Waterland

by Graham Swift

  In January 1918 Henry Crick is shipped home, an obliging shrapnel wound in his knee. By that time plans are already afoot in Hockwell to raise the war memorial that will bear, amongst others, the name of his brother. Henry Crick becomes a hospital case. Henry Crick limps and blinks and falls flat on his face at sudden noises. For a long time he finds it hard to separate in his mind the familiar-but-foreign fields of the Fens and the foreign-but-familiar mudscapes he has come from. He expects the ground to quake and heave under his feet and become a morass. He is sent to a home for chronic neurasthenics. He thinks: there is only reality, there are no stories left. About his war experiences he says: ‘I remember nothing.’ He does not believe he will one day tell salty Tales of the Trenches: ‘In some of the big old shell-holes – there were eels …’ He does not believe he will ever talk to his son about mother’s milk and hearts.

  But much will happen to Henry Crick. He recovers. He meets his future wife – there indeed is another story. In 1922 he marries. And in the same year Ernest Atkinson brings indirect influence to bear on his future employment. Indirect because the Atkinson word is no longer law; the Atkinson empire, like many another empire, is in decline, and since before the war, when he sold most of his share in the Leem Navigation, Ernest Atkinson has been living like a recluse, and some would say a mad one at that. But in 1922 my father is appointed keeper of the New Atkinson Lock.

  4

  Before the Headmaster

  AND Lewis says, ‘We’re cutting back History …’ Just like that. As if there’s no need to go into the actual and embarrassing reasons for my inevitable departure, these being fully acknowledged (if never discussed) between us. As if we can play the game that it is not under a cloud of personal disgrace that I am to make my exit, but over a simple matter of curricular rethinking.

  But hold on, Lewis. Cutting back History? Cutting History? If you’re going to sack me, then sack me, don’t dismiss what I stand for. Don’t banish my history …

  Children, our commendable and trusty headmaster – if I may waive professional discretion for a moment – regards me and my department (whatever he says) as a thorn in his flesh. He believes that education is for and about the future – a fine theory, an admirable contention. Thus a subject, however honoured by academic tradition, which seeks as its prime function to dwell on the past is, ipso facto, first to go …

  Children, there’s this fellow called Lewis – better known to you, indeed to me, as Lulu – who’s trying to make out that I’m a bad lot, that I’m even just a bit off my rocker. And that this is the inevitable result of my long dabbling in the hocus-pocus of this selfsame History. ‘Early retirement, Tom. On full pension. Half the staff would jump at it.’

  ‘And the closure of my department?’

  ‘Not closure. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not dropping History. It’s an unavoidable reduction. There’ll be no new Head of History. History will merge with General Studies.’

  ‘Amounts to pretty well the same thing.’

  ‘Tom, let’s be clear about this. This isn’t my personal decision. I don’t, it’s true, have a taste for your subject. I’ve never disguised my views. You don’t care for physics. Nor, so you’ve made clear, for headmastership. We’ve been sparring partners for years –’ (a weak smile) ‘–it’s been the basis of our friendship. A little healthy academic animosity. But there’s no question here of a vendetta. You know how the cuts are biting. And you know the kind of pressure I’m under – “practical relevance to today’s real world” – that’s what they’re demanding. And, dammit, you can’t deny there’s been a steady decline in the number of pupils opting for History.’

  ‘But what about now, Lew? What about in the last few weeks? You know as well as I do there’ve been no less than six requests by students doing other subjects to transfer to my ‘A’ level group. I must have some attraction.’

  ‘If you call a complete departure from the syllabus “attraction”, if you call turning your classes into these – circus-acts – “attraction”.’

  He snorts and starts to lose patience.

  ‘I gave you my advice, Tom – my sympathetic advice. I said take a rest, a period of leave …’

  (And come back to no bloody History Department.)

  ‘If you chose to persist—’

  He gets up, taking deep breaths. He stands by the window, hands in pockets, leaning, sideways-on, in the angle formed by the window-frame and a filing cabinet. Four-thirty. Lessons over. Dusk enveloping the playground.

  ‘It just so happens, Tom, that I agree with the powers-that-be. Equipping for the real world. It just so happens that I think that’s what we’re here for.’ A demonstrative hand waved towards the playground. ‘Send just one of these kids out into the world with a sense of his or her usefulness, with an ability to apply, with practical knowledge and not a rag-bag of pointless information—’

  (So there we have it.)

  A good, a diligent, a persevering man. Truly. Sometimes when I leave school I see Lewis’s light still on, on the first floor, suspended like a lantern amid the darkened classrooms. He cares; he strives; he endeavours. And where he can’t prevail he worries, as if in penitential reparation. Worries for his pupils’ sake. Worries that in the 1980s he can’t provide them with golden prospects. Worry’s donated him an ulcer, which he douses with whisky from a filing cabinet (I know about that too).

  A brief sketch of our Headmaster:

  Once upon a time, in the bright mid-sixties … But you won’t remember the bright mid-sixties. OK to be revolutionary then, quite possible to be revolutionary then. The product (let’s put it into historical perspective) of temporary affluence, educational expansion and a short-term good outlook. A sort of revolution of the young … The period also of the cold war, the Cuba crisis and the intercontinental ballistic missile …

  Once upon a time, in the bright mid-sixties, when you were being born and Lewis, apart from being appointed Head (his only rival a history teacher, a senior man who none the less wanted to remain in the classroom), was busy begetting his own little ones, there was plenty of future on offer. Good times for headmasters. Our school a new ship bound for the Promised Land. Lewis, our doughty captain, a teacher of physics and chemistry (technology then in its white-hot days), confidently striding the deck.

  It’s still his ship. But he’s no longer captain. He’s become – a figurehead. Steadfast and staunch, but still a figurehead. Tap him. Beneath the varnish, solid wood (and worms of worry). Our ship’s figurehead is a replica of a headmaster of fifteen years ago.

  Watch him at morning assembly. (You do? And listen too? Yes, yes, he casts a certain spell.) You won’t catch old Lulu looking glum. You won’t see him up on the dais without his chin held high and determinedly jutting, a smile and a joke to hand. He sees that as his role now: hold firm, keep smiling. But it’s hard work, masking the marks of worry. Gives you ulcers.

  And he’s good with kids. Has three of his own. Corners you with them in the staff room (my David, my Cathy – ). At a private dinner party (guests Tom and Mary Crick) he announces, not a little worse for drink, that he’s considering installing a domestic fallout shelter: ‘For the kids, you know, for the kids’ sake …’ If he can no longer be a bountiful Santa Claus, if there are no longer enough of those gift-wrapped promises to go round, he’s still free with pats on the head and genial exhortation. Just work hard at your lessons, be good in class. Your education will save you. A school is a microcosm, so if the school works well … He’s good with kids.

  It’s just the cares of grown-ups, it’s just the addled adult world he’s not so keen on. He wants to be close to his pupils: keeps his distance from his staff. When they have problems they get short shrift …

  He must have worked it out with the Authority. Seized the excuse of their pressure to impose cut-backs. The man’s got to go. No question of that. But how to avoid all that adult mess? Departmental reshuffling. Budgetary directives … And the relevance of the subject to
the real world …

  (But since when have you been living, Lew, in the real world?)

  So he says, ‘We’re cutting back History …’

  He doesn’t say: ‘If it were anything else … But child theft. Child theft. A schoolmaster’s wife. You can’t deny the repercussions. And those damned press reports …’

  He doesn’t say: ‘I’d stand by you, Tom, I’d defend you. But, in the circumstances – these lessons – these circus-acts …’

  He doesn’t say: ‘How is she, Tom?’

  (She’s what in days gone by they might have called mad. She’s in what, in days gone by but not any more, they called an asylum.)

  He doesn’t ask: ‘Why?’

  He says— But he can’t even say what he’d planned to say: he’s opening his filing cabinet, he’s going to offer me whisky. No reasons, no explanations, no digging up what’s past. He’d rather pretend it isn’t real. Reality’s so strange, so strange and unexpected. He doesn’t want to discuss it.

  Mr Lewis Scott, Headmaster, had ‘no comment’ today when faced with angry reaction from parents.

  He’d like it over and done with and out the way.

  Early retirement. Full pension. We’re cutting History.

  5

  A Bruise upon a Bruise

  IT BOBBED gently. It swivelled and rocked in the eddies, face down, arms held out, bent at the elbow, in the position of someone quietly, pronely asleep. But it was dead, not asleep. Since bodies do not sleep which lie face down in the water, least of all if they have been lying thus, undetected in the darkness, for several hours.

  For that night (July the twenty-fifth, 1943), as chance would have it, Dad had not been plagued by his usual restlessness. That night he had slept soundly till woken by the dawn, at which he had risen, along with Dick who, never suffering himself from disturbed nights, woke every morning at five-thirty, to depart at six-thirty on his motor-cycle for the outskirts of Lynn, where he worked on a dredger in the Ouse. Only a commotion coming from the front of the cottage, a hoarse shout from Dad, the clanking of someone running over the cat-walk of the sluice, denied me the extra hour’s sleep I was allowed as a studious schoolboy (schoolboy then on holiday, and not so exclusively studious) and prevented me from being woken, as I usually was, by the coughings and garglings of Dick’s motorbike.

  And when I went into Dick’s room to look out over the river, Dad and Dick were standing on the cat-walk, bent forward, eyes lowered, and Dad was prodding something in the water, tentatively, nervously, with a boat-hook, as if he were the keeper of some dangerous but sluggish aquatic animal and were trying to goad it into life.

  I flung on my clothes; went downstairs, heart jumping.

  At that time of year the river was low. The barrier of the sluice itself, the vertical brick-facing of the adjacent river bank and the pier between sluice and lock formed a deep three-sided enclosure from which no body, alive or dead, could be lifted with ease. Dad must have been considering this fact and was scrambling back to the cottage to look for better tools than the boat-hook, when he met me, scrambling in the opposite direction, by the sluice engine. His face had the look of a criminal caught in mid-crime.

  ‘Freddie Parr,’ he said.

  But I had already recognized the checked summer shirt, the grey cotton trousers, the prominent shoulder-blades, the dark hair which, even when soaked with river water, formed unsmoothable tufts at the back of Freddie’s head.

  ‘Freddie Parr.’

  He brushed past me. I joined Dick on the cat-walk. He held the boat-hook and was giving gentle, deliberate pokes to the body.

  ‘Freddie Parr,’ I said.

  We could not get beyond this repetition of a name.

  ‘Freddie Parr,’ Dick said. ‘Freddie Parr-Parr.’

  For that was how Dick spoke, in a sort of baby-language.

  He turned his face to me; a long potato-coloured face, with a heavy jaw and a slack mouth which hung invariably open, emitting a thin, unconscious wheeze. His eyelids flickered. When Dick was moved, only his eyelids showed it. The muddy complexion neither flushed nor paled; the mouth remained limp; the eyes themselves stared. The eyelids alone registered emotion. But although they registered emotion it was impossible to tell merely from their movement what emotion was being signalled.

  ‘F-Freddie Parr. Dead. D-dead Freddie. Deddie Freddie.’

  He stirred the body with the boat-hook. He was trying to get it to float face upwards.

  Dad had disappeared into the lean-to shed abutting the cottage. Here were kept more boat-hooks, ropes, life-belts and the rakes and grappling hooks he used for clearing debris from the river. Our punt, which would have been the most serviceable piece of equipment at this moment, was lying upturned on a pair of trestles by the tow-path, a section of its bottom removed for repair.

  He emerged again, empty-handed. It was clear that he had given thought to the ropes and hooks, but though they were effective for tree branches and the carcasses of sheep, he baulked at using them on the raw flesh of a dead boy.

  He stood, facing us, on the tow-path. Then quite deliberately, for a matter of several seconds, he turned to look the other way. I know what he was doing. He was hoping that all this was not happening. He was hoping that no drowned body had floated one bright summer’s morning against his sluice-gate. He was hoping that if he turned his back, counted ten, whispered a covert entreaty, it would go away. But it didn’t.

  The sun was still low, glinting on the river. Above the fields, larks were twittering in a milky-blue sky. All over the globe, at this very hour, a war was being fought. Our troops were pushing hard, so we were told, in Sicily; the Russians, also, were pushing. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic … But except for the Lancasters and B24s which favoured for their roosts the flat and strategic country of East Anglia, no hint of this universal strife reached us in our Fenland backwater.

  Dad hobbled back over lock and cat-walk and took the boat-hook from Dick’s hands. There was nothing for it but, by means of this boat-hook, to steer the body through the water to a point where it could be manhandled on to dry land. This meant manoeuvring it around the central pier, across the headgate of the lock, then upstream a few yards along the tow-path to where landing-steps led down to the water and where, had it not been upturned with a hole in its bottom, our punt would have been moored.

  I watched Dad decide between the collar of Freddie’s shirt and the belt of his trousers. He settled for the collar. It would have been better, in the long run, if he had chosen the belt. Slipping the end of the boat-hook between the shirt-collar and the white nape of Freddie’s neck, he gave a twist and succeeded in getting a hold. He began to walk, slowly, holding the boat-hook with great, indeed trembling, concentration, along the cat-walk and up the central pier. We followed him.

  The position of Freddie’s outward-bent arms did not facilitate this journey through the water. It also gave the illusion that he was propelling himself in some crude, floundering way over the surface – a semblance counter-acted by the evident stiffness of both arms and legs, and by the well-known fact, only confirmed by this morning’s discovery, that Freddie Parr could not swim.

  As Dad tried to guide the body round the upstream end of the central pier he ran into difficulties. When he pulled the body across-stream the legs swung out into the current. The right hand and forearm, at the same time, caught against the brickwork, increasing the feet-first swing. By applying sideways pressure with the boat-hook, Dad attempted to correct this tendency and to disengage Freddie’s hand – which none the less remained caught – from the wall of the pier.

  The combined effect of all these movements and counter-movements was that the twist in Freddie’s collar by which he was attached to the boat-hook, twisted still further, to the point where it could twist no more without Freddie twisting with it. All at once, the body, left leg and shoulder first, turned face upwards, and this, unlike the unconvincing imitation of swimming, gave every appearance that Freddie Parr had suddenly
woken from his nose-down slumber and, annoyed by the boat-hook that was both probing his neck and threatening to throttle him, was angrily alive.

  Whether it was in frantic response to this illusion or whether he had decided anyway to abandon his plan and haul the body out of the water there and then, Dad began to pull mightily on the boat-hook. Freddie reared out of the water, as far as his waist, and hung, elbows out, wrists raised in a gesture of surrender, still several feet below Dad. The head fell back and hit the brickwork of the pier. Water flowed out of the mouth. The twisted shirt-collar which could not support the weight of the hanging body, tore apart. The boat-hook caught first under Freddie’s jaw, then, as the body fell back into the water, gouged upwards through cheek, eye-socket and temple.

  And it was then, children – as Freddie Parr plunged but bobbed up again, and as it became clear that the inadvertent wound to his head had drawn blood, but not blood of the usual kind, vivid red and readily mingling with water, but a dark, sticky, reluctant substance, the colour of black-currants – that I came out of a dream. That I realized. I realized I was looking at a dead body. Something I had never seen before. (For I had seen Mother dying but not dead.) And not just any dead body, but the dead body of my friend (true, a devious friend, a friend to be suspected on more than one count – but a friend). Freddie Parr. Whom I had talked to the day before yesterday. With whom, not so long ago, I used to sit and joke and banter on the high banks of the Hockwell Lode where it joins the Leem, not far from where the Leem meets the Ouse. Along with Dick, and Mary Metcalf and Shirley Alford and Peter Baine and David Coe, most of us half-naked and muddy-limbed, because this was our favourite spot for swimming.