THE, FEN FLOODS: FICTION AND FACT
By DOROTHY L. SAYERS
From my fifth to my thirty-fifth year my home was in the Fen country. My father's first parish was at Bluntisharn- cum-Earith, just at the junction of the Old West River with the two great artificial drains—the Old and the New Bedford Rivers—that span the winding Ouse like a double bow- string from Earith Bridge to Denver Sluice. They are part of Vermuyden's great work of drainage under the fourth Earl of Bedford, and they by-pass the upper waters of the Ouse fifteen miles across the South Level, to rejoin their parent river at the Sluice and thence follow their natural course to their outfall at King's Lynn. The two Bedfords run parallel and straight as a rule can make them ; they are dyked high on their outer and low on their inner banks ; and between them lies the flat strip of land known as the Washes. In making the Washes, Vermuyden's idea was to provide a space on which the excess water might harmlessly "bed "itself in flood-time and so be prevented from drowning the land beyond the dykes.
As a child I was thus thoroughly accustomed to the phenomenon of winter floods. Year after year, someone would regularly observe at breakfast : "We've been having a lot of rain ; they'll be letting the water out." Year after year, we could see from our front windows the overflowing of the upper Ouse, that turned plough and pasture into standing water ; and could thereafter take a walk to the Seven-Holes Bridge or the Hermitage Sluice at Earith, and watch the flood come swirling and eddying through the opened gates into the Old and New Bedford Rivers. Year by year, Earith parishioners from outlying places excused lateness at church by the natural explanation that the water was over the causey and they had had to wait for the ferry. Year by year, a journey by train in almost any direction found us looking from the carriage-window over a sheet of sullen water, broken only by the lines of sunken hedges and the tops of willow and poplar trees. Year by year, the prospects of skating on the Fen were discussed ; and once the Ouse froze hard, so that the Fen people could run from Earith to Ely on the characteristic Fenland running-skates, with the blades curled up at the toes. When we first came to the parish in 1898, the memory of the ancient marsh agues was still vivid, and old women still smoked opium in clay pipes as a prophylactic.
The whole strange business of Fenland flood and drainage was so familiar and ordinary to me in those days that I accepted it incuriously and made little attempt to understand it. Even when, later, my father went to the parish of Christ Church near Upwell on the Nene, about eight miles from Wisbech, I only registered vaguely in my mind that the country was still flatter and more dyke-crossed than the Huntingdonshire Fen ; still more like Holland ; still fuller of windmills ; still more lacking in forest trees. Only when I came to write The Nine Tailors did I realise how casually I had taken the why and wherefore of the thing for granted. I knew what it looked like, and could describe it well enough in a superficial way ; but when it came to technicalities about the working of the drain-and-dyke system, I had to read the thing up in books before I could make anything of it.
Not that it is easy for anybody, except an engineer, to make anything of the history of the Fen drainage system— if you can call that a system which, for seven or eight hundred years, has proceeded haphazard under spasmodic stresses of alternate avarice and alarm. Not (I believe) until the present century has there ever been so much as an attempt to consider the draining of the North, South and Middle Levels as a single problem. In the Middle Ages every parish swept before its own doorstep, as cheaply as it could, doing just as little as it was forced to by Act of Parliament, and caring little where the water went so long as- its own lands were protected. From time to time rulers interfered, always with the idea of spending as little as possible and getting as much as possible in the way of financial return. My own early recollections concern disputes among various conflicting boards and departments as to whose duty it was to scour the rivers and make good dilapi- dated bridges. Moreover, it has been fiercely contended by persons qualified to judge that from the beginning the whole method used to drain the Levels has been one vast and complicated error.
Starting, we are told, with that mediaeval undertaking which, some time before 1292, diverted the waters of the Great Ouse to King's Lynn, instead of to their proper outfall by the Nene at Wisbech, the error has always been to substitute artificial for the natural lines of drainage. Instead of leading as much water as possible into the rivers, to increase their scour and assist them to grind their own outfalls, successive engineers have turned water away from the rivers and spread it over the Fens in drains, many of which run at right angles to one another and to the natural slope of the land. The tide silts up the mouths of the weak- ened rivers, forcing the water back inland, thus aggravating the original difficulties of the problem. At the same time, the surface of the land, which used to be well above sea- level, is sinking, owing to the withdrawal of the water from the peat into the drains ; in consequence, the scour of the rivers is weakened still more, and the water has to be lifted into them by intensive pumping. The ideal scheme, it has been maintained, would have been to restore the drainage to the rivers, and keep their outfalls clear by making great cuts out into the Wash, so as to hold back the menace of the shifting sand-banks. But experts disagree, and while they argue the face of the land keeps changing. By this time, it seems likely that only a great artificial system of interacting pumps and sluices would suffice to keep the land thoroughly and permanently drained.
The Fens are, indeed, as well accustomed to drowning as eels to skinning. Parts of them are drowned every year in the ordinary course of things ; only in exceptional years is any great damage done, and I remember no outstanding calamity in my lifetime. So, for a parallel to the disaster imagined in my story, I turned to the records of 1713, and tried to reproduce, in miniature, what happened when the great sluice burst at Denver. (This seemed the more appro- priate, since I had borrowed for the head of my hero's illustrious house a title of nobility taken from that very same sluice and village ; and I may here observe, for the benefit of visitors from overseas, that my Duke of Denver never at any time had any family connexion with Colorado.) At the point where the Old and New Bedford Rivers rejoin the Great Ouse, their channel lies, or lay in 1713, some eight feet above the course of the Ouse itself. Denver Sluice was accordingly built across the junction in order to force the tidal water from King's Lynn up the Bedfords, and prevent both it and the Bedford waters from turning back up the Ouse. When the tide is flowing, the sluice- gates are shut, and the waters pile up against them, both above and below ; when the tide turns, then as soon as the tidal water has fallen below the level of the upper waters, the gates are opened, and the accumulated upper waters are sent down.
In 1713, Denver Sluice "blew up "—that is burst— under the pressure of a high spring tide and a violent wind, and the tidal water, together with the flood- swollen waters of the Bedford Rivers, turned back up the Ouse, drowning the whole South Level (to quote a con- temporary writer) "to such a depth that the sun cannot exhale the waters or dry them up : and from Haddenham Hills, in our view of the Fens, we observed they were all to the south and east bright, excepting here and there a reed or sallow-bush, and some small tract of grounds which appeared above the water."
Since, for my story, I wanted a sudden disaster and the quick release of a considerable volume of water, I borrowed the framework of this ancient catastrophe, doing the thing on a more modest scale, with a smaller river and sluice, allowing only a mild flood of a fortnight or so and drowning only a few isolated parishes. The recent danger to the Fens has. been, if I understand the matter at all, of rather a different kind—less sensational, but in some ways more alarming. An outcry has been raised against the B.B.C. and the popular Press for having " over-dramatised " this year's inundation. To some extent, the rebuke is justified. So long as the pumps work and the sluices hold, we need never, I think, anticipate any fierce rush of waters, roaring in spate like the Mississippi and sweeping away houses, cattle and human beings like straws. That is not the way of the Fen waters. They are seldom spectacular, never in a hurry. They bide their time. What is always to be dreaded is the steady erosion of the banks under pressure, the silting and blocking of drain and river, the slow water-logging of the whole rich land. As the water lies, the river-beds choke, the sand-banks pile across the estuaries, and the drainage work of centuries is silently and relentlessly undone.
When, in a romantic mood, we dream of the wrath of water, the power and terror of the sea, we think first of Cornwall or the Hebrides—of tall Atlantic billows hurling themselves in a spume of fury against an iron-bound coast. But against those quiet and colourless Eastern counties, the assault of the cold North Sea is deadlier. Its silent tides re-draw the map of England ; they devour towns and parishes ; they lie continually in wait to reclaim their own. The great Fenland churches, with their lofty bell-towers, stand today, as they stood of old, calling to one another- across a waste of waters. If ever the dykes crumEe away those churches may be the only part of the Fenman's eeence against the water that will not have to be made over again.
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