To the River

by Olivia Laing

  Another engineer, William Cubitt, took a brief look at the project, but it was William Jessop, the son of a shipwright, who finished the job, as he was often to do with Smeaton’s schemes. In 1787 Jessop was asked to re-survey the river, and armed with his plans a group of local traders and landowners took the matter to parliament. The ins and outs of what followed are excessively complicated, but by 1791 the Lower Ouse Navigation Act was passed and a little later Jessop submitted his final scheme – closely resembling Smeaton’s – for draining the Levels and making the river navigable for trade. A few hundred workers were employed and, steadily, steadily over the next ten years the river’s more tortuous curves were sliced away, the banks rebuilt, a breakwater flung up at Newhaven and the channel widened and dredged so that it ran both swift and clear. Barges no longer ran aground at Piddinghoe, unable to ship their cargoes of coal, salt, fruit and slate upstream. Instead, it was the river that was imprisoned, compelled to remain within the reinforced banks that the navvies built: at a cost, by the century’s end, of nearly £20,000.

  Did matters end there? Of course not. The lower river may have been canalised, but it still remained at risk of fluvial flooding when rain or surge tides overtopped the banks. One of the worst came in 1852, when the rains were so great sheep drowned in the fields, train lines were impassable, and harvests of hay and corn were beaten to the ground and rotted where they lay. There was another in 1960, of comparative severity to the 2000 flood, though it caused less damage, for in that period the floodplain hadn’t yet filled with the housing estates and supermarkets that clutter it today. As for the defensive work, though the duties of the commissioners have long since been absorbed by the Environment Agency the old techniques of casting and shoresetting have not yet been abandoned. The banks are still raised and braced, the vegetation dragged away, work that in 2008 was estimated to cost £410,000 a year, for labour is dearer now than it was two centuries ago.

  I leaned my chin on the wall and gazed down at the network of ditches, glinting in the light like fishing lines. The river turned its curves, for though its crookedness had been corrected, it was never made entirely straight. For the last ten years, I’d laboured under the impression that this view was almost natural, and now I felt a fool. Landscapes, we all agree these days, are palimpsests, laid down in layers over the centuries. While this is undoubtedly correct, it’s also true that some eras work in pencil and others in indelible ink. The river bore the signature of the Industrial Age; its previous character might be discernible but it cannot be retrieved.

  The first time I was shown the map that Smeaton used I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. The Ouse looked intricate and tricky, plunging through deeps, meanders, shoals and shallows with names I’d never heard. Iron Hole, I traced, Bramble Shallow, Ranscombe Pool. Had there really been a fording point near Stock House, where the river now runs at a gallop through banks that rise a good six feet above the outlying land? And where was Sleeper’s Hole? Swallowed up by the marina at Newhaven, I guessed, while the Washing Place at Malling had been dredged clean away.

  The clouds had been banking up behind Mount Harry while my back was turned. Now they started to spill south, following the river towards the Channel. I watched them slip overhead, rudderless in the fretting breeze. The river’s transformations bothered me because they seemed to highlight the wrongheaded rapaciousness of my own species, carving the world up with no thought to its consequences: behaviour, ironically enough, that seems doomed to bring an apocalypse of floods and droughts upon us all. I thought of the sewage treatment works trickling their poisoned outfalls into the Bevern; of the water companies that abstracted groundwater from its secret hoards in the Downs. And then I thought ahead, a century or two. Would the river have dried up? Would its snaking passage through the valley be marked by cracked earth, nothing more? Or would the sea have inched an advance until it took the town and returned it to a salty swamp, contaminated with the bodies of cattle and the bright bobbing plastic toys with which we’ve filled our world? Would a watcher stand here one day and see a desert, or would they look out upon a toxic sea?

  Lewes’s periodic and continuing floods are a reminder that all actions store up consequences. Building on a floodplain, no matter how many sewers have been contrived, remains a risky venture – until, of course, we find a way to make it rain at will. And like those forest fires that are necessary for the germination of certain seeds, a flood is not entirely a destructive event, though I wouldn’t perhaps think that if my own house had been filled with sewage, my books crimped and mildewed, my clothes washed away. But even the Environment Agency is agreed that too much of the Ouse’s catchment has been reclaimed and that if Lewes is to survive the travails of climate change some land must be relinquished to the river.

  I’d come, somewhere in my delvings, across a project to reestablish washlands on the banks of the Ouse. Washlands are meadows that can tolerate flooding of short duration, acting as holding bays for the excess water that would otherwise force its way through culverts and sewers and into shops and homes. As farming has grown ever more intensive these habitats have become progressively imperilled, though they once grew so richly that they could be used three times in a year, bringing forth first a harvest of hay at midsummer and then an aftermath crop that cows could graze into autumn and sheep right through to the winter storms.

  The idea, cooked up by ecologists and historians at the University of Sussex, was to re-establish these wildflower meadows, reducing the risk of flooding downstream and returning to the river those fugitive grasses that I’d seen near Sheffield Park: bent and black knapweed, cock-foot, crested dog’s-tail, fescue and Yorkshire fog. The scheme was a tiny one, and yet there was an elegance to it that was deeply pleasing: it was both economical and lavish and made me hopeful for the future. Perhaps we will be able to accommodate ourselves to this world after all, instead of chipping away at it until the foundations collapse and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

  I swung down the stairs in a rush, suddenly full of beans and ravenously hungry. I bought a slab of pizza and a can of fizzy sugar, faintly flavoured with elderflower, in a strange sort of grocer’s that had heaped in its window bread, a bicycle, potted geraniums and a spinning wheel. I took my lunch down to the railway lands and built myself a picnic in the sun. Jackdaws were flying together over the builders’yard, one calling Ka Ka Ka and another answering Clack Clack Clack. I lay back, swigging the counterfeit cordial and counting the flowers that grew entwined beneath the brambles. White clover, ribbed melilot, black medick, plantain which is good for sore throats, mugwort, curled dock, hedge woundwort with its protruding lower lip, like a currency trader with whom I once went on a blind and unrepeated date. The ground ivy was no longer in flower but I rubbed a few leaves in my hand all the same, hoping for that brisk aromatic hit.

  After I’d eaten I walked on along the bank to the Rowing Club, which is on an island formed by the cut that severed Cliffe Shallow. The river had turned molten again. It was the colour of milk chocolate and just as glutinous. The surface was no longer glassy, but scored rather with lines and pockmarks, as if a struggle was going on far beneath, the stays of current cleaving together and wrenching away. The little boats swung grimly to and fro. I leant right over the river to make out their names: Star One, Deejay, Osprey, the tarp-covered Triton. A man on the far bank was lifting a kayak out of the water. The grasses here were the same metallic blue-green as unripe wheat. It was high tide, and the river had filled to just below the brim, so that some stems were reflected on the surface and others drowned beneath it.

  There was another story about a submerged valley that I’d forgotten, and it came back to me then, striking a different note to those dreamy tales my granny used to spin. Floods and droughts are both predicted to increase with climate change, and the worries about insufficient water, as well as its excess, have begun to preoccupy the water companies. South East Water already manages two reservoirs supplied by the Ouse, but f
or years has been angling to build a third at Clay Hill, obliterating a valley just east of here to supply the region’s ever-increasing water needs.

  Matthew and I once looked at a house on the edge of that valley, a slate-tiled house in the shadow of Plashett Wood with a huge neglected garden out the back. The kitchen floor was rotting and there was no cooker or fridge. One of the bedrooms had been painted a bright, unhealthy pink, with a frieze on the wall that depicted a cartwheeling pig. Someone had tried to tear it down and failed, leaving it to hang in dismally fluttering strips. The rooms smelled of dogs and misery. Outside the front door mint flourished in a border full of damp clumps of discarded toilet paper. I can’t live here, I said and so regretfully we left, for the location was pretty and we had become increasingly desperate of finding somewhere that would suit us both.

  The house would survive, but the land it overlooked: that would be sunk beneath millions of litres of river water if the company’s plans were approved. The valley had once been a hunting estate owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and was now a tenanted farm, run in the old style, with crops grown in rotation in small fields that were divided by towering hedges. In the field boundaries great oaks remained, for as Thomas Browne said, generations pass while some trees stand. The ancient woodland that clung on in shaws was home to hordes of bats of many species: Natterer’s bat, which can catch a spider from its web; Daubenton’s bat, which fishes insects from the water with its feet; Brandt’s bat and the rare Bechstein’s; the swift noctule; the barbastelle; the brown long-eared bat; the whiskered bat and the soprano pipistrelle.

  The bats rise each evening and cross the woods and glebes, hunting for beetles and midges above the remains of medieval fishponds. A reservoir will leave them with nowhere to feed or roost: no rotting trees, no woodland pools, no flowering meadows where the moths – the Oak Eggar, the Garden Tiger – circle above the pale yarrow and the glowing heads of clover. The farm and its scattered Georgian cottages will be plucked down, I guess, and there will just be water, an abundance of it, and somewhere far beneath it the ghosts of massive oaks.

  I lay there in the grasses that grew at the river’s edge, disinclined to get up and travel on. I lay amid the mugwort that flourished in this stretch of land, that cousin of wormwood which vanquishes parasites and which St John the Baptist is said to have worn in a girdle about his waist. The cows were grazing in the fields, wheeling away when a walker passed, and in the distance the cars crossed back and forth above the bridge where the A27 swings up to vault the river. The chalk rose white before me, carved into portals and sleeping places until it resembled nothing so much as a mouldering tower block, home to a vast family of jackdaws, a gathering so unruly that it was once accurately known as a clattering. I watched them come and go for a long time. There were binoculars in my pack, wedged between the sunblock and a sweating lump of cheese, and I pulled them out and set the bag behind my back, where I could rest my elbows on it.

  A flotilla of nine jacks had crossed in very high, circling on the thermals that persist above Mount Caburn, when something plunged vertically out of the sky. I held my breath. It landed on a narrow ridge almost at the top of the cliff and stood there, one foot forward, shoulders hunched: part ballet dancer, part pugilist. Peregrine!

  In the 1960s the peregrine population of Britain had been decimated due to relentless hunting and the increasing use of pesticides on crops. DDT was a particular problem; it accumulated in the bodies of the smaller birds that were the falcon’s meat and caused the peregrines’ eggshells to grow perilously thin. When DDT was banned and stricter laws regarding hunting passed, the birds recovered and came back, pair by pair, from the brink. In recent years they’d begun to return to the south, favouring city blocks as well as the cliffs of old. There was a nesting pair that lived next to my gym in Brighton, and a falconer I’d met recently told me he thought two more had settled here.

  The binoculars were jammed so hard against my face that I could feel rings engraving around my eyes. The bird footed casually at the husky grass, glaring from side to side so that I could see the dark markings that gave her the appearance of wearing a helmet. I couldn’t see if there was a nest beside her or if the ledge was simply somewhere to pause. And then, before I’d quite taken her in, she shifted her weight and rose sheer to the sky, up beyond the rook roads, until she was just a dark anchor among many dark shapes, all wheeling, a centrifugal surge of motion above the collapsing cliff.

  I rose then too, and hoisted the bag onto my back. As I turned I could hear the water lapping almost at my heels, a flood tide rushing to glut the river. It rises and it falls, that flood, and in time it will have the barbastrelle and the brown-eared bat; it will have the Oak Eggar and the Garden Tiger; it will have the peregrine and the clattering jacks. In time I too will lie beneath the water, and here I differ from my granny, for I do not think that in a hundred years or in a thousand any one of us will be returned to the quick and ready air, any more than I think the iguanodon might rise and stalk the railway lands, or the soldiers that perished here climb to their feet and draw their swords. Right now, though, it is we who have the tenancy of this shared realm. I would like to think that we might pass it on, this small blue planet, cauled in water. Till a’ the seas gang dry, I guess, and it is blue no more.

  VI

  THE LADY VANISHES

  TO LEAVE LEWES I HAD to pass under two bridges, one carrying the road and the other the railway. The concrete was irresistible to graffiti artists and among the tags and scribbled insults someone had sketched a woman’s face in quick blue lines, her cheekbones aslant, her hair sleeked back. She looked out through empty eyes at the water as it rushed between the girders, vacant and lovely, oblivious to the traffic that screeched above her.

  The face struck an echo, and for once I could remember what it was. In Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes’s last collection, there’s a poem about a clay head that is abandoned by the side of a river. The book was published in 1998, a month or two before Hughes died, and all the poems in it, written over decades, concern his relationship with Sylvia Plath. In the one I was thinking of, Plath is given a terracotta bust modelled in her likeness by an American friend. The head disturbs her. The likeness is off-kilter – the lips too swollen perhaps, the eyes too close together. She doesn’t want it in her room but nor does she want to toss it away, and so the two of them, Ted and Sylvia, carry it along the towpath towards Grantchester and deposit it in the branches of a willow, where it can watch the yellow leaves as they flicker down into the water.

  What were they hoping to do? Avert the bad luck they both felt gathering; strike it away with a single resonant act? If so, they failed. It didn’t take long for disquiet to flare: the primitive fear that harm done to a model will by sympathetic magic cause harm to the original too. What happened to the head, Hughes asks. Did boys with sticks smash it apart? Did it crumble over decades into the Granta? Or is it still there, in the bole of the willow, owl-eyed, the river’s daughter, watching and not speaking: the one that got away?

  We navigate by omens such as these. You don’t have to be a poet to be prone to apophenia, to seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday. In a certain mood, the earth itself can seem a ouija board, calling out its advice, discharging symbol after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single black and white bird winging down the sky. I once dated – in fact loved – a man who left me as we walked together through a field. As we had been talking, he told me, he couldn’t help but notice that we walked in separate furrows that ran parallel but did not conjoin. This, it seemed to him, was the essence of our relationship, though whether the path had clarified our fate or actually authored it I didn’t ask.

  Martin. Christ, why was I thinking about him? I shook myself physically, like a cat caught in the rain. These were marsh thoughts, uneasily buried: the doomed woman, the lost lover. They belonged to the region I was entering, the reclaim
ed fields of the Brooks, crisscrossed with sewers and barred with sluice gates. In the winter the ditches run like mercury but now they were brackish and dully green, home to marsh frogs, those alien interlopers that do not croak but cackle as you pass. Virginia Woolf drowned herself down here, in the lowlands that stretch between the Downs. It was hardly any wonder my mind had taken a ghoulish turn.

  I came out from under the bridge then and as I stepped into the light I caught a flash of colour. At the foot of one of the pilings there was a single pyramidal orchid the flushed pink of a cat’s tongue. I didn’t know what it boded but it made me smile, growing there unlooked for in the trampled dirt at the base of a bypass. And then – as if I’d cried out for omens to the sibyl of the underpass – something dark shot through the space at the corner of my eye and disappeared into the river. I stepped back, stunned. What the hell had happened? Had a car shucked a hubcap as it swung across the bridge? As I craned to see a cormorant emerged from the water, lifted briefly to the air and then settled demurely on the surface. Show off, I muttered. I can swim too you know. The cormorant ignored me, as a creature that can fly through two elements no doubt has the right to do.

  It was half past three. I didn’t have far to go: a couple of miles of river path and then a skim over the fields to Rodmell, where Virginia Woolf had lived, off and on, from 1919 to her death in 1941. She loved walking in this marsh, and it wasn’t hard to see why. God, but it was beautiful. I’d given up trying to fight through the vegetation at the top of the embankment and had climbed down to the water’s edge, following a faint, yellowing path through the same blue-green grass that had earlier reminded me of wheat. Last time I’d been down here I got caught in a torrential rainstorm and had to fight my way through dripping grasses the height of my chest, until I was as conclusively drenched as if I had walked home along the riverbed.