WHITTLESEY is a Godforsaken village in the middle of frozen Cambridgeshire fenland, ten miles from Peterborough. To judge by the simple yet heartfelt graffiti on the benches (“I love cheese”; “I love carrots”), very little occurs for most of the year. On the first Monday after Epiphany, however, the Straw Bear Festival comes to town — a ritual of which no body knows the provenance and which fills the pavement outside Somerfield with Morris dancers, Molly dancers, pagans, real-ale devotees, freaks and a 9ft straw bear.

You see the special sights of a group of Molly dancers standing furtively around outside a pizza shop, sharing a resoundingly unpagan American Hot; or Morris dancers trying to have a quiet wee behind a church, forgetting that the bells round their ankles work as a deadly accurate aural tracking device at all times. Indeed, if you’re very lucky, you will see the man I chanced on this year, who had not only dressed himself and his wife in the Morris mode, but also his two children, three grandchildren, and a big fat golden Labrador — who, if my ears weren’t deceiving me, was actually called Morris.

On paper, I wouldn’t put money on this being of much interest. Indeed, before I went the first time I wasn’t intending to. “But Molly dancers are the evil Morris dancers,” a Straw Bear-going friend said, by way of encouragement.

But surely Morris dancers are already the evil Morris dancers? I couldn’t really see a way you could possibly up the malevolence quotient of Morris dancers any further. Unless they had clown make-up, perhaps. And danced to one of Tom Waits’s more demented New Orleans funeral marches.

Interestingly, when you arrive at Straw Bear, you realise that this is exactly what one of the troupes — the Pig Dyke Molly from Yaxley, Cambridgeshire — have done. With their faces painted to look like Edward Scissorhands, dressed in black and white Op-Art fabrics, and accompanied by a large tuba, the Pig Dyke Molly look like Dress Down Friday at the Robert Smith Academy for Troubled Youths.

At 11am on a cold, sunny day they make a slightly alarming sight, like a giant Goth gang that missed the last bus home last night and are now so out of their minds with longing for White Lightning that they’re dancing for pennies.

Still, it’s not as if the Pig Dyke Goth Hoedown are alone in looking incongruous. At the first Straw Bear I attended, in 2001, we got off the train just as the main procession reached the village square. A plough decorated with flowers was being pulled along, surrounded by dancing women in long dresses with ivy in their hair. Alongside them were Old Glory — Molly dancing transvestites in woollen frocks with blacked-up faces — and the Pig Dyke Sisters of Mercy Knees-Up.

Milling about at the edge of the procession were the Witchmen, the Hell’s Angels of Morris dancers, dressed in black and amber, spiked with pheasant’s feathers and wielding big sticks.

And in the middle, of course, was the Straw Bear — a villager bound up in 9ft of straw and looking like an agrarian, medieval, extremely flammable Darth Vader. Completely blinded by his straw head, the Bear was being led on a chain by another villager and executing an odd, rhythmic, stumbling dance, in which a key move seemed to be sporadically realising how top-heavy he was and nearly pitching into the audience.

I can’t tell you how surprised I was when, on taking this all in, I immediately burst into tears.

Obviously I had risen before 7am on a Saturday to stand outside a Somerfield in the fens — and at an event, it was sadly clear, that had absolutely no jerk chicken stalls — but it wasn’t all down to that.

I think it was a sudden realisation that this is what, until very recently, being English had all been about. My conception of Englishness had been built on P. G. Wodehouse and Amnesty International and Radio 4 and Dan Cruickshank but, in fact, they were preceded by hundreds of years of this: peasants in the middle of winter, without antibiotics or telegraphs or thermals, pretending to be witches and warlocks and Straw Bears until the spring finally came.

Whatever modern Englishness is, it was either a reaction to or stemmed from what I was watching: wild drunken joy, fear, cheap, deep magic and cross-dressing. I felt like Estelle in the recent single 1980 when she raps: “I touched Africa and came back darker/ Knowing myself, feeling my roots a little harder.”

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