Waterland (15 page)

So when your history teacher’s teachings are put to the test, when his wife, who is yet to be branded by the local press as ‘The Baby Snatcher of Lewisham’ and ‘The Child Thief of Greenwich’, delivers herself one Sunday afternoon of an inexplicable announcement, he obeys both human instinct and academic training. He drops everything (even the French Revolution) and tries to explain.

But he already knows – though he carries on, in defiance of his professional superiors, risking, indeed, his whole career – that it’s not explaining he’s doing. Because he’s already reached the limits of his power to explain, just as his wife (a once dogged and patient woman) has ceased to
be realistic – has ceased to belong to reality. Because it’s the inexplicable that keeps him jabbering on nineteen to the dozen like this and scurrying further and further into the past. Because when there’s no way forward the only way is— Because his children, who have bad dreams, suddenly want to listen, and although he’s trying to explain he’s really only telling a—

11
About Accidental Death

S
O WHEN the pathologist had presented his report and the witnesses – notably my father, Henry Crick, and Police Constable Wyebrow – had given their testimonies, the inquest into the death of Frederick Parr, sixteen, of Hockwell, Cambs, held at Gildsey Coroner’s Court on July 29th, 1943, reached the verdict that the deceased had died by accident. End of story.

But sir! Sir! That can’t be all. What about that double bump on the head? What about that freaky brother? And this thing with you and Mary what’s-her-name? (Hey, we never knew you—) What about our detective spirit? Don’t stop, keep telling. That can’t be the end.

Very well. No end of story.

Because, for one reason, when the Coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death and the death certificate was
signed and the order for burial drawn up, my father was still asking Whywhywhy. I could see the question tying new knots in his forehead, causing new twinges in that chronically troublesome knee and making him, when enough seemed enough, turn once more and continue pacing, on his evening sentry-walks on the tow-path.

A coroner’s court is a court of law; though an inquest is not a trial. But my father, a simple and impressionable man, summoned by the coroner’s officer to attend as witness, was under every apprehension that he stood accused; that the purpose of this official gathering was not to ascertain how Freddie Parr had died but how he, Henry Crick, lock-keeper of the Atkinson Lock, had by his own negligence suffered a sixteen-year-old boy to drown in his sluice and had further compounded his crime by defacing the body of the same with a boat-hook. My father, in a hot courtroom, in an unaccustomed stiff collar under which the sweat prickled and trickled, awaited the judgement: Henry Crick, we find you guilty of manslaughter, of murder, of death, of the sins and wrongs of all the world …

 … CORONER: At what time, in your opinion, did death occur?

PATHOLOGIST: As near as I can judge, between the hours of 11 p.m. of the twenty-fifth and 1 a.m. of the twenty-sixth.

CORONER: Mr Crick, between those hours, did you hear any sounds to alarm you – splashings, cries for help – in the vicinity of the lock?

MY FATHER: No sir. I’m afraid, sir, I was asleep …

CORONER: Doctor, the wound and contusion on the right side of the deceased’s face – can you explain how and when they were caused?

PATHOLOGIST: By a rigid, semi-sharp object or instrument, some hours after death had occurred.

CORONER: On the last point you are sure?

PATHOLOGIST: Yes, sir.

CORONER: Mr Crick, could you give your account of how exactly this wound came to be caused?

MY FATHER: He were heavy. I’m sorry, sir. The boat-hook slipped – got him.

CORONER (patiently): Do not be sorry, Mr Crick – but be more precise. Rest assured, you have no cause to reproach yourself in this matter …

But my father does not rest assured. He walks up and down the tow-path asking Whywhywhy. He asks, how do these things happen? (And I ask, watching him, does he suspect? – Mary, Freddie, Dick, me?) He casts back over his life (just as I, one day, will cast back over his life, going even so far as to unearth dusty inquest transcripts), looking for wrongs requiring expiation, omens to be fulfilled. And on his face, as he stares from flat river to flat fields, is imprinted an expression of exaggerated vigilance.

And Freddie Parr’s father, with even greater cause, is asking Whywhywhy. No repetition of that neat word ‘accident’ can stop that siren in his brain, or close the chasms of blame that yawn inside him …

 … CORONER: In plain terms, how would you describe the proportion of alcohol present in the deceased’s blood?

PATHOLOGIST: As considerable, sir.

CORONER: Sufficient to have rendered the deceased drunk?

PATHOLOGIST: Certainly.

CORONER: Incapacitated by drink?

PATHOLOGIST: Very likely.

CORONER: To an extent where he might have been more liable than usual to a slip or fall from the riverside?

PATHOLOGIST: Quite probably.

CORONER: And finding himself in the water, less able than usual to save himself?

PATHOLOGIST: Again, very probably.

CORONER (frowning): The deceased was sixteen years of age. Was he in the habit of getting drunk?

PC WYEBROW (circumspectly, the deceased’s parents not being present): I believe he was, sir. With all respect to the bereaved, I believe he took after his father.

CORONER: Mr Parr is a heavy drinker? Mr Crick, are you able to substantiate this?

MY FATHER: …

CORONER: Mr Crick?

MY FATHER: He likes a drop, sir.

CORONER: Mr Parr is a known drinker. And Mr Parr is a signalman – and level-crossing keeper …

And why did these facts – so the coroner might have pursued had his business not been in another area – not strike constant trepidation into the hearts of the motorists, cyclists and other road-users in the habit of relying on Jack Parr’s gates, not to mention the footplatemen, guards and passengers of the Great Eastern Railway? And why had the railway authorities never got to hear of the unfortunate weakness of their employee – fuelled as it was (though the coroner didn’t know this) by illicit liquor conveyed on their own rolling-stock?

For the simple reason that it was Mrs Parr – and this was common knowledge too, PC Wyebrow might have added – who manned the gates and the signals during the periods of her husband’s debility. It was she who heaved back and forth as to the manner born the clanking signal-switches; it was she who received and passed on the telegraph messages from Apton to Newhithe, from Apton to Wansham, that the nine-ten to Gildsey was twelve minutes late, that a goods train had been rescheduled; it was she who on icy winter dawns unfroze with the aid of a blow-lamp the hinges of the level-crossing gates while her husband lay snoring off the effects of a hard night’s Kentucky bourbon.

And what was the cause of this shameless laxity on the part of the husband and this remarkable forbearance on the part of the wife?

Hearsay holds that in the early and sober days of Jack Parr’s signalmanship a terrible accident very nearly occurred at the Hockwell level-crossing. That the nightmare which haunts all level-crossing keepers one day became reality, and Jack Parr forgot to close, when needed, his life-saving gates. Perched in his signal-box, he suddenly awoke not only to this dreadful omission but to two other facts. That a scarlet Post Office van was idly mounting the Leem bridge on the southern side from where the railway line, on the northern side, was hidden by that fatal combination of bend, river embankment and line of trees; whilst, further to Jack Parr’s left, down the dead-straight track in the direction of Apton, the all-too-punctual King’s Lynn express was thunderously approaching. Jack Parr alone saw the full horror of the complete scene which was denied to any of its human components. With the alacrity of the panic-stricken, he leapt from his signal-box, descended in two bounds the flight of iron stairs and began turning, as only terror can make a man turn, the crankwheel of the crossing-gates.

The scene implodes. In one unthinkable, if perfectly harmless, moment gates close, Post Office van screeches to a halt and King’s Lynn express, brakes likewise screaming their utmost, hurtles through. No one is scathed. Jack Parr’s professional record remains unblackened. But so great was the shock, so terrible was the thought of what
might
have happened and so unendurable was the possibility that at some time another lapse might occur, that Freddie Parr’s father took to earnest drinking, thus forestalling any future forgetfulness through regular alcoholic oblivion.

But this whole story is possibly only the justificatory fabrication of Jack Parr’s drink-sodden fancy. Jack Parr drank, perhaps, for no other reason than a good many
other of his Fenland countrymen reached for the bottle. Because he was oppressed by those flat black Fenland fields and that wide exposing Fenland sky. Because he grew tired of looking every day, unable to move from his post, at featureless river-banks, phlegm-hued river-water, at rows of beets and potatoes, at straight railway track and files of spindly poplars; at the wind-swept platforms of Hockwell Station, at the dykes and drains intersecting and receding, imprinting on the brain their intolerable geometry. Because all this, together with the awesome fixity of his duties – this terrible combination of emptiness and responsibility – was too much for him.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing-keepers, pity lock-keepers, lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon … Sometimes I wonder why my father, turning and turning yet again on the Leem tow-path, did not also take to drink.

Assuredly, Jack Parr did not drink to be merry – he who never raised a laugh, a true, a mirthful laugh, so it was said, after the day of that accident that never happened. And assuredly it is not for mirth’s sake that he grasps again the neck of his Old Grand-dad on the night of the twenty-ninth of July, 1943, the date that it is officially recorded that his son has died – by another accident. He tilts and tilts again the bottle in order to silence that dreadful wail. Whywhywhy …

Because (he swigs) my Freddie was drunk and fell, with no one to save him, into the river. And why …? Because he learnt to drink from his father, who was a worthless drunkard, who even went to the despicable lengths of sending his son on black-marketeering missions with the sole object of procuring alcohol. And why …? Because his father was a hopeless good-for-nothing, content to train his son in dishonesty and vice, a sinner who is rightly punished by this death of his first- and only-born. But why …?

And as each Why opens its bleating mouth Jack Parr stops it with a swig, and another swig, endeavouring to efface the crime of drink with yet more drink.

But it’s not enough; it won’t work.

For what do these unquellable and guilt-inflicting Whys lead Jack Parr to do on this same July night? They lead him to clamber over the gates of his own level-crossing, bottle in hand, and to sit down with an air of great finality on the rails. The desperate efforts and frantic protestations of Mrs Parr will not budge him. He says nothing. Moonlight gleams on the lines. Freddie Parr’s father sits down and waits for the 00.40 Gildsey or the one o’clock goods (the time-table is blurred) to run him down.

But he is not run down. He is still there, drawing breath, in the morning. Because Mrs Parr, abandoning her futile pleas and assuming her old resourcefulness, has mounted to the signal-box, as so often during her husband’s bouts of mental absence, thrown switches, tapped messages, phoned PC Wyebrow – who hastily institutes a traffic diversion – to announce a ‘failure’ at the level-crossing, communicated with other signalmen up and down the lines and thus effected a telegraphic conspiracy: lights winking over half the eastern Fens, trains cancelled, diverted, unaccountably delayed, much to the chagrin of late-night passengers and freight-shippers and a good many mystified officials of the Great Eastern Railway.

Thus Jack Parr spent a whole night under the stars – which, according to my father, hang in perpetual suspension because of our sins – stupid with alcohol, waiting for iron-wheeled death which never came. Thus he sat – lay – snored – dreamed. Till he awoke, amidst the twittering of skylarks, to discover that he was not dead but alive and that by his calculation (for Flora Parr said nothing) two passenger trains and three goods had roared over him without leaving a single mark. And thus Jack Parr, who was a superstitious man and that very morning swore to forsake drink, came to believe that God, who sometimes
brings about by way of punishment inexplicable cruelties and drowns a man’s own son, also performs inexplicable wonders.

Because, despite everything, despite emptiness, monotony, this Fenland, this palpable earth raised out of the flood by centuries of toil, is a magical, a miraculous land.

12
About the Change of Life

M
ARY, wherever you are – now you’re gone, still here but gone, somewhere inside yourself, now you’ve stopped and all that is left for anyone else is your story – do you remember (can you still remember?) how once we lay in the shell of the old windmill by the Hockwell Lode and how the flat empty Fens all around us became, too, a miraculous land, became an expectant stage on which magical things could happen? Do you remember how we looked up at the sky, into blue emptiness, and how out of the sky (because I told you: my homespun religiosity for your Catholic sophistication) God looked down on us; how He’d lifted off the roof of our makeshift home of love, and we didn’t mind? How no one else could see us in our windmill bower but He could; and we let Him?