The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  They were lucky as well: the insurance company covered the cost of repairs to the house, but the money didn’t solve all the problems. The house had evolved over many years and couldn’t be remade in one go: they couldn’t get the curtains without the sofa, and they couldn’t get the sofa until they knew the colour of the walls. Eventually, they had to decide it all at once. ‘It was all thrown at you, and your mind was spinning with it all,’ Gordon said.

  Other people felt a deeper unease about the influx of new possessions. I had met a retired nurse from Bransholme who said she had relished buying her furniture piece by piece because she knew she had earned it. If she didn’t have the money, she didn’t buy it. Being given the money to buy her kitchen all at once was an affront. The builders started work in East Ella Drive in October, and most of the work was done by December. The first meal Jacqui cooked in their new kitchen was Christmas dinner, which they ate on an improvised table, made from trestles and a sheet of MDF. Yet it didn’t feel like home. ‘I turned on the TV and sat here like I was in a hotel room,’ she said. ‘You’re a long time before you get everything back to where it was.’

  ~

  Jacqui had been feeling like ‘a caged animal’ in their upstairs rooms, and when she was invited to join the writing group, she relished the chance to get out and talk about the flood. To begin with, it had forty members, and even when the Lancaster University project ended after eighteen months, Jacqui rented a room where they could meet. Sandy Henderson also went to the first meeting and kept going. The writing group saved her life, she told me. She and Jacqui became friends and six years later, they were still in touch. But, gradually, the cathartic effects of writing things down began to fade. It had helped Sandy through the ordeal, but it wasn’t helping anymore; in fact, it was keeping the trauma alive. If it started raining heavily, she would grow anxious, fearful that the house would flood again, and she told Jacqui that she didn’t want to keep going. ‘It’s past, it’s gone, and I’ve finally got to love my house again.’

  Jacqui was not so determined to move on. When the diarists’ thoughts were published in a report, she was invited to speak at conferences across the country, and she also went to London to address the Cabinet Office. ‘If I can do a bit of good going and talking to people, I would rather die knowing I had tried,’ she said, modestly. Years later, she was still concerned with testifying to the effects of the flood. While her husband was talking to me, she went out of the room and came back with a box of papers and photographs, which we looked through together.

  I was fascinated by the writing group, and the complementary impulses of remembering and forgetting that it served – remembering, in Sandy’s case, aiding forgetting, which seemed to me the ultimate aim of ‘recovery’. But I also wanted to understand how the experiences that Jacqui and Sandy had recorded sat within the wider context of the city, and its estuary and river. I walked into Hull when I left Sandy Henderson’s house, following the banks of the River Hull as it wound through the marshes, past the pumping station that had failed on the day of the flood. Factories, warehouses and wrecking yards closed in around the river, accumulating like barnacle-encrusted mussels on a rope. The next day, I caught the train to North Ferriby, a town beside the Humber, eight miles west, and approached Hull from another direction, along the shores of the Humber.

  ~

  My grandmother lived in Ferriby, as it is usually known, for forty years, but that wasn’t the only reason I had chosen it as my starting point. Ferriby is the site of one of the oldest boatyards in the world, where boats capable of navigating the estuary and the North Sea were built. The first one was discovered in 1937 by a nineteen-year-old amateur archaeologist and palaeontologist called Edward Wright. He was searching for dinosaur bones on the foreshore at Ferriby, where I had played as a child, when he saw ‘three massive wooden planks projecting at a shallow angle’ from the intertidal mud flats. He took the timbers back to the family house, which stood behind my grandmother’s in Turner’s Lane. Her house was still there, but the Wrights’ wasn’t; the old brick wall that had marked its boundary now contained the houses of a new estate.

  Ferriby was smaller than I remembered: places that you knew as a child always are when you go back as an adult. It was quieter, as well. A girl on a horse rode past me when I got off the train and walked up Station Road. Yet there was concern about overcrowding, even here: Save Our Ferriby, said the yellow stickers plastered to lamp posts and windows. The locals were campaigning against a plan to build 600 homes on waterlogged land north of the village; they said it would force water downhill and overload the drainage systems of the village, which already could barely cope. I heard the same story in many places I had been, and I wasn’t surprised to hear it in Ferriby as well, for it had always seemed a characteristically English place, as robust and unselfpitying as my grandmother, its apparent insularity belied by the great waterway that flowed past its feet.

  It was early. I waited until the florists opposite the church had opened, so I could buy some flowers for my grandparents’ grave, and then walked down to the shore. The outline of the boat engraved on the bank of the estuary was larger than I expected: it was a flat-ended oval, braced by eleven cross pieces, long enough for eighteen oars and a mast. The original had been built from trees split into planks with wooden wedges, stitched together with yew branches and waterproofed with moss. It was sixteen metres long and weighed four tonnes empty. It would have been propelled by eighteen paddlers, capable of making six knots in short bursts.

  At first, Edward Wright thought it was a Viking boat, left by the people who had founded ‘the village by the ferry’ on the north shore of the Humber in c. 900 AD, but it proved to be much older: it has been dated to 2030–1780 BC, which means it was almost as old as the Humber Estuary itself. Until the end of the last Ice Age, the area had been covered by a lake; yet, as the glaciers retreated, the water that had been dammed inland cut a channel to the sea, and the estuary formed. Until 2500 BC, its banks were covered by forests of oak and alder, but, as the sea levels rose, the salt water poisoned them.

  The boats were an adaptation to the changing landscape of the Humber. Some people believed they had been left by immigrants from Egypt, where the only boats older than the ones in Ferriby had been built, but the theory has been dismissed, and I prefer to think of them as prototypes of the cargo ships, trawlers and ferries that generated Hull’s prosperity – and that of families like Edward Wright’s. His grandfather had been chairman of the Hull Dock Company, though Wright himself had worked for Reckitts, another great Hull institution. My grandfather and great-grandfather had worked for Reckitts as well, and it had paid for the information board beside the boats.

  The tide was out. A row of exposed posts that looked like the remnants of a bridge or jetty trailed away into the water, tracing a dotted line towards the wind turbines on the far shore and the towers of a factory or refinery beyond. Upstream, the estuary narrowed and disappeared out of sight. Downstream, the vertical pillars of the Humber Bridge, and the lines of the cables that supported its decks, framed the view towards the open sea.

  ~

  I followed the dead-straight cinder footpath that ran beside the Humber for the next six miles, only leaving the dark brown water when I reached a stretch that was being repaired. I had to duck through a hedge on to the railway line; the train that I had caught to Ferriby at half past seven rattled past at terrifying speed, whistle screaming. A digger backed, beeping, into view through a gap in the hedge, and I fell flat on my face to make sure I wasn’t seen. Beyond the workmen, I scrambled down the bank into a deep, overgrown ravine, and climbed up the other side, on a fallen metal fence as springy as a trampoline.

  The sun was coming out as I reached the Humber Bridge. Lorries rumbled over the decks and descended into Hessle, where a man had drowned, in July 2007, when he got trapped in a storm drain. Hessle was the site of the first sea defences on the Humber, but it might not be protected for much longer. Hull and G
rimsby will be saved, but Hessle may be relinquished, as part of the policy of ‘managed retreat’ in the face of the ever-rising seas.

  As I reached the outskirts of Hull, the path ran into the rush of oncoming traffic beside the A63. Car dealerships, business parks and supermarkets gave way to derelict plots and breakers’ yards, where the cars were stacked in shiny piles that looked like they might slide into the river. High reeds shaded the path and obscured the river, and two men in black shirts sat on the steps outside a warehouse, smoking. There were horses tethered on the towpath. A graffiti artist was tagging the walls of an old warehouse and, further on, the metal frame of a new warehouse rose from an empty site.

  At St Andrew’s Quay, I passed the memorial to the trawlermen who had lost their lives at sea and entered a long tract of derelict docks. My father began his career auditing businesses in St Andrew’s Quay, but there were none left anymore; the empty warehouses reminded me of photographs of the bombed-out cities of Europe at the end of the Second World War. A teenager in a hoodie emerged from a doorway carrying a piece of corrugated metal. He threw it into a trolley pushed by another boy, and they trundled off ahead of me, leading the way into Hull.

  As I approached The Deep, the museum which stands at the confluence of the River Hull and Humber Estuary, I thought about a man I had met earlier in the week, at a community centre in Bransholme. Jeff Dixon – who was no relation of Gordon and Jacqui – had been a sapper in the Royal Engineers, and had then worked on the railways and the buses. Until he retired at the age of sixty-five, he had never had a day off. Six years later, he watched as everything he had worked for was destroyed by the water pouring through the front door of his house. Yet he didn’t complain: ‘Everyone lost something they valued, that day,’ he said.

  The insurance company had covered all his costs, and he didn’t ask for a penny more than he was owed. He got his house back. His son, who has cerebral palsy, used to live in a room on the ground floor, but after the flood, he had moved into sheltered accommodation in Victoria Dock near The Deep.

  Mr Dixon was pleased with his son’s new home – it had beautiful views, and it was well maintained. They were getting the grounds done, he said, and making a nice job of it. The council official who had introduced us was happy that Mr Dixon seemed so pleased. I had never met his son, but the warmth of the exchange that I witnessed in a community centre far from the Humber made him seem very real to me. I imagined him sitting in his flat in Victoria Dock, looking out across the estuary towards the North Sea, in the direction from which the next storm to hit the city would come.

  5: The Colinda Spear

  LOST WORLDS, EAST: ATLANTIS & DOGGERLAND, 6200 BC

  As early as the tenth century, astute observers noted that Britain’s coastlines were fringed with trees that were only visible at low tide. They tended to regard the ‘drowned forests’ as evidence of Noah’s flood, relics of the antediluvian world destroyed in the Biblical story, and it was not until the twentieth century that their true significance was acknowledged. In 1913, a self-trained geologist called Clement Reid published a book called Submerged Forests, in which he argued that one of Noah’s woods ‘stretched far below the level of the mean tide. In fact, we followed it down to the level of the lowest spring tides. Nothing but a change of sea level will account for its present position.’ Observations on the east coast of England led him to conclude that the Thames and Humber estuaries were once ‘flanked by a wide alluvial flat which now lies from 40 to 60 feet [twelve to eighteen metres] below the modern marsh level’.

  In an attempt to verify his claim, Reid analysed a clump of ‘moorlog’ – the peaty substance that fishermen used to dredge up from the shallow bed of the North Sea, in an area known as Dogger Bank. As well as the compacted remains of shells, wood and lumps of peat, it contained the bones of a bestiary: bear, wolf, hyena, bison, mammoth, beaver, walrus, elk and deer. There was only one way to explain their presence at the bottom of the North Sea: ‘Noah’s Woods’ must have once stretched far beyond the current shore, with Dogger Bank forming ‘the northern edge of a great alluvial plain, occupying what is now the southern half of the North Sea, and stretching across to Holland and Denmark.’

  Confirmation of Reid’s theory came in 1931, when a trawler called the Colinda, which was fishing off the Norfolk coast, found a remarkable artefact embedded in another lump of moorlog. The crew of the Colinda would have thrown the block overboard, as they always did, but the master of the ship noticed that it made a metallic sound when it was struck with a shovel. ‘I thought it was steel,’ Skipper Pilgrim E. Lockwood said later. ‘I bent down and took it below.’

  He split the peaty lump open and ‘an object quite black’ fell out. It was a handworked antler, twenty-one centimetres long, with a set of barbs running along one side. It was a prehistoric harpoon, and it was subsequently dated to the Mesolithic age, between 4000 and 10000 BC. It had been lying in a freshwater deposit, meaning it hadn’t fallen overboard during a sea voyage, but had been dropped by a hunter crossing a landscape dotted with lakes and pools. It was ‘the first real evidence that the North Sea had been part of a great plain inhabited by the last hunter-gatherers in Europe’, write Vincent Gaffney, Simon Finch and David Smith, the trio of archaeologists who have made the most sustained attempts to map the area that has become known as Doggerland, in a book called Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland. It was a remarkable discovery – though, in a way, it was not a surprise. Long before the existence of Doggerland was established, people had speculated about lost worlds beneath the seas, which they conceived in terms of another great flood myth that has been retold countless times.

  ~

  In the original version of the story, which appears in Plato’s dialogue Critias, the continent of Atlantis was a ‘great power’, ruled by descendants of Poseidon, ‘a remarkable dynasty of kings’, which ‘arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic Ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia’. Ancient Athens, which represented Plato’s idea of the perfect state, defeated it in battle, but had no time to enjoy its triumph, for both victor and vanquished were overtaken by disaster: in ‘a single dreadful day and night, all [Athens’s] fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished’. Scholars often insist that we are not meant to take the accounts of Atlantis literally, but rather ‘we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power,’ writes the philosopher, Julia Annas, in Plato: A Very Short Introduction. ‘We have missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea bed.’

  The warning has often been ignored. Plato’s first readers were not interested in the exact location of Atlantis, and early modern writers such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon explored Platonic ideals of the good society, in Utopia and New Atlantis respectively, without becoming preoccupied by questions of geography. Yet, recently, we have renounced the challenging task of interpreting Plato’s layered enquiry into the nature of the good society in favour of millennial fantasies about drowned worlds. The number of stories about lost continents is ‘beyond count’, said the American science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp in 1954, in a survey of the genre, and it featured in several books I read as a child, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep, which is set in a miraculously preserved and inhabited undersea world. It tells the story of a group of underwater explorers who are attacked by a giant crustacean that snips the cable of their ‘bathysphere’, plunging it to the bottom of the sea. They are rescued by the surviving Atlanteans, who take them as curiosities to their submarine city.

  Atlantis also appears in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – though as a ruin, not a thriving city. In one memorable scene, the occupants of the submarine Nautilus climb through a sunken forest on the slopes of an erupting volcano on the bottom of the Atlantic, until they find themselves looking down on a ruined town, ‘its roofs open to the sky, its temp
les fallen, its arches dislocated, its columns lying on the ground’. Captain Nemo chalks a single word on to a rock of black basalt: ‘ATLANTIS’. Aronnax, the marine biologist who narrates Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, marvels at the thought that he is standing ‘on the very spot where the contemporaries of the first man had walked’.

  The treatment of the subject was not confined to books that advertise themselves as fiction. The champion of the idea of Atlantis ‘as veritable history’ was an American politician called Ignatius Donnelly. He was a congressman and senator for Minnesota, but he was also a land speculator, farmer and fantasist. He proposed three implausible theories: that Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays and embedded a cipher within them; that great events in the Earth’s history, such as the Ice Age, were brought on by ‘extraterrestrial catastrophism’; and that Atlantis was a fragment of a vast oceanic continent that used to lie beneath the Atlantic Ocean between Britain and America.

  Yet it was not only a real place – it also represented all the lost paradises from which humanity had been expelled, and all the longed-for realms of the afterlife: ‘the Garden of Eden; the Gardens of the Hesperides; the Elysian Fields . . . the Asgard of the traditions of the ancient nations . . . a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness,’ Donnelly wrote in a book called Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. He believed that a few lucky survivors of the submergence of Atlantis had escaped ‘in ships and on rafts’ to populate surrounding continents. As proof, he cited seemingly uncanny resemblances between European and American plants and animals, culture and language – common artefacts and habits of mind, which he believed the Atlanteans had carried with them as they fled, east and west, from the sinking land.