The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  Made Goddess of the river.

  The Severn has flooded many times. On 29 November 1620, sixty-eight people drowned on their way to Bewdley Fair, near Kidderminster, when the Severn burst its banks, and in November 1768, it turned all of Herefordshire and Shropshire into ‘a perfect sea’. In 1795, the floodwater in Shrewsbury rose ‘higher than was ever remembered by the oldest inhabitants’, and in 1852, ‘the whole vale of Gloucester was one wide-spreading sea’. On 11 November 1875, the floods were ‘out again as far as the eye can reach west of Gloucester.’

  There is visible evidence of the height the river can reach engraved in the wall of the arch that leads from the riverside walk into the precincts of the cathedral in Worcester, fifteen miles upstream from Tewkesbury. Mary Dhonau, the flood campaigner, who calls herself ‘Flood Mary’ because ‘Mary was synonymous with flooding’, took me to see them when I went to Worcester in June 2013. I was in search of further evidence of the effects the Severn has on the places through which it flows, and on the lives of the people who live beside it. There were marks recording floods in 1886 and 1947, and a cluster in the previous twenty years – in 1990, 1998, 2000 and 2007. Yet the highest mark dated to 1770, when a long winter of heavy snow was followed by a rapid thaw. The plaque recording this level was a foot above my head, while the river was several feet below the banks on which I stood. It was hard to imagine the river that originated as a diffused, ghostly absence beneath a peat bog in Wales and emerged in Hafren Forest as a gushing, sparkling stream could ever summon sufficient force to rise so high. Yet there was further proof of its volatile nature in the adaptations people had made to their homes.

  ~

  When I first walked into the sitting room of Dunmoppin’, which stands beside the Severn in the middle of Worcester, half a mile upstream from the cathedral, it took me a moment to realize what was strange about it. It looked like a normal room, and yet the ceiling was lower than it should have been, and the window that overlooked the road between the house and the embankment that protected it from the Severn started at my knees, meaning my feet were level with the roofs of the cars outside. The shortened radiator filling the gap beneath the sill added to the sense that I was standing on a podium, looking down on the street below. Dunmoppin’s ground floor had been raised by at least two feet (sixty centimetres).

  The Severn ran beyond the embankment, or bund, on the far side of the road, at the bottom of a deep channel, flanked by banks thick with ferns and grasses. On the far side, steps that belonged to a rowing club led down into the water; they looked like the ghats on the Ganges, though they were used for launching long-oared boats that would glide across the water, instead of corpses or garlands of flowers. Beyond it, there was a racecourse, which became a lake when the river flooded, as it had done twice in the last ten years.

  Mary Dhonau had introduced me to Andy, the owner of Dunmoppin’, and he told me how he had raised the house himself in order to protect it from the threat of another flood. He had worked at the local paper for thirty years, which had offices just down the street, but he had been laid off a few years ago and, since then, had been doing home and garden maintenance. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt and workman’s trousers. He had moved to the house after he ‘ended with the girl I was with,’ he said. It had flooded for the first time in 2000, and the insurance company had put it back exactly as it was. He had to live in a rented house for a year. When it flooded again in 2007, he knew what was in store; he left the house and took a bucket with him, because he was going to be sick.

  ‘You cried when the news team from BBC Worcester came to interview you, didn’t you?’ said Mary, helpfully.

  She knew what it was like; her house had flooded so many times that she had lost count, she said – though, when I pressed her for a number, she guessed a dozen. The first time was in 1996, when she had been living in her house in Worcester for eighteen months, but it was the flood of 2000, when she got three feet (a metre) of sewage water in her home, that impelled her to act.

  Severn Trent Water refused to help, but she got the city council involved and sent a report to Downing Street. By then, ‘Worcester woman’ had become the archetypal voter the political parties wanted to attract, and Mary thought it might have an effect if a representative of the type went to Downing Street and made a fuss. ‘And Downing Street rang Severn Trent Water and said we have had this unholy gaggle of very angry women in the street – what are you going to do about it?’ Severn Trent Water built a sewage pumping station, which has reduced the risk of flooding in her street. Yet she wanted to help other people as well. She set up Worcester Action Group, which started as a research project, but so much of its work involved discussions that it inadvertently became a support group. ‘People need help and advice – and who better to give it to them than people who have been flooded themselves?’

  Her house flooded again in 2007, and she had other challenges to face as well. She was working at the National Flood Forum (NFF), which was overwhelmed, and she was also trying to put her autistic son into residential care, as well as going through a divorce. She has five children, three with her first husband, and two with her second husband, including Charlie, who was sixteen and as tall as I was, but with a mental age of eighteen months. She blamed the MMR vaccine for causing his autism: ‘Medical science has proved me wrong on that,’ she said, but she plainly didn’t believe it, or didn’t want to believe it. She said he had been normal at eighteen months: he could point, and he had nine or ten words. He had the jab, and, a couple of days later, he had a fit and got the flu. He was never the same again. He used to wake up every night between two a.m. and six a.m. and smear poo around his room. Mary had to get up and change the curtains.

  It didn’t seem surprising that the marriage collapsed. She tried to sell the house, and couldn’t, so her husband bought her out. Since then, it had flooded twice, but ‘in a very minor way.’ Her new house, which she moved to in 2011, hadn’t flooded yet, though she didn’t discount the possibility: ‘Never say never.’ She left the NFF, which she said was one of the worst decisions she ever made, both for her and it, for it had changed since she left. The chairman and the board had never been flooded, and Mary believed they were driven by ‘getting in money.’ It was the kind of complaint often made by founding members of an organization, which didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  Yet, even if the NFF had ‘lost sight of its reason for being,’ as Mary put it, she was intent on continuing its work in a freelance capacity, and she had never been busier. John Badham, who I’d met in Tewkesbury, and who lived between the Swilgate and the Mill Avon, would become mayor of the flood-prone town; he was conscious of the lasting effects of the floods on people who didn’t earn very much and faced enormously increased bills on their insurance, if they could get it at all. But Mary Dhonau’s campaigning was not restricted to a single place.

  She had been to Dunmoppin’ before, and she sat on the sofa while Andy showed me the changes he had made. He had raised the ceiling in the kitchen and conservatory by propping the walls on supports and putting in another layer of four or five bricks. It had been ‘a health and safety nightmare,’ not helped by his accident-prone dad – he had dropped a patio door, which had fallen over his head without touching him, Buster Keaton-style. Andy had also raised the decking at the back. Steps led down to the lawn, matching the ones at the front and the ones leading down into the garage. The multiple layers added a kind of improvised grandeur to the house. There were koi in the pond at the back – three of them had survived the flood. Andy had scooped them out of a pool of shitty water, but the others had escaped into the polluted lake that subsumed the concrete-lined pond, streaks of yellow and gold that flickered briefly in the murk.

  ~

  The word ‘bund’ is another legacy of Mesopotamia, the ‘land between the rivers’ that produced the Noah story. The embankments beside the Tigris in Baghdad were called bunds, and the term was exported by Jewish Baghdadi exiles, like the Sassoon fam
ily, who were known as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’. David Sassoon was the son of the chief treasurer to the pashas of Baghdad, but his family was forced into exile by a new ruler. He was a successful businessman and established outposts across Asia, including in Shanghai, where he built Sassoon House on an embanked quay known as the Bund. Since then, the term has travelled around the world. The French engineers who raised the embankments to protect New Orleans from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi called them ‘levees’, but they are ‘bunds’ in Britain, and the word carries an echo of Mesopotamia, even when it applies to flood defences in the centre of Worcester, or in the village of Kempsey, five miles downstream, where Mary Dhonau took me after we left Dunmoppin’.

  Kempsey’s bund was the product of more than twenty years of campaigning by the Oram family, who owned a flood-prone cottage in the middle of the village. Rex Oram saw Tudor Cottage for the first time in 1976, when he was planning to move his family back to England from Ghana, where he had been teaching. It was used as a hospital for Cromwell’s men in the Civil War and it has a thatched roof and timbered walls. Its front windows are set below the level of the street, so you can see people’s feet as they go past – an element of its antique charm, which came to seem less charming. Rex thought it was the perfect place to live, within easy reach of Birmingham, where he would be working, yet he did not realize that Hatfield Brook, a tributary of the Severn, which runs through a wood on the other side of the road, had a habit of backing up and flooding the village – and that, when it did, it would, inevitably, cascade into the subterranean sitting room of Tudor Cottage.

  The house flooded for the first time in 1979. Cathy Oram, Rex’s daughter, came downstairs to see the carpet billowing and everything floating. ‘It seemed very exciting at the time,’ she said. They considered moving – they even looked at other houses – but, in the end, they decided to stay and adapt as best they could. They built an extension that was two feet (sixty centimetres) higher than the original house, and they fitted a pump in the corner of the sitting room, which was not only the lowest point in the house, but the lowest in the village. When Tudor Cottage flooded, as it did every two or three years, they would go and stay with friends. ‘Mum just got on with it,’ Cathy told me, when I met her at her house on the edge of Kempsey, a short walk from Tudor Cottage, which she was trying to rent out. ‘She put the furniture on trestle tables, mopped and cleaned and just got on. It wasn’t a big deal. The water could come in and it would just be little swirls across the floor – and it would be pumped out through the gate.’

  Yet, since the turn of the century, the floods had got worse: in 2000, the water was a metre deep and the extension flooded for the first time. The electricity was cut off and they were forced to move out. In July 2007, more than 150 homes and businesses were flooded in Kempsey and the A38 was blocked for two days. Tudor Cottage would flood six times in the course of the year – once, a week before Cathy’s sister’s wedding. They had planned her hen do at a pub down the road, which had also flooded. ‘And we just carried on really, preparing for the wedding, walking into the cottage in our waders,’ Cathy said.

  Yet by then, her parents had had enough: ‘Anyone can cope with a flood, but you can’t cope with six in twelve months,’ Cathy said. They couldn’t get insurance anymore, and they knew it would be hard to sell it; even Mary Dhonau, who had pointed it out to me as we drove through the village, did not want to take it on. She had considered it when it was for sale at a knock-down price, but her partner, who is older than her, refused. He said he might curl up and die if he got flooded, which was hardly surprising, given the way she talked about it. Cathy’s parents considered demolishing it, but instead, her dad gave it to her, and in 2007, they took on the task of fitting it with pumps and flood gates. ‘It was great to be back in the village. And it gave me an opportunity to really get to know Dad better.’ They spent three years fixing up the cottage, and in the meantime, they were also campaigning for flood defences to protect the village.

  When Mr Oram proposed the idea in 1991, it seemed crazy, Cathy said. ‘He thought you could put a gate across the field. Everyone thought he was bonkers – the parish council laughed at him. But he kept writing letters. My dad had this idea that people act with integrity – he believed that, if we were one of the worst-flooded villages in the country, then the Environment Agency would do something about it.’

  In 2009, Cathy took on the task of running the campaign ‘against her better judgement’, and with Mary’s help, she set up Kempsey’s Flood Action Group. Some people told her she was wasting her time. ‘They said, “Good luck, my dear – it has always flooded here, and it always will.”’ Mr Oram died unexpectedly in 2009, but his persistence was vindicated posthumously: three years later, the bund he had campaigned for was completed.

  A long, flat embankment now runs through the middle of the field between Kempsey and the Severn. It passes round the back of the church, where the bones that were unearthed in its construction had been re-interred, and crosses the narrow channel of Hatfield Brook. Its profile feels as timeless and unobtrusive as the grassed-over outline of an Iron Age hill fort, though the massive sluice gates that bracket Hatfield Brook are modern: when we went to see it the stream was a trickle, and the flood gates were open, for the Severn was low, but when it rises, they close, and pumps lift the water from Hatfield Brook into the field beyond the bund to stop it backing up and flooding the village.

  Cathy’s mother and the local MP cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony. Five months later, Kempsey flooded again. ‘It was as bad as it had ever been,’ Cathy said. ‘Everyone went to bed thinking they were working – and, in the night, they were flooded.’ Yet it wasn’t a structural failure or a fault in the concept that had caused a flood; it was a computer glitch, which switched off one pump and failed to switch on another. Cathy was confident that it would pass the next test, which might come very soon: a month’s worth of rain was forecast for the next day, and it had already started to fall as Cathy’s two-year-old son, Rex, peeled away from our group and started running across the field, past the bench dedicated to his grandfather in memory of twenty years of letter writing, towards the sunken thread of the Severn.

  ~

  Heather Shepherd, who now ran the National Flood Forum, was another victim of Sweet Sabrina. She lived in the upper catchment of the Severn, in Herefordshire, but she spent most of her time travelling around the country, and she had agreed to meet me in a village on the coast of Sussex, which was exposed to flooding from both fresh water and salt.

  I took the train to the coast. As it wound through the fields inland, on a raised track, I could see how vulnerable the coastal plain would be. At Pulborough, we crossed a bridge above a terrace of houses with lush green gardens that ran down to a dark, slow-moving river. It was a bright June day: the marshes felt mutable and fluid, as if their spongy beds and peaty paths were stapled together by the railway tracks, though the process of reclamation began long before the Industrial Revolution. In his famous book The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins says that ‘Offa’s Charter’, which was written in the eighth century, ‘speaks already of ditches in the Pevensey Levels’ in West Sussex, though ‘300 years later the tide water still flowed freely over most of the Sussex marshes.’ In the twenty-first century, some of the reclaimed land is being relinquished. In Medmerry, new defences have been built a mile inland, and the sea will be allowed to advance towards them, creating a new wetland habitat and reducing the risk of flooding for hundreds of homes elsewhere on the coast.

  Yet, other parts of ‘poor old West Sussex’ will remain prone to flooding, Heather Shepherd said. She had been in Lancing in the morning; when she arrived, there had been a bit of flooding, but, by the time she left, water was spouting through the tarmac ‘like geysers’.

  ‘It was coming out all over the place,’ she said, with such enthusiasm that I wondered if she had been misreading the chain of cause and effect: she th
ought she was following the floods, but perhaps the floods were following her as she travelled around the country, a modern-day Enlil, god of mops and sodden carpets, conjurer of storms and spouts of gushing water.

  ~

  Heather’s house had flooded for the first time in 1998, two years after she had moved to a village called Pentre, in Herefordshire. It is several miles from the river, but the water builds up behind an argae, or embankment, like an earthen bund, which was built in the nineteenth century to facilitate farming. It was several miles long, though it was tied into the landscape in a way that made it hard to see, even at the point where it crossed the road. When the house flooded for the first time, she could hear a distant roar, like the sound of a storm at sea, though she didn’t know the water was on its way towards her – nor that she had two hours before it got there.

  Even if she’d known, she wouldn’t have realized how it was going to feel to have water in her home. ‘You have all these visions in your head, but it’s difficult to understand the concept until it happens to you. It came in at different levels. We couldn’t stop it. It came in through the walls, in little spurting fountains; it came in through the floors; it came through any opening it could find.’ It kept rising all day, covering the hedges and gates. At the end of the drive, it was chest deep. She spent the day trying to save what she could, carrying on by torchlight after the electricity failed. The adrenaline kept her going, but when she opened the fridge door and saw that everything was ruined, she burst into tears. She and her husband carried the kids to the neighbours’ house, which had been raised on stilts to escape the floods, and they drank a couple of bottles of red wine. ‘God, if you ever need alcohol in your life, it’s then. But, of course, you have to face it all in the morning, and that’s really just the beginning.’

  Builders were brought in to do the repairs, but proved inadequate. One team left live wires in the wall; another team cooked breakfast on camp stoves and then went to the pub; another admitted that they usually worked on the railways, laying sleepers. One day, she found two builders preparing to demolish a sixteenth-century staircase. ‘They said, “It’s all right, you’ll get a brand-new one – it’s contaminated.” And we said, “It’s been contaminated for the last several hundred years: it will survive.”’ The damp and the dehumidifiers drove the family out, so they lived in a caravan in the drive. It was like bereavement. Broken relationships were common. Heather had been married for thirty-five years – if it had been much less, she and her husband would have got divorced.