Waterland

by Graham Swift

  And Freddie Parr’s father, with even greater cause, is asking Whywhywhy. No repetition of that neat word ‘accident’ can stop that siren in his brain, or close the chasms of blame that yawn inside him …

  … CORONER: In plain terms, how would you describe the proportion of alcohol present in the deceased’s blood?

  PATHOLOGIST: As considerable, sir.

  CORONER: Sufficient to have rendered the deceased drunk?

  PATHOLOGIST: Certainly.

  CORONER: Incapacitated by drink?

  PATHOLOGIST: Very likely.

  CORONER: To an extent where he might have been more liable than usual to a slip or fall from the riverside?

  PATHOLOGIST: Quite probably.

  CORONER: And finding himself in the water, less able than usual to save himself?

  PATHOLOGIST: Again, very probably.

  CORONER (frowning): The deceased was sixteen years of age. Was he in the habit of getting drunk?

  PC WYEBROW (circumspectly, the deceased’s parents not being present): I believe he was, sir. With all respect to the bereaved, I believe he took after his father.

  CORONER: Mr Parr is a heavy drinker? Mr Crick, are you able to substantiate this?

  MY FATHER: …

  CORONER: Mr Crick?

  MY FATHER: He likes a drop, sir.

  CORONER: Mr Parr is a known drinker. And Mr Parr is a signalman – and level-crossing keeper …

  And why did these facts – so the coroner might have pursued had his business not been in another area – not strike constant trepidation into the hearts of the motorists, cyclists and other road-users in the habit of relying on Jack Parr’s gates, not to mention the footplatemen, guards and passengers of the Great Eastern Railway? And why had the railway authorities never got to hear of the unfortunate weakness of their employee – fuelled as it was (though the coroner didn’t know this) by illicit liquor conveyed on their own rolling-stock?

  For the simple reason that it was Mrs Parr – and this was common knowledge too, PC Wyebrow might have added – who manned the gates and the signals during the periods of her husband’s debility. It was she who heaved back and forth as to the manner born the clanking signal-switches; it was she who received and passed on the telegraph messages from Apton to Newhithe, from Apton to Wansham, that the nine-ten to Gildsey was twelve minutes late, that a goods train had been rescheduled; it was she who on icy winter dawns unfroze with the aid of a blow-lamp the hinges of the level-crossing gates while her husband lay snoring off the effects of a hard night’s Kentucky bourbon.

  And what was the cause of this shameless laxity on the part of the husband and this remarkable forbearance on the part of the wife?

  Hearsay holds that in the early and sober days of Jack Parr’s signalmanship a terrible accident very nearly occurred at the Hockwell level-crossing. That the nightmare which haunts all level-crossing keepers one day became reality, and Jack Parr forgot to close, when needed, his life-saving gates. Perched in his signal-box, he suddenly awoke not only to this dreadful omission but to two other facts. That a scarlet Post Office van was idly mounting the Leem bridge on the southern side from where the railway line, on the northern side, was hidden by that fatal combination of bend, river embankment and line of trees; whilst, further to Jack Parr’s left, down the dead-straight track in the direction of Apton, the all-too-punctual King’s Lynn express was thunderously approaching. Jack Parr alone saw the full horror of the complete scene which was denied to any of its human components. With the alacrity of the panic-stricken, he leapt from his signal-box, descended in two bounds the flight of iron stairs and began turning, as only terror can make a man turn, the crankwheel of the crossing-gates.

  The scene implodes. In one unthinkable, if perfectly harmless, moment gates close, Post Office van screeches to a halt and King’s Lynn express, brakes likewise screaming their utmost, hurtles through. No one is scathed. Jack Parr’s professional record remains unblackened. But so great was the shock, so terrible was the thought of what might have happened and so unendurable was the possibility that at some time another lapse might occur, that Freddie Parr’s father took to earnest drinking, thus forestalling any future forgetfulness through regular alcoholic oblivion.

  But this whole story is possibly only the justificatory fabrication of Jack Parr’s drink-sodden fancy. Jack Parr drank, perhaps, for no other reason than a good many other of his Fenland countrymen reached for the bottle. Because he was oppressed by those flat black Fenland fields and that wide exposing Fenland sky. Because he grew tired of looking every day, unable to move from his post, at featureless river-banks, phlegm-hued river-water, at rows of beets and potatoes, at straight railway track and files of spindly poplars; at the wind-swept platforms of Hockwell Station, at the dykes and drains intersecting and receding, imprinting on the brain their intolerable geometry. Because all this, together with the awesome fixity of his duties – this terrible combination of emptiness and responsibility – was too much for him.

  Ah, children, pity level-crossing-keepers, pity lock-keepers, lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon … Sometimes I wonder why my father, turning and turning yet again on the Leem tow-path, did not also take to drink.

  Assuredly, Jack Parr did not drink to be merry – he who never raised a laugh, a true, a mirthful laugh, so it was said, after the day of that accident that never happened. And assuredly it is not for mirth’s sake that he grasps again the neck of his Old Grand-dad on the night of the twenty-ninth of July, 1943, the date that it is officially recorded that his son has died – by another accident. He tilts and tilts again the bottle in order to silence that dreadful wail. Whywhywhy …

  Because (he swigs) my Freddie was drunk and fell, with no one to save him, into the river. And why …? Because he learnt to drink from his father, who was a worthless drunkard, who even went to the despicable lengths of sending his son on black-marketeering missions with the sole object of procuring alcohol. And why …? Because his father was a hopeless good-for-nothing, content to train his son in dishonesty and vice, a sinner who is rightly punished by this death of his first- and only-born. But why …?

  And as each Why opens its bleating mouth Jack Parr stops it with a swig, and another swig, endeavouring to efface the crime of drink with yet more drink.

  But it’s not enough; it won’t work.

  For what do these unquellable and guilt-inflicting Whys lead Jack Parr to do on this same July night? They lead him to clamber over the gates of his own level-crossing, bottle in hand, and to sit down with an air of great finality on the rails. The desperate efforts and frantic protestations of Mrs Parr will not budge him. He says nothing. Moonlight gleams on the lines. Freddie Parr’s father sits down and waits for the 00.40 Gildsey or the one o’clock goods (the time-table is blurred) to run him down.

  But he is not run down. He is still there, drawing breath, in the morning. Because Mrs Parr, abandoning her futile pleas and assuming her old resourcefulness, has mounted to the signal-box, as so often during her husband’s bouts of mental absence, thrown switches, tapped messages, phoned PC Wyebrow – who hastily institutes a traffic diversion – to announce a ‘failure’ at the level-crossing, communicated with other signalmen up and down the lines and thus effected a telegraphic conspiracy: lights winking over half the eastern Fens, trains cancelled, diverted, unaccountably delayed, much to the chagrin of late-night passengers and freight-shippers and a good many mystified officials of the Great Eastern Railway.

  Thus Jack Parr spent a whole night under the stars – which, according to my father, hang in perpetual suspension because of our sins – stupid with alcohol, waiting for iron-wheeled death which never came. Thus he sat – lay – snored – dreamed. Till he awoke, amidst the twittering of skylarks, to discover that he was not dead but alive and that by his calculation (for Flora Parr said nothing) two passenger trains and three goods had roared over him witho
ut leaving a single mark. And thus Jack Parr, who was a superstitious man and that very morning swore to forsake drink, came to believe that God, who sometimes brings about by way of punishment inexplicable cruelties and drowns a man’s own son, also performs inexplicable wonders.

  Because, despite everything, despite emptiness, monotony, this Fenland, this palpable earth raised out of the flood by centuries of toil, is a magical, a miraculous land.

  12

  About the Change of Life

  MARY, wherever you are – now you’re gone, still here but gone, somewhere inside yourself, now you’ve stopped and all that is left for anyone else is your story – do you remember (can you still remember?) how once we lay in the shell of the old windmill by the Hockwell Lode and how the flat empty Fens all around us became, too, a miraculous land, became an expectant stage on which magical things could happen? Do you remember how we looked up at the sky, into blue emptiness, and how out of the sky (because I told you: my homespun religiosity for your Catholic sophistication) God looked down on us; how He’d lifted off the roof of our makeshift home of love, and we didn’t mind? How no one else could see us in our windmill bower but He could; and we let Him?

  And was it the same God, looking down on us then, who spoke to you—?

  Once upon a time there was a history teacher’s wife called Mary, with blue, curious eyes and brown hair, who before she was a history teacher’s wife was the daughter of a Cambridgeshire farmer. Who lived in a stark, sturdy, sallow-brick farmhouse, amidst beet fields, potato fields and geometrically disposed dykes. Who during the years of the Second World War attended the St Gunnhilda (Convent) School for Girls in Gildsey, thus furthering her acquaintance with the future history teacher, then also attending school in Gildsey. Who, to her widower father’s delight and pride, was praised by the sisters of the St Gunnhilda School for being a bright and eager pupil with a thirst for knowledge, but who, to her father’s bitter disappointment, could not keep from exercising her curiosity out of school hours, particularly in matters sexual. Whose investigations, in this area, did not stop with the future history teacher. Who was adventurous, inquisitive, unrestrainable. Who was the last person one could imagine imitating the patron saint of our local town and shutting herself up, hermit-fashion, for over three years in that stark farmhouse; though she did, to her own mortification and her father’s mounting dismay, in the autumn of 1943, her curiosity – and much else – having come in that same year (her seventeenth) to a sudden halt.

  Many years ago there was a future history teacher’s wife who resolved upon a certain drastic course of action. Who said to the future history teacher (causing consternation to engulf him, for he had no notion what he, in the circumstances, would do): ‘I know what I’m going to do.’ Who said to him, at a later date, much having occurred in the interval: ‘We must part.’ And then buried herself in that lonely farmhouse – as he buried himself in history books.

  Some would say that this withdrawal of hers was not so much a voluntary act of penance as a punishment inflicted by her shamed and angered father, a man capable of stern measures, who, having once had hopes for his daughter, but being now only too aware of her wickedness, determined to lock her away from further mischief. But your history teacher (frightened witness to his wife-to-be’s resolve) knows that the father, punitive though he was, played only a secondary part. He knows that Mary locked herself away of her own free will. Though he does not know, being denied at the time even the rights of visits or written communication, what occurred during that three-year period. Whether God spoke to her (then too) as He spoke, above the howls of demons, to St Gunnhilda; whether she found Salvation; whether, perhaps, she was visited by the ghost of Sarah Atkinson, the Brewer’s Daughter of Gildsey, who, so local lore has it, offers companionship to those whose lives have stopped though they must go on living … Or whether the truth of those three years was that nothing, nothing at all, occurred and that the future Mrs Crick, gazing day after day from her farmhouse cell at the level fields, was only, wittingly or unwittingly, preparing herself for her later marriage – which would be a sort of fenland.

  Whatever the truth of the matter – for the future history teacher’s wife is destined never to disclose it, and the future history teacher, called away early in 1945 to do military service, is in no position to glean anything at first hand – whatever the truth of the matter, true it is that Farmer Metcalf’s shame and anger relent and turn, in three years, to anxiety for his daughter’s health and her future welfare.

  Swallowing his pride – resigned to the fact that his daughter is not to rise in a world whose natural propensity appears to be to sink – and breaking a vow never to speak to the man again, he pays a visit to his neighbour, Henry Crick.

  Though Harold Metcalf is, like Henry Crick, a widower and has grown accustomed to the ambience of seclusion, he is struck by the ramshackle solitariness of the lock-keeper who now lives alone in the lockside cottage and whom he finds, perhaps, mending eel-traps or conversing with his chickens.

  Henry Crick receives him with an apprehensive and round-mouthed stare. They beat about the bush. The one laments the declining river traffic, the other the iniquities of the War Agricultural Committee. They avoid more tender spots. Farmer Metcalf, at length, asks Henry if he has heard from his son, now stationed in Cologne – and so broaches his subject.

  By the banks of the Leem, rapidly coming to an accord, less rapidly overcoming mutual shyness, the two men stammer, sigh, nod heads sagely (Henry Crick rubs his knee) and agree that enough is enough of anything, it can’t go on, and that Time, after all, is the great reconciler. In short, Farmer Metcalf proposes that Henry Crick write a letter to his son, hinting that a second letter, of a certain drift, be sent in turn from the son to the Metcalf farmhouse. And though Henry Crick, being no letter-writer and no master of diplomacy, inwardly blenches at this undertaking, he agrees; for (to judge, indeed, by his own experience) he believes that marriages are made by Destiny, and Destiny is a great force; and where Destiny lends its hand even the most daunting tasks may be accomplished.

  Yet he need not have agonized over that momentous letter. Because his son, a member of His Majesty’s Army on the Rhine but now approaching the term of his period of service, is already, as the two fathers meet, resolving to put pen to paper and break a long, prohibitive silence. He writes, indeed, the sort of letter in which Destiny impregnates each word. But he too beats about the bush. He describes, with faltering eloquence, gutted cities, refugees, soup kitchens, mass graveyards, bread queues. He attempts to explain how these things have given him a new perspective, have made events by the River Leem seem, perhaps … Though he leaves out how they have deepened his desire to fathom the secrets of history and aroused, moreover, a belief in education. He hints that he has undergone his own penance, though does not dare to suggest that this is of a kind that can possibly match hers, or that two years’ of life in barracks and fitful meditation on the ruins of Europe can offer absolution. He makes no allusion to the wider future, but only asks that, upon his forthcoming demobilization and return to England, they should, at least, meet.

  And, as if to prove the hand of Destiny, it is only two days after he posts this letter that he receives another, tortuously and painstakingly composed, from his father. So that Farmer Metcalf is amazed, taking from his mailbox an envelope marked Cologne and addressed to his daughter, at the speed and efficiency with which Henry Crick has carried out his mission. Thereafter (since neither is disabused) he is inclined to take fresh stock of the lowly lock-keeper whom he had always regarded as a credulous simpleton (brains bashed about in Flanders) who had made that preposterous marriage.

  Thus it is that in February, 1947, the future history teacher’s wife waits at Gildsey station for the arrival of her husband-to-be. Thus it is that ex-serviceman Crick (now fully determined to become a teacher) makes his journey home in the guise of the returning Prince ready to pluck aside briars and cobwebs and kiss his Princess out of wha
tever trance has possessed her for the last three years. He expects to find – and accept – a nun, a Magdalen, a fanatic, a hysteric, an invalid … But he sees, even as he steps from the train, a woman (no girl) who impresses him with her appearance of toughness, endurance, as if she has made the decision to live henceforth without any kind of prop or refuge. And he realizes that though this three-year separation has fostered the illusion that, should they reunite, he would be a prop to her (the specious sense of having grown up, the hardening effects of army life, acquaintance with the wide – and devastated – world), it is quite the opposite: that she will be a prop to him; that she will always be, just as she was in those days when she lost her curiosity, stronger than him.

  It is a freezing winter. Hard snow covers the Fens and though, on this February day, the sun shines brilliantly, the air bites. In the White Rose Tea Room, near Gildsey station, in a scene evoking for the outsider but not for the protagonists certain cinema-screen reunions (no moon-faced café proprietor observes with a wink that they haven’t touched their tea), the future history teacher’s wife and the future history teacher deliberate their life together. It is clear that bonds exist between them stronger, and sterner, than those which link many couples who rush into wedlock; it is clear that if they are not meant for each other, then what other persons could there be for whom each of them, separately, is meant? It is clear that though certain things must be, though they cannot dispose of the past …

  He breaks off his stumbling speechifying. They look into each other’s eyes. Hers are still a smouldering blue: she is – has she forgotten it? – a desirable woman. She wears (to fuse the image of ex-schoolgirl and ex-soldier?) a simple black beret. He talks to her through wreaths of smoke from his Camel cigarettes, several packs of which he has specially hoarded to prepare the ground with Harold Metcalf. It is clear that if they have not been lovers in deed for three and a half years, they are still lovers in spirit.