There is nothing to be done about this. The bill for building one metre of sea-wall reliable enough to keep the sea out for a maximum of twenty years is £10,000 – which would amount to £20 billion for the entire eastern coastline between Ramsgate and Hull. Imagine the feelings of inland taxpayers confronted with that bill. Instead the official policy is one of ‘managed retreat’, defending settlements and vital ecosystems wherever feasible, but allowing the sea in elsewhere, to form new, natural saltmarsh, the best absorbent buffer against tidal surges.
To some, this smacks more of reckless surrender than managed retreat. But this is where the narrative of East Anglia’s vernacular engagement with the weather diverges from that of much of Britain. Indundation by the sea has been a constant in East Anglia for millennia, and it is hardwired into the indigenous folk-memory. There has been an accommodation reached that hasn’t always been possible in areas where weather extremes are less predictable. If there’s been a long struggle to keep the water out, there’s also been an irresistible temptation to invite it in, to the imagination and the heart. East Anglians are conjurors with water. They eulogise it, paint it, coax it into extraordinary forms and structures, and generally treat it with the same respectful chutzpah that a snake charmer shows to a snake. Even during the terrible storm surge of 31 January, 1953, in which 307 people lost their lives, this spirit survived. In the bar of the Jolly Sailors in the Suffolk coastal village of Orford, there’s a brass plaque on the wall marking the level reached by the floodwaters. The locals kept drinking by taking to the table-tops, while the landlord dived down heroically into the cellar to bring up new barrels of beer.
We have a boat on the Norfolk Broads and spend a lot of time in what is likely to be the front-line of tidal flooding as the warming sea rises. The whole area may become saltmarsh and human communities and freshwater ecosystems will have to be given room to migrate westwards. The irony is that the Broads were themselves the creations of climate change. They began as medieval open-cast peat mines, and were then flooded by an unexpected rise in sea-level and decades of torrential rain in the thirteenth century. But the locals adapted to their new swampland habitat. They designed special shoes, called pawts, for walking in marshland. They built houses on stilts.
Five hundred years later, with the Broads now a National Park, and one of the most spectacular wild landscapes in Britain, that ancient accommodation continues. Riverside villages are full of self-build wooden cabins. The first stilt-houses are reappearing. Solar-powered boats glide about the water, and already household rubbish is collected by bin-barges. Our national uncertainty about what the weather is going to do often prevents us from making this kind of commitment. We build the wrong kind of houses in flood prone areas, or no houses at all. Why not create buildings to coexist with water? Venice and Amsterdam seem to have made quite a good job of it. It could be a first step in learning to live with nature and climate change, as well as doing our feeble best to slow it down. Coming home in our boat on autumn evenings we sometimes see a strange and beautiful weather metaphor for this, a harg, a sea-mist, that constant symbol of ambivalence, which blows back and forth across the coastal boundary between ocean and broad, so that churches and windmills are continuously appearing and disappearing and we scarcely know if we are at sea or inland.
Meanwhile we will doubtless continue with our tragicomic street theatre of daily coping. Parishioners will rope themselves to favourite trees to try and keep them upright in gales. Policemen will improvise giant snowballs to stop off slip-roads on iced-up motorways. Crowds at sporting events will sing to frighten away increasingly torrential downpours. And all the while, waving and drowning, we will say to each other ‘It’s turned out nice again.’
Turned Out Nice Again Page 5
