Always the Same River

At my twenty-first birthday party, in a cheap north London pasta restaurant, a friend gave me a copy of Graham Swift’s Waterland, telling me that everyone who studied History should read it. Studying was perhaps a grand word for my efforts at university, but I was intrigued. My choice of subject meant I’d read very little fiction; I was busy reading historians who had initials instead of forenames – C. V. Wedgwood, E. H. Carr, A. J. P. Taylor and my patient tutor, H. R. Loyn – and had found time only to read a smattering of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. To be given a contemporary novel was thrilling.

The cover of my edition was a pixelated grey mist, with a narrow rectangle at the bottom giving a glimpse of an estuarine landscape, and the book’s title and author in a corresponding rectangle at the top. Amid the many glowing reviews on the back I found two references to Thomas Hardy. Having suffered three consecutive school years of Jude the Obscure, this was something of a red flag, but the elegant understatement of the Picador edition won me over. I began reading and within a few pages was hooked. The book’s narrator is Tom Crick, a beleaguered History teacher in south-east London, under pressure from cynical pupils who are unconvinced of the value of his subject: for them the Here and Now is what really matters, especially given the imminent threat of nuclear war – Waterland was published in 1983, in the heat of the Cold War. As one of Crick’s pupils, Price, points out, History is about to end anyway. Pressure comes too from the headteacher who tells Crick that he needs to make cuts to the syllabus, though we soon discover this is a ruse. In response, and as a result of terrible events in his own personal life, Crick suddenly stops teaching the French Revolution and begins to tell the class stories of his childhood in a cottage in the Fens, that vast, marshy flat land surrounding the Wash, in north-west East Anglia. As a boy, Tom lives with his father Henry, a lock keeper, and his elder brother Dick. The family and their ancestors have always been fen-dwellers. They are ‘fixed people’, and the land has made them practical, superstitious and weavers of tales. For some the landscape summons a sort of desolation of the soul; for others it is magical, or it is both. Henry sets eel traps at night, keeps chickens, grows vegetables for the pot, and flowers for a grave. He believes in magic, of a kind. Tom is the studious, bookish younger child, whose passion for history leads him to discover deeply uncomfortable family secrets. The elder son, Dick, is disabled and rarely speaks, but he understands the workings of machines, has otherworldly wisdom, and is the hinge of the novel. Henry has given young Tom strict instructions not to teach Dick to read: ‘Don’t educate him!’ And then one morning in 1943, Henry is awakened by a noise, the sound of a body knocking repeatedly against the lock gates. Waterland is a novel of secrets slowly revealed to us and simultaneously to Crick’s class as he embarks on his hazy curriculum; and the ebb and flow of the fenland, the battle with water, the continual draining and dredging, pervade the book. As Swift writes, the Fens are not reclaimed, they are always being reclaimed. If Hardy’s Wessex, where landscape shapes character, is character, had failed to stir me, Swift’s fenland, also a shaper of lives, wrought a dark, watery magic. Hardy’s landscapes are literal equivalents of England’s south; the place names are changed but remain themselves. By contrast Swift’s Fens are both actual and fictional – the real River Ouse mingles with the made-up Leem, creating a new, deep fenland, waterlogged but earthbound. The old saying ‘you can never step into the same river twice’ is shown to be untrue – the endless cycle of rainfall, of water carried to the sea and of the sea surrendering water to the clouds in turn, means that we’re always stepping into the same river. In this flat land young Tom believes, quite wrongly, that ‘everything is open, everything is plain; there are no secrets’ because God is always watching. But into this dankly oppressive atmosphere, reminiscent of those other melancholy writers inspired by England’s East, W. G. Sebald and M. R. James, Crick pours expansive stories from the ‘Wide World’. Tom Crick is the perfect fictional History teacher, slightly pompous but like his father a tremendous storyteller. And while his lessons may be unconventional, even useless academically, they are so popular that pupils taking other courses begin asking to study History. Crick’s classroom stories are elliptical and encompass the history of a brewing dynasty – into which soothsaying or magic is also poured, as is some very strong ale, the history of land reclamation in the Fens, the mysterious life cycle of eels, the very point of History. The chapters are headed ‘About the Ouse’, ‘About Contemporary Nightmares’, ‘About the Witch’, and, most importantly for a book which wonders aloud whether History is anything more than mythmaking, ‘About the Story-telling Animal’. The Wide World has an impact again and again on the characters’ lives: Tom Crick becomes a soldier at the end of the Second World War, a witness to the devastation of Europe, just as his father fought in the First World War trenches of the Western Front. World events are inescapable, but even more so is the past. Crick cannot stop himself from telling his class seemingly unconnected tales; but in Waterland no stories are wasted, all return to the narrative, to the characters: Henry, Dick, Tom, Tom’s girlfriend Mary, and Freddie Parr, whose body it was knocking at the lock gates, waking the Crick family and casting slow ripples forwards in time, and backwards too. Tom’s classroom storytelling is not the only way the present is made to feel the force of the past. Forty years since that morning at the lock gates, Mary, now Tom’s wife, who has recently rediscovered her long-buried Catholic faith (while Tom has lost his faith in History) but is also experiencing a psychotic episode, takes a single and devastating step, becoming known in the local press as ‘The Baby Snatcher of Lewisham’, breaking their lives apart. But Mary has her reasons, the fault lines created by lives lived long ago, and deaths still remembered. The impact on me of this birthday present, from one impecunious student to another, was revolutionary. Waterland shaped the way I thought about fiction, about History and about the meaning of Place – how landscapes and the stories they hold make their mark on us. The book ignited in me a sort of Swift-mania. I read all his novels, starting at the beginning and eagerly anticipating each new book, as I still do now – he’s not a book-a-year sort of writer, so the waits are long. When Swift won the Booker prize for a later novel, Last Orders (1996), I cheered at the television as if my football team had won some major silverware, and then I wrote to him, asking if he would read at the bookshop I managed. I received a charming postcard in reply: he was sorry, but he couldn’t. I once saw him walking on Wandsworth Common, as I believe was his daily habit, but I was too star-struck to approach him. Swift’s later books are intense, his characters casting repeated backward glances through their lives to a single, defining and often tragic moment. Waterland shares this trait, but unlike the deliberate claustrophobia of the later books, Waterland is as open as the landscape it inhabits. It is also as complex as a detective story, which in some ways it is, but more subtle, its plotlines as intricate as the watercourses of the Fens. I rarely reread books but every few years I return to Waterland, each time finding something new to consider. Great books have the capacity to reshape themselves each time they are read. A reader coming across it in the twenty-first century might find it a little dated – would Dick be written this way today? Would Mary? Novels are, to some extent, prisoners of their time, which is an irony, given Waterland’s central preoccupation. Still, its ambition and scope are breathtaking, its intelligence impressive, the characters always believable and its humanity deeply sincere. Replace the fear of imminent nuclear war with the threat of climate catastrophe and it remains relevant to today’s anxieties. That Swift latterly opted for a narrower palette is unsurprising – repeating the high-wire act of Waterland would surely be impossible.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Jon Woolcott 2025