Born Yesterday (10 page)

Even the weatherman got in on the act. When the Camp David press conference the following day was delayed for unknown reasons and BBC
News 24
cut away to the weather, the forecaster opened with: ‘Maybe they’ve had a tiff.’

When they finally did appear, it was striding across an expanse of lawn, past the presidential helicopter and saluting marines, exuding manly purpose and mutual bonhomie. It was his backyard, and the president immediately assumed control. He announced that he had found the prime minister to be not at all ‘dour and awkward’ as reported: ‘He’s a humorous Scotsman.’

Mr Bush slumped hand-in-chin against his lectern, looking like Dean Martin propping up the bar in an all-night joint, one foot hooked over the other. Mr Brown stood as erect as Andy Stewart singing one of his bracing Scottish skirls, buttoned-down, whey-faced, reading from prepared notes printed in the extra-large type he depends on because of his reduced sight; at one point a breeze licked them and they started to blow away; acting to catch them was the only unrehearsed gesture the prime minister
allowed himself. He was the model of propriety and solemn authority. He would leave pleased with his performance, and relieved. But Bush had an amused glint in his eye throughout. And, sure enough, there was a small time-bomb, innocent in itself but suggestive of all Gordon’s once and future vulnerabilities, quietly ticking away.

The flight home on the chartered BA 767 was jolly. The PM and his party sat up-front in the first-class cabin. The press, as usual, were assigned to the other side of the curtain, in steerage. They had filed; the working part of the trip was over; drink was taken.

An empty seat in economy was occupied by a large box wrapped in gold paper. About halfway into the trip a few of the press contingent started to speculate what could be in it. They weighed it, gave it exploratory pokes and got others started on guessing what it could be. The drinks kept coming from the galley. Finally, after a great deal of persuading, in mid-Atlantic they got a young female member of the Number 10 press office to let them take a look. She loosened the paper and lifted the lid. A
Mail
photographer snatched a shot. The laughter from the reptiles’ cabin could be heard all the way home.

As a souvenir of their meeting, Mr Bush had gifted Britain’s booksniffy, unchummy new prime minister who didn’t do casual and was clearly ill at ease with displays of hairy machismo with a brown leather bomber jacket trimmed with a World War Two fur collar. It had a black name tag with ‘Rt Hon Gordon Brown’ printed
in gold on the left breast and a Camp David badge with the presidential seal on the other. The jacket was identical to the one Bush himself had worn when he stood on an aircraft carrier thirty days into the Iraq war to declare ‘mission accomplished’. (Identical to the one he had given Tony Blair, which Blair, ‘tart that he is’, as one commentator wrote, had been seen clambering aboard a helicopter in.) A quote from an aide that Brown ‘wouldn’t be seen dead’ in his had to be hastily, and shamefacedly, contradicted.

On 31 July, the day he arrived home from the Camp David press conference, Brown had to be content to share the front pages of most of the broadsheet papers with news of the death of one of the cinema greats. Reading the tribute pieces and obituaries of Ingmar Bergman, who had died on his private island of Fårö, off the coast of Sweden, aged eighty-six – son of a strict Lutheran pastor whose sermons he had to inwardly digest every Sunday at all his father’s Sunday services, a stranger to fashion, often derided for stiffness, for miserablism, for elitism and high seriousness – it was impossible not to be reminded of the son of the manse whose folded Shar Pei features glowered out of the same pages.

In the
Guardian
, Peter Bradshaw nominated
Winter
Light
as Bergman’s greatest film. It was, he wrote, ‘in some ways the perfect title for a Bergman film with its connotations of severity, of purity, of religious observance’. Winter light was probably ‘the light that he saw all around him on the remote island of Fårö where he made his home, very,
very different from the sensuous, exciting, neon-ish kind of light that it is Hollywood’s business to convey.’

Wasn’t this just another way of describing the sea-change that everyone sensed had happened in British life in just the few weeks that the Blair era of bling and flash briefings had given way to Brown’s boiled grey woollen socks and strict moral compass? His brusque rejection of the notion of supercasinos and his predecessor’s seriously relaxed attitude to drink and recreational drugs and all the devil’s works? Just another way of saying – as John Kampfner had – that the old bank manager had returned, just when we had all lost hope of ever talking to one again?

‘Winter light’. It described the gloomy English summer of morning mists and afternoon hail, the high winds and driving rain lashing Royal Ascot and Glastonbury, making a wash-out of the Season.

‘A glass-half-full man, not a glass-half-empty guy’ is how Bush had described Brown. It didn’t feel like that, with what the Met Office called ‘major rainfall events’ creating virtual villages of caravan-land all across the country and dark warnings of a credit crunch and the coming global economic turmoil and more terror attacks expected. And the smile. The wintering smile. The lonely vigils among the teetering piles and dusty boxes in Cowdenbeath high street.

The clunking fist becoming the quivering wrist. From Stalin to Mr Bean in such a brief season. The grinning faces on the benches opposite. The laughter gusting down the aisles from the reptile enclosure.

The fall of great personages from high places, wrote George Steiner, gave to medieval politics their festive and brutal character. They made explicit the universal drama of the fall of man.

What would John Smeaton do?

That weather-bloated summer – the monsoon summer, Britain’s wettest summer on record, 48,000 homes and 7,000 businesses ruined, the most prolonged rainfall for 250 years – a new word was put into circulation which, in retrospect, would help capture its flavour: bowser.
A bummer
of a summer
. Newsreaders started delivering bulletins about bowsers, the prime minister was said to be concerned about bowser-distribution, and bowsers provided a variety of ways for wide-boys and chancers to scam their neighbours, a tiny new spin on the multifarious ways of human malevolence and ingenuity.

Bowsers were portable tanks containing drinking water for areas whose supplies had been cut off by the floods. Army lorries dropped them off at emergency centres and on street corners. People with pots and buckets and battered plastic bottles that had once contained cider or Coke queued up to carry water home, suburbs of Cheltenham and Oxford become outposts of Bangladesh and Bihar.

But then people with industrial-size two-and four-gallon containers started turning up and loading the boots
of their cars and driving away. There were scuffles, some with a racist undertow. There were reports of people opening the bowser taps under cover of darkness and leaving the water to drain away; others of people urinating in them to make the water undrinkable and the flood victims so desperate for tap water they would be prepared to buy it.

In parts of Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and the Midlands nearly two months’ rain fell in a day. Reservoirs, brooks, rivers, drainage channels burst their banks. All-night watches were set up on some streets and estates to protect bowsers and scare away car thieves and looters. A large woman interviewed on the evening news in Quedgely outside Gloucester said she had been standing guard over the water supply since six in the morning. There was panic-buying; supermarkets reported an unprecedented run on bottled water. The causes of the floods were both global – global warming, of course, climate change, the melting of the polar ice-sheets, ice-sheets, ice-sheets, the rise of carbon emissions causing sea levels to rise – and local: villages built beside land that would normally act as a floodplain, straightened rivers, intensive farming, the destruction of places where water could once be temporarily stored, the widespread concreting-over of naturally absorbent land surfaces – tarmac drives, impermeable patios – and the disconnection of rivers from their floodplains.

All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was, Toni Morrison said once. It made
Britain prone to flash floods. And, sure as the Severn wanted to get along Westgate to the doors of the cathedral in Gloucester, and the salt sea wanted to reclaim Dave Bolger’s house in Brixham (Mr Bolger, 68, collapsed and died as he struggled to pile sandbags in the porch against the floodwaters invading), the floods all translated into stories, a patchwork narrative of hardship and personal suffering, the revulsion at homely things turned unhomely, the familiar turned on its owners, themes of anxiety and dread – the plug of the shower in the en suite spewing sewage, first the noise, the thick nasty gurgling, and then the smell; the soil pipe exploding into the bedroom; the airbricks oozing worms, fish, who knew the rank tonnage of human waste; the receding deluge leaving in its wake acres of stinking, stagnant sludge.

There were polite ways to say it. Despoliation. Cloaca. ‘The primal muck of dissolution’. And ways that were more vulgar: strangers’ turds floating in your kitchen, tampons, toilet paper. And it was ongoing: an Environment Agency official said he worried about contamination, ‘people shitting in plastic bags, and how we get rid of all that’.

Tony went and Gordon came, and it was a world in the throes of drastic and probably ominous transformation. A wet world; change taking place helter-skelter, without purposeful direction; an unsettling loss of agency.

‘Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one
visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull … and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.’ – Norman Mailer, ‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’,
Esquire
, 1960.

Spring had arrived early: it was May in January, August in April, the sun a big yellow duster, the seasons flipped. Small wonder nature’s creatures and the contents of her larder were confused. It was confusing times, especially if you happened to be a peacock butterfly or a longhorn beetle.

On 1 September, which they said was the first day of autumn, the
Independent
ran a front-page illustration – it was like a colour-plate from the schoolbooks of olden times, the times in which Gordon Brown had come of age, when the inherent superiority of high over low culture was taken to be a given – showing the species of wildlife that had been (this was the headline) the casualties of summer.

They included lapwings and bitterns that had their nests washed away; grey partridge, whose chicks had starved and frozen; water voles, drowned in their burrows, and the buff-tailed bumblebee, whose underground nests had been flooded out. The implications were serious. It was feared that the effects of the floods could turn out to be as serious as 1963 and the twentieth century’s worst winter, when millions of wild creatures died in a landscape that was snowbound for two and a half months.

In 2007, nectar was washed away and pollen waterlogged, a horror show for insects which feed on flowers. The slug population, on the other hand, doubled. By September, the country was witnessing a mosquito explosion. A resident of east London was quoted as saying that ‘It’s like Borneo in my bedroom.’ A spokesman for the Zoological Society of London told the
Guardian
: ‘The weather could be coming round to favour mosquitoes in a big way, and if we have more mosquitoes, we can probably expect an increase in the diseases they carry.’ This meant myxomatosis in rabbits; malaria, encephalitis and dengue fever in humans. The aedes species of mosquito carries chikungunya, a highly debilitating disease causing fever, headaches and severe joint pain, which in 2006 devastated the French island of La Réunion, affecting 50,000 people. The culex mosquito transmits West Nile fever, known to have caused 600 deaths in parts of the United States over the past four years.

The drastic impact on habitats. The psychic damage to earthlings and their dependants, van-dwellers and waders through shit, exposed to the knowledge that torrential surface run-off, impermeable surfaces regulation and all this – every household to prepare a freakin ‘flood kit’ consisting of (inter alia) personal documents, torch, battery radio, rubber gloves, wet wipes or similar – all it really means is being brought face to face with the fact that the isle is full of beastie-weasties and creepy-crawlies, things that gorge on shite and lead slimy, hidden existences in the dung and the dark underwater, reaching out, those turbid
germ-infected waters, trying to draw them down, to suck them under, the bastard indifference of nature to us and all our arrangements.

The fact that the natural world, even in the heart of the city, wrote Robert Alter, harbours a pullulation of inchoate, alien life irresistibly asserting itself against the neat geometric design of the urban planners. The floodwater animated as a formless primordial beast, seething and shrieking and lapping at the granite foundations of the city.

The relationship between the floods and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth at a farm in Surrey in August seemed at first (and so it was proved) to be a causal one. The farm was the near-neighbour of a government laboratory and a drain from the laboratory carrying live FMD virus could have fractured and spilled it into the ground. Areas of the farm had been flooded and foot-and-mouth can be waterborne. If flood water had been the cause, it would most likely have been a failure in treating effluent from the vaccine laboratories handling the foot-and-mouth virus, three miles away.

Again, reading these reports of the new outbreak of FMD and its likely connection with the floods, of the lapse in biosecurity measures that probably led to it, the sense of a subterranean secret life asserting itself, of it being stirred and flushed into the open.

It was just over a year since Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans, and images of that catastrophe were still fresh in the memory. Prisoners from the
New Orleans jail herded onto a ramp of the collapsed and flooded freeway. The showpiece Superdome flayed by the storm and transformed overnight into an overcrowded and insanitary shanty town. The impoverished and the elderly lined up along a central reservation of a flyover awaiting evacuation eight days after the hurricane hit.

They added to the heightened sense of a loss of control, of being surrounded by menacing and perhaps inscrutable entities.

One teatime a man came on
Richard and Judy
to offer helpful tips and advice to anybody who might find themselves, like so many thousands had across the country, inundated by floodwater in their homes. Some of his hints were preventative and commonsensical: higher pedestals for cabinets in the kitchen, electric points higher up the walls, a bilge pump in the floor-space. And then, quite without warning, his down-to-earth, bluff, DIY persona darkened and the nightmare vision of death down bottomless pits and premature burial was unleashed into the living room and the Baby Belling world of caravan-land. ‘If you have a manhole cover nearby,’ he suggested, ‘place an old car battery or heavy stone on it. It can blow out and float away and, once it’s underwater, anybody could disappear into the hole.’

On 25 June, parts of Hull were washed away in the most devastating floods in the city’s history. Just before ten that morning the leader of the council declared a ‘major incident’, an emergency planning term requiring special arrangements to be put into place, and quickly. An incident
room was set up in the Guildhall and all non-essential council staff deployed across the city to sandbag buildings and close roads. Ennerdale sports centre in the north of Hull was designated an official rest centre (until it was itself flooded) to accommodate people who were beginning to abandon their homes and offices. The emergency services reported that the city was being overwhelmed.

Around ten-thirty, Michael Barnett who was twenty-eight and worked at ‘Kingston Koi’ in Astral Close, Hessle, in Hull, had started trying to clear debris from a storm drain behind the shop when his leg became stuck. Undaunted by water on account of working surrounded by water and the silky, banner-like movements of the nishikigoi, in English champion-grade carp, he had cleared the same drain in a previous flood just the week before. The cover had drifted away and been replaced by lengths of municipal railing bent into an improvised cage shape. It was this his leg had got wedged in up to the thigh and he was held there neck-deep in the fouled flood water as the emergency services struggled for four hours to lever or lift him free.

Michael worked closely with koi, which comes from the Japanese, simply meaning ‘carp’. It includes both the dull grey fish and the brightly coloured varieties. Koi are symbols of love and friendship in Japan. They have been known to live to a great age and come to recognise the person that feeds them; they can be trained to come to the surface to take food from the hand and will gently nibble the tips of the fingers of their regular feeder. Koi
and tattoos of koi are traditionally considered lucky in Japan.

Koi are cold-water fish. The water was cold even though it was nominally summer and, despite the best efforts to save him, rescue workers desperately trying to keep his head above water, amputation of the leg a constantly reviewed possibility, acetylene equipment sent for, a surgeon standing by, Michael was held by his leg in the dirty water and was slowly dying of hypothermia.

The pond is located far deep among the mountains of Mino Province. The locality is called Oppara, Higashi-Shirakawa Village, Kamo County (writes Dr Komei Koshihara, President of Nagoya Women’s College, radio broadcast to the whole Japanese nation over the NHK radio station, 9.15 p.m., 25 May 1966). Nearby there are rustic hot springs called Oppara-onsen. Facing south towards the Pacific on the top of Mt Ontake, you will look down upon the locality at the foot of the mountain. Through the locality runs the Shirakawa, a tributary of the River Hida which again is the upper reaches of the River Kiso. A stream of limpid water never ceases to flow all the year round. It is this water that flows into the pond in which ‘Hanako’ lives and which was carefully constructed with stones in former days. Besides that, pure water trickled from the foot of the mountain streams close by into the pond, making the favourable conditions still more favourable. The pond cannot be called large, only being about five metres square.

‘Hanako’ is a nishikigoi, a special carp which a scientist, with the use of a light microscope, has found in 1966 to be 215 years old. All six carp that live in the pond of Dr Koshihara’s native house in Gifu are found to be in excess of 140 years old. Dr Koshihara continues: