The more you look at this landscape ... the more you can feel it, looking back at you.
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DEBORAH CURTIS WRITER
Writer, theatre director and author based in East Anglia
As a writer, theatre maker, film-maker and story maker, I take my inspiration from the landscape, people and places of the Fens.
This region inspires a great deal of my work.
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Flat, brooding under vast skies, with horizons stretching into infinity, the place has its own unique atmosphere.
This is a harsh and haunted place. Poverty has walked hand-in-hand with the people here since time began.
Perhaps that's why Fen folk clung to the old ways for so long.
Putting their faith in folk magic, home remedies, and of course, the white blooming opium poppy.
Fen folk are still a race apart. Proud, independent, and famously pig-headed!
They don't call them 'Fen Tigers' for nothing. But make a friend of one of them, and you'll have a friend for life.
The lilting, sing-song Fen accent is becoming rarer these days.
A reminder of the time when this part of England was ruled by the Viking Danes.
And the old dialect words are becoming rarer, too. Diluted by the influence of TV and the ever-widening spread of Estuarine English.
You can still hear traces of it now though, in goo, froze, frit, bor, and hum.
And the Danes have left their mark in place names such as Toft.
In spite of all the changes to this region I still find the people and places an endless source of inspiration.
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CONTACT
thefieldtheatregroup@hotmail.co.uk
FaceBook:
Deborah Curtis Writer
Field Theatre Group
Littleport Riot 200
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Poetry
A hideous fenne of huge bignesse, that extends in a vast tract,
even unto the sea .....
Ghostly Title
Flat as water on a plate ….
Flat as a map of itself …
The land unrolls and flows outwards,
from under your feet to meet the sky.
The horizon - a distant field border …
a smudged line ... under the marching cloud banks.
There are no edges here.
Field .... flows into hedge line …
Flows into sedge and reed bed …
Flows into ditch and drain …
Flows into river .... and on ....
into the peat-brown northern sea.
The longer you look at this landscape,
the more you can feel it looking back at you.
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Joint winner. Cambridgeshire County Council. A Sense of Place.
The Dead Garden
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Shadow houses …. ghost houses … sunken houses.
So many buildings left empty.
Deserted droves, empty yards.
A way of life …. abandoned …. and yet still here.
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Only the spiders are busy now … and the rats.
Houses … farms …. churches …. chapels …. and barns.
Left to the ministry of wind and dust.
Time has scattered them.
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Windows …. blank as stones …. stare out over the ruined years.
Cracked glass …… wood …… and brick …..
Sinking into earth, under the crushing weight of sky.
The Fen is a dead garden.
Memory … thin as a blown thread.
Thin as the reed song.
The whisper of bird-bones crunched underfoot.
Where ditch flowers twine through the rust.
Fool’s parsley …. nettles …. and bindweed.
A sheet of plastic rises, like a pale ghost to meet you.
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Land Lines. 2014.
