Waterland

by Graham Swift

  Once upon a time there was a river which flowed into another river which one day men would call the Rhine. But in those days there were no men, no names and no North Sea and no island called Great Britain and the only beings who knew this river which followed into the nameless Rhine were the fishes which swam up and down it and the giant creatures which browsed in its shallows and whose fantastic forms we might never have guessed at were it not for the fact that now and then they lay down to die in circumstances that would preserve their fossilized bones and so, millions of years later, became a subject for human inquiry.

  Then there was an ice age, or, to be precise, a series of glacial advances and withdrawals, during which time the sea interposed itself between the conjunctive Ouse and Rhine, and the land mass later known as Great Britain began to detach itself from the continent. And during this same lengthy period the first men, or their ape-like ancestors, coming from no one knows exactly where, perhaps from Africa, perhaps from China, or even, by way of an evolutionary detour, out of the sea, migrated across the continental shelf and began to inhabit this not yet severed peninsula, thus setting a precedent many times to be followed, but for the last time successfully in 1066.

  What these first men and their waves of successors called the Ouse we have no idea, having no inkling of their language. But how the Ouse regarded (for let us adopt the notion of these primitive peoples who very probably thought of the Ouse as a God, a sentient Being) these two-legged intruders who by daring to transmute things into sound were unconsciously forging the phenomenon known as History, we can say readily: with indifference. For what did such a new-fangled invention matter to a river which flowed on, oozed on, just as before. What did the three Stone Ages, the Beaker Folk, the Bronze Age, Iron Age, the Belgic Tribes and all their flints, pots, axes, brooches and burial customs signify to a river which possessed as no man did, or does, the secret capacity to move yet remain?

  Then the Romans came. What they called the Ouse we do not know either, but we know that they called the Wash ‘Metaris’. And they were the first to impose their will on the sullen, disdainful Ouse. For they employed several miles of it in the construction of their great catch-water channel, the Car Dyke, which ran, and can still be traced, from the Cam to the Witham – from near Cambridge to near Lincoln – round the whole western flank of the Fens, thus providing yet another example of the Roman skill in engineering and dauntlessness before nature at which modern man still gasps in admiration.

  But in those days the Ouse took a different course from that which it takes today. It is a feature of this footloose and obstinate river that it has several times during its brush with human history changed direction, taken short-cuts, long loops, usurped the course of other rivers, been coaxed into new channels and rearranged its meeting-place with the sea. All of which might be construed as a victory for history (for it is human ingenuity which in so many cases has effected these changes), yet which is more aptly to be interpreted as the continued contempt of the river for the efforts of men. Since without the old Ouse’s perpetual if unhurried unruliness, without its ungovernable desire to flow at its own pace and in its own way, none of those cuts and channels and re-alignments, which are still being dug, and which ensnare the tortuous, reptilian Ouse in a net of minor waterways, would ever have been necessary.

  In Roman times and in that period known as the Dark Ages but which, as many, notably Charles Kingsley, the Fenland fabulist, have opined, was for the Fens their most lustrous and legendary era – the Ouse flowed northwards, nearly to March, before meeting with the old River Cam. In that period in which Canute, who could no more stop rivers flowing than he could bid waves retreat, was mesmerized by the singing of the monks as he was rowed past Ely in his royal barge, the Ouse, giving a free ride to its brother Cam, met the sea at Wisbech (which is now ten miles from the coast).

  But in the Middle Ages, under licence of great floods, the Ouse took it upon itself to flow eastwards up one of its own westward-flowing tributaries and by way of this channel to meet the Cam where it still meets it, some dozen miles downstream of Cambridge. At much the same time it abandoned its outfall at Wisbech to the encroachment of silt, and found a new exit at Lynn. Thus the old river became extinct and a new river, a great ragged bow thrown out to the east, was formed, much to the rejoicing of the people of Ely and the tiny community of Gildsey who now found themselves not only on the water-route between Lynn and Cambridge but also on that between Lynn and Huntingdon. And much to the disgruntlement of the corn merchants of Huntingdon, whose way to the sea was now extended by many miles.

  Then, as we know, Vermuyden came, to put matters right, and dug the Bedford and New Bedford Rivers – straight strings to the bow of the rebellious river – to the glee of the men of Huntingdon who now had better access than ever to the coast, and the dismay of the men of Cambridgeshire whose three-centuries-old waterway was reduced to little more than a land drain. And thus the fate of that true and natural, if wayward, Ouse (and still called ‘Great’ despite the sapping of its waters along the Bedford Rivers) was to lie thenceforth (for we have now moved into a period which even historically speaking is recent and which in the limitless life of a river is but yesterday) in the hands of those local men of ambition so characteristic of this island which as a nation was approaching the peak of its worldwide ambitions – not least amongst whom were the Atkinsons of Norfolk and later of Gildsey.

  The Ouse flows on, unconcerned with ambition, whether local or national. It flows now in more than one channel, its waters diverging, its strength divided, siltprone, flood-prone. Yet it flows – oozes – on, as every river must, to the sea. And, as we all know, the sun and the wind suck up the water from the sea and disperse it on the land, perpetually refeeding the rivers. So that while the Ouse flows to the sea, it flows, in reality, like all rivers, only back to itself, to its own source; and that impression that a river moves only one way is an illusion. And it is also an illusion that what you throw (or push) into a river will be carried away, swallowed for ever, and never return. Because it will return. And that remark first put about, two and a half thousand years ago, by Heraclitus of Ephesus, that we cannot step twice into the same river, is not to be trusted. Because we are always stepping into the same river.

  It flows out of the heart of England to the Wash and the North Sea. It passes the sturdy English towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, St Ives, Ely, Gildsey and King’s Lynn, whose inhabitants see the river which flows only one way – downstream – and not the river which flows in an eternal circle. Its name derives from the Sanskrit for ‘water’. It is a hundred and fifty-six miles long. Its catchment is 2,067 square miles. It has several tributaries, including the Ouzel, the Ivel, the Cam, the Little Ouse and the Leem. The Leem flows into the Ouse below Gildsey. The Leem flows into the Ouse, and the Ouse flows … flows to … And by the Leem, in the year 1943, lived a lock-keeper.

  16

  Longitude 0°

  A PARK bench. A bench in Greenwich Park, some fifty yards from the line of zero longitude. Onset of winter twilight; the park soon to close. Trees turning to silhouettes; flame-pink and pigeon-grey sky. A couple on the bench, striking intense attitudes (she passive yet tenacious; he, on the edge of the seat, indignant, importunate) which suggest, despite the trappings of advanced years (thick winter coats, scarves, a begrudgingly docile golden retriever lashed by its lead to one arm of the bench) a lovers’ tiff. She is silent, as if having already spoken. He speaks. He wants to know, it seems, what she means, what on earth this is all— He demands an explanation. He addresses her in the manner of a schoolmaster addressing a recalcitrant child. The experienced observer of park-bench lovers’ tiffs might say that the woman has had something to confess.

  He remonstrates. She holds her ground. Is this that familiar drama, the ‘It’s time we broke it off’, the ‘It’s time we never met again’ drama? Or is it that equally much-repeated scene, the ‘You see – there’s Another’ routine? That outrage on his part; that hand
-waving, question-firing. The patent symptoms of male jealousy? Yet, suddenly curbing his agitation, as if urged by a new consideration, he moves closer to the woman, grasps her shoulders (this schoolmaster can be human too) as though to shake her from some trance. The passer-by might catch the words ‘doctor – you must go to a doctor’. So then, it is that other well known amorous crisis: the ‘Darling, I think I’m—’ crisis. But these words of his are not spoken with their usual air of masculine bluster (First, I want to know for sure, first I—) but with a kind of desperation – can it be that our park-bench gallant is going to weep? – with the kind of anguish with which one begs, one prays—

  She is leaving him; she is forsaking him. That’s what he is thinking. But this is no ordinary separation. Not the kind where one or the other will get up and walk away.

  Waning light through the trees. A park-keeper’s bell. The park must close soon. Soon, everyone must be gone. Purple dusk descending on the Observatory, on the locked-up collections of antique chronometers, astrolabes, sextants, telescopes – instruments for measuring the universe. Glimmering lights on the Thames. Here, in this former royal hunting park where Henry VIII, they say, wooed Anne Boleyn, where in more august, Imperial times the nannies of the well-to-do wheeled their charges to and fro to the sound of band music and swapped their nanny-gossip, he is constrained to utter to his wife those often-used yet mystical, sometimes miracle-working words, ‘I love you, I love you.’ He is constrained to hug his wife as though to confirm she is still there. For in the twilight it seems that, without moving, she is receding, fading, becoming ghostly.

  She doesn’t explain. She says, ‘Wait – you see.’ Her eyes are blue and smoky. She doesn’t say, ‘This is only a joke.’ He doesn’t know how to play this crazy game she is playing. In his confusion he starts to affect once more a pedagogic pose, to adopt the position of a certain practical-minded headmaster and teacher of physics. To everything a positive answer. The park-keeper’s bell. He repeats: ‘I think you should see the doctor. I want you to go to the doctor.’ He believes: there is a condition called schizophrenia. He believes: it was because people were ignorant of such things that they once believed in— He believes: this is Mary; this is a bench; this is a dog. The last thing he wants to believe is that he’s in fairy-land.

  17

  About the Lock-keeper

  AND by the Leem lived a lock-keeper. Who was my father. Who was a phlegmatic yet sentimental man. Who told me, when I was even younger than you, that there was no one walking the world who hadn’t once sucked … And that the stars … Who was wounded at the third battle of Ypres. And had a brother killed in the same battle. Who when asked about his memories of the War, would invariably reply that he remembered nothing. Yet who when he was not asked would sometimes recount bizarre anecdotes of those immemorial trenches and mud-scapes, as if speaking of things remote and fantastical in which his involvement was purely speculative. How, for example, the Flanders eels, countless numbers of which had for ever made their abode in those watery and low-lying regions, undeterred by the cataclysmic conflict that was devastating their haunts, found their way into flooded saps and even into shell craters, where there was no shortage of well-ripened food …

  Who trapped eels himself in his native Fens. Who showed me as a boy all the various ways of cooking eels-poached in vinegar and water; in a white sauce; in a green sauce; in pies; in a stew with onion and celery; jellied, with horseradish; chopped, skewered and roasted on an open fire – and so I became just as partial as he to their subtle and versatile flesh. And so did my brother. But my mother, Fenwoman though she was and far from squeamish, could not abide them. She would scream if she saw a not-quite-dead eel begin to slither on the kitchen table …

  Who when he returned from the Great War in 1918, not only wounded in the knee but profoundly dazed in the mind, was shunted for four years from this hospital to that. But was despatched in due course to Kessling Hall, until recently country mansion of the Atkinson family, but now converted as a convalescent home for war invalids. Who spent many weeks in the spring and summer of 1922, sitting on the tree-girt and secluded lawns of that curative establishment among several other bescarred, becrutched and bepatched-up victims, all of whom in that scene of apparent tranquillity (and four years after the guns had stopped) were desperately attempting to find their peacetime bearings.

  Who fell in love with one of the nurses. Who came home from the war, a wounded soldier, and married the nurse who nursed him back to health. A story-book romance. Who, delivered from the holocaust, could scarcely believe that this enchanted chapter of events was happening to him. Whose love was returned – with surprising readiness. Who married, in August 1922, this woman whom for several weeks his numbed brain had registered only as ‘nurse, brunette’ and who even after his return to lucidity – and notwithstanding their growing mutual affection – was reluctant to disclose her name. Who discovered only after a while that this white-aproned, war-volunteer, now regular nurse, who was familiar in more ways than one with Kessling Hall, was the daughter of a well-known – indeed notorious – and come-down-in-the-world brewer.

  Who through the mediation of this woman (her father’s residual influence with the then still extant Leem Drainage and Navigation Board) acquired the post of keeper of the New Atkinson Lock and Sluice. Who learnt, so it seemed to the boy who used to go with him to trap eels, to find both solace and mysterious, never quite suppressed vexation in this situation: fixed home, flowing river, flat land; beautiful wife. Who became the father of two sons (born 1923 and 1927), the first of whom turned out to be a semi-moron who loved his motor-cycle.

  And then this former nurse, this beautiful woman who was my mother, this unlooked-for gift from a dreamworld between war and familiar life, this brewer’s daughter who – setting aside her practical virtues – was blessed with beauty of mind as well as body, with imagination, with hidden depths, with the art (drawn in part from her husband but perhaps derived too from her great-aunts Dora and Louisa who were avid readers of far-fetched tales in verse and prose) of telling stories, died suddenly.

  My father, on the Leem tow-path, seen in profile against the Fenland sky. A series of rounded, time-worn outlines. Straight nose which goes blunt; chin which perhaps once had a point; neck tending towards the creased and convexly rippled (do you recognize your teacher? Do you see, Price, how we revert to type?). But the eyes (in full-face as he about-turns), shifting, harassed, on the look-out, belying that impression of bumpy stolidity. And that incessant pacing …

  For many years I wondered what made my father pace up and down like a tethered dog; why even at night he could be seen, a mere half-form, mooching by the lock-pen. For many years I wondered – until the body of a boy (your age, Price) whom I had played a part in murdering, floated against the sluice.

  18

  In Loco Parentis

  IT’S TRUE, children, your commendable headmaster, Lewis Scott, is a secret tippler. In the bottom drawer of that green filing cabinet to the right of his office window, behind a stack of virgin report sheets: one – no, two – bottles of J & B.

  He pours into pale blue institutional teacups. Pushes one across the desk to me.

  A diligent, a persevering man. And good with kids too … As each one of his own brood made its entrance into the world, that questioning glance, half curious, half condescending, amidst celebratory staff-room effusions, to his senior-junior colleague (and respected sparring partner): And why not you, Tom? Why have you never?

  (It’s Mary. You see—)

  With fatherhood, authority; with fatherhood, patronage. Even over his older-by-five-years Head of History. Ah yes, granted, Tom, twenty years in the classroom and you learn a bit about children – but when you’ve some of your own …

  With fatherhood, a growing tendency to be ubiquitously fatherly, even to his grown-up assistant staff.

  Pushes the cup of whisky towards me like a genial pater allowing his son (who’s in for a dressing-down) th
e adult privilege of stiff liquor. Eyes me archly, a trifle regretfully, as if indeed I am a troublesome child, one of his difficult pupils. Now this behaviour of yours – it can’t go on.

  And who knows? These preposterous lessons. The – regrettably early – signs of a mind in relapse. Second childhood …

  Children, beware the paternal instinct (yes, Price, I understand your distrust) whenever it appears in your officially approved and professionally trained mentors. In what direction is it working, whose welfare is it serving? This desire to protect and provide, this desire to point the way; this desire to hold sway amongst children, where life is always beginning, where the world is still to come …

  ‘So you see, Tom’ (with palms held candidly open), ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘Of course not. I understand fully. What you are saying is that even if certain – circumstances – had not arisen, you would still now be demanding my retirement. Not your decision. Policy.’

  He looks at me as if I’ve ungraciously refused a handsome offer.

  ‘Or put it slightly differently. These circumstances – which I won’t discuss, since it’s plain you don’t want them discussed – provide a very convenient opportunity for carrying out, unresisted, a long-harboured intention.’

  ‘Now that’s not true. And be careful what you say. I’ve already said there’s no question of a vendetta.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but, whatever the reasons, I’m not going to be bamboozled by – circumstances – into leaving quietly, picking up my pension, and not protesting against the relegation of my subject in the curriculum.’