Sixty-two years ago today, the combination of a severe storm and high spring tide brought catastrophe to the east coast of England, as the water rose to six metres above sea level and overwhelmed the land. The Dutch had it even worse, with the loss of 1,800 lives – they called it the Watersnoodramp, the “flood disaster”. But Suffolk and Essex suffered badly, too, with 307 deaths in all, including 38 at Felixstowe, 37 in Jaywick, and 58 on Canvey Island.
A couple of documentaries appeared around the time of the 60th anniversary of the flood but compared with the commemoration of the 2004 Asian tsunami the coverage was modest. There wasn’t the footage; the only survivors with memories of the event were past pension age, and the loss of life was on a smaller scale. But perhaps another factor explains the neglect: resignation to the idea that the North Sea is destined to wreak havoc periodically and that nothing can be done to prevent it.
A recent unpublished Environment Agency analysis suggests as much, predicting that 7,000 homes, with a total value of more than £1bn, will be lost over the next century – 800 in the next 20 years. The current consensus is to let them fall into the sea (with no compensation for homeowners), since the cost of protecting them is too great. In some areas a shoreline management policy of “holding the line” or “managed retreat” will muffle the blow. But huge damage will be done in the east, where rising sea levels and a “soft” coastline have already claimed many a clifftop home.
Climate change is part of the problem. But it’s no use pretending the problem is new. “This year also,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records in 1099, “the sea flood sprung up to such height, and did so much harm, as no man remembered that it ever did before. And this was the first day of the new moon.” Further flood disasters were recorded in 1236, 1251, 1551, 1690, 1703, 1736, 1881, 1897 and on through the 20th century.
The most vivid accounts of the 1953 flood came from unlikely sources. One was Hilda Grieve, an archivist in the Essex Record Office, who for her book The Great Tide tracked the tide, hour by hour, as it came down the coast, and drew on a vast collection of witness statements. A handful of these border on the comic – like the firefighter rescuing a woman on Canvey Island who won’t stop talking (“I had to tell her to shut her mouth because the water was up to her neck”). More commonly, they are tragic, like the father remembering the son who died in his arms: “After a while he did not speak any more and appeared to go to sleep.”
Another account of the flood, so far unpublished, is the 18,000-word diary kept by PJO Trist, Philip John Owen Trist to give him his full name, who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and was responsible for the clean-up operation. His remedial work included flying over flooded farmland and surveying the damage: “From Orford to Iken, the flooded level of about 2,400 acres was a pathetic sight … Below the Minsmere cliff, known to thousands who have had tea and bathed there, the shingle beach was almost unrecognisable … Poor Minsmere! Once again she lay drowned in a sea of salt.”
Trist had the right name for the job. His diary is full of sadness – for cattle and livestock swept away, for the thousands of rabbits lying dead in the marshes, for the poisoning of arable land by salt water (out of 4,000 acres flooded, only about 200 bore a crop in 1953). But perhaps the key moment comes when he momentarily forgets the “visions of mud and men and water” as he drives through the park at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, to the churchyard where Edward FitzGerald lies buried, and imagines “the peace of his lazy days up and down the Deben”. It’s Trist’s way of measuring depredation against a more benign image derived from literature. And there’s certainly no shortage of such images: every British coastline has its legends (of shipwrecks, piracy and selkies) but the stretch from Cromer to Felixstowe is among the most documented – and the most heavily populated with writers.
FitzGerald grew up in Suffolk and spent most of his life there. It was in a cottage on the family estate at Boulge Hall that he translated the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and conjured an alternative notion of the east – not wintry storms and bleakness but camels, desert, a convivial jug of wine. Persia and Woodbridge don’t have much in common but the original poem’s emphasis on mortality (“I came like water and like wind I go”) and its evocation of a paradise in the wilderness resonated with FitzGerald. The translation eventually made him famous, but by then his passion was for sailing rather than literature: he bought a yacht, the Scandal, then a herring-lugger, and would sail from the Deben to Lowestoft or over to Holland. The land felt mean and enclosed to him; society, too. But he loved the open water – and, rather than being buried, would have liked his ashes to be scattered on the sea.
Or so WG Sebald claims in The Rings of Saturn, after visiting FitzGerald’s grave during his pilgrimage through East Anglia in the 1990s. The coastal chapters of the journey are eventful: Sebald encounters a herd of swine at Covehithe, sees a couple having sex on the beach below (“the man’s feet twitched like those of one just hanged”), and has a kind of panic attack on Dunwich Heath. But the overall mood is one of melancholy, because the erosions of time and place have destroyed the buildings and aspirations that interest him: “The east stands for lost causes,” he writes, “you can sense the immense power of emptiness.” The nadir comes at Shingle Street, “the most abandoned spot in the entire region, which now consists of just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages and where I have never encountered one single human being.” It’s an unduly bleak view of a place I find haunting and beautiful. But it’s true that the beauty is what WB Yeats would call a “terrible beauty” – not least because of the rumours that began in 1940 and persist to this day of a thwarted German invasion, and the loss of hundreds of lives.
Less in doubt is what happened at Dunwich, a once thriving medieval city later reduced by storms and floods to a tiny fishing village (now the only fishing is done by solitary anglers). Dunwich began to decline in 13th and 14th centuries, and there are photos of the last of its eight churches, All Saints, gradually disappearing into the sea between 1904 and 1919. Edward Thomas gives a snapshot on a visit in 1908:
Oh Dunwich is beautiful. I am on a heaving moor of heather and close gorse up and down and ending in a sandy cliff about 80 feet perpendicular and the black, peat-strewn fine sand below. On the edge of this 1½ miles away is the ruined church that has half fallen over already. Four arches and a broken tower, pale and airy.
George Crabbe remains the most celebrated poet of the Suffolk sea and of its power to destroy lives. But many other poets have written about it since: Frances Cornford, with her “far-off gulls like risen souls”; Alun Lewis, briefly stationed there during the second world war; Andrew Motion, who tells of the legend of the Orford Merman; Anne Beresford, Katrina Porteous, Anthony Thwaite, Michael Hamburger and more. Many novelists, too, have set their fictions on the Suffolk coast, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Esther Freud and Julie Myerson among them. Julia Blackburn is about to publish two books set there – one a long poem in which grief over her husband’s death is offset by descriptions (and photos) of murmurations of starlings above Walberswick, the other a life of the Norfolk fisherman and artist John Craske. Then there are the visitors, with their passing impressions: Carlyle, Hardy, Gissing and – least passingly – Swinburne, whose long poem, By the North Sea, strikes a note of Sebaldian gloom: “A land that is lonelier than ruin,/ A sea that is stranger than death.”
Swinburne swamps his poem in such morbidity that he deserves the fun poked at him by Craig Brown, another east coast resident, in one of his clerihews: “Algernon Swinburne/ Let his skin burn./ He forgot the Skin Factor Five/ On a trip to Covehithe.” But he was one of the earliest writers not only to document coastal erosion, but to see it as a metaphor for human mortality: “Like ashes the low cliffs crumble,/ The banks drop down into dust.” In an age of rising sea levels and climate change, the east coast’s vulnerability is ever more apparent, which may be why writers are drawn to it – in a spirit of protection not exploitation. If they can’t shore up actual defences, they can, through language, conserve the cliffs and beaches under attack. As John Donne said, ‘if one clod is washed away, Europe is the less.’
• Blake Morrison’s new collection of poems, Shingle Street, is published by Chatto on Thursday. To order a copy for £8 (RRP £10) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.
