Waterland (43 page)

He seems to dip and sway, clinging to the lectern, an undaunted Canute.

A vision of Lewis, here on this same precarious dais. At a special – an emergency assembly. While sirens wail outside, his hands are raised to enjoin trust and calm. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. Lewis will save you. Follow me – into our special bunker. School as shelter. School as deliverance. Follow me, my little ones, and be saved …

‘Don’t be … Don’t be …’

But the clamour subsides, draws breath. So are they more afraid of him?

‘And so I call on Mr Crick – can we have silence and respect for Mr Crick? I know who you are and you’ll be punished. I call on Mr Crick to give you his own farewell. Mr Crick. Mr Crick!’

Mr Crick rises to his feet, creeps towards the front of the dais. He hasn’t expected this. He’s expected the quickly bustled exit, the swift public execution. Lewis
turns to him. His face is bathed in sweat. It looks scared. (This is your doing, isn’t it, Tom? You—) Yet it’s flushed with a glow of undeniable triumph, of proven lordliness. See, they heed me. I quell them. See, they’re swayed by me.

Yes, the rebel voices are stilled. Silence for Mr Crick. But what is this? From the centre point of the recent eruption, in the midst of the silence, comes a sudden solitary cry, strangely urgent and imperative, devoid of schoolboy insolence: ‘No cuts! Keep Crick!’

Price.

Crick doesn’t know what to say. He clears his throat.

‘Children—’

49
About Empire-building

W
HO will inherit the world …

When the children of the French Revolution threw off their tyrannical father Louis XVI and their wicked step-mother Marie Antoinette (who, as it turned out, were only like figures in a puppet show, you could pull off their heads, just like that), they thought they were free. But after a while they discovered that they were orphans, and the world which they thought was theirs was really bare and comfortless. So they went running to their foster-father Napoleon Bonaparte, who was waiting by the old puppet theatre; who’d dreamed up for them a new drama based on old themes and who promised them an empire, a destiny – a future.

Children, there’s this thing called civilization. It’s built of hopes and dreams. It’s only an idea. It’s not real. It’s artificial. No one ever said it was real. It’s not natural. No one ever said it was natural. It’s built by the learning process; by trial and error. It breaks easily. No one said it couldn’t fall to bits. And no one ever said it would last for ever.

Once upon a time people believed in the end of the world. Look in the old books: see how many times and on how many pretexts the end of the world has been prophesied and foreseen, calculated and imagined. But that, of course, was superstition. The world grew up. It didn’t end. People threw off superstition as they threw off their parents. They said, Don’t believe that old mumbo-jumbo. You can change the world, you can make it better. The heavens won’t fall. It was true. For a little while – it didn’t start so long ago, only a few generations ago – the world went through its revolutionary, progressive phase; and the world believed it would never end, it would go on getting better. But then the end of the world came back again, not as an idea or a belief but as something the world had fashioned for itself all the time it was growing up.

Which only goes to show that if the end of the world didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent it.

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.

50
The Whole Story

H
E OPENS his eyes, and his eyes tell him that he’s not in the familiar room (yellowed wallpaper, mahogany wardrobe) in the Atkinson Lock cottage, where every morning (every morning with a few exceptions) he would be up with the dawn – that is, if he had not already quitted his bed for the dark lock-side and the chain of cigarettes – and where even before he was on his feet a conspiracy of signs, the rustle of wind about the eaves, the soft or firm patter of rain, even the weatherwise cluckings of his hens, would tell him whether today was a day when a good sluice-keeper should have a mind to his sluice.

He opens his eyes, and his eyes, or rather his limbs and the feel of a strange mattress beneath him tell him that he’s not in the brass-framed double bed (purchased in 1922, from Thorpe Bros., Gildsey), which years ago – ten to be precise – became a bed for one only: so empty, so cold, so hard to sleep in, so impossible to abandon. He’s not in that large, comforting and comfortless bed because (now his memory returns) that same bed stands at this very moment – or attempts vainly to float – in a good half-fathom of treacherous water. And since the bedroom is on the first floor it follows that the larger part of the cottage is occupied by this liquid and uninvited guest and that the goods and chattels pertaining to it are either submerged and awash or, by a process astonishing to contemplate – witness the absent lean-to; witness the
non-existent hen-coop; witness the vanished vegetable patch (and flower garden) of Henry Crick – carried clean away, or erased by mud. That, in short, the Atkinson Lock cottage is a waterlogged ruin. That the Atkinson Lock, with its companion sluice, built by Thomas Atkinson in 1815, rebuilt by Arthur Atkinson after the deluge of 1874, is no more.

And will never be rebuilt again. For what has become, in this war-shadowed, petrol-driven twentieth century, of the once bustling river-traffic between Gildsey and Kessling? (Ask Henry Crick.) The River Leem, in future years, though at present indistinguishable from an inland ocean, will become a weed-strangled, sludge-choked stream, navigable only to Hockwell railway bridge, its upper reaches a mere catchwater for tributary drains.

He opens his eyes. It’s not his bed. It’s not the marriage bed of Henry and Helen Crick (and death-bed of the latter), but the marriage bed of his newly wedded son and daughter-in-law, who have vacated it for his sake and are sleeping as best they can, and in turns, on the floor in the next room. And it’s not the old bedroom at the cottage, but the bedroom of the narrow, two-up, two-down terraced house in Church Lane, Gildsey (look out of the window and you can see, above the rooftops, the tower of St Gunnhilda’s), bought for the young couple with begrudging magnanimity by the bride’s widower father. And it’s just as well, at present, that this house happens to stand on the higher ancient ground neighbouring the church (still known unofficially, but with historical accuracy, as ‘The Island’), because large parts of Gildsey, no less than the Atkinson Lock cottage, are inundated; and Water Street, once again, is a street of water.

He remembers where he is. He sees the unfamiliar curtain, half drawn over an unfamiliar view; he sees the bedside cabinet transformed into a medicine trolley (cough mixtures, bowls, towels, a kettle – but it’s past all that; it’s reached the somnolent, delirious stage). He sees it all. But
perhaps in his mind, which has grown so extraordinarily vivid and mutinous, he’s neither in his son’s marriage bed nor his own but still on the wind-lashed slate roof of the old cottage, having clambered there from the attic window, watching water surge and slap beneath the guttering, watching debris – a five-bar gate, a whole willow tree – casually cruise by, watching the cataract where once a lock and sluice— Watching a world that has sunk without trace, as if some giant plug has been knocked from its hidden bilges.

He’s still straddling the ridge, where he’s been now for a whole night and most of a day, in the midst of a roaring gale, feeling the uncurbable sensation (surely this bed too is tilting, moving?) that the roof, the cottage beneath him, must at any moment shudder, heave, unmoor itself from solid ground and bear him away like an impromptu Noah. He’s still huddling against the chimney-stack for protection from the wind, clad in an old Army great-coat (though it’s soaked through and his teeth chatter like a monkey’s) first worn, as befits a great-coat, in the so-called Great War. So that he presents to his rescuers, who at last come, in a labouring motor-launch (and some of them are soldiers too), the image of a beleaguered sentry sticking like a khaki limpet to his slithery station, or, though it’s the wrong uniform, a sailor determined to go down with his ship.

The launch draws near. It carries a sergeant of engineers and two sappers. It carries lifebuoys, ropes, tackle, sandbags, first-aid packs, an urn of hot soup, a keg of rum. It carries a whole shivering family of four, huddled under blankets, picked up from a farm east of Newhithe, with a half-drowned cocker spaniel rescued with them. And it carries volunteer rescue-worker Tom Crick. Who, while the launch bucks and rolls and spray breaks over its bows, can scarcely believe his inability to act as extemporary pilot, there being an absence of familiar landmarks, and can scarcely credit when at last they draw near, that this is
the old cottage, and that that grotesque gargoyle on the roof, who – now help is at hand – adamantly refuses to budge, is his own father.

‘Lots of them the same,’ says the sergeant, who in only forty-eight hours, in two wild March days and two wild, sleepless March nights, seems to have acquired a knowledge of flood-victims worthy of a lifetime’s study, ‘they do and they don’t want to be rescued. You’d best talk him down, sir.’

So the son – an ex-serviceman who finds it strange to be addressed as ‘sir’ by a sergeant – shouts through cupped hands to the huddle on the roof: ‘Dad, it’s me! Dad, come down. It’s me!’ And when the huddle doesn’t answer: ‘There’s nothing you can do, Dad. There’s nothing …’

And the huddle on the roof (and in the fever-rocked bed) sees a launch perform a tricky docking operation where once swallows made their nests, and sees a landing-party of two balloon-chested, slithering soldiers start to clamber towards him as if to seize his last remaining unsurrendered toehold of territory.

It’s March 18th, 1947. The war’s over. But the hardship’s not over. The ration book still stands on the mantelpiece. And show us, please, the fruits of our victory. Uncle Sam will give us credit. Gandhi wants his India back. View it all through the memory of a forty-eight-year-old man, born in Victoria’s reign, wounded at Ypres and to die in 1947 of broncho-pneumonia. What happened to that yarn our grandfathers spun us?

And now, to cap it all, comes one of the hardest winters and, to follow it, one of the most calamitous floods on record.

She was right: it would be a bad thaw. The Boards and Committees bungled: 60,000 acres under water, 15,000 homeless, 20,000 tons of potatoes … But we’ve seen all this before. For example, in 1874 …

And the lock gone, and the cottage. And a black trunk, inscribed E. R. A., carried off to sea …

It’s his fault. (‘His fault for not getting out when he should’ve,’ scowls the sergeant.) If he’d taken more care, if he’d been more watchful. He might have saved the sluice. He might have saved the world.

Or if Dick had been there to help. Strong, stupid Dick.

He opens his eyes. A woman’s face bends over him. Smoky eyes; a stray lock of chestnut hair. A woman’s hand touches his brow. He sees the face of a nurse. Nurse. Brunette. So he’s not on that floundering rooftop. He’s not where the world— He’s rescued, he’s safe. Among the wounded soldiers. She stoops, she’s saying something. She’s so lovely; it’s a miracle. She’s trying to get him to tell …

But instead of words he delivers a ragged fusillade of coughs. His breath rasps; his lips are livid. He brings up into the bowl held out for him a rust-stained gobbet.

‘Don’t speak … don’t try to speak.’

She holds the bowl and with her free arm supports his juddering shoulders. When the coughs subside she returns the bowl to the bedside-table and eases him back on to the pillows. She wipes a trail of sputum from his mouth. Presses his hand.

She’s tended him like this for six days. She’s found in this stricken father-in-law a kind of calling, a purpose (and perhaps her true atonement); so that her husband, who sits at the foot of the bed, hands held uselessly between his knees, feels excluded and unworthy, a clumsy gooseberry to this scene of painful intimacy.

She has no illusions. It’s real, this coming of things to their limits, this invasion by Nothing of the fragile islands of life. She’s been this way before. And prayers won’t help you. And miracles don’t happen. She’ll become a practical person, a realistic person. She won’t ever tell about the time when— She’ll find work one day in age-care. She’ll minister to those near the end of their days. She’ll move with her husband to the big city, but in her heart she’ll always remain in the flat fens. They’ll take with them this
marriage bed which is also a death bed; and, of the two of them, she’ll always be the stronger, the more enduring …

‘Don’t speak … don’t try to speak.’

But he wants to speak …

Yes, yes, it’s true, he didn’t want to speak, not then, didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to know any more. After that business with Tom and Mary. And Dick. After Dick—

It had flowed back into him once more, reclaimed him. That old Crick phlegm. It had been seeping back, trickling back, ever since she— But now it had repossessed him utterly, extinguishing even that old story-telling flame inside him. He didn’t want to tell stories any more. Didn’t trust in them. And Tom – yes, he knew – had those notebooks. Tom was poring over them, itching to know more, making trips to Gildsey and the Kessling Hospital. But he didn’t even want to open those blue-bound pages.

Phlegm flowed back. The glide of the river, the tedium of the tow-path. You can stand on level ground and let the mind go numb. Father and son lived together, scarcely sharing lives. He talked to chickens, Tom pursued history. Till Tom got his call-up papers (history chasing him). Just as his father did thirty years before. How it goes in—