To the River (16 page)

After the sun had dropped and I’d soaped myself thoroughly beneath a lukewarm shower I began to revive. I ate a curry in an empty restaurant and drank a beer down with it. The bill came with a bowl of fennel seeds coated in coloured sugar, pink and white and yellow, and for the rest of the evening the ghost of aniseed lay on the tip of my tongue like a word I knew but could not speak. While the light lasted I went down to the railway lands that lay between the town and the A27, bordered by the river to the east and the train tracks to the south-west. The railway lands had once been the station’s goods yard, and after years of neglect were turned quite recently into a nature reserve. Despite some attempts at landscaping the place had not lost its haphazard feel, and the tangled hedges were full of the last punch-drunk elderflowers and the first green nubs of blackberries. I sat by the water there, watching the jackdaws wheel overhead. Once or twice a kestrel came by, pale-winged, its rusty tail splayed into a wedge, circling the Brooks in search of mice. I could hear traffic on the dual carriageway, and with it the periodic wail of a train crossing the river from Lewes to Hastings and back.

Most of this land, and much more besides, had once belonged to the Cluniac priory, where Henry took refuge before he signed away his kingdom. Though it continued to thrive after the battle, the priory had been plucked down in the autumn of 1537 during the dissolution of the monasteries at the orders of Thomas Cromwell, who employed an Italian military engineer to oversee its destruction, selling off even the lead from the roof and the bells before building the largest house in Lewes, Lords Place, from what had once been the Prior’s lodgings. Three years later Cromwell himself was dead, and the building passed into private ownership and was later destroyed.

When the railway from Brighton to Hastings was built in 1845, it cut right through the ruins of the priory, which had, despite the labours of the Italian engineer, been only imperfectly erased. In the course of their excavations, the railway workers opened up a well filled with hundreds of bodies, which were said to emit such noxious odours that several were too overcome to work and had to return to their homes to recover. The bodies were believed to be the royalist soldiers who had been killed in the later stages of the Battle of Lewes, as the fighting reached the priory walls. So what did the railwaymen do with their find? They dredged out the bones, loaded them onto trucks and hauled them into the marshes, where according to the
Sussex Express
of 17 January 1846 ‘they were thrown into the mass of rubbish which forms the embankment through the brooks, midway between the river and Southerham corner’.

The embankment was still there. I could see it from where I sat, and tomorrow I would cross beneath it to reach the marshland beyond. But it took me a while to make sense of the story. The trains to Hastings and Newhaven, to Glynde and Ore and Seaford, travel each day across the compacted bones of the men who fought here in 1264? Unsurprisingly, not everyone approved of using human remains in this way. The
Sussex Express
published a leader condemning the practice, and a local doctor added sternly in his diary:

It has been suggested, with much probability, that these bones are the relics of the persons who fell in the Battle of Lewes in 1264, in the streets and immediate vicinity of the town, and which were gathered up and afforded Christian burial within the precincts of the Priory, by the monks of St Pancras. In perfect accordance with the spirit of this railway age, this heap of skeleton of the patriots and royalists of the 13
^th
century, which filled thirteen wagons, was taken away to form part of the embankment of the line in the adjacent brook.

And his name, this good doctor who cared so much about the relics of persons and how they were treated? It was none other than Gideon Mantell, the fossil-hunter who had found and named the first iguanodon and whose own spine had been damaged in a carriage accident and was later exhibited in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, surviving the bombs that rained down on London for fifty-seven consecutive nights and being at last destroyed in 1970 during a clearout.

Ossa hic sita sunt
, the Romans used to write on their gravestones, or sometimes simply OHSS: the bones are buried here. It almost made me laugh to think of it: that the train line was built on a bank of compacted femurs and tibias, just as the Downs behind it were made from the accumulated bodies of single-celled algae and phytoplankton, a centimetre each thousand years. ‘I see it – the past – ,’ went on Woolf, ‘as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions.’ She was wrong. The past is not behind us but beneath, and the ground we walk on is nothing more than a pit of bones, from which the grass unstinting grows.

V

IN THE FLOOD

I
STAYED ON THE RAILWAY LANDS
for a long time. The light was draining away but the air was still warm and from where I sat Lewes looked like an island crowned with a castle, drifting above the dark sea of trees as if it were floating. It seemed to me then a town built on a fault-line or at a contested boundary: a place only imperfectly subdued, where the natural world and that which belonged to man had made no more than a precarious truce.

Perhaps a decade back, I read an article in the
Guardian
that suggested Satanists were at work here, and though it sounded like nonsense it left me with a faint unease about the place that took years to properly disperse. Then there’s the matter of Guy Fawkes Night, when the residents go lavishly crazy and parade through the narrow streets with blackened faces, tossing firecrackers and hauling huge effigies of the Pope and Tony Blair, which they later set alight in recreation grounds on pyres of pallets they’ve been hoarding all year. This annual ritual taps into a deep seam of anti-Catholic feeling that is said to derive from the burning of seventeen Protestant martyrs in Lewes during the sixteenth century. Some were killed singly, but on 22 June 1557 ten were murdered together in a grotesque parody of the midsummer bonfires that once burned around that date. Their martyrdom is said to have been the single greatest act of violence of the Marian persecutions, which were ordered by Bloody Queen Mary in her bid to eradicate the Protestant faith.

A place of fires then; and one with an uneasy relationship to water. Lewes was built by the river for a reason. It grew rich on fishing and milling and later on the barges of Wealden iron. But the valley beneath the town is set very low, barely three feet above sea level, and at times of heavy rainfall the water swells outward into land reclaimed from what was once a stinking, sodden marsh. For centuries this tendency to inundation affected farming, but now houses and industrial estates have sprouted in the floodplain, and the last time the Ouse seriously breached its banks the outcome was very bad.

It happened in the autumn of 2000, after days of storms and rain. By Monday 9 October, pools of water had begun to form over low-lying fields and roads and people began phoning the council to order sandbags. Each time the tide ebbed out the surface water seemed to recede, but the rain didn’t stop for long enough to allow the saturated ground to drain. On Wednesday night it bucketed down and at some point before the sun was up the Uck, the Ouse’s largest tributary, began to flood. Things happened very fast then. At nine o’clock the town of Uckfield was six feet under water and the river had turned into a torrent that sunk parked cars and swept supermarket goods from the shelves.

Over in Lewes, the Winterbourne, that little stream that once marked the northern boundary of the Priory, was also filling rapidly. Winterbournes, as the name suggests, come to life in winter months, carrying the water stored in the great chalk aquifers of the Downs. When rainfall is acute these aquifers can behave erratically, channelling water where it hasn’t been seen for decades, sometimes even centuries. To make matters more complicated, the Lewes Winterbourne coincides with the path of the A27 and the Brighton to Lewes railway line, and for much of its course is buried in culverts or diverted through concrete channels and drains. Now a culvert had become blocked with litter and the water was surging out into the new street of Tanners Brook and over the geranium beds of the Grange.

The Uck joins the Ouse at Isfield, and as the floodwater began to shift downstream the Ouse also breached its banks, gushing out into the land between Barcombe and Hamsey until all the pastures had disappeared beneath a swelling lake. By lunchtime Lewes’s defences were also overwhelmed and the dirty, rain-coloured river came surging over the embankments and into town. Water rushed down the streets at the bottom of the hill and by mid-afternoon the Phoenix estate, the Pells, the new houses at Malling and the old ones at Cliffe had been submerged. Police shut down the centre of town and hundreds of people trapped in houses and offices were rescued by lifeboat crews manning inflatable boats.

The peak came with the high tide at half past nine that night, when the water reached a depth of almost twelve feet on the Malling estate, submerging the houses to the second storey. The roads and rail links had also flooded, and by evening Lewes was almost an island, cut off from the outside world by the encroaching river. Water is sly; make no bones about it. It slips in anywhere, though the doors might be barred against it, and is most equitable, favouring neither sewers nor churches. Wherever you looked it was carrying off something: prayer books, children’s toys, underwear, the sodden bodies of rats. And then there were the things you couldn’t see: the rumour of asbestos, farm fertiliser and pesticide; the leached-out contaminants from graves and crypts.

The evacuees passed that night in a temporary emergency shelter in the town hall, which was built, oddly enough, on the site where the Protestant martyrs had been burned. In their abandoned houses the water continued to rise, poisoning the places it seeped into with a toxic mix of sewage and heating oil, shifting furniture around and saturating everything with what looked like beer and smelled like shit.

When morning came the rain stopped and the river began to drop, but by then the water had become trapped behind the flood defences designed to keep it out. The fire brigade used mobile pumps to suck it back into the river, though 70,000 litres contaminated with oil had to be drained off and taken away in a tanker. In all, 1,033 properties were thought to have been flooded, and over 2,000 hectares of land. In their wake, the receding waters left strange cargo. One photo I’d seen showed a woman standing at her front door, a bloated cow lying dead at her feet.

Over the past few years, similar pictures have eddied in from Tewkesbury, Boscastle, Sheffield: pictures of roads swept away and cathedrals surrounded by inland seas made opaque by particles of clay. These events are meat and drink to newspaper editors, though they rarely involve the loss of life that is common in other nations. But even the overspilling of a minor river on a small archipelago carries with it a larger story, and one that stretches far back in time. There’s something about a flood, something mythic and disturbing, that gets to the heart of our uncertainty about our place on the earth at all.

The Biblical flood, that primal act of destruction, took place because God – the temperamental, petulant God of the Old Testament, who the Albigensians thought was actually the Devil and who bears a decided resemblance to a Victorian patriarch of the Leslie Stephen mould – decided the world he’d created wasn’t as pleasant as he’d hoped. The people had become evil and so he resolved to wipe them from the earth, along with the beasts and the creeping things and the fowls of the air, all save a breeding pair from every species. This decision is explained in a curious passage: ‘The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon earth.’

Only Noah and his family were exempt from this fate, and so they built their ark from gopher wood, and painted it with pitch, and when this was done the heavens opened and it began to rain without pause for forty days, until the whole earth was covered to the depth of fifteen cubits, even the highest mountains, and everything alive had died. Things remained like this for one hundred and fifty days and then the waters began to recede, though it took a good three months further before the tops of the highest mountains were revealed and perhaps another three before the ground was fully dry. And after that God promised never to destroy the world again, adding resignedly, ‘for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’.

What a horrible story. I didn’t understand how a religion could be founded upon such a quixotic Creator, but I sympathised with the underlying anxiety: that we might at any moment be rubbed from the planet. There’s a long lineage of these decreation stories, which arise from all corners of the globe. Some – Atlantis, Lyonesse – deal with whole civilisations that are drowned, while others are more parochial in their scope. When I was a child, my granny used to tell one about a village that was sunk beneath a lake. The villagers had done something bad –
what, Granny, what?
– and they had to be punished –
oh, probably they didn’t say their prayers.
The village was in a valley that I always imagined very smooth, rollered like a bowling green, the houses huddled at the base. When the time came, a great flood of water rushed from the hills, with a noise like ten thousand horses, and the village was submerged. But the people were so wicked they didn’t die! They went on about their business beneath the surface, tending the pigs and ploughing the fields, breeding away down there as if they had gills. On Sundays they all trailed off to church, wicked though they were, and if you listened carefully at the water’s edge you could hear the bells pealing off the hours. Once every hundred years the spell wore off and the lake drained away. The houses dried and the people came out into their gardens and talked to one another in the unfiltered air. If you wandered through on that single, singular day the village looked like anywhere else, but if you stayed past midnight water would begin to seep up from the soil and puddle out across the streets and before you could one, two, three take a breath the lake would be drawn up over your head for another hundred years.