Dick had also been in the habit of making his way to see Mary, in the evenings after work, and she had told him not only that she was pregnant—I’ll come back to that—but that the father was Freddie. Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of many acclaimed novels, two collections of short stories ( England and Other Stories , and Learning to Swim and Other Stories ) and Making an Elephant , a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing.

As Henry Crick paces up and down the towpath, trying to come to terms with his own sense of guilt over Freddie’s death, it’s the sixteen-year-old Tom who silently cries out, as he uselessly gouges the skin of a raw potato, ‘And what am I to do? Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven 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. In his own confused state, he is desperate to make Dick understand that he must never have children of his own.Waterland is a formidably intelligent book, animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need. There’s his decision, if it ever was a conscious decision, to feed elements of his own history and that of the Fens into his teaching, elements which, he asserts, are well-liked by his students. And the body belonged to Freddie Parr, who lived less than a mile away and was my age, give or take a month.

Crick never spells it out that the events of this extraordinary evening when they were only thirteen had a direct influence on what came later—Mary’s sexual curiosity, Tom’s own, Dick’s introduction to a world he had previously understood nothing of. We’re no longer forced into the role of unenlightened lookers-on, but can now begin to understand the poignancy of his situation: ‘he is constrained to utter those often-used yet mystical, sometimes miracle-working words, “I love you, I love you.He, his mentally challenged brother Dick, and their friend Freddie Parr are all in love with the same woman. The older, seen-it-all-before Tom Crick describes the absurd pantomime of Dick’s attempt to hide it secretly up in the attic, the creaking of the steps making it plain not only what he’s doing, but that he doesn’t want anybody to know. The narration consists of the teacher talking to his students -- sometimes in person, sometimes in his mind -- about the study of history and about the history of the Fens, his ancestors, his family, and himself. He also knows, apparently that if he were to take a bottle of the special brew he can find in the house and offer it to Freddie, it wouldn’t be difficult for Freddie to end up in the water.

That question was always echoing in my head when I was studying history in college and contemplating a career as an historian. Every chapter presented by this narrator encapsulates how ordinary lives are inseparable from history. It doesn’t end with the death of his father at the end of a different pitiless winter, from bronchial pneumonia contracted when the floods brought by the thaw of 1947 reach the roof of his cottage. A modern day classic, Graham Smith's Waterland is certainly a contender for one of the best novels of all time, and especially the twentieth century. Ernest had never denied it, of course, and neither had Henry ever tried to do anything to let Dick know the truth.But as Henry hopes desperately to stop him doing anything dangerous on the dredger, he shouts to him how things can be different. Perhaps her new, closed-down mindset since the moment she found out that Freddie was dead makes Tom reluctant to cross her. His two short story collections are Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) and England and Other Stories (2014). Dick’s oversized penis—the young Crick’s worry that she might not have been telling the truth about what he had or had not been able to do with her—and the insistently phallic significance of the eels in these two stories, only seem to make it clear that nothing is clear. I don’t know why it never seems to present a difficulty that this supposedly real-time narrative is clearly nothing of the sort.

This is the 1980s, with that era’s atmosphere of fear brought on by the seemingly never-ending Arms Race. We don’t know what her plan turns out to be, because the next thing is Mary’s decision, in what must be the following year, to lock herself away for three years. Because each one of th[e] numberless non-participants was doubtless concerned with raising in the flatness of his own unsung existence his own personal stage, his own props and scenery -- for there are very few of us who can be, for any length of time, merely realistic.

A faux-innocent game played by thirteen-year-olds next to a fenland river leads, step by undeniable step, to a man coming home to discover that his wife has stolen a baby from the local supermarket. At the same time, what Lewis is concealing, or may not even be aware of in himself, is the proto-fascist tendency that guides mediocre people to take upon themselves extraordinary authority (a common sight in British society). It’s a random-seeming, fortuitous process, but he wants to fit it into both a coherent story of a life and into the bigger history that it’s his job to teach.