by Edward Platt
Not everyone was affected. One of the rectors of St Botolph’s lived in a modern house at the end of the road. He had missed Princess Anne’s visit because he was home with a cold, but his wife showed me the view from the kitchen windows, where she was baking. At high tide, the Haven was the level of the ceiling, and the lawn that stretched to the tree-lined bank at the end of the garden looked like it was under water, even now, for the light falling through the kitchen windows made it glow like the sea beneath a dock at night. Yet the water had followed its usual capricious path: it had flooded their neighbours’ houses and bypassed theirs entirely. There was a bitter joke doing the rounds the day after the flood, she said: Boston had finally drowned under its weight of immigrants. And yet the people who had turned up to help clean up the Stump weren’t local.
7: Little Venice
RIVER DREAMS: YALDING, JANUARY 2014, & MORPETH, 2008
It was not an easy Christmas for the residents of Yalding, which lies six miles south-west of Maidstone, in Kent. As the storm subsided on the east coast, it began to rain inland, and the three rivers that converge upon the village burst their banks, in a series of unkindly timed floods. The first was on Christmas Day; the second, a week later, at New Year’s; and, when I arrived in the town on 4 January 2014, the Environment Agency was considering evacuating the Little Venice Caravan Park for the third time in two weeks.
The water was ankle-deep inside the park, but deeper in the garden of the cafe, which adjoined a flooded field. Upturned plant pots, gas canisters and plastic chairs had washed up inside the gates, and there was a pair of waders hanging out to dry. Humidity Restoration Disaster Recovery Specialists, said the sign on the van parked in the entrance, a short walk down the hill from the station. The residents of Little Venice were used to knee-deep water, for the park often floods, but they had never seen it as high as it was on Christmas Day. ‘It was the scariest thing I have ever seen,’ said the man who lived in caravan number sixty, inside the entrance.
Usually, the water comes across the fields at the back, from the River Medway, which was so far out of its banks that it came halfway up the handrails of the riverside paths, but, on Christmas Day, it had come from another source: the canalized section of the Medway, which runs down the far side of Hampstead Lane, past the caravan park. The water rose six feet (1.8 metres) in four hours, until it was higher than the garden shed that stood beside the caravan with its back to the main channel of the Medway. The caravan had risen with the water, as it was supposed to; the park floods so often that the caravans are classified as houseboats. Yet it didn’t stop rising until it was two feet (sixty centimetres) above the railings that contain it within its mooring, and it was knocked over by the downdraught of the helicopter that came to evacuate the residents in the middle of the night.
The owner of number sixty hadn’t been there for long. He and his partner had got engaged in May and sold their properties to buy the caravan. ‘It was our dream home,’ he said. ‘Now it’s like bloody Beirut.’
They had moved out for four days, and they had only just got back in when they were told to go again. Now, they were expecting to go again. He didn’t blame the Environment Agency, for he knew it was dealing with ‘exceptional weather’, but he didn’t want to leave. He was worried about looting, because people knew the park was empty. The police had been slow to arrive, but, when they did, they made their presence felt – there were two stationed on motorbikes beside the bridge above the Medway, further down Hampstead Lane.
The meadow beyond the bridge was flooded, and there was rubble strewn across the pavements in the high street: remnants of the first flood on Christmas Day, when the River Beult had burst its banks and poured down the high street in a waist-high torrent. People were carrying possessions in and out of their homes, and I could see furniture stacked on the tables in ground-floor rooms. Some of the houses were empty. Some were fitted with floodgates. The George Inn, which stood beyond the bridge, on the banks of the Beault, was closed. A group of four or five men had gathered in the doorway of a flooded house on the other side of the road, and, when I tried the door of the pub, one of them came over and asked what I wanted. He wasn’t very friendly.
‘I was hoping to get some lunch,’ I said. It was one o’clock, and there was nowhere else open.
He was a balding, thickset man in his fifties or early sixties, dressed in a leather jacket. He laughed. ‘You’ll be lucky to find that open,’ he said. I knew he was worried about looters, but I didn’t think it was very likely a looter would try to break in the front door of the pub in daylight, and in full view of a group of possessive-looking blokes. He had reason to be possessive; he had been the landlord for more than thirty years. Flooding wasn’t uncommon. Yalding had flooded in 1968, a year after he arrived, and again in 2000, when the George had been shut for several months. We chatted for a few minutes, but I still didn’t feel he trusted me, and he watched me as I walked away, until I reached the turning that led to the bridge across the Beult, the river that had backed up and swept through his pub on Christmas Day.
~
George Parker and his wife, who lived in a fifteenth-century cottage on the far side of the narrow bridge that spanned the Beult and the grassy meadow that served as its floodplain, had started moving belongings upstairs on Christmas Eve, after the Environment Agency issued a warning for Yalding. It was only a precaution: they didn’t think the town would flood, for the forecasts had been wrong before. ‘Since three rivers meet at Yalding, it means you have three different catchments and three different sets of rainfall, so there are lots of different scenarios,’ Mr Parker said.
Besides, the water had a long way to rise. Even on a day like today, when it was far above its usual level, it was contained within the wide expanse of low-lying land that lay beneath the full span of the bridge. Yet, on Christmas Day, it had reached the windows of the house that stood on the far bank, below the church. Workmen from one of the many branded vans that I had seen in the town had been carrying furniture out of the front door when I went past.
‘I bet its value has just gone down,’ said an elderly man standing on the bridge, leaning on a stick. He had a Kent twang to his voice that made him sound like Mick Jagger. He seemed rather pleased by the thought of falling property prices.
‘How’s your house?’ I said.
He laughed. ‘My house didn’t flood. We’d all be in trouble if my house flooded.’ He pointed out George Parker’s house and told me to go and speak to him. ‘He’s a friend of mine, and he’s had a terrible time,’ he said, with the same curious relish. ‘He’ll be pleased to see you.’
It was a strange introduction; he was like a storm crow, conjured into life by the flood, that had come to rest on the bridge. Mr Parker said he didn’t know who he was – and he wasn’t particularly pleased to see me, either, for reasons I understood. He didn’t talk to journalists or the BBC, he said, but, since I was writing a book, he agreed to speak.
His house was set back from the river, but it was lower than the neighbouring buildings, and the area in front of it often flooded. Sometimes, the water reached the top of the bowed step that led up to their wooden porch, but it had come inside the house only once, in the summer of 2000. Since then, it hadn’t even reached the steps. There were no records of floods in Yalding, but there was evidence that people put down wooden boards to stop the water coming in.
‘In those days, they would have expected it – and they wouldn’t have had so many possessions. They wouldn’t have had the electrics, either.’ The carpet had been lifted up to expose a red stone floor. There was a dehumidifier in the fireplace, which was big enough to stand up in, and he was surrounded by boxes of possessions, including a crate of toys.
He was in his sixties, I guessed, with grey hair and an earring. He was a retired teacher, who had set up a school in the Zambia, and he was a keen sailor – which had not reconciled him to the prospect of water in his house. He looked tired, which was hardly surprising, gi
ven the Christmas he had endured. In 2000, there had been eighteen inches (forty-six centimetres) of water inside the house, and when it started coming up through the floorboards on Christmas Eve, they didn’t expect it to be any worse this time. Some of their neighbours came round to help them move their belongings upstairs, and, in hindsight, they wished they had taken more.
The Environment Agency said that the river would peak on Christmas Eve, but it didn’t stop raining, and, by Christmas morning, the water inside the fifteenth-century sitting room was three feet (one metre) deep. They couldn’t get out of the front door, for the water had filled the area in front of the house and was climbing towards the steps of the church and the windows of the library on the other side of the road. They rescued what they could from the study, and, at nine thirty on Christmas Day, they escaped through their neighbour’s back garden.
‘We came back on Boxing Day, but there was still water in the house, so we decided to go and stay with our daughter. We came back early, the day after Boxing Day, and started clearing up.’ It would be a long process; the walls were made of lime plaster, which will dry out, unlike modern gypsum, which has to be stripped out and replaced, but it takes months, and having been through it before made the prospect harder to bear. Mr Parker had begun to think that he would never feel entirely safe in the house again, and he wondered how he and his wife would cope as they got older. ‘We thought 2000 was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and it would never happen again, but we will never have that feeling again.’
~
Edward Raikes, who lived in a converted oast house on the banks of the Medway, would not have tried to convince George Parker that his house would not flood again. But he might have tried to persuade him that the risk was worth taking. Mr Raikes had a profound attachment to his house, which he had inherited from his grandmother, but it coexisted with a rigorous assessment of the chances of a flood – and an unsentimental disdain for its effects.
‘Is your book going to be anecdotes or statistics?’ he asked when I arrived at the house, and there was no question which he preferred. The way people talked about flooding made him impatient. ‘People always ask whether the water is still coming up, or has it stopped and is it starting to go down again?’ he said. ‘And they say, “Yes, it’s still coming up, because it was up to the third brick and now it’s up to the fourth brick in the wall of my yard.” But there was no good means of making the measurement.’
After the floods of 2000, he had come up with a two-part plan to address the lack of accuracy. He wanted to persuade the Environment Agency to put a gauge on the upstream side of the main town bridge, and then set up a surveying service, so people could see how high they were above the water. ‘We had no takers.’ Mr Raikes seemed baffled by the lack of logic. ‘No one wanted to know. And I think that’s why we have such appalling consequences from floods. People are in denial. They don’t want there to be any relationship between their house and a flood.’
He was right, though I thought the denial was less conscious than he implied. Collective amnesia ensures that every flood is entirely unexpected: ‘Floods are forgotten, until the next one occurs,’ writes Peter Ackroyd, in Thames: Sacred River.
Mr Raikes also wanted to put markers showing the height the water had reached on the side of the library, opposite George Parker’s house, but people didn’t like that idea either. He had been doing what he could to address the lack of information, for he had been keeping records of rainfall in Yalding since 1991. He published the results in the parish magazine and posted them in the window of the library. I had seen the December update when I left George Parker’s house, and I was so intrigued by the neatly tabulated figures and the dispassionate summary of the weather that I had gone inside and asked where I could find Mr Raikes of Parsonage Oasts.
~
The house had flooded over Christmas, which wasn’t surprising, given its position on the banks of the Medway. The Environment Agency had an office at the end of the lane, which was a sign in itself, and the Sea Scouts kept canoes in a pillbox on a strip of lawn between Mr Raikes’s gravelled drive and the Medway, which was high and fast flowing. Inside the house, there were no mouldering carpets, and none of the representatives of the recovery teams that I had seen elsewhere in the village; the Raikes had banished the evidence of disruption – and yet there had been two inches (five centimetres) of water in the house on Christmas Day. Mr Raikes pulled back the curtain and showed me where the white paint had sprung from the wall. ‘The boards are damp, as well,’ he added, though he did not seem particularly concerned. The Raikes had taken the old-fashioned approach: they had let the water flow through, and carried on as normal.
Admittedly, it was very cold. Mrs Raikes, who was doing a sudoku on a table in the corner of the room, was wearing an overcoat, and Mr Raikes, who was an elderly man, straight backed and white haired, was wearing a tweed jacket. I wasn’t sure if the heating had gone off or if they always wore coats indoors; perhaps it was evidence of their ingrained hardiness and frugality. After all, the lights were working again.
The power had gone down for the first time in the storm on the night of 23 December, and the river had been ‘out of its bank’ on Christmas Eve. They didn’t pay much attention to the Environment Agency’s warnings. ‘We make up our own minds what we need to do,’ said Mr Raikes. Their warnings had proved unfounded in the past, and Mr Raikes trusted his own observations. ‘I think I can see rather better than they what is going to happen, because I can look out of the window – and I have a rain gauge.’
He didn’t have an accurate reading at the height of the storm, because his gauge had blown over, but he was surprised that the water came up so quickly and rose so high. Yalding had 159 millimetres, or six and a quarter inches of rain in January, which was approximately three months’ worth of rain in one month, or a little over two and a half times January’s average rainfall. It was less than the 174 millimetres of rain that fell in October 2000, the month of the ‘Great Millennium Flood’, as Mr Raikes called it. Yet the rain that falls in Yalding does not have a direct bearing on the level in the Medway; the river was eleven inches (seventy-eight centimetres) higher than in October 2000, and, this time, it had come inside.
On Christmas Eve, they decided to leave the house. ‘We couldn’t go far,’ Mr Raikes said. ‘We were cut off from the village and the station. The coastguard would have taken us, but we thought we would rather be near the house, so we could get to work as soon as possible. It’s one thing to get them to evacuate you – it’s another thing to get them to bring you back.’ They stayed with their neighbours, whose house had flooded as well, but they had ‘a lovely party’ upstairs, and they were back home within days. It was too cold to have a bath, Jennifer Raikes said – but even that stopped being annoying after a while. Mr Raikes was even less concerned: ‘I didn’t think it was too bad,’ he said, adding that the flood’s ‘peculiar characteristics’ had proved to their advantage, for the water had left as quickly as it arrived.
~
The flood of 1968 had delayed their arrival in the house. On the day they were planning to move in, Mr Raikes’s grandmother had rung them up and told them not to come ‘because the whole thing is under water.’
They were planning to live with his grandmother, for she was getting old and needed looking after, but she did not want to leave the house, to which she had a quasi-mystical attachment that Mr Raikes described with measured respect. She had grown up in Hertfordshire, and, on a pre-war visit to Cambridge, she had seen a postcard of an oast house beside a river. She bought six copies of the postcard because she ‘thought it looked rather nice.’ Later, her son had brought a house in Yalding, where Edward Raikes grew up, and, sometime in 1954, she had gone to stay with him. One afternoon, she went for a walk beside the Medway and saw the oast house from the postcard. It was a ruin, but she knew straight away that she had to buy it. She paid £1,000 for it, and set about converting it into the house she had always imagined. I was in
trigued by the sense of destiny that had brought his grandmother to the house. He had known I would be – here’s a story you might like, he had said, offering it up in a spirit of generosity to the anecdote-collector who had emerged from the darkness as the river began to subside.
Mr Raikes showed me the postcard that had inspired his grandmother’s dream, and a photograph of the oast house during the conversion. Only the tall white conical chimneys denoted what it used to be. A narrow path ran between the sitting-room window and the river, joining the ‘pleasure garden’ at the back to the ‘rough garden’ at the front, and he showed me the point on the wall where a gantry had offloaded hops on to barges.
In 1968, they waited until the flood subsided and then moved in, a week late. Since the water hadn’t come into the house then, or in 2000, they ‘rather thought it was at the right height.’ But being proved wrong had not diminished their affection for it, nor made them fearful for its future.
They were used to flooding; the house in Yalding where Edward had grown up was above the floodplain, but Jennifer grew up locally and she said they used to have a ‘serious flood’ every three or four years. Recently, she thought it was happening less often; it was quite an event if they got cut off from the village. The proximity to water had had no adverse effects on their three children. ‘I used to say that I would rather live here than on the edge of a big main road – and none of them ever fell in,’ Jennifer said. None of their friends had either. And there were pleasure boats and long boats from Holland and Germany passing by, and the view, and the sound of flowing water – all the delights of the pastoral dream of riverside life. ‘It’s a lovely place,’ Jennifer said, ‘a beautiful place.’
