Waterland

by Graham Swift

  And there’s no saying what consequences we won’t risk, what reactions to our actions, what repercussions, what brick towers built to be knocked down, what chasings of our own tails, what chaos we won’t assent to in order to assure ourselves that, none the less, things are happening. And there’s no saying what heady potions we won’t concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

  Once upon a time the future Mrs Crick – who was then called Metcalf – as a result of certain events which took place while she was still, like some of you, a schoolgirl, decided to withdraw from the world and devote herself to a life of solitude, atonement and (which was only making a virtue of necessity) celibacy. Not even she has ever said how far God came into this lonely vigil. But three and a half years later she emerged from these self-imposed cloisters to marry a prospective history teacher (an old and once intimate acquaintance), Tom Crick. She put aside her sackcloth and sanctity and revealed in their stead what this now ex-history teacher (who is no longer sure what’s real and what isn’t) would have called then a capacity for realism. For she never spoke again, at least not for many years, of that temporary communing with On High.

  But it must have been always there, lurking, latent, ripening like some dormant, forgotten seed. Because in the year 1979, a woman of fifty-two, she suddenly began looking again for Salvation. She began this love-affair, this liaison – much to the perplexity of her husband (from whom she could not keep it a secret) – with God. And it was when this liaison reached a critical – in the usual run of liaisons not unfamiliar, but in this case quite incredible – pitch, that your astounded and forsaken history teacher, prompted as he was by the challenging remarks of a student called Price, ceased to teach history and started to offer you, instead, these fantastic-but-true, these believe-it-or-not-but-it-happened Tales of the Fens.

  Children, women are equipped with a miniature model of reality: an empty but fillable vessel. A vessel in which much can be made to happen, and to issue in consequence. In which dramas can be brewed, things can be hatched out of nothing. And it was Tom Crick, history-teacher-to-be, who, during the middle years of the Second World War, not knowing what repercussions, what reactions, and not without rivals (though none of them was God), was responsible for filling the then avid and receptive vessel of Mary Metcalf, later Mrs Crick.

  But on the afternoon of July the twenty-sixth, 1943, he was about to know what repercussions.

  7

  About Holes and Things

  FOR at four o’clock on that same afternoon, after I had assisted in retrieving the body of Freddie Parr from the River Leem but before I had plucked from the same river a certain brown bottle, I was riding on an ancient bicycle along the narrow, pot-holed but otherwise dead-flat road which runs between the Fenland villages of Hockwell and Wansham, to meet, at an appointed time and place, the fore-mentioned Mary Metcalf. I had taken the main Gildsey to Apton road, which runs eastwards, close by the lock-keeper’s cottage at the Atkinson Lock, following the south bank of the Leem. But I had not turned left – which would have been my quickest, and my usual route – on to the road which crosses the Leem by Hockwell bridge and heads northwards to Wansham and Downham Market, but continued along the Apton road a further quarter of a mile, wheeled my bike across the footbridge which spanned both the river and a line of the Great Eastern Railway, and thence, by a circuitous route, involving travelling along three unnecessary sides of a rectangle, regained the road to Wansham. I had not crossed the Leem by the Hockwell bridge because on the other side of the bridge, only a little distance from it, yet hidden by the raised banks of the river, a line of trees and a bend the road makes on the northern side, was a level-crossing. And the keeper of this level-crossing was Jack Parr, Freddie Parr’s father.

  All of which meant that, what with the troubled events of the day, I was late for my rendezvous.

  But Mary was not late. She sat in the hollow of sheltered ground formed by an angle in the banks of the man-made waterway known as the Hockwell Lode. To her left was a line of sunken, vivid grass, dotted with clumps of rushes and marsh weed, marking a silted-up drain, and to her front and right (masking her from me as I strode with my bike along the top of the embankment) a group of those trees so characteristic of temperate flatlands – poplars. Perched on an outwork on the landward side of the Lode bank, which formed the termination of the defunct drain, were the remains of a windmill. That is to say, the tarred, cracked wooden shell of the mill’s lower portion, no more than six feet in height, devoid of its internal workings, open to the sky, but preserving still, minus its door, the tiny access-way through which the mill-man had once ducked to enter. And leaning against the derelict mill, on top of the mill emplacement, beside the weed-choked brick culvert and rusted cog-wheels which once conveyed water from the old drain up to the Lode, sat Mary, in a red-check skirt, knees drawn up to her chin and clasped in her arms, waiting for me to appear.

  The silting up of the old drain – when abandoned in favour of a new pumping station to the north – had left the adjacent land wet and spongy, fit only for summer pasture. So Mary shared her vigil with a score or more of munching cows, which cropped the lush grass and released their splatterings of dung between her and the poplar spinney. The cows belonged to Farmer Metcalf, whose chief business was beets and potatoes; but who, not wasting an acre of land, kept also a small herd of Friesians which roamed every summer up and down the margins of the Lode, and sent their milk to a dairy in Apton. Thus it was not only mother’s milk but Farmer Metcalf’s milk which Dick and I drank when we were boys. And it was her father’s milk – but, alas, never her mother’s – that Mary Metcalf grew up on.

  For Mary was a farmer’s daughter. Her father owned the fields, thick at that moment with creamy-flowered potatoes, which she could see if she looked to her left, across the narrow ditch dividing pasture from ploughland. And away in front of her, hidden by poplar spinney and twisting banks, lay Harold Metcalf’s brick farm-house and clustered farm buildings, looming abruptly and starkly amidst the flat fields, as is the manner of Fenland farms, and in no way nestling or huddling like the farms of picture-books. A Polt Fen Farm had existed since the days when Thomas Atkinson drained Polt Fen, and the Metcalfs, who built the new farmhouse in 1880, were the second family to own it.

  Polt Fen Farm, like many farms of the region, was not large but made up for size with intensity of yield. Harold Metcalf employed three permanent hands and an additional contingent of cursing raw-fingered temporary labourers during the long and malodorous winter beet harvest. But now, in the summer of 1943, neither permanent nor temporary hands, excluding the lame or one-eyed variety, were available. Instead, into Farmer Metcalf’s farm, as into other neighbourhood farms, fluttered coveys of Land Girls, in boiler-suits and dungarees and tightly fastened head-scarves, their forearms growing muscular and sunburnt, their urban decorum evaporating in the summer heat. Broken-down trucks ferried these creatures from their hostels in Apton and Wansham to the scenes of their labours, to the leers and jeers of the local inhabitants. It was said that the land girls brought to our Fenland byways an atmosphere of subversion and simmering sexuality. But simmering sexuality – as you may well know, children – is always there.

  Freddie Parr claimed that he had enjoyed the utmost favours of one of these female migrants – an auburn-haired beauty called Joyce, whose well-formed rump, upturned as she worked in the fields, Freddie spent many hours watching from the banks of the Hockwell Lode. And it was true that after they shed their initial ladylike airs, the land girls would often wave to us local kids, tell us their names and share their field-side lunches with us (though they persistently declined our invitations to bathing parties in the Hockwell Lode). And it was even true that this same auburn-haired Joyce used to wave with smiling condescension at Freddie in particular (for perhaps she was touched by his moony attentions); and only stopped one day when she saw that Freddie (who was barely f
ourteen at the time) was not only vigorously waving back with one hand but with the other doing something of unmistakable import in the region of his trouser buttons. After which Joyce was seen no more in the fields around Hockwell.

  So, doubtless, Freddie Parr was lying.

  And now, in any case, Freddie Parr was dead.

  And the land girls, anyway, were not for us. At night, healthily exhausted, they were swooped up by roaming airmen from the bases, whom bad weather kept from their missions. And if the girls gave themselves readily to these heroes of the skies, then it was not for anyone to protest and was even regarded as proper, since these same brave fliers might be dead tomorrow.

  But Freddie Parr was dead too.

  Farmer Metcalf had no idle fancies about acquiring for the length of the war a temporary harem. A grave, reserved, hard-headed man, he regarded the land girls as replacement labour and made no concessions either to their sex or to the patriotic motives which brought them to his acres. Nor did he look upon them as fit companions for his only daughter. For years, with the earnestness of a good beet- and potato-grower secretly emulating the role of gentleman-farmer, he had discouraged all tendencies on her part to help out either in the fields or in the farm-yard, to become the archetypal farmer’s daughter – dung on her boots and straw in her hair. With a view to her becoming a cultivated and elegant lady, an embodiment of everything above beets and potatoes, he sent her, at his own expense, to the St Gunnhilda Convent School in Gildsey.

  For Harold Metcalf was not only a farmer with ambitious notions but also a Roman Catholic. That is to say, he had married a Catholic wife, a fact which might have had no effect on the dour disposition of Harold Metcalf, were it not that Mrs Metcalf had died, in the second year of their marriage, and in remaining faithful to her memory – Harold never remarried and those land girls could not snare him – he conferred the articles of her faith on his daughter. Thus ‘Mary’ became this daughter’s inevitable name, and thus Harold Metcalf would have turned her, if he only could, into a little madonna, who would be transformed, in due course, into a princess. And Mary might have met her father half-way over this arrangement, which, in effect, was that she should be a distilled and purified version of her mother, had she known at all what her mother had been like. For Mary’s mother had died in giving birth to Mary. And perhaps it was this common factor – the absence of a mother – that (among other things) drew her and Tom Crick together.

  So Farmer Metcalf, intending his daughter for Higher Things, but scarcely consulting her own inclinations, sent her to the St Gunnhilda School for Girls (more exclusive by far than the Gildsey High School for Girls), firmly believing his outlay and his efforts must have results. Just as his neighbour, Henry Crick, a humble lock-keeper, seeing his younger child, without any paternal effort or outlay, win a scholarship to Gildsey Grammar School (for Boys) and begin to immerse himself in history books, drew the converse conclusion that his son must have a vision which he lacked, and began consciously and apologetically to see to it that this son should not soil his hands on sluice engines.

  Yet Henry Crick once had a wife whom Harold Metcalf might have doted on for a daughter …

  And so it was on the little four-carriage train that called at Hockwell Station (not a stone’s throw from Jack Parr’s signal-box and level-crossing) and went on via Newhithe to Gildsey, that Mary and I got to know each other. That, to the accompaniment of clacking bogie-wheels and passing steam-puffs, irrepressible symptoms began to appear and steps were taken, tacit or overt, to relieve them.

  Yet for a long time, even before these hesitant but tell-tale traits broke surface, your history-teacher-to-be was in love with Mary Metcalf. For a long time the very feelings that drew him towards her placed her also, in his eyes, at an impossible distance, and made him melancholy and mute.

  He is timid, he is shy – this fledgling adolescent. He has a sorrowful streak. He believes he is fated to yearn from afar. And why is he these things? Why sad? Why this gap between him and the world (which, for better or worse, he attempts to fill with books)? And why, even when he cannot deny certain distinct signs – that Mary Metcalf, it seems, might have feelings about him too (because his reticence and plaintiveness have not failed to lend him an air of mystery, and Mary cannot resist a mystery) – can he scarcely believe that it can really be happening? That this unattainable girl—? That he—?

  Because his mother is not long dead. Because she died when he was nine years old. Mary’s mother is dead too, but Mary cannot be said to miss her, never having known her. Whereas this son of a lock-keeper has not yet got over missing his mother.

  So even more, perhaps, than Farmer Metcalf, Tom Crick has turned Mary – in spite of the facts – into an untouchable madonna (that red sacred heart, emblem of the blessed St Gunnhilda, that burns so tantalizingly, so ambiguously, on the breast pocket of her school blazer). Yet he knows – he has evidence – that Mary Metcalf is no demure convent girl. And Mary Metcalf knows that although Tom Crick has a Platonic disposition and a brainy head …

  Thus the Great Eastern Railway which brought these two young people into twice-daily contact – she in a rust-red uniform, he in inky black – is to be held responsible for loosening inhibitions which, without its nudging and jostling, might have stuck fast, and for a merging of destinies which might otherwise never have occurred. For while the shadow of the engine – westward-slanting in the morning, eastward-slanting in the evening – rippled over the beet fields, the unattainable was attained. Certain notions were gradually (and not unpainfully) dissolved, certain advances made and, less falteringly, encouraged, and, at last (but this was the work of two years’ railway travel), an undeniable intimacy mutually – but always circumspectly – achieved.

  And why were we so circumspect, beyond the normal discretion in such cases, on these schoolward and homeward journeys? Why did we choose our carriage and compartment with care and last-minute changes (which no doubt earned us more attention)? Why did we sometimes, on the return journey, deliberately miss the ten-past-four from Gildsey and pick up the next train from Newhithe, thereby not only avoiding the usual carriage-loads of passengers but allowing various fondnesses to occur on the walk from Gildsey, across the mud-grey Ouse, past the decaying lighter wharves of Newhithe, along the tree-screened fringes of celery and onion fields?

  Because on that four-ten train might be Freddie Parr and Peter Baine and Shirley Alford, not to mention other contemporaries from Hockwell and Apton, pupils, for the most part, at the Gildsey Secondary School (blue uniform) and the Gildsey High School (dark brown and green uniform).

  But Freddie Parr above all. There was no suppressing Freddie Parr. Freddie lacked subtlety, had a crude tongue. Freddie was often drunk at four-thirty in the afternoon on secret supplies of whisky stolen from his father, who in turn procured it, by nefarious means, from an American air base. Freddie, at sixteen, had the mind of an advanced roué and a complex about the size of his penis – which was average. I might have been intimidated by Freddie Parr were it not that I knew, at least, that I could swim and he could not – a distinct failing in a watery region. But there remained Freddie’s leering eye, and his talent for gossip. For, no doubting it, Freddie would have hastened to tell my brother how Mary and I always sat together (and not just that) on the Gildsey train. Because, by the summer of 1943, it was a well-known fact (how well I knew it) that Dick Crick often took solitary evening walks along the banks of the Hockwell Lode in the direction of Polt Fen Farm.

  Freddie would gladly have implanted in Dick’s mind the seeds of revenge for the thwarted designs that he, Freddie, had on Mary; were it not that he feared that Dick might suspect him; that he spurned the ignominious role of pander; and were it not that he stood in awe, in any case, of my brother. Because Dick Crick, it was generally rumoured – even his own brother was unable to refute it – possessed a penis of fabulous dimensions. And had it not been my opinion that even if Dick had had a penis like a marrow he would not have known h
ow to use it; had I not innocently believed that brothers, after all, are brothers; had Freddie Parr not curbed his tongue; and had I not wanted to keep Mary so much that instead of taking jealous exception, I myself had already pandered to her fascination with Dick (for she couldn’t resist a mystery), not least with his much wondered-at parts – I might have been afraid of my brother.

  As afraid before as I was after that day we pulled Freddie from the river with a new bruise and an old bruise on his head …

  But in the school holidays, when the Great Eastern Railway no longer provided us with a travelling rendezvous, we would meet in the late afternoon by the stump of the old windmill, near the poplar spinney, by the bend in the Lode, out of sight of the farmhouse of Polt Fen Farm.

  Why here? And why at this particular hour?

  Because it was here that one day in August 1942 (defeat in the desert; the U-boat stranglehold) we first explored, tentatively but collaboratively, what we called then simply ‘holes’ and ‘things’.

  Hesitantly, but at Mary’s free invitation, I put the tip of my index finger into the mouth of Mary’s hole, and was surprised to discover what an inadequate word was ‘hole’ for what I encountered. For Mary’s hole had folds and protuberances, and, so it seemed to me, its false and its genuine entrances, and – as I found the true entrance – it revealed the power of changing its configuration and texture at my touch, of suggesting a moist labyrinth of inwardly twisting, secret passages. The dark curled hairs – only recently sprouted – between Mary’s thighs, on which at that moment broad Fen sunlight was genially smiling, had, on close inspection, a coppery sheen. I dipped one finger, up to the first, the second knuckle into Mary’s hole; then a second finger alongside it. This was possible, indeed necessary, because Mary’s hole began to reveal a further power to suck, to ingest; a voracity which made me momentarily hold back. And yet the chief and most wondrous power of Mary’s hole was its capacity to send waves of sensation not only all over Mary’s body, but all over mine; and this not by some process of mental association but by a direct electric current which flowed up my arm, flushed my face, and gathered in the part of me to which Mary was simultaneously applying her hand.