Waterland (19 page)

Teacher pauses. Price’s response to all this suddenly seems important.

He hesitates a moment. Then, boldly, almost insolently: ‘Should we be writing this down, sir? The French Revolution never really happened. It only happened in the imagination.’

Laughter.

‘Don’t be literal, Price.’

‘No, but I think it’s true. We don’t know the half, so a good half must be make-believe. And are we really supposed to believe that in 1789 everyone wanted to put the clock back?’

More giggles and outbursts. Price turns, surveys, with a faint grin, the class.

(So is that your game? All it is? Just the old bash-the-teacher stuff? The old schoolroom power-contest: Class-mates beware! Don’t be fooled by our teacher’s attempts to turn a thing into its opposite. To call revolution retrogression. What all this clever-talk amounts to is that our Cricky’s over the hill. Like all old fogies, he can only look backwards. He can’t bear the notion of anything new …)

‘I’m speculating, it’s true, Price. But we’re all free to interpret.’

‘You mean, so we can find whatever meaning we like in history?’

‘Price—’

(But actually I do believe that. I believe it more and more. History: a lucky dip of meanings. Events elude meaning, but we look for meanings. Another definition of Man: the animal who craves meaning – but knows—)

‘Price,’ (side-step again), ‘I draw attention to the backward-tending element of the Revolution to illustrate that even revolutions with their claims to construct a new order are subject to one of the most ingrained historical beliefs. That history is the record of decline. What we wish
upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.’

He frowns. For the first time in this classroom set-to he looks unsure. (Will you have a lost past, Price? When you’re my age—?)

‘I don’t understand that, sir. I mean that’s really
weird
, isn’t it?’

Open mirth in class. Teacher’s eyes fasten on the view beyond the window.

‘It’s no more weird – no more superstitious than saying that at some magical time in the future paradise will arrive.’

Price bites his pen. He’s not laughing with the others. But he’ll wait for another lesson for his Big Statement.

‘I never said that, sir. Never said anything about paradise. But – I want a future.’ (The class has gone suddenly quiet.) ‘We all do. And you – you can stuff your past!’

And so, having examined all the evidence, we must ask ourselves some big questions. Why was it that this revolution in the name of liberty and equality ended with an emperor? Why was it that this movement to abolish for good the
ancien régime
ended with a reincarnation of the old Sun King?

Why was it that this revolution which did indeed achieve lasting reforms could not do so without fear and terror, without the piling up, in the streets of Paris alone, of (at a modest estimate) six thousand corpses, not to mention the thousands of corpses in greater France or the unnumbered corpses of Italians, Austrians, Prussians, Russians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen – which were to be strewn over the battlegrounds of Europe? Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?

Follow me, said the little Corsican, and I will give you
your Golden Age. And they followed him – these regicides, these tyrant-haters.

How it repeats itself, how it goes back on itself, no matter how we try to straighten it out. How it twists and turns. How it goes in circles and brings us back to the same place.

So if you’re thinking of going somewhere. If you want your Here and Now. If you’re tired of school and lessons, if you want to be out there, in the real world of today, let me tell you

15
About the Ouse

T
HE Great Ouse. Ouse. Say it.
Ouse.
Slowly. How else can you say it? A sound which exudes slowness. A sound which suggests the slow, sluggish, forever oozing thing it is. A sound which invokes quiet flux, minimum tempo; cool, impassive, unmoved motion. A sound which will calm even the hot blood racing in your veins. Ouse, Ouse, Oooooouse …

Once upon a time there was a river which flowed into another river which one day men would call the Rhine. But in those days there were no men, no names and no North Sea and no island called Great Britain and the only beings who knew this river which followed into the nameless Rhine were the fishes which swam up and down
it and the giant creatures which browsed in its shallows and whose fantastic forms we might never have guessed at were it not for the fact that now and then they lay down to die in circumstances that would preserve their fossilized bones and so, millions of years later, became a subject for human inquiry.

Then there was an ice age, or, to be precise, a series of glacial advances and withdrawals, during which time the sea interposed itself between the conjunctive Ouse and Rhine, and the land mass later known as Great Britain began to detach itself from the continent. And during this same lengthy period the first men, or their ape-like ancestors, coming from no one knows exactly where, perhaps from Africa, perhaps from China, or even, by way of an evolutionary detour, out of the sea, migrated across the continental shelf and began to inhabit this not yet severed peninsula, thus setting a precedent many times to be followed, but for the last time successfully in 1066.

What these first men and their waves of successors called the Ouse we have no idea, having no inkling of their language. But how the Ouse regarded (for let us adopt the notion of these primitive peoples who very probably thought of the Ouse as a God, a sentient Being) these two-legged intruders who by daring to transmute things into sound were unconsciously forging the phenomenon known as History, we can say readily: with indifference. For what did such a new-fangled invention matter to a river which flowed on, oozed on, just as before. What did the three Stone Ages, the Beaker Folk, the Bronze Age, Iron Age, the Belgic Tribes and all their flints, pots, axes, brooches and burial customs signify to a river which possessed as no man did, or does, the secret capacity to move yet remain?

Then the Romans came. What they called the Ouse we do not know either, but we know that they called the Wash ‘Metaris’. And they were the first to impose their will on the sullen, disdainful Ouse. For they employed
several miles of it in the construction of their great catch-water channel, the Car Dyke, which ran, and can still be traced, from the Cam to the Witham – from near Cambridge to near Lincoln – round the whole western flank of the Fens, thus providing yet another example of the Roman skill in engineering and dauntlessness before nature at which modern man still gasps in admiration.

But in those days the Ouse took a different course from that which it takes today. It is a feature of this footloose and obstinate river that it has several times during its brush with human history changed direction, taken short-cuts, long loops, usurped the course of other rivers, been coaxed into new channels and rearranged its meeting-place with the sea. All of which might be construed as a victory for history (for it is human ingenuity which in so many cases has effected these changes), yet which is more aptly to be interpreted as the continued contempt of the river for the efforts of men. Since without the old Ouse’s perpetual if unhurried unruliness, without its ungovernable desire to flow at its own pace and in its own way, none of those cuts and channels and re-alignments, which are still being dug, and which ensnare the tortuous, reptilian Ouse in a net of minor waterways, would ever have been necessary.

In Roman times and in that period known as the Dark Ages but which, as many, notably Charles Kingsley, the Fenland fabulist, have opined, was for the Fens their most lustrous and legendary era – the Ouse flowed northwards, nearly to March, before meeting with the old River Cam. In that period in which Canute, who could no more stop rivers flowing than he could bid waves retreat, was mesmerized by the singing of the monks as he was rowed past Ely in his royal barge, the Ouse, giving a free ride to its brother Cam, met the sea at Wisbech (which is now ten miles from the coast).

But in the Middle Ages, under licence of great floods, the Ouse took it upon itself to flow eastwards up one of its own westward-flowing tributaries and by way of this
channel to meet the Cam where it still meets it, some dozen miles downstream of Cambridge. At much the same time it abandoned its outfall at Wisbech to the encroachment of silt, and found a new exit at Lynn. Thus the old river became extinct and a new river, a great ragged bow thrown out to the east, was formed, much to the rejoicing of the people of Ely and the tiny community of Gildsey who now found themselves not only on the water-route between Lynn and Cambridge but also on that between Lynn and Huntingdon. And much to the disgruntlement of the corn merchants of Huntingdon, whose way to the sea was now extended by many miles.

Then, as we know, Vermuyden came, to put matters right, and dug the Bedford and New Bedford Rivers – straight strings to the bow of the rebellious river – to the glee of the men of Huntingdon who now had better access than ever to the coast, and the dismay of the men of Cambridgeshire whose three-centuries-old waterway was reduced to little more than a land drain. And thus the fate of that true and natural, if wayward, Ouse (and still called ‘Great’ despite the sapping of its waters along the Bedford Rivers) was to lie thenceforth (for we have now moved into a period which even historically speaking is recent and which in the limitless life of a river is but yesterday) in the hands of those local men of ambition so characteristic of this island which as a nation was approaching the peak of its worldwide ambitions – not least amongst whom were the Atkinsons of Norfolk and later of Gildsey.

The Ouse flows on, unconcerned with ambition, whether local or national. It flows now in more than one channel, its waters diverging, its strength divided, siltprone, flood-prone. Yet it flows – oozes – on, as every river must, to the sea. And, as we all know, the sun and the wind suck up the water from the sea and disperse it on the land, perpetually refeeding the rivers. So that while the Ouse flows to the sea, it flows, in reality, like all rivers, only back to itself, to its own source; and that impression
that a river moves only one way is an illusion. And it is also an illusion that what you throw (or push) into a river will be carried away, swallowed for ever, and never return. Because it will return. And that remark first put about, two and a half thousand years ago, by Heraclitus of Ephesus, that we cannot step twice into the same river, is not to be trusted. Because we are always stepping into the same river.

It flows out of the heart of England to the Wash and the North Sea. It passes the sturdy English towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, St Ives, Ely, Gildsey and King’s Lynn, whose inhabitants see the river which flows only one way – downstream – and not the river which flows in an eternal circle. Its name derives from the Sanskrit for ‘water’. It is a hundred and fifty-six miles long. Its catchment is 2,067 square miles. It has several tributaries, including the Ouzel, the Ivel, the Cam, the Little Ouse and the Leem. The Leem flows into the Ouse below Gildsey. The Leem flows into the Ouse, and the Ouse flows … flows to … And by the Leem, in the year 1943, lived a lock-keeper.

16
Longitude 0
°

A
PARK bench. A bench in Greenwich Park, some fifty yards from the line of zero longitude. Onset of winter twilight; the park soon to close. Trees turning to silhouettes; flame-pink and pigeon-grey sky. A couple on the bench, striking intense attitudes (she passive yet tenacious; he, on the edge of the seat, indignant,
importunate) which suggest, despite the trappings of advanced years (thick winter coats, scarves, a begrudgingly docile golden retriever lashed by its lead to one arm of the bench) a lovers’ tiff. She is silent, as if having already spoken. He speaks. He wants to know, it seems, what she means, what on earth this is all— He demands an explanation. He addresses her in the manner of a schoolmaster addressing a recalcitrant child. The experienced observer of park-bench lovers’ tiffs might say that the woman has had something to confess.

He remonstrates. She holds her ground. Is this that familiar drama, the ‘It’s time we broke it off’, the ‘It’s time we never met again’ drama? Or is it that equally much-repeated scene, the ‘You see – there’s Another’ routine? That outrage on his part; that hand-waving, question-firing. The patent symptoms of male jealousy? Yet, suddenly curbing his agitation, as if urged by a new consideration, he moves closer to the woman, grasps her shoulders (this schoolmaster can be human too) as though to shake her from some trance. The passer-by might catch the words ‘doctor – you must go to a doctor’. So then, it is that other well known amorous crisis: the ‘Darling, I think I’m—’ crisis. But these words of his are not spoken with their usual air of masculine bluster (First, I want to know for sure, first I—) but with a kind of desperation – can it be that our park-bench gallant is going to weep? – with the kind of anguish with which one begs, one prays—

She is leaving him; she is forsaking him. That’s what he is thinking. But this is no ordinary separation. Not the kind where one or the other will get up and walk away.

Waning light through the trees. A park-keeper’s bell. The park must close soon. Soon, everyone must be gone. Purple dusk descending on the Observatory, on the locked-up collections of antique chronometers, astrolabes, sextants, telescopes – instruments for measuring the universe. Glimmering lights on the Thames. Here, in this former royal hunting park where Henry VIII, they say,
wooed Anne Boleyn, where in more august, Imperial times the nannies of the well-to-do wheeled their charges to and fro to the sound of band music and swapped their nanny-gossip, he is constrained to utter to his wife those often-used yet mystical, sometimes miracle-working words, ‘I love you, I love you.’ He is constrained to hug his wife as though to confirm she is still there. For in the twilight it seems that, without moving, she is receding, fading, becoming ghostly.