King’s Lynn.
The Great Level.
Spring, 1650.
With the end of winter, the flood begins its retreat. I watch the meres shrink to pools and the rivers take their narrow courses once more. Land emerges slick and waterlogged. Meadows form in the spring light, bright with flowers and noisy with geese. Dragonflies flash and career across the water. Nightingales and warblers sing the day down.
In the long wait over the winter many of Van Hooghten’s small band of Dutch navigators took their wages and went home. Their job is done, their maps and plans drawn and settled. Two new rivers will be dug, and, in the north, other cuts will carry away the flood waters of the Rivers Nene and Welland from the meres all about them. Straight seaward lines will replace the meres and islands, that now to my eye look like silver discs scattered across the landscape.
We put the word out for engineers, men who will turn our flat drawings into the new land. Van Hooghten writes to his acquaintance in Amsterdam and round about that we are looking for men familiar with the building of run-off channels and sluices, windmills and locks, as well as the digging of watercourses. Engineers are men accustomed to travel in order to find business. Moreover, their work runs from one project to another and is paid at a rate higher than work that is fixed and certain. For these reasons, and the Great Level being close to Holland, Van Hooghten is confident of finding his men. But word of the strangeness of this place and the failure of the last works seems to have got about. A few men trickle in, but along with eager youngsters who travel for the first time, Van Hooghten has to take on some whose greater experience comes at a price.
One is Adriaan Renswyck, a tall man with sunken cheeks and rheumy blue eyes. Renswyck has years of service in the West India Company behind him and the flux has worn him thin and bad-tempered. His clothes are greasy and black, his beard likewise, a circumstance notable amongst us Dutch, who are a people much given to cleanliness. An earthenware bottle hangs in the pocket of his frock coat and pulls it down on one side. He has no family with him besides a bony orange-colored cur that follows everywhere at his heels. He is only come, he says, because the wages are good and the work familiar.
By the end of April three dozen Dutchmen are here, in different lodgings all over the Great Level. I place those who will work in the south in the biggest towns, and to each give a copy of my plan. Between them they divide up the work. Four men in Ely take charge of the start of the new river, four in Downham Market have the middle section and the sluice at Denver, four in King’s Lynn the stretch from Denver to the sea. Van Hooghten puts Renswyck at the head of the King’s Lynn section, knowing him to be a man who has experience of command.
Hundreds of laborers must clear the land, lay out the cuts, dig and lift the soil and build the great embankments. Van Hooghten considers the extent of the works and says that hundreds may not be enough. Thousands in the end may be required. Where shall we find them? The mood in the towns is sullen, though we pick up a few dozen men in each, and contrive to begin with them.
When word of our scarcity reaches the Gentlemen Adventurers, General Cromwell offers a solution that solves two problems with it, his own and ours. He will send us prisoners from his wars in Ireland who have been taken in great numbers. They are costly and threaten to escape. He will deliver them to us, Cromwell says, and furthermore will add soldiers from his own army to guard them. He keeps his promise smartly. The first men arrive a few weeks later at King’s Lynn, packed into the holds and on the decks of such merchant ships as Ireland could provide. Many have died on the way. The survivors are ragged. They are insolent men, proud in their hatred of General Cromwell, Van Hooghten tells me. To my mind they are no more than slaves.
We keep the men in barns and storehouses near the towns. General Cromwell sends more soldier guards, tense men who keep one hand on their swords as they walk. Contempt for the Irish sits in them and shows itself in blows and insults that I do not understand. It is the disdain the soldier feels for one of his kind who has been captured, the swagger of the victor, and mixed in with it a resentment of their present task. The prisoners are set to work straightaway to build camps for themselves. They put up wooden huts thatched with reeds to sleep in, food stores and depositaries. Adjoining each they build huts for the soldiers. Nine camps in all are built over the whole Great Level.
As the weeks pass, the two camps by King’s Lynn begin to look like a settlement, with paths between the huts and noxious privies dug here and there. The prisoners’ camp, bordering the river, is stockaded round its edge in a rough semicircle. It houses three hundred men in thirty huts. In a few weeks a market establishes itself by the soldiers’ camp, food laid out for sale on thick reed mats. Milk and summer greenstuffs from the fields of the islands; even meat is to be found. Fenswomen walk through the market wrapped in their cloaks. They sell wildfowl, eels and all manner of fish. The market soon turns into a kind of town. Makeshift taverns and bordellos spring up. Soldiers off duty saunter down the two dirty lanes; anyone who has money or wages is inclined to spend it after hours. At night the river flows through sheets of smoke that glow like orange muslin in the firelight.
The mere is still alive with songs and noises, but I hear them less often now. The world of men is pushing in. A web of other sounds stretches out across the Level; the push and return of toothed saws; shouts, hammers, voices of complaint, wood-groan from the wagon wheels, the dart and snap of the whip. Boots bang on the wooden pathways and Renswyck’s cur barks at the rats that have come off the ships.
Out on the water are the groups of fensmen, watching. I see men pause as they put out their eel traps, unbend and turn towards the camps. They stand in their boats, collected against the horizon like bottles on a shelf. When we begin the works I feel a change in the air. It has the quality of a threat. This feeling I try to ignore and rather look forward to the moment when my plans will bear fruit in the pastures and wheat fields of the whole redeemed land.
Once the works start I no longer feel safe to meet you out on the fen, so I leave my lodging and move to a dark lane on the edge of King’s Lynn where I have two rooms with my own door. It is at first an odd circumstance that we are closed into a room with a roof over our heads; but here we can pass the evening together. Here I wait for a soft knock, or to hear the latch lift from its iron bed. When you come to me our nights begin to take on a settled feel. I always have food ready, the coverlets smoothed, and the floors brushed clean. These homely habits delight me, though I know that you will leave before sunrise. In the morning all that is left of us are two plates and knives, and two glasses that stand side by side next to the wooden washtub. Often I leave them when I close the door, so that I can return to a sign that we were here together.
In the small parlor you walk from wall to wall. You pick up one thing after another and ask questions. How is this used, how that? You open the covers of the books that I keep on a shelf and study pages while I say nothing but wonder to myself how a mind might be that has no letters in it. You know about reading; how, you do not say. It is only that you lack the skill. I see that you observe my face when I read. Your eyes follow mine.
One evening I hand you the only English book I have, Mathematical Magick by one John Wilkins, and watch as you run your finger across the biggest letters of the title page, up, down, up and down the bars of the M, withdrawn into concentration. You feel your way round the black letter where the type has pressed and the ink puddled in its shape. Then you hand the book back to me.
“I wish to learn now.”
It is not a statement, but a demand. We sit side by side at the small table. I write the letters of the alphabet in order on a bare sheet of paper, spaced far enough apart that you can trace them with your finger, and sound them out as I write. Though my Dutch makes me a poor guide to the sounds they make, you learn most of them in those first evening hours. The next day and the next we go on, until you have them easily.
I feel myself a woeful teacher, having no memory of how I myself learned my letters or turned them into words. My English is weighed down with the earthy thickness of Dutch. You seem not to notice, but set about the task with care, not moving from the first group of letters I have written until you are sure of all their sounds.
On the fourth day I make the letters into words and try to explain how they group together in sound. You laugh when you make the first word entire: moon. I put another next to it: fen. You laugh again, with triumph and with joy.
Another day we make a list. You say a few words, and I write them in my own imperfect English: Jan, Eliza, mallard, bread. I want to write all the words that crowd my mind and hear you sound them out—desire, beauty, tomorrow, together—but this I forbear to do, only adding others from the place we are in: mere, sea, eel, heron. You wish to know the useful words of my work and I write some of them for you: cut, embank, washes, tides, sluice, drain. Others, too, that I no longer remember.
My teaching is muddled and inexpert, the sounding of the words and the writing of the letters mixed together. The foolish book of mechanics is all I have to teach you with, but it does not matter. I write out the alphabet and hand you pen, ink and paper; you return with the paper forested with letters with their curls and hooks ready to join to others in the manner I then show you, so that you write in the way of the Dutch, for the English hand I have never mastered.
Though you learn and I teach, I do not simply put words down your throat as a mother feeds a child. Something else happens. We learn together. I see a wonder in you that reminds me of a schoolhouse game, writing in lemon juice, and bringing the paper up to the candle. Near the heat each word came to life and revealed itself. So it is with you, as if the words are already present and now come to the surface. Your delight we share, and both of us are changed; you by the knowledge, I by the joy of the knowledge in you.
When I see that joy cross your face and flash through your eyes I feel a tenderness to weep, though I do not, but rather gather you to me and hold you tight to myself. If afterwards we explore one another by the candlelight, it seems just as if one way of learning takes over from another and enlarges it.