Waterland

by Graham Swift

  When can we fix the zenith of the Atkinsons? When can we date the high summer of their success? Was it on that June day in 1849? Or was it later, in 1851, when among the products privileged to be represented at the Great Exhibition was a bottled ale from the Fens, known appropriately as Grand ’51, which, in the face of strong competition, won a silver medal for excellence, outdoing even the noble brewers of Burton-on-Trent? Was it before that, in 1846, when having served his six years as alderman of the town, George Atkinson was unanimously elected mayor? Or was it in 1848 (two years later) when his brother Alfred succeeded to the same office, and the tacit principle became established that whoever, thereafter, would be nominal and official mayor, the true mayoralty of the town would belong always to its brewers?

  Was it in 1862? When George and Alfred, stout men now with greying whiskers, as old as the ageing century, decided that their labours had earned them the right to stylish seclusion, to a rural retreat to complement the bustle of the town; and so had built at Kessling, though not near the maltings and their father’s former residence but a good mile or more to the south, an opulently ugly country mansion, Kessling Hall, complete with gargoyles and turrets, happily concealed by thick woods, where at weekends or for longer sojourns George and Catherine would occupy one wing and Alfred and Eliza another, but would meet together in the Long Room or the Dining Room to entertain visiting men of rank and their families; and where the cousins, Dora and Louisa, young ladies in their mid-twenties – but not so young that they did not give cause for recurrent concern – would suffer and deter, on the Terrace, or the Croquet Lawn, suitor after suitor. For they preferred, above all suitors, their darling Papas, and to the company of young men that of each other, and perhaps a volume of moody verse.

  Or was the pinnacle not yet reached, even in the luxury of Kessling Hall? Was it not, indeed, to be reached during the ascendancy of George and Alfred but during that of Arthur, who, as his father and uncle puffed their proud cigars at Kessling, was already assuming command at Gildsey, and who, in 1872 – as Atkinson Ale was in demand over all the eastern counties, and as a special pale brew known as Atkinson India Ale was being regularly shipped thousands of miles to Bombay – added yet another province (in well-tried manner) to the Atkinson dominions, by marrying Maud Briggs, daughter of Robert Briggs, owner of the Great Ouse Flour Mills?

  Is there no end to the advance of commerce? But should we speak only of the advance of commerce, and not of the advance of Ideas – those Ideas which the Atkinsons cannot help conceiving? For these present Atkinsons, brothers and son, though they would be the first, if need be, to point with rigid fingers to facts – to figures of profit and sale, to sacks of malt, barrels of ale, chaldrons of coal – are apt also, when the mood takes them, which it does more and more, to make light of these material burdens, and to assert in almost self-renouncing tones that what moves them is indeed none other than that noble and impersonal Idea of Progress.

  Have they not brought improvement to a whole region, and do they not continue to bring it? Do they not travail long and indefatigably in the council chamber as well as in the boardroom, for the welfare of the populace? Have they not established, out of their own munificence, an orphanage, a town newspaper, a public meeting-hall, a boys’ school (black uniform), a bath-house – a fire station? And are not all these works, and others, proof of that great Idea that sways them; proof that all private interest is subsumed by the National Interest and all private empires do but pay tribute to the Empire of Great Britain?

  What is happening to our little Fenland outpost, once but a mud hump with a wattle chapel, once so removed from the wide world?

  How many times does the Union Jack flutter above the arched and motto-inscribed entrance to the New Brewery to mark some occasion of patriotic pride? How many times do George and Alfred and Arthur pause in their boardroom addresses, hands on lapels, to allude to some new instance of imperial prowess? And how often do those barrels and bottles of Atkinson Ale find new wonders to celebrate? ‘The Grand ’51’; ‘The Empress of India’; ‘The Golden Jubilee’; ‘The Diamond Jubilee’ …?

  Why this seeking for omens? This superstition? Why must the zenith never be fixed? Because to fix the zenith is to contemplate decline. Because if you construct a stage then the show must go on. Because there must always be – don’t deny it – a future.

  Yet when, in 1874, Arthur Atkinson is elected Member of Parliament for Gildsey and concludes his maiden speech with the much-applauded phrase, ‘For we are not masters of the present, but servants of the future’, does he know what he means? Does he mean what he says? Is he merely masking behind that gesture towards duty and sacrifice the smug knowledge that he is, indeed, master of the present, and is that why his words receive, from his Tory-democratical compeers, such loud and self-congratulatory ‘hear, hears’? Does he see the future as only a perpetuation of the present? Does he see what the future will bring? Does he see that the fate of the future (my father’s and my own, early twentieth-century present, when there were still plenty of copper pennies bearing the rubbed-away profile of Victoria) will be only to lament and wearily explain the loss of his confident sentiments?

  Which way do we go? Forwards to go backwards? Backwards to go forwards?

  Can Sarah solve this puzzle – Sarah who in 1874 has seen ninety-two years and yet, since that bang on the head, has forgotten the date of her birthday and has perhaps been oblivious of the passage of time? Who, so old yet so vigilant in her eyrie above Water Street, is now required to add to her various guises – Guardian Angel, Holy Mother, Saint Gunnhilda-come-again – yet another. To take in her left hand a trident and in her right a shield, to submit her wrinkled scalp and thin white locks to a plumed helmet, to allow her blue velvet chair to be transformed into a seagirt rock and to evoke an intrepid Britannia, staring, staring— To where?

  How do the Atkinsons mark, in 1874, the ninety-second birthday of Sarah? With beer and merriment? With raised tankards and toasts? For once, being a brewer’s daughter, Sarah enjoyed her beer. Once she liked nothing better than to sit cradling a pewter pot in her lap. Once, before she became a lady of the town and all the other, more remarkable apparitions that fate would turn her into, she downed many a cheery draught with – her darling husband. But now, though it has been pushed at times hopefully before her, not a drop will pass her lips. No match, perhaps, for those raging inner fires.

  They mark Sarah’s birthday by building an asylum. Between Gildsey and Ely, a mile from the Ouse, discreetly sealed from the world by dykes and poplar brakes, no less than is Kessling Hall by its enshrouding woods, it stands, at the beginning of 1874, almost finished. Further evidence of the Atkinson belief in progress. Further proof that in their commercial zeal they do not overlook the claims of the distressed and needy; of how they extend their concern even to those poor Fenland madmen and melancholics, who in a less enlightened age would have been pilloried, burnt or whipped to the next parish.

  It is completed in March (no flags, no speeches). And here, in the same year, the brothers George and Alfred, with the assistance of Arthur, because they have always been so devoted to their mother, install Sarah as guest of honour, in the best apartments, with the most diligent attendants at her disposal. Because in Gildsey tongues have begun to wag. They have begun to say that Sarah Atkinson is perhaps, after all, just stark-raving. Heads have begun to turn in Market Street and Water Street, upwards towards the window, where everyone knows … but from where now, even from behind the secondary panes of glass that have recently been fitted, shrieks of the most uncooperative and defiant, of the most hideous and alarming kind have begun to emanate.

  And if – when the shrieks, quite suddenly, stop – tongues should begin to wag again, self-contradictorily as tongues are apt to wag; if they should start to say: the only reason why the Atkinsons built that asylum was to put their mother in it, because they wanted to take away our saintly, blameless Sarah and lock her up in a cage for cretins, then they are answe
red by the patient assertions of the Atkinson servants (whose private wardrobes, in the 1870s, acquire an unusual fineness): Mrs Atkinson is in her room where she has always been. She is confined to her bed. A specialist is prescribing drugs. (Hence the cessation of screams.) If you really must know (a confiding yet disdainful expression enters the face of the spokesman), Mrs Atkinson is dying. Yes, dying. Now – must you profane the passing of our dear mistress with your ignorant gossip?

  Who will go to Wetherfield Asylum, to that house of horrors, to check?

  And, besides, in the autumn of 1874, Sarah Atkinson does die.

  It is announced, in a black-bordered column, in the Gildsey Examiner. All Gildsey is hushed. There are those who regard her death with loyal and poignant remembrance. There are those, a majority perhaps, who regard her death as, when all is said, a merciful release. And there are those – the ones who believed it was always Sarah and never George, Alfred or Arthur who fostered the fortunes of the town – who regard her death with anxiety and foreboding.

  But everyone wants to know one simple thing. Will all be reconciled, will all be resolved in good old story-book fashion – in a fairy-tale ending to make the heart melt? Will the brothers bury Sarah beside old Tom?

  What is going on in the house in Market Street where the blinds are drawn and few lights burn? Has anybody seen the undertaker, or the rector, come and go? Are there tears, quarrels? Is there dissension in the family?

  Then it is given out: Mrs Atkinson will be buried in St Gunnhilda’s churchyard in the plot (which no other parishioner has dared claim) adjoining the grave of her husband. God rest both their souls. In honour of one so beloved and lamented not just by her children and grandchildren but by the whole town, the brewery will be closed on the day of interment and public houses and shops are requested to suspend business. The hearse will pass down Water Street, along the Ousebank, past the brewery gates and thence to St Gunnhilda’s. The funeral service will be at eleven.

  The town is overjoyed – if overjoyed a town can be at a funeral. Because there is nothing like a good ending to turn mourning into smiles, and stop the asking of a thousand questions. And nothing like a little pageantry to lift the heart even in the midst of sorrow.

  In his yard beside the Ouse, not far from Cutlack’s smoking-house, with its own small wharf where Atkinson lighters off-load his supplies of stone, granite and marble, Michael Jessop, Monumental Mason and Stone-cutter, is up all night with his apprentices, lovingly carving a most special and esteemed commission. He pauses as he labours perhaps, trying to revive the delicate touch of his grandfather who once fashioned the stone that is this one’s twin, trying to render, as once old Toby Jessop did, the feathery likeness of two scattered barley ears, and sheds – most unlikely thing for a monumental mason – a tear.

  Yet is it a tear, or only a drip from one of the many troublesome leaks in the rickety wood and tarred canvas canopy under which he works? For outside it has begun to rain.

  It is still raining on the morning of the funeral. Not heavily, not torrentially, but with a steadiness, a determination that Fenlanders have come to know cannot be ignored. All over the country of the Ouse and the Leem that morning they are watching water-levels, fuelling auxiliary pumps, tending sluices and flood-gates. The Cricks – my father’s grandfather and his brethren – are spitting into the mud and saying to themselves there is work to be done. And the rain increases. Moreover, if it was raining that day in the Fens, it was raining also over those upland regions to the south and west whence the rivers descend for which the Fens are a basin; and it was raining with particular intensity, with particular intentness, some will assert later, over Kessling, Kessling Hall and those Norfolk hills where the Leem has its source.

  The brothers, who, since the decision to bury Sarah by her husband, have been elevated from the status of stern businessmen to that of sentimental heroes, do not mind the rain. Rain is good for a funeral: it masks human tears and suggests heavenly ones. Furthermore, rain is peculiarly reassuring when old Sarah had ranted so much about fire. The cortège proceeds down Water Street, and the mourners feel that the rapid ruination of so much black crape, black horses’ plumes and black funeral outfits can only add to the impression of authentic and unself-regarding sorrow. Likewise, amongst the shopkeepers and artisans who dutifully line the streets, bareheaded, while water trickles down their necks, those who hold that the rain is a good sign (compare the unbefitting sunshine of old Tom’s funeral day) far outnumber those who hold it is bad.

  The cortège moves at a steady pace past the brewery, and the only signs of unseemly impatience on this solemn occasion are in the porch of St Gunnhilda’s church, where the waiting rector, sexton and grave-digging party mentally urge the hearse to quicken its pace, because, despite temporary coverings, the grave is filling with water, and there is nothing worse than a neat grave which disrespectfully subsides in the middle of the ceremony – or than lowering a coffin into a puddle.

  The ceremony is indeed a somewhat brisk affair – for the ladies, at least, must not be exposed overlong to the risk of chills. The rector intones the service; raindrops drip off his nose and are caught in his lower lip. The rain hides the bowed and veiled faces of the mourners and seems to cast its own veil of obscurity over this sad ritual, cutting it off, as it were, from all around. But whether this briskness and concealment are purely accidental or in some way fortuitous and appropriate, no one yet asks.

  It is done; it is over. Mrs Atkinson lies again at the side of her husband.

  But the rain doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop for two days and two nights. For two days watery palls unfurl themselves over the Fens; for two nights God’s arrested stars are blotted out. But thoughts of divine weeping and so forth are soon put to one side as the flood takes hold. The folk of Gildsey know from long observation that however brown, swirling and threatful their old Ouse becomes, they have little to fear from a flood confined to that river alone. A few traders near the banks will receive a wetting and be bailed out literally and, if they are lucky, financially, by their drier neighbours. Nothing worse. But if the Leem floods simultaneously with the Ouse then the effect of the torrents discharged by the former into the latter will be like a liquid dam causing the Ouse to flow back on itself and spill out in every direction. All of which could make the position of Gildsey, so near the junction of the rivers, a disastrous one on which to build a town – were it not for the fact that Gildsey rests upon a hill, the one-time mud-isle of St Gunnhilda, a mere bump to a non-Fenlander, but enough to keep the community from drowning.

  The waters rise. At first with a steady increase, and then with a sudden rush which signals that the Leem has indeed thrown in its forces. The watermen along the Ouse embankment haul in their boats and punts; the eel fishermen bring ashore their nets. Wagons carry shop-wares, livestock and household furniture to the safe vicinity of the church and the market-place. But no one can move in a hurry Michael Jessop’s stock of stone and marble, nor his cumbersome stone-cutting gear, and the floodwaters immerse them, mysteriously stealing away several slabs that two men could not carry and demolishing the wood and tarpaulin canopy – though it is not the first time that canopy has been removed, hence its perpetually makeshift nature. Nor does Peter Cutlack, fish-smoker, quite have time to rescue all his stock: several crates of his coppery eels find themselves stiffly swimming once more in their old element.

  The waters rise. They creep up the slopes of Water Street. The lower buildings are, as everyone expected, inundated, and here and there a forlorn if defiant figure – in many cases not unused to the situation – squats immovably on a roof. They creep further. They dump a ton or more of mud into the hastily cleared cellar of the Jolly Bargeman, but they do not reach the Pike and Eel; nor do they reach – much to the intense glee or disappointment of some of the populace for whom floods, notwithstanding their being natural catastrophes, are also sources of excitement and much laying of bets – the white-painted mark at the base of a chemist’
s shop which records the furthest encroachment of floodwater up the street hitherto commemorated, and which, apart from historical interest, has much to do with the fixing of rents in Water Street.

  The Gildsey Dock and the Brewery remain undamaged. For the brothers, in their wisdom, have taken great pains to guard against this perennial danger, and the elaborate system of locks, sluices and channels incorporated into the dock complex do their work. Not only this but the two Relief Channels, one to the north and one to the south of the town, dug with public funds but largely at Atkinson instigation in 1868, are fully tested for the first time and prove equal to their task. From the air (though there are no helicopters in 1874 – no flickering newsreel shots of beleaguered rooftops and engulfed cars), Gildsey must look like a moated settlement drawn in on itself and hoisting up its skirts for defensive action; its lower extremities submerged, the brewery and the dock like separate outworks, the two relief channels forming a mud-brown horseshoe, diverting the floodwater to the meadows to the west and thus returning the town to its ancient island state.

  But if the Gildseyites can pride themselves on their capacity for self-protection, they have little other cause for gladness. A country town, especially a Fenland town, depends upon the region which serves it; and from the outlying – outwallowing – districts, the news is bleak. In the floods of October 1874, eleven thousand acres of land are rendered uncroppable for a year. Twenty-nine people are drowned, eight missing, presumed so. Eight hundred head of cattle and twelve hundred head of sheep perish. The damage to houses, highways, bridges, railways, drains and pumps is beyond clear reckoning.

  But what is abundantly clear is that the River Leem, navigable water-course and traffic-lane of the Atkinson malt barges, is temporarily no more. The rain has indeed been heavy – malignly heavy – over the westernmost hills of Norfolk. It has caused the Leem to show such contempt for its confines that the helicopter panorama would reveal its raised embankments, over long stretches, only as dark parallel lines against a watery sheen, like scratches on a mirror. The Hockwell Lode has overflowed into Wash Fen. The bridge is threatened at Apton. At the Atkinson Lock the lock-gates have been wrenched loose and the iron sluice-gate, so accustomed to restraining water, has been torn bodily from its supports and flipped like a slate into the current, watched by the lock-keeper and his family who are forced to pass four days in their attic. While at Kessling, the barge-pool has vanished; water flows through the front doorway of Thomas Atkinson’s one-time home, and despite the heroic efforts of the pool manager, refugees from the flood, already astonished enough, encounter to their amazement, for miles around Kessling, empty lighters, broken free of their moorings, their red stemposts and painted insignia plain to see, drifting at random over former fields of wheat and potatoes.