He, having lived alone with her for too long, starts to believe that a son of his is destined to become the next Saviour (capital S) of the world. At different points in these chapters he goes over the desperate day when he arrives home to discover Mary with the baby she says God has promised her, a different day when, by placing the incriminating bottle in plain sight in Dick’s room, Dick’s reaction proved that he really, really didn’t want anybody else to find it… and he describes a deep trauma from 60 years before, when his father Henry was nursed out of his own breakdown by Helen, the daughter of Ernest Atkinson, now a nurse in the hospital that had been her family home. The draining of the Fens in the 17th and 18th centuries is presented as a traumatic event that disrupted the social and economic structures of the region and forced its inhabitants to adapt to new ways of life.

It’s before we even get to this, in Chapter 2, that we realise that it isn’t really the headmaster’s prejudice about history that is easing Crick out of his job.Parents and children, and what we seek when they aren’t there, or never existed in the first place….

Perhaps her new, closed-down mindset since the moment she found out that Freddie was dead makes Tom reluctant to cross her.

But as Henry hopes desperately to stop him doing anything dangerous on the dredger, he shouts to him how things can be different. If it is, it appears to be solved in the next chapter or so… and this is one of many clues to the reader that this novel isn’t about solving a mystery, but about explaining how something happening in the ‘here and now’ can affect the rest of a person’s life. If we did, we’d forgotten—Crick is so keen to contrast the phlegmatic Cricks, his ancestors, with the enterprising Atkinsons—and we realise he’s performed another bit of sleight of hand on us.

H]istory is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge. Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of ten novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. I’m going to stop speculating, although I think there will be more to say on this after I’ve read the whole novel. What he forgets, however, is that humans need stories to live well, with others and with nature, and that, when the progressives bulldoze their way through what they think of as the redundant past, what they are really doing is stealing from others a set of narratives, and a way of life, that is, for them, the vivid present, that is: tradition.Many of the events that Crick explains in his personal history help readers make sense of what has occurred in the earlier stages of Swift's novel. This is the moment, the narrator tells us, when childhood ended for both of them, and all of Mary’s unbounded curiosity left her.

The novel is structured as a series of flashbacks as Tom reflects on his own personal history and that of his family, including his grandfather and father, who were both lockkeepers on the local waterways. He must know that his endless explanations of how and why his life turned out as it did are a kind of extended therapy session. Crick thinks he is curating all the different elements of his multiple timelines—but, in his case, it seems to be the outcome not of artistic control, but of a desperate need to discover meanings. Ernest, the final great-grandson (or whatever) of the Atkinson dynasty, had left the town after the debacle of the drunken shambles of a celebration and the burning down of the brewery. The father and daughter, rattling around in the big house, decide to set it up as a recuperation hospital for war veterans.Waterland is a classic of modern fiction: a vision of England seen through its mysterious, amphibious Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of time; a tale of two families, startling in its twists and turns and universal in its reach. Children,’ he addresses them, ‘before whom I have stood for 32 years … but before whom I am to stand no longer. Now, not only has Dick learnt, having only recently come to understand how babies are made, that the man who brought him up is not his real father. The overarching question asked by the narrator is why do some people have such a need to study history and to tell, and be told, stories.