by Edward Platt
I had met Frank earlier in the year, at the house where he lived with an old friend called Jane, who had also survived the flood. He had been at school with Jane’s late husband, to whom she had been married for fifty-seven years. He had died two years before: ‘He fell, or I assumed he fell, and by the time I got out of bed, he was gone,’ she said. ‘The doctor said there was nothing they could have done – they turned the machinery off at three minutes to ten, and he was dead by ten.’ They sat in matching leather armchairs facing a widescreen TV. There were doggie snacks, a comedy beer mug (It’s my bum, I’ll fart if I want to) and a box set of John Wayne DVDs. They were both in their late seventies and talking made them short of breath.
They had lived in Canvey all their lives. The street where Frank now lived had been open fields when he was a boy – he used to help the farmers collect the hay to make haystacks, before destroying them by tunnelling into them, and, when he wasn’t doing that, he was playing in a bombed-out house on the seafront. The memories of childhood games made him laugh so much he cried, though they also prompted the mournful refrain that nothing was quite the same. Canvey had grown so much that they didn’t know anyone anymore. At one time, they could walk into the Haystack pub and say hello to everybody – now, they would be lucky to recognize anyone at all. Canvey was now so densely occupied that you can’t see greenery when you drive on to the island, Jane said. That was partly true: I had passed open fields flanking the Avenue of Remembrance, the wide straight that led into Canvey from the mainland, but I had soon found myself amongst a maze of streets. From the vantage-point of Hadleigh Castle, which stands on a low rise on the Essex shore, Canvey Island looks like a housing estate moored midstream, but once I was on it, I had no sense of its precarious location: most of the time, I couldn’t see the estuary or the far shore, for they were hidden by the sea walls that rise above the houses. It felt like I was wandering through the streets of a low-rise prairie town, exposed to the overarching sky, rather than a seaside resort, threatened by the rising tide.
Frank’s grandfather, who had driven the first bus across Canvey, used to tell Frank there was no need to fear flooding, for only the very highest tides could breach the walls, and, by the time they did, the water would be going down. He was wrong. Yet Frank had been lucky – his grandmother’s house in Rainbow Road had a first floor. Many houses didn’t; some people broke into the roof space, but others were trapped in ground-floor rooms, which filled to the ceiling. Some people climbed on to the roof; some stayed there all night, others slipped into the water and drowned. Even the first-floor rooms of Frank’s grandmother’s house flooded, but they climbed on to a wardrobe, and watched the water rise towards them. Frank’s ‘normal clothes’, which he had come home in, were wet, because he had left them on a chair: the only dry thing was his army uniform, so he put that on.
Jane had been woken by the noise of barking dogs. She called her father, who told her she had left the tap running. ‘I said, “Dad, there’s a fish in the living room,” and he said, “Don’t be so bloody stupid, woman.”’ She was forced to shelter on the roof. ‘I cried all night,’ she said, adding that it was freezing, and she was on her own, as if her anxiety needed any explanation. Some of her neighbours slipped off and drowned.
Her husband-to-be, Frank’s schoolfriend, was also on military service. He got back before his mother knew there had been a flood. The water was six feet (1.8 metres) deep in Hainault Road, where they lived, so he went in by boat, and found the occupants of the house asleep upstairs. In Rainbow Road, Frank sat on the wardrobe with his grandmother and his aunt and her baby for four or five hours until the police arrived. They put the women and the baby in the boat, but Frank walked up to the main road in his army uniform and was requisitioned by the police, who told him to tell his unit that they were keeping him. There were still people trapped in houses in Sunken Marsh. No one knew which ones were occupied, and eyewitnesses remembered the shouts of the rescuers as they rowed down the flooded streets, where gas lamps glowed beneath the water.
~
Sunken Marsh has changed its name: it is now called Newlands, and, like most of Canvey, it has been covered by a brick mesh of post-war houses. I wandered through it, trying to identify the location of a photograph of a rescue boat drifting down a flooded street, but it had changed so much, it was hard to be sure. There was a floodgate at the entrance to Smallgains Marina, where the water had broken through. The tide had encrusted the sides of the creek with deposits, natural and man-made: tractors, jetties, wooden boats on stands, and broken-hulled barges. Canvas dinghies full of old tyres settled their backsides in pillowy beds of green-brown mud. The harbour-master’s office was a shipping container – an emblem of one of the great trade routes in the world. Further up, the water faded to a trickle that exposed the fat ridges of sea-sculpted mud, but it was easy to imagine a surging tide filling the channel and sweeping away the scaffolding that braced its sides.
I didn’t have to go far to reach Canvey’s undefended shores. The waves were breaking noisily on a sloping pebbled wall, and the railings around Concord Beach paddling pool were almost submerged. Families in swimming gear were camping on the benches on the path and on the small scrap of beach. The Thames was a rich, dark green, laced with white horses. A tanker moved slowly through the mouth of the estuary. Beyond the Island Yacht Club, I found a path lined with shells that crackled underfoot, which led out on to a marshy promontory, sprinkled with samphire and sea lavender, where two men were collecting winkles. A line of rotting posts marked the remnants of a sea wall built in 1623.
Essex is England’s driest county, but no point of it is further than thirty-four miles from tidal water, and it is defended by 300 miles of man-made defences that have been built up over the last 800 years, says The Great Tide, Hilda Grieve’s account of the events of the night of 31 January 1953 in Essex. ‘The walls run in almost unbroken sequence, from the muddy saltings of Judas Gap, at the head of the Stour estuary, right round to the wharves, warehouses and docks of the Port of London,’ she writes. ‘They front the open sea boldly, and wind interminably round the creeks, only interrupted, here and there, by a short stretch of clay cliff, a quay, “hard”, wharf or seaside promenade, or, on Thames-side, a plateau of refuse “tipped” on the marshland.’
Yet large stretches of the defences were destroyed on the night of 31 January 1953. On Mersea Island, the local ‘wall walkers’, who monitored their stretch of the hundreds of miles of sand dunes, groynes, sea walls, and clay and shingle banks that fortify the coast of Essex, went out at dawn on 1 February 1953, and found a scene of devastation: ‘At approach points, what looked like a vast calm lake hid roads and deep marshland drainage ditches,’ yet gates and fences were ‘submerged obstacles and traps,’ and, in places, the sea wall had collapsed or been washed away, ‘leaving nothing but salting levels.’ The same was true elsewhere, for defences had been damaged along three quarters of the coastline: ‘the bank between Kings Lynn and Hunstanton, with its formerly neat line of beach huts and bungalows, had been reduced to a shambles of driftwood,’ writes Michael Pollard in North Sea Surge. ‘The north Norfolk villages of Salthouse and Cley . . . had become waterside settlements . . . Foulness and Canvey had become half-submerged offshore islands.’
It would take many months, and in some places years, to repair the damage, though the sea subsided as soon as the storm passed through. The MP and author Tom Driberg, who used to own a house in Bradwell-on-Sea, on the Dengie Peninsula, which he called ‘the most beautiful house in Essex, and therefore the most beautiful house in England, and therefore the most beautiful house in the world,’ had gone wall walking on Sunday, 15 February 1953, two weeks after the Great Tide, and found everything peaceful: ‘All quiet, water gently lapping the base of the wall,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Home to bed 3.30 am.’
~
I had been planning to go back to Norfolk after the great tide of 5 December 2013 passed through, but, as usual, Norfolk found a way t
o frustrate my plans. My car had broken down when I had driven up to the coast in the summer to visit the Buxtons at Horsey, and, this time, it was me that packed up. I got a bug and went to bed. It didn’t matter; I followed the coverage on the radio and online, and I was lying in bed when I heard that Bryony Nierop-Reading’s house, in Happisburgh, Norfolk, had been swept into the sea.
Bryony was another great survivalist of the east coast, like Peter Boggis – though, unlike him, she had no plans to save her home, beyond the impractical-seeming idea of seeding the cliff-face with weeds and grasses, in an attempt to bind it together.
When I had gone to see her in the summer of 2013, she had measured out how far the cliff in front of her house had receded since she bought it in 2008, by laying out the posts of the fence she had been taking down as the ground beneath it gave way. Laid end-to-end in the grass, they were twenty-eight feet (eight and a half metres) long – more than the remaining distance from house to cliff. She had lost more than half her garden in the last five years, though the rate of erosion wasn’t steady, and she hoped that the house would last several more years. She had got so used to living near the sea that she couldn’t imagine moving, though she found the wind intimidating, especially at night, when it infiltrated the frail, weather-beaten walls of her bungalow and made it wheeze like an accordion. The furniture and the books and tools that filled every shelf and surface in the bungalow and in the workshops and greenhouses and spilled out into the garden above the beach did not seem enough to anchor it against the weather.
She said it was absurd that we had resisted invasion over the years, and then let the sea eat away the land, bit by bit. Yet the forces at work are inexorable, as Happisburgh makes plain; the Thames used to run through it when it was a tributary of the Rhine, some 800,000 years ago, and, when the English Channel was formed, 450,000 years ago, Happisburgh lay fifteen miles inland, on the grassy banks of an estuary where the River Thames and the Bytham River met. The pine forests in the valley were home to rhinos, hippos, bison and their predators – sabre-toothed cats, lions and hyenas – and the eroding cliffs that threatened Bryony’s home periodically reveal moments of great significance in human history.
In May 2013, six months before the storm, the oldest set of hominid footprints ever found outside Africa were discovered in a layer of sediment beneath the cliffs. There were fifty in all – twelve of them more or less complete. They had been made by a group of five individuals, both children and adults, of the species homo antecessor, who were between two feet eleven inches (seventy-eight centimetres) and five feet seven inches (170 centimetres) tall. They were walking south along the mudflats of the estuary, hunting for shellfish, or going to or from an island that provided refuge from the animals in the woods and plains onshore. Archaeologists mapped and photographed the footprints before they were washed away, and their existence was not announced until the winter storms had passed through, scouring away another scallop-shaped segment of cliff and leaving Bryony Nierop-Reading’s house hanging precariously above the beach where they were found.
~
I got better, so I went to Boston, the Lincolnshire town that had flooded on the night of 5 December 2013, thanks to the effects of the surge. The storm had reached the Lincolnshire coast soon after it passed Hull. In the centre of town, the water reached the top of the wall of the tidal inlet, called the Haven, paused long enough to reassure everyone it wasn’t going any further, and then heaved forwards, pouring through the graveyard of St Botolph’s and spilling through the streets beyond.
I caught sight of the ‘Stump’ – as St Botolph’s is affectionately known, thanks to the lantern tower that rises high above the flat landscape of the Fens – as the train approached Boston, and I didn’t lose sight of it for the rest of the day. Daniel Defoe said that sailors used to steer by it; he called it ‘the largest and highest’ church tower in England, and said it was ‘strange’ that it stood in a country that ‘has no bottom’.
It was low tide, and the water was seven or eight metres below the top of the bank that enclosed the Haven, which connects the once great port of Boston to the sea. The river was no more than a narrow grey stream at the bottom of a slick, muddy channel, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the graveyard waist-deep in churning, ice-cold water, for the saturated stones still exuded a steely dampness. Everywhere was damp: pavements, window ledges, even the trees. There were heaps of wet leaves and piles of sooty earth among the gravestones commemorating the pilgrim fathers who had founded another city called Boston on the other side of the Atlantic. When I put my notebook on the wall, it got wet. The dark tidemark on the wall of the Stump was higher than the engraved marks that recorded the levels of previous floods that had hit the town. They had been getting higher over time: the floods of 1978, 1953, 1810 and 1781 were all neatly ranked in ascending order, the most recent at the top.
The cobbles of the surrounding streets and the market square were wet as well, slick and black, encrusted with a residue like flakes of salt, and the air smelt briny, as if I was standing on the muddy foreshore of a secluded creek.
Police officers had begun to arrive in anticipation of a royal visit. I stood beneath a dripping tree on the edge of the graveyard and watched Princess Anne and her entourage pick their way through it. They did what I had done: looked over the wall at the Haven, inspected the flood marks on the tower, ascending so neatly over the years, and looked inside the sealed doors of St Botolph’s. Not surprisingly, the church was closed, though a man who called himself a ‘gopher’ let me look inside. Cardboard walkways had been laid down across the floor, and pumps and dehumidifiers were at work, heating the air so that it rose upwards and dissipated through the inverted funnel of the tower.
~
I had lunch in a Mexican restaurant run by a Portuguese woman, in a narrow street outside the gates of the churchyard. The woman had lived in Wales and Norwich before she had moved to Boston in 2001 – for, instead of exporting people, the town now imported them. As I walked through its streets, I overheard conversations in so many languages that I didn’t recognize, let alone understand, that I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been told that I had fallen asleep on the train and woken up on the other side of the North Sea. Yet Boston’s immigrants do not only come from the countries of Eastern Europe to which it used to be connected through the trading alliance of the Hanseatic League, for the Haven is a saltwater road that runs into all the oceans of the world.
The owner of the restaurant was a trained chef, but she had worked for a company that made car cables before she decided to go into business on her own. She had been hoping to open the restaurant on Saturday, 7 December 2013, and she was doing the final preparations on the Thursday before, when the police told her to go home. That night, the Haven burst its banks and began to pour across the narrow, cobbled alleyway towards the front door of her restaurant. She was lucky: she was at the higher end of the street. The water had reached the doorstep, but didn’t come in.
The neighbouring buildings had not escaped. The newspaper office on the corner had flooded, and so had most of the shops on the other side of the street, which backed on to the Haven. The chalk mark on the wall of Nevermind was just below the CD racks. It was just as well, the owner said, as he leant on the counter at the back of the dark, narrow shop, which stood in the middle of a jumble of Victorian and Georgian buildings. ‘I wouldn’t be here if that lot had got wet.’
The record shop had been knee-deep in water on Saturday morning, but the owner was determined to remain open. The water had come in at seven thirty in the morning and had gone down by eleven. He had lost a lot of stock in the basement, but he had worked hard to stay open. Nevermind sold more than records: there were racks of jewellery hanging from the walls, and the shelves were filled with T-shirts, hoodies, boots and dolls from horror films and video games. The pervasive dampness suited the clutter of gothic props and toys. ‘When it happens to you, it feels personal,’ the owner said. ‘But I hate feeling so
rry for myself.’ He’d grown up with a severely disabled brother, and he had always been told to get on with things: ‘If I got ill, I was told to run it off – play football, have a hot toddy, go to bed and sweat it out.’ Besides, he had other things to worry about: his daughter was in hospital with a recurring condition. ‘If this is the worst thing that happens to me this year, I’ll be okay.’
~
It wasn’t only businesses that had flooded. The surge had travelled along the Haven, hit the barrier upstream and rebounded, in a widening current that spread out through the streets of Boston. Once the water was high enough to overtop the tree-lined path on the westward bank of the Haven, there was nothing to stop it. It poured down the slope and crashed through the doors and windows of the houses below. One woman had been in her kitchen when she saw the cooker rise from the floor and sway in the air, before swinging towards her with a kind of leisurely violence that seemed all the more threatening for being unexplained: she thought it had moved of its own accord, until she saw the current that was carrying it, and felt the icy water around her feet. Most of the houses were still empty, their gardens strewn with rubbish. Discarded sandbags littered the slope of the Haven. Three old-school red phone boxes, without their doors, were arranged in a back garden further down the lane. Two lads were rolling a spliff in an alley, and a pink-legged girl in a short skirt sat on her doorstep, smoking a cigarette.
‘It happens,’ said a man helping one of his tenants move out of a flooded house on the other side of the Haven.
‘Not very often,’ I replied.
He shrugged. ‘About once every thirty years.’
The devastation wasn’t confined to the first row of houses. The water had poured through their windows and through the gaps between the terraces, spreading out into the streets beyond. Damp furniture and rotting carpets were piled on the pavements in Irby Street. Many of the cars had Czech number plates. One woman had been in Prague when the water flowed through her terraced house, leaving an ankle-deep tidemark on the walls. She didn’t seem particularly surprised. The houses in Irby Street are officially under water for several hours a day, for they lie below the level of the high tide in the Haven, and perhaps the flood seemed less like a disruption of life in Boston than a confirmation of the mingled elements that sustain it.