Waterland by Graham Swift

tied back in the eighteenth-century fashion), looking down from his Norfolk hills, William clasped his son’s shoulder and saidperhaps some such words as these: ‘We must help these poor besodden Fenlanders. They need a little cheer in their wretched swamps. They cannot survive on water.’
    Picture another scene, in the parlour of the red-brick farmhouse that Josiah built in 1760 (still standing in all its Georgian solidity on the outskirts of Wexingham) in which Will unfurls a map specially purchased from a Cambridge map-seller and points with a nut-brown index finger to the region of the Leem. He takes as a centre the little town of Gildsey near the confluence of the Leem and Ouse. He compares the distance, by way of the Leem, from their own farmland to Gildsey, with that by way of the Cam and Ouse from the barleyland of the south. He draws his son’s attention, for which no map is necessary, to the hamlet of Kessling, but a few miles west of Wexingham – a run-down cluster of dwellings amidst rough heathland and pasture where the young Leem, after its journey from the hills, begins to slow and gather itself – from which most of the inhabitants have already departed to become Atkinson labourers. He taps the map with his pipe-stem. ‘The man who builds a malting house at Kessling and has the keys of the river will bring wealth to a wasteland. And himself.’
    Thomas looks at the map and at his father. The keys of the river? He sees no river; only a series of meres, marshes and floodlands through which perhaps a watery artery is vaguely traceable. Whereupon William, pipe-stem back in the corner of his mouth, utters a word which falls strangely and perplexingly on the ears of a man who lives on top of a chalk hill: ‘Drainage.’
    So Thomas Atkinson, spurred by his father, who goes to his rest in Wexingham churchyard, year of our Lord 1785, begins to buy waterlogged land in the Leem catchment and discovers that Drainage is indeed a strange, even magical, word – as magical as the grains of his own barley. Because in five or six years’ time he can sell the same land, with the water squeezed out of it, at a tenfold profit.
    While on the continent the millennium arrives, while the Bastille tumbles, Jacobins oust Girondins and there is widespread draining away of blood, Thomas Atkinson studies the principles of land drainage, of river velocity and siltation. How the efficacy of artificial drainage is measured by the increased water dischargeable through the natural drain of a river. How the velocity of a river increases as a fraction of the increase of water but siltation decreases as a multiple of the increase of velocity. He applies these principles with palpable results. He consults and hires surveyors, engineers and labourers, none of whom complain of his ignorance or his impatience or his parsimony as an employer. And amongst those who come to work for him are the Cricks from across the Ouse.
    Thomas learns it isn’t easy. And it’s never finished. Little by little. The obstinacy of water. The tenacity of ideas. Land reclamation.
    But, lest it be thought that amidst these arduous toils Thomas has lost sight of his father’s Good Cheer, his account books record the provision of regular supplies of ale, made with Atkinson malt, to be brought from Norfolk, at some cost and hardship, considering the problems of transport, for the refreshment of his Fenland workers. And when in 1799, grown rich from land-speculation, and appointing an agent to run his Norfolk farm, he moves from Wexingham to Kessling – where, to the astonishment of the handful of villagers, he has not only had a house built but drawn up plans for the digging of a basin in the River Leem and the construction beside it, in due course, of a malting house of large and most up-to-date pattern – it is to bring with him a young and spirited bride of eighteen. And the man-servant, maid-servant, cook and stableman who have followed him from Wexingham