Mawkin-mad East Anglia has festivals devoted to scarecrows. But by far the best specimens can be found lurking in the region's backwaters, says Tom Cox
I had high hopes for my new year's resolutions this year, I really did. When I wrote "Garden more!", "Grow veg!", "Cook more (with the veg)!" and "Make scarecrow!" on the blackboard in my kitchen, it was with the zeal of a man turning over a new leaf, putting his procrastinating ways behind him and vowing to embrace the outdoor life like never before. Admittedly, I'd written exactly the same instructions on my chalkboard at the beginning of 2010 and neglected to go through with any of them, but I'd been a different, more work-shy kind of person back then ? and this time, all importantly, I'd written the "G" in "Garden" quite a lot more neatly.
Now it's May, however, and I'm still finding excuses not to get properly started. I'd hoped to have read The Faber Book of Gardens twice by now and finally been able to nod knowingly instead of pretendingly when my mum talked about her Trachycarpus ? but all I really have to show for myself, horticulturally speaking, are the remnants of a couple of show-off bonfires and a patch of new lawn semi-destroyed by the hoodlum ducks inhabiting the lake next door. I made some aubergine pasta a few weeks ago but, living alone, I can never quite convince myself that cooking is more worthy of my time than myriad other activities ? like experimenting to see if my hair looks better more sticky up at the front, say, or watching a clip of three guinea pigs fighting over a cucumber on YouTube.
When people who've seen my new year's resolution list have asked me about the scarecrow, they often assume it's to serve as gatekeeper to my nonexistent veg garden. I'd like to claim this was the case, but the truth is I just really like scarecrows. They seem to me to be both a brilliant and surprisingly eclectic example of found art, and part of that same strain of spooky folklore running from Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough to The Wicker Man: an eerie British tradition unaltered by progress, which even the advent of the mechanical bird-scarer can't make extinct.
I actually have my very own wicker man in my garden, purchased from a garden centre in Swaffham eight years ago. It's not as big as the one in the film ? more the size of a 9th-century knight who might have gone by the nickname "Dumpy". Ivy has now snaked its way round his wooden ribs and he's looking a bit forlorn, so I thought a scarecrow could prove to be just the companion he needed. The latter probably wouldn't do much to prevent the ducks from enthusiastically stealing my grass seed and mounting each other, but I imagine he'd darken the place up nicely.
Since a few years ago, when I started properly trying to get to know the part of rural Britain where I live, instead of just repeatedly driving from my house to B&Q, Starbucks, Borders and Sainsbury's and missing all the interesting bits, I've taken photographs of around 300 scarecrows ? or "mawkins", as they're known here in Norfolk. In order to do this, I've got off trains before my scheduled stop and made myself late for meetings, almost been run over at least three times, and put my life at risk trespassing on a variety of East Anglian allotments. I've snapped scarecrows who look like floating ghosts, scarecrows who look like futuristic horse people from outer space, scarecrows with their own pet scarecrow foxes, chav scarecrows, disco scarecrows, scarecrows with drawn-on gnashing teeth that could haunt your dreams more than any George A Romero film.
Last week, my friend Annabel and I set out to find the holy grail of East Anglian scarecrows: a couple of tailor's dummies on an allotment in Blaxhall, near Snape, who are constantly dressed in immaculate 1940s and 1950s attire, their outfits rotated and altered by their owners to keep passersby on their toes. The Blaxhall scarecrows hibernate sometimes, however, and we'd chosen a day when they weren't around. It was small consolation to find a neighbouring scarecrow in a pointy-arms pose which tried to say "Look ? I'm a dude!" but actually seemed to say "Cutting Crew have announced from the stage that the next song will be (I Just) Died In Your Arms." I photographed him, which I sensed was what he wanted, but the more I mulled it over the more I saw that, had he come to life, he would probably have been a bit of a tool.
Annabel is an artist who lives in a house with a crocodile's jaw in its basement and the remnants of her dead landlord's porn collection in its spare room, so finds my obsession with straw humanoids completely normal, but sometimes I forget that to many it might not seem the normal hobby of a cosmopolitan male thirtysomething. Last summer, I arrived to pick a date up from the train station with the skeleton of my own scarecrow-to-be in the back of my car: a conveniently shaped bit of dead tree my dad had found in the woods behind his house. Fortunately, Hannah was an open-minded sort of girl and reacted quite nonchalantly to sharing a Toyota Yaris with a relative stranger and a jagged, 6ft, man-shaped piece of timber, but since I've learned to leave mention of my penchant for straw mannequins until at least the second meeting.
That said, an enthusiasm for the scarecrow-as-spectacle is increasingly common these days ? particularly in East Anglia, where several village scarecrow festivals are held throughout the year. These include the annual event in Barton Mills, Suffolk, whose 2008 celebrity-scarecrow edition arguably polarised the posh end of the village (Stephen Fry scarecrow) and the less wealthy end (Katie Price scarecrow) like never before. I attend these festivals out of a certain amount of duty as an enthusiast, but as I analyse the exhibits I realise that, if such a thing is possible, I have become something of a scarecrow elitist. Most festival scarecrows seem overdone, too in thrall to pop culture and lacking the DIY charm of their more isolated brethren.
I love the latter most, both for their makeshift comedy and because they are characters in the East Anglia-based horror film in my head that I will probably never write. I think, in a way, the reason I haven't made my mawkin is the same reason I haven't written that film: I want to get it just right, and fear failure.
I have most of the outfit now, however. It's really just the innards that are missing ? and here is where I falter slightly. "Where does a person purchase a small amount of straw?" is not a question I've ever had to answer before. I suppose I'll just turn up at a farm and ask nicely. I don't know why I'm so worried, really. When you've knocked on a stranger's door in a remote part of the Fens and enquired whether you could possibly take a photo of the weird inert man in the boiler suit in their back garden, a lot of life's odder questions suddenly become a lot easier to ask.
? Follow Tom Cox on Twitter or at tom-cox.com.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/16/scarecrow-country-east-anglia
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