The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  Blake ‘who was heavily influenced by beliefs in the lost city of Atlantis, of which the British Isles were the only remnant’ watched the sea ‘at all times and in all seasons’. He was on the beach one day when he had a vision that expanded ‘Like a Sea without shore’: he became entranced by what he called ‘the shifting lights of the sea’, and, all along the shore, he saw the spirits of poets and prophets, ‘“majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men” . . . as if the light of the sea itself had acquired human form.’

  ~

  We said goodbye on the promenade. Jane was going back to the caravan in the drive, but Heather had other places to visit. She was staying with family in Oxford and then going on to a village in Essex, where another blocked culvert had flooded an estate, but, before that, she had another meeting in West Sussex and she was planning to walk along the coast to get to it. ‘I love walking,’ she said, in her usual enthusiastic way, and she set off along the promenade, heading east, pacing out another dimension of her floodable domain.

  4: Forgotten City

  THE HUMBER LAKE: HULL & FERRIBY, 2007

  Sandy Henderson and Jacqui Dixon, two women from Hull – a city poised, like the village of Felpham, between fresh water and salt – had responded to the floods of 2007 by forming a different kind of group from the ones set up in Sussex and on the banks of the Severn. Theirs was not political. It was not concerned with securing new defences. It had a purpose that I approved of and understood: prompted by a researcher from Lancaster University, whom I met one day in London, Sandy and Jacqui attempted to deal with the emotional and psychological effects of the flood that overwhelmed Hull by writing about it, as if setting down their memories on paper was the only way to contain them.

  The subject of memory was particularly significant for Sandy Henderson, for she had grown up on the Hessle Road, in west Hull, the centre of the old fishing community, which used to flood all the time. Recovery was simpler in those days, she said; people used to get out the carbolic soap, get down on their hands and knees and scrub the floors. ‘Not everyone could live like that,’ she said. ‘They were hard people. They would go to sea for three weeks, come back for two days, get drunk and then go off again.’ But there was something to be said for it, because there was no fuss, and ‘you could recover.’ Yet the old sense of the inevitable rise and fall of the waters had gone. Naturally, she welcomed the construction of the barrier on the River Hull that put a stop to flooding in the middle of the city, but she also felt that it had made people forgetful and complacent: flooding didn’t mean anything to anyone anymore – a significant absence in a city that was partly created by flooding.

  By the tenth century, deposits of silt and mud left behind by the inflowing tides had created dry land on the coast, though the freshwater marshes – or carrs – inland were permanently sodden. Meaux Abbey was established on islands between the River Hull and the River Fleet in 1150, and the monks began the process of reclaiming land, despite opposition from the locals, who feared the loss of fishing grounds and pasturage, in the same way they would in the Fens and the Levels. The southern area was most easily drained and defended, though there were periodic setbacks: in the thirteenth century, reclaimed land at Myton collapsed into the Humber and was never recovered.

  Keeping the seawater out was not the only challenge, for the rivers that meandered through the carrs had to be allowed to drain. That was especially difficult at high tide, when the gates in the sea walls were closed, or at times of exceptional rain, when water built up behind the defences, as it did on 27 June 2007, forming a shallow lake that spread across the city. Yet, even in less testing times, there was little margin for error, for the dykes and channels that supplied Hull with drinking water had to be kept full to ensure a steady flow. In 1409, people in the villages of Anlaby, Ferriby and Swanland, west of Hull, complained that their meadows had flooded, because the ‘Julian dyke’ in Anlaby hadn’t been kept clear. But it wasn’t neglect that caused flooding; it was the ‘flatness of the land’, write Edward Gillet and Kenneth MacMahon, in their book, A History of Hull. Since the hamlet of Wyk, which became Kingston-Upon-Hull in 1293, stood in an area of ‘rough common land’ which often flooded from both sides, ‘there were seasons in which the town was virtually an island in a sea of flood water.’

  The pattern continued into the twentieth century. My father, who took accountancy articles in Hull in the 1950s, said the river overtopped its banks so often that you had to watch where you put your feet in the city centre. The barrier on the River Hull, which was completed in 1980, helped Hull live with its river, a council official said to me, as if the river was an antisocial teenager, causing disturbances on a street corner. But the floods of 2007 didn’t come from the river, the official said. They came from the sky.

  May 2007 had been the wettest month in Yorkshire since 1882, and the downpours continued in June. The Lord Mayor’s Parade was cancelled in the middle of the month because of flooding, and sewers overflowed in Hessle, in west Hull. It was a taste of what was to come, people said. ‘We asked ourselves: could it happen again?’ the council official said to me. ‘Would it happen again? By God, it did happen again.’ What’s more, it happened within a month.

  ~

  Sandy Henderson and her husband were on holiday when it started raining. They put their caravan into storage in Cottingham and came home. There was a lot of surface water on the road when her husband went to work the next day at half past seven. ‘I took the dogs out and came back,’ Sandy said. ‘I was going to do the ironing, but I went out again, and the water was lapping on the pavement and coming up the road. Next door came out and said there was water in the garage. We were trying to pick things up and put them away. I telephoned Paul and he said, “That bad? I’ll come home.” And the wash of the car as he came into the drive sent the water over the threshold.’

  It was July 2013, and we were sitting in the conservatory at the back of their house in Bransholme, a suburb in the drained marshes in north Hull. There was no sign of the damage that the flood had done six years before. The garden was a neatly gravelled square, with plants in pots and a swing seat, and the inside was just as tidy: it had white walls, grey radiators, wooden kitchen cabinets.

  Sandy was proud of the house, for it was the first place she had settled. She was born on the Hessle Road on the Queen’s twentieth birthday, which meant she was sixty-one in 2007. Her mother was half-Welsh, half-Scottish and her father was a Canadian from Alberta, who had come over during the war. ‘I was the result, but they never married,’ she said. She never had any contact with her father. Her mother was grateful when Sandy’s stepfather proposed, but he turned out to be a womanizer and there were always problems. ‘I was eighteen when I was told he wasn’t my father – I was only told because he had lung cancer and he was ill, but it all fell into place.’ She moved to east Hull aged five, where she went to school, and then to Beverley, where she met her husband. They lived in various places, depending on where he was working. ‘You weren’t allowed to buy a house in the early days in the police force, because they moved you around so much,’ she said. ‘I think we have been a bit like gypsies.’ They moved to Hull twenty-one years ago, and twelve years ago, they bought the house in Bransholme.

  It was the lowest in the street, and, since it stands on piles in the marsh, the water came up through the floorboards as well as through the door. They managed to save the sofa in the conservatory and other pieces of furniture, but by the evening the hall was completely flooded. ‘It went up about three stairs – two feet – sixty-five centimetres of water,’ Sandy Henderson said, with practised fluency. She showed me photographs of the dark brown water filling the house. They were not yet aware of the scale of the calamity that had overtaken the city: one of the pumping stations that lifts water into the River Hull packed up, meaning it couldn’t drain, and the city’s 1950s watercourses were overwhelmed. Even the River Hull contributed: it rained so hard that groundwate
r began to emerge – and, by the time it stopped raining in the afternoon, more than 10,000 houses and flats in Hull were flooded.

  ~

  Sandy Henderson was standing at the sink of her house in Bransholme, on 26 June 2007, when she felt something nudge her leg. It scared the life out of her, she said. Even shallow water evokes terrors. It might have been a shark or a sea snake that had swum into her flooded home through the channel that had been opened to the deep, but in fact it was a koi carp that had escaped from her neighbour’s pond. The Hendersons stayed in the house for the first night. It was like being on a ship, Sandy said; there was creaking and groaning as the furniture shifted and swelled, and, in the middle of the night, they were woken by a crash. Downstairs, the floorboards had popped up and tipped over the table on which they had piled many of their possessions.

  They stayed in the flooded house for three or four nights in total, but the staircase was unsafe, and they had no power or furniture, so they moved to a Premier Inn, where many of their neighbours were staying. ‘It was like a reunion – we’d all eat together in the evening and come down for breakfast together,’ Sandy said.

  Three nights later, they had to move again, for the kennels where they had left their dogs had also flooded, and they couldn’t have them in the hotel. Sandy rang the Bridlington Caravan Centre, which is on the coast, near Flamborough, thirty miles north of Hull, close to the source of the River Hull, and asked if she would be able to have a static caravan on her drive. The salesman said yes – and they were lucky, because it fitted across the front of the house. ‘He came to see us, measured all the houses, and, within a couple of days, we had seven static caravans in the close.’

  In many places, the water trapped behind the river defences had still not gone down: large parts of one of England’s largest cities were still flooded, and yet the rest of the country had barely noticed. ‘It was flooded in pockets right across Bransholme,’ Sandy told me, ‘but no one knew – no one knew.’

  Years later, she still found it hard to comprehend – though, in one sense, it was not particularly surprising. Hull has always seemed a marginal place – to the rest of the country, at least – overlooked in its unglamorous estuarial location at the end of road and rail routes. Sometimes, that works to its advantage: Philip Larkin, Hull’s most famous twentieth-century resident, said it was ‘in the world yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance’. But its isolation worked against it after the Cod Wars of 1975–6, when the fishing industry that had sustained several generations of Hull families, including Sandy Henderson’s collapsed. The loss of fishing was an industrial catastrophe comparable to the demise of coal or shipbuilding, people in Hull said, but the city didn’t get the kind of help that was given to Sheffield or Glasgow, and, in June 2007, as the floods moved south and west across the country, it found itself overlooked again.

  ‘The council didn’t bother with us – no one had bothered with us for quite a while,’ Sandy said. Then a Sky News helicopter passed over Hull, on its way to ‘something or other’, and they looked down and saw all the caravans lined up in the Hendersons’ close. ‘And, the next thing we knew, there was a Sky van outside.’ Sandy laughed. ‘It all snowballed from there and we became quite famous.’

  ~

  Gordon and Jacqui Dixon were also on holiday when it started raining. Their son-in-law texted them in Menorca to say that East Ella Drive had flooded, but their house hadn’t. It’s going down, said the next text. Don’t come back, said the third. East Ella Drive has been evacuated, and you can’t get in. But they went, anyway – they couldn’t resist, Gordon said. They flew back and tried to drive home, though the M62 was closed and they had to go around the south side of the Humber and across the bridge.

  They got to East Ella Drive at one o’clock in the morning. It was as dark as it had been in the war, Gordon said, though the blackout hadn’t been imposed to disorientate enemy planes, like the one that dropped a bomb through the roof of the house, in east Hull, where he had grown up. The water was ankle-deep at the top of the street, but, by the time they reached their house, it was level with the top of the bay.

  The Dixons stayed with their sister-in-law and went back in the morning. ‘It wasn’t very nice water to wade around in,’ Gordon said. It was waist-deep inside as well – even the dishwasher was full of water. ‘We lost everything – literally everything – on the ground floor. We have been married for fifty-two years now, and we lost things we were given as wedding presents,’ Gordon said. ‘Our daughter’s wedding videos. The insurance guy said it was all a write-off – all had to be replaced.’

  Their fish had escaped as well – but they found their way back. Gordon and Jacqui were surveying the damage the water had done when a couple of lads knocked on their door and said they had found their goldfish. Gordon gave them two quid and they came back with a bucket of fish. When the water went down, he put them back in the pond; after all, he didn’t know that the fish weren’t theirs.

  They moved back in after two nights, and lived in a room upstairs, because Gordon didn’t want to leave the workshop in the garden unattended; anything you put down disappeared. Some of the plundering was officially authorized. In the morning, East Ella Drive was full of white vans clearing possessions. The Dixons were upstairs one day and watched from the window as ‘this army of big guys with big muscles walked down the middle of the street, picking things up. It was quite frightening. They were volunteers from the prison – they spent all their time in the gym. It was a weird sensation, seeing everybody’s belongings crushed. The people on the other side of the street had antique furniture that used to belong to their parents: it all went in the skip.’

  Gordon had rewired the house so the upper floor was on a separate circuit to the downstairs, and their middle bedroom became a sitting room. People dropped in at all hours. The street was dark at night, since most of their neighbours had left, but it was never quiet, for the industrial dehumidifiers ran twenty-four hours a day, draining moisture not only from walls and furniture, but also from the air. ‘We could hardly speak for three months, because of our throats,’ Gordon said. The owner-occupiers of west Hull got no help from the council, the Dixons said, though the Red Cross gave them a microwave. It was a welcome gift, though it added to the sense they were living through a disaster.

  Yet it was the builders appointed by the insurance company that upset Gordon the most. ‘I don’t mean to insult you, but they were from the south,’ he said, as if I might have known them personally.

  ‘I’m not insulted,’ I said, but he didn’t seem to believe me. It wasn’t personal. It was a matter of regional pride. He was a joiner and a cabinetmaker in a city known as a centre of joinery. The insurance-company builders were cowboys from Maidstone.

  ‘I don’t know where these guys served their time,’ he said. ‘I could get my fingers behind the skirting board.’

  ‘And they’re not small fingers,’ his wife said.

  Gordon Dixon was in his late seventies or early eighties, but he was still a solid-looking man, barrel-chested and with a big white beard. Like Sandy Henderson, he had grown up in a flood-prone part of town, in the docks in east Hull; he remembered rolling up the coconut matting on the floor of his childhood home in the docks and watching the water trickle through the front door. There were disadvantages to the approach, he said, such as high rates of diphtheria and scarlet fever, but he shared Sandy Henderson’s view that at least it meant you recovered quickly. Even after fifty years of marriage, he couldn’t stop himself reminding his wife that she’d ‘had it easy’, for she had grown up in the wealthy streets of west Hull, which never flooded. ‘A bit of flooding round here didn’t bother me as much as it did you,’ he said, though it wasn’t clear he meant it, for he was not as robust as he looked.

  He had had a major operation in 2000 and, ten years later, he had succumbed to a condition called cauda equina or ‘horse tail’ syndrome, in which the spine closes up, leaving him with
no feeling in his legs. ‘I only told you that after I drove you, didn’t I!’ he said, with a shout of laughter. I wasn’t surprised that he had offered to pick me up, for Hull is a place where you rarely have to walk. Sandy Henderson had picked me up at The Deep, the museum that commemorates the city’s relationship with the sea, and, one afternoon, I was driven around by the council official tasked with improving the city’s flood defences. I had tried to walk to the Dixons’, but I misjudged how far it was down the Anlaby Road, which runs parallel to the Humber, inland from the once flood-prone fishing community where Sandy Henderson had grown up, and, since I was late, I rang Gordon, and he said he would come and pick me up.

  He drove in the same way he spoke: rapidly and impulsively. When he turned into East Ella Drive across a two-lane road, he accelerated so wildly that I was thrown back into my seat. I wasn’t surprised to discover that he couldn’t feel the pedals. He drove by memory and hearing. ‘Completely numb!’ he said, delighting in my surprise. Yet, despite his habit of ‘nearly popping it’, he had been on the ‘up and up’ when the flood struck, and he felt it had knocked him back: ‘It took a big chunk out of our lives,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how many years I have got left, but I couldn’t afford to give any away.’

  ~

  The Hendersons were luckier than most; they knew a builder who used to live next door, and they rang him up the day after the flood and asked him to do their house. Even so, Sandy wasn’t sure how she managed not to slit her wrists. ‘People bickered, they got divorced, several split up. Another moved to Australia. One had a heart attack and died. Until you have had it happen to you, you really can’t understand.’

  There were loss adjusters to deal with as well – official ones, and unofficial teams of freelancers who offered to negotiate with the insurance companies on behalf of those who had been flooded. It was hard for people to take control, one person said. Even after the water had gone, they felt like flotsam, cast adrift on the currents. One of the Dixons’ neighbours was ‘tipped over the edge’ by the flood and had been in a home ever since. Another man burst an artery in his leg and nearly bled to death: ‘The kitchen was like a butcher’s shop,’ Gordon said, with a certain relish. Many got ulcers from padding around in the polluted water, and Gordon had to endure the spectacle of the hapless southern builders trampling through a house that he had always taken care of himself.