by Edward Platt
There was still no official explanation of the cause of the flood, though the Environment Agency had published details of a twenty-year plan intended to prevent it happening again. It planned to repair fifty ‘assets’ – embankments, pumping stations, sluices, floodgates and coastal flood defences – and to install new barriers and pumps. There was a hint of defensiveness apparent in the hyperbolic claim that it had been ‘the largest flood event ever known’ – and yet the figures were undeniably impressive. The Environment Agency estimated there were one hundred million cubic metres of floodwater spread across an area of sixty-five square kilometres, and it did not seem surprising that it was unable to contain them.
When the helicopters passed over Northmoor, telling people to get out, Mr and Mrs Hutchings wouldn’t leave, for they had to stay and look after the animals. Two days later, when the water was knee-deep in the cattle sheds of Battens Farm, they started moving their cows, and, two days after that, they moved out as well – they had no choice, as the farmhouse had also flooded.
Their animals were their first concern. They weren’t back in their house, but that mattered less, for they were comfortable enough in the mobile home that had been set up at the end of the muddy yard, facing the drive, so it was the first thing you saw when you turned into the farm from the road that ran along the southern edge of the village. There were plant pots lining the steps leading up to the front door, and a sign saying ‘Battens Farm’.
Inside, it was equally neat and tidy. There was an L-shaped sofa inside the door, with a kitchen beyond, and bedrooms at the back. It was very hot, even with the doors open to admit the breeze that made the net curtains flick and sway. ‘It’s lovely,’ Mrs Hutchings had said when I arrived. ‘We couldn’t have wished for anything better. But, at the end of the day, there’s nothing like home.’
Not everyone was forced to leave. The water rose on Wednesday night, and on Thursday the Environment Agency built a wall to protect properties further down the lane, so those people were able to stay. Yet all ninety acres of the Hutchings’ land ended up under water. They sent some of their animals to different farms, but they had to sell half of them, because the water was too deep for tractors, and they couldn’t get round to them all. Yet the farm hadn’t been entirely abandoned; the cats were still there, and Mr and Mrs Hutchings had come back in their waders, delivered in the police’s amphibious vehicles, so they could feed them. It was very eerie, Brian said, because the garden walls had been knocked down and the fences had floated away: there was nothing except the unbroken expanse of water.
They found the LPG gas tank under the apple tree, upside down, and their domestic heating tanks had tipped over, spilling oil into the village. They lost their car. Even then, the rain hadn’t abated: fourteen millimetres of rain fell on 24 February, and the Environment Agency said that ‘access to the area remains extremely difficult’. ‘If you are in immediate danger, please call 999,’ said another bulletin on 27 February 2014. ‘There remains a significant risk to local properties.’
Additional pumps were running, and they were needed. Battens Farm was flooded for twenty-six days, and once the water started going down, it took two days to disappear. Mr and Mrs Hutchings moved back to the farm on 16 March, and found nothing left, except the brick buildings, and even they had been damaged. Even the grass had disappeared: ‘The grass on the moor has largely survived, because it’s used to being wet,’ Mr Hutchings said. ‘But, back here, where we’ve never had floods, it killed it.’
Their neighbour was pleased to see them, for it had been very eerie being there on his own. His house had been built on higher ground, but it had flooded nonetheless. ‘It was a shambles, down here,’ said Mr Hutchings, who was plainly not given to exaggeration. ‘It really was.’ Yet they took consolation from the offers of help that came from all over the country. One day, forty-three members of the Young Farmers Association arrived, and there were local volunteers as well, including the man who came in and washed his hands at the sink while I was there. ‘He’s one of the gentlemen who moved the animals out and he’s come back and he’s helping us rebuild our farm,’ Mary said, when he had gone. He was an angel, Mrs Hutchings said, and her husband agreed: ‘Marvellous. He’s in the council and he knows who to contact. We’d be struggling tremendously with that. The kindness we’ve had is wonderful.’
Despite their age, they were determined to restore their herds and remake the farm as it had been before, and things were improving slowly. It was hard to remember how bad it had been, because it was looking better, they said, though it still looked bad enough to me. There was a new shed that housed a young herd of cows, but the house was a shell, and the sheds and barns that had been flattened in the flood were marked by strips of tarmac.
The house still smelt damp. They were turning the kitchen and sitting room into a single room. Mr Hutchings seemed pleased with the idea of transforming the old farmhouse into a bright, open home. They hoped to be back at the end of September, though there was still much to be done, inside and out. Even the garden had gone; behind the house, there was nothing but an area of hardstanding and a swing-seat in the middle of the muddy patch of earth that used to be the lawn. Beyond it lay the scrubby fields through which the water had come, a black wave rising through the darkness, flattening out the dips and hollows in the moor as it sped towards Battens Farm.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all the people who appear in the book, and several others that I interviewed who did not. They include: Adrian Durrant and Simon Tobin in Southwold; Ivor Kemp in Hickling and Malcolm Kerby in Happisburgh; Mark Jones and Steve Wragg in Hull; Joanne Ellison and John Owen Roberts in St Asaph; Mark Gilbert and Joe Martin in the Fens; Lynn Jones in Keswick; John Leach in Thorney; Richard Coutts of Baca Architects; and Sue Tapsell in the Flood Research Unit, Middlesex University.
I would also like to thank Kris Doyle, my patient and insightful editor, and everyone else at Picador who worked on the book with great care and expertise, especially Paul Baggaley, Chloe May and Gabriela Quattromini. I am grateful to my agent Caroline Dawnay for her guidance during the last twenty-odd years. Jason Cowley and Helen Lewis at the New Statesman, Marina Benjamin at Aeon and Simon Grant at Tate Etc. commissioned articles about floods and rivers. For other kinds of support, I am grateful to the following people: Charles Fernyhough, Alexa de Ferranti, Linda Garforth, Nicholas Garnham, Cassian Harrison, Geoff Hewitson, Leo Hollis, Josh Lacey, Carol MacArthur, Robert Macfarlane, Matt McAllester, Charlotte Moore, Johann Perry, Catherine Platt, Judy Shedden, Rebecca Whittle and Kim Wilkie. I would like to thank my parents, John and Liz Platt, for introducing me to many of the places that I visit in the book. Most of all, I would like to thank my children, Benjy, Eliza and Ava, and my wife, Sophie.
Notes and References
the Red Lady of Paviland – who was in fact, a manThere is a full account of the discovery of the skeleton, and the ways it has been interpreted, in Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland, by Marianne Sommer.
‘a poured landscape’From Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels (p.10), by Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson, which is a rich and evocative guide.
‘the gift of the river’The Histories, Herodotus, translated by George Rawlinson, p.117
‘Normally the Nile would start to rise in late June’Flood: Nature and Culture (p.56), by John Withington, is a very useful introduction to the art, literature, history and mythology of flooding.
‘a devout Marxist to an equally impassioned anti-Marxist’Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, p.261.
‘grandiose’ and ‘overdrawn’The Evolution of Urban Society, Robert McCormick Adams, p.67.
‘Heaven commanded Yu’Early China: A Social and Cultural History, Li Feng.
If I were called inThe lines are from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Water’, in The Whitsun Weddings.
‘For anyone under the age of 30’https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/october/the-rising-sea
&
nbsp; nine of the ten warmest years on record in the UK have occurred since 2002https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/26/uk-flooding-threat-people-moved-michael-gove-climate-change
globally, the last twenty-two years have seen the twenty warmest years on recordhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/29/four-years-hottest-record-climate-change?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0d1YXJkaWFuVG9kYXlVUy0xODExMjk%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&CMP=GTUS_email
‘At the eastern extremity the Lake narrows’After London: or, Wild England, Richard Jefferies, p.37.
‘confusion of small brooks’Portrait of Elmbury, John Moore, the first book of The Brensham Trilogy, p.13.
The gods’ load was too greatThe translation is from the poem dated to c. 1700 BC, known as Atrahasis, by Stephanie Dalley. The lines from Gilgamesh are from the Penguin Classics edition of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George, and the account of the significance of the flood is from his introduction.
an expert in Mesopotamian cuneiform at the British MuseumThe Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood is both a learned account of the evolution of the ark legend, and a great adventure. The story of the attempt to build a new ark is also told in the TV documentary The Real Noah’s Ark.
There are at least two versions in Greek mythologyThe story of Deucalion and Phyrra appears in The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus (p.36 of the Oxford World’s Classics).
‘sacrificed kava, pigs, and coconuts’The Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology, Arthur Cotterell, p.285.
She wanted ‘to visit all the fairest cities of the kingdom’There is an essay by Liam Rogers which retells the stories of the Severn. It references Worcestershire’s Hidden Past by Bill Gwilliam. http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/sabrina.htm
The Severn has flooded many timesThe descriptions of the floods (and many others) are taken from a fact-sheet I picked up in Tewkesbury. The floods of 1620, 1795 and 1852 are referred to here: http://ct-files.glos.ac.uk/igd/showcase/web/floodproject/bewdley_p2.htm
‘Offa’s Charter . . . speaks already of ditches in the Pevensey Levels’The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins, p.78.
the water builds up behind an argaeThe Landreader defines an argae as ‘an earth bank built to hold back or retain flood water’ (http://www.thelandreader.com/glossary/argae).
‘still exert an influence upon the world above them’Thames: Sacred River, Peter Ackroyd, p.44.
Blake who was heavily influenced by beliefs in the lost city of AtlantisThe references to Blake and his time in Felpham are from Peter Ackroyd’s biography Blake, p.52.
They were hard people‘Why fishing produced so much cruelty is not clear,’ write E. Gillett and K. MacMahon in A History of Hull, p.304. ‘Later, attempts were made to deny that there was any cruelty at all, but the record is quite certain: there was a great deal.’
the ‘flatness of the land’A History of Hull, E. Gillett and K. MacMahon, p.42. The Draining of the Hull Valley, by June A. Sheppard describes the reclamation of the carrs (http://www.eylhs.org.uk/dl/121/the-draining-of-the-hull-valley).
When the diarists’ thoughts were published in a reportWhittle et al. ‘After the Rain – learning the lessons from flood recovery in Hull, final project report for Flood, Vulnerability and Urban Resilience: a real-time study of local recovery following the floods of June 2007 in Hull’, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. Rebecca Whittle organized the writing group.
‘three massive wooden planks’The Ferriby Boats, Edward Wright, p.7.
‘Nothing but a change of sea level’Submerged Forests, Clement Reid, p.5. Also quoted in Europe’s Lost World, by Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith, which tells the story of the rediscovery of Doggerland, and describes the history of our preoccupation with lost lands beneath the seas.
‘a wide alluvial flat’Submerged Forests, Reid, p.38.
‘the first real evidence that the North Sea had been part of a great plain inhabited by the last hunter-gatherers in Europe’Europe’s Lost World, Gaffney, Fitch and Smith, p.20.
early modern writers such as Thomas More and Francis BaconUtopia and New Atlantis were published in 1516 and 1624 respectively.
The number of stories about lost continents is ‘beyond count’Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme, L. Sprague de Camp, p.284.
‘its roofs open to the sky’Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, pp.167–168.
‘the Garden of Eden; the Gardens of the Hesperides’Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Ignatius Donnelly, pp.1–2.
Blavatsky believed that Atlantis was one of several lost continents on which humanity had evolvedThe Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
Its existence had originally been proposedPhilip Sclater proposed the existence of the lost continent of Lemuria in an 1864 essay called The Mammals of Madagascar.
‘His stature was gigantic’The Lost Lemuria, William Scott-Elliot, p.23.
the American writer Frederick S. OliverA Dweller on Two Planets is available online, at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/dtp/index.htm
‘the continents of Atlantis and Mu [often synonymous with Lemuria] did exist and still do’So says the Lemurian Fellowship on its FAQ page: https://www.lemurianfellowship.org/faq/#faq6
‘I suspect he felt increasingly disappointed’The Norfolk Cranes Story, John Buxton and Chris Durdin, p.15.
‘The fun of the thing to me’Fisherman Naturalist, Anthony Buxton, p.189.
the most landward of the three cottagesJuliet Blaxland describes life on the cliff in Easton Bavents in a book called The Easternmost House, which is due to be published in 2019.
‘You do not need to remind a Fenman’Waterland, Graham Swift, p.10.
‘Never in any history of which we have record’The accounts of the Fen flood are from Harvest Home: The Official Story of the Great Floods of 1947 and their Sequel, Dudley Barker.
‘Jaywick has succeeded’Villages of Britain: The Five Hundred Villages that Made the Countryside, Clive Aslet, p.251. Fred Gray has written about seaside architecture, and the significance of the bungalow within it, in Designing the Seaside: Architecture, Society and Nature.
‘By the afternoon of Saturday 31st January’North Sea Surge: Story of the East Coast Floods of 1953, Michael Pollard, p.28.
‘wall of death’The 1953 Essex Flood Disaster: The People’s Story, Patricia Rennoldson Smith, pp.37–39.
‘the largest and highest’A Tour through the Whole Island of Gt. Britain, Daniel Defoe, Letter 7, p.414.
The Wansbeck was quiet in the first half of the twentieth centuryThe accounts of the floods of 1963 and 1967 are from David Archer’s book about Northumbria’s rivers, Land of Singing Waters.
‘surrounded on all sides by very great swampy and impassable marshes’The description comes from The Life of Alfred by a Welsh monk called Asser. It is the only contemporaneous account of his life. It is quoted in Adam Nicolson and Patrick Sutherland’s book about the Levels, Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels, which calls Alfred’s retreat ‘the great symbolic moment in the history of the Levels.’
‘a remarkable adaptation’The Draining of the Somerset Levels, Michael Williams, p.17.
the sea at a flowing water’This document is quoted in The Draining of the Somerset Levels, Williams, p.87. The Natural Environment Research Council says the flood of 1607 was the greatest loss of life from a natural catastrophe in the UK in the last five hundred years (https://nerc.ukri.org/planetearth/stories/1812/).
‘receiv’d great Damage’The Storm, Daniel Defoe, p.120.
the hand-printed guide to the LevelsThe pamphlet, which I found very helpful in understanding the geography of the Levels, is The Somerset Moors by Michael Stirling.
‘The winter rising of the river was anxiously watched’Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Kenneth Pople, p.3.
‘There were hidden bits of Cookham as remote as the Milky Way’Gilbert Spencer, quoted in
Stanley Spencer: Visions from a Berkshire Village, Duncan Robinson, p.10.
‘Heaven could not be further away than the other side of Widbrook Common’Stanley Spencer: Visions from a Berkshire Village, Duncan Robinson, p.9.
‘Spencer raised a statue of Hilda’Ibid., p.113.
the twentieth century had begun ‘to transform the Thames Valley into a pleasing replica of Los Angeles’A User’s Guide to the Millennium, J. G. Ballard, p.183.
‘the dappled light below the trees’The Unlimited Dream Company, J. G. Ballard, p.41.
‘new form of aquatic mammal’The Kindness of Women, J. G. Ballard, p.123.
‘a series of violent and prolonged solar storms’The Drowned World, J. G. Ballard, p.21.
‘the earth was poison’After London, Richard Jefferies, p.113.
‘a fertile territory’Welsh Folklore and Folk-Custom, T. Gwynn Jones, p.97.
The sinister tall-hatted botanistis from W. H. Auden’s poem ‘As We Like It’. The ‘low, dishonest decade’ is from ‘September 1, 1939’, by W. H. Auden.
‘The water comes so deep and so fast it is frightening’Weathering the Storm: Stories and photos from the Keswick Floods, November 2009, Keswick Flood Action Group, p.58.
to break the great stillness‘Civic’, Paul Farley, Tramp in Flames.
‘the Thames was wider and shallower than today’s embanked river’The quote, and the following ones in the paragraph, are from Westminster: A Biography, Robert Shepherd.
‘wove in coils, its broad curves moving through a marshy riverine landscape . . .’Thames: Sacred River, Peter Ackroyd, p.68.
‘I was thrown into an intensely absorbing present’A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit, p.5.
The devastating Mississippi floods of 1927 drove the spread of the bluesThey also changed attitudes to the great river. ‘It ended forever the argument over whether levees alone could control the Mississippi River,’ writes John Barry in Rising Tide. Since nothing could control the Mississippi, ‘Man would have to find a way to accommodate it.’