by Edward Platt
Wittfogel’s ideas have been dismissed as ‘grandiose’ and ‘overdrawn’, but the story of Yu the Great, who established China’s first political dynasty by containing the Yellow River, which floods so destructively it is known as ‘China’s Sorrow’, suggests the management of water was sometimes a path to political power.
Yu was the son of a man called Gun, who had tried and failed to contain the Yellow River by building dykes. The king lost patience with Gun and threw him into prison. Yu was asked to take over, and he tried a different approach: inspired by the lines on a turtle’s shell, he dredged the rivers and built a system of canals that diverted water into the fields. ‘Heaven commanded Yu to spread out the soil, and to cross the mountains and dredge the streams,’ runs the inscription on a tureen, dated to c. 900 BC.
Most versions of the story praise his dedication. He had been married for four days when he started work. The first time he went past his house, he heard his wife in labour. The second time, he heard his son crying. The third time, he saw a young man in the garden he didn’t recognize. Even when he realized it was his son, who had grown up in his absence, he didn’t stop. ‘Each time, Yu told himself that countless people were still being driven from their homes by floods and that he had no time to interrupt his work,’ writes John Withington. Emperor Shun was so impressed by his dedication that he appointed Yu to succeed him in place of his own son, and Yu went on to establish China’s first real dynasty, the Xia, which lasted for more than 400 years.
Yet even Yu the Great could not contain the Yellow River for long; according to some estimates, it has flooded 1,500 times in the last 3,000 years. In 1938, the nationalists deliberately breeched the levees along the Yellow River near Kaifeng to delay the invading Japanese troops; some reports claim 300,000 people drowned in a deluge that has been called the worst ever man-made natural disaster. At other times, the Yellow River’s floods and disruptive shifts in course have prompted dynastic changes and rebellions, for they are seen as proof that ‘the mandate of heaven’, by which rulers govern, has been withdrawn.
Christian mythology acknowledges the spiritual significance of floods, as well. The Royalist antiquarian William Dugdale, whose History of Imbanking and Drayning of Divers Fenns and Marshes mapped the topography of seventeenth-century England with a completeness I did not aspire to match, said that ‘works of Drayning are most antient and of divine institution’. He pointed out that drainage appears in Genesis before Noah, for the command to ‘let the waters be gathered together, and let the dry land appear’ was the third act of creation. His perception of God as a kind of universal drainage engineer might explain why He (or She) used water to reboot the design after the first model failed: ‘Again, after the Deluge, it was through the Divine goodness, that the waters were dried up from off the Earth, and the face of the ground was dry.’
People sensed the hand of God at work in the Somerset Levels, as well; they were going to church to pray for the floods to end, Julian Temperley said, though he believed they were petitioning the wrong authority; the only thing that God could be blamed for was ‘not giving the Environment Agency any brains.’
It wasn’t surprising that Julian Temperley was angry; his father – a ninety-eight-year-old professor of mathematics, who had given his name to a branch of algebra – lived in Thorney House, the Georgian manor that stood at the far end of the village, opposite the Wards’ house. Thorney House hadn’t flooded since 1924, and now it had flooded twice in little more than a year – once in December 2012, and again in January 2014. The water had started rising on New Year’s Day. It began as a trickle, but it soon became a torrent, and the water in Thorney House rose so quickly that Professor Temperley was evacuated before the end of the day.
~
It was dark by the river, beyond the light cast by the unflooded houses at the southern end of the village. I had to use the cold metal handrail on the bridge above the weir as a guide as I crossed the Parrett behind Thorney Mill. The water pouring through the weir was smooth and black; I could hardly see it, until it hit the surface of the pool, where it stirred up a head of yellow-flecked foam that drained into a fast-flowing channel. The Parrett, which got so low in the summer that Glen’s canoe would catch on the bottom, was nearly at the top of the raised bank dividing it from the gardens that backed on to the river. Hosepipes snaked through the flooded lawns and sank into the fast-flowing current. The Parrett hadn’t flooded Thorney – the water had come across Westmoor, sweeping through an orchard and picking up its cargo of windfalls – but it had come close, and it showed how precarious Thorney had become that the owners of the houses were draining water into a river that would send it back if it rose much higher.
The narrow, trampled path veered away from the river and, ahead of me, the land dipped towards a clump of buildings, lit like the superstructure of a container ship, moored in the flooded fields. I felt a momentary panic; it didn’t seem very sensible to be stumbling deeper into the Levels as it got dark, and I was relieved when I came round a curve in the river and saw Glen pulling his canoe on to the raised ground at the back of his house. His cheerful wave made my anxiety seem foolish.
I paused for a moment when I came up on the road beside the bridge, relieved to be back on solid ground again. To the north, the road was clear as far as I could see, though it must have slipped underwater before it went much further, for it was the road that ran through Muchelney and on to Langport – the one I had walked down earlier in the day. I turned and crossed the bridge into the village. The water reached the foot of the bridge and lapped at the fringes of the sodden, apple-thickened mat of compost it had laid down in the Wards’ drive. The house was a low, whitewashed building with metal windows; its simple lines seemed out of place among the Georgian farmhouses and post-war red-brick semis that I had seen elsewhere, and yet it was an authentic product of the Somerset Levels, for it used to be a withy factory, where the reeds that grow in such profusion in the waterlogged fields were woven into baskets.
Most of the houses in the village were empty, but the Wards hadn’t left. At first, they didn’t think their house would flood; the year before, the water had reached the middle of the street, and they didn’t think it would come any higher. ‘But it just kept coming and coming and coming,’ Glen said. The trail of apples in the drive suggested the path it had taken. Glen had boarded up the front door, but the water seeped upwards through the floor. Even then, they hadn’t left: they had moved into the granny flat that stood on the raised bank between the river and the garden. ‘We were luckier than some,’ Glen said, with what seemed like characteristic resilience. Some people had only just got back into their houses, after being flooded the year before, when they had been forced out again. The fact that the Wards could stay and tend the pump meant they had been able to keep the water down – if they hadn’t, it would have been much worse. Since he couldn’t lift the water over the bank into the river, he had drained it into the lawn, where it lay, ankle-deep, in another pool filled with rotting apples.
Six days after the water had first come up, Glen thought it was finally going down; it was several inches below the mark on the back wall, which showed the highest point it had reached, though it got deeper quickly in the road, where it ran past the front wall of the house. I edged into it, until I was standing on tiptoes, and peered inside. I couldn’t see the water until I tilted my head. It was a still, grey layer, glossing the floor like wet paint. I had been travelling round the country for a year, visiting places that had flooded, but I usually arrived after the water had gone down – sometimes, years after, sometimes when the clearing up was going on. I had met many people who had been affected and heard their stories of the floods. But I had never been inside a flooded house.
‘Can we have a look inside?’ I said.
Glen had been so welcoming that I assumed he wouldn’t mind, but he said he had to check with his wife. As he crossed the sodden, apple-strewn drive to the lighted room on the bank, I waited in the sh
adows by the back door, conscious of the expanse of water pressing in from three sides. I expected Glen to return with a set of keys, but he shook his head as he approached: ‘I’m sorry; it’s private,’ he said, as if there was something shameful and intimate about being flooded.
I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, for I knew that flooding affected people in profound and unpredictable ways. Being forced to watch, helplessly, as polluted water pours through your doors or windows, or seeps upwards through your floors, destroying your possessions and turning your home into a sodden, stinking cave: it didn’t take much imagination to understand how upsetting that must be. Yet flooding seemed to induce a degree of anguish that could not be explained by a rational tallying of its effects: as one civil servant said to me – off the record, as all those conversations were, for no one would speak officially, for fear of making things worse – it was ‘disproportionately upsetting’.
People have always told stories of great floods that sweep the earth and drown its people, and stories of lost lands beneath the seas, and the primal fear provokes primal reactions. People are drawn to water for many different reasons – spiritual and emotional, as well as practical. We cherish the sea view and the sound of running water.
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water
Philip Larkin wrote, in a poem called ‘Water’, which attempts to define a liturgy for the spiritually uncommitted. Baths and fountains are an enduring emblem of civic good. Yet flooding turns a substance that we depend upon and revere into something malign and unfamiliar. Floodwater isn’t soothing or beguiling, like rivers or streams, nor is it awe-inspiring, like the sea. It is dirty, cold and destructive, and when it erupts from the channels in which we seek to contain it and invades people’s homes, it leaves stains that cannot easily be erased.
~
I am lucky; I have never been flooded, though I have lived in flood-prone places. The Northumberland town of Morpeth, where I lived as a child, had flooded twice in the five years before I visited the flooded Levels – once, the water reached the bottom of the street where we used to live. The Wirral Peninsula and the Hampshire town of Winchester – two other places where I grew up – would also flood in the course of the winter of 2013–14, and the seas would encroach on the shores of Essex, where I was born.
For the last fifteen years, I have lived on a hill in North London, though even that is not as safe as it might appear, for floods are not only caused by torrential downpours or once-in-a-decade storms; it only takes a blocked pipe or an overloaded sewer to fill a street or flood a house. Sometimes, our ageing Victorian infrastructure gives way, and buried streams re-emerge with sudden force.
Such events will become more common, as climate change takes effect. As a child, growing up in the north of England in the seventies, I lived through cold wet winters and mild damp summers. Long hot summers, like the one of 1976, were memorable because they were so rare. My enduring memories are of rain-streaked windows and the smell of the morning air after a night of rain. The rubbery scrape of a windscreen wiper evokes the atmosphere of childhood holidays in Scotland or the Lakes.
The qualities that the British value most in themselves – resilience, a tendency to self-mockery, an ability to find consolation in defeat – derive from seeing the world through a haze of drizzle. The weather was moderate, like the British themselves; it rarely ‘got out of hand’ or acted excessively; it pre-empted extremes in us. Yet the floods and storms that marked the beginning of the twenty-first century seemed of a different order altogether, and it is not just nostalgia that makes me say so. ‘For anyone under the age of 30 – more than half the world’s population – the experience of a stable climate is entirely unknown,’ wrote the author Brian Stone in the London Review of Books in 2018. ‘That is to say, not a single month in their lifetime has fallen within the limited range of temperature, precipitation or storm activity that governed the planet for the previous 10,000 years.’ According to Met Office figures, nine of the ten warmest years on record in the UK have occurred since 2002 – and, since a warmer climate holds more water, they have also brought more floods.
The same pattern holds elsewhere: globally, the last twenty-two years have seen the twenty warmest years on record, with the same effects that we have seen in Britain. Low-lying countries like Bangladesh and island nations like the Seychelles are threatened by the rising seas, and cities like Miami and New York are increasingly exposed to devastating storms.
I couldn’t go everywhere that had been affected. Work and family kept me in London, and when I could get away, it wasn’t for long. I didn’t resent the constraints; Britain is the place that I know best, and the place that I have always felt most compelled to explore. Besides, its intricate coastline, its winding rivers and its variable Atlantic weather have laid down a long history of floods and flooding, preserved in art, literature and folklore. But, above all, it was the memories of the people who had been flooded that I wanted to record. I hoped that they would want to tell their stories – though not, perhaps, when they were struggling to cope with water coming through the door. I didn’t want to be intrusive. But I did want to understand the nature of an experience that more of us will be forced to endure.
I was fascinated by the flood maps the Environment Agency produced that showed how water spread through streets and fields, and I wanted to make a version of my own. My map would be shamelessly subjective and incomplete, deeply etched in some places and blank in others, less preoccupied with the point the water reached or the rate at which it went down than with the emotional and psychological marks it left behind.
I didn’t plan where I was going in advance; I knew that people would pass me on to other people they thought I should meet, and tell me about other places I ought to go, and I wanted to let my journey develop a momentum of its own. It was only afterwards that I saw a pattern had emerged. By the time I arrived in Thorney at the height of the winter storms, which had begun when a ‘great tide’ travelled down the east coast on the night of 5 December 2013, driving the sea higher than it had been since the Great Tide of 31 January 1953, when 300 people in the east of Britain and 3,000 people in Holland had drowned, I had completed a clockwise circuit of the country that took me from the flood-prone towns of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, through Wales and along the west coast to the Lake District and the North, and back to London along Doggerland’s fraying shores.
~
I was pleased when Glen offered me a lift back to my car in the canoe; perhaps I hadn’t offended him as much as I had thought. Or perhaps he wanted to get rid of me before I fell in the river. In any case, I was glad to see what the village looked like from the perspective of the water.
It didn’t take long. We passed the flooded house on the bend and the dark channel of water that used to be the drove leading on to Westmoor, and then the lighted windows of the Anchorage came into view. The water got shallower quickly – the stained surface of the tarmac rushed towards me seconds before the canoe scraped against it and grounded in the soft bed of compost. I got out unsteadily, and Glen turned the canoe round and pushed off, standing up in the back, feeling for the surface of the road he used to walk on every day. ‘See you when we get over this,’ he called out, as his upright figure faded into the dusk. ‘If we ever do.’
He was right to be cautious; some of the people I had met in the course of the year said the process of ‘recovery’ was worse than being flooded, though I doubted it would trouble Glen much. Apart from his understandable reluctance to let me look inside the house, he seemed remarkably unperturbed by living in a flooded village and going home by canoe. At the risk of overtaxing his hospitality again, I planned to take him up on the offer to go back to Thorney; though, by the time I got back there, seven months later, I would have learnt something that made me think about the flood – and the complaints of his neighbours about its cause – in a different way.
&nbs
p; 2: A Stone Ark
GILGAMESH IN GLOUCESTERSHIRE: TEWKESBURY, 2007 & 2012
Tewkesbury was the first place I went to, for the small Gloucestershire town was the capital of our newly flood-prone country until the villages of the Somerset Levels displaced it.
It gained the title during the floods of the summer of 2007, when torrential rain swept through the North and the Midlands. Tewkesbury was cut off for days; thousands of houses and businesses flooded and three people drowned, including a father and his son who were overcome by fumes when they were trying to pump out the basement of a rugby club.
Yet it wasn’t the individual tragedies or the statistics that earned Tewkesbury global fame of a kind it never wanted – it was an aerial photograph of the town marooned in the dark brown lake that had risen up around it. The water enclosed the close-packed streets of the town on all sides. It stretched beyond the edge of the frame, its surface broken by telegraph poles and curving lines of trees that traced the route of submerged roads. Tewkesbury Abbey was in the bottom corner of the frame: the water had risen through its lush green grounds, which was the only open space visible in the town, and was lapping at the base of its tower, which stood like an old stone lighthouse in the flood.
The photograph was transmitted around the world: it became as famous as the picture of the dome of St Paul’s rising through the smoke of the Blitz, the vicar of Tewkesbury Abbey told me when I went to the town for the first time, in November 2012. Britain, which was used to watching climatic disasters unfold on the other side of the world, had found itself the object of attention. When the water went down, the first people to enter Tewkesbury were members of a film crew from Al Jazeera.