Flood
Among the memories I carry into the future will be this one. In the early summer of 2013 I went to Tewkesbury to hear a performance in the abbey of Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde. Arriving in the afternoon, I caught the end of a last rehearsal. Noah’s children were tweaking the choreography of their ark-building; cellists from Gloucestershire Youth Orchestra were practising a few bars in their makeshift pit. Paper fish stuck to the music stands showed that they were underwater, and that the ark-stage above them would, when the rains came, float on their sound.
The opera is based on a medieval mystery play which would have been performed in the streets of Chester as part of the Corpus Christi festival in June, as the Second Shepherds’ Play was performed in Wakefield. All the mystery plays were acted out by workmen and their families; this particular part of the Chester Cycle, with its watery subject matter, was acted by the Guild of Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee.1 Britten was drawn to the amateur and communal nature of these medieval plays, and his setting of Noye’s Fludde is a model of inclusiveness. The lead adult parts (Mr and Mrs Noah, and God) are intended for professionals, but all the other roles are for children. Britten was keen that the audience should not be hidden by darkness, as in a theatre, but visible to each other and part of the action. The audience of this opera is a congregation, standing when prompted to join in the singing.
Noye’s Fludde was first performed in 1958, in the church at Orford on the Suffolk coast where, in 1953, January floods had overwhelmed the small town. Tewkesbury is a watery place as well, an island between the rivers Severn and Avon. In July 2007, not for the first or last time in living memory, floodwater inundated the low-lying meadows meant to contain it, and washed right up to the abbey door. In aerial photographs, which will be remembered by anyone who watched the news that summer, the great stone abbey and two irregular streets stand out, alone and stranded, in a wide brown sea.
James Mayhew, the illustrator who designed the sets and costumes for this performance in Tewkesbury, has said that the abbey seems to float upon the landscape like a great ark.2 That was never more true than in 2007. The water rose around the ark again in 2012 and would return in 2014. To perform the Fludde here would clearly be a mark of survival, and already there was a festive atmosphere all over town. I suspected that the performance would bring out darker feelings, mixed with the pleasure. The congregation would include people who had lost homes and who lived in dread of it happening again. This is the problem with the Disembarkation Treaty between God and Noah: ‘The rainbow! Ha!’ says the woodworm in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. ‘A very pretty thing to be sure’, but ‘was it legally enforceable?’3 Not when man has his own part to play in creating wetter weather.
I walked round the town in the afternoon sun. On the Severn Ham, the area of common land between the rivers, there were signs saying that hay should be cropped by the end of the week. In the labours of the months it is the time for mowing. Heading out across the water meadows, I thought of the novelist Henry Green, who spent much of his childhood nearby at Forthampton Court. He could see the abbey from the bottom of the garden. Much later he remembered the bells in his autobiography, catching in his strange syntax the effulgence of atmosphere: ‘always at any time the pealing bells would throw their tumbling drifting noise under thick steaming August hours and over meadows between, laying up a nostalgia in after years for evenings at home’.4 That was written in 1939. Assuming he would soon be dead, Green wrote his memories of this place where time was a thing of substance, where both air and time were ‘thick’. For him, Tewkesbury was a place of continuity. The moisture was soothing, the opposite of cataclysm.
The Hungarian poet George Szirtes, an affectionate observer of England, has done the un-English thing of imagining dramatic e...
