KNOWING YOUR PLACE
East Anglian Landscapes and Literature
Foreward by Richard Mabey
This anthology is both a celebration of the region’s wide skies and watery landscapes and a testament to the many writers who, according to Richard Mabey, ‘have sought nourishment in the austere air of East Anglia’. Knowing Your Place follows their progress from the illimitable mudflats of the Wash, by way of Breckland’s badlands, to the crumbling cliffs at Dunwich; and from the debatable ground of the north Norfolk coast through damp rectories and sluggish backwaters to the Halvergate flats and the watermeadows of the Stour valley.
The most recent clutch of distinguished nature writers – the late Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker and Mabey himself – are all incomers who, like Adrian Bell and George Ewart Evans before them, have put down roots in East Anglia. Others like Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Edward Thomas, John Cowper Powys and Sylvia Townsend Warner for whom Norfolk was more precious than her‘native’ Dorset, were exotic migrants who have left their impressions of place in the letters, diaries and essays written at the time. Whatever drew them initially, ‘the wind, the flatness, the ubiquitous and perilous closeness of water [Mabey again] has nurtured a culture of realism, of making do’
This is most apparent in the work of native East Anglians – Mary Mann, Alfred Munnings, George Crabbe and the Suffolk farmworkers given their voice by Ewart Evans. Ronald Blythe too, like the poet John Clare, has lived in East Anglia all his life and through his own ‘Inherited Perspective’ ‘our paterfamilias’ has elevated the spirit of staying put and celebrating the familiar into ‘a literary form that transcends locality’. To Blythe, and Susan Hill for whom Aldeburgh became ‘a landscape of the spirit’, and to all the writers in this glorious collection ‘knowing your place is a reciprocal process: the place also comes to know you, to absorb your voice.’