Waterland

by Graham Swift

  So forget, indeed, your revolutions, your turning-points, your grand metamorphoses of history. Consider, instead, the slow and arduous process, the interminable and ambiguous process – the process of human siltation – of land reclamation.

  Is it desirable, in the first place, that land should be reclaimed? Not to those who exist by water; not to those who have no need of firm ground beneath their feet. Not to the fishermen, fowlers and reed-cutters who made their sodden homes in those stubborn swamps, took to stilts in time of flood and lived like water-rats. Not to the men who broke down the medieval embankments and if caught were buried alive in the very breach they had made. Not to the men who cut the throats of King Charles’s Dutch drainers and threw their bodies into the water they were hired to expel.

  I am speaking of my ancestors; of my father’s forefathers. Because my name of Crick, which in Charles’s day was spelt sometimes ‘Coricke’ or ‘Cricke’, can be found (a day’s delving into local archives) amongst the lists of those summarily dealt with for sabotaging drainage works. My ancestors were water people. They speared fish and netted ducks. When I was small I possessed a living image of my ancestors in the form of Bill Clay, a shrunken, leathery carcass of a man, whose age was unknown but was never put at less than eighty, a one-time punt-gunner and turf-cutter, who had witnessed in his lifetime the passing of all but the dregs of the old wild fens in our area; who stank, even with his livelihood half gone, of goose fat and fish slime, mud and peat smoke; who wore an otter-skin cap, eel-skin gaiters and whose brain was permanently crazed by the poppy-head tea he drank to ward off winter agues. Old Bill lived with his wife Martha in a damp crack-walled cottage not far from the Ouse and on the edge of the shrinking reed-filled marsh known, after the watery expanse it had once been, as Wash Fen Mere. But some said that Martha Clay, who was some twenty years younger than Bill, was never Bill’s wife at all. Some said that Martha Clay was a witch …

  But let’s keep clear of fairy-tales.

  The Dutch came, under their engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, hired first by King Charles, then by His Lordship, Francis, Earl of Bedford. Honouring their employer’s name, they cut the Bedford River, and then the New Bedford River alongside it, to divert the main strength of the Ouse from its recalcitrant and sluggish course by Ely, into a straight channel to the sea. They built the Denver Sluice at the junction of the northern end of the new river with the old Ouse, and the Hermitage Sluice at the southern junction. They dug subsidiary cuts, drains, lodes, dykes, eaus and ditches and converted 95,000 acres into summer, if not winter, grazing. Practical and forward-looking people, the Dutch. And my father’s forebears opposed them; and two of them were hanged for it.

  Vermuyden left (he should have been rich but the Dutch Wars robbed him of his English fortune) in 1655. And nature, more effectively than my ancestors, began to sabotage his work. Because silt obstructs as it builds; unmakes as it makes. Vermuyden did not foresee that in cutting new courses for the rivers he reduced, not quickened, their flow; since a divided river conducts at any one point a decreased volume of water, and the less water a river conducts the less not only its velocity but also its capacity to scour its channel. The Earl of Bedford’s noble waterways gathered mud. Silt collected in the estuaries, where the current of the rivers was no match for the tide, and built up against the sluices.

  And Vermuyden did not foresee one other thing. That reclaimed land shrinks – as anything must shrink that has the water squeezed out of it. And peat, above all, which absorbs water like a sponge, shrinks when it dries. The Fens are shrinking. They are still shrinking – and sinking. Land which was above sea-level in Vermuyden’s day is now below it. Tens of feet below it. There is no exaggerating the dangers. The invitation to flooding; the diminution of the gradient of the rivers; the pressure on the raised banks; the faster flow of upland water into the deepening lowland basin. All this, and silt.

  In the 1690s the Bedford River burst a sixty-foot gap in its banks. In 1713 the Denver Sluice gave way and so great was the silting below it that the water from the Bedford River was forced landwards, upstream, up the old Ouse to Ely, instead of discharging into the sea. Thousands of acres of farmland were submerged. Cottagers waded to their beds.

  And at some time in all this, strangely enough, my paternal ancestors threw in their lot with the drainers and land-reclaimers.

  Perhaps they had no choice. Perhaps they took their hire where they were forced to. Perhaps they responded, out of the good of their hearts, to the misery of inundated crops and water-logged homes. In 1748, among the records of wages paid to those employed in rebuilding the Denver Sluice, are the names of the brothers James and Samuel Cricke. And in the parish annals of the Crick homeland, which in those days was north of the small town of Gildsey and east of the New Bedford River, are to be found for the next century and a half, and in the same tenacious connection, the names of Cricks. ‘John Crick: for repairing the west bank …’; ‘Peter Crick: for scouring the Jackwater Drain and cutting the new Middle Drain …’; ‘Jacob Crick, to work and maintain the windmills at Stump Corner …’

  They ceased to be water people and became land people; they ceased to fish and fowl and became plumbers of the land. They joined in the destiny of the Fens, which was to strive not for but against water. For a century and a half they dug, drained and pumped the land between the Bedford River and the Great Ouse, boots perpetually mud-caked, ignorant of how their efforts were, little by little, changing the map of England.

  Or perhaps they did not cease to be water people. Perhaps they became amphibians. Because if you drain land you are intimately concerned with water; you have to know its ways. Perhaps at heart they always knew, in spite of their land-preserving efforts, that they belonged to the old, prehistoric flood. And so my father, who kept the lock on the Leem, still caught eels and leant against the lock-gates at night, staring into the water – for water and meditation, they say, go together. And so my father, who was a superstitious man, always believed that old Bill Clay, the marsh-man, whose brains were quite cracked, was really, none the less, and if the truth be known, a sort of Wise Man.

  When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours to nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? Every Fenman secretly concedes this; every Fenman suffers now and then the illusion that the land he walks over is not there, is floating … And every Fen-child, who is given picture-books to read in which the sun bounces over mountain tops and the road of life winds through heaps of green cushions, and is taught nursery rhymes in which persons go up and down hills, is apt to demand of its elders: Why are the Fens flat?

  To which my father replied, first letting his face take on a wondering and vexed expression and letting his lips form for a moment the shape of an ‘O’: ‘Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view …’

  When the land sinks below the water-level you have to pump. There is nothing else for it: water will not flow upwards. The pumps came to the Fens in the eighteenth century, in the form of black-sailed windmills, over seven hundred of which once creaked, whirred and thrummed in the wind between Lincoln and Cambridge. And my ancestor, Jacob Crick, operated two of them at Stump Corner. When the redcoats were storming Quebec, and the citizens of New England were rising up against their British masters (and offering a model for the discontented citizens of Paris), Jacob Crick was putting his cheek and ear to the air to feel the direction and force of the breezes. He was leaning and pushing against the tail-poles of his twin mills to set the sails in the right position. He was inspecting his paddle-wheels and scoops. But in times when there was no wind or the wind blew steadily in the same quarter, requiring no resetting of the sails, he
would catch eels (because he was still a water-man at heart), not only with wicker traps but with a long, many-bladed spear called a glaive; and he would cut sedge and snare fowl.

  Jacob Crick manned the mills at Stump Corner from 1748 to 1789. He never married. In all those years he probably moved no further than a mile or two from his mills, which at all times he had to guard and tend. With Jacob Crick another characteristic of my paternal family emerges. They are fixed people. They have tied around their legs an invisible tether, and have enjoined upon them the stationary vigilance of sentinels. The biggest migration the Cricks ever made – before I, a twentieth-century Crick, made my home in London – was to move from the land west to the land east of the Ouse – a distance of six miles.

  So Jacob Crick, mill-man and apprentice hermit, never sees the wide world. Though some would say the Fenland skies are wide enough. He never learns what is happening in Quebec or Boston. He eyes the horizon, sniffs the wind, looks at flatness. He has time to sit and ponder, to become suicidal or sagely calm. He acquires the virtue, if virtue it is, of which the Cricks have always had good supply: Phlegm. A muddy, silty humour.

  And in the momentous and far from phlegmatical year 1789, whose significance you know, children, though Jacob Crick never did, Jacob Crick died.

  Wifeless, childless. But the Cricks are not extinct. In 1820 it is a grand-nephew of Jacob – William – who is foreman of a gang employed in digging the southern end of the Eau Brink Cut, a new, deep channel to carry the waters of the lower Ouse by the shortest route to King’s Lynn. For they are still trying to straighten out the slithery, wriggly, eel-like Ouse. In 1822, Francis Crick, perhaps another grand-nephew of Jacob, is entrusted with the operation of the new steam-pump on Stott’s Drain, near the village of Hockwell. For the wind-pump is already obsolete. A windmill’s use is limited. It cannot be used when there is no wind or when a gale is blowing; but a steam-pump will chug through all weathers.

  So steam-power replaces wind-power in the Fens, and the Cricks adapt themselves, as we might say, to technology. To technology, and to ambition. For in this once wallowing backwater, in this sink of England, there are suddenly reputations to be made. Not only are Smeaton, Telford, Rennie and numerous other renowned engineers discovering that in the problems of drainage lies a test for their talents, but a host of speculators, contemplating the rich dark soil that drainage produces, have already seen the wisdom of investing in land reclamation.

  One of them is called Atkinson. He is not a Fenman. He is a prosperous Norfolk farmer and maltster from the hills where the Leem rises and flows westwards to the Ouse. But, in the 1780s, for reasons both self-interested and public-spirited, he forms the plan of opening up for navigation the River Leem, as a means of transport for his produce between Norfolk and the expanding market of the Fens. While Jacob Crick spears his last eels by Stump Corner and listens not just to the creaking of his mill sails but to the creaking of his ageing bones, Thomas Atkinson buys, little by little and at rock-bottom prices, acres of marsh and peat-bog along the margins of the Leem. He hires surveyors, drainage and dredging experts. A confident and far-seeing man, a man of hearty and sanguine, rather than phlegmatic, temperament, he offers work and a future to a whole region.

  And the Cricks come to work for Atkinson. They make their great journey across the Ouse, leaving old Jacob at his solitary outpost; and while one branch of the family goes north to dig the Eau Brink Cut, another goes south, to the village of Apton, where Thomas Atkinson’s agents are recruiting labour.

  And that is how, children, my ancestors came to live by the River Leem. That is how when the cauldron of revolution was simmering in Paris, so that you, one day, should have a subject for your lessons, they were busy, as usual, with their scouring, pumping and embanking. That is how, when foundations were being rocked in France, a land was being formed which would one day yield fifteen tons of potatoes or nineteen sacks of wheat an acre and on which your history teacher-to-be would one day have his home.

  It was Atkinson who put Francis Crick in charge of the new steam-pump on Stott’s Drain. When I was a boy a pump still worked on Stott’s Drain – though it was no longer steam- but diesel-driven and manned not by a Crick but by Harry Bulman, in the pay of the Great Ouse Catchment Board – adding its pulse-beat to that of many others on the night I learnt what the stars really were. It was Atkinson who in 1815 built the lock and sluice two miles from the junction of the Leem and Ouse, christening it the Atkinson Lock. And it was another Atkinson, Thomas’s grandson, who, in 1874, after violent flooding had destroyed lock, sluice and lock-keeper’s cottage, rebuilt the lock and named it the New Atkinson. A Crick did not then become lock-keeper – but a Crick would.

  Yet why, you may ask, did the Cricks rise no further? Why were they content to be, at best, pump-operators, lock-keepers, humble servants of their masters? Why did they never produce a renowned engineer, or turn to farming that rich soil they themselves had helped to form?

  Perhaps because of that old watery phlegm which cooled and made sluggish their spirits, despite the quantities of it they spat out, over their shovels and buckets, in workmanlike gobbets. Because they did not forget, in their muddy labours, their swampy origins; that, however much you resist them, the waters will return; that the land sinks; silt collects; that something in nature wants to go back.

  Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? If you are an Atkinson it is not difficult. If you have become prosperous by selling fine quality barley, if you can look down from your Norfolk uplands and see in these level Fens – this nothing-landscape – an Idea, a drawing-board for your plans, you can outwit reality. But if you are born in the middle of that flatness, fixed in it, glued to it even by the mud in which it abounds …?

  How did the Cricks outwit reality? By telling stories. Down to the last generation, they were not only phlegmatic but superstitious and credulous creatures. Suckers for stories. While the Atkinsons made history, the Cricks spun yarns.

  And it is strange – or perhaps not strange, not strange at all, only logical – how the bare and empty Fens yield so readily to the imaginary – and the supernatural. How the villages along the Leem were peopled with ghosts and earnestly recounted legends. The Singing Swans of Wash Fen Mere; the Monk of Sudchurch; the Headless Ferryman of Staithe – not to mention the Brewer’s Daughter of Gildsey. How in the past the Fens attracted visionaries and fanatics: Saint Gunnhilda, our local patroness, who in 695, or thereabouts, built a wattle hut for herself on a mud-hump in the middle of a marsh, and resisting the assaults and blandishments of demons and surviving on nothing but her prayers, heard the voice of God, founded a church and gave her name (Gunnhildsea – Gildsey: Gunnhilda’s Isle) to a town. How even in the no-nonsense and pragmatic twentieth century, this future schoolmaster quaked in his bed at night for fear of something – something vast and void – and had to be told stories and counter-stories to soothe his provoked imagination. How he piously observed, because others observed them too, a catechism of obscure rites. When you see the new moon, turn your money in your pocket; help someone to salt and help them to sorrow; never put new shoes on a table or cut your nails on a Sunday. An eel-skin cures rheumatism; a roast mouse cures whooping cough; and a live fish in a woman’s lap will make her barren.

  A fairy-tale land.

  And the Cricks, for all their dull phlegm, believed in fairy-tales. They saw marsh-sprites; they saw will-o’-the-wisps. My father saw one in 1922. And when echoes from the wide world began to penetrate to the Cricks, when news reached them at last, though they never went looking for it, that the Colonies had rebelled, that there had been a Waterloo, a Crimea, they listened and repeated what they heard
with wide-eyed awe, as if such things were not the stuff of fact but the fabric of a wondrous tale.

  For centuries the Cricks remain untouched by the wide world. No ambition lures them to the cities. No recruiting party or press-gang, foraging up the Ouse from Lynn, whisks them off to fight for King or Queen. Until history reaches that pitch – our age, children, our common inheritance – where the wide world impinges whether you wish it or not. Till history performs one of its backward somersaults and courts destruction. The waters return. In 1916, ’17 and ’18 there is much flooding of fields, much damage done to embankments and excessive silting in the estuaries, because of the unavailability of those normally employed in the peaceable tasks of drainage and reclamation. In 1917 paper summonses call George and Henry Crick, of Hockwell, Cambs., employees of the River Leem Drainage and Navigation Board, to be fitted out with uniforms and equipped with rifles.

  And where do they find themselves, that autumn, separately but as part of the same beleaguered army? In a flat, rain-swept, water-logged land. A land not unlike their own native Fenland. A land of the kind where the great Vermuyden earned his reputation and developed those ingenious methods which none the less proved inappropriate to the terrain of eastern England. A land where, in 1917, there is still much digging, ditching and entrenching and a pressing problem of drainage, not to say problems of other kinds. The Crick brothers see the wide world – which is not a wondrous fable. The Cricks see – but is this only some nightmare, some evil memory they have always had? – that the wide world is sinking, the waters are returning, the wide world is drowning in mud. Who will not know of the mud of Flanders? Who will not feel in this twentieth century of ours, when even a teenage schoolboy will propose as a topic for a history lesson the End of History, the mud of Flanders sucking at his feet?