Waterland

by Graham Swift

  A thronged market-square. A band going through its heart-stirring paces. Flags, bunting— But we’ve seen enough of this sort of thing in the town before, so if we add a lot of khaki, some old-buffer colonels with medals and shaving-brush moustaches, some bawling and shouting, some strutting recruiting sergeants, some rifles; and don’t forget to deduct something too, from the background: a brewery chimney – we’ve got the picture.

  The march-past begins. The saluting brigadier takes his position. The first ranks are composed of judiciously picked and well-drilled regulars out to display just what the Army, with a little spit and polish, can do with a man; the remainder – but these are the real persuaders – consist of recent, untrained and excitable recruits, apt to march in imperfect step, to flush and, in an effort not to grin when they shouldn’t, to wear unduly solemn expressions.

  The first ranks pass the stand and give their salute – perhaps with the barest split-second’s mistiming – in the manner expected of them. But when the turn comes for the successive eyes-right from the main body of new volunteers, something is patently wrong. For before the eyes-right order comes, a good many eyes are already turned right; and not towards the saluting brigadier either, or any of the other florid-faced chiefs, but towards Helen Atkinson, who’s sitting by her father on the makeshift platform amongst the civic dignitaries, to the right of the saluting point. Once they get a glimpse out of the corner of their eyes, they have to take a proper look. And once they take a proper look, they can’t wrench their eyes away. Now, isn’t that a prettier sight than a brass-hat with medals …? And because they are constrained even to look back over their shoulders and not to want to pass this object of attention quickly, all pretence at keeping step or holding line gets abandoned, ranks behind tread on the heels of ranks in front, someone trips, a rifle falls – this march-past turns into a shambles …

  My mother told it differently (so I never knew whom she meant or how false modesty was being dismissed): Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl at a parade of soldiers, and the silly soldiers with their rifles bumped into each other and forgot how to march because they all wanted to look at the beautiful girl. And the general turned red, and then he turned purple …

  And the watching throng, on that spring day, had their own story: It’s his doing – they say he’s here somewhere on the platform – he’s put them up to it somehow …

  Though the ones who were close enough to pick him out and might indeed have shared these accusatory sentiments, had their gazes, and their wrath, diverted: My, what a gem she’s grown up to be – and what a shame, what a crying shame for her sake, that she is who she is …

  And the town dignitaries told themselves: Something’s gone wrong with our town – we can’t seem to stage a Big Event any more …

  And the visiting top brass said: Damn filly on the stand goes and wrecks the whole show. Mind you, quite a stunner …

  And the Gildsey Examiner reported: ‘It would be churlish to dwell, in these urgent times, on an unfortunate disarray …’

  And just a few, amongst the older sectors of the community (notwithstanding that we’re already fifteen years into the twentieth century of hard facts and hard technology), had yet another version: It’s her. It’s her work. She stirred up those floods in ’74 when she should have been lying quiet in her coffin, then she got inside those bottles of beer, drove everyone crazy and got the brewery burnt down; and now she puts the jinx on our recruiting parade…

  But all these variants upon the same incident meant nothing to my grandfather beside the fact of his daughter’s sudden power, without the need for either word or action, to make a mockery of these war-mongering proceedings – when his own words and actions had failed. And perhaps it was then, on that April day in 1915, that my grandfather fell in love (if this can be properly said about the feelings of a father) with his daughter.

  After April, 1915, my grandfather never showed his face in Gildsey again. After that inauspicious parade he became not only a thoroughgoing recluse but a worshipper of Beauty.

  (This is no supposition. Not wild invention. I have my grandfather’s own authority: a journal, which he almost destroyed, but in the end didn’t …)

  For having done all within his power, in his own small corner of the world, to warn the world of the calamity approaching it, what more could he do now that calamity had arrived, now that, across the sea in France, the world was systematically constructing a hell-on-earth, than cling (I only paraphrase his words) to some left-over fragment of paradise?

  What is happening to my grandfather? Can it be that he too has succumbed to that old Atkinson malaise and caught Ideas? And not just any old idea, but Beauty – most Platonic of the lot. The Idea of Ideas. Can it be that my grandfather is lapsing – heaven knows – into gobbledy-gook?

  But this is no idea. It’s a living being. It’s his flesh-and-blood daughter.

  And there’s nothing Platonic about it.

  A strange thing, but the more the war progresses (if that’s what wars do), the more it loses its fairy-tale flavour, its rally-round-the-flag, all-over-by-Christmas flavour and becomes something appalling, something quite unlike a fairy-tale, so the more beautiful grows this daughter. And the more despairing (of mankind) and worshipping (of his daughter) grows Ernest. Till – while George and Henry Crick join the forward march of history and end up in muddy madness – Ernest Atkinson beats a headlong retreat, backwards, inwards, to Paradise, and starts to believe that only from out of this beauty will come a Saviour of the World.

  It’s said that after his withdrawal into complete retirement in 1915, Ernest Atkinson’s former desire to make his countrymen look to the future converted into misanthropy (though it’s hardly misanthropic to endow a hospital). The terrible truths of the war, which by 1917 were beginning to come home (along with George Crick’s personal effects and a letter from his CO) gave him no cause for self-satisfaction or for exultation over his former detractors – they only deepened his disgust for humanity. It’s said, variously, that he destroyed all remaining stocks of that deadly Coronation Ale along with all records of what went into it; that he became a teetotaller; that he kept a cache of bottles but he never drank them; that he did drink them, and not only this but he and Helen continued to brew, in that private experimental brewery he’d set up at Kessling, further supplies, for purely domestic use, and that this continued imbibing, whether it calmed his Jeremiahical humour or fuelled it, certainly awoke some pretty strange urges, and drove him plain out of his wits.

  In November, 1918 – when the Hall at Kessling was being prepared to receive its first batch of patients and Helen and her father were settling, just like man and wife, into the Lodge – the people of Gildsey and the Leem villages might have forgiven Ernest Atkinson. Because this founding of a hospital, to be sure, scarcely looked like the work of a madman – or a degenerate. And perhaps all those rumours—

  But there’s something the people of Gildsey and the Leem (and not just them but people everywhere) wanted to do more than forgive; and that was forget. They wanted to forget the nasty things that, in four years, human nature can get up to. But a Home for war victims (albeit hidden by thick woods) is a pretty big reminder (now could this just be Ernest Atkinson’s gesture of revenge?). And so the simplest way not to be reminded, not to be made guilty, and at the same time not to let that man off the hook, was to say: Oh yes, he may have endowed a war hospital all right, and very fine too, but just take a peek at what’s going on in that Lodge, go on, and then see what you think. Yes, we all know that there’s nothing like public virtue for hiding private vice. And we don’t want to hear, no, thank you very much, about a hospital that’s built on shame …

  (And of course history confirms that this isn’t the first time that the Atkinsons, for reasons that may or may not bear scrutiny, have established an asylum …)

  Thus the good people, having affirmed their position and satisfied themselves on two counts, rubbed their hands and got on wi
th sane and wholesome pursuits, such as the improvement of land drainage. The local systems had fallen into grave disrepair, not only through the deprivations of the war, but through the undeniable neglect (we must mention him again) of Ernest Atkinson, who, whilst his brewery was no more, his water transport company sold up and his agricultural interests whittled away, still held a nominal position of power on the Leem Drainage and Navigation Board.

  And in a very short time they did indeed forget. They forgot about Ernest and Helen. They forgot about the Atkinsons who for a hundred years or more had ruled over their fortunes. They forgot about Coronation Ale (how easy it is to forget the awkward things). They forgot about the old world of breweries and malt barges and civic receptions – how much had been eclipsed, and so quickly, by those four dark years. Then they forgot about the war too, because that was the main point of their forgetfulness and the most awkward thing of all.

  But Ernest and Helen couldn’t forget – not with that Home for the shell-shocked just over their back fence. And the inmates of the Home certainly couldn’t forget – because that’s why they were there. Five, ten years later – ten years after the end of the war, which, of course, was to end all wars, and much talk of things of the past being things of the past – some of them are still there. And even twenty-five years later, when Henry Crick tunes in religiously to his evening bulletin and bombers set the night sky rumbling, and young Tom Crick takes a keen interest in a certain bottle, there’s still a small core there – but who remembers them? – still in the throes of the old war, still trying to forget …

  But let’s not jump ahead. One way or the other at Kessling, in the years following the Great War, there are quite a few who can’t forget what a mad place the world is.

  Henry Crick forgets. He says: I remember nothing. But that’s just a trick of the brain. That’s like saying: I don’t care to remember, and I don’t want to talk about it. Yet it’s perfectly natural that Henry Crick wants to forget, it’s a perfectly good sign that he thinks he’s forgotten, because that’s how we get over things, by forgetting. So in June, 1921 (it wasn’t a quick process), when Henry Crick starts to say in a perfectly calm and collected voice, ‘I remember nothing’, the doctors in London and elsewhere, who for some three years now have been wondering quite what to do with Henry Crick, decide it’s time he can go home. Yes, he’s recovered pretty well, and it’s time, now he’s got rid of all those nasty memories, that he revived some nice ones. So they deliver him back to Hockwell. Here’s the old village, remember? Here’s the river, and the bridge, and the railway station. And here’s the old home and your old Mum and Dad – they’ve aged a bit, but remember them? (But where’s brother George?) Yes, we think you’ll be all right now. Yes, it’s been a long trip, but you’re back now at last where you came from.

  But that’s just where they’re wrong. Because it doesn’t take much or long – just a few walks by himself along the river-bank and around the fields, just a few weeks of autumn rain filling the dykes and turning the ground quaggy – and Henry Crick’s crying out again for treatment. Because this flat, bare, washed-out Fenland, which ought to be the perfect home of oblivion, the perfect place for getting used to forgetting, has quite the opposite effect on our limping veteran. And maybe that’s just the point: it’s oblivion he’d like to forget, it’s that sense of the dizzy void he can’t get away from. He could do without this feeling of nothing.

  Henry Crick comes home from a long walk one October afternoon, a mass of twitches, trembles, shakes and jitters, unable to speak a sensible word. They pack him off to that place at Kessling, where it looks as though he might be staying a long while. For Mr and Mrs Edward Crick it’s all too much. One after the other – like two of those dazed, doomed Tommies advancing blindly into the same machine-gun skittle-alley – they topple into their graves. For poor Henry things couldn’t be worse. He’s back where he came from all right – in the old, old mud. But he’s also at Kessling Hall, and there— But we know what happened to him there …

  In February, 1919, shortly before her twenty-third birthday, Helen Atkinson becomes a trainee auxiliary nurse (one of fourteen at the Kessling Home). Is this her choice – or her father’s wish? Or just the product of an inexorable logic? It’s his hospital, after all; and she’s his daughter. Every day, and sometimes at night too, lighting her way with a torch, she leaves the Lodge (which is no longer the Lodge proper, because the hospital has its own separate entrance, off the Kessling-Apton road) and, unlike the other nurses who either live-in or cycle from nearby lodgings, walks up the old Atkinson driveway to the scene of her duties. (This is something that Henry Crick won’t puzzle out – when he recovers the wherewithal to puzzle things out – why she always comes and goes that way.) In her nurse’s wimple and nurse’s cloak, she bids goodbye to her wifeless father (a man of forty-four, though to look at him you’d add on at least another ten years) and disappears amongst the ranks of trees.

  And Ernest Atkinson is content to watch her go. Because Ernest Atkinson, though his mind may be touched, is not – unlike a certain ancestor of his – a jealous, a possessive man. Quite, quite the opposite. He pictures his daughter moving amongst those shattered creatures at the hospital, like some lady of the lamp. He imagines her effecting miracle cures, not by her nursely arts, but by the sheer magic of her beautiful presence. He sees, stepping out of the hospital portals, a redeemed race of men.

  That’s how Ernest sees it. You don’t believe it? It’s in that journal.

  And – believe it or not – miracles happen: with Henry Crick.

  Ah yes, put it down, if you like, to improved methods of therapy, the know-how of doctors, or simply the passage of time, but Henry Crick will tell you it was none other than that angel in a nurse’s uniform, that white-aproned goddess. Her and her alone.

  Henry Crick has discovered love. All through that spring of 1922 (it’s 1922 – is that possible? Not 1917?) he is indeed in paradise. And it’s no dream. Because she loves him too. She says so. And it’s no airy and imaginary thing, this love. It gets more palpable, more passionate, the more Henry Crick recovers. Having missed, because of the intrusion on his time – not to say his sanity – of the affairs of the wide world, a good many of his youthful, amorous years, Henry Crick has learnt little about love, is an inexperienced lover. But Helen Atkinson teaches him. She is an able teacher (now where has she gained her knowledge?). And heals him.

  Does Helen Atkinson, too, then, believe in miracles? No, but she believes in stories. She believes that they’re a way of bearing what won’t go away, a way of making sense of madness. Inside the nurse there lurks the mother, and in three years at the Kessling Home for Neurasthenics Helen has come to regard these poor, deranged inmates as children. Like frightened children, what they most want is to be told stories. And out of this discovery she evolves a precept: No, don’t forget. Don’t erase it. You can’t erase it. But make it into a story. Just a story. Yes, everything’s crazy. What’s real? All a story. Only a story …

  So Henry Crick, who is learning about love, learns, also, to tell those stories of old Flanders which he will tell again, more embellished, more refined, by the lockside, by the fireside and during the nocturnal lowering and raising of eel-traps, and which will lead on to other stories, till the pain, save for sporadic twinges in the knee, is almost gone. (Though other pains …) He retrieves that old knack of his Crick ancestors which his little trip to the trenches nearly put paid to for good and all. He even saves up, for some future time, though perhaps without knowing it, the story of this same extraordinary adventure he is now undergoing, this encounter with a nurse (for how can you explain a miracle except by saying: this is how it was?). Though he won’t do that, he won’t tell that story, till much, much later, till he’s a dying man, and another woman is nursing him …

  They not only become lovers, this strangely matched pair, they tell each other stories.

  And what story does Henry hear issuing from the lips of Helen Atkinson?


  Once upon a time there was a father who fell in love with his daughter (now let’s be clear, we’re not just talking about ordinary paternal affection). And the father – who’d lost his wife many years before – and the daughter lived alone in a former lodge on the edge of the grounds of a hospital. Hemmed in by tall trees and standing all by itself, this lodge was like a house in a fairy-tale – a gingerbread house, a woodcutter’s cottage; but in fact the father had once been a rich and influential man – amongst other things he owned a brewery – though, one way or another, he’d fallen on bad times; and once he’d lived in the grand building which was now a hospital. Far away, across the sea, there’d been a great war and the hospital was full of soldiers, some of them wounded in their bodies but all of them wounded in the mind. And this was true even though the war had ended three years before.

  Before it began, the father had spoken out against the war, which everyone felt was coming like a great adventure. He told the people that when it came it would be a terrible, a disastrous thing. But the people scoffed and scorned the father. On top of this, one night, his brewery burnt down. So he went to live, like a banished man, with his daughter in the big house in the country which would one day be a hospital.

  Then the war began and became all the things the father said it would be, and the father grew sick at heart, with only his daughter to comfort him. Sometimes, in that lonely house, where, to while away the heavy hours, they told each other stories and dabbled still in beer-brewing, he would tell his daughter that the world was dying; it would never be the same again. All its youth and bloom were being sucked away. But even as he said these things he could not deny (a man who was neither young nor old but ageing rapidly) that his daughter was blooming before his eyes. And even as he said these things he must have already fallen in love with his daughter. And the daughter must have known it. Because one night they stopped telling stories and fell into each other’s arms, the way a father and a daughter shouldn’t.