Lucyl Harrison’s Secret Fakenham

Lucyl Harrison is a resident of Fakenham and a PhD researcher at the University of Hull, examining a literary response to Covid.  She is also host of the Pandemic Pages Podcast.  This is her Secret Fakenham…

What The River Knows

I have lived in other places, noisier ones, where the days seemed to blur each other out. But when I came back to the town of my youth in 2020 and walked through the little lanes pronged by chimneys where blue plaques say Cromwell’s men once lodged, despite the world around us, something in me softened.

Most mornings begin with the river, and a chocolate-coloured spaniel who knows her own way to Goggs Mill. The water on our right gliding with its peculiar precision – smooth in the middle, racing at the sides, because it has somewhere important to move to upstream. When the first tentative signs of spring arrive in Hempton and Fakenham, the trees along the bank unfasten their buds and then, with a yawning relief, burst into their five-pronged leaves. A lifelong tree bends over the river path until it is removed. Scratching sentences in my journal next to the river who etches its own alongside our town. When you wait long enough with the water, fish fling themselves into the air before the flossy catkins, fern fronds and bulrushes.

True spring in Fakenham is different from those early hints. When greenness reveals itself outright, stems stirring, shoots wakening, the ducks and geese choose to gather on the pond at Back Street instead, leaving the swans to their own. The river seems most sentient then, watchful, seeing more of us than we see of ourselves. Spring is a slower kind of breathing. A lone kingfisher swoops, a smooth coated otter ascends. The flagstone cobbles are shuffled over. Small shops to walk into and look around just for the pleasure of slowing down. Drifting through charity shops always surrenders a book or two. There is warm bread to be sliced, taken home and eaten with molten butter.

The leaves rouse out of their buds, viridescent, almost full, while the evenings meander on. You hear the mother oystercatcher at her chicks peeping from a thicket of thorns and nettles in the sideyard. Living by the river precipitates a special kind of nerve you never knew you had: you must learn to grieve the infants. Your neighbours who have lived here long before you have almost become desensitised to the sound of the cuckoo as it drops into another’s nest, the ducklings as they are guzzled by gulls, the horrendous mating behaviour of mallards.

In Summer, I like how I am in the tall grass, more animal than anything else. You move how the river moves, unencumbered by any cage. Ordinary glimpses into a still churchyard where I spent my Friday nights summon the fondness of mornings with my grandfather in the grip of some dementia, afternoon picnics with my nephew. The running stream behind a sun-baked road, overgrown groves and three brick arches, give small confidences. Here, by the chalk river, you are perfectly content, and care less than you have ever cared. That’s what this place becomes: a gentle steadiness that subdues the modern woe.

By the time autumn races in, we have almost forgotten that the world turns so quickly. You have never paid as exquisite attention to how the leaf falls, until right now. As the chocolate-coloured spaniel pelts into the crystal waters near what you only know as ‘the slaughter house’, the river nudges me toward not thinking. The church bell knells in the open air. Observing the quainter tangles and ongoing vibrations of the river world, I remember why I love living here: because the smallest things insist on being noticed and then I imagine the years of possibility ahead of us.

Winter can feel long-boned and sharp. Fog on the river rises; everything the frost touches collapses in on itself like paper houses; and snow arrives with its impermanence. Still, even then, you nought but smile at what this small world offers you: the winter light when house lights are out, the tawny colours of a landscape, the cold felt through the curtain. Winter brings the clearest meteor shower – it is nice to hear nothing but the stars.

The truth of my affection: my love of this place is a romantic one. Less grand, undramatic, yet constant, an undercurrent that carries me from season to season, from fog to thaw, through the busy hums of people meeting on the market, back to the low-lying lanes where the house with three cats in the window waits.

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