Fear & Loathing In East Anglia. Part One – Wither Witham
Created | Updated Mar 23, 2002
Founded by a travelling freakshow some time in the 14th century, Witham has preserved a genetic purity that even Hitler would have frowned upon. It’s a town which you could well believe is the true geographical location of the Garden of Eden. Not for it’s outstanding beauty. Not for the peace and tranquillity instilled there. Not even for the fact that outsiders to the town often claim to have heard God telling them to flee. No, merely because, after five minutes in the town centre, it’s plain to see that the entire population sprang forth from the loins of just two people – and they,I suspect, were brother and sister.
Witham has more genetic deformities per square yard than Cambridge has pubs, London has Australians, and Liverpudlian bedrooms have car stereos.
The economy of the town is carefully balanced and revolves around the staggering myriad of charity shops that line the main road. Within these shops lurk the population’s clothing surplus – luxury items if you will – clothes that can often be seen changing location from shop to shop and from warped back to warped back in something almost reminiscent of crop rotation. It has been known (not a word of a lie, I swear) to see such delightful items on display in the windows of these shops as an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, a naked, headless doll, and used postcards of Colchester and Chelmsford.
Another splendid attraction is the local optician’s, a tiny shop sandwiched between two of the town’s ‘Slaughtered Lamb’ style pubs. The whole place is run by a wonderful old lady who is never immediately obvious as she often wears clothes which allow her to blend in with the shop’s grim interior.
A colleague of mine tells a tale of a time he entered the shop to have a screw on his glasses tightened. “Yes?” enquired the old woman sharply, looming up frighteningly out of the quasi-darkness so often favoured in Witham. Proffering the glasses to her and explaining his request, the old lady snatched them from his hands and with an equally terse, “Right!” promptly disappeared into a back room where he heard several low voices mumbling in annoyance for ten minutes. Finally returning, she charged him £4.00 for the repairs and escorted him from the shop, locking the door behind him.
Next-door lurks The Spread Eagle, a public house that, what is lacks in charm, it more than adequately makes up for in inhospitality. The majority of its patrons are of an indeterminable age and eye you with horror and deep-seated loathing the moment you walk in (perhaps because of the fact that you can actually walk without the aid of callipers).
Still, it’s a distraction from the free-ranging sideshow attractions. Speaking of which, a personal favourite can normally be found festering in these hideous premises, ‘The Drumming Man’, a thirty-something, basin haircutted, lumberjack jacket wearing freak-of-nature who spends about three hours a day hunched over a coke beside his insane, gnarled mother. However, out in the street it’s he takes on a new and far more exciting form. With his headphones on, he walks alone, dancing, singing, and drumming air to what always appears to be ‘Could It Be Magic’.
But he can walk, and that sets him apart from most of the other natives. Without doubt, Witham inhabitants possess the greatest number of deformities this side of Incestville USA. What begins as sympathy soon turns to surprise, then to disbelief and, finally, to abject horror. Each turning you take reveals yet another collection of warped locals, their limbs bowing and cracking beneath them, horribly misshapen as though they’d been left leaning against a radiator all night.
And there is much more – the sewage plant, the chicken factory, and the elbowless man, but that’s for another installment.
