24th April 2022 - The Nicor or approaching forgiveness

 Some time to kill before we start on the day.  Last night I was awake for about three hours brooding away as one does.  Tasker's tale of Belgium set me off funnily enough, for over the last few months and with the help of 'My Heritage'  I have realised that my grandfather came from Belgium, because we could only find him in Belgian birth files, though his death certificate was in the English records.  Perhaps this is why I feel completely that we should be part of Europe.

I had a different upbringing to most children, three stepmothers does not give one a sense of security or coming to terms with forgiveness as I have grown old.  Or perhaps, it doesn't really matter anyway this looking back.

But there was a secrecy in the family, and I say family because though I was born illegitimate I was adopted by my paternal grandfather.  In the time of the second World War he lived in Belgium with his wife Catherine, whose name is on my adoption.  Sadly she must have died when I was about two and I was looked after by a series of housekeepers.

But that is to start the story at the wrong place.  For when the Germans invaded Belgium, they both fled their home in the new car just bought with a mattress on top of the car, and Catherine smuggling her little dog in her fur coat to the coast where they boarded a boat and landed in England, where my grandfather went on to work as an engineer.  He was clever, had 6 languages to fall back on and was soon working for Villiers a big motorbike factory in Wolverhampton.

So what happened to their Belgium home?  Well it fell into the hands of a  collaborator, and it wasn't to several years later when this man was brought before a judge that these properties must have been released  to their rightful owners.  At this stage, Catherine was dead and I was about 8 years old and I was taken over to Brussels to claim it as for some reason the property would come to me.  Fear not readers, it never did but the monies from it were swallowed up in a small factory called Nicor  (A great water dwelling monster)

My memories of Brussels are fleet, I remember going to this rather elegant house which had a small lake in front and being rowed round by the agent.  I also remember walking along a canal path and meeting some people, and to this day I swear they used large dogs to pull the barges.  Other images, sitting in a lawyers offices in a leather chair and weirdly my grandfather driving me down a 'red light' district with the females on show in the windows, bet Tasker never had that experience!

The realisation that my grandfather was a refugee, just like the people pouring over the borders from Ukraine has slowly only just entered my consciousness.  Today there are literally hundreds of thousand people wandering the world as refugees, and their lives will follow similar or different patterns.  The horror story that we will be shipping people to Rwanda will play out.  To be quite honest such cruelty is turning people's stomach and I pray that it will not happen.

As we try to take in the Ukranian refugees in this country, obstacles still remain, banks won't give them accounts if they do not have a residential address.  Luckily they are not sent on wild goose chases after visas as they did in Calais.

There is a great movement of people in the world, not only war of course, the climate has also added to the chaos,  and economic betterment as well.  Whatever the answer is it must be found quickly.

One of the things that has always intrigued me was why was the factory that was started as Nicor was so named by my father.  The only reason is I think is because he loved the sea and always had a boat.  The Nicor has an interesting story as well. This story comes from a website about old wells, now sadly defunct. But the word Nicor unites both my father and myself, if nothing else did, in a love of monsters and stories.  His name by the way was Reg, the first son of my grandfather.

Nykerpole : here be dragons

Nykerpole is a very obscure well. Indeed, it is now not a well at all, but a mediaeval place-name, recorded first in 1272, indicating a well now lost, at Mildenhall near Marlborough. Nevertheless, I include Nykerpole here because, like Puckwell, the place-name recalls a legendary well-dwelling creature.
Mildenhall (pronounced Mine-all) was Roman Cunetio. Two Roman shaft-wells have been found in the area, one of which contained a Saxon burial, the remains of a female skeleton with a knife, pins, buckles and beads. Black Field is the site of the Roman settlement, and Roman ghosts have been seen here (Wiltshire 1984, pp. 25-6). Nickamoor Field lies just west of Black Field beside the River Kennet. A place name of the sixteenth century, Nicapooles Croft, may refer to this very field, or to another associated with it. Centuries have passed, and we will probably never know the exact location of Nykerpole, the nicor-pool of Anglo-Saxon times which gave its name to Nicapooles Croft and Nickamoor Field (Gover 1939, p. 499). The nicor was a great water-dwelling monster of the dragonish or sea-serpent type: two nicras are described in Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem of the early eighth century. Nowadays the nicor lingers most notably in the Knucker Holes of Sussex, great deep pools of water in whose bottomless depths lurked the Knucker itself (Simpson 1973, pp. 37-42). But it is clear that, centuries ago, Wiltshire too had its Knucker which perhaps, like its Sussex cousins, would come crawling up out of its pool to terrorise the people of the gentle Kennet valley.
Location: Nicamoor Field is at SU 214 694, Sheet 1186. Footpaths run either side of the River Kennet.