Waterland

by Graham Swift

  ‘One might argue that you’ve already waived your responsibilities to the curriculum by turning your lessons into these – story-telling sessions.’

  ‘The subject’s still history.’

  ‘I see. Whatever that means. Have some more Scotch. I thought the standard line was that the past actually had something to teach us. By learning from—’

  ‘If that were so, history would be the record of inexorable progress, wouldn’t it? The future would be an ever more glowing prospect.’

  (Price would love that: ‘glowing’.)

  He straightens in his chair. Looks at me through blackrimmed glasses. As if he’d dare to say, Well, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

  But he doesn’t say it. He’s not giving one of his cheery morning-assembly addresses now. He swallows whisky.

  ‘Lew, do you know what my students dream about?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tom. You mean it’s not just stories? It’s dreams too?’

  ‘Seriously. Do you know what my – what our, your – students dream about?’

  ‘I hardly think—’

  ‘It came up, a while ago, in my ‘A’ level group. Nine out of sixteen said they’ve dreamt of a nuclear war. In several cases a recurring nightmare. They dream about the end of the world.’

  ‘Is this—?’

  ‘It came up – we had this count of dreams – because one of the group, Price—’

  ‘I know Price. Wears that stuff, doesn’t he? He’s been told—’

  ‘He’s an intelligent kid.’

  ‘All the more reason—’

  ‘Price suddenly announced in the middle of a class that history was a fairy-tale – you see, perhaps he’s on your side. And then he said – which led us on to his and then the rest of the class’s nightmares: “The only important thing about history is that history has reached the stage where it might be coming to an end.” ’

  ‘Well, isn’t that an argument for—?’

  ‘And I began quite seriously to think, Lew: what does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and faced instead with – no future at all?’

  His eyes narrow. His face makes that expression teachers make when a student offers downright insolence, throws everything back where it came from. (I know it too, Lew. I do it too. Feel the same muscles clench. Pace up and down and fume, just like a schoolmaster. With Price, for example.)

  He gets up, cup in hand. Moves to the window. Darkness falling; looming tower-blocks. How we stick to our posts, how we cling to the curriculum.

  He turns, stern, recriminative.

  ‘Perhaps this only proves one thing, Tom. Have you ever stopped to think that it’s the study of your precious subject that inspires such – gloom? Yes, you may be right, we don’t learn from the past. What’s more, what we pick up from dwelling on it is a defeatist, jaundiced outlook …’

  (So it’s all right, children. No need to be afraid. Lewis is here. Don’t be gloomy. To all these morbid dreams, a simple answer: the nuclear fallout shelter.)

  He runs a palm across his forehead, which is waxy and furrowed.

  ‘I’ve always said it—’ (He’s never said it. But he’s thought it. He’s saying it now. And now we know.) ‘History breeds pessimism.’

  ‘Or realism. Or realism. If history shows that the scale of human calamity increases. If the evidence of history corroborates what my students sense by intuition—’

  He sits again. Pours more Scotch.

  ‘So what are you saying – that you have these dreams too?’

  No, Lew, I don’t dream about the end of the world. Perhaps because, unlike my students, I’m not a child (fifty-three this year). I don’t expect, demand a future. And there are ways and ways, a thousand million ways, in which the world comes to an end …

  Shall I tell you my dream? It’s how it’s supposed to happen: telling your dreams. They’re trying it on Mary, right now. In that place which modernity forbids we call an asylum. First you tell your dreams. First you speak all your innermost fears. Then all the rest follows – the whole story. Even back to when you were a little—

  We could try it, Lewis. See if it works. The night before us. This bottle to help. You could say, So why did it happen, Tom? And I could say, These ulcers, Lew? This whisky-drinking? This ossified optimism?

  My dream’s different. Less spectacular. But I dream it over and over again. The setting’s a suburban supermarket on a winter’s evening. Dusk falling. You see, I have to tell it like a story. It’s a Friday night, a busy night. Long queues at the checkouts; cash registers bleeping. All the Mums with families to feed have got their weekend supplies. All the couples with cars to load are eager to be home. They’ve got all the good things that supermarkets provide. They’ve got their canned soups and frozen meat, their breakfast cereals and scrubbed vegetables in polythene bags; they’ve got their cat food, dog food, washing powder, paper tissues, cling film and aluminium foil. But there’s something someone hasn’t got. Because amid the jostling trolleys, baskets and commotion a woman suddenly begins to wail. She screams and screams and won’t stop …

  ‘Lewis, tell me something. Our business is children. Do you believe in children?’

  19

  About my Grandfather

  COULD he be blamed, my grandfather, Ernest Richard Atkinson, for being a renegade, a rebel? Could he be blamed for showing but scant interest in his future prospect as head of the Atkinson Brewery and the Atkinson Water Transport Company? Could he be blamed – having been sent by his father, Arthur Atkinson MP, to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to receive the finest education any Atkinson had so far received – for squandering the time in undergraduate whims, for flirting with ideas (European socialism, Fabianism, the writings of Marx) directly aimed at his father’s Tory principles; for spending large parts of his vacations in nefarious sojourns in London, where he was called upon by the police to explain his presence at a rally of the unemployed (he was there ‘out of curiosity’) and whence he brought back to Kessling Hall in the year 1895 the woman, Rachel Williams, daughter of an ill-paid journalist, to whom, he brazenly declared (omitting to mention other ladies with whom he had toyed), he had already engaged himself?

  Born in those memorable floods of ’74, born amid whispering and aspersion, born, moreover, at a time when the sales of (a suspiciously weak) Atkinson Ale were showing signs of decline, was it entirely his fault that he was disposed to be wayward and obstinate? And was it entirely surprising that when, in 1904, at the still youthful if mellowed age of thirty, the father by now of an eight-year-old daughter, Helen, he became director of both the Brewery and the Water Transport Company, he should accept his inescapable fate with misgiving, with reluctance and a good deal of hard thinking?

  For Ernest Richard, my grandfather, was the first of the brewing Atkinsons to assume his legacy without the assurance of its inevitable expansion, without the incentive of Progress, without the knowledge that in his latter days he would be a richer and more influential man than in his youth. The profits of Atkinson beer were not the only thing to decline after that flood year of 1874. Because that last quarter of the nineteenth century, which, children, we could analyse at length if it happened to be our ‘A’ level special subject, and which is apt to be seen as a culminatory period leading to that mythical long hot Edwardian summer so dear to the collective memory of the English, was, if the truth be known, a period of economic deterioration from which we have never recovered. A period in which the owner of a Water Transport Company, when water transport and inland navigation were falling nationally into neglect and losing, indeed, their fight against the ever-spreading railways, could scarcely view the future with confidence.

  How did Arthur Atkinson, who was not a master of the present but a servant of the future, endure, in his later years, these implacable trends? By applying himself more and more to his political activities (five times re-elected for Gildsey), by being a staunch advocate of forward imperial policies (f
or here, after all, expansion was still possible), by reminding his Fenland constituents of the wide world and their national destiny; by becoming a caricature statesman – by alienating his son.

  And how did Ernest Atkinson confront the same writing on the wall? By remembering, after an errant and experimental youth, his origins.

  In 1904, while Balfour and Loubet were raising the Kaiser’s hackles by signing the Anglo-French Entente, Ernest Atkinson saw as no Atkinson had clearly seen for four generations the essential desolation of the Fens. Affected perhaps by the watery circumstances of his birth, he wished that he might return to the former days of the untamed swamps, when all was yet to be done, when something was still to be made from nothing; and there was revived in him the spirit of his great-great-grandfather, William Atkinson, standing amidst the barley-corn. Since a brewer he must be, albeit a brewer of fading fortunes, what else could he do but serve faithfully his trade and brew better beer? What finer cause could there be to labour in than the supplying of this harsh world with a means of merriment?

  But does merriment belong to him who gives it? Testimonies from those times – amply confirmed by his last years, and by the photographs which I still possess of my maternal grandfather (brooding brows, deep-set, glowering eyes) – suggest that even in his restless youth Ernest Atkinson was a melancholy, a moody man. That the flightiness of those early years was merely pursued – as is so often the case – to combat inner gravity; that his dabbling with socialist doctrines was not done solely to spite his father but out of an inclination (true to his name) to take the world in earnest; that he dedicated himself to the manufacture of merriment because despondency urged him, and because – but this is mere speculation, mere history teacher’s conjecture – he had learnt such dark things (what death-bed confessions preceded old Arthur to the grave in 1904?) about his far-reaching progenitors that he wished for nothing more than to be an honest and unambitious purveyor of barrels of happiness.

  In 1905 Ernest Atkinson proceeded to sell off most of the Water Transport Company’s stock and the larger part of the Gildsey Dock (snapped up by the Gas and Coke Company as the site of a future works), whilst retaining the barges and lighters for the malt carriage from Kessling and pooling his remaining water-borne interests in the Gildsey Pleasure Boat Company: three steam-launches, the St Gunnhilda, the St Guthlac and the Fen Queen. Trips to Ely, Cambridge, and King’s Lynn. For pleasure, mind you.

  At the same time he entered into lengthy consultations with his under-brewers, experimented, with a research chemist’s finesse, with different hops, yeasts and sugars, with temperatures and proportions, and produced in 1906 a New Ale which the lip-smacking die-hards of the Swan and the Bargeman, or those of them whose memories stretched that far, declared to be the equal – no, the superior – of the Atkinson Ales of the middle of the old century.

  But the Gildsey folk at large did not approve of Ernest’s retrenching policies, which seemed to bring dishonour on their once-flourishing town. They did not approve of an Atkinson who, be he a brewer in name, actually rolled up his sleeves and committed the indignity of conducting trial mashings and fermentations. For such was Ernest’s style; and it was even said that in out-buildings specially converted for the purpose at Kessling Hall he concocted brews of a much more powerful character than any that issued from the Gildsey brewery. Not only this, but drank large quantities of the stuff himself. They resented his attempt – unpatriotic shirking they called it in this time of arms-racing and gunboat-sending – to shun the political sphere in which his father had so distinguished himself. But reserved the right to spread the rumour none the less that Ernest was a socialist sympathizer. They drank Ernest’s New Ale, but they seemed to have lost the simple faith that the spirit of festivity could be poured at any time from a brown bottle and was not the prerogative, as it had been for the last time in Gildsey on Mafeking night, of occasions of national celebration.

  Added to my grandfather’s (conjectural) inward sorrowfulness was the knowledge that even when they are offered merriment people do not necessarily want it.

  Added to my grandfather’s inward sorrowfulness was the continuing fall in the Brewery profits.

  Added to my grandfather’s (surely no longer conjectural) inward sorrowfulness was the succumbing of his wife, Rachel, my grandmother, to a severe asthmatic complaint for which the damp atmosphere of the Fens may have been partly to blame, and her subsequent early death in April, 1908.

  Ah, what stocks of merriment we need, what deep draughts of it are required to counter the griefs life has in store …

  People who drew simple-minded comparisons and conclusions, people whose sense of history was crude, who believed that the past is always tugging at the sleeve of the present, people of the sort who claimed they had seen Sarah Atkinson when Sarah Atkinson was dead – began to speak again of a curse upon the Atkinsons …

  And Ernest Atkinson, in mourning at Kessling Hall, mixing, for consolation, the wort of a still unperfected but potent beer and assisted by a twelve-year-old daughter, began to speak of his ‘Special’.

  In November, 1909, at a public meeting held in Gildsey Town Hall, my bereaved grandfather announced the return of his family to the political arena by declaring his intention to stand as Liberal candidate during the general election then considered imminent. Outlining his creed, he inveighed against the Conservative tradition which for so long had gripped his home town. Without disclaiming his one-time socialist propensities, he approved the recent Liberal reforms and championed Lloyd George’s ‘enlightened and level-headed policies’. He did not shrink from accusing his own father (muttered protests), from berating him as one of those who had fed the people with dreams of inflated and no longer tenable grandeur, who had intoxicated them with visions of Empire (which ought to have been clouded for ever by the disgraces of the South African War), thus diverting their minds from matters nearer home. Whilst he, the son of the father, advocated restraint, realism, the restoration of simplicity and sufficiency, and, alluding to his station in life as the proprietor of a brewery – a joke which fell on stony ground – a return from pompous solemnity to honest jollity.

  He described – I have in my possession a verbatim copy of this brave and doomed speech – how it was conscience alone and no love of taking public stances (heckles from rear) that had spurred him into the political field. How fear for the future had already soured his pleasure-giving role of brewer. How he foresaw in the years ahead catastrophic consequences unless the present mood of jingoism was curbed and the military poker-playing of the nations halted. How civilization (had Ernest inherited the prophetic gifts of Sarah? Or was he, as many suspected and attested with nudges to their neighbours, just plain drunk?) faced the greatest crisis of its history. How if no one took steps … an inferno …

  Further and louder heckling, mingled with smiles from the more knowing representatives of conservatism who see that in one stroke and at the very outset Ernest has ruined his electoral chances. A speaker from the floor rises to be heard: ‘If your father, sir, intoxicated our minds with imperialism, what are you doing with that stuff that comes out of your brewery?’ Laughter, applause. Another speaker, with epigrammatic brevity: ‘Mr Chairman, drunkenness ill befits a brewer!’ More laughter, intenser applause. ‘Or abusing his own father!’ (from another). ‘Or his country!’ (another still). Howling, jeering; hammering of the Chairman’s hammer (‘I must ask that gentleman in the audience to withdraw his—’).

  My grandfather (amidst uproar): ‘I warn you … if you will not listen … I foresee a … if … I foresee …’

  But as he returns to the uncanny quiet of Cable House, knowing his reputation to have been cast away, as he clasps his daughter Helen, now thirteen years old, with an intensity – if anyone had been there to witness it – suggesting a man clutching his only comfort, he reflects perhaps on that cuttingly invoked word: drunkenness.

  Drunkenness. Not merriment – drunkenness.

  And, retiring to
the leaden seclusion of Kessling Hall, and dictating to his daughter who diligently enters in a notebook figures, quantities and even the names of certain additional ingredients which have remained and always will remain secrets, he perfects his ‘Special’.

  It doesn’t escape me: something of my grandfather’s fulminating and faltering rhetoric infects my teacherly oratory. Something of his predicament, before that Town Hall assembly, those heckles, those jeers, revives itself in my classroom confrontations, when I face resentment and hostility over the desk-tops. And yet in whom is it that I observe today my grandfather’s inward melancholy and fear for the future? In a curly-haired lad called Price.

  20

  The Explanation of Explanation

  WHOM I call to order, whom I come on strong with: ‘Right, Price. That’s enough. You’ll see me after school.’ (His unveiled disgust at my crude authoritarianism.) But that ‘stuff your past’ … Pedagogic panic. Teach them about revolution and they— Fears of revolt in the classroom, fed by fears of persecution from on high (Lewis wants a word), inflamed by fears of anarchy in his private life (anarchy? His wife’s got religion, she’s turned to the Lord). Play the despot. Take it out on— Tyranny and insecurity:

  ‘So wipe that smirk off, Price,’ (actually he’s not smirking), ‘and come and see me at four o’clock.’

  And now Price stands by my desk, at the end of lessons, playing his part perfectly too: the shame-faced – but unrepentant – offender.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Price. You opted for History. Now and then you actually produce some good work. You can’t come to history lessons and have no time for history. You can’t engage with me on specific points about the French Revolution – no harm in that – but at the same time want to dismiss the whole subject.’

  The history room at four o’clock. School dispersed; winter dark beyond the windows. Empty desks; scuff marks; chalk motes. We go through the motions, the teacher-student charade. Discipline above all. We look – or at least I do – for mutual ground, for opportunities for saying, Hang it all, let’s be reasonable … and, For goodness’ sake, must we be like this … But only discover that what we’re forced to be, what we have to be – is on opposite sides.