Waterland

by Graham Swift

  ‘Well?’

  Price shrugs. ‘You made things plain in the lesson. It’s your show. You’re the chief. You do the explaining.’

  ‘I see. Very well, if the position’s so clear – then let’s not be vague. If I’m the chief, if I’m the one who gives the lessons, then I have the right not to have my lessons interrupted.’

  Price says nothing, but round his lips hovers a faint, unsettling smile.

  ‘And if my lessons get interrupted then I have the right to know – which is why I’ve brought you here – why.’

  The smile remains.

  ‘So how about you doing some explaining?’

  But he doesn’t have to explain. Doesn’t have to do anything more than stand there with that hint of mockery on his face. Because the situation denounces itself, the tableau is complete: oppressor and oppressed. (Consider this, Price, just in passing: how so much of history is a settling for roles, how so much of it happened because no one said what they really—)

  Amateur dramatics. Keep him in after school: make something happen.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well – that’s simple, sir. I interrupted – because I wanted to.’

  ‘Of course. And it’s a free country. No good. Because I ask myself why does only Price choose to interrupt, out of a class of sixteen others, who, by and large, are a pleasant bunch—’

  ‘You mean they do what they’re told.’

  ‘One interpretation. But what about your explanation?’

  ‘I’m here to learn, sir.’

  ‘I’m touched by your trust and humility – which seem so lacking during lesson-time. And since you wish me to do your explaining for you … As I see it, your underlying complaint is not with the form or manner of my lessons or anything so narrowly particular. If that were the case we could indeed debate method and approach – all very healthy and proper – we could even come to the amicable conclusion that we hold different views. Your protest is rather purer, more radical than this. Your position – am I right? – is that history is a red herring; only the present matters. The logical end of your view is that we should not waste time learning about the French Revolution – which, none the less, it strikes me, is a subject, given its flavour of subversion, you don’t find so unengaging. We should instead be sitting down and sorting out Afghanistan, Iran, Northern Ireland, the ills of this worn-out country of ours.’

  I get up from my desk. Begin to pace the room as I speak, not looking at Price. Blathering again. Talking too much. Rhetorical hand-sweeps over empty desks. As if I’m addressing a class, not—

  ‘A laudable proposition, Price. And I believe there’s an opportunity for this sort of discussion in your General Studies periods with Mr Wallace.’

  ‘He’s an old—’

  ‘Careful. As far as I’m concerned in this matter, we come up against a quite practical obstacle. Namely, the syllabus. Namely, that I’m paid to be a history teacher and to teach the history syllabus, that the history syllabus includes – amongst other irrelevancies – the French Revolution, and that’s what we do.’

  (Get out of this role. Get off this stage.)

  ‘Great! I’m glad you’ve got it all so worked out!’

  Said with venom, said with exasperation, said with a sort of forlorn and disappointed anguish, as I walk back up the desk aisle and momentarily lose my poise.

  Now – now is your opportunity.

  ‘Price, it sometimes occurs to me that there’s something – on your mind. That we haven’t even touched on. That we’re saying the wrong things. If I can—’

  A hand raised – but not in rhetorical gesture. A hand raised, almost unconsciously, to touch Price’s shoulder.

  His expression falters, then hardens, switches to the offensive. I turn, rebuffed, and walk back between the desks.

  ‘I mean, if there’s any way I can help—’

  Stop at the window. Look out at the darkness. Silence.

  ‘Don’t know, sir. Do you think history “helps”?’

  ‘Price?’

  ‘What I mean is – I don’t understand this “can I help” bit. I didn’t know that was on the syllabus either.’

  Self-protective dismissal: to hell with the kid.

  His form, beyond mine, reflected in the window. Standing by my desk where I stand to face my class. Ghostly schoolboy in his teacher’s place in a ghostly classroom floating in the dark …

  But how we forget what it’s like, to be like that. To be sixteen, and floating … How we forget. How we stick to the syllabus. Until—

  (Price, there are certain things on my mind.)

  ‘All right. You’re quite right. Offers of help aren’t on the syllabus. Shall we skip my out-of-order display of concern? On the other hand, I haven’t kept you behind for extra tuition. I’d still like an explanation.’

  Still with my back turned to him. He edges towards the rear of the classroom, as if (a momentary delusion on my part?) anxious about me. People who stand at secondstorey windows …

  ‘So?’

  Badly timed. He stops. I turn.

  ‘You know what your trouble is, sir? You’re hooked on explanation. Explain, explain. Everything’s got to have an explanation.’

  A human instinct, Price. Goes with living—

  ‘But you said: You do the—’

  ‘Because I can do without explanations—’

  The face is all twisted.

  ‘Because I don’t want explanations—’

  The voice wavers. He’s struggling to release some punchline. Has he been saving this one up?

  ‘Because explaining’s a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near to them—’

  Very good, Price. Very profound. One for the Price Book of Aphorisms. But that frightened face—?

  ‘And people only explain when things are wrong, don’t they, not when they’re right? So the more explaining you hear, the more you think things must be pretty bad that they need so much explaining.’

  Silence. A flush behind the pale warpaint. The eyes glare, then flicker away.

  He looks at his watch.

  ‘Can I go now, sir? It’s getting late.’

  So, message annunciated. So. Is that why you bothered to come to my little disciplinary rendezvous? To deliver a Challenge. Class-spokesman’s manifesto. The Price Explanation of Explanation. Something to make old Cricky think. And he will. He does …

  ‘Yes, it’s getting late.’

  ‘Can I go then?’

  ‘Price, I—’ (But my hand stays at my side.) ‘Yes, you can go.’

  He moves briskly, snubbingly to the door. Turns before exiting:

  ‘So see you at tomorrow’s lesson.’

  21

  Aux Armes

  AT WHICH the Spokesman, returned from the camp of the Despot, invested (my tactical blundering) with the aura of martyr and champion, has gained esteem and attention. Is a focus for commotion. So what did he say? And what did you say? And what’s he like, by the way, when you get him on his own? Is he really – you know – a bit off his head …?

  At which there are murmurings and stirrings. A mood of temerity. At which the whole class has grown tired of this tedious discussion of causes, preliminaries; analytical debate. Explanation, explanation. Talk, talk. The National Assembly; its feasibility; its components; its cast-list of characters. The constitutional options; dialogue; rhetoric and reality; theory and practice; history and histrionics …

  Hey, we thought revolution was about action. About barricades and blood. So what about it?

  See how you’ve roused them, Price. See how you’ve worked them up. But for the right reasons? Against History? The syllabus? But it’s not the syllabus that’s wrong, it’s just that it dawdles, it’s just that it’s slow getting to the exciting bits. Schoolboy relish for battles and beheadings. (Me too once, in my inky-black uniform.)

  What you wanted, Price? Down with the past. But see how they want the old, old story. See how they’re rushing to be
knocking down again that big, bad legendary Bastille. Action and atavism. Get out the costumes. When history provides our mock-up for protest …

  The Spokesman remains silent amidst the clamourings. Eyes his teacher. Revolutionary paradoxes: when the subject’s revolution, how do you rise up against it? When the past tries to demolish itself, how do you demolish the past? That twisted face. At the next lesson (Declaration of the Rights of Man) he’ll throw in, for good measure, the end of the world.

  But what about the barricades and the bloodshed? And what about the guillotines? Come on.

  So you want drama? You want action? You want the apocalyptic note? Then let me tell you

  22

  About Coronation Ale

  HE RETREATS to Kessling Hall, a brewer by trade, a politician by erroneous aspiration. A brewer: a fermenter.

  In the election of January, 1910, my grandfather polls only eleven hundred votes and, notwithstanding his name and his being Gildsey-born, is passed over in favour of an outsider, John Sikes, a Yorkshireman, quickly bustled in to snap up an easy seat, and duly returned as Conservative member, albeit under a Liberal government. My grandfather accepts defeat, having expected, perhaps, nothing more; having already resigned himself to the role of a political Cassandra and the loss of his candidate’s deposit.

  But though he accepts defeat he does not accept inaction. He waits for the moment to give the people what they want.

  And finds it, in the summer of 1911.

  In the summer of 1911, as you will surely know if you have learnt by heart your Monarchs of Great Britain and their Dates, good old gadabout King Edward was dead and diligent family-man – but still King and Emperor – George V had acceded. And when a king accedes he must be crowned, in order to give his people an occasion for rejoicing and for the expression of their loyal fervour.

  And how convenient, how fitting that such an occasion should exist at such a time. When the Dreadnought programme, even under a Liberal government, had been doubled; when the Kaiser was committing indiscretions all over Europe; as Britons entered this second, momentous decade of the twentieth century.

  In June, 1911, during the preparations in Gildsey for celebrating the coronation of George V, amidst the hanging of flags, the building of bonfires, the arranging of floral mottoes and planning of banquets, my grandfather, the morose and unpopular brewer of the town, proposed to make his own contribution to the festivities by producing a commemorative bottled ale, to be called, appropriately enough, Coronation Ale; the first thousand bottles to be issued free, but no drop to pass any man’s lips till the king was indeed crowned.

  Though it had already passed, in a form known simply as ‘Special’, my grandfather’s lips. And perhaps too the budding lips of Helen Atkinson, my mother.

  Warmed by patriotic zeal and softened by a mood of reconciliation (so, when it comes to it, the peevish brewer can say his God Save the King like any man), the townspeople chose to forget for a moment their differences with Ernest Atkinson. The jubilant day drew near. They cast their minds back to other times when they had been licensed to swill beer in a noble cause; to the Diamond and Golden Jubilee Ales, even to the Grand ’51, and so to those halcyon days when the fortunes of the town had bloomed. Had those days gone for ever? Could this National Occasion – so Ernest Atkinson ventured, addressing the Celebrations Committee, with no hint of politics but with a curious glint in his eye – not include a local one? For was it not, he pointed out, the glint becoming curiouser, almost exactly one hundred years ago that Thomas Atkinson received, to the great grudgingness (uneasy laughter amongst the committee members) of certain Gildsey factions, the Leem Navigation, thus inaugurating the process by which this once obscure Fenland town gained its place in the Nation – if not, indeed, the World?

  What was in this Coronation Ale, offered in a dark brown bottle of a shape narrower and more elongated than the beer bottle of later days, with ‘Atkinson – Gildsey’ embossed upon it and a label bearing a large crown, centre, and a continuous border of alternating smaller crowns and Union Jacks? Nectar? Poison? Merriment? Madness? The bottled-up manias of His Majesty’s subjects?

  Rest assured, it was no ordinary ale that they drank by the Ouse while in Westminster crowds thronged, guns fired and the Abbey bells pealed. For when the men of Gildsey jostled into the Pike and Eel and the Jolly Bargeman to be amongst the privileged first one thousand to receive their bottle gratis and to raise their glasses in decent good cheer to toast the King, they discovered that this patriotic liquor hurled them with astonishing rapidity through the normally gradual and containable stages of intoxication: pleasure, satisfaction, well-being, elation, light-headedness, hot-headedness, befuddlement, distraction, delirium, irascibility, pugnaciousness, imbalance, incapacity – all in the gamut of a single bottle. And if a second bottle was broached—

  Precise accounts of the events of that day are hard to track down. Partly because it was a day that Gildsey wished to forget; partly for the more pertinent reason that many of those who might have acted as reliable witnesses were, at the time, hopelessly drunk.

  With alarming frequency the women of the town were called upon to restrain displays of intemperance in their menfolk, only to succumb themselves to the temptation of tasting this brew which had such remarkable effect. The landlords of the town’s twenty-three public houses began to fear for the respectability and physical safety of their establishments. A parade of schoolchildren down Water Street demonstrating their innocent, flag-waving allegiance to the new Monarch, was marred by the raucous – and possibly obscene – choruses emanating from the Swan and the Pike and Eel. Sky-rockets and Roman candles intended for a dazzling evening display were let off in broad daylight and along alarming trajectories. A horrific incidence of shipwreck and drowning almost occurred when the St Guthlac, whose steersman had quaffed his bottle, as had a good many of his passengers, took a zig-zagging career across the river, pennants aflutter and steam-horn braying, and was almost run down by the Fen Queen, under a similar state of captaincy.

  Drunkenness. While the bells of St Gunnhilda’s ring in the new reign. Drunkenness in many sudden and wonderful forms.

  A deputation of the two senior police officers of the town addressed themselves, in the canvas structure known as the ‘Coronation Pavilion’, to Ernest Atkinson, to express their urgent view that in the name of law and order the public houses of the town should be closed, and to ask, in the meantime, what on earth was in those bottles, and was there no antidote? To which Ernest is said to have replied, with a detectable mimicking of his election speech style, that it would be a most deplorable action, to suppress, on this of all days, a gesture intended only to do honour to King and Country; that though he was responsible for the beer, he could hardly be held responsible for those (these were his words) who did not drink it wisely. And to illustrate this latter point, he proceeded, before the eyes of the police chiefs, to drain in one draught a bottle of the ale in question (of which several crates had penetrated the Coronation Pavilion) without the slightest visible effect, thus giving the lie to the slanders made at that same election speech and proving the adage that it takes more than his own beer to get a brewer drunk. The officers were cordially invited to try for themselves. Being in their best ceremonial uniforms, they declined.

  To these same senior officers it had soon regrettably to be reported that a number of their constables had yielded to the general intoxication and tasted the extraordinary potion. A young reveller had attempted to climb a flagpole and broken a leg. The Processions and Events were falling into disarray. And numerous participating citizens who even on this day should have maintained a necessary degree of sobriety, had failed to do so, including the members of the Gildsey Free Trade Brass Band, whose much rehearsed programme suffered from wild improvisations and whose rendering of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture broke down irredeemably.

  It was now a question of some difficulty, for those still able to judge the matter, whether prohibiting the suppl
y of this by now clamoured-for beer might not lead to even greater uproar than that caused by its consumption.

  During the course of this riotous afternoon several of those invited to attend the Coronation Banquet (at eight, in the Great Chamber of the Town Hall) began to wonder how (given that they too had drunk—) they might conceivably excuse themselves from such a dignified gathering. But no Coronation Banquet was to occur. For the worst of this outrageous day was yet to come.

  No one knows how it started. Whether the alarm was first given by individuals (and was ignored as one of innumerable hoaxes and hallucinations) or whether the whole town as a body was suddenly aware of the palpable fact. But as twilight descended on this more than festive day it became evident that the brewery, the New Atkinson Brewery, built in 1849 by George and Alfred Atkinson, was on fire. Palls of thickening smoke were rapidly followed by leaping flames, then by the loud crackings and burstings that signal an advanced conflagration.

  A crowd rushed and swarmed. The Coronation Banquet, in the face of such a dire emergency, was summarily cancelled. The Gildsey Fire Brigade (founder, Alfred Atkinson) was called out in full complement. But whether this stalwart body, with its three engines and two auxiliary tenders, was of any use on this disastrous night is to be doubted. For not only had the Fire Station been improvidently undermanned throughout the day (one of the engines having been decked out with ribbons and flags as part of the celebratory procession) but almost every fireman, struggling now just as much to sober himself as to get into his cumbersome fireman’s garb, had drunk his share of the Ale; with the result that when the engines at last arrived, in ragged order, with much clanging of bells, and in one case still festooned with patriotic rosettes, the brewery was already past saving. And it was claimed by several eye-witnesses that the gallant crews devoted much more of their energy to a variety of insubordinate antics (such as playing their hoses upon the watching crowd) than they ever did to the fire.