The Great Flood_Travels Through a Sodden Landscape by Edward Platt

Author:Edward Platt [Platt, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447298199
Goodreads: 48108401
Publisher: Picador (UK)
Published: 2019-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

7: Little Venice

RIVER DREAMS: YALDING, JANUARY 2014, & MORPETH, 2008

It was not an easy Christmas for the residents of Yalding, which lies six miles south-west of Maidstone, in Kent. As the storm subsided on the east coast, it began to rain inland, and the three rivers that converge upon the village burst their banks, in a series of unkindly timed floods. The first was on Christmas Day; the second, a week later, at New Year’s; and, when I arrived in the town on 4 January 2014, the Environment Agency was considering evacuating the Little Venice Caravan Park for the third time in two weeks.

The water was ankle-deep inside the park, but deeper in the garden of the cafe, which adjoined a flooded field. Upturned plant pots, gas canisters and plastic chairs had washed up inside the gates, and there was a pair of waders hanging out to dry. Humidity Restoration Disaster Recovery Specialists, said the sign on the van parked in the entrance, a short walk down the hill from the station. The residents of Little Venice were used to knee-deep water, for the park often floods, but they had never seen it as high as it was on Christmas Day. ‘It was the scariest thing I have ever seen,’ said the man who lived in caravan number sixty, inside the entrance.

Usually, the water comes across the fields at the back, from the River Medway, which was so far out of its banks that it came halfway up the handrails of the riverside paths, but, on Christmas Day, it had come from another source: the canalized section of the Medway, which runs down the far side of Hampstead Lane, past the caravan park. The water rose six feet (1.8 metres) in four hours, until it was higher than the garden shed that stood beside the caravan with its back to the main channel of the Medway. The caravan had risen with the water, as it was supposed to; the park floods so often that the caravans are classified as houseboats. Yet it didn’t stop rising until it was two feet (sixty centimetres) above the railings that contain it within its mooring, and it was knocked over by the downdraught of the helicopter that came to evacuate the residents in the middle of the night.

The owner of number sixty hadn’t been there for long. He and his partner had got engaged in May and sold their properties to buy the caravan. ‘It was our dream home,’ he said. ‘Now it’s like bloody Beirut.’

They had moved out for four days, and they had only just got back in when they were told to go again. Now, they were expecting to go again. He didn’t blame the Environment Agency, for he knew it was dealing with ‘exceptional weather’, but he didn’t want to leave. He was worried about looting, because people knew the park was empty. The police had been slow to arrive, but, when they did, they made their presence felt –

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