Waterland

Introduction by the author

It’s not just playing with words to say that Waterland marked a watershed in my career. It was my third novel but the first to gain a large readership and to be widely translated. Materially, it enabled me, after years of needing to do other jobs, to see if I could survive by writing alone. I’ve managed to do so ever since. It came out, in 1983, at a time when there was real excitement in the air about new fiction by new young novelists, and its publication was great fun. Eels feature prominently in the book, and the day before the launch party I bought a large smoked eel from a fishmonger’s in Soho, had it wrapped and sent to my publishers. When it was opened it apparently caused lots of screams.

In less overt ways, though not all of them marking an unprecedented crossing into new terrain, it was a watershed too. I recognised, even as I wrote it, that it was ‘bigger’, more ambitious than anything I’d previously attempted. In the more elated periods of the writing (though, as with any book, there were some bleak doldrums) I felt I could do and get away with anything. I’d dealt with multiple time levels before and with switching between different narrative threads, but never so adventurously; and while Waterland has its several plots and a pervasive story-telling urge, it often shifts into something not like narrative at all—the chapter ‘About the Eel’ is the example people tend to pick out. I felt confident about these seeming digressions, that they wouldn’t be digressions but vital parts of an organic, if idiosyncratic and complex, whole.

Unlike earlier, or subsequent, work, Waterland also has a strong element of the supernatural and the fantastical, or at least the larger than life. The remarkable effects of Ernest Atkinson’s Coronation Ale would be a case in point. Many chapters or passages invoke a fairy-tale atmosphere. I felt I could justify all this too. It was partly that I wanted to explore the workings of superstition. I may also have been under the sway of the ‘magical realism’ in vogue at the time. But there was a more basic principle that had operated quietly in my writing before and has done ever since: that one begins with the ordinary, mundane, even disappointing world we all know and looks for the extraordinary in it. I’ve always worked that way round, it’s a guiding instinct.

What Waterland peculiarly provided for me—and it really wasn’t anticipated but thrown up by the novel itself—was a special, almost literal stage for the exercise of this instinct. I mean its Fenland setting, which could hardly seem more prosaic and monotonous, but out of which so much of what happens in the book arises. Once I had the Fens—though at first scarcely appreciating it—I had the perfect arena for the counterplay between mere reality, mere flat mundanity and everything in human nature (or just nature) that strives against it—whether history, superstition and human enterprise on the one hand, or elemental forces (water versus land) on the other.

I don’t come from the Fens, but from south London. Ever since the book appeared I’ve had to surprise—sometimes, it seems, let down—people by explaining that I have no personal link with the region and that even my physical research for the novel was minimal. I still find myself disabusing readers, and one awkward but touching aspect of this is that even real Fenlanders can make the assumption that I’m a native—a fellow ‘Fenny’. Of course, long before I ever thought of setting a novel there, I’d seen the Fens, if only from a train window, and a mere sight can leave a haunting impression, but that was really the extent of my connection. So the novel endorses another of my fiction-writer’s faiths: the simple force of the imagination—of fiction itself—which can take us to both geographical and mental territory which isn’t indigenously ours.

As far as I can remember, my choosing the Fens was at first arbitrary, even abstract. The novel begins with a dead body floating in a river. I found myself picturing locks, lonely lock-keepers’ cottages, a generally watery, low-lying environment . . . But I think in any case that before I wrote Waterland I didn’t consider the setting of a novel to be that important. What mattered was the human drama, and up to a point, of course, that is broadly true. So I may actively have been looking for a setting that was as unobtrusive as possible. The Fens may have seemed to me the ideal nonsetting, the ideal flat, bare platform for my human drama.

Little did I know. What quickly happened was that the apparent background became a foreground, even a kind of principal character. As my imagination travelled to the Fens, the Fens took hold of my imagination. This realization of their potential not just for physical atmosphere but for all kinds of metaphysical and metaphorical implication was one of the explosive stages in the novel’s genesis. Then there was the historical factor (I did quite a lot of historical research). The Fens, for all their seeming desertion and power to haunt, are an entirely man-made landscape. They have been claimed from water. Water is always trying to claim them back. Here was an apparently neutral domain that was actually fraught with underlying drama and with the paradoxes and ambiguities that generally attract me as a writer, since I think life is fraught with them too.

Waterland, in short, would teach me never again to regard location as a mere incidental feature of fiction. I could look at my preceding novels and see how important location and something going beyond just physical location—locality—is to them. Novels are there, I believe now, to be true to, to insist on, sometimes to celebrate, the inescapable locality of existence.

Another explosion in the genesis of the book was to make its narrator, Tom Crick, a history teacher. The story begins when he’s a Fenland teenager, in wartime, but I always had the feeling of an older man looking back at a crucial time in his life. So what had Tom become? Making him a history teacher gave a direct validation to something else the novel was urging me (ambitiously enough) to do, to explore the whole mystery of ‘history’ (local, personal and global)—its meaning, if it has any, its distinction, so far as there is one, from mere ‘story’. But it had the second effect of extending the interplay between age and youth, implicit in Tom’s memories, into other areas. Tom, in his classes, could be confronting pupils the same age as the schoolboy self he would be recalling. It was then a quick route to a third explosion. Tom might be a sacked or redundant history teacher. Either way, his subject would have been under curricular pressure (an educational reality then as now). So Tom would in a sense be removed from history and forced into a questioning of its substance and purpose. This in turn might match the position of some of his pupils—or at least of their ringleader, Price—who would feel not only that history might have nothing to teach them, but that, anyway, as Price declares, it was ‘probably about to end’.

That watchword of Price’s is a reminder that, though many of the novel’s concerns are, I hope, timeless, it’s nonetheless a book of its time. Students today no longer fear that the world will come to an end in a cold-war nuclear Armageddon, though they face other forms of catastrophe that are just as besetting, and perhaps they will have no difficulty in identifying with Price’s apocalyptic anxiety. I think, too, that history is no less of a conundrum for us than it was in 1983. It has perhaps become more baffling. Whether as an academic discipline or as material for bizarre televisual guided tours, we seem to know less and less what to do with it. Is it a toy, a tool or just an embarrassing encumbrance?

When I was writing Waterland I believe I felt there was a sort of umbilical cord connecting me with previous decades and previous generations. I feel now that it has either been snipped off completely or become inextricably twisted. To reflect on some of the things that simply didn’t exist in 1983 is to recognise how great has been the rate of change in just twenty-five years. Suppose Price and his fellow students had had computers and had texted each other on mobile phones. This rapid acceleration into the future seems to make us increasingly awkward at handling the past. But then handling the past is one of fiction’s principal, perennial functions.

Ecologically, the world has changed hugely too, though here at least my Fenland setting hasn’t, as it were, lost any ground. If I were writing the novel now I’d no doubt want to bring out the microcosmic relevance to climate change—the Fens as an emblem of planetary fragility, planetary conservation—but I’m not sure if this isn’t taken care of anyway, if the mutable nature of my setting, as fluid conceptually as watery in fact, doesn’t accommodate eventualities that were scarcely thought of when the book was written. It’s an irony of the last twenty-five years that while in the Fens (because of the region’s experience in such things) flood defences have probably improved, other parts of the country, not to say of the world, have found themselves increasingly, sometimes devastatingly, under water. We live in more flood-prone times.

All the same, I can see that Waterland belongs to an era (though it was a long and significant enough era) before the lifting of the Iron Curtain, it belongs to the early eighties, or to the seventies when it was germinating and to which it refers. More generally, it’s something of a shock for me to realise—because the book really doesn’t feel that ‘old’—that a quarter of a century, a large part of my life, has passed since its publication, that it’s become ‘historical’ in that sense too. When I wrote it, I was closer in age to Price than to Tom, and while I’d been a teenage schoolboy I could only imagine the viewpoint of someone in their early fifties. Now I’m some years older than Tom, but I don’t feel he’s the mere thin projection of a younger man.

Revisiting the novel, I’m struck by its bravura, even exhibitionist tendencies. It’s something of a show-off book, I was clearly flexing my literary muscles at the time. I find some of this embarrassing now. On the other hand, even this show-off element somehow receives its levelling—an inadvertent bit of self-correction—from the swampy levels of the setting. It’s also levelled, or countered, by a preexisting leaning that isn’t exhibitionist or extrovert at all, but introspective. Anyone who’s read a few of my novels will see that Waterland begins and ends where most of them begin and end, in the mind of a first-person narrator. For all its exploration of the big world of history and of communal endeavour, it comes back to the small world of our individual habitation.

Strictly speaking—despite Tom’s persistent brooding on the flat wetlands of his youth and of his ancestors—the novel’s setting is not actually the Fens, but Greenwich, London, near that entirely man-made, abstract imposition upon the world, the line of longitude zero. More precisely, it’s a room, where all the brooding is occurring, in Tom’s otherwise now sadly deserted home.

To put it another way, Waterland is set where we’re all set, inside our own heads. In this sense it’s consistent with all my fiction. The novel I’d most closely link it to is Tomorrow. Here too there are the solitary but roaming thoughts of a single narrator, a woman this time, Paula Hook. She’s closely surrounded by her family, though they’re all asleep and in that sense absent, and this time the house is in Putney. Here too there are memories, and history, going back to the Second World War, and here too the thoughts of the narrator take the form of an address to ‘children’, this time Paula’s own. In neither case is this literal (Paula’s children aren’t listening, any more than Tom’s ex-pupils), in neither case are the children and the reader the same, the reader is simply privy to the vocative form of thinking, but in both books there’s an intense appeal from age to youth, a concern for origins and ends, for familial unfoldings, for where we come from and for what the future holds.

It’s not difficult for me to return to Waterland. Despite its historical placing and despite those personal reservations about its style, I don’t, for the most part, feel any remoteness. That lock-side cottage of the mid-forties (I can see the intricacies of its interior without having to open the book) and that Greenwich house of the late seventies are equally accessible. I can be with its characters and reoccupy its scenes as readily as if I’d invented them yesterday. The predominant feeling I have is that, in contrast to those ever-floodable, ever-evanescent Fens, it’s all still there.

As a form, the novel has the peculiar capacity, for both writer and reader, to be reinhabitable, reliveable, as if, for all its copious ability to deal with time, change, history and memory, it’s really intent on creating and preserving some permanent present tense. It can be both then and now. I hope readers returning to this book will find it all still there too, and I hope new readers will find it just as inhabitable, even as contemporary a book as it was for me twenty-five years ago.

GRAHAM SWIFT

January 2008

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 fairytale 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 riverbank. 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 1930s, 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 brickfaced 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 lockgates to the cabin and begin—with a groaning of metal 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 cogwheels 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; fertiliser bags. All floated down on the westerly current, lodged against the sluicegate 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 ironwork 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 economise. 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 bloodletting, 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 makeup 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 classmates, 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 recognised 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 undermines 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.

So forget, indeed, your revolutions, your turning-points, your grand metamorphoses of history. Consider, instead, the slow and arduous process, the interminable and ambiguous process—the process of human siltation—of land reclamation.

Is it desirable, in the first place, that land should be reclaimed? Not to those who exist by water; not to those who have no need of firm ground beneath their feet. Not to the fishermen, fowlers and reed-cutters who made their sodden homes in those stubborn swamps, took to stilts in time of flood and lived like water rats. Not to the men who broke down the medieval embankments and if caught were buried alive in the very breach they had made. Not to the men who cut the throats of King Charles’s Dutch drainers and threw their bodies into the water they were hired to expel.

I am speaking of my ancestors; of my father’s forefathers. Because my name of Crick, which in Charles’s day was spelt sometimes ‘Coricke’ or ‘Cricke’, can be found (a day’s delving into local archives) among the lists of those summarily dealt with for sabotaging drainage works. My ancestors were water people. They speared fish and netted ducks. When I was small I possessed a living image of my ancestors in the form of Bill Clay, a shrunken, leathery carcass of a man, whose age was unknown but was never put at less than eighty, a one-time punt-gunner and turf-cutter, who had witnessed in his lifetime the passing of all but the dregs of the old wild fens in our area; who stank, even with his livelihood half gone, of goose fat and fish slime, mud and peat smoke; who wore an otter-skin cap, eel-skin gaiters and whose brain was permanently crazed by the poppy-head tea he drank to ward off winter agues. Old Bill lived with his wife Martha in a damp crack-walled cottage not far from the Ouse and on the edge of the shrinking reed-filled marsh known, after the watery expanse it had once been, as Wash Fen Mere. But some said that Martha Clay, who was some twenty years younger than Bill, was never Bill’s wife at all. Some said that Martha Clay was a witch . . .

But let’s keep clear of fairy tales.

The Dutch came, under their engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, hired first by King Charles, then by His Lordship, Francis, Earl of Bedford. Honouring their employer’s name, they cut the Bedford River, and then the New Bedford River alongside it, to divert the main strength of the Ouse from its recalcitrant and sluggish course by Ely, into a straight channel to the sea. They built the Denver Sluice at the junction of the northern end of the new river with the old Ouse, and the Hermitage Sluice at the southern junction. They dug subsidiary cuts, drains, lodes, dykes, eaus and ditches and converted ninety-five thousand acres into summer, if not winter, grazing. Practical and forward-looking people, the Dutch. And my father’s forebears opposed them; and two of them were hanged for it.

Vermuyden left (he should have been rich but the Dutch Wars robbed him of his English fortune) in 1655. And nature, more effectively than my ancestors, began to sabotage his work. Because silt obstructs as it builds; unmakes as it makes. Vermuyden did not foresee