Waterland (23 page)

No one knows how it started. Whether the alarm was first given by individuals (and was ignored as one of innumerable hoaxes and hallucinations) or whether the whole town as a body was suddenly aware of the palpable
fact. But as twilight descended on this more than festive day it became evident that the brewery, the New Atkinson Brewery, built in 1849 by George and Alfred Atkinson, was on fire. Palls of thickening smoke were rapidly followed by leaping flames, then by the loud crackings and burstings that signal an advanced conflagration.

A crowd rushed and swarmed. The Coronation Banquet, in the face of such a dire emergency, was summarily cancelled. The Gildsey Fire Brigade (founder, Alfred Atkinson) was called out in full complement. But whether this stalwart body, with its three engines and two auxiliary tenders, was of any use on this disastrous night is to be doubted. For not only had the Fire Station been improvidently undermanned throughout the day (one of the engines having been decked out with ribbons and flags as part of the celebratory procession) but almost every fireman, struggling now just as much to sober himself as to get into his cumbersome fireman’s garb, had drunk his share of the Ale; with the result that when the engines at last arrived, in ragged order, with much clanging of bells, and in one case still festooned with patriotic rosettes, the brewery was already past saving. And it was claimed by several eye-witnesses that the gallant crews devoted much more of their energy to a variety of insubordinate antics (such as playing their hoses upon the watching crowd) than they ever did to the fire.

So the fire burned. Subsuming all bonfires and all other pyrotechnic displays arranged for this joyous evening. The crowd, indeed, eyes glazed as much by their intake of ale as by the glare of the flames, watched as if this were not their town brewery being burnt to the ground but some elaborate spectacle expressly arranged for their delight and contemplation. And perhaps it was. The ineptitudes of the Fire Brigade were cheered and encouraged. Few accounts speak of dismay, of panic, even of apprehended danger. When the fire performed particularly impressive stunts (a row of upper windows bursting all at once like a ship’s
broadside) it did so amid hearty applause; and when, at twelve midnight (for that was the last hour ever to be registered on its lofty clock face) the brewery chimney trembled, tottered and, with its Italianate friezes and paralyzed iron clock-hands, sank swiftly, vertically, into the blazing shell of the brewery, it was to the accompaniment of a resounding ovation, notwithstanding the fact that if the chimney had chosen to adopt a different angle of collapse it might have crushed several score of the spectators.

An unearthly glare lit all that night the clustered rooftops of Gildsey. On the oily-black surface of the Ouse fiery necklaces scattered and rethreaded themselves. In the deserted, garlanded market-place the paving stones throbbed, and in the Town Hall where the places were laid for a banquet that was never to be, the shadows of the tall municipal window frames quivered on the walls. For miles around, across the flat unimpeded outlook of the Fens, the fire could be seen, like some meteoric visitation – a gift to Fenland superstition; and on the morning of the twenty-third of June, in place of the familiar chimney, a great cloud of smoke lingered for many days.

Was it the case – for no sooner had the blaze gone out than the talk began to be fanned – that this Coronation Ale, which so fired internally those who drank it, had found a means to manifest its power externally and in a process of spontaneous combustion engulfed in flames its own source? Had this phenomenal ale, intended to regale the people on a day of national festivity, only exposed the inflammatory folly of their jingoistic ardour and revealed to them that they preferred destruction to rejoicing? And was that the meaning of Ernest’s cryptic and bitter remark when in the autumn of 1914 he left Gildsey for ever: ‘You have enjoyed one conflagration, you will see another’? Had the brewery fire been started – as was widely credited – by drunken revellers who, bursting into the buildings in search of further supplies of the ale and, accidentally or
otherwise, starting a fire, had discovered a new and more consuming thirst? Or was the counter-theory true, that the fire was started by the town authorities as a desperate means both of preventing a night of wholesale lawlessness and of destroying at one go all stocks of the offending brew? For, indeed, after the razing of the brewery, no more Coronation Ale was ever seen (or drunk) again (with one exception). And the secret of its concoction – remained a secret.

Did the burning of the brewery give final and positive proof of the notion that a curse lay on the Atkinson family? Yet if it did, how did this accord with that other theory that sprang up quietly at first but with greater boldness in the ensuing years when Ernest, having made no plans to rebuild, sold his remaining business assets and retired – all too guiltily it seemed – to Kessling Hall? That Ernest himself, under cover of getting the whole town drunk, had set fire to the brewery. Because he wished to get his hands on the massive insurance sums.

And because (allow your history teacher his fanciful but not ill-researched surmise), far from being the victim of a curse he was glad to be its instrument. Because he saw no future for this firm of Atkinson and its one-time empire, let alone for these people who courted disaster. Because he wanted nothing better than to see this brewery utterly destroyed and finished with. To wipe the slate clean.

So, perhaps, he reflected, that October day in 1914, in the ample back seat of a Daimler limousine, beside his only daughter (a beauty of eighteen), being driven from Gildsey to Kessling, where once there was no Hall, no Maltings, and no barge-pool. So he pondered, passing through those flat fringes of the Leem so similar to the low country between the Lys and the Yser where so many lives were soon to be extinguished and where Henry Crick was to be wounded in the knee. What had the Atkinsons achieved, he perhaps asked himself, by bringing the wide world to a backwater?

And – I put it to you, children – were Ernest and all the beer-producing Atkinsons doing anything more, if on a grander scale, than what Freddie Parr’s father did when he took to drink? Trying to assuage emptiness. Lifting sunken spirits. Kindling fire and ferment out of watery nothing …

The verdict of the official investigators and the insurance company inspectors: an accident.

To get his hands on the insurance money. To get his own back on the town which booed his speech and never elected him MP. To make fools of them all (for they sobered up soon enough). Who knows if the whole thing had not been a monstrous trick and, had they been able to find him on that fateful night, they wouldn’t have taken him and cast him into the midst of the flames?

For where, indeed, was Ernest Atkinson while his brewery was ablaze? Not in evidence. Though everyone assumed he must be there, amongst the gaggle of astonished and agitated dignitaries, many in their banqueting regalia, toasting themselves in an unanticipated fashion before the fire, no one, afterwards, could distinctly remember having seen him. Though he was there in the Coronation Pavilion and popped up again (quelling certain fears) in the morning to view the still red-hot ruins, no one could quite account for him in the interval. A most implicating absence.

Yet while Ernest had been making himself scarce, another and not unrelated presence had apparently stood in. For, dismiss it if you will as yet another hallucination brought on by the mixture of flames and ale, but more than one member of that crowd of fire-watchers recalled encountering a woman – a woman who put them suddenly in mind of a preposterous old story. And when,
indeed, at about eleven-thirty, when, Ernest being looked for and not being found, two police constables (whether sober, is not known) were despatched to Cable House, it was to find a solitary maid, Jane Shaw (all the other servants having departed to watch the blaze), in a highly wrought condition; who swore blind, first that she had touched none of that dreadful beer and, second, that she had gone up to the top room in order to see the fire, because she feared for her safety in the streets, and she had seen – she had
seen
– Sarah Atkinson. Because she knew her from that portrait hanging in the Town Hall, not to mention other pictures in the house. Because she’d heard all those silly old tales, and now she knew they were true. Sarah was standing before the window, where the leaping flames could be seen assailing the top of the chimney, which was soon to disappear, and she was saying with a grin on her face and a pertinence that had eluded, long ago, her husband and two devoted sons: ‘Fire! Smoke! Burning!’

23
Quatorze Juillet

B
UT let us not overestimate the actual character or the actual achievements of the Fall of the Bastille. Seven prisoners released (that was all the fortress contained): two madmen, four forgers and a hapless roué. Seven heads – the governor and six of the defending garrison – paraded on pikes. Two hundred or so of the besiegers killed or wounded. The stones of the Bastille
itself, a mountain of rubble, carried away by professional contractors and disposed of at a tidy profit …

No, the significance of this tawdry conquest lies not in its tangible gains but in its symbolic value. The king’s citadel captured by the king’s people. Hence that famous tricoloured flag – the red and blue of the city of Paris holding under close guard the white of the house of Bourbon – which became the portable token of revolution, just as the fallen Bastille became its historical archetype. Of revolution – though it was to be waved in the decades to come through two Empires and to find itself flying more and more before the gusty and oppressive winds of nationalism, and even to be crossed in fellowship, in 1904, with the likewise red, white and blue flag of (the old enemy) imperialist and monarchical Britain.

Ah, the idols and icons, the emblems and totems of history. How when we knock down one, another rises in its place. How we can’t get away – even if you can, Price – from our fairy-tales. How even in your teacher’s childhood (if you can picture such a thing), during a great Depression which returns to haunt us in our own unprosperous times, Empire Day was regularly celebrated with no small enthusiasm (and no reference to brewery fires).

And we all know what the French do (seven heads on pikes and a mountain of rubble) every July the fourteenth.

24
Child’s Play

B
UT on the fourteenth of July, 1940, the French people had no taste for their Bastille Day and no taste for celebrating their imperishable victory over tyranny. On the fourteenth of July, 1940, France lay, as she had lain for three weeks, under a German occupation swiftly imposed against swiftly evaporating resistance. Because – so posterity points its accusing finger – either that old traitor and defeatist, Marshal Pétain (who blamed the collapse on nothing less than the poisonous spirit of La Révolution), sold his country down the line; or – not to foist everything on a single scapegoat – because previous successive onslaughts, of bitter memory, from across the Rhine had already knocked the stuffing out of the glorious Bastille-taking French people.

In July, 1940, a German army occupies the land which in 1914 to ’18 a million and a half Frenchmen had given their lives to defend and for which Pétain himself had heroically struggled at Verdun. In July, 1940, Hitler contemplates – as in 1805 Napoleon had contemplated – the invasion of England. Only to put it off and go marching off to Russia. Just as Napoleon once did.

Now who says history doesn’t go in circles?

And in July, 1940, as Hitler conferred with Goering, and as tearful evacuees filtered into Fenland villages to become
butts for the gibes of local children, Tom Crick (future history teacher), Freddie Parr, Peter Baine, Terry Coe (friends of the first-named) and Dick Crick, all in assorted woollen swimming-trunks and, with the exception of Freddie Parr, wet-haired and muddy-limbed, together with Mary Metcalf and Shirley Alford (cotton skirts and blouses of various shades, white ankle-socks and sandals), are convened on the banks of the Hockwell Lode and engaged in matters little affected by (and little affecting) the muffled noises-off of world events.

For beneath the woollen swimming-trunks of Tom Crick, Freddie Parr, Peter Baine and Terry Coe unmistakable swellings are apparent, provoking the curiosity of Mary Metcalf and, less brazenly, of Shirley Alford, whose eyes, as much as they are persuaded to look, are also impelled to look away, for complicated reasons which simultaneously bring a glow to her cheeks.

And Mary Metcalf says, ‘Show us, show us.’ (Ritual words in a ritual confrontation, which make the woollen-covered swellings swell a little further.)

And Freddie Parr says, ‘First you must—’

Bicycles recumbent in long grass. Larks twittering. Aeroplane drones (a nation at war). A more than half drained bottle of whisky, cradled now, with a certain pointedness, between Freddie’s thighs but previously passed amongst those assembled, by way of encouragement. Peter Baine has drunk, Terry Coe has drunk, your history teacher has drunk, Freddie Parr has drunk (more than anyone else), but Dick has refused most rigidly, and so, in coyer vein, has Shirley Alford; while Mary Metcalf, wise already, it seems, to the delicacies of situations in which ladies are offered intoxicating drink by gentlemen, but still under the sway of her ruling curiosity, merely tilts the bottle sufficiently to sting the tip of her tongue and says, thrusting it back, ‘Ugh!’

And this whisky, it should be added, is the genuine Scotch article, stolen with much subterfuge by Freddie
from his father. For the days of black-marketeering and illicit American imports are yet to come.

Baked mud smells, river smells, a hot-blue sky, a warm wind … Not to mince matters, and to offer you, in passing, an impromptu theory, sexuality perhaps reveals itself more readily in a flat land, in a land of watery prostration, than in, say, a mountainous or forested terrain, where nature’s own phallic thrustings inhibit man’s, or in towns and cities where a thousand artificial erections (a brewery chimney, a tower block) detract from our animal urges.