The title of this anthology contains a rather misleading ambiguity. The book does not in fact deal with issues of social deference: instead, the focus is purely on geographical location and the way in which a particular place can, as Ronald Blythe argues, convey a universal significance. I am not sure that the collection of writings presented establishes this somewhat mystical proposition. Two things, though, it does most powerfully. It communicates the atmosphere of Norfolk and Suffolk, both inland and coastal, and of the Fens, and it demonstrates how even the most remote or seemingly desolate settings can take on meaning if the observer is aware of their history. These extracts indicate not just the perennial tension between human achievements and the destructive power of nature, but the way in which human activities can work to the detriment of natural patterns.
Although the final contribution is Ronald Blythe's loving description of the abundance in his cottage garden, once owned by the artist John Nash, the book's dominant tone is melancholic: from Graham Swift's portrait of the Fens in his novel Waterland to W. G. Sebald's account of Lowestoft's decay, perhaps rather self-indulgently viewed through the lens of his pervasive kulturpessimismus. The floods of 1953 drown the cottage which Sylvia Townsend Warner once rented. A Breckland sandstorm wipes out a village. Hilaire Belloc reflects on ‘the air of a great past time’ still lingering in towns like Boston and Wisbech. Mary Mann's The Fields of Dulditch presents an ‘unsparingly truthful’, fatalistic picture of rural hardship at the turn of the twentieth century. Parson Woodforde's niece Nancy finds her life in remote Weston Longville stiflingly tedious. John Betjeman, in the mid 1960s, perceives the threat which modernity poses to the organic harmony of the town centre in Diss. The artist Alfred Munnings recalls the lost splendour of teams of horses. Peter Tolhurst writes about George Ewart Evans, who lived in East Anglia during the period when agricultural mechanisation rapidly swept away knowledge of traditional farming practices.
Struggle is a pervasive theme. Humans fight back against nature. They drain the Fens; they reclaim the wastes of Breckland, with enclosures playing a vital part in this process; they exterminate the coypu and use the coast for military experiments and nuclear power stations. A long historical perspective, however, makes it clear that man's efforts are doomed to transience. There is one possible exception to this conclusion: the churches which are so prominent in the East Anglian landscape. Sylvia Townsend Warner disliked these ‘melancholy teeth from an old jaw’, but for Betjeman they offered a ‘soaring majesty’ which drew together different periods, while A. C. Benson saw them as gaining in beauty through the toning grace of time's passage.
My response to Knowing Your Place is personal rather than academic. While a student at the University of East Anglia, I travelled by train one day in December 1968 from Norwich to Cambridge, crossing Breckland and the Fens. There was a light dusting of snow, and it suddenly dawned on me that the flat landscape had its own kind of beauty, refreshing in its spaciousness: an austerity which Richard Mabey well describes in his foreword. From then on I regarded East Anglia differently. Later, I came to know the churches north of Norwich which Candida Lycett Green mentions - Booton, Cawston and Salle – and the bleak Suffolk coastline. This collection of writings seems to me to capture most effectively the atmosphere of the various East Anglian landscapes. Anyone who has become attuned to their features and their mystery will take pleasure in finding them so powerfully evoked.
