Waterland Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1992

  Copyright © 1983 by Graham Swift

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by William Heinemann Ltd, Great Britain, in 1983.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Swift, Graham, 1949–

  Waterland / Graham Swift. — 1st Vintage international ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82980-1

  I. Title.

  PR6069.W47W3 1992

  823′.914—dc20 91-50600

  Author photo © Mark Douet

  v3.1_r1

  For Candice

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ABOUT THE STARS AND THE SLUICE

  ABOUT THE END OF HISTORY

  ABOUT THE FENS

  BEFORE THE HEADMASTER

  A BRUISE UPON A BRUISE

  AN EMPTY VESSEL

  ABOUT HOLES AND THINGS

  ABOUT THE STORY-TELLING ANIMAL

  ABOUT THE RISE OF THE ATKINSONS

  ABOUT THE QUESTION WHY

  ABOUT ACCIDENTAL DEATH

  ABOUT THE CHANGE OF LIFE

  HISTRIONICS

  DE LA RÉVOLUTION

  ABOUT THE OUSE

  LONGITUDE 0°

  ABOUT THE LOCK-KEEPER

  IN LOCO PARENTIS

  ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER

  THE EXPLANATION OF EXPLANATION

  AUX ARMES

  ABOUT CORONATION ALE

  QUATORZE JUILLET

  CHILD’S PLAY

  FORGET THE BASTILLE

  ABOUT THE EEL

  ABOUT NATURAL HISTORY

  AND ARTIFICIAL HISTORY

  DETECTIVE WORK

  ABOUT THE SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD

  A TEACHER’S TESTAMENT

  ABOUT BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

  WHO SAYS?

  TOO BIG

  UNKNOWN COUNTRY

  ABOUT NOTHING

  LE JOUR DE GLOIRE

  ABOUT THE EAST WIND

  STUPID

  ABOUT CONTEMPORARY NIGHTMARES

  A FEELING IN THE GUTS

  ABOUT THE WITCH

  NOT SO FINAL

  BEGIN AGAIN

  ABOUT THE PIKE

  ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER’S CHEST

  GOODNIGHT

  AND ADIEU

  ABOUT EMPIRE-BUILDING

  THE WHOLE STORY

  ABOUT PHLEGM

  ABOUT THE ROSA II

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note About the Author

  Historia, -ae, f. 1. inquiry, investigation, learning. 2. a) a narrative of past events, history. b) any kind of narrative: account, tale, story.

  ‘Ours was the marsh country …’

  Great Expectations

  1

  About the Stars and the Sluice

  ‘AND don’t forget,’ my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, ‘whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother’s milk …’

  Fairy-tale words; fairy-tale advice. But we lived in a fairy-tale place. In a lock-keeper’s cottage, by a river, in the middle of the Fens. Far away from the wide world. And my father, who was a superstitious man, liked to do things in such a way as would make them seem magical and occult. So he would always set his eel traps at night. Not because eel traps cannot be set by day, but because the mystery of darkness appealed to him. And one night, in midsummer, in 1937, we went with him, Dick and I, to set traps near Stott’s Bridge. It was hot and windless. When the traps had been set we lay back on the river-bank. Dick was fourteen and I was ten. The pumps were tump-tumping, as they do, incessantly, so that you scarcely notice them, all over the Fens, and frogs were croaking in the ditches. Up above, the sky swarmed with stars which seemed to multiply as we looked at them. And as we lay, Dad said: ‘Do you know what the stars are? They are the silver dust of God’s blessing. They are little broken-off bits of heaven. God cast them down to fall on us. But when he saw how wicked we were, he changed his mind and ordered the stars to stop. Which is why they hang in the sky but seem as though at any time they might drop …’

  For my father, as well as being a superstitious man, had a knack for telling stories. Made-up stories, true stories; soothing stories, warning stories; stories with a moral or with no point at all; believable stories and unbelievable stories; stories which were neither one thing nor the other. It was a knack which ran in his family. But it was a knack which my mother had too – and perhaps he really acquired it from her. Because when I was very small it was my mother who first told me stories, which, unlike my father, she got from books as well as out of her head, to make me sleep at night.

  And since my mother’s death, which was six months before we lay by the eel traps under the stars, my father’s yen for the dark, his nocturnal restlessness, had grown more besetting. As if he were constantly brooding on some story yet to be told. So I would see him sometimes, inspecting his vegetable patch by the moonlight, or talking to his roosting chickens, or pacing up and down by the lock-gates or the sluice, his movements marked by the wandering ember of his cigarette.

  We lived in a lock-keeper’s cottage by the River Leem, which flows out of Norfolk into the Great Ouse. And no one needs telling that the land in that part of the world is flat. Flat, with an unrelieved and monotonous flatness, enough of itself, some might say, to drive a man to unquiet and sleep-defeating thoughts. From the raised banks of the Leem, it stretched away to the horizon, its uniform colour, peat-black, varied only by the crops that grew upon it – grey-green potato leaves, blue-green beet leaves, yellow-green wheat; its uniform levelness broken only by the furrowed and dead-straight lines of ditches and drains, which, depending on the state of the sky and the angle of the sun, ran like silver, copper or golden wires across the fields and which, when you stood and looked at them, made you shut one eye and fall prey to fruitless meditations on the laws of perspective.

  And yet this land, so regular, so prostrate, so tamed and cultivated, would transform itself, in my five- or six-year-old mind, into an empty wilderness. On those nights when my mother would be forced to tell me stories, it would seem that in our lock-keeper’s cottage we were in the middle of nowhere; and the noise of the trains passing on the lines to King’s Lynn, Gildsey and Ely was like the baying of a monster closing in on us in our isolation.

  A fairy-tale land, after all.

  My father kept the lock on the River Leem, two miles from where it empties into the Ouse. But because a lock-keeper’s duties are irregular and his pay, set against the rent-free cottage in which he lives, is scant, and because, in any case, by the nineteen-thirties, the river-traffic on the Leem had dwindled, my father also grew vegetables, kept chickens and trapped eels. It was only in times of heavy rain or thaw that these secondary occupations were abandoned. Then he would have to watch and anticipate the water-level. Then he would have to raise the sluice which cut across the far side of the stream like a giant guillotine.

  For the river in front of our cottage divided into two channels, the nearer containing the navigation lock, the further the sluice, with, in between, a solidly built brick-faced pier, a tiny island, on which stood the cabin housing the sluice engine. And even before the river had visibly risen, even before its colour had changed and it began to show the milky brown of the Norfolk chalk hills from which it flowed, Dad would know when to cross the lock-gates to the cabin and begin – with a groaning of m
etal and throbbing of released water – to crank up the sluice.

  But under normal conditions the sluice remained lowered, almost to the river bottom, its firm blade holding back the slow-flowing Leem, making it fit for the passage of boats. Then the water in the enclosure above it, like the water in the lock-pen, would be smooth and placid and it would give off that smell which is characteristic of places where fresh water and human ingenuity meet, and which is smelt over and over again in the Fens. A cool, slimy but strangely poignant and nostalgic smell. A smell which is half man and half fish. And at such times Dad would have plenty of leisure for his eel traps and vegetables, and little to do with the sluice, save to combat rust, grease the cog-wheels and clear away from the water the accumulations of flotsam.

  For, flood or no flood, the Leem brought down its unceasing booty of debris. Willow branches; alder branches; sedge; fencing; crates; old clothes; dead sheep; bottles; potato sacks; straw bales; fruit boxes; fertilizer bags. All floated down on the westerly current, lodged against the sluice-gate and had to be cleared away with boat-hooks and weed-rakes.

  And thus it was, one night in midsummer, when God’s withheld benedictions were shining in the sky, though this was several years after Dad told us about the stars, but only two or three since he began to speak of hearts and mother’s milk, and the tump-tump of the pumps was drowned now, in the evening, by the roar of ascending bombers – it was, to be precise, July, 1943 – that something floated down the Leem, struck the iron-work of the sluice and, tugged by the eddies, continued to knock and scrape against it till morning. Something extraordinary and unprecedented, and not to be disposed of like a branch or potato sack or even a dead sheep. For this something was a body. And the body belonged to Freddie Parr, who lived less than a mile away and was my age, give or take a month.

  2

  About the End of History

  CHILDREN. Children, who will inherit the world. Children (for always, even though you were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, candidates for that appeasing term ‘young adults’, I addressed you, silently, as ‘children’) – children, before whom I have stood for thirty-two years in order to unravel the mysteries of the past, but before whom I am to stand no longer, listen, one last time, to your history teacher.

  You, above all, should know that it is not out of choice that I am leaving you. You should know how inadequate was that phrase, so cruel in its cursoriness, ‘for personal reasons’, that our worthy headmaster, Lewis Scott, used in his morning assembly announcement. And you should know how beside the point, by the time they were applied, were those pressures brought to bear by this same Lewis in the name of a so-called educational rationale. (‘Don’t imagine I like it, Tom, but we’re being forced to economize. We’re cutting back on history. You could take early retirement …’)

  You should know, because it was you who were witness to the fact that old Cricky, your history teacher, had already in one sense, and of his own accord, ceased to teach history. In the middle of explaining how, with a Parisian blood-letting, our Modern World began, he breaks off and starts telling – these stories. Something about living by a river, something about a father who trapped eels, and a drowned body found in the river, years ago. And then it dawned on you: old Cricky was trying to put himself into history; old Cricky was trying to show you that he himself was only a piece of the stuff he taught. In other words, he’d flipped, he’d gone bananas …

  Or, as Lewis put it, ‘Maybe you should take a rest. A sabbatical term. How about it? A chance to get on with that book of yours – what was it now? – A History of the Fens?’

  But I didn’t take up this offer. Because, as it happened, you listened, you listened, all ears, to those new-fangled lessons. You listened to old Cricky’s crazy yarns (true? made up?) – in a way you never listened to the stranger-than-fiction prodigies of the French Revolution.

  And so it was not until a certain event occurred, an event more bizarre still than your history teacher’s new classroom style, an event involving his wife, Mrs Crick, and – given the inescapable irony of the husband’s profession – made much of, as you know, by the local press, that my departure became, at last, an absolute necessity.

  Schoolmaster’s wife admits theft of child. Tells court: ‘God told me to do it.’

  Children, it was one of your number, a curly-haired boy called Price, in the habit (contrary to regulations but passed over by me) of daubing his cheeks with an off-white make-up which gave to his face the pallor of a corpse, who once, interrupting the French Revolution and voicing the familiar protest that every history teacher learns to expect (what is the point, use, need, etc., of History), asserted roundly that history was ‘a fairy-tale’.

  (A teacher-baiter. A lesson-spoiler. Every class has to have one. But this one’s different …)

  ‘What matters,’ he went on, not knowing what sort of fairy-tale was about to envelop both his history teacher and his history teacher’s wife, ‘is the here and now. Not the past. The here and now – and the future.’ (The very sentiments, Price – but you didn’t see that – of 1789.) And then – alluding rapidly to certain topics of the day (the Afghan crisis, the Tehran hostages, the perilous and apparently unhaltable build-up of nuclear arms) and drawing from you, his class-mates, a sudden and appalling venting of your collective nightmares – he announced, with a trembling lip that was not just the result of uttering words that must have been (true, Price?) carefully rehearsed: ‘The only important thing …’

  ‘Yes, Price – the only important thing—?’

  ‘The only important thing about history, I think, sir, is that it’s got to the point where it’s probably about to end.’

  So we closed our textbooks. Put aside the French Revolution. So we said goodbye to that old and hackneyed fairy-tale with its Rights of Man, liberty caps, cockades, tricolours, not to mention hissing guillotines, and its quaint notion that it had bestowed on the world a New Beginning.

  I began, having recognized in my young but by no means carefree class the contagious symptoms of fear: ‘Once upon a time …’

  Children, who will inherit the world. Children to whom, throughout history, stories have been told, chiefly but not always at bedtime, in order to quell restless thoughts; whose need of stories is matched only by the need adults have of children to tell stories to, of receptacles for their stock of fairy-tales, of listening ears on which to unload those most unbelievable yet haunting of fairy-tales, their own lives; children – they are going to separate you and me. Lewis has seen to it. Forgive this emotion. I do not deserve your protestations. (We need our Cricky and all that stuff of his.) I do not expect you to understand that after thirty-two years I have rolled you all into one and now I know the agonies of a mother robbed of her child.… But listen, listen. Your history teacher wishes to give you the complete and final version …

  And since a fairy-tale must have a setting, a setting which, like the settings of all good fairy-tales, must be both palpable and unreal, let me tell you

  3

  About the Fens

  WHICH are a low-lying region of eastern England, over 1,200 square miles in area, bounded to the west by the limestone hills of the Midlands, to the south and east by the chalk hills of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. To the north, the Fens advance, on a twelve-mile front, to meet the North Sea at the Wash. Or perhaps it is more apt to say that the Wash summons the forces of the North Sea to its aid in a constant bid to recapture its former territory. For the chief fact about the Fens is that they are reclaimed land, land that was once water, and which, even today, is not quite solid.

  Once the shallow, shifting waters of the Wash did not stop at Boston and King’s Lynn but licked southwards as far as Cambridge, Huntingdon, Peterborough and Bedford. What caused them to retreat? The answer can be given in a single syllable: Silt. The Fens were formed by silt. Silt: a word which when you utter it, letting the air slip thinly between your teeth, invokes a slow, sly, insinuating agency. Silt: which shapes and under
mines continents; which demolishes as it builds; which is simultaneous accretion and erosion; neither progress nor decay.

  It came first from the coast of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, borne on the inshore currents which flowed southwards into the ancient Wash. In the blue-black clay which lies under the soil of Cambridgeshire are deposits of silt containing traces of shells of a type occurring on the beaches and cliff-beds of north-east England. Thus the first silts came from the sea. But to these marine silts were added the land silts carried by the rivers, the Ouse, the Cam, the Welland, which drained, and still drain, into the ever-diminishing Wash.

  The silt accumulated, salt-marsh plants took hold, then other plants. And with the plants began the formation of peat. And peat is the second vital constituent of the Fens and the source of their remarkable fertility. Once it supported great forests which collapsed and sank when climatic changes caused water to re-immerse the region. Today, it forms the rich, black, beet- and potato-bearing soil which is second to none in the country. But without silt, there could have been no peat.

  All this was still happening not so long ago. In 870 the Viking fleets sailed with ease as far as Ely, through a region which was still predominantly water. Two hundred years later Hereward, defending the same high ground of Ely, watched his Norman besiegers flounder and drown in the treacherous peat-bogs. The landscape was still largely liquid.

  For consider the equivocal operation of silt. Just as it raises the land, drives back the sea and allows peat to mature, so it impedes the flow of rivers, restricts their outfall, renders the newly formed land constantly liable to flooding and blocks the escape of floodwater. For centuries the Fens were a network of swamps and brackish lagoons. The problem of the Fens has always been the problem of drainage.

  What silt began, man continued. Land reclamation. Drainage. But you do not reclaim a land overnight. You do not reclaim a land without difficulty and without ceaseless effort and vigilance. The Fens are still being reclaimed even to this day. Strictly speaking, they are never reclaimed, only being reclaimed. Without the pumps, the dykes and embankments, without the dredging programmes … And you do not need to remind a Fenman of the effects of heavy inland rainfall, or of the combination of a spring tide and a strong nor’easter.