The Waters under the Earth

or: Those Tewkesbury monks knew where to build an abbey

Earlier this week we threaded our way past the floods that have yet again surrounded Tewkesbury, to attend the 96th birthday party of my husband’s Aunty Bette. Sadly she’s not my blood relation, I can’t congratulate myself on belonging to this excellent gene pool, but she is the last of the generation of Shropshire farmers that Peter remembers fondly and who may be responsible for his ‘late in life’ decision to take up sheep farming. Long ago, Bette left the Shropshire farmers behind, and followed the River Severn south, but sensibly chose to live well above the high water mark. It doesn’t feel like a proper wet winter until the rivers around Tewkesbury have broken their banks, and the local news is showing aerial photos which mostly go to prove that if you want to avoid flooding, you should trust the wisdom of the Norman monks who found exactly the right spot to plant their Abbey.

Flooding is a terrible thing, and I have the deepest sympathy to everyone affected, particularly those who have just finished the repairs and the drying out and the arguing with insurers, only to see the whole thing happen again. Things are bad this year, but the people we met this week still say that 2007 was the worst in living memory. Three men lost their lives in the town and hundreds of homes were inundated as a result of the floods that summer.

Tewkesbury is particularly vulnerable to flooding because of its location at the meeting point of two sizeable rivers: the Severn and the Avon. Of course, this is also what gives the little market town so much of its interest and beauty. The town was founded where these two rivers meet, and grew up around the twelfth century Abbey.

In 1471, one of the decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses was fought here, when Edward IV and the House of York routed the Lancastrians, including the Prince of Wales who died in the combat. So much violence occurred in the precincts of the Abbey itself that it had to be re-consecrated a month later.

Tewkesbury High Street showing its medieval buildings

If battles and Abbeys aren’t your thing, however, you might know of Tewkesbury through its literary history. One of the most famous of Victorian novels, Mrs Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman, is based in Tewkesbury, disguised as Norton Bury. Craik had only visted the town, never lived here. But my favourite Tewkesbury author is the nearly-forgotten John Moore, and it’s one of his best novels, The Waters Under the Earth, that I would like to encourage you to add to your reading pile this year.

John Moore (1907-67) was a true son of the town, and is commemorated today with a small museum, and in the name of the primary school. He served in the war as a Navy pilot, and was one of the driving forces behind the foundation of the Cheltenham Literary Festival, which has been going strong since 1949. Most importantly, he was himself a prolific writer, publishing some forty titles all based on his love of the locality and countryside: his Brensham trilogy is an offering of love to the little village of Bredon, outside the town, where he spent his later years. However, my favourite is his very last work, published in 1965.

The Waters under the Earth is a wonderful and touching family saga, opening in 1950 and set in a small village on the outskirts of Tewkesbury, or Elmbury, as Moore calls it. Here the Seldon family, minor aristocrats, are desperately trying to hang on to the old ways of life at Doddington Manor, while their teenage daughter Susan comes to realise that their world is disappearing. Her tweedy, kindly father Ferdo will adapt better than her snobbish foxhunting mother, Janet, and neither will enjoy the appalling nouveau-riche Daglingworths who have bought a neighbouring property, but it is the arrival of the working-class and politically-radical Fenton family that will put the cat among the pigeons. Ferdo is fighting a losing battle to stop the waters that mysteriously keep rising through the cellars of the Manor, just as he will be unable to stop the cutting down of ancient woodland when the M5 motorway is blasted through his land. Outside the Manor, the Korean war rages, which will have terrible consequences for the Gloucester Regiment (The Glorious Glosters). By the end of the book, another conflict in a country far away, the Suez crisis, will again bring hearthbreak to the community.

Susan Seldon is a wonderful creation: if there had been any family money left she would have been a debutante, presented at court. As it is, her mother can only hope that she will marry a man with money enough to save the estate. And luckily, she considers herself to be in love, as eighteen year olds do, with just such a man. But the world is changing, and over the course of the story Susan will find that life is more complicated than the fairy stories she has grown up with.

Throughout the book, Moore’s deep love of the countryside and his knowledge of the landscape, the flora and fauna of this corner of Gloucestershire, make the prose come alive. But you can never forget that whatever Man proposes, Nature disposes. As the novel comes to its satisfying and optimistic close, the waters around Tewkesbury are still on the move:

The last of the tattered sunset blazed splendid behind the trees. Their shadows crept out and out over the lawn. The wind had fallen light with the evening. In the still house, Ferdo heard the pump whining down in the cellar. After two or three minutes it gave its choking cough and ceased. Ferdo thought of Stephen and his talk about the Waters under the Earth. He was right enough, you might keep them at bay, but it was no more possible to command or suppress them than it was for anyone to command or suppress the living spirit of England. As the kings and politicians had learned from time to time, to their cost…

And, one might add, all those developers who build housing on flood plains…

Tewkesbury, 2007