Waterland

by Graham Swift

  And shall we leave it too – possessing though we do the gift of hindsight – to see what God, Time and the people will decide, and make no comment, as yet, on what, if anything, lies beside old Tom’s grave in St Gunnhilda’s churchyard; nor make any moralizing and wise-after-the-event comparisons between the simple headstone, which stands gathering moss and lichens in Wexingham, of William Atkinson who died content and the grand tomb of Thomas Atkinson who died wretched?

  To Thomas’s sons, George and Alfred, mere striplings of twenty-five and twenty-three, yet already fashioned by regrettable circumstances into brisk and earnest young men of business, it seems that the air is cleared, purified. Their debt of shame has been paid and now with renewed righteousness, with renewed purpose, they can start once more. History does not record whether the day of Thomas’s funeral was one of those dazzling mid-winter Fenland days in which the sky seems to cleanse every outline and make light of distances and the two towers of Ely cathedral can not only be seen but their contrasting architecture plainly descried. Nor does it record whether the people of Gildsey, who so confidently scorned the genuine grief of Thomas for his wife, failed to notice the lack of grief of Thomas’s sons for their father.

  But such things would have been appropriate. For the town, no less than its two young champions, feels, as it enters, indeed, its heyday, this ever-recurring need to begin again, to wipe the slate, erase the past and look to the sparkling landmarks of the future.

  Has not the shrewdness of old William been borne out? No Fenland brewer, dependent on barley from the south, can compete with Atkinson barley malted at the Atkinson maltings and brought down the Leem in Atkinson lighters without a single toll charge. Soon not only the people of Gildsey but the people of March, Wisbech, Ely and Lynn will appreciate the fine quality and fine price of Atkinson Ale. And if Atkinson lighters can carry Atkinson Ale to all these places, and beyond, why should they not carry other things? Why should the Atkinsons not avail themselves of their favourable position at the junction of Ouse and Leem, and of the general improvement of the waterways, to turn Gildsey into an entrep’t of the eastern Fens? The Atkinson Water Transport Company along with the New Brewery is perhaps already a living creature in the minds of young George and Alfred as they drive away from their father’s burial.

  And what creature stirs in the mind of Sarah Atkinson? If anything stirs in the mind of Sarah Atkinson. Popular opinion will not entertain the possibility that Sarah Atkinson is stark mad. (Was it not her husband who was the mad one when he struck his wife for no cause at all?) Popular opinion learns scarcely anything of Sarah Atkinson, though it knows that she sits constantly in that upper room, surveying the town like a goddess. And it begins to tell stories. It tells, for example, how although Sarah Atkinson never uttered a word to her husband after that fatal day, nor ever gave him a single glance of recognition, such was not the case with her two sons. That to them indeed she imparted, perhaps in plain words, perhaps by some other mystical process of communication, wisdom and exhortation. That it was from her, and not from their father, that they got their zeal and their peculiar sense of mission. Not only this, but the success that came to the Atkinson brothers came to them not from their own sterling efforts but from this wronged Martyr.

  In short, that that blow to the head had bestowed on Sarah that gift which is so desired and feared – the gift to see and shape the future.

  Thus it was she who so uncannily predicted the exact timing of the repeal of the Corn Laws; it was she who devised a cunning strategy to outface the Challenge of the Railways; it was she who divined, and even caused to be, the boom years of the mid-century and who envisaged, even as they stood by their father’s grave, her George and Alfred, masters respectively of the Brewery and the Transport Company and jointly of the Leem Navigation and the Atkinson Agricultural Estates, as kings in their own country.

  Yet some imaginative Gildsey souls went much further than this. For when that portrait of Sarah in her old age, in her black satin dress and diamonds, was painted, and donated by the brothers, in a gesture both poignant and magnanimous, to the town, to be hung in the lobby of the Town Hall, it became the object of no small local pilgrimage. And it was not long before someone asked: did not the gaunt yet angelic features of Sarah bear a striking resemblance to those of St Gunnhilda, in the precious Gunnhilda triptych (then still in the church of her name) – St Gunnhilda who looked out over the devil-ridden Fens and saw visions?

  Whether any of this contains a grain of truth; whether the brothers themselves regarded their mother as oracle, priestess, protectress, or merely allowed these rumours to circulate as a means of securing the favour of the town, no one can tell.

  But a further story, which supports the stark-mad theory, which has been handed down and repeated too often to be lightly dismissed, relates that, whatever the bonds between Sarah and her sons and whatever the true description – serene, dumb, inscrutable – of her long and stationary vigil in the upper room, she would be seized every so often by a singular form of animation.

  It began with a trembling and twitching of her nostrils; then a wrinkling of her nose and an energetic and urgent sniffing. This would be followed by a darting of her eyes hither and thither in an alert fashion and a claw-like tightening of her hands. Then her lips would rub furiously at themselves and while her face contorted and her body wriggled and bounced so violently in her chair that its oak legs sometimes lifted from the floor, she would utter the only words specifically attributed to her in all the years following her husband’s dreadful fit of rage. Namely: ‘Smoke!’, ‘Fire!’, ‘Burning!’, in infinite permutations.

  The servants – and this bespeaks their devotion – would exert themselves to calm her. The butler would undertake a tour of the house, checking every fireplace and chimney. A maid would look from the window and affirm that neither smoke nor fire were visible – unless one included the fumes wafting from the brewery chimney, which were nothing but a good sign, or unless the wind was blowing from the direction of Peter Cutlack’s smoking-house at the far end of Water Street, where Peter Cutlack turned slithery olive-green Ouse eels into crooked copper-brown walking-sticks. Another maid would be dispatched to the kitchen to ensure that whatever assailed their mistress’s nostrils was not a portent that dinner was ruined. A boy would even be sent to inquire in the streets.

  But all these steps were to no avail. Sarah would go on sniffing and wriggling and popping her eyes and hollering ‘Smoke!’ and ‘Burning!’ till exhaustion overcame her.

  These fits, it is claimed, grew more frequent, and it is a fact not without irony, if entirely coincidental, that in 1841 the Atkinsons, amongst others, were responsible for bringing to Gildsey its first custom-built fire-engine.

  More frequent and more distressing – and more embarrassing too. It is even suggested – though here scepticism must step in, for the principal evidence is that of one of the Atkinson servants dismissed for being in a shameless state of pregnancy and thus having a motive to invent malicious lies – that the spasms grew so severe and convulsive that, far from continuing to adore and sanctify their mother, the brothers packed her off to an Institution; though, for the sake of the townsfolk, they continued to preserve the legend (for example, by having a certain picture painted of Sarah in black dress and diamonds when in fact she was trussed up in a strait-jacket) that their Guardian Angel still watched over them.

  All this, it is true, was much later, in the 1870s – Sarah, indeed, was a long time adying – when the brothers themselves were past their peak and young Arthur, Sarah’s grandson, George’s son, was already the driving force of the Atkinson machine. Yet even in 1820, the year of the shocking event, it was put about by certain omen-loving and sourly witty parties that when Thomas Atkinson devised his company emblem, so neatly denoting both his Brewery and Navigation interests, of the crossed barley ears over a symbolic representation of water, and cast about for a motto to go with it, he chose unwisely. For the motto which he chose – E
x Aqua Fermentum – which was once engraved in huge arched capitals over the main entrance to the New Brewery and which appeared on the label of every bottle of Atkinson beer, does indeed mean, simply, ‘Out of Water, Ale’, and can even be construed, as perhaps Thomas intended, ‘Out of Water, Activity’; but it can also be interpreted, as surely Thomas never meant: ‘Out of Water, Perturbation’.

  Children, you are right. There are times when we have to disentangle history from fairy-tale. There are times (they come round really quite often) when good dry textbook history takes a plunge into the old swamps of myth and has to be retrieved with empirical fishing lines. History, being an accredited sub-science, only wants to know the facts. History, if it is to keep on constructing its road into the future, must do so on solid ground. At all costs let us avoid mystery-making and speculation, secrets and idle gossip. And, for God’s sake, nothing supernatural. And above all, let us not tell stories. Otherwise, how will the future be possible and how will anything get done? So let us get back to that clear and purified air and old Tom tucked up in his new white grave. Let us get back to solid ground …

  In 1830 – when in Paris the barricades go up again, the mob once more invades the Tuileries and the air is full not only of smoke and revolution but of the heady scent of déjà vu – George Atkinson marries Catherine Anne Goodchild, daughter of the leading banker of Gildsey. A marriage in every way predictable, laudable and satisfactory. In 1832 – for the brothers conducted their lives to a pattern and in almost all things Alfred, being two years the junior, did what his brother did, only two years later – Alfred married Eliza Harriet Bell, the daughter of a farmer who owned land on both banks of the Leem to the west of Apton, once drained and sold to him by Thomas. A marriage less predictable and laudable for though everyone can see how Alfred is consolidating the navigation interest, this is not a prosperous time for farmers of the likes of James Bell.

  Was this Sarah’s work? Was it she who saw what a handsome profit James Bell’s wheat would fetch in the post-Repeal era of the ’50s and ’60s? And was it she who saw how the Norwich, Gildsey, and Peterborough Railway, which in 1832 was but a tentative pencil-mark in some planner’s rough-book, must one day pass through James Bell’s land, either north or south of the river? When the time came, James Bell would be readily persuaded to hold out for two years to the railway company – not just so that, when he finally sold, it would be at double the price, but so that Eliza’s husband and brother-in-law could complete in the interval the replacement of draught-horses, quant-poles and sails by steam-barges and narrow steam-tugs on the Leem.

  Thus the brothers Atkinson would ensure that steam would compete with steam, and that when the railway came it would still be cheaper to freight bulk goods to and from Gildsey by river. And thus the Norwich, Gildsey and Peterborough Railway was mainly a passenger service; just as it was still when, as part of the Great Eastern Railway, its varnished teak carriages were the scenes of daily assignations between a boy in a black uniform and a girl in a rust-red one.

  Sarah’s work perhaps. But let us keep to the facts. In 1834 Catherine Anne gives birth to a strapping son, Arthur George. In 1836 Eliza Harriet bears a daughter, Louisa Jane. In 1836, likewise, but after the birth of Louisa Jane, Catherine Anne is delivered also of a daughter, Dora Emily. In 1838— But in 1838, for once, Alfred does not observe the two-year principle and does not complete the square by fathering a son of his own. And there, indeed, in 1838, with a round total of three – and only one male child, what’s more, on whom to place the hopes of the future – the Atkinson progeny reaches its limit. No unusual thing in our own times, but unusual in 1838 when successful men of business were given to make children as they made money, and were further spurred by the knowledge – George and Alfred had but to think of their own short-lived brother and sister – that to be certain of one heir it is well to beget several.

  If they had not so revered the two brothers, if the brothers’ fortunes were not so inseparable from their own and if the brothers had not built such a fine tomb for their unhappy father, the people of Gildsey might have reflected on this state of affairs. They might have reflected upon the four-year period after marriage before, in the case of both couples, conception was achieved. They might have connected the brothers’ habitual air of stern and implacable purpose with a certain frosty forlornness about both their otherwise charming wives; and connected this in turn with a certain fulsome affection they were wont to display, even in public, to their ribboned and crinolined daughters. They might have concluded that the nuptial squeaks and squeals that once old Tom and Sarah had raised at Kessling did not find an echo in the pious atmosphere of Cable House; and that this was how the Guardian Angel wrought her magic. In short, the brothers were inhibited by that woman up there in that upper room. In short, the townsfolk might have diagnosed, had they been acquainted with a form of magic not then invented, the classic symptoms of the Mother Fixation, not to say the Oedipal Syndrome. And was it not possible that the tireless industry of George and Alfred was nothing other than Sexual Energy which, like Fenland water, cannot be subdued but can be pumped into new channels?

  But, facts, facts. In 1833 the new wharves, known collectively as Gildsey Dock, with their warehouses, derricks, pony-pulled railway trucks and their sister installation across the Ouse at Newhithe, are officially opened. Simultaneously, the Atkinson Water Transport Company, with its soon-to-be extended fleet of three steam-tugs, four steam-barges, six sail-barges and forty-six lighters – not to mention the craft already at work on the Leem – is inaugurated. Within a few years, malt and barrels of ale are no longer the prime, though they are still the most honoured, cargo of the Atkinson vessels. Nor is the Leem the chief artery of their trade. The Atkinson barges go as far afield as Huntingdon, Bedford, Peterborough and Northampton. They ship grain to King’s Lynn, and Tyne coal and continental produce back again. They carry iron, timber, agricultural machinery, bricks, stone, hemp, oil, tallow, flour.

  When work begins, in 1839, on the Norwich and Gildsey, and the Ipswich, Bury and Gildsey Railways, it is the Atkinson Transport Company which brings supplies and even Atkinson expertise which advises on such matters as drainage and embanking. The townsfolk are dismayed. Will we not lose our trade, they demand, to the railways? And the brothers reply: And would you lose your markets to some other town served by steam-trains? For the brothers foresee (Sarah’s work?) that what the railway may take in long-haul trade, they regain in short-haul traffic in goods brought by the railway itself. Can trains deliver coal to every pumping-station in the region? Can trains bring goods to every village in this land where people are naturally settled beside water? And, pray, compare our rates of carriage with those of the Railway Company.

  Besides, the brothers hold substantial shares in the railways. In these times of change, it is best to be sure.

  And not the least of those many materials ferried into the new Dock (and in this case not ferried out again) were the materials used between 1846 and 1849 in the construction of the New Atkinson Brewery. For let us not forget that the name of Atkinson is first and foremost the name of a beer. Even as the dock is completed, space has been set aside for the grand building which must one day replace the enlarged but soon-to-be inadequate old brewery. And, little by little, in those mid-century years, the edifice rises.

  It is not vast, by modern standards; but as its foundation stones give way to its part brick and part stone-faced walls, and as its brick and stone-faced walls give way to elaborately embellished cornices and friezes (a chain of barley sheaves and beer casks) and a roof part gabled and part widely arched in the manner of railway termini, and as this roof leads on, in turn, to a four-sided chimney, sixty-six feet high, the sides tapering upwards and faced with brickwork fluting, and the whole crowned beneath the vent, by more ornate moulding and friezing (of indeterminate style but said by the architect to suggest an Italian campanile) and, for good measure, a clock, by which all Gildsey, and half the Fens if they possess
a spyglass, can tell the time – as all this rises up and draws with it the gaze of the gaping inhabitants, a joke originates: that the New Brewery must surely cause a new flooding of the Fens, but not a flooding of water – a flooding of beer.

  Sarah hears, in her room, the sounds of work in progress. There comes a time when above the crooked house-tops on the northern side of Water Street appear scaffolding, the tops of cranes and hoists, then the iron skeleton of the roof itself, over which workmen crawl and strut, as if on some giant flying-machine. Then the chimney, phallically rising to abash the Fenland sky. Does she notice? Does she care? Is she pleased, is she proud? No record notes that she is present among the guests of honour on that day in June, 1849, outdoing for splendour even that former day of triumph in 1815, when a band played once more, when no less than two Lords were in attendance, when speeches rang out first from a flag-bedecked rostrum and again at the Grand Reception in the Town Hall; when the Atkinson bargees raised their caps and sounded the horns of their steam-barges, when the crowd hurrahed and the first ceremonial shovelfuls of malt-grist were loaded into the mashing tuns. But was she there in spirit – cheering with the rest of them? Or was she still, in her upper room, keeping her watch over Nothing?