woman with a small backpack and hiking boots. It’s clear I’m not from here as I stand stock still, glance at the map on the phone, and try to get my bearings. He observes me without saying a word, and I think of the way someone in my hometown might stare at a stranger. On my side, I glance at him to see if he might resemble someone from the Hovell side of the family, on the short side, stoutish, barrel-chested. I set off south of town to see the nearby Denver Sluice, a great complex of dams and gates that controls the waters of the Great Ouse River; since 1651 it has been key to making the Fens into farmland. I head out as if I know where I’m going, and it’s easy enough to find the path along the straight line of water, the large gate-like contraption of the locks standing over it a mile south. I walk along what I take to be a river bank, twenty feet and several feet below an embankment that parallels the way between field and canal. Apparently, after they drained the Fens in the 17th century, they had not accounted for how much the peat would shrink when it dried out, and now much of the land is some twenty feet below what it once was, in some places falling below sea level. I climb to the embankment for a better view and startle at the sound of galloping hooves behind me. Flinching, I turn to see—not a charging horse—but three swans taking off from the water and racing to the sluice. At the sluice itself, a gate holds back a wall of water from what is not actually a river but a “relief channel,” and near that is the smaller Ouse. A man in an orange safety vest putters around the machinery, and I think of my dad and my uncle Clyde’s employment by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s and ‘70s, working on dams all up and down the Upper Mississippi, and of their father, Stanley Hovell, a farmer, road builder and manual laborer, who was often referred to as Shovel—S. Hovell. And I think too of Thomas Hovell, who, once he settled in Wisconsin was known as a well-digger. Men digging. Men managing water. I cross on the short bridge to the other bank and head back towards town. The muddy path is lined by tire treads, and some worker has collected and then left garbage at various sites along the way: large plastic jugs, soda bottles, plastic. The sun is out, and I stop to eat a sandwich along the bank and, not for the first time, wonder why I am here. Back in London, I’d checked on Google Maps whether I might be able to walk to Upwell from Downham Market, and I suppose I could have done so by simply walking on the two-lane road. But I am eager to get to Upwell soon and decide to save my walking for that place. Unlike the long through-walks of the Ridgeway or along the Cornwall coast, today’s will be a patched-together walk. At Downham Market, I get a taxi for the short ride to Upwell. The driver is originally from Manchester and has lived here eight years, he says. “But it will take anover twenteh before I can say I’m a local.” I ask him to describe life here, and he says, “It’s slow. People live a long time. There a lot o’ old people here.” When I ask him about the ditches, he says they are used as much for irrigation as for drainage. I think he is taking the piss, as they say, just as when he tells me that on account of locals intermarrying with Vermuyden’s crew of foreign canal workers, “once in a while someone will have a black baby!” But I find out he is right about the irrigation, at least: for much of the year, the Fens are dry, and the drained-off water is used in spray irrigation. Speeding through the flat land, I think of my parent’s farm on level land between bluffs, called a sand prairie. My family’s 100 acres (a small holding for this area) are now rented out to farmers who can afford to water them, their irrigation set-ups like metal dinosaur skeletons lurching across the corn fields. We soon approach the village of Outwell, which is conjoined to my destination, Upwell. Upwell forms the upright portion of the letter T to which Outwell forms the cross bar. (Upwell’s population in 2011 was 2750 and Outwell’s 2083). Considered together, the two villages of Upwell and Outwell can boast of being “the longest village in England.” But local folks don’t think of them together. Though they were once a single village called Welle, the two villages divorced in the thirteenth century over some monastic rivalry. And it seems that the inhabitants of Upwell and Outwell are still sworn enemies. No one remembers why. We motor through the cheerless village of Outwell, and the taxi drops me at what passes for the center of Upwell, near St Peter’s Parish Church, where TS, my brother, and I once poked around the lichen-covered headstones looking for a Hovell. The River Nene cuts neatly through the center of Upwell, dividing the long village. Daffodils bob in the sun along the canal. The Five Bells Inn is shut for renovations, and the few businesses that line the main street appear closed, most for good. But Joanne’s Pantry is open just across the way, so I head in for a cup of tea. Although London friends had told me that people from the Fens have a reputation for being stand-offish and insular, the proprietress is a friendly woman, and one of her regulars helps me find the lights in the jumbled-up closet of a loo. He has the short and stocky stature of a Hovell, and I can’t help but look at him and others for signs of myself and my family. At the next table, an older couple is having lunch. The woman stares at me, just as someone at home might do to an interloper, and her husband drinks milk with his meal, something I’ve only seen adults do in the Midwest. After a cup of tea, I walk back down to the far end of town to the Globe Inn. We had stopped there twenty years earlier with my brother, but now it is shut down. I take out a bit of cake I’d saved from dinner last night and eat it in the sun above the canal of the Nene river. And it comes again, that question: Why am I here. I’m not like my brother, who can spend hours on Ancestry.com piecing family history together. As someone who tried to leave home as quickly as I could, I don’t feel the pull of blood ties as he does. Do blood ties really matter? Does my genetic connection to Thomas Hovell four generations back mean anything at all? The story Bob creates seems plotted along the neat spaces in a family tree. But for me, this place, Thomas, my ancestors, my family are pieces in a story I have yet to put fully together. Upwell is not “where I come from” in any simply or direct way. And yet, I want to use gleanings of the past to try to make some meaning in the world. While sitting at the south end of the town by the canal, I use my phone to make a reservation at the only hotel in the area; currently, there isn’t any place to stay in Upwell, so I have to stay in the dreaded rival Outwell. I take a side street and see a Great War memorial that lists a Charles Hovell among the war dead. The earlier sun has faded to gray. I try the door of the locked community center. There seems no one about, no one on the street. The churchyard at St. Peter’s has tumbled down gravestones, and in any case, my relatives were likely not Anglican. I head back up the street in the direction of the hotel, past empty storefronts. It takes only a few minutes to walk past the closed-off facades to the northern end of the village to where my hotel is, but in that short time I am ready to cancel my reservation and hop on the next bus out of town. I don’t belong here; I don’t care about ancestry. An arrow points left to the city of Wisbech (pronounced Wiz-beech), and it sounds so much better than this dreary place. For me it’s as easy as that: get on the bus and go, get on the train and go. Did Thomas feel such a drive to leave? What was it that propelled him out of there, when so many others stayed? Maybe I am his descendant after all. The hotel room is uncancellable, so I make my way to St. Clement’s Church that marks the intersection connecting Upwell and Outwell, and then to the hotel and my snug room. I lie down on the low bed and feel unable to move for a while. There’s a feeling of stuckness, of being immobilized. A character in Graham Swift’s novel set in the Fens, Waterland, says of his family: “They are fixed people. They have tied around their legs an invisible tether, and have enjoined upon them the stationary vigilance of sentinels” (22). And this seems as true of my Wisconsin family as perhaps of my ancestral one, most of whose “biggest migration,” like the family in Swift’s story, “was to move from the land west to the land east of the Ouse—a distance of six miles” (22). Thomas’s parents, the records show, were born, lived, and died within a range of 15 miles. Their last address was in Wisbech, 6.5 miles from Upwell. Similarly, in the 1940s, my father moved just five miles from his birthplace to a spot on the Wisconsin prairie where he stayed until he died; my mother has lived there since her marriage in 1948. Most of my parents’ siblings and many of my cousins have remained in the area. There can be stuckness, yes. But for some people, staying in one place is just what is. Others choose to stay for family. And still others just gotta go. Lying on my back in the Corwin Lodge Hotel of Outwell, for which I had shelled out over 80 pounds (mindful that the average yearly wage in Thomas’s day was about 24 pounds), I open Ancestry.com and try to piece together my family history, to put family history in some kind of context. In multiple censuses, Thomas’s father Robert (1799–1866) was listed as an agricultural laborer in Upwell. Thomas was born in 1832, the fourth child of seven. His next eldest brother, also Thomas, died in infancy. As with my ancestors, my more immediate family recycles the same names over and over—Thomas, Robert (my father, my brother, my great-grandfather, and great-great-great grandfather), William, John, forms of Laurena (my mother, my aunt, me). When Thomas E. Hovell is recorded in the 1851 census at age 18, he is listed as a “lodger” at Morton’s Farm, where he was likely also a laborer. In the mid-nineteenth century in the Fens, as William P. Smith writes in Discovering Upwell, “[t]he vast majority of the inhabitants of Upwell and the surrounding areas were land workers working extremely long hours. It would be common for women to work twelve hours a day alongside their husbands, harvesting the seasonal crops” (184). Laborers didn’t own their houses but rented from their farmer-employer as part of their pay; this may explain why in census records Thomas’s parents don’t have a consistent address. Working conditions in the Fens were notoriously difficult. The long days, the wet. Ague and rheumatism were widespread afflictions. Hunger was widespread. (In Churchill’s play Fen, a ghost from the 1830s, a female labourer, says “We are starving….My baby died starving” (Scene 9).) And as a way to deal with the pain and suffering, it was very common for local people to use laudanum, a form of opium. As Smith writes, Opium was grown all over the fens for hundreds of years; almost all farm labourers had a bed of white poppies in their gardens. Opium tea was the normal drink at “dockie time” (lunch break). This evil white poppy liquid was brewed up at night and drunk cold all day long. Opium pills were also readily available from the druggist and most general stores. (184) Smith includes a photo of potato pickers sitting in piles of straw at “dockie time”: I picture my relatives among them. I imagine Thomas’s mother among the women giving “Godfrey’s Cordial” to her kids at teething time, or buying a halfpenny of laudanum from the local druggist who says, “oh well, it keeps the women folk quiet it do” (184). Thomas departed at age 26. Photos of him taken in Wisconsin show a short, barrel-chested man with his breeches tucked into high boots. Like others of his era, he probably used credit to get from Liverpool to New York. From there he made his way to the newly “opened” upper midwestern region around the Mississippi. This area, historically, had been an important site for various Native American groups—the Hopewell, Mississippians, Oneontas11; by the nineteenth century, Native people in the region were mostly Ho-Chunk and Dakota; by the time Thomas purchased his land in 1866, the U.S. government had removed many Native people to west of the Mississippi and was selling their homelands for $1.25 an acre.12 Through the processes of settler colonialism, Thomas—a formerly landless product of internal colonization in England—bought some land. Eventually he acquired over 200 acres, settling in the crook of a coulee between hilly country very different from the flat black lands of the Fens. Owning land mattered to white settlers and their descendants. Land was wealth; it was meaning. Thomas’s newly claimed land became a place which future generations of Hovells might inherit and to which they would return. Indeed, my grandfather lived on this land twice. First, as a young man, he worked on the farm and lived in the granary; later, he got possession of the house and farm. But Grandpa couldn’t make the land profitable: he later had to sell the land to some outsider from Chicago, though he and Grandma were permitted to continue living there. He died in the barnyard at age 66, with no land to pass on. But the place mattered to him. My nephew was similarly drawn to the place of my parents’ farm. Before Larry died, he had been staying at my mom’s as much as he could. Officially, in terms of his probation, he was supposed to stay in an apartment picked for him by the state, from where he could be called in for drug tests and counselling, monitored, and piss-tested. But it was the farm and its woods that he loved. The quiet. The chance to putter with his “treasures,” to poke among the many oddments my father had left behind. Larry wanted to scrap and tinker, to chop wood for Grandma’s stove, to watch deer and, in bow season, hunt them. (He wasn’t allowed to carry a gun, given his record.) But he couldn’t stay on the farm legally, and it was hard on my mom, his coming and going and erratic behavior. Places draw people—or they get stuck in them. Swift’s protagonist again: “To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty spaces of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness, and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon… [What can you do] if you are born in the middle of the flatness, fixed in it, glued to it even by the mud in which it abounds…?” (Swift, 24–25). This feeling of stuckness: as if the flat land under a gray sky was the whole world. It is a kind of depression—people in my family have been prone to that. How much of it was Fenland history? How much of it was genetically passed on, the trauma of hard living? I know this flat feeling, have lived with it on and off all my life, sometimes taking it for The Way Things Really Are: flat, gray, inert. As if the mind is bogged down in marsh. As if you cannot move. I have been there as well. When Larry died—when he killed himself—we set about trying to piece it together. How could he? Why would he? We learned that he had meth in his system. We learned that he shot himself in the head with a .22. Did he feel this overwhelming sense of stuckness, of powerlessness, such that—that taking power over this—whether he was dead or alive—seemed like the only real choice he could make? After he died, when we gathered for his memorial, my sons came out from Ohio to my mother’s farm. Wandering around the early spring places where Larry had stacked and arranged his piles, his treasures, the things that he collected, my sons Jack and Liam noticed that they were largely arranged. “They’re like installations, Mom,” said Jack, an artist. And as soon as Jack said that, I saw them too: A study of circles, composed of garden hose, wagon wheel, flower-shaped lawn ornament. A study of bicycles, including one mounted on the peak of an outbuilding roof. And, in a work that spread out across 60 acres of the woods, a study of chairs. A chair perched on an old downed tree. A chair settled on a tall mound of dirt. An old car seat placed so that Larry could watch over a small drinking pond he’d made for deer. And then even the chairs that seemed not to have been part of a composition began to seem so: a red chair-seat above empty yellow shotgun shells. An old metal tractor seat angled at the base of a walnut tree. A deerstand in an old oak that, when Liam and I sat in it for a time, revealed that Larry had reworked the woods to create sight lines across the entire patch of land. For look across the way–here comes Jack! Larry had made of the woods an elaborate construction, an arrangement, an assemblage, a fabulous gleaning, it seemed to us then, that nobody else had picked up on. The chairs were there as if to say, I want a place to rest: it is here, it is here, and it is here. Outside my hotel room, the sun is shining again through the lacy-curtained window, so I rouse myself and head back out to follow one of the walks described optimistically by the Norfolk County Council. It’s a patched together thing, this walk: a road, a dirt path, a bit of this and that at odd angles. But the beauty of this route is its honesty: Instead of leading you up and down the one main street where the house faces have largely been prepared to meet you, the prescribed track circles behind the village and reveals a different story. Horses, dogs, a few sheep, small farms, piles of garbage. A walk claimed from reclaimed land. Near the fields, the pumps constantly labor, bailing and bailing water. The dirt track along the small fields as the sun begins to set reminds me, again, of the flat prairie between bluffs that my father and his father had settled in, that Larry had loved. (There’s a photo of Larry in which he’s dragged an old couch into a field; he’s resting with his feet up, more content and cozy than in any living room.) Garbage piled up at crossroads and gates included, as if in homage to Larry, first a set of three car seats, then, at a gate, a set of two, then hidden in a human-made warren of sticks and brush, a single sky blue car seat. Ponies with winter-long shaggy forelocks dare not to meet my eye; black chickens and a green-black rooster scatter at my approach. A huge mound of carrots piled at the end of a field and left to rot, and I think again of the gleaners. I think: But they were still good! Gleaning is about taking what others don’t want—it’s seeing value in what is not generally valued. Draining the Fens involved something quite different: taking the land from those who valued it, those who lived there, and making it into something profitable for a select group—and something less liveable for the previous inhabitants. This was the story back home too: take the land in the name of progress and civilization. On a backroad behind the main street I see a teenage boy heading out from home in the direction of town, the call of a spring evening seeming to bring him out, even if, from the looks of things, there is nothing to do in the village. I pass a dog obedience school where the students seem not to have learned their lessons: Their barking is calamitous. I make my way back up the main street again, along the Nene that will flood the road again soon, up past the British Legion Hall where preparations for Monday night Bingo are underway. For half a second I consider joining the white-haired folk gathered there at the only place in Upwell you could, at the moment, get a pint. But I push on, encountering a man and woman out walking; the man pushes a bicycle, and on one pedal he’s balanced a vacuum cleaner. They give me a cheery “Evenin’.” As I come back to Outwell, some crows’ nests high in the trees above St. Clement’s Church catch my eye, and while I look up at them, a woman comes by walking her dog. “It’s a lovely aspect, isn’t it?” she says, and stops to look up at the sky with me. “My father always said, when the crows build their nests high, it will be a long summer.” She asks me what I’m doing there, and I tell her that one of my ancestors came from Upwell. “Oh—I am Upwell born and bred,” she says. “Though now I live in Outwell,” she confesses somewhat sheepishly, as if I would understand. When I tell her the family name, Hovell, she doesn’t recognize it. Crossing the churchyard at St. Clement’s, I say a prayer of gratitude to Thomas Hovell for leaving Upwell. If he had not left, “I” would not have been born, it’s true, but there’s something else. The through-line of ancestry is not clear cut like the lines of a drainage ditch; there are layers and murk, dead zones and fertile ground. I have gleaned something of my nephew here—about home and travel—and also some perspective on the ways I’ve tried to embark on a life different from the one created by my natal family. I would spend the night in Thomas’s hometown, and then I would go. My deep gratitude goes out to Robert Hovell, Jr. for his genealogical work, to T. S. McMillin and Jessica Grim for their generous conversations on this project, and to KT Thompson for crucial perspective and encouragement. This piece is dedicated to the memory of Larry R. R. Sacia. Footnotes 1 Lexico, Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.lexico.com/definition/hovel. 2 In some census and baptism records, the name is spelled with one “l,” Hovel. 3 I will capitalize “the Fens” when I refer to the specific area of East Anglia. Other authors, however, refer to the area with a lower case “f,” which is preserved when I quote them. 4 For an extensive consideration of Native American history in this region of Wisconsin and local people’s memory and forgetting of it, see my Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). 5 See also Robert Macfarlane’s 2008 account of the Fens in “Ghost Species.” 6 It’s important to note that Camden made this claim as part of an argument for ousting Fen-dwellers from the area. 7 The title of the film in the original French is “Les glaneurs et la glaneuse”—the gleaners and the [female] gleaner. 8 See Keith Lindley for further discussion of this pivotal moment in the Fens’ history: Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London, Heinemann, 1982). 9 As Lindley suggests, this internal colonization was happening at the same time as the English were colonizing Ireland and the Atlantic seaboard (4). 10 The 1861 Census lists Robert (Thomas’s father) and William as “Ag Lab,” an agricultural labourer. 11 “Hopewell” and “Mississippian” are archaeologists’ terms for peoples whose names are no longer known. 12 See Merle Curti for a detailed discussion of land speculation and settlement in Trempealeau County in this region in The Making of an American Community (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1959). Works Cited “The Anti-Projector, or, the History of the Fen Project.” s.l., s.n, 1646. ProQuest . Web . Accessed22 Feb. 2021 . Churchill Caryl. “Fen,” Plays: 2. London: Methuen Drama, 144 – 309 . Drama Online. Web. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781408162286.00000013. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Curti Merle. The Making of an American Community . Stanford : Stanford UP , 1959 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Giblett Rob. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology . Edinburgh UP , 1996 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Harris L. E. Vermuyden and the Fens: A Study of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and the Great Level . Cleaver-Hume Press , 1953 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Lindley Keith. Fenland Riots and the English Revolution . London : Heinemann , 1982 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Mcfarlane Robert. “Ghost Species .” Granta 102 , 7 July 2008 , https://granta.com/ghost-species/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat McMillin Laurie. Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town. Madison : U of Wisconsin P , 2006 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Sayers Dorothy L. The Nine Tailors. Harvest/Harcourt , 1934 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Smith William P. Discovering Upwell . Carrillson, UK , 2012 Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Swift Graham. Waterland . Picador , 1983 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Varda Agnes , Dir. The Gleaners and I [Les glaneurs et la glaneuse], Ciné-tamaris, 2000 . © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - To Claim Some Ground
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isab101
DA - 2021-12-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/to-claim-some-ground-HyrKDcGGad
SP - 757
EP - 771
VL - 30
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -