A Scottish friend of mine tells me that where he lives people from Essex are ‘affectionately’ known as Clay-Kickers. Some may take umbrage at such nomenclature, not I, I for one am proud of my somewhat tacky heritage. It seems that Essex clay was the main reason why the area had relatively few large working farms and was more suited to smallholdings, plotlanding and other forms of pseudo bucolic endeavour. Due to the Depression - and other things best known to students of agricultural economics - farmland was not in as great demand as was usually the case. Consequently, the best land got sold off first - and as is the way with supply and demand, or so they tell me at the Adam Smith institute - the worst land failed to reach the asking price and was either left fallow or taken out of agriculture altogether. Far-sighted speculators - who were obviously in dire need of the services of an optician - bought thousands of acres of that potential hard-pan and divided it up into plots to sell to Londoners looking for somewhere to build their summer dream-homes. In conjunction with The London Tilbury and Southend Railway, weekend excursions were arranged to show the prospective buyers the advantages of country living. For some reason, whether it was to do with the ague, the infertility of the soil, or a surfeit of inbred, indigenous idiots, sales were slow. In fact they never really gathered momentum at all. And that accounts - I think - for the miscellaneous patchwork of thorn-thicketed, grass-tufted territory that I was to become heir to. Those who did buy, build and stay in the area - whether for purposes of tax-avoidance, family evasion, or even genuine agricultural interest - were soon to find out, as all of us unsuspecting immigrants did eventually, something of the intractable nature of Essex-clay. In summer it was a rock-hard, dust-blowing desert. Owing to shrinkage it formed a reticular moonscape of interlinking chasms. Some of these were so wide and deep that newcomers could be recognized by a grimace and a hobbling gait. It’s rumoured that one smallholder lost a gaggle of geese and his mother-in-law down one of those abysmal trenches for a week. But that could be the elderberry wine talking. Sufficient to say that for those interested in market gardening, you’d probably find more tilth on a greengrocer’s scalp! With regards to the season that concerns us now we have to shift into the diametrically opposite mode. Wet, cold, claggy, and pretty near impervious to rain, is a fair résumé, I think. But for my fellow agrarians and me this was the ideal soil-profile. To walk across those late autumn-cum-winter fields was as to step into your father’s shoes. The accumulated weight of the adhering clay built up to the point where the equation of legs + boots + gravity = dry feet, became untenable and was as insoluble as infinite regression itself. The leaving of boots behind and squelching off into the mire was all part of the ten-toed, mud-oozing, morass of mathematics. “Take that,” splat! One of the boys having grabbed a handful of clay from his retrieved boot had scored a bulls-eye. “You filthy pig!” I responded. Throwing an even bigger handful back in his direction. Somebody else would join in and before you knew it everyone present had got in on the act. Between the sucking sounds of mud and the wet slap of direct hits, expletives buzzed through the air like black satanic bees. “Shit!” “Damn!” “Bollocks!” “Sod it!” It would end in tears. And it did. It always did. One of us, or two of us, or all of us, would fall headlong into the glutinous furrows. Then the heart-stopping realization of our predicament would dawn on us. Another tricky arithmetical calculation would have to follow. Wetness + mud + clothes + parents was as near an insoluble problem as that of infinite regression or even Zeno’s inscrutable arrow itself. Though not the time of year for skinny-dipping desperate situations required equally desperate remedies. Water over grass was usually the answer. Cold, but at least mercifully clear. Stripping off, scrubbing clothes and flesh, turning blue and purple, was all part of the teeth-chattering excitement. We never got fully dry or clean. We always ended up with thick ears, hot-baths and runny-noses. Lying in bed - earlier than usual - sniffing and whimpering, you swore to yourself that you would never, never, ever, do such a stupid thing again! But of course you did, you did........
Fog was another perennial joy. Schools have been known to close early because of it - guardians to be confused by it. Literally and metaphorically to my un-fathoming mind it is one of the most obscure and obscuring of nature’s miracles. How by subtle shifts in temperature, invisible water-vapour - which to me is something of a contradiction in terms anyway - can become visible water-vapour is like having your cake and conjuring it out of thin air at the same time! Having tentatively dabbled at the keyboard of a microprocessor I’m patently aware that you don’t necessarily have to know anything about the scientific principals lying behind something to gain benefit from it. So it is with the word-processor, and so it was with invisible water-vapour. “Where are yer Eddy?” “Over ‘ere, where d’yer fink?” So it went on. Like binary black holes we revolved around each other, spared only from the crushing weight of oblivion by virtue of our equal and opposing gravitational influence. Along the bridle path a muted, indivisible cloud of overhanging branches mimicked the ways of rain. At the slightest breath, the once intermittent drops altered their frequency. As in the lull after thunder they gathered their strength and spattering momentum only to descend en mass. “Bloody ‘ell Eddy, I’m drowned!” “Me an’ you bof mate. Let’s get out of ‘ere!” Coming together again, like twin apparitions newly evolved from the diffuse unknown of the astral-plane we ran along the path as the sole inhabitants of our own grey bubble of thoughtlessness. “What shall we do next Merv?” enquired Eddy. “Let’s go an’ look at the one-eyed man,” I said. “Not me!” replied Eddy in quivering castrato. “What’s a matta,” I taunted. “Not scared are yer?” “Who me? I aint scared of nuffin,” he countered. He was though, and so was I. One of the greatest games of do-and-dare in our neck of the woods was that of confronting the one-eyed man. This - as I see it now - shy, reclusive, old soul, lived on his own in another of those near uninhabitable dwellings scattered about the plotlands. In the deep, hushed unwelcoming dankness of that foggy, late November day, that lopsided box of a home made up of little more than pebble-dash and tin reminded me of the immortal - but ill-remembered words - of that much anthologized and much quoted poem by Thomas Hood - November. No sun, no moon, no gas, no coal, no light, no warmth, no way! “Praps we could do somefink else?” I suggested. “Scared are yer?” came the triumphant response. Rather like the atmosphere itself there seemed no way out. “All right then,” I said, “Let’s go!” Just how that poor old man came to have the terrible disfigurement I’m about to describe, I don’t know. What I do know is the spine-chilling effect it had on all of us children. One side of his face was red and blotchy, and hung with loose wattles of folded skin. Above that was a dark unseemly orifice, which drew us in with its hypnotic power to the very brink of corruption. If a wriggling mass of worms and maggots had come spilling out of that eyeless orbit we should not have been surprised. The closer we got to his home, the further we were from sanity. All sorts of imagined disasters crept in to our distraught minds. Looking through the bushes into his front window we could see him at his table carving a lump of meat. To me that lump of meat could have been the carved remains of any of my erstwhile acquaintances. Unaware of our presence he began to eat his meal. The sucking sensation of canines and incisors tearing at my goose-bumped flesh was as real as it was electrifying. “Ow! yer little bastard, get yer teeth out of me arm.” Such was Eddy’s juvenile sense of humour. Whether or not it quite compensated for the reciprocal blow to his ribs, I wouldn’t like to say. All that can be said is that the resultant yell was enjoyed far more than the preceding laughter. This of course had the less than desired effect of attracting the attention of Vulcan’s feasting Cyclops.