Waterlog Page 8

  That night I met Ernie Hall playing darts in the Three Tuns at Welney, where three grey and white cats curled up in the window, and a washing line on the river bank danced with long johns, flowered frocks and pairs of woollen gloves. He told me how, after work on hot days, he and his friends used to dive off the bridge there into the muddy Hundred Foot Drain, swim down on the ebb-tide to the Crown, three miles away, sink three pints while the tide turned, then swim back up on the rising tide to Bank Farm, where he lived. ‘Nobody worried,’ he said. ‘There was no law against it.’ Bank Farm lies just below the massive bank of the Hundred Foot Drain, some twenty feet below the surface of the river. ‘We used to drink that water in the Hundred Foot,’ said Ernie, sipping his pint thoughtfully. ‘There was nothing else to drink. We used to siphon it out and take turns to do the pumping. It was bloody hard work.’ They would stand the water overnight to let the silt settle, decant it, and boil it. They had water butts too, so not a drop of rain was ever wasted. ‘If you ever drink rainwater you’ll never drink nothing else.’

  When it froze they would take to their skates and travel the dykes and rivers like roads for miles all over the Fens. A favourite would be to skate from Littleport for three miles up the Great Ouse to Brandon Creek, where it meets the Little Ouse, for a drink at the Ship. On a Sunday afternoon at Welney in cold weather there would be 2,000 people skating on the Ouse Washes, and even more for the Fenland Skating Championships on Bury Fen if it froze hard enough. Welney has produced more first-class skaters than any other fenland village, breeding whole families of champions.

  I was struck by the fierce loyalty amongst these people. Everyone in the Three Tuns agreed with Ernie when he said they were all salt of the earth in the Fens and would ‘give you a sack of potatoes as soon as look at you’. Once you got beyond Cambridge, however, ‘They wouldn’t give you the drippings off the end of their nose.’ They were still talking about a dog otter that had been found killed on the road at Welney three weeks before, and they all remembered the last coypu captured in the river there. It weighed 35 pounds and was probably eaten by the lock keeper upstream at Earith, who used to trap the amiable rodents for the stewing pot.

  Another of the fenmen, Don Dewsbury, described standing on the banks of the big Hundred Foot Drain in stormy weather and feeling the banks shaking with the sheer weight of water. He had worked for the Great Ouse River Board for fifty years, and was once on a barge in the river with his friend Budgie from Soham when the banks burst and they were washed through on a great wave of brown surf and beached in the middle of a potato field. Mick Willets, who lives by the sluice at Denver, said he once picked potatoes from aboard a punt on a farm at Willingham with his auntie during the 1947 floods.

  Each village would have its own favourite natural lido. Across the Fens in Cottenham, the people would walk north along a track over Smithey Fen to swim where the sandy bank slopes gently into the Old West River. Pop Day was one of the swimmers, and he had seen as many as a hundred bathing there together and basking on the banks. He undid his shirt buttons to show me the scar he got from diving into the river over the hedge at Stretton Pumping Station and cutting his chest open on the shallow gravel. He said most of his friends still have scars from diving accidents in the river. Kamikaze running dives from the far side of the hedge were a favourite sport. No fen boy was truly initiated without a set of scars from the lacerating thorns or unknown hazards under the surface. At that time there was a lot more traffic on the water, and the swimmers would splash people in the boats, holding on to the gunwales, and getting into trouble.

  Pop learnt to swim in the Old West River, by the steam-powered Stretham Pumping Station. He and his friends clung on to an old oil drum, gradually learning to let go and keep swimming. Later, they graduated to underwater swimming, and bets and dares. But the favourite bathing hole in that part of the Fens was near Wilburton where the Old West River runs past Australia Farm, so called because it was so remote. Just as everyone on the Fens seemed to go by their nickname – ‘Fish’, ‘Turkey’, ‘Boxer’, ‘Scadger’, ‘Pop’ – so did fens, farms, dykes and rivers. Names from the colonies or remote wars were often used to denote a far-away field or farm. Hence Sebastopol Farm, or Botany Bay, where the Twelve Foot Drain joins the Little Ouse at one end of Stallode Wash, miles from anywhere.

  The River Lark was known as Jordan, because people came from all over the Fens to be baptised by total immersion in its waters at Isleham. The Fens have always been strongly non-conformist and are well provided with Baptist chapels. Isleham has two, the High Street Baptist Chapel and the Zoar Chapel, as well as its original church, and people were baptised in the river here from at least as early as 1812 until the early seventies. In search of the original baptism places on the river, I went down Sun Street next morning, along Waterside to Fen Bank and called in at the best source of local knowledge in any village: the allotments. The day was again fine and warm, and the allotmenteers were all out pottering in the quiet, purposeful way of these places, in and out of their sheds with watering cans. Oh yes, they said, people used to come past on their way to be baptised. ‘We used to have a laugh when the tall ones went by,’ said one of them, ‘because the vicar was a short bloke and we’d say, “He’ll never get his head under.”’ The gardeners pointed out three places on the river: one by the old ferry; another by the new bridge, where there was a hole in the river bed, since filled in; and the third, eventually more popular, a watering and bathing hole on a bend in the river known as ‘the Horse Pond’.

  I breaststroked three hundred yards down to it from just below the bridge, navigating the occasional weed-jam, in water no more than four or five feet deep with a velvet silty bed that sent shivers through me when I put my feet down on it. There I found a deep pool and a gently shelving beach, now muddy but with a firm, sandy foundation. It was a drinking place for cattle in the riverside meadow and a roost for swans.

  Mrs Jenny Davis, the last person to be baptised in the river at Isleham, had sent me some photographs of the ceremony. In one, the minister and his assistant stand waist-deep and fully-clothed in the Horse Pond, with Mrs Davis dressed in white between them. In the other they duck her under completely before helping her to ‘go up out of the water’. There are fewer trees in the photos than there are now. Willows grow fast. Baptism is wonderfully pagan, and there’s nothing half-hearted about going through the full works in a river. It takes nothing away from the symbolic re-enactment of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection and the washing away of sin, to say that the ritual is really grafted on to something much older and pre-Christian. It clearly harks back to a time when the rivers themselves were deities, as they certainly still are in India, where people hop in and out of the Ganges at every opportunity. At the sacred ghat at Hardwar, one of the seven great places of pilgrimage for Hindu India, two million people are said to have bathed in the river on 13 April 1962 at the Dikhanti fair to celebrate the birthday of Ganga. I stood up to my waist in the Horse Pond, pushed my toes into the mud, and tried to imagine such a scene in Isleham. It would give the allotment holders something to talk about.

  Feeling baptised by the naiads of the Lark, I swam back upstream to the bridge and scrambled out up the steep muddy bank clutching at handfuls of tough ryegrass. The other side of a breathtakingly secular concrete weir, through meadows full of sacred cows, a stone beside the old chain-ferry landing-stage commemorates the baptism of the Rev. Charles Spurgeon, ‘The Prince of Preachers’, on 3 May 1850. Spurgeon was a fifteen-year-old Newmarket schoolboy then, but went on to be ordained and to preach to Baptist congregations that reached 12,000 and packed the Surrey Gardens Music Hall in London.

  The Isleham Baptists stopped immersing people in the Lark in 1972 because they thought it had become too polluted. It didn’t feel at all bad when I swam at Isleham, and appeared even better when I plunged in an hour later further upstream in a delightful deep pool beside an old hump-backed bridge above the mill at Icklingham. But the water is not
as clear as it was when the allotment gardeners of Isleham were young and learnt to swim in it, each pushing a floating log by way of water-wings. They remembered the river as sparkling and transparent, with a clearly visible gravel bottom instead of the caked black mud I still wore on my calves.

  With the Lark water scarcely dry on me, I rang the Environment Agency to enquire whether the river was still polluted, or whether it might once again be safe to be baptised in the river. I was told that my question was ‘multifunctional’ and could not therefore be answered over the telephone. It was, apparently, a far more complex question than I naively realised and would involve the expenditure of staff time in more than one department, for which I would have to be prepared to pay. I explained that I was not a scientist, just an ordinary member of the public, and really only sought a simple yes or no answer. Mr X told me to write in to the Customer Services Department, refused point blank to give me his name, and rang off before I could utter so much as a multifunctional word.

  I did write in, and received a reply free of charge informing me that:

  All rivers which contain sewage effluent, however well treated, will contain E. Coli and coliforms or worse, and the Agency would therefore discourage you from immersing people in the river. There is also a risk, albeit slight, of ‘Leptospirosis’ or Weil’s disease. This is caused by a bacterium which is carried in the urine of domestic and wild animals, particularly rats.

  Apart from the flattering misapprehension that I was to be doing the baptising, the letter showed very little faith in the ability of either the agency or the Lord to provide. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have left behind T. S. Eliot’s conception of the river as ‘a brown god’.

  The Lark was full of God’s creatures in the far-off pre-Environmental Agency days, but they all met their maker in one of the worst incidents of industrial pollution in recent years in the late 1980s. The sugar factory at Bury St Edmunds leaked some of the highly toxic effluent from the treatment of sugar beet into the Lark. Nothing is more polluting than sugar, which deoxygenates water by promoting the massive growth of bacteria. As the poisoned water went downstream it killed everything. The river has since recovered, and I saw plenty of fish, but the question remains (although the answer could cost you), could it happen again?

  Lorry drivers on their CB radios on the A14 call Bury St Edmunds ‘Sugar City’. Driving by, it would be easy to imagine the sugar factory as a giant conspiracy against the nation’s health, financed by a mafia of dentists and heart surgeons. It looks its most satanic at night, when clouds of evil-smelling white smoke and steam billow like candyfloss out of a forest of steel chimneys and hi-tech ducting, floodlit in lurid pink and orange. Half-hidden and fortified behind high-wire fences and ramparts of earth, the place looks like a missile launching site. In winter, when the sugar beet season is in full swing, there is even a system of deodorant mist sprays around the perimeter fence perfuming the evil-smelling air. You can always tell something untoward is going on in a place when you see large numbers of trees being planted. All round the factory a gleaming new spinney conceals vast lagoons full of rotting beet sludge. Wild clematis picturesquely clambers up the chain-link barricades, and rabbits innocently graze the verge. Just as this pot pourri of perfume and stench assails the puzzled nostrils of the traveller, a sign comes into view beside the road: WELCOME TO BURY ST EDMUNDS, BRITAIN’S FLORAL TOWN.

  Across the A14 from the sugar factory, I stood outside the Bury St Edmunds Tesco. Here, the Lark had been treated with something less than reverence as it flowed through the vast forecourt car park. Pure Spring Water may be highly valued on the shelves inside, but outside, the real thing was ignored. This was a world of tarmac, four-wheel drives, storm drains, smooth, black engineering bricks and steel safety rails. The hapless Lark, which once meandered gently through water meadows here, had been neatly packaged in an outsized concrete canyon. No water vole would dream of venturing here, nor otter, purple loosestrife or figwort. The water was impossibly remote and fenced. If this were a zoo, they could safely keep crocodiles in it. Even after torrential rain, the infant river could hardly be more than a far-off six-inch trickle, yet it was treated like a monster, a flash flood waiting to happen. Tesco, who like Nature to behave herself, had originally wanted to conceal the stream altogether inside a concrete pipe – a drain – and were forced into this dubious compromise by the Environment Agency.

  In Japan, Morocco or the Isleham allotments, running water is a joy, and always presents the architect or gardener with an opportunity for celebration; the chance to make something beautiful. Water bubbles in a maze of miniature streams and sluices through the village orchards of the Ameln Valley in the Anti Atlas mountains, dances down rivulets across the hot plain from the Atlas to fill the ornamental lakes in the Marrakesh botanical gardens, or swirls down makeshift gutters off the Isleham shed roofs into allotment water butts, where it is highly prized. As I had returned past the Isleham allotments with my wet togs, the allotmenteers ministered peacefully to their cabbages, decanting the holy butt-water from their cans with appreciation, if not reverence. By contrast, in a prosperous and sainted English town, I witnessed the public humiliation of the Jordan of the Fens. By the Bury St Edmunds Tesco I sat down and wept.

  6

  AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS

  Suffolk, 16 May

  I WAS LESS THAN an hour’s drive from the moat, and I had been missing the dramatic changes that occur in it literally from day to day in spring. It is constantly repainting and renewing itself. Swimming somewhere familiar is quite as addictive as a familiar walk, or bike ride, or sleeping in your own bed. So I returned home that night, and went straight across the lawn behind the house to the moat, lying very black and still, reflecting a cloud-filled sky, with the half moon floating near the willow tree. All that disturbed the surface was the slight wave as a moorhen dived and crossed underwater to the shadow of the hedge, where it surfaced for a moment, then hid, submerged. The wing-beats of a pair of mallards whistled as they circled the field, making repeated low runs over the water, uncertain whether it was safe to land, muttering uneasily. The choirs of toads whose song had filled the air at the end of March were silent now, and the wild orgy of beasts with two backs, or even three, floating about the margins, bloated and tangled in skeins of their own glutinous spawn, had subsided. I took the torch to two old aquariums by the bank, where I put some of the spawn for protection, and saw tadpoles stirring when I tapped the glass. Shining into the moat, its beam caught dozens of newts swimming underwater. I leant down by the cart-ladder and fished out the thermometer on its bit of string: sixty-one degrees. I would swim in the morning.

  I fell asleep within a minute of hitting the pillow, dreaming of a time before the Fens were drained, when the villages were all islands, and people lived there like the Marsh Arabs in the days of Wilfred Thesiger. In the middle of the night I was woken up, as ever, by the cock pheasant that roosts not fifteen feet from my bedroom window in a tangled rambling rose on a wigwam of hazel poles. At precisely four o’clock, he suddenly chortles loudly, then ruffles his feathers self-importantly like a man who has had his say at a public meeting. Then, just as I am going back to sleep, he does it again, this time from the lawn, where he paces like a schoolmaster, muttering to himself. Sometimes I wish someone would shoot him, but immediately repent because we are such close neighbours.

  To my delight and relief, I awoke later to the thrumming of wing-beats in the chimney that heralds the arrival of the swallows – my swallows – from Africa. The sound was deep and breathy, and vibrated through the wood-framed house, and through me. When I bathed in the moat, the birds were already busy dibbling clay from along its margins for nest improvements. They feed off the moat too, skimming over me on a regular flight path as I swim, snapping their beaks audibly as they swoop and hawk for insects, some just emerging from their larval stage in the water. They seem to be engrossed in an endless conversation with one another, arriving later and later from their mi
gration each year, so I fret about them anxiously. I always note the day in my diary and it is usually somewhere between the 19th and 27th April. They had returned while I was away. The moment they arrive, they will fly in and inspect the chimney where they nest. It acts as a bass organ pipe, and amplifies their tiny wing-beats to a rumbling that can sound like a passing lorry. Such an emphatic affirmation of spring is always welcome, but in these days of diminishing returns in the world of migrant birds it is also a terrific relief to know that the last of the free spirits have survived another season. Their little colony of mud nests, looking like a Dogon village in Africa (where I imagine them spending their winters), has been there for ever and must have been kilned almost to earthenware by my winter log fires. Bits fall off from time to time, like fragments of Easter egg, and when I see the birds getting mud from the moat, I think of the original Tudor builders, who did just the same when they made the house.

  Rain in the night had made the moat wonderfully fresh and clear. I walked across the wet lawn and went down step by wooden step into the inviting water, because I didn’t want to disturb the insect, mollusc and amphibian city, already far into the rhythms of its day, by diving. The submerged jungle of Canadian pond weed was beginning to thicken and encroach from the banks towards my central swimming lane. Only a strand or two wrapped round your arm or neck interrupts the rhythm as you flick it off. It would have to be pruned.