Amid the mudflats
Kate Chisholm
If you’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. after yet another nightmare about climate change, there’s been a well-timed antidote on Radio Four this week. On The Estuary (made by the wildlife team, Chris Watson as sound recordist, Mike Dilger as naturalist and Stephen Head as the landscape historian), we heard how The Wash on the east coast of England has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. Maybe we are entering a new meteorological phase where sea levels will rise and what were once silty fields and verdant pastures will disappear under water. But what’s new? The estuary of the fenland rivers has changed radically over the last 12,000 years since the icecap melted and the North Sea became a huge tundra plain. We humans are as nothing; mere witnesses to natural changes over which we have no control.
The soundtrack of this evocative series of 15-minute shorts (broadcast mid-afternoon from Monday to Friday) had very few words, but instead created vivid aural pictures of that vast wetland wilderness, mudflats shimmering as the sea rushes in and out, thousands of birds wheeling overhead, squawking, squealing, hooting. Knots, dunlins, godwits, redshanks — what ancient, atmospheric names. In the winter months 400,000 of them take over the huge estuary, from Skegness to Hunstanton and Boston to King’s Lynn, fleeing the northern icecap. Grey plovers with their telltale jet-black bibs and chequerboard markings like a Formula One flag, red-breasted mergansers with their spiky punk hairdos and serrated bills, and the pink-footed geese from Siberia.
It’s a desolate, dangerous place for mere mortals, the tides rushing in so fast, the mudflats so unstable. In 1216 when King John was on the move around the country trying to tame his unruly baron lords, he travelled from Lynn to Wisbech by the safe landlocked route but ordered his baggage train to take the shortcut across the Wash causeway. The tide rushed in and everything was lost, including the great crown of England. He died a week later — not so much from a surfeit of peaches as from petulant shame at losing his badge of office.
Listening to The Estuary (produced by Sarah Blunt) was almost as good as being there; such intensity of sound and silence. If you missed it, take your laptop to an armchair by the fire just as the light fades on these dreary January afternoons. You’ll almost smell the mudflats — an intense mixture of silt and salt, seaweed and birdlime — and feel that wind blasting your cheeks.
Another reminder on Radio Four this week that history matters in the Woman’s Hour Drama, which took us back to the beginning of the last century. Writing the Century was dramatised (by Vanessa Rosenthal) from letters written between 1900 and 1912 by Rudyard Kipling, which were interwoven with the diaries of a Kensington housewife called Ada Reece. Ada was born in 1869 and for almost 80 years kept a journal until her death in the 1960s. Two very different views of life from that era — Kipling, the friend of Cecil Rhodes and Stanley Baldwin, flitting between his winter retreat in Cape Town and his idyllic Sussex home at Bateman’s while busily writing Kim and Puck of Pook’s Hill; Ada, a bored civil servant’s wife, beset by servant problems and what to have for dinner.
We were taken back to New Year’s Eve 1899 — Kipling reporting on complaints from the soldiers fighting in the Boer War that they were running out of supplies, the country rotting because of its ‘material luxury and overmuch ease’, and worries about the flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe creating job shortages and exorbitant rents. It’s rather reassuring to discover that we’ve been making a mess of foreign policy since records began. Kipling complains that the government warlords have ‘chucked men and guns and brigadiers into South Africa and expected them to evolve into something like an army’.
When Queen Victoria dies everyone rushes out to buy mourning and the streets become ‘a vast sea of black crêpe’. The new King marches alongside the German Emperor in the funeral procession from Victoria to Paddington. But Kipling comes to fear ‘the Teuton’, who ‘has his large cold eye on us and prepares to decimate us when he feels good and ready’. By 1912 he can see what lies ahead. Ada meanwhile sinks into frustrated boredom. ‘The problem is in me,’ she writes. ‘I potter about in sheer hatred of everything there is to do. And yet I don’t do anything.’ I rather wish we had heard more from her and less of Kipling, whose voice is so well known. What did she think of votes for women? And how does she learn how to cope without a cook, maid and nanny?
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