by Edward Platt
The holiday feeling was particularly apparent on Cookham Common; only the causeway to the high street remained above the surface of the wide grey lake that the river had become, and the novelty of the flood induced people to talk to one another in a way they normally wouldn’t. The locals were proud of their village. ‘Nicer than working in Essex!’ one shouted to an Environment Agency official. The complacency was striking – and so was the lack of anger. No one wanted to apportion blame for the flood, for the locals understood the Thames’s propensity to burst its banks. Cookham is effectively an island, for it stands on a slight rise within the bend where the Thames turns abruptly south. In the past, the river may have run on the other side of the village, and the low-lying moors and meadows that surround it have always been prone to flooding. ‘The winter rising of the river was anxiously watched,’ writes Spencer’s biographer Kenneth Pople. Yet the Thames wasn’t just a threat; it was part of the magical landscape of a village that Spencer regarded as ‘a kind of earthly paradise.’
He was born in 1891, in a house on Cookham High Street, the eighth child of a music teacher and organist, and he was taught in an improvised schoolroom at the bottom of the garden by two of his older sisters; yet, for him and his brother, Gilbert, who was also a painter, the village contained infinitudes: ‘There were hidden bits of Cookham as remote as the Milky Way,’ Gilbert said. Spencer called it ‘a holy suburb of Heaven.’ He said that ‘the village churchyard held, somehow, the secret of the Garden of Eden, and Heaven could not be further away than the other side of Widbrook Common.’
Miracles occurred everywhere. ‘I like to take my thoughts for a walk and marry them to some place in Cookham,’ Spencer said. He depicted many of the great Biblical scenes in the streets of Cookham: the Last Supper, Christ entering Jerusalem and Christ stopping Peter from attacking the servant of the high priest after his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane were all transposed to Cookham, and the sight of workers walking past his studio with ladders inspired his depiction of Christ carrying the Cross through Cookham High Street. He was so attached to the village that he was known as ‘Cookham’ while he was studying at the Slade; he came back every day, and, while he wasn’t there, he secured his presence in its holy ground by burying a tin filled with sketches and drawings in ‘a little place I know.’
Cookham Moor, which was under water, lay at the heart of Stanley Spencer’s romantic entanglements, and his attempts to transfigure them in paint. I wouldn’t have been able to work out where the river ran if it hadn’t been pointed out to me by one of the locals, who took such pride in showing off their flooded village, but I had some idea of what lay beneath the lake, for I had seen it in Spencer’s paintings. He had painted the common in many different guises, as manifestations of his spiritual, emotional and erotic desires. The top of the war memorial, which stood at the end of the causeway, where the road across the common slipped under water, became an altar to Priapus in A Celebration of Love in Heaven, and the common was the setting of a tribute to his first wife, Hilda: ‘Spencer raised a statue of Hilda as the Goddess of Love upon the most sacred of all turf: Cookham Moor,’ writes Duncan Robinson, in a book called Stanley Spencer: Visions from a Berkshire Village. It was to be the centrepiece of an unrealized dream to take ‘the in-church feeling out of church’ and make Cookham itself a place of worship: the main street would be its nave, the river a side aisle, the common its cathedral close.
Even the pub where I had lunch appeared in one of his re-imaginings of Cookham. Spencer completed six paintings in a series called Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta but he did not finish the seventh and largest, which shows Christ sitting in the old horse ferry barge drawn up against the lawn of the Ferry Hotel, preaching to a group of children. ‘The place is Cookham bridge,’ he said in a letter to Hilda in 1944. ‘I don’t know yet whether he is a week-end guest sort of person or me-out-painting or not so much human as connected with the sedgy bank of the stream. But it will come.’ The painting was intended for ‘the river-aisle of the Church-house’, but it now hangs in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in the high street, which was open despite the flood. It shows Christ sitting in a punt, leaning forward, almost bent double in his eagerness to communicate with the dimunitive children arrayed before him, while Mr Turk, the boatman, stands in the foreground, oars and mops resting on his shoulders, as if he was levering up the floor of a mysterious structure. A group of adults were standing on the bank in the background, their figures emerging from the empty canvas in a way that revealed the craft and magic of the illusion Spencer was creating.
The spot where they had been standing was empty; for the river was rising rapidly towards it. The manager of the pub said it would get higher still: the water had come up a foot overnight and there was more rain forecast. It was usually six feet (1.8 metres) below the terrace. Many of the riverside buildings had flooded, and he expected the pub to flood as well. Half the staff couldn’t get in to work, though it didn’t matter because there were no customers.
I walked to the middle of Cookham Bridge, but I couldn’t go any further, for the road on the far side, which led into Bourne End, was flooded. A lorry pushed through the water, sending a bow wave spilling into the flooded foundations of a new block of flats beside the bridge. It was raining again. I leant on the railings of the bridge and watched a reporter doing a piece to camera on a boat beneath me, its bow slantwise towards the bank as its engines held it steady against the current.
Spencer had never painted the Biblical story of the flood, though he painted the Thames many times. Turk’s Boatyard Cookham depicts boats drawn up on the footpath on the Cookham side of the bridge. In a letter to Mrs Andrews, who purchased the painting, he said he had painted it on ‘mainly rainy days and “a rainy day” would have been a sub title for it’. Spencer had captured the Thames while it was still enough to hold the colours of the trees and the reflections of the pillars of the bridge, though the gondola-like boats had climbed the bank and were pressing inwards, as if lifted on a wave.
The graveyard of Holy Trinity Church, which lay behind the towpath where Turk’s Boatyard had once been, had also flooded, and the water lay in pools between the graves. In The Resurrection, Cookham, Spencer depicted the dead bursting forth from the graves. Hilda is sleeping on a bed of ivy, and a pleasure steamer is taking the risen souls to heaven. The idea was ‘not as far-fetched as it sounds,’ he maintained, for the ‘river was a sort of holy of holies’ and the people who went past on the steamers had ‘a kind of magicle [sic] feeling about them.’ They were manifestations of another world that even Spencer’s vision of Cookham could not contain. ‘They did not stop at Cookham,’ he said. ‘They came from a world I did not know & disappeared into an unknown.’
~
The boy didn’t hesitate when he reached the river pouring across the road and streaming through the gaps in the hedge on the other side. It was knee-deep and fast flowing; it had nearly knocked me over when I had waded through it. I wouldn’t have tried to cross it on a bike, but the boy kept going. His back wheel skidded to one side, and he nearly fell off, but he shrugged his satchel back into place on his shoulders and stood up on his pedals to generate more momentum. His wheels dragged in the water, throwing up jets of spray. By the time he was halfway across, he was soaked to the waist. He didn’t look behind him when he reached the other side: he picked up speed down the rain-slick road that led across Widbrook Common towards Cookham, as if he crossed knee-deep, ice-cold torrents every day on his way home from school.
I had been told that the road to Maidenhead was closed, and the causeway across the moor was the only way to leave the island Cookham had become, but I thought I would see for myself. I set off out of town towards Widbrook Common – yet another place Spencer regarded as holy, and commemorated in paint. ‘Walking along the road he turned his head and looked into Heaven, in this case a part of Widbrook Common,’ said his brother, Gilbert, and, in 1911, Spencer painted John Donne Arriving in Heaven, in which he
imagined Donne walking across Widbrook Common, ‘and here encountering heaven.’
It was raining heavily again, and the sky was dark. I was wearing a pair of waterproof trousers I had inherited from my father and they weren’t waterproof anymore; I had never worn them in such heavy rain, and they were soon soaked through. They made a steady swish-swish as I strode along, the rhythm broken up when I had to jump across puddles. Even my waterproof coat, which was newer, had begun to leak, and, by the time I got to Widbrook Common, I was soaked.
The rain had transformed the Widbrook from a narrow stream into a lake. A large white house was mirrored in the shining sheets of water on the edge of the common. Cookham Station was hidden in the mist and rain that veiled the hills to the west. Spencer had lived near the station for the last twelve years of his life, in a house called Cliveden View, which looked across Widbrook Common to ‘the country seat of the Astor family’, which stood in the woods on the far side of the Thames. As a child, Spencer had resented the Astors, because they had built a wall across the side of Widbrook Common, but he had gone to Cliveden often in his last years, for the grandson of the wall builder had become an important patron. Yet the distance from the working-class suburb of Cookham Rise to the stately home could not be measured in geographical or social terms; to Stanley Spencer, the water-silvered fields were measureless – though the sight of the boy going home on his bike made me think of the countless minor accommodations that the rest of us will be required to make as the weather subtly alters the places where we live.
~
The road into Maidenhead was long and straight, lined with large houses overhung by dripping trees that deepened the shadows around them. It had stopped raining, but the tarmac was black and glossy, and the air felt thick and damp, clogged with grit and dirt. The canal beside Boulter’s Lock was very placid, but the Thames was fast flowing and streaked with yellow foam. It rose halfway up the trunks of the trees on the far bank, which found answering shades in the water – the evergreens merged with deep-lying tones of green-brown, and the bare grey branches of the deciduous trees picked up silvery filaments in the fast-moving surface. Two swans were keeping pace with me, effortlessly, undisturbed by the force of the current. The steps leading down to the water were fenced off; the towpath was submerged, and the water was only half a metre below the road. A man was fixing floodlights to the terrace of a Victorian house on the far bank, as if to monitor the water threatening to inundate the lawn – or in the hope that illumination might hold it back.
There was one car left in the basement of Chandler’s Quay, but the others had been moved to higher ground. The residents knew it was time to move them, said one of the three people standing by the railings, watching the river. ‘Too much building on the floodplain,’ another one said. It didn’t flood here anymore, not since they built the Jubilee River, which carries water past Maidenhead and dumps it in the Thames beyond Bray – but it flooded more downstream. They were building a new school on a floodplain downriver – an enlarged version of one that was popular with locals. It will be built on stilts, like Chandler’s Quay, but, even so, the man said it would flood, and they would have to move it. The three locals weren’t sure how far the water had reached, but they knew that Widbrook Common had flooded. ‘Well, that’s a floodplain,’ the man said: ‘And they’re planning on building on that as well.’
The schoolboy was not the only cyclist I had seen on the common. I had stopped to talk to a man who had set out to cycle from Oxford to London and was beginning to regret it. It was wet; he had decided to get on the train at Maidenhead, but he must have changed his mind, for he cycled past me on Maidenhead Bridge, heading away from the station. On the banks below, dog walkers whistled to unseen animals exploring the expanded edges of the sleek black river.
~
One of the residents of Chandler’s Quay was sweeping out the basement car park when I went back to Maidenhead, two days later. She could tell when the water was going down because the ducks that lived on the island midstream came back. They weren’t there yet. She had walked the Thames from source to mouth in the summer months, when the towpaths were clear, but you couldn’t do it now.
A blustery wind was blowing. A hundred yards outside Maidenhead, a branch cracked and fell through the trees, landing on the towpath with a bump that made the sodden ground shudder. The river was fast flowing, spilling up the bank and pooling around the trunks of the trees that shaded the path. I passed a mock-Tudor mansion with a boathouse and a monkey-puzzle tree planted in the middle of the lawn that sloped down to the river, and another that looked like a plantation mansion, transplanted from Georgia, except the flag it was flying was a Union Jack.
There were traces of the rural origins of Eton Dorney, the rowing lake used during the 2012 Olympics, in the form of the sheep in the distance, beyond a fence, but the pursuit of fitness had displaced agricultural labour. There were people jogging and cycling, and others walking dogs. The flat grey sheet of water had become an arena of mortification, divided into lanes designed to test strength and endurance. Rowers skittered past in slim-hulled boats, while their coaches kept pace on bikes on the road in the middle, shouting instructions. The Eton College Boating Centre slowly came into view. There were schoolboys and girls unloading boats, some with their names engraved on the prow.
The cafes in Windsor had sandbagged their doors, and the path on the south bank of the Thames had flooded. Swans were congregating around a submerged pontoon. The meadow beyond Romney Lock was soft and squelchy underfoot; the standing water got deeper as it stretched towards the railway embankment that crossed the river. The top bar of a wooden fence marked its depth. I walked back to Windsor Station and caught the train to Datchet – the next village along.
Datchet had only flooded because a wall upstream had collapsed, the owner of the Manor Inn told me. The river was no higher than it had been several times since he had bought the pub in 1999, but the water had poured down the railway line from Old Farmer’s Bridge at Eton End School and swept down the high street in a torrent, three or four feet (about a metre) deep. The distinction mattered, for it made a repetition seem less likely. The water had poured into the building through vents and seeped up through floorboards in the conference rooms. Yet it had also descended into the cellars. No one knew how far it had stretched. Workmen had taken up a trapdoor in the hall and were running pumps into the chambers below.
Some of the streets nearer the river were still flooded, and a long chain of sandbags known as the ‘Datchet wall’ had been stacked along South Lea Road, the damp hessian reminiscent of an improvised military installation. Do not remove, said the signs, as if they might be picked apart by sightseers or zealous bin-collectors. The Thames Path was closed. I turned away from the river, but I still found myself following a trail of water, in the form of the culverted stream that ran across the sodden grass of Datchet Common towards one of the reservoirs that supply London’s south-west suburbs. The Queen Mother Reservoir was one of the many blue pools drawn on the map of the Thames Valley, among the thin blue lines of rivers and streams, though bright yellow danger signs and lifebelts hanging on the railings by the steps that led up the grassy slopes to the summit were the only signs of the mass of water that rose higher than the roofs of the houses on the other side of the road.
A rainbow – the symbol of God’s promise that he would never send another flood – hung over the woods at Sunnymeads, but the air was heavy with the smell of sewage; even the faithful would not consider modern floods purifying. Yet a kind of calm had descended on the villages. Two days before, people had been rescued by boat from the riverside streets in Wraysbury, but as I stood by the railings that enclosed the green, ducks landed on the surface of the still grey sheet of water, ruffling the image of the cricket pavilion.
Outside Splash Studios, people had laid down planks so they could reach the corner by the bridge over the stream. Even the old gravel pits that housed Wraysbury Dive Centre had been absorbed into
the lake that had risen from the Thames. I passed dinghies and canoes tethered to lamp posts and saw people pulling on waders as they prepared to reach their homes.
Already the adaptations seemed routine, and, now I was surrounded by flooded houses, I was less concerned with seeing what they looked like. Perhaps I had learnt some manners since I had been in Thorney – or perhaps the idea of a flooded house seemed less extraordinary. In any case, I was less interested in the effects of being flooded, and more interested in trying to understand its causes, like many of the people I had met in the Somerset Levels.
~
It was hard keeping track of the places that had flooded. Cornwall was ‘in recovery’, as if the entire county had been afflicted by a bout of illness, and, in Somerset, only essential journeys were recommended. In Thorney, the water had gone down and come up again. Professor Temperley’s family had begun cleaning up Thorney House, which had been flooded for thirty-two days, but, the very next day, it had flooded again. We would not be able to protect the Levels indefinitely, one expert said on the radio. At some point, it would be abandoned, though cities like Hull would be defended. The water reached record levels in the centre of Worcester, though only the ‘usual suspects’ had been affected locally, Mary Dhonau said. Even Kempsey had survived; the bund that Mr Oram had campaigned for was doing its work.