The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  John Badham knew all the stories. He liked to joke that he was the only man in England who had bought a house in 2000 that was now worth less than he paid for it. It didn’t make any difference, because he couldn’t sell it anyway. ‘Any entry of water into your home, no matter how tiny, has to be disclosed – probably quite rightly,’ he said. ‘The first question anybody asks when they buy a house in Tewkesbury is obvious: was it flooded? Well, I would ask the same thing.’

  Abbey Terrace was not only vulnerable from the front; at the back, it bordered the Mill Avon, which had burst its banks in the winter, flooding the western edge of town. The windows of Mr Badham’s study, on the top floor of his house, revealed another transformation: the grey lake that I had contemplated from King John’s Court was now a managed riverscape of locks and gates that contained the narrow strip of water dividing the town from the water meadow called the Ham, its lush green grass invigorated by its winter drenching. It was like going backstage in a theatre and seeing the old-fashioned machinery that was used to raise and lower the flats. It was the industrial end of town, John Badham said – though, when the water came up and the locks and gates disappeared, it was like living in Switzerland.

  Their house hadn’t flooded in November 2012, though it had come close: water from the Mill Avon had filled the garden and come halfway up the steps of the renovated kitchen. It had been higher in 2007, for the Mill Avon was the second river to flood Tewkesbury, after the Swilgate; it had burst its banks on Saturday morning and added to the depth of water already in the houses in Abbey Terrace. John Badham, who chewed nicotine gum throughout the time I spent with him, used to be a heavy smoker, and he had been stuck in the house without any cigarettes. ‘So I rang my friend, who was very hostile to smoking, and I said, “I’m desperate, I have to have a packet of fags.” He had a pair of galoshes, and he decided that, in the circumstances, he would go and buy me some.’

  Yet even cigarettes couldn’t persuade the Badhams to stay. One of their neighbours had a boat and, at lunchtime, he sculled up to the front door and collected them. They left with a suitcase. ‘The dog swam – there was only one, in those days.’ There were now unmistakably two, and they made the kitchen seem very small as they circled in a constant search for food or affection. The Badhams had had a cat as well, which they had been happy to leave behind. ‘It was a horrid cat.’ Mr Badham laughed. ‘One of my friends called it cooking fat, which is a spoonerism. It was a dreadful cat – used to savage you at the slightest provocation.’ They thought they would be back within a day, but it was three or four, and they had to ask the RSPCA to save the cat.

  Hundreds of houses had flooded by then, though some things went ahead as planned: there was a wedding in the abbey on Saturday, and the bride arrived in a four-by-four. The Reverend Canon Paul Williams, the vicar of Tewkesbury Abbey, went across the road to the pub, which was another relic of the old monastic establishment, and asked people to help him move furniture beyond the water’s reach. He returned the favour by helping people sandbag houses and businesses. John Badham, who became a Catholic when he went to college in Oxford, partly to irritate his Presbyterian businessman father, said he didn’t belong to ‘the vicar’s flock’, but had nothing but praise for him all the same. He remembered the vicar padding about with a teapot, visiting people stranded in their cars. On Saturday evening, he held a service at the gates of the abbey, and people came out of the nearby houses to listen.

  I had met the Reverend Williams in the abbey on my first visit to Tewkesbury. It was only half past three when I got there, but it was getting dark already; the yellow-tinted light falling through the stained-glass windows had faded, matching the tone of the burnished pews and flagstone floor. The Reverend Williams was standing at the end of the nave. I recognized him from a photograph on the website, which included knitting patterns and cake recipes as well as accounts of Tewkesbury’s history and statements of theological identity, though the dog collar marked him out, anyway. We walked round the outside of the building to his study, in the vicarage. There were comfortable armchairs and shelves of books on theology, and a tray of tea was delivered discreetly from the recesses of the old building. Yet the Anglican warmth and civility contrasted with the cold, dark expanse of water that filled the Vineyards and rose to within metres of the windows.

  People came up with ingenious ways of getting through the flood of 2007, the Reverend Williams said: they rigged up a pulley system to reach the inhabitants of the Abbey Mill, which had been cut off, and sent across essential supplies, such as champagne. ‘What makes human beings unique is that ability to work together for the common good,’ he said. ‘It was awe-inspiring, the care for one another that emerged.’

  I was fascinated by the stories of life in the flooded town. I had studied the aerial photograph of Tewkesbury in 2007 so often that I felt I could have found my way through the streets revealed by its elevated perspective, but I had no idea what was going on in them. The town looked deserted – that was part of the strangeness of the photograph. I could see the tall Georgian houses of Abbey Terrace, knee-deep in water at the eastern edge of the narrow isthmus of land to which Tewkesbury had been confined, the flats of the converted Abbey Mill, which were cut off from the rest of the town, and the windows of the vicarage where I was sitting with the vicar, but I couldn’t see the Badhams climbing into the boat with their dog, the pulley ferrying champagne to Abbey Mill, nor the bride arriving in a four-by-four. And I couldn’t see the congregation that had formed in the streets outside the abbey to listen to the service. Now that I had heard the way sound rebounded from the surface of the water, which lay at the end of the streets, and seen how it glossed the walls of the alleys running off the high street with a faint grey glow, I could imagine prayers and chanting drifting around the flooded town on the evening of 21 July 2007, and I didn’t doubt the vicar’s claim that it had been ‘a powerful cultic event’.

  ‘You could see the force of ritual holding a community together,’ he said. ‘We had people who were trapped in their cars and slept overnight here. We had 200 in the abbey, 200 in the hall, and people dotted around about – people ran for shelter, and it became an ark.’

  ~

  According to Mesopotamian mythology, the gods used to live on earth and provide for themselves. They even dug the channels that carried the life-giving waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Yet, as the years passed, they got tired of looking after themselves:

  The gods’ load was too great

  The work too hard, the trouble too much

  says a poem dated to 1700 BC, which also contains the earliest recorded story of a survivor of a flood. The gods made fourteen humans from clay and blood to be their slaves, but they bred too fast and the noise of their chattering and arguing rose up to heaven and irritated the gods. They tried to reduce the humans’ numbers through plague, drought and famine, before a god called Enlil decided to settle the matter with a purging flood. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains the fullest version of the story, another god, Ea, learns of Enlil’s plan and passes on a warning to a man called Uta-Napishtim. Speaking to him through the wall of a reed hut where he is sleeping, Ea tells him to build a boat in which to ride out the flood:

  Abandon wealth, and seek survival!

  Spurn property, save life!

  Take on board the boat all living things’ seed!

  Enlil’s deluge was so overwhelming that ‘even the gods took fright’ and retreated to heaven, where the goddess Ishtar ‘cried out like a woman in childbirth’ at the agonies of the humans:

  It is I who give birth, these people are mine!

  And now, like fish, they fill the ocean!

  When the flood was over, ‘all the people had turned to clay.’ Uta-Napishtim said, ‘the floodplain was flat, like the roof of a house.’ The ark, filled with breeding pairs of animals, came to rest on a mountain called Nimush, and, on the seventh day, Uta-Napishtim sent out a dove to look for land. It couldn’t find any and came b
ack. So did a swallow, but a raven didn’t:

  . . . it saw the water receding,

  Finding food, bowing and bobbing, it did not come back to me.

  The similarities with the story of Noah are not coincidental. Irving Finkel, an expert in Mesopotamian cuneiform at the British Museum, who was recently given a Mesopotamian tablet with specifications for an ark and built a serviceable version of it for a TV documentary, believes the Jews heard the story during their exile in Babylon, in the early sixth century BC, and imported it into the Bible, with few modifications.

  The story has been transported into other cultures, too. There are at least two versions in Greek mythology, including one in which the ark lands on Mount Parnassus and a husband and wife, Deucalion and Pyrrha, repopulate the earth by throwing rocks over their shoulders. And it has travelled beyond the Judaeo-Christian realm of the Mediterranean: there is an Incan Noah who survives the flood in a sealed cave; a Hindu Noah called Manu, who is warned of the flood by a fish, which grows so large that it tows his boat to its resting place in the Himalayas; and a Polynesian Noah, Nu’u, whose boat lands on a mountain in Hawaii, and who ‘sacrificed kava, pig, and coconuts to heaven.’ The Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology says the legend is a mixture of Biblical and local borrowings, but ‘there is no reason to suppose that independent stories did not exist prior to the arrival of missionaries.’

  In Mayan mythology, the creator-god Hurricane was so disappointed with his early attempts to carve humans out of wood that he drowned them in a flood, while the sun-god, Nakuset, of the indigenous Canadian Mi’kmaq people, was so saddened by mankind’s wickedness that he wept tears that became a global deluge. The people attempted to escape in bark canoes, but only one man and one woman survived.

  Yet it remains best known in the Christian version. Michelangelo depicted the sinners escaping the rising waters on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Raphael painted a fresco in the Vatican loggias of Noah supervising his sons building the ark. There are versions of the flood in most of the great galleries of the world, including several on the theme of The Deluge by J.M.W. Turner, which hang in Tate Britain – the Thameside gallery that flooded in 1928. Recently, the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky retold the story in his movie Noah, starring Russell Crowe, in which he mined the great storybook of Genesis for all its strangeness and violence.

  Novelists have revisited the myth as well. In two recent re-imaginings, it is not the flood that wipes out most of the human race, but disease – though, in both cases, the waters rise all the same, and shrink the survivors’ worlds.

  The characters in Clare Morrall’s When the Floods Came are the last remaining inhabitants of Birmingham, isolated in tower blocks that become islands in the seasonal floods, while Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of post-apocalyptic novels, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, tells the story of a benign cult, called ‘God’s Gardeners’, who live in rooftop communes in the chaos of the ‘pleeblands’, the slums outside the compounds of the biotech companies that have devastated the planet through a mixture of accident and design.

  God’s Gardeners disguise themselves as religious fanatics in the hope that they will be left alone in their ‘sheltering Ararats’, though their recycling of Biblical tropes and environmental beliefs and practices is, in part, sincere. ‘God had promised after the Noah incident that he’d never use the water method again, but considering the wickedness of the world, he was bound to do something: that was their reasoning,’ Atwood writes in MaddAddam, the concluding book of the trilogy. While they prepare for the plague they call the ‘Waterless Flood’, the seas are encroaching on the continental United States. Santa Monica has become the ‘Floating World’, and ‘nearby Venice was living up to its name’. On the east coast, New York has given way to New New York ‘on the Jersey shore, or what was now the shore.’ New York has not been entirely abandoned – it is ‘officially a no-go zone and thus a no-rent zone, so a few denizens were still willing to take their chances in the disintegrating, waterlogged, derelict buildings.’

  Sometimes, the story is re-enacted outside the realms of fiction. In 2015, a flood swept through a zoo in Tbilisi, Georgia, drowning three keepers and releasing hippos and tigers into the streets, in a reversal of the pattern all children learn of the breeding animals ushered into the ark, two by two. I sometimes wondered whether the story’s enduring prominence explained our attitude to global warming: to those affected, being flooded feels like the end of the world, but, to the rest of us, there is subliminal reassurance in the knowledge that there have always been floods, and, one way or another, we have come through them. True believers may relish the prospect of a cleansing, apocalyptic flood, but even those with no religious convictions find it hard to resist the irrational belief that they will be the ones to be saved. There may be room for only one family on the ark – one pair of breeding adults to accompany the animals – but we like to think that it will be us.

  Even the way the vicar of Tewkesbury invoked the Christian version of the ancient Mesopotamian myth to describe the calamity that overtook a small English town in the first decade of the twenty-first century confirmed its significance. On the face of it, it made no sense to describe Tewkesbury Abbey as an ark; even Winchester Cathedral, which was saved from sinking by a solitary diver who dug out its foundations and resettled it on a kind of raft, could hardly be described as a boat. Yet the ark that Ea told Uta-Napishtim to build, as he slept on the floor of his reed hut in the marshes of Iraq, is a universal metaphor – though it has an added local resonance, Reverend Williams said. ‘The idea of the abbey as a refuge is something very deep in Tewkesbury.’

  It hasn’t always proved effective. One of the decisive battles of the War of the Roses was fought in the fields south of Tewkesbury, when the Yorkist forces led by King Edward IV overtook the Lancastrians, who were trying to cross the Severn and retreat into Wales, and defeated them in a battle that is re-enacted every year. Many of the Lancastrian noblemen sought sanctuary in the abbey, but they were dragged out two days later and executed.

  The abbey was supposed to be a refuge in another sense, too. Tewkesbury was founded by a pilgrim from Newcastle called Theoc, who lived in a hermit’s cell on a spit of land where the Severn and the Avon meet, and the abbey stands on the same spot. ‘The monks knew where to build,’ the Reverend Williams had said, as we stood in the nave of the abbey. In its 900-year history, the abbey had only flooded once, in 1760, when one of the Reverend Williams’ predecessors had paddled a boat down the aisle, but on Sunday, 22 July 2007, it flooded for a second time. The gauge on the Mythe Bridge over the Severn, half a mile outside Tewkesbury, had reached its highest level in the floods of 1947, but on Sunday morning it set a new record: 5.43 metres was more than ten times its normal level. ‘When I woke up, it was eerily quiet,’ the Reverend Williams said. Yet there were firemen in the streets, and, when he went outside, he saw the water rising through the grounds of the abbey and entering the building he had described as an ark.

  3: Sweet Sabrina

  THE KINGDOM OF THE SEVERN: WORCESTER & FELPHAM, 2012

  I walked to the source of the Severn a week after I went to Tewkesbury for the second time. It was a rainy day in late May. I followed a well-trodden path through Hafren Forest until I reached a trail of stone steps dug into the damp black earth of a moor sprinkled with late-blooming snowdrops. Tarddiad Afon Hafren, said the vertically stacked letters on the post in an area of the bog that had been paved with stones; if the context hadn’t supplied their meaning, their fluid rhythm might have. There was no sign of a stream, though the ground was soft underfoot – springy and buoyant in places, sodden in others. Wisps of dark, fast-moving cloud rose from the valley and drifted across the moor, as if the spirit of the river had been transfused into a veil of mist and rain.

  According to one story, the Severn is one of three sisters who meet on the slopes of Mount Plynlimon in Wales and debate the best way to the sea. The River Rheidol takes a direct rou
te westwards, the Wye takes the picturesque route, but the Severn stays close to the ‘haunts of men’ on her 220-mile journey to the Bristol Channel. She wanted ‘to visit all the fairest cities of the kingdom,’ says Bill Gwilliam, in Worcestershire’s Hidden Past. Or perhaps she wanted revenge; according to another story, the river is animated by the spirit of a murdered girl called Sabrina, the illegitimate daughter of one of the sons of Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain. Sabrina was drowned in the river by her father’s estranged wife, who was seeking revenge for her husband’s infidelity.

  Her death wasn’t final. Rivers are the ‘fons et origo, the “spring and origin,” the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence,’ writes the historian of folklore Mircea Eliade, and ‘the symbolism of the waters’ implies both death and rebirth. ‘Contact with water always brings a regeneration,’ he writes. John Milton describes the rebirth of Sabrina in Comus. He says the ‘guiltless damsel flying the mad pursuit / Of her enraged stepdame’ did not drown when she fell into the Severn, for water nymphs picked her up and washed her ‘in ambrosial oils’ until she revived,

  And underwent a quick immortal change,