FLOODS AND FORTITUDE
Awesome stoicism in the face of calamity. A famous son of the area on the grit of the Lake District people he grew up with
The heavens opened and unleashed a savagery of water, so much in such a short time. The power of it cracked great bridges, swept away others and turned a city, and towns and villages, into foul water wastes.
All this in the jewel of england, itself a source of pure water, inspirational waterfalls, lakes and springs — the most loved landscape in Britain, immortalised in paintings, poetry and the memories of so many of those who go there.
It was a deluge. And it brought out the best in us.
Last week’s biblical flood begat friendships between neighbours who had never spoken to each other or to those in the next street. They had seemed worlds apart. Disaster made a single world. Today, there are houses often uninsured (because uninsurable) and now uninhabitable — in some cases for the second or even third time in a few years. Yet the resilience is utterly remarkable.
The Lake District remains a place underpinned by tough work, done by people largely invisible to tourists, but who keep the place the wonder of nature that it is.
In one of the stricken streets after the worst night, the householders worked through until 3am. ‘It was like a party’, one of them said. ‘And we agreed that we would never leave.’ A barber moved out of his shop (gutted for the second time) and set up business on the pavement. his first customer was the vicar.
One sad but determined woman aged 87, whose lifetime house had been utterly degraded, said: ‘There’s plenty worse off.’ A young couple about to be married saw all their wedding finery and most of their possessions rotted by the rain. The young man even laughed as he said: ‘You won’t believe it but we are going to Venice for our honeymoon!’
DurIng the last floods here a few years ago I remember a young woman in the small market town of Cockermouth who went into her shop to confront the utter ruin of what must have been scores of splendid handmade wedding dresses.
A television interviewer asked her, ‘What are you thinking of now?’, or some such crass question. She ignored him. She ignored the camera, which crept closer and closer, hoping, it seemed to me, for tears. She took her time and then, quietly speaking to herself, she said: ‘I’ll just have to start again.’ And that was all. Strong women, like strong men of old, did not weep.
I was lucky enough to be brought up just outside the northern rim of the Lake District in a market town called Wigton. We looked south across the plain to Skiddaw, one of the great fells, just a dozen miles away — the weather vane, the sentry and lure to a place that local people then, and still today, speak of reverently.
‘You can go all over the world ... ’ as so many had, in the early 1940s, on war service which took the great county regiments to Africa and Burma, ‘... but there is nothing to beat the Lake District!’
I was born a month after World War II began and this saying is as commonplace now as it was then. I would have gone to the Lakes first on a day-trip, most likely organised by Saint Mary’s Church. In the town of 5,000 people, there were 12, strong churches in the Forties. Saint Mary’s choir could number 60 singers.
We went on a swaying bus. My fear of sickness (the thick cigarette smoke; the stink of it) added to the swaying, which came from a determination to stand upstairs on the double-decker by the big windows.
The test was to see how long you could keep your feet before the motion of the bus, along those then near- empty, higgledy- piggledy lanes, made you grab something to steady yourself.
And so we charioteers usually lurched into Keswick. We made straight for the three-mile long Derwentwater, which the romantic poet William Wordsworth called ‘the jewel of the Lakes’; there were splashy attempts to manoeuvre bulky rowing boats — two of us to an oar, trebles recast as happy galley slaves intoxicated by the sight of the steeps and swoops of fells all round, looking for the hidden island in the lake which we were promised came up once or twice a year.
With children, later, there were other pleasures: canoeing (I exempted myself), scrambling, rambling, and fish and chips by lakes in the early evening — throwing the chips high in the air and watching the gulls catch them, circus-style.
We trekked to great gable, Wast Water, then helvellyn — from the top of which one winter’s day my then eight-year-old son carried a large snowball he would not give up until persuaded to lay it to rest at the foot of the fell, but only after it was proved it did not fit into the car boot.
Forty-four years ago I bought a small cottage on one of the most northerly fells. It has no nearby lake nor a significant waterfall. It’s in a hamlet, a mile or so from the nearest villages. Across the lane I can look north, to the sheath of sea called the Solway and over into the auld enemy, Scotland.
From up the fell, I can gaze into the heart of the Lake District and across to the Pennines. I sit on a pile of stones which are the remains of an iron age fort. Larks do ascend! There are many sheep. And there is the rare richness of silence and solitude.
Almost 2,000 years ago this land was cordoned off by the romans, who built tremendous forts around the perimeter, leaving ancient Britons to rule what was, and remains, a land of its own.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, Viking farmers shaped and determined the land, transplanting their civilisation, ways and language — left behind in local place-names. The language is still there and though being gradually swamped by BBC english, it has vigorous supporters, and among many hill farmers it is still basic to their daily speech.
I live among hill farmers who are in direct line from the Vikings. It is they who give the district its grit, its rock character — far removed from the fictional local worlds of Beatrix Potter, or Swallows And Amazons. These few men and women, sons and daughters of those I first met all those years ago, work all hours in often bitter weather not fit for a dog, for very modest and precarious rewards.
Theirs is a style of life which links effortlessly back to a period before the Middle Ages, and in many ways has not changed. I see these farmers as the largely unacknowledged keepers of the Lake District.
They, their friends and often their relations in the small towns refuse to give in when flood waters rise, have many skills, and live where most of us would fail. The Lake District is, by their work, prevented from sliding into a mere theme park.
Wordsworth wrote some of the greatest english verse in his cottage in the Lakes.
ABOVe all, it was he who, with a few friends, sowed in the public mind the revolutionary idea that nature was not a place of horror and wild beasts, but a place which could calm a troubled mind and, by some inexplicable alchemy of the imagination, fuse our senses with the rest of the animate world and show us we could learn from it as much as from any book or ancient wisdom.
Of course, nature has not been a source of calm these past few days, but fortitude will prevail: we have splendid castles, country houses and market towns which will rise again from the floods — Appleby, Cockermouth, Keswick, Kendal, Workington and, just outside the district itself, Cumbria’s capital, Carlisle.
Last week, the few tears were immediately repressed, replaced by a common resolution — the sort of reaction we thought had deserted us in our fast-moving world — and by community, a word used for once with sincerity and not, as so often, as a political crutch, bereft of meaning.
It seemed to me that so many of us in Britain, however distant, not only felt direct sympathy with the flood victims, but experienced solidarity. I think that after this crisis, we realised not only how vulnerable we were but how united we could be, and needed to be. not islanded, but tethered together.
grace under pressure, self-reliance, the need to help others — this spoke to what we think is the best of us, and was, and could be again. This great flood and the response to it, which seems to me to be beyond praise, will slowly harden into a legend that will give us all comfort and thought for years to come.