by James Runcie
I tried to imagine what the island had been like when the Dutch had first reclaimed it: a meeting of river and land, the mist lifting from patches of earth, rock and inlet; water draining away through the sluices and creeks.
‘We’re special, Canvey people,’ Dad said to me, ‘and don’t you forget it. We’re islanders. We look out for each other.’
‘We like simple things,’ said Mum. ‘A little bit of love and a little bit of family.’
I walked back along the seafront and watched the last of the swallows gather over the swing of the sea. The smell of the island hit me once more, of sugar and sewage, petrol and salt winds. River barges carried the detritus of the city on the ebbing Thames tide, out into the estuary where my life had begun. I waited for the silvered surface of the sea to darken with the last of the light; its turbulence calmed, the moon rising.
Acknowledgements
For a documentary account of the floods of 1953 I have drawn on Hilda Grieve’s survey written in the aftermath of the event for Essex County Council and published in her book The Great Tide. I am also indebted to Geoff Barsby for his book 1953 Remembered – Canvey Floods and for his photographic collection and advice. Patrick Wright took me, memorably, to Canvey for the first time and I am particularly grateful to him.
The water experiment in Chapter Three is taken, in part, from Fiona Dow, Gilson Gaston, Ling Li and Gerhard Masselink’s Variations of Hydraulic Conductivity in the Intertidal Zone of a Sandy Beach. I am also indebted to Andrew D. Short’s Handbook of Beach and Shoreface Morphodynamics (Chichester, 1999).
For the sections on Greenham Common I have been aided by Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins’s important book Greenham Common: Women at the Wire (The Women’s Press, 1984), by the film Carry Greenham Home, directed by Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, and by Julia Foot’s Timeshift Programme for BBC Four.
I am grateful for the stories, advice, ideas, anecdotes and opinions of Diane Atkinson, Georgina Brown, Nici Dahrendorf, Brenda and Gerald Davies, Louise Dew, Fiona Dow, Sarah-Jane Forder, Rachel Foster, Gaby Hornsby, Anne-Louise Jennings, Rosie Kellagher, Ian Kennedy, Mary Loudon, Joanna MacGregor, Juliette Mead, Susan Meiklejohn, Jamie Muir, Marion Nancarrow, Siobhàn Redmond, Lady Runcie, Charlotte Runcie, Lareine Shea, Mary Taylor and to Pip Torrens – early reader and true friend.
Special thanks to Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury, to Anna Ledgard, and to David Godwin – for faith.
A Note on the Author
James Runcie is the author of two novels, The Discovery of Chocolate and The Colour of Heaven. He is also an award-winning filmmaker and theatre director and has scripted several films for BBC Television. James Runcie lives in St Albans with his wife and two daughters.
By the Same Author
The Discovery of Chocolate
The Colour of Heaven
First published in Great Britain in 2006
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2006 by James Runcie
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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