The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  On 5 February 2014, I sat at my desk in London watching the sea punch holes in the causeway that Isambard Kingdom Brunel built to carry the railway line along the coast at Dawlish, in Devon. The last time I had been through Dawlish on the train, the sea had been a flat expanse that seemed to be tinted red by the sandstone leaching from the cliffs; now, it made the railway lines jump and buckle, and flung shingle at the windows of the houses on the far side of the tracks.

  The next day, I caught the train to Shepperton, where J. G. Ballard had lived for nearly fifty years, and resumed my attempt to walk along the Thames. At Hampton Court, the river was high, but within its banks. Kempton Park Racecourse was dry, but there were pools of water on Sunbury Golf Course, and the Ash, the tributary of the Thames that runs through the common at the end of the road where Ballard used to live, had expanded into a widening pool, brushed by the branches of a willow. As I walked back down the road, past Ballard’s old house, I passed a man in wellies and waterproof trousers.

  In 1994, Ballard said the twentieth century had begun ‘to transform the Thames Valley into a pleasing replica of Los Angeles, with all the ambiguous but heady charms of alienation and anonymity’, banishing the ‘spirit of Stanley Spencer’s nearby Cookham’, which had ‘seemed to preside over the splash meadows and bosky walks’ when he arrived. Yet I had never been anywhere that preserved the aesthetic of 1930s suburbia so perfectly. Most suburban streets have been absorbed into the mesh of other streets, or become entwined with the motorway access roads, airport terminals and research centres of Ballard’s fictions, yet Shepperton still felt like an outpost on the edge of the city. When I stepped off the train on to the empty platform and emerged beside a parade of 1930s shops, I felt like I was retracing the path the first commuters had taken when they came home. Ballard’s house, which was for sale, had the same period air, with its pebble-dashed facade and Crittall windows.

  Yet Ballard had remade his surroundings in other ways, transforming Shepperton in his fiction as profoundly as Spencer had transformed Cookham in his paintings. In a novel called The Unlimited Dream Company, he imagines the Thameside suburb as a tropical forest, seeded by handfuls of semen distributed by a mysteriously transfigured protagonist, who arrives in Shepperton when he crashes a stolen plane in the Thames. The embanked masses of water that surround it on all sides prompted the idea that the Thames Valley was ‘a marine world’, in which ‘the dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor.’ Shepperton was surrounded by water: ‘gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons.’ Ballard, who had grown up in Shanghai, a city built around the Bund, the world-famous embankment that took its name from the flood defences beside the Tigris, had found himself in another place defined by bunds – the banks and walls that held back the masses of water stored among, and above, the villages and suburbs.

  He returned to the idea of the Thames Valley as a ‘marine world’ in The Kindness of Women, a fictionalized memoir in which he imagines it inhabited by a ‘new form of aquatic mammal’ and describes his ‘children playing on the grass and fishing for minnows along the reedy banks’ of the Ash. ‘I could almost believe that the bright summer frocks, fishing nets and children’s voices were a dream conjured from this placid stream,’ he wrote. Yet, in 1962, two years after he settled in Shepperton, he wrote a novel that offered a much less benign version of a world under water.

  ~

  The global catastrophe in A Drowned World is not caused by human activity, but by ‘a series of violent and prolonged solar storms’ that deplete ‘the earth’s barrier against the full impact of solar radiation’. Tropical areas become uninhabitable, once-temperate areas became tropical, and ‘entire populations’ migrate north or south. The human population is reduced to no more than five million people, who survive in the subtropical zones on the polar ice-caps. ‘The South’ has been abandoned, and even London is too hot for most people; the city has become a tropical lagoon, where giant ferns sprout through the windows of the abandoned buildings and the air is thronged with giant bats and mosquitos. Reptiles are the dominant species. Ballard’s flooded London of the future recreates elements of its past. When the Thames first emerged as ‘an observable entity’, some thirty million years ago, it ‘would have been a recognizable, tropical scene,’ Peter Ackroyd writes. ‘Termites and ants, beetles and spiders, flourished in the humid atmosphere; there were also turtles and crocodiles . . . as well as lizards that resembled modern iguanas.’ There were ‘palm-trees and laurels, vines and citrus trees, as well as oaks and beeches. There were water-lilies on the surface of the river, as well as long weeds that drifted through the warm water. There was also a new form of plant; grass began to grow.’

  Yet Ballard’s drowned world is far more hostile than the ancient Thames. Everyone has left, except the crew of a research station and Ballard’s two protagonists, a man called Kerans and a woman called Beatrice Dahl, who self-consciously style themselves as a second Adam and Eve, living in a kind of inverted Eden in which there will be no birth or rebirth – only a dying swoon into the embrace of a planet that has become inimical to human life.

  They do not want to leave London, because they are drawn by the deep, distant emanations of the increasingly powerful sun, and they welcome the re-emergence of the primeval world, with which we are all subconsciously familiar. ‘How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well,’ says the doctor of the research station.

  Richard Jefferies’ proto-science-fiction novel, After London, depicted the drowned city as a polluted swamp that no one could enter safely: ‘the earth was poison, the water poison, the air poison, the very light of heaven, falling through such an atmosphere, poison,’ he writes. Yet Kerans has no desire to escape London’s flooded streets. An adventurer called Strangman, who arrives in London on a flying boat manned by a crew of pirates, drains the lagoons in his search for treasure. The submerged buildings emerge ‘from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis,’ but Kerans is unable to accept ‘this total inversion’ of his normal world. He blows up the barricades and re-floods the city, ‘savouring the fresh tang that the water had brought again to the lagoon.’

  Kerans does not fear the flood – he embraces it. Strangman sends him down to explore the halls of the planetarium and Kerans contrives to cut off his own air supply; he almost drowns, sinking contentedly into the ‘deep cradle of silt’ on the floor, which ‘carried him gently like an immense placenta.’

  ‘He wanted to become part of the drowned world,’ Strangman says.

  The novel’s loving accounts of the drowned city, and Kerans’ fascination for its lagoons and reptiles, have profound implications for our response to global warming; they imply that the reason we fail to address it is not because we do not recognize the severity of the crisis, or lack the energy to do anything about it, but because we do not want to: the drift to disaster is self-willed.

  I had travelled through King’s Cross on my way to Waterloo to catch the train to Shepperton, and I found myself standing in front of a poster advertising holidays in a luxury resort on a man-made island in the Arabian Gulf, called the Palm Atlantis. I had seen it many times in the course of the year, when I was reading about the history and mythology of flooding, and I always wondered what had been going through the owners’ minds when they decided to name their artificial island after a continent that had sunk overnight. Had they forgotten what happened in the story, or were they consciously exploiting the allure of the name? To J. G. Ballard, who was fascinated by advertising’s ability to articulate our subconscious desires, the attraction of a holiday in a drowned world would have needed no explanation.

  ~

  Shepperton Green had flooded, and many of the roads were under water. The T
hames had burst its banks by the jetty of the sailing club; the fast-flowing, wind-whipped water was as high as the benches on the riverside walks. It looked as wild and cold as a winter sea, thickened with a scurf of twigs and grass. Moored dinghies had tipped upwards, prows rising through the choppy grey waves. A houseboat called Midnight Shadow lay beyond the water’s edge, parallel to the line of trees that marked the river’s normal limit. The water had reached the back porch of the hotel on the riverbank. I stopped for a drink and a sandwich, and to get out of the cold. The barman had seen the river higher, but he said it never came inside. Ferry Lane was under water; the line of foot posts marking the pavements was almost submerged. A man driving a four-by-four with outsized wheels and a raised body, like a jeep adapted for water, offered me a lift; he was running his own kind of ferry service to get people home. I said I was going the other way, but I waited until he picked up another passenger and watched him roll the vehicle forward into the lime-green water.

  ~

  A tree had come down on Chertsey Road. It had fallen towards the house on the other side, and had caught in the branches of another tree, which held it like a crutch. If it slipped, it would crash into the garden. The owner of the house and her husband were standing in the road. They had called the police. As I walked on, I was conscious of the other trees dipping and swaying in the wind. The water lapping at their trunks was dark and muddy, but it was pale yellow in the shallows on the edge of the field, turning green as it got deeper. The further reaches of the lake were grey and opaque. The wind stirred up ripples on its surface and flung skin-tingling bursts of sleet in my face. My feet were frozen in my cheap rubber boots, and my ageing waterproofs were leaking again.

  I wondered whether it was a coincidence that both A Drowned World and After London ended with their protagonists on foot. After Felix escapes near-death in London, in Jefferies’ story, he becomes the leader of a band of tribes, but he does not stay for long, because he wants to find his lover, Aurora, and bring her back with him. He sets off into the woods as the sun sets: ‘still onward’, runs the last line, ‘and as the dusk fell he was still moving rapidly westward.’ The sentence anticipates the end of The Drowned World and its unforgettable closing line. After Kerans escapes his pursuers in London, he sets off through the swamps and lagoons of continental Europe, ‘a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun.’ Kerans is the only character drawn to the south; most had gone the other way, fleeing the ever-expanding zone around the tropics, where humans could no longer survive. Jefferies’ vision of ecological collapse is not yet with us, but the northward exodus that Ballard imagined has begun. For the time being, most of the refugees arriving on Europe’s shores are escaping war and civil unrest, but it will not be long before climate change drives many more to seek sanctuary in the north.

  ~

  I reached Sunbury at the end of the day. The last stretch of road was closed, but a man in a petrol station, where I stopped to buy some chocolate, told me I could get through. Watersplash Farm hadn’t flooded, but the stream by Fordbridge Road was level with the street and ringed the trunks of the trees on its banks. Ahead of me, cars were turning back, though two men in high-vis jackets were directing an ambulance through the water. It was knee-deep, and almost reached the top of my boots, but I could see that it was deeper in the flooded fields that stretched towards the river; it reached the top of the swings in a flooded playground and rose halfway up the goalposts in a playing field. The houses on the far side looked like houseboats.

  A small red car had been left at the entrance to a long, winding drive, water lapping at the top of its wheels, and there were upturned benches and gas canisters beside a canoe and a life jacket in the garden. There was a rainbow over lower Sunbury, and the Thames was flowing fast between the shore and the island, where I had stopped on my way back from the Levels, two weeks before. A pair of waders hung above the gate at the entrance to Sunbury Court Island, and there was a UKIP flag flying above one of the houses. The river had gone down; it was lapping at the feet of the benches that marked its usual limits, but the main current was full and fast flowing. A canoeist came past, slaloming between the bins in the shallow water on the edge of the expanded river, followed by a line of joyriding ducks that made his progress seem effortful and clumsy.

  10: The Sunken Hundred

  LOST WORLDS, WEST: WESTMINSTER & BORTH, MAY 2014

  The tide was going out so fast that the sea seemed to be receding even as I walked towards it, new expanses of gleaming sand appearing every few seconds. It even seemed to outpace my son, who was running towards it with the eagerness of a seven-year-old released from the car at the end of a long drive. It was easy to imagine it returning at the same speed, breaking over the defences at the entrance to the bay and crashing over the sixteen cities that are supposed to have stood on the sand.

  Cantre’r Gwaelod, or the Sunken Hundred, the lost kingdom that lies beneath the sea in front of the Welsh town of Borth, was a Celtic New Orleans, precariously positioned below high tide, protected by defences that had to be constantly maintained. At its greatest extent, it stretched from Bardsey Island to Ramsey Island, which lie at the northern and southern ends of Cardigan Bay. According to the Welsh folklorist T. Gwynn Jones, it was ‘a fertile territory’, forty miles long and twenty miles wide, enclosed by Sarn Badrig, or St Patrick’s Causeway, a bank of glacial deposits extending south-west from Shell Island, near Harlech, for twelve and a half miles. The causeway remains a hazard to shipping, says Robert Duck, in a book called This Shrinking Land: Climate Change and Britain’s Coasts, and it is visible at the lowest spring tides. So are four main ‘roads’, also made of glacial deposits, that are said to have run across the kingdom. According to one version of the story, the Sunken Hundred was lost when a drunken keeper of the embankment forgot to close the sluices after a banquet. ‘The sea broke through and only a few of the inhabitants escaped,’ writes T. Gwynn Jones. There is no reason to believe the sixteen cities ever existed – and, if they did, they were not lost overnight. Yet land has been lost in the bay, and the storms of the winter had uncovered new evidence of how far it used to reach.

  I saw the first of the tree stumps – Borth’s own Noah’s Woods – dotting the sands as I walked towards the receding sea. They were jagged triangles, like sharks’ teeth, or miniature volcanoes, with sloping sides tapering to cratered summits. Some were turreted like sandcastles and moated by seawater. They were draped with moss or seaweed, or moored in beds of soft black peat. Some had roots twined around their base, like ribbons of dough. My son was soon soaking wet, and I took off my shoes and paddled in the shallows, where the stumps were gathered most thickly. The wood was turning white as it dried in the sun.

  It was May 2014 – two months after the winter floods had come to an end – and it was a clear, fresh day, with a cool wind, and a pale blue sky draped with thin wisps of cloud. The noise of the sea was as steady as a waterfall.

  Further up the beach, the struts holding up the groynes were a regular grid of dots shading into the speckled dots of the trees. There were lads sitting on the sea wall, smoking, in front of the pastel-coloured terraces and modern semis that lined the front. Beyond, lay the dyke-ribbed, river-threaded marsh that might, one day, fall within reach of the sea that had churned up the sands in the winter storms and exposed the stumps on the beach.

  I had never been to Borth before, though my mother’s family lived there during the war, and went back afterwards on family holidays. My mother remembered cine footage of her and her brothers eating ice cream on the beach – though she didn’t remember the event itself. The town is supposed to have inspired ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, Morrissey’s post-Smiths ode to the drabness of British seaside life, though it seemed to me a fascinating place, enriched by the evidence of its past that kept emerging on the beach.

  The storms had also revealed a wattle walkway that began near the lifeboat station, and the ancient footprint of a child, who was
believed to be four years old. While we waited for the tide to turn, we had walked along the front to see if we could find them, and had come to a raft of peat beds that looked like models of the Grand Canyon: perfectly eroded formations, with streaked sides and flat overhanging tops. Sheets of drying water lay between the ribs of peat. I had been watching the tide running through the miniature canyons, like rivers, for several minutes before I looked up, momentarily disorientated by the shift in the scale, and saw that the sea had receded by hundreds of metres, and the stumps beneath the high-water mark had begun to appear.

  The forests had flourished between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, in the period when Stonehenge was being built. The trees at Ynyslas, the village that lay less than two miles north in the bay, were the first to go, while those at Borth survived until 1500 BC. Some reports suggest there were trees growing at the southern end of the bay until 1000 BC.

  Yet the legend of the Sunken Hundred is not the only story that compresses the gradual loss of land, over thousands of years, into the events of a single, cataclysmic night, prompted by human failings of one kind or another – an act of drunken carelessness, or treachery, conducted in the name of ambition or love. Henry W. Longfellow included a poem in his anthology Poems of Places (1876–9) that gave a similar account of the loss of Kaer-Is, a drowned land off the coast of Brittany:

  Now curséd forever mote she be,

  That all for wine and harlotry,

  The sluice unbarred that held the sea!

  The culprit is the king’s daughter, who steals the key ‘which bolts the sluice and bars the tide’ from around her father’s neck as he sleeps off a drunken party, and gives it to her lover.

  The kingdom of Tyno Helig, which lies beneath the Great Orme, the sheep-cropped headland beyond Llandudno, was also lost to the sea when the floodgates were opened, though the villain was not one of the daughters of the king, but the ambitious young man who wanted to marry her. He could only do so if he had a nobleman’s golden torque or collar, so, when he was sent to escort a ransomed Scottish nobleman to his home, he murdered him and stole his collar. His treachery seemed to pay off at first, but the ghost of the dead man returned on their wedding day and said the family would be cursed to the fourth generation. The prophecy came true during the banquet to celebrate the birth of their great-grandchild: a maid went to fetch wine from the cellar and found that the sluices had given way, and the sea was pouring in. Already, the cellar was filled with fish.