by Graham Swift
What do you do when reality is an empty space? You can make things happen – and conjure up, with all the risks, a little token urgency; you can drink and be merry and forget what your sober mind tells you. Or, like the Cricks who out of their watery toils could always dredge up a tale or two, you can tell stories.
My becoming a history teacher can be directly ascribed to the stories which my mother told me as a child, when, like most children, I was afraid of the dark. For though my mother was not a Crick, she had the story-telling knack in no small measure, and, in any case, as I did not then know – as only later historical researches would reveal – she had cause of her own to be no stranger to fairy-tales.
My earliest acquaintance with history was thus, in a form issuing from my mother’s lips, inseparable from her other bedtime make-believe: how Alfred burnt the cakes, how Canute commanded the waves, how King Charles hid in an oak tree – as if history were a pleasing invention. And even as a schoolboy, when introduced to history as an object of study, when nursing indeed an unfledged lifetime’s passion, it was still the fabulous aura of history that lured me, and I believed, perhaps like you, that history was a myth. Until a series of encounters with the Here and Now gave a sudden pointedness to my studies. Until the Here and Now, gripping me by the arm, slapping my face and telling me to take a good look at the mess I was in, informed me that history was no invention but indeed existed – and I had become part of it.
So I shouldered my Subject. So I began to look into history – not only the well-thumbed history of the wide world but also, indeed with particular zeal, the history of my Fenland forebears. So I began to demand of history an Explanation. Only to uncover in this dedicated search more mysteries, more fantasticalities, more wonders and grounds for astonishment than I started with; only to conclude forty years later – notwithstanding a devotion to the usefulness, to the educative power of my chosen discipline – that history is a yarn. And can I deny that what I wanted all along was not some golden nugget that history would at last yield up, but History itself: the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark?
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting markerbuoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall – or when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
And when he sits, with more leisure but no less terror, in the midst of catastrophe, when he sits – as Lewis can see himself sitting, for the sake of his children – in his fallout bunker; or when he only sits alone because his wife of over thirty years who no longer knows him, nor he her, has been taken away, and because his schoolchildren, his children, who once – ever reminding him of the future – came to his history lessons, are no longer there, he tells, if only to himself, if only to an audience he is forced to imagine, a story.
So let me tell you another. Let me tell you
9
About the Rise of the Atkinsons
SOME say they were originally Fenmen. But if they were, they moved long ago, tired of wet boots and flat horizons, to the hills of Norfolk, to become simple shepherds. And it was on the hills of Norfolk (low and humble hills as hills go, but mountain ranges by Fen standards) that they got Ideas – something the stick-in-the-mud Cricks rarely entertained.
Before Vermuyden came to the Fens and encountered the obstinacy of the Fen-dwellers, an Atkinson forefather, on his bleating hillside, conceived the idea of becoming a bailiff; and his son, a bailiff born, conceived the idea of becoming a farmer of substance; and one of the fourth, fifth or sixth generation of idea-conceiving Atkinsons, while land was being enclosed and the wool trade fluctuating, sold most of his sheep, hired ploughmen and sowed barley, which grew tall and fruitful in the chalky upland soil and which he sent to the maltster to be transformed into beer.
And that is another difference between the Cricks and the Atkinsons. That whereas the Cricks emerged from water, the Atkinsons emerged from beer.
Those acres of land he ploughed must have been special, and Josiah Atkinson must have known a thing or two, because word got around that the malt made from his barley was not only exceptional but there was magic in it.
The good – and exceedingly good-humoured – villagers of west Norfolk drank their ale with relish and, having nothing to compare it with, took for granted its excellence as only what true ale should be. But the brewers of the nearby towns, eager men with a flair, even then, for market research, sampled the village produce on foraging excursions and inquired whence came the malt. The maltster in his turn, a simple fellow, could not refrain while praise was being heaped on his malt from declaring the source of his barley. Thus it came about that in the year 1751 Josiah Atkinson, farmer of Wexingham, Norfolk, and George Jarvis, maltster of Sheverton, entered a contract, initiated by the former but to the advantage – so it appeared – of the latter, whereby they agreed to share the cost of purchase or hire of wagons, wagoners and teams of horses to convey their mutual product, for their mutual profit, to the brewers of Swaffham and Thetford.
This partnership of Jarvis and Atkinson thrived. But Josiah, who had already conceived another idea, did not deny himself in this agreement the right to send his barley, if he so wished, to be malted elsewhere. Atkinson foresight told him that in his son’s or his grandson’s lifetime, if not in his own, the brewers in their market towns would find it expedient to operate their own malting houses, close at hand, and that Jarvis, who for the present believed Atkinson to be tied by their joint commitment to the brewers, would suffer.
So he did – or, rather, so did his successors. While across the Atlantic the first warning shots were being fired in what is known to you as the War of American Independence, William Atkinson, Josiah’s son, began sending his barley direct to the brewers. Old George’s son, John, perplexed, enraged but powerless, could only fall back on local trade. His malting business declined. In 1779, with the boldness of a man only pursuing an inevitable logic, William Atkinson offered to buy him out. Jarvis, humbled, broken, agreed. From that day the Jarvises became overseers of the Atkinson malting house.
William, nothing compunctious, had only to complete the well-laid stratagem of his father. On his sorrel horse, with his tricorn hat on his head, he went visiting the brewers of Swaffham and Thetford. He announced that as for his barley, there was none finer, as they well knew, in the region; nor was there any shortage of it (for was he not even now bringing more land under the plough?) but henceforth no brewer was to have it unless it was malted at the Atkinson maltings.
The brewers protested, arched their eyebrows, pushed back their carved oak chairs, snapped the stems of their clay pipes. What of their own malting houses, built at considerable expense and for the express convenience of proximity? William replied that, by all means, they should continue to use them – to produce an ale that their customers would surely judge inferior. That as for the question of proximity, had not his own wagons given reliable service in the past?
The brewers huffed, scowled, loosened their itching periwigs; and at length yielded to compromise. The early 1780s in Swaffham and Thetford witnessed a phenomenon as yet unheard of. Ale was, henceforth, no longer ale but a twin-headed creature, one face bearing the accustomed character of ale but costing a halfpenny more, the other, at the old price, unfamiliar and insipid.
William Atkinson rode away, well pleased, from further consultations with the brewers, at which he is to be imagined, perhaps, sitting in their tap-rooms, jovially clinking tankards. For William owed his success not merely to the prescience of his father, or his own acumen, but to infectious good cheer. It was that magical liquor, cupped
in their hands, winking and beaming even as they spoke, which prevailed, as much as Will’s wily brain. Good cheer: was not this the ultimate aim of his – and their – business? And was good cheer to be propagated by rancour and hard feelings? Could he not tell these begrudging brewers how once his father, old Josiah, had taken him out into the barley fields where the wind rustled like a thousand silk petticoats through the ripening ears, and, stooping low and cocking his head to one side, had said: ‘D’ye hear that? D’ye hear that now? That’s the sound of loosening tongues, that’s the sound of ale-house laughter – that’s the sound of merriment.’
William’s wagons lumbered from Sheverton to Swaffham and from Sheverton to Thetford with their sacks of malt. In time, brewers from Fakenham and Norwich, who had tied up no capital in maltings of their own, found it worth their while to send to Sheverton for their malt.
But William, who was growing old and already conferring much of his affairs on his son, Thomas, knew that success could not continue unthreatened. Other Norfolk barley-growers, showing the farming enterprise he and his father had shown, must compete for the brewers’ favours. Besides, Will Atkinson was still having ideas. He dreamed that the Atkinsons would one day follow the wondrous barley-seed from its beginning to its end without its passing through the hand of a third party. That the former shepherds who now farmed and malted would one day brew, and in a style far surpassing the tin-pot brewers of Thetford and Swaffham.
Picture a scene not dissimilar from that in which Josiah and William once stood listening to what the barley had to say, but in which it is now William who, leaning on a stick, commands his son’s attention and directs his gaze towards the west, to where the Fens lurk in the misty distance. To where the peaty soil, such as has been won back from water, albeit admirable for oats and wheat, will never yield malting barley like that nourished by the furrows on which they stand. Drawing his outstretched hand across the view, he explains to young Tom how the people of the Fens import their malt from the uplands of southern Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. Very good barley country too, and very good malt, except that the numerous tolls levied on it as it is brought in barges down the Cam and Ouse make it expensive; and the natural hazards of those same waterways, which have a troublesome habit of bursting their banks, changing their course and every so often becoming choked with silt, ensure that supplies are unreliable, sometimes unforthcoming and, when forthcoming, often in poor condition. In short, the Fenmen pay hard for irregular and indifferent ale. And, as if this was not enough, the Fens are such a backward and trackless wilderness, that few Fenmen can lay their hands on what ale is available.
Looking down from his hilltop in an expansive and prophetic manner (which perhaps explains how, when I tried to visualize that God whom Dad said had such a clear view, I would sometimes see a ruddy, apple-cheeked face, beneath a three-cornered hat, with snowy hair tied back in the eighteenth-century fashion), looking down from his Norfolk hills, William clasped his son’s shoulder and said perhaps some such words as these: ‘We must help these poor besodden Fenlanders. They need a little cheer in their wretched swamps. They cannot survive on water.’
Picture another scene, in the parlour of the red-brick farmhouse that Josiah built in 1760 (still standing in all its Georgian solidity on the outskirts of Wexingham) in which Will unfurls a map specially purchased from a Cambridge map-seller and points with a nut-brown index finger to the region of the Leem. He takes as a centre the little town of Gildsey near the confluence of the Leem and Ouse. He compares the distance, by way of the Leem, from their own farmland to Gildsey, with that by way of the Cam and Ouse from the barleyland of the south. He draws his son’s attention, for which no map is necessary, to the hamlet of Kessling, but a few miles west of Wexingham – a run-down cluster of dwellings amidst rough heathland and pasture where the young Leem, after its journey from the hills, begins to slow and gather itself – from which most of the inhabitants have already departed to become Atkinson labourers. He taps the map with his pipe-stem. ‘The man who builds a malting house at Kessling and has the keys of the river will bring wealth to a wasteland. And himself.’
Thomas looks at the map and at his father. The keys of the river? He sees no river; only a series of meres, marshes and floodlands through which perhaps a watery artery is vaguely traceable. Whereupon William, pipe-stem back in the corner of his mouth, utters a word which falls strangely and perplexingly on the ears of a man who lives on top of a chalk hill: ‘Drainage.’
So Thomas Atkinson, spurred by his father, who goes to his rest in Wexingham churchyard, year of our Lord 1785, begins to buy waterlogged land in the Leem catchment and discovers that Drainage is indeed a strange, even magical, word – as magical as the grains of his own barley. Because in five or six years’ time he can sell the same land, with the water squeezed out of it, at a tenfold profit.
While on the continent the millennium arrives, while the Bastille tumbles, Jacobins oust Girondins and there is widespread draining away of blood, Thomas Atkinson studies the principles of land drainage, of river velocity and siltation. How the efficacy of artificial drainage is measured by the increased water dischargeable through the natural drain of a river. How the velocity of a river increases as a fraction of the increase of water but siltation decreases as a multiple of the increase of velocity. He applies these principles with palpable results. He consults and hires surveyors, engineers and labourers, none of whom complain of his ignorance or his impatience or his parsimony as an employer. And amongst those who come to work for him are the Cricks from across the Ouse.
Thomas learns it isn’t easy. And it’s never finished. Little by little. The obstinacy of water. The tenacity of ideas. Land reclamation.
But, lest it be thought that amidst these arduous toils Thomas has lost sight of his father’s Good Cheer, his account books record the provision of regular supplies of ale, made with Atkinson malt, to be brought from Norfolk, at some cost and hardship, considering the problems of transport, for the refreshment of his Fenland workers. And when in 1799, grown rich from land-speculation, and appointing an agent to run his Norfolk farm, he moves from Wexingham to Kessling – where, to the astonishment of the handful of villagers, he has not only had a house built but drawn up plans for the digging of a basin in the River Leem and the construction beside it, in due course, of a malting house of large and most up-to-date pattern – it is to bring with him a young and spirited bride of eighteen. And the man-servant, maid-servant, cook and stableman who have followed him from Wexingham cannot refrain from exchanging nudges, winks and leers at the unmistakable sounds that emanate thereafter from their master’s chamber. Thomas, with good eighteenth-century uninhibitedness, is begetting heirs.
Who was this frolicsome and – so it proved – fecund young bride? She was Sarah Turnbull, only surviving child of Matthew Turnbull, brewer, of no great fortune, of Gildsey, Cambridgeshire – to whom Thomas Atkinson had one day come with the astonishing proposition that if he, Matthew, were to sell him, Thomas, one full half of his business, he, Matthew, would one day be a rich man. Whereupon Matthew had reflected deeply, paced several times around the sparsely furnished brewery office, and Thomas had spied, through the window, in the brewery yard below, the brewer’s comely, light-stepping daughter, and, after discreet inquiries as to the health of the brewer’s family, evolved a means of securing his aims in Gildsey more effective than any buying up of shares.
By the year of Trafalgar, Thomas had drained 12,000 acres along the margins of the Leem; dykes had been dug by the score; some sixty or so wind-pumps were in operation; and tenant farmers were paying the lucrative rents and drainage levies that went with equally lucrative soil. From Kessling, where by now almost every villager received Atkinson wages, to Apton – a distance, by water, of nine miles – the river had been embanked and sluices and staunches built to control the flow.
But the remaining section between Apton and the Ouse proved difficult. Thomas suffered the fate of all me
n of initiative whose single-handed ventures pay off: he came up against a wall of rivalry, vested interests and parliamentary machination. For fifteen years he had waged war on water, mud and winter weather, but he encountered no enemy more stubborn than the elders of Gildsey and their elected representatives when they perceived that the navigation of the Leem was indeed feasible and land prices were rocketing. While Napoleon made his lightning marches against Austrians, Prussians and Russians, Thomas Atkinson got bogged down in protracted litigation and labyrinthine wrangles over navigation rights, land tenure and the constitution of drainage boards.
A lesser man would have been dissuaded. A lesser man would have cut his losses and returned to the dry and stable vantage point of his Norfolk hills. But in 1809, at long last, the Leem Navigation is officially, if grudgingly, ceded to him. Simultaneously, he gains the chairmanship – albeit over a divided and unruly board – of the Leem Drainage Commission.
He sets to work once more. The new banks of the river progress westward. Where he cannot buy land he buys co-operation. The Hockwell Lode is dug to assist the drainage of the particularly intractable region north of the lower Leem. A location is fixed, two miles from the junction with the Ouse, for the construction of a combined sluice and navigation lock, to control the entrance to the river. The barge-pool at Kessling is completed and a site on the west bank of the Ouse on the northern outskirts of Gildsey purchased for development as wharves. Though no boat has yet made the auspicious journey between Kessling and Gildsey, numerous craft are already plying their way with materials and waste between Kessling and Apton, Apton and Gildsey, and overtures have been made to the boat-builders in Ely and Lynn regarding the construction of a permanent fleet of lighters.