The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  Only the tops of trees and houses could be seen, as if the towns had been built at the bottom of the sea, and ‘people had plaide the husbandmen under the Waters.’ Ricks were borne away, one bearing a ‘company of Hogs and Pigs’, and rabbits, scoured from their burrows by the water, climbed on the back of sheep, ‘as they swom up and down and at last were drowned with them.’

  Another great storm struck the coast on 26 November 1703. The parish of West Huntspill, where I reached the estuary, ‘receiv’d great Damage by the late inundation of the Salt Water,’ wrote Daniel Defoe in The Storm, his account of the night, which collected testimony from around the country. Many people took shelter in the church in the middle of the village, drawn for practical as well as spiritual reasons – even now, it was the largest building for miles around, and it was pushed out furthest into the flat land that led towards the estuary. It was locked, and I couldn’t get inside.

  A brisk wind was stirring the trees, provoking expressions of surprise or consternation from the crows hidden in their branches, and tugging at the flag of St George that hung from the tower. The shape of a newly turned mound of earth on a grave was repeated on a larger scale by the sea wall beyond the churchyard. There have been defences along the Bristol Channel since the twelfth century, but, on the night of the storm in 1703, they were overwhelmed by water ‘eight foot higher than ever was known in the Memory of Man’, Defoe said. It broke the windows of the church, ‘threw down several Houses,’ and forced many people from their homes. An eighty-year-old woman drowned.

  I left the church and walked to the point, half a mile west, where the River Huntspill joins the Parrett. The Huntspill was the final major engineering project undertaken in the Levels, though its purpose was not only to remove water, but to store it as well. It was dug in the Second World War, with gates at either end that turned it into a reservoir a mile long and ensured that the armaments factory at Puriton was guaranteed the supply it needed. No attempt had been made to disguise its artificial origins; it was as straight as the road that ran beside it, and it fitted neatly into the regular lines drawn by drainage ditches. Like most of the rivers in the Levels, it has no natural fall or slope to carry it to the sea. It drops six inches (fifteen centimetres) in three miles. Upstream from the sluice, the water was so still that I could see trees and bushes reflected in the surface, but it gained speed as it funnelled towards the sluice, and, on the other side, it cascaded dizzyingly down a muddy ravine that wound through grassy banks towards the widening estuary of the Parrett.

  The tide was out: the mudflats were sown with clumps of reddish marsh grass and studded with boulders carpeted with moss or seaweed. A TV, filled with straw, sat on a concrete wall. Softened shards of driftwood, sea-bleached cans and bottles and shattered pots showed how high the tide could reach – though, for the time being, the water was a narrow glossy thread in the centre of the wide, flat channel; there was no shortage of space for the Parrett to drain into. The sound of sea birds merged with the sound of traffic on the A38. The ground was very soft, but I followed a concrete causeway, which climbed higher as the estuary grew wider, curving into the mist beyond Burnham on Sea. My ears tingled in the cold.

  On the Steart Peninsula, on the other side of the estuary, where the Environment Agency was establishing a nature reserve, green-tufted sand-dunes rose from a thin line of golden beaches. The locals sitting at the bar in the King Alfred Inn in Burrowbridge were complaining about it when I went in at lunchtime. The idea that the Environment Agency should allocate £31 million for a nature reserve on the coast, when it couldn’t find £5 million to stop the Levels flooding, was proof that it cared more about birds than people, one man said. I didn’t see the contradiction: turning uninhabited parts of the coast into salt marsh recreated habitats lost to rising seas in the Bristol Channel and other places, but it also provided a buffer zone where the winter storms could waste their force. It was part of a plan called ‘making space for water’, and I thought its logic should have been apparent to the inhabitants of Burrowbridge, where the tide flows inland twice a day to meet the laggardly flow of the brimming river that was barely passing beneath the arches of the bridge beside the pub.

  ~

  The crisis had brought other visitors to the town, besides me: there was a BBC van parked in a farmyard, upstream from the pub, and people were strolling along the banks with cameras round their necks. The emergency services were in evidence as well: there were fire engines parked on both sides of the river, and a helicopter passed overhead as I came out of the pub. The red phone box on the far bank was lined with shelves of books. Sacks of building rubble bound with black plastic sheets, and sandbags stamped with the Environment Agency’s number, reinforced the banks beneath it. ‘Stop the Flooding – Dredge the Rivers!’ said the banner slung across the bridge. Downstream, two thick yellow arcs of water cascaded on to the dark brown surface of the Parrett: the pumps were lifting water from the flooded fields to the west and sending it into a river that was already full to overflowing.

  ~

  Michael Horsington had farmed the land two miles downstream from Burrowbridge since 1975, and it had only flooded once. He wasn’t local, he said, with a fine regard for county boundaries, as we sat round the table in the kitchen of Moorland Farm. He grew up near Cerne Abbas, in Dorset, thirty-five miles south of Burrowbridge, but his father sold the family land and gave him a chance to start elsewhere. He bought 150 acres, but, over the years, he had added to it. His daughter, Rebecca, who was sitting at the table with us, had been born six months after they arrived, and, three years later, the land flooded for the first time. ‘It breached the sea wall in Burnham and overtopped,’ Michael said. ‘I went out to go milking and I thought it had been snowing – it was like a lake, out there. But it came and went in about a day; it didn’t hang about.’

  Their neighbour’s house often flooded, but the Horsingtons usually escaped, thanks to the contours of the land, though the name of their road – Lake Wall – was a reminder that they were far from invulnerable. The farmhouse stood within one hundred metres of the Parrett, where the river made a sharp dogleg past the village of Moorland, or Northmoor Green, which stands on the other bank. The family had divided the house in two, with Michael Horsington and his wife living on the far side, while Rebecca and her husband, Dan, lived in the side that faced the lane.

  The TV was on in Dan and Rebecca’s sitting room when I arrived, for they were expecting an announcement from the Environment Agency about its plans for the Levels. As we waited for the press conference to start, we stood in the kitchen next door, looking out across the fields that had been under water until two weeks ago. Beany-hatted Dan was drinking tea and making dinner. They were friendly, hospitable and argumentative, prone to talking over one another. ‘What’s happened to us is irritating, but it isn’t devastating,’ Rebecca said. She and her father had been standing on the bank of the Parrett near the house in January when it came over ‘like a weir’, and there were still patches of standing water in the field. Other people had been much more badly affected: their neighbour, James Winslade, who farmed on the other bank of the Parrett, had been flooded two years in a row, and most of his farm – 790 of 840 acres – lay beneath the lake that I had seen from the top of Burrow Mump.

  Dan was a more recent arrival than his in-laws: he had moved there four years ago, when he and Rebecca got married, but he had read the hand-printed guide to the Levels that I had picked up in a local shop, and he was keen to talk about its topography and history. The whole area had been under water, all year round, until the abbots began to drain it, he said. It was a man-made system, and it had to be maintained. The tide carried silt upriver on the inflow, but didn’t drain with sufficient force to take it out again, and it was getting to the point where it couldn’t take a single day’s rain.

  ‘We’re not saying that dredging would fix it altogether,’ said Rebecca, who was part of the local Flood Action Group, which was leading the campaign for dred
ging. ‘We will still flood from time to time – we know that. But it wouldn’t come up so high and it wouldn’t stay so long. It wouldn’t come into people’s homes.’ The argument had been heard in Downing Street; earlier in the week, David Cameron had told the House of Commons that he had overruled the Environment Agency, and dredging would start as soon as the water had gone down.

  Michael Horsington didn’t think it would make much difference. ‘You have an announcement like yesterday, and you think, Great! But you’re still surrounded by water,’ he said. Rebecca had offered to introduce me to him, and we had walked round the outside of the house and gone into the kitchen on the other side. ‘A statement in Prime Minister’s Questions doesn’t change that,’ he said. ‘Everyone just wants to get back to normal – we’re all upset, angry and frustrated.’ He didn’t seem it; he seemed remarkably calm and even-tempered, like many farmers I had met. He had noticed significant change in the Parrett over the years: it used to be so low that you could walk across it to get to the pub in Moorland, but it was much higher now, all year round. For the time being, the water had gone down, but it wouldn’t take much more rain before it overtopped the bank again.

  He also felt that the Environment Agency lacked local knowledge. Like most farmers on the Levels, he used to be part of the drainage board that managed the ditches or ‘rhynes’ that took water into the rivers, but the task had now been taken on by the Environment Agency, and he didn’t think it was qualified to do it.

  Even the name of its chairman, Lord Smith of Finsbury, seemed to condemn it, for it implied he was an urban dweller, with little sense of the realities of rural life. Yet it was only the senior staff that attracted resentment. Rebecca and Dan had jeered good-naturedly at the television when David Jordan, the Environment Agency’s director of operations, came out of River House in Bridgwater and stood in the rain on the edge of a car park, talking about the new plan to dredge the rivers, but they didn’t blame its other employees. They were very friendly and welcoming to the man who drew up beside us in an Environment Agency Land Rover, after we had left the house and walked up the lane to the flood wall. He wasn’t local; he was one of the extra staff who had been drafted in to work in the Levels. ‘I’m from Stafford, near Alton Towers,’ he said, as if no one could pick a fight with someone connected to a funfair. Rebecca and Dan weren’t even much use as protestors; when the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, had come to Northmoor Pumping Station, on the other bank of the river, two days before, they had gone out to ‘harangue’ him, but Rebecca had seen her father in the crowd, and she had been caught on film jumping up and down, waving at him instead.

  As we walked along the edge of the field that the river had broken over in January, I asked them whether they thought global warming had contributed to the flooding in the Levels, but neither was prepared to consider the idea. ‘No one round here blames global warming,’ Rebecca said. ‘They blame the Environment Agency.’ She laughed as she said it, but Dan was even more dismissive.

  ‘It’s just incompetence,’ he said. Sea-level rise or climate change had nothing to do with it. ‘It’s just the natural cycle. It’s just weather, innit? The record doesn’t show any difference. Storms happen – it doesn’t mean the end of the world is nigh. There are more important things to worry about than a bit of carbon in the atmosphere.’

  The Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, was another ‘climate sceptic’, though that had done nothing to endear him to the locals. They even objected to the shoes he was wearing – smart black lace-ups – when he arrived at the pumping station. He tried to explain that he hadn’t had a chance to put on his wellies before he was dragged from his car and engulfed by a crowd of people demanding answers, but it was too late to alter the impression he had created.

  Northmoor Pumping Station was half a mile downstream from the farm, and the tide had turned by the time we got there; the river was moving faster, and the jets of water arcing from the mouths of the giant hoses slung across the bank and landing in the stream were sliding away rapidly in the dusk. It was an impressive operation. There were twelve pumps in all, plus two in the building, almost half the numbers brought in to supplement the battery of forty that drained the Levels all year round. It was the country’s largest-ever pumping operation: 2.9 million tonnes of water was lifted into the engorged river every day from the lake that lay west of the Parrett.

  Even the old pumping station, which stood upstream from the farm, had been pressed into use. Usually, the low redbrick building was a museum housing the old steam-driven pump that used to drain the fields, but a modern pump had now been set up in its interior. We met another Environment Agency employee on the riverbank beside it. He was there to stop the ‘pikies’ stealing the diesel, he said. He was from Stafford as well, though he didn’t claim a connection to Alton Towers. ‘We don’t have much trouble with tidal rivers up there,’ he said. He told me that dredging was only part of the solution; they needed a barrage on the Parrett, like the one on the Thames – though, even then, they would need to maintain the river. ‘That’s just a giant drain,’ he said, gesturing at the Parrett.

  It was a supportive assessment, but Dan still corrected him: ‘It’s not a drain,’ he said. ‘It’s a high-level carrier – it’s the same system they have in Holland – and if they looked after Holland the way we look after the Levels, there would be no Holland.’

  God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland, the saying goes, and the people in the Levels wanted Dutch engineers to be brought in to drain the flooded fields.

  It was dark. The man from Stafford was knocking off after a twelve-hour shift. Dan went to round up the horses, and Rebecca and I walked back towards the glowing square of the kitchen window, which lay beneath the level of the brimming river as it ran towards the sea.

  9: A Drowned World

  THE THAMES VALLEY, JANUARY & FEBRUARY 2014

  Rebecca Horsington had claimed that nothing would be done about the floods until places closer to London were affected, and she didn’t have to wait long to find out if she was right. In Kent, the rivers were subsiding, but in Surrey and Berkshire, the Thames was rising fast. In Sunbury, where I stopped on my way back from the Levels, it had already burst its banks. It was like standing on the edge of a rush-hour motorway, inches away from the torrent of traffic. The river’s blustering roar was intimidating, and yet I was conscious of a vertiginous urge to step into the flow. Shapes drifted past in the darkness. I knew that I was standing near one of the inhabited islands in the Thames, and I wondered if its houses had come adrift. It had happened before. On the evening of 31 January 1953, the 7.37 p.m. train from Hunstanton to Lynn collided with a floating bungalow as it travelled through the marshes, and, in the course of the night, many other houses on the east coast were lifted off their moorings.

  Sometimes rivers shift houses around, as well. The Mississippi ‘would enter the house and float the piano out of it, and the pictures off the walls and even remove the house itself if it were not securely fastened down,’ William Faulkner wrote. Huck and his friend Jim, his former guardian’s slave, come across a house floating down the Mississippi in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when they escape on a raft. Jim goes inside and finds a dead man lying on the floor; he had been shot in the back.

  The Thames is not as long as the Mississippi, and drains a fraction of the area, but, in the dark, it seemed as wild as any of the great rivers of the world. The barrier on its eastern reaches cannot always contain it. The plan for a barrier near the mouth of the river was conceived after the Great Tide of 1953, but it wasn’t completed for another thirty years. My wife, who grew up in Fulham in the seventies, remembers drills at primary school to prepare them for the day the Thames burst its banks, as it would have done, more and more often, if the barrier hadn’t been built. It was closed four times in the eighties, thirty-five times in the nineties and seventy-five times in the first decade of the new millennium. In the winter of 2014 alone, it would close no less than
fifty times.

  ‘People say we shouldn’t live on a floodplain,’ Rebecca Horsington had said, ‘but they don’t say that to people who live in London.’ The Environment Agency had released a map that illustrated her point; it showed how far the Thames would have spread through its former floodplains, north and south of the river, if the barrier hadn’t been in place. The translucent blue wash covers the City and Docklands and spreads north along the low-lying parts of East London bordering the River Lea. Battersea, Fulham and Hammersmith are flooded. So is Westminster, the Thorney Island in the Thames. Boat taxis would have crowded the flooded streets and stirred the reflections of the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey.

  Yet there are places near London that the barrier can’t protect. It can hold back high tides and coastal surges, and it can be closed at low tide during heavy rain, creating a reservoir in central London that can hold the water flowing downstream until the tide has turned. But it can’t speed the flow of the swollen river downstream, which means it can’t protect the suburbs of West London that lie beyond the Thames’s tidal reach, nor the towns and villages of Berkshire and Surrey.

  ~

  The next day, I took the train out to Cookham, the Berkshire village that the painter Stanley Spencer had reimagined as a Thameside Jerusalem, and tried to walk back along the banks of the swollen river towards London. I knew I wouldn’t get very far, for long stretches of the riverside paths were closed. The scale of the disruption was apparent as we left central London and reached the outer suburbs. Many of the trains at Maidenhead Station had been cancelled, and the platforms were packed with people staring at departure boards, waiting expectantly for the display to change. It was like life behind the lines in wartime, when the irritation and frustration caused by the endless disruptions was offset by the exhilarating thought that the usual rules had been suspended.