Waterland (44 page)

But his son would be safe; the war had ended (no six weeks’ rifle training then off to merry hell), and Henry Crick had stopped listening, anyway, to his six o’clock bulletins, to the noise of the wide world.

So he was left all alone, with the mute river; and – till Harold Metcalf called one day with a story that needed an ending – phlegm enveloped him …

And now it’s choking him, filling the cavities of his lungs, welling in his throat. He’s escaped the flood, but he’s drowning …

He gasps. His face is a purple flush. His nostrils flare.

‘Don’t speak …’

Beyond the window the bells of St Gunnhilda’s strike the half hour. (But only his son, apprentice historian,
notes the exact time: four-thirty, March 25th, 1947.) Those bells, those damn bells, gonging and echoing through the vaults of his delirium. But don’t damn church bells, Henry Crick. Not on your death-bed. (Because this is your death-bed.) Remember God on your death-bed. Pray to God on your death-bed. And think yourself lucky these aren’t medieval times, when the bells tolled incessantly during the days of flood …

The bells chime. So he’s not still on that slippery roof. And he’s not— He’s in the house in Church Lane, Gildsey, that Tom and— But just for a moment he thought he was drowning. And just for a moment he thought that face, bending over him …

It was only a vision, Henry Crick, it was only a glimmer of that magic tale that must be told at last, that struggles for utterance in your breathless throat. Because, yes, it’s true, when you drown you see it all pass before you. And now’s the time, now’s the only time, to tell the whole—

He beckons with a weak arm to his son, so far away at the end of the bed. But his son, prompted by some look in his father’s eyes, has already drawn near; and this lovely girl (yes it’s Mary, and this must be their marriage-bed, how things go in—) is already grasping, with such a strong, sure grip, not just his own dying man’s hand but little Tom’s too.

The lips tremble, form a quivering circle.

Once upon a time—

51
About Phlegm

O
R MUCUS. Or slime. An ambiguous substance. Neither liquid nor solid: a viscous semi-fluid. Benign (lubricating, cleansing, mollifying, protective) yet disagreeable (a universal mark of disgust: to spit). It checks inflammation; retains and disperses moisture. When fire breaks out in the body (or in the soul) phlegm rushes to the scene. It tackles emergencies. When all is quiet it does maintenance work on drains and hydrants.

Its soggy virtues make it inimical to inspiration or cheer. It resists the sanguine and the choleric and inclines towards melancholy. A preponderance of phlegm may produce the following marks of temperament: stolidity; sobriety; patience; level-headedness; calm. But also their counterparts: indolence; dullness; fatalism; indifference; stupor.

An ambiguous humour, said to be characteristic of the insular and bronchitic English. It affects the elderly; accumulates with experience. To the sick and fevered it brings equivocal comfort. Eases yet obstructs; assists yet overwhelms. According to ancient tradition the phlegmatic or watery disposition is to be remedied by infusions of strengthening liquors. A specific in all cases (though never a permanent or predictable one): the administration of alcohol.

52
About the Rosa II

S
O WE mount our bicycles and ride to Hockwell Station. Dad first, me following. We’re in time for the six-thirty King’s Lynn. The air is heavy and muggy but we wait in the stuffy waiting-room (so as not to be spied, though neither of us says as much, from the nearby watch-tower of the Hockwell signal-box). The six-thirty is punctual. We load our bikes into the guard’s wagon. The guard, one of a former ring of railway employees engaged in an illicit freight service (bagged water-fowl one way, bourbon whiskey the other) strikes up: ‘You’re Henry Crick, ent you? The one as found poor Jack Parr’s—’ But Henry Crick doesn’t want to talk. Henry Crick looks as if he’s seen a ghost. We travel three stops to Downham Market where we detrain and cycle upwards of a mile, to Staithe Ferry, on the east bank of the Ouse, in the vicinity of which we have reason to believe is anchored – and so it is, a quarter of a mile or so upstream in the middle of the tidal channel – the
Rosa II.

A dredger. A mud-sucker. A sludge-extractor. A battered, rusting, sixty-foot hulk with – where on most vessels the superstructure steps down in more or less graceful, more or less shapely style towards the deck – a monstrous deformity: the befouled and beclogged bucket-ladder with its befouled and beclogged winding apparatus.

Why so evocative a name for so unsightly a craft? Why so fragrant an emblem for so noisome a task? Rosa. Rosa? Who could have chosen such a name? Rosa.
Rosa II.
The
humblest ship has its whiff of romance. Steamers chug to exotic havens, corvettes ride out on their perilous duties (for we’re back in that summer of ’43). But a dredger, a dredger.

And who would choose dredging for their calling? Who would opt for this endless and stationary war against mud? This dredgery-drudgery, sludgery-sloggery. It would sap even the stoutest spirit. It would dull even the brightest soul.

And yet it has to be done. Because it won’t go away. It gathers, congeals, no matter what’s going on in the busy world above. Because silt, as we know, is the builder and destroyer of land, the usurper of rivers, the foe of drainage. There’s no simple solution. We have to keep scooping, scooping up from the depths this remorseless stuff that time leaves behind.

Consider the plight of Stanley Booth, dredger skipper, master of the
Rosa II
, who in the autumn of 1941 needs a good dredger’s mate. Someone to share his skipper’s burdens, someone to take away the weight of twenty-five years’ Ouse dredging (for Stanley Booth has no love left for his trade), to ease the toils of this rusting, lifetime’s liability of the
Rosa II.
Dredger’s mates come, to be sure – Stan Booth has employed over twenty. But they also go – off, now, to fight this other war where the enemy, at least, is human. They can’t stick this life of mud.

He advertises – yet again – in the
Gildsey Examiner.
And receives an inquiry from a Mr H. Crick on behalf of his son – a young but seemingly unpromising applicant, since the Army do not want him and he cannot write a letter for himself. The youth, indeed, turns out to be a semi-imbecile. His powers of conversation are limited (but then Stan Booth is no great chin-wagger), his mental arithmetic wanting. And yet, to Stan Booth’s surprise, he is strong and dextrous, docile and dependable; and, what is more to
the point, seems to have a natural instinct for the principles of dredging.

Stan Booth is only too glad to pay his new hireling’s wages. And not only his wages but, since this lucky find looks set to stay, to offer certain sums in advance so that his young helper can buy the second-hand Velocette motor-cycle which will bear him to his labours much more promptly than the means at first employed (milk lorry to Newhithe, early bus to Staithe Ferry). And many times, indeed, the early-arriving mate dutifully starts up the bucket-ladder by himself on those days (which become more frequent) when the skipper is disinclined to be punctual.

Stan Booth is happy. His young apprentice is happy. Yes, happy. For how else explain (can it be that this new apprentice, so assiduous and reliable, actually
enjoys
his labours?) that strange singing, that out-of-tune yet contented wheezing which he sometimes emits amidst the clattering of the ladder and the slurp-slurp-slurp of discharging silt? (Now who ever heard of a
merry
dredger-man?)

So it’s not surprising that Stan Booth should quite regularly, at about the middle of the morning, feel free to leave the
Rosa
and its cacophonous machinery under such rapt and zealous supervision, and, taking the dredger’s dinghy (thus marooning his trusty companion) make his way to the nearest waterside pub.

For Stan Booth, too, was a drinking man …

A further ride along the bumpy, summer-hardened Ouse embankment. Past ditching works, pumping equipment, an idle bulldozer, not to mention a concrete pill-box or two, hastily erected in 1940 and now, so general opinion feels confident in asserting, unlikely to be used. Then a halt and a rapid dismounting. For not only have we drawn opposite the
Rosa II
, but there, standing riderless but erect
on the brow of the embankment, identifiable, in fact, long before we reach it, is a Velocette motor-cycle.

So my hunch was accurate. But goes uncongratulated. Dad still wears, despite his cyclist’s flush, his witness-of-a-ghost look. We gaze down the bank and exchange significant glances. The motor-cycle keeps guard over what is clearly a makeshift mooring: two angle-iron stakes driven into the slope of the bank, ropes trailing from each. A contrivance, no doubt, of the two-man crew of the
Rosa
to save the trouble, during favourable states of tide, of rowing all the way from the Staithe Ferry landing-stage. And the tide is plainly favourable at present. Because the river is high, and the green-fronded ends of the ropes snake languidly into water which is uncertain which way to flow. A simple matter, therefore, to conclude that the dinghy now tied up to the
Rosa
’s hull, just upstream of its attendant sludge barge, is the same that but a while ago must have been tethered to the bank.

Nothing stirs on the dredger. Over an hour has passed since Dick departed, sack on back, down the Gildsey road. A trio of seagulls perches on the idle bucket-ladder. Wasting no time, Dad fills his lungs, puts hands to mouth and repeats the cry uttered from my bedroom window. ‘Di-i-i-i-ick!’ A good, professional bellow this time – the cry of a man used to hailing lighters on the mist-bound Leem, and surely audible across the water on this still and torpid summer evening. But Dick doesn’t appear. The cry reverberates as if in some empty room.

He shouts again, allowing a pause, as if planning, if necessary, on regular shouts at ten-second intervals. The three seagulls, unmoved, nonchalantly arch their wings; then suddenly take squawking to the air. And then we see him. We see, that is, a figure – and there’s no mistaking Dick’s figure – emerge from the bowels of the dredger and lumber, like some half-awake animal disturbed in hibernation, towards the nearside rail.

We can’t see his face, we can’t read his expression (Dick
– expression?). But we don’t have to guess at the cause of that lurching gait or that strange lolling of his head as he stares at us across the water. He raises to his lips what can only be a bottle and ostentatiously quaffs.

‘Di-ick! Di-ick – for God’s sake, boy, come back!’

But Dick is obeying other, authentically paternal instructions. In case of emergency—

He throws the bottle, emptied, over the side and ducks out of sight, as if to fetch another from his hidden hoard. The gulls swoop, wheel and return to their perch. The floating eyesore of the dredger, bucket-ladder raised in the non-operative position, presents to us its lop-sided, rotten-toothed grin.

Dad turns to me. ‘You have a go.’

He stands, recovering his breath, watching my own loud-hailing efforts like an instructor appraising a novice.

My cries (did you hear them, Dick?) die on the air.

‘No good. We’ll go back to the ferry. We’ll get a boat and go out and get him.’

We pick up our bikes. We mount and ride off along the bank, the Ouse this time on our left.

A ferry no longer operates at Staithe Ferry. A new three-pier road bridge, built in the mid-thirties north of the village, has made the former, centuries-old mode of crossing redundant. There remain some cottages, a boatyard, a landing-stage and, next to the old ferry point, the half-timbered Ferry Inn.

The cindered forecourt of the Inn is almost deserted, but it is well past the Sunday opening time and a grey Ford saloon parked at a careless angle and displaying on its rear seat a pair of US Air Force forage caps, suggests a roistering party of our American allies. We lean our bikes against the white-washed Inn wall – where a rust-pocked enamel sign still announces ghostly ferry charges – and make for the bar door. But even as we do so a sudden eruption of noise, breaking the languor of the evening, stops us in our tracks.

A series of rattles and grindings, a medley of explosive, mechanical retchings and hiccups issues from upriver. Followed, to the accompaniment of various raucous subnoises, by a persistent rhythmic hubbub: Chung-gha-chung-gha-chung-gha! The dredger has started. Dick has started the dredger.

We stand for several seconds on the forecourt, beneath the motionless inn sign, in frozen appreciation of this fact. Then turn again, with renewed urgency, to the door. But we do not need to open it. For who should emerge at this same moment, closely followed, in trim crew-cuts and shirt-sleeve order, by two USAAF aircraftmen, but Stan Booth, skipper of the
Rosa II
, bafflement on his bleary face and whisky on his breath.

He stares through us – at the source of this sound which has clearly activated even his drink-sedated senses – and only after his eyes have endorsed his ears (the bucket-ladder is dipped and turning; wisps of oily smoke are dispersing above the dredger), do they register our own gaping presence.

‘What the—?’

But – wait a moment – hasn’t he seen this man before? This is Henry Crick, isn’t it? He who on his son’s behalf— A glimmer of realization combined with a vague ripple of relief crosses the dredger-skipper’s face.

‘Mr Crick, I know your lad’s a bit—’ (he taps a plump finger to his temple in place of a word) ‘—but can’t ’ee tell a Sunday from the rest of the week?’

He stops, looks suddenly, with uncertainty, at the assembled company.

‘ ’Tis Sunday, ent it?’

We concur. It’s Sunday, without a doubt.

‘An’ ’tis him on board, ent it?’

Something in our faces is draining the relief from his.

We concur again.