A race on the fen ice

Text 1: The Great Frost Championship, by William Dunthorne

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

The frost of that winter was the hardest within living memory, and by the second week of January the fen lay frozen from Welney to the sea, a great grey plain of ice beneath a sky the colour of pewter. When word went round that the championship race would be skated on the Wash, the whole country seemed to empty itself onto the banks.

I was fourteen, and I had never seen such a crowd. They came on foot, on horseback, in farm carts, in sledges drawn by boys; they lit braziers along the dyke and roasted chestnuts and stamped their feet and argued, in that flat fen speech of ours, about whether the Welney men or the Nordelph men had the longer stride. The air was full of smoke and steam and laughter.

At noon a pistol cracked, and the skaters were away. I can see them still: twelve men in black, bent almost double, their hands clasped behind their backs, their long blades flashing as they swung from side to side. They did not seem to be working at all. They seemed to be blown across the ice like leaves. The sound of them reached us after they had passed, a hiss and a ringing, like a scythe going through dry grass.

For two miles the race was close. Then Turpin of Welney, a labourer who had cut reeds all his life, lowered his head and went away from them. Stroke by stroke the gap grew, ten yards, twenty, fifty, until the others were small dark figures toiling far behind him.

When he crossed the line the crowd broke onto the ice with a roar, and for a terrible instant I heard it crack beneath us like a gunshot. It held. Turpin was carried on men’s shoulders to the inn, and I walked home through the blue evening, sliding where I could, my own short strides suddenly very long.

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