Cambridge academic Charles Moseley charts ‘fearful’ move to Eel Island in new book

Cambridge academic Charles Moseley’s latest book, To the Eel Island: An Evening Journey, is about his move from Reach, the small Fenland village, to the city of Ely.

The book – his 29th – deals with “getting old, but it’s also about change,” says Charles, 84, a life fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and a member of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.

He continues: “It’s about that fearful business that everybody’s so afraid of that we all have to go through at some time, about downsizing.

“It’s also about embracing change and finding that what one had feared can turn into a joyful and strenuous adventure, as it has been for the two of us [Charles and his wife Rosanna].”

Charles grew up on the Lancashire coast, went up to Cambridge – to Queens’ College – to read English, and never left.

His varied career includes working as a printer and a publisher, but he has mainly taught literature in Cambridge.

Before relocating to Ely – Rosanna purchased the property, a real fixer-upper, in the city in 2019 – Charles had lived in Reach since 1963.

“I’ve never lived in a town,” he reveals, “and suddenly to find oneself gravitating towards a very nice town – Ely, which I’ve come to love – is a strange feeling and it is rather an adventure.

“I’m really rather enjoying it, discovering this new place, and the book’s about people, it’s about dogs, it’s about new relationships…

“I think above all, it’s about gratitude – I’ve been so damn lucky. And I look back on a long life which has had plenty of dark patches and it’s beginning to fall into a sort of pattern.

“It’s certainly not saying I’m about to pop my clogs and this is my final farewell. It’s not, because there might be something after this, I just don’t know.”

Charles notes that he’s had a “lifelong love affair with the English countryside”, adding: “I’ve seen it change so much and I have to say that I grieve daily over the loss [of it], thanks frankly to our exploitative and greedy culture, it’s misused, the world we live in…

“And until recently, as I said, I’d never lived in a town – except when I was a student – and so facing this change of eventually leaving a place that I love, a place of memories of family, dogs, livestock, people, connections, to go somewhere more… it is a challenge but you take your ghosts with you.

“The book is attempting to get to grips with that, with that journey. It’s only a few miles but it’s a different world.”

On what he likes about Ely, Charles, whose research area was late medieval and early modern literature, says: “Ely is a town I’ve known since I was an undergraduate.

“It is a lovely town and it’s one of those few towns where you can actually, on the whole, be quite nice about the planners, because some of the new building has been well-mannered, to say the least, and some of it’s really rather beautiful.

“It’s retained a lot of the things that I think a good country town should have. I grew up near Kendal, halfway between Kendal and Fleetwood, in the northwest.

“I remember Kendal as an ideal town; it’s got to have a centre, it’s got to have a market, it’s got to have shops like an ironmonger.

“That’s one of my diagnostic things – has a town got an ironmonger? Has it got a seedsman? Has it got a place where you can really have a proper good bookshop – and Toppings is a superb bookshop.

“It’s got to have a butcher who knows what meat is about and knows how to hang it! It [Ely] used to have two but it’s only got one now…

“And it’s got to have that sort of feel that people speak to each other in the street and say good morning, even though they’re strangers, and ideally it’s got to have a church where music is taken quite seriously – and I think Ely fits that bill!

“So it is a delightful place, and of course when you look at Google Earth, you realise just how much green space there is in the centre, and that matters to somebody like me.”

At present, Charles and Rosanna divide their time between Reach and Ely, with the intention of eventually letting out their house in the former.

To the Eel Island: An Evening Journey was published by Merlin Unwin Books Ltd and is available now, priced £16.99.