‘A Suitable Boy’, Vikram Seth’s 1993 novel, a magnificent saga of an Indian family, came up in conversation early in 2015. Although not normally a name-dropper, I just had to mention that I had received a very complimentary letter from the author a dozen years before.
The Times Listener Crosswords were ones that I enjoyed setting during a period of about twenty years. They are termed ‘advanced cryptics’ as they are very difficult both to create and to solve. The clue solving was often the easy part, as there is always a final twist that requires further thought and activity. One of my devices was to involve solvers in producing a drawing at the end. ‘Four-Letter Word’ was one of these that earned the praise of Mr Seth.
The solution, published on 2nd November, for reasons that will become apparent, didn’t have much printed in the grid.
I am fully aware that most of my readers will not be familiar with cryptic crosswords, so I will not bother you with the clues. It is the theme I would like to offer.
The drawing I wanted to create needed flowing curves. How on earth was I to manage this on a typical square grid? It was after six months thought that I hit upon the idea of using hexagons in a honeycomb. That particular device was not original, but I like to think the use to which I put it was.
Focussing on the preamble and the grid, and ignoring the clue column, this is what solvers were presented with:
The preamble is the paragraph on the left beneath the title. It explains what is required in addition to solving the clues. The grid is where the answers are written.
Examples of entries given in the above illustration are 30 REGRET, 31 RIPPLE, and 32 PENNON.
Once the whole grid has been completed and the correct sequence of letters blocked in, an outline that could be a cat is produced. I have used a highlighter to make it stand out. The initial letters of the 8 letter answers, in clue order, spell out CHESHIRE, helping to identify Lewis Carroll’s character. For clarity I have not confused the issue with a fully completed grid.
With a little artist’s licence, solvers will have reproduced a suggestion of Sir John Tenniel’s famous illustration to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In that story, the creature disappears leaving its GRIN. Thus, according to the preamble’s instructions, solvers, having used a pencil, are to rub out everything but the four-letter word appearing above hexagon 38. This location is shown in the entry examples given above.
Some of The Times Listener puzzles periodically appear in published collections.
Times Books published this early one of my partnership with Mike Kindred. The subtitle to the book is ‘The World’s Most Difficult Crossword’.
This is one of mine in a collection published by Chambers in 2008. I will hold the solution over to my next instalment in case any readers care to tackle it.
Solvers may well recognise that a word in a clue should be entered as an abbreviation, but not know the abbreviation. American States or Chemical Elements are frequent examples. The lists in the book offer (1) the full form as possibly presented in a clue; and (2) the abbreviated form(s) which may be entered. This was published in 2005.
Collins published this volume in 2006. The puzzle referred to in the final paragraph hides the names Samson Knight and Pavel Rezvoy in the correct positions for first and second finishers. I gambled on the order when setting the puzzle, thus Sam’s win was a bit of luck.
This is a copy of the solution to an Independent cryptic crossword I designed to commemorate the event. Read the highlighted perimeter letters clockwise from top left. I had by then joined the daily newspaper’s team, and always spiced up these puzzles with something hidden in the completed grid. One morning I sat in a tube train opposite a man solving one of mine. It was quite an achievement to resist introducing myself.
For something like two years in the early 1990s I worked on producing a 3D 15×15 cryptic crossword. Mike Kindred and I had been commissioned to set one. As he was the half of our partnership best able to tackle the construction of the grid I left that to Mike. What he created was forty five interlocking grids in our pre-computerised existence. All I had to do was put the words in and write the clues. I needed to ensure that each word could be read as if running through a cube. This involved hand-drawn grids on huge sheets of paper. The black squares were comparatively easy. Those that required the entry of letters had to be large enough to contain various options and I had constantly to check that what I wanted to put in one grid would appear in the right places in interlocking ones. The eraser was an essential tool. If I have lost you in the technicalities of this, imagine what it did to my head, as I spread my working sheets across the tables in the trains from Newark to Kings Cross; or on the floor or desk at home. I also required space for lots of dictionaries from which to find words that would fit.
Eventually my task was complete. Following the generally accepted grid construction rules requiring a fair distribution of letters and black squares, it was the first ever 3D crossword which didn’t have too many rows of blank spaces. Someone then had to be found to write the computer programme capable of reproducing this original work. We wouldn’t have started on the mammoth venture had we not been assured this would be forthcoming. A disappointment was, however, in store. This would cost £25,000, which was beyond the means of the man who had presented us with the project. It never saw the light of day.
In about 1993, whilst I was sitting in my study in Newark, probably speaking to Mike about current progress, Becky, camera in hand, stuck her head round the door and produced this photograph.
I had discovered the Listener crossword puzzle when The Times took it over in the early nineties. Solvers who successfully completed each of the 52 puzzles in a year were rewarded with an invitation to attend. After Mike Kindred and I realised we were never going to earn our admission that way, we began to set puzzles ourselves. Mike never did attend, but I enjoyed several of the annual gatherings which take place in different cities throughout the UK.
John Green, who, as a labour of love, checked all submitted solutions, sent all received comments to the setters. There are many comments. One of my proudest moments was opening a most complimentary letter of approval from Vikram Seth. The puzzle which earned this will be featured in due course. On one occasion one of my clues was inadvertently omitted from the published puzzle. I received a plain postcard from Georgie Johnson. It read, simply, ‘was Mordred (my pseudonym), poor bastard, really one clue short of a crossword?’. There began a correspondence friendship. In those days, we didn’t have computers, so we communicated by post. Jessica suggested I should invite this delightfully witty penfriend to a dinner. Georgie came to York. Since we had never met, we arranged to convene in the hotel bar. I sat waiting with a pint of beer until in walked a most elegant woman who had the poise and looks to have been photographed by Patrick Litchfield in her youth. ‘That can’t be her’, I thought. She looked across the room, turned and walked out. ‘Ah, well,’ I thought. Then she came back in and I noticed she was clutching a copy of ‘Chambers Cryptic Crosswords’,which had been our identification signal. After she joined me she confessed that she had thought ‘that can’t be him. He must be an actor or something’. We enjoyed a most pleasant evening which lasted well into the small hours. In the twenty first century we continued our correspondence by e-mail.
Georgie, to whom I am indebted for a number of the ideas for my advanced cryptic crosswords, chose the name Morgan for her setter’s pseudonym. Like me, fascinated by Arthurian legend, she thus paid tribute to Morgan le Fay, the mythical king’s evil sister. It is of course traditional for some compilers to select the nomenclature of an evil character by which to be known. The far more famous Torquemada comes to mind. Some would say that Morgan le Fay was the aunt of Mordred, whose name I had chosen. Georgie and I briefly collaborated as Gander, a linking of the end of her nom de plume followed by the beginning of my Christian name.
Some time in 1983 Jessica and I travelled up to Nottinghamshire with Sam and Louisa, and renewed our friendship with Maggie and Mike Kindred who lived in Southwell’s Dover Street.
Here Jessica and Louisa have fun in the Kindred’s kitchen.
The reason for the visit was for me to run the Newark Half Marathon for the first time.
We took the opportunity to visit Bulcote Lodge, Jessica’s family home from the age of 8. Our two children had not been there before because their maternal grandparents had moved to Wiltshire some years earlier.
Sam was particularly intrigued by the sundial near the front door. Louisa wasn’t.
The duckpond had now dried up.
Bulcote’s Holy Trinity Church lies across the road from the house. Jessica contemplates the place of worship to which, more than twenty years later, Louisa was to return to marry Errol.
Little did I know what this trip would lead to. We eventually moved from Furzedown in South London to Newark in Nottinghamshire, and a lifelong friendship was cemented. Having discovered that Michael and I shared a passion for crosswords, it seemed natural, when I got bored with reading on my daily commute to London, to set him a puzzle. He solved it and retaliated. This exchange continued for some time. Other commuters, noticing what I was engrossed in, interrupted my work to ask for solutions to puzzles they were solving. I did not give them the answers, but helped them to work it out for themselves. After a while Mike and I decided to do something a bit more ambitious and write a book which took students through a series of graded puzzles with the object of their being competent to solve a daily cryptic puzzle in any of the newspapers. I might say that, in doing so, our own solving abilities became vastly improved. When we began, I would spend my whole journey on the Times Crossword, often without finishing it. Eventually I would use a stopwatch and several times took less than five minutes. This book became, in 1993, ‘Chambers Cryptic Crosswords and How to Solve Them’. It remained in print, with a number of reprints and
going into a second, improved, edition for just short of twenty years, until Chambers was finally taken over by a company which did not want to use it because they specialised in e-books. Not being able to break into a daily newspaper team in those early days, we decided to set what are called advanced cryptics. These are much more difficult, themed, puzzles found in the weekend newspapers, the editors of which accept puzzles from anyone who can meet the standard. We began with The Times Listener, generally recognised as the most complex of this genre. Now we had to have a pseudonym. So Mordred was born. I have always loved Arthurian legend, and as a setter, fancied myself as an evil Knight. Mordred was King Arthur’s treacherous nephew. The ‘dred’ bit fitted nicely with Michael’s surname, and as has been mentioned by more than one sorrowful solver, the whole is a homophone for more dread. We set a couple of joint puzzles as Mordred until, on the editor’s advice, we split up (although remaining very good friends). I became Mordred and Michael continued to set as Emkay.
I continued to compose puzzles for The Listener and was soon setting for other newspapers and magazines. Some puzzles were to appear in collections in books and I was to feature in Collins A-Z of Crosswords. There is more to come on my development in this field.
I have already spoken of my freelance work with groups of people, in particular the Coping With Violence course.
A meeting with two Eastern European mushroom gatherers in the New Forest in October 2013 reminded me of Anansi.
Sometime in the late 1980s I was facilitating a series of team building days with a staff group of residential social workers at varying levels in the hierarchy. I very soon realised I had my work cut out because most of these people only met during handover periods; no two individuals shared the same nationality, gender, racial characteristics or sexual orientation; and there were 17 of them. Deep seated prejudices prevented any meaningful communication.
By the end of the first day it was all in danger of going horribly wrong. Racking my brains overnight, I came up with the idea of the West African mythical storyteller, and Little Miss Muffet.
Abandoning the programme I had prepared earlier, I took a flip-chart and drew a spider hanging from a web on the large sheet of paper. I asked the group members to tell us what they thought and felt when seeing this drawing. As always, it took a minute or two for the first volunteer to tell us about her thoughts. Slowly, people began to rush to tell theirs. And eventually fear or reverence could be expressed.
Anansi, the spider, is loved for his storytelling; whereas it was a spider who ‘frightened Miss Muffet away’.
On another sheet of paper I portrayed a set of cricket stumps with a West Indian male wicket-keeper crouching behind them. I went on to tell of Tony Pinder, the best keeper who ever received my bowling, and how he and his brother Winston, who, when I began playing club cricket in 1957 had been the first black people I had ever met. I spoke of their influence on me, and, in particular, the father figure that Winston, known as Bunny, had struck.
I had their interest. This waned momentarily when I invited them to take their turns at drawing anything relevant to their culture or history that they would like to tell us about. That was scary. However, the floodgates soon opened. At the end of the day many people had not had time for a turn, but all wanted to spend the following, last, day finishing the task. Many brought their own art materials.
Then came what, to me, was the greatest, and most satisfying, surprise. A white Central European woman and a black African man both described mushroom gathering from their childhoods. They realised that they had, after all, something in common. I have always hoped that the team continued to build on the discoveries that emerged from these exercises. Once we accept our differences and look beyond them, we are quite similar, really.
The move to Newark heralded nineteen years commuting to Kings Cross in London. Lindum House cost just £10,000 more than we obtained for our semi-detached home in Furzedown, so I increased my mortgage by that figure.
This was very risky because I had only been freelance for a year and had no clients in Nottinghamshire or Lincolnshire. I calculated that, because long term commuting was priced at a lower rate than shorter distances, I could just afford the annual season ticket to London. That covered 120 miles.
The following year British Rail, as it then was, decided to increase the long distance rates by 5% per annum for five years. The season ticket became unaffordable, so I stayed at home on Fridays as I built up a small amount of local work, and bought daily return tickets. At the same time interest rates went through the roof and mortgage repayments soared.
On my first day of travelling by the Intercity train it broke down in the evening and we arrived home four hours late.
A swan had been caught in the braking system which could not be freed. It was necessary to wait for a replacement engine.
As I walked into the house after midnight I thought “what have I done?”
Fortunately there was nothing so disastrous again and I settled into a travelling community.
One activity was the solving of The Times crossword which led to the creation of Mordred, about which there will be more to come. Unfortunately my fellow travellers got the erroneous impression that I knew everything.
There was to be an NSPCC fundraising quiz night in Grantham at which more than 30 teams competed. Two of these were from our commuter crowd who vied for my company. The team who lost that honour won the competition while mine came second. This was quite salutary.
Memorable as that was, rather closer to home was the ‘great storm’ of 1987. Jessica, Sam, Louisa and I were then living in Furzedown in the London Borough of Wandsworth. I must have been the only person in Southern England who slept through the whole phenomenon. Our neighbour across the road enjoyed no such luxury. He was having a new roof put on, and spent the whole night hanging on to the ropes and stays which were keeping the tarpaulin covers over his otherwise unprotected upper storey.
I always ran to work in Queens Park in those days. This was a nine mile journey which I covered daily carrying a back pack containing my clothes and other necessities for the day. I was employed in the former Paddington Town Hall where there was a shower room which had been installed for the council members. I would take a shower, get dressed, go to a greasy spoon for a fry-up, and start the day sometime before 9 a.m. On this particular day, completely oblivious of the night’s destruction, I set off as usual. I vaguely wondered why a tree I hadn’t noticed before had been felled on Tooting Bec Common, and why there seemed to be rather more traffic jams than usual. Since much of my journey followed treeless routes or public parks I had no idea that the tree I had seen was not the only arboreal casualty. Many others were blocking main roads into London. When I arrived at my building in Harrow Road, I followed my usual routine and then began to wonder why no-one else had arrived. Had I gone by car I may have learned the news on the radio. On the other hand, I too would not have arrived on time.
This storm changed the landscape of Southern England. 70% of the trees in the wooded valley in which Chartwell is set were lost. Those you see today are in fact their replacements. Sevenoaks in Kent is no longer appropriately named.
It is a measure of the vast technological benefits satellites have given meteorological predictions that the paths of such storms can be tracked on our TV screens today. Back in 1987, with no such aids, poor Michael Fish, the TV weatherman – as if his name were not enough – earned decades of jokes by dismissing reports that a hurricane was on its way.
With my father on his deathbed in Hampshire, Jessica, Sam, Louisa, and I
moved to Lindum House in Newark, Nottinghamshire. I was to have one more visit before Dad died on Christmas Day. He was buried at Catherington, near Horndene and it was 34 more years before Mum’s body rejoined him.
It must have been some time in 1986 that my desire to move out of London for the first time had been crystallised by a menacing incident in Tooting. Having been concerned about my two youngest children’s schooling being in a vast comprehensive school I was already thinking about it.
I was walking home from Tooting Bec underground station along Tooting Bec Road to Gracedale Road quietly smoking a cigar. Five young men approached me in line across the wide pavement, allowing me no room for manoeuvre. Sticking to the fences on my side, I faced one who silently squared up to me. Raising the glowing cigar level with his face I asked “Where am I going to go?”.
Nothing more was said. After what seemed an age, but was probably instantaneous, my prospective assailants made space for me to continue on my way. With some difficulty I took care not to look back. But my mind was made up.
We began seriously considering a move, seeking assistance in research from friends and relatives who lived some way from the metropolis. With Giles and the Kindreds both living in Southwell in Nottinghamshire Jessica, Sam, Louisa, and I spent a fortnight’s bed and breakfast holiday in the nearby village of Kersall We had decided to stay up there for a fortnight and search for a house. My discovery, with my friend Giles Darvill, of Lindum House advertised by Gascoigne’s estate agency in Southwell, was the result.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of our hostess, which is a pity because she ran an excellent establishment, and was instrumental in a campaign to save her hamlet’s famous red telephone box from extinction. She carpeted the box, and kept fresh flowers, a visitors book, pencil, and various telephone books inside it. It was regularly cleaned and sweet-scented, and received many visitors. Unfortunately it wasn’t profitable and whichever of our enlightened telephone operators was responsible for this treasure wished to close it. The battle to keep it functional continued into 2008, later residents having kept up the continuing care. I do not know the outcome.
Perhaps because of our focus on selling our own house and buying another, we had not visited my parents in Hampshire’s Horndean for some months. I was shocked to see my tall, strong, father a shadow of his former self who did not join us at the dining table because he didn’t “require very much”. My readers will already have realised the same as I did. I persuaded Mum to get him to hospital. Despite surgery, he was dead from stomach cancer six weeks later. I was able to say goodbye but was not there at his death with took place ten days before we moved. He returned home for his last days. A further shock was how easily, with Joe’s assistance, this featherweight was turned in bed.
In December 1985, Dad was happily playing with Sam and Louisa. The first of these photographs is the one from which I took my pastel portrait.
Like me, our mother thought about him every day for the next 34 years.
These photographs from April 1986 were taken by staff members on my last day as Westminster Social Services Area 1 manager as I prepared to continue my working life in a freelance capacity.
Here I stand in my office in the former Victorian Paddington town hall,
and here I am signing a few documents. Through the window behind me can be seen the old St Mary’s Hospital, which like the town hall has been largely demolished and converted to Housing Association dwellings.
I doubt that any Social Services Departments can today afford the luxury of spacious accommodation for all staff, such as the splendid manager’s office, on the walls of which I was able to hang many family photographs,
Louisa came to see where I had been working. We stand in front of portraits of, clockwise from top left, Michael, Sam, Louisa, Auntie Gwen, Matthew, Dad, and Jessica. One of Becky is obscured by her sister’s head. The other two are of me running in a marathon and in a twenty mile race.
This brought to an end twelve enjoyable, if very difficult, years in post.
For the next 24 years I remained self employed. My major tasks were personal individual and couple counselling; consultation to helping agencies including Local Authorities; supervision (mentoring) of other professionals; group work, such as for training and support; and various chairmanships, including those of Adoption and Fostering panels; and the occasional Social Work task, such as preparation of assessment reports for a court.
I have already mentioned that my former Director of Social Services surprised me with a contract for one day a week across the board in my old Department. The Coping with Violence course featured earlier was one task from Westminster.
Jackie was simultaneously ironing and watching television on the afternoon of 2nd July 1987. It was then some years since we had last seen each other. The header picture of BBC News which was broadcast that day was a full face portrait something like this one
taken by my brother Chris. Despite the shock to my then ex-wife, I don’t think any items of clothing were burnt.
You may well ask where I am and what I am doing there. Well, I am in a side-street just off Oxford Street in Central London. So close were we to the main thoroughfare that the watchers in the window must have been in an outlet in Oxford Street.
During the morning notices fixed to the bath announced the event and the charity, Westminster Mencap, of which I was a Committee Member, for which donations were sought.
Volunteers poured in the various ingredients and stirred them into the consistency of porridge. It was a pleasantly warm viscous mixture into which the chosen victims lowered themselves for their allotted stints.
Two slang words for a prison sentence are in fact ‘stir’ and ‘porridge’, which fact you may or may not find interesting.
Most people dressed down for the performance. It was Chris’s brilliant idea that I should approach Moss Bros to ask them to donate an ex-hire morning suit, complete with topper, for the event. I therefore dressed up.
The system was each of us would spend ten minute periods, with a minute or two changing over. My temporary companion was Jane Reynolds, the then Director of the Association. That wasn’t particularly arduous, now was it?
Tubs of rather colder water were provided for a clean up afterwards. There was no shirking that.
Finally, my niece Fiona was on hand with a collecting box, hopefully relieving spectators of the money they had saved in the Selfridges sale on the other side of Oxford Street.
This Charity was one of those renting space in the Area 1 building. It also became a consultancy client of mine, so I regularly visited their rooms in the former Town Hall. It was not long before I joined the Committee which got me into the above fine mess.
Sometime in the late 1970s I travelled to King’s Lynn on the Norfolk coast in order to deliver a speech about Social Work to the nuns of a convent about ten miles away. From London this involved a lengthy train journey and cab rides. The town was etched in my memory because it had suffered from the North Sea flooding of 1953.
(BBC News)
‘The devastating North Sea flood of 1953 caused catastrophic damage and loss of life in Scotland, England, Belgium and The Netherlands and became one of the worst peacetime disasters of the 20th century. 307 people died in England, 19 died in Scotland, 28 died in Belgium, 1,836 died in the Netherlands and a further 361 people died at sea.
The flood caused a major rethinking of coastal defences, weather prediction and warning systems after it became obvious that the majority of deaths could have been avoided had these already been in place. The failure of any preventative measures meant many people – babies, adults and the elderly – went to bed that on that fateful night of Saturday 31 January 1953 not knowing of the devastation to come and for many that they would not wake up in the morning.
The Terrain
The east coast of the UK has a number of low lying areas, some of which are barely above sea level, most notably in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Essex and the mouth of the Thames area. The Netherlands also has 50% of its territory less than 1 metre above sea level and 20% of it is below.
Sea defences in the UK were of inadequate design for flooding and tidal surges in 1953. What little there was had been designed in World War Two and was designed to keep invading armies out, not invading seas. The natural sea barriers such as sand dunes had also seen much erosion and had numerous gaps where people had walked over and worn away the natural height. Tragically, these would later prove to be natural inlets and gateways for the sea surge to flow inland.
Post war housing shortages also saw a rise in the number of pre-fabricated buildings (mainly in a bungalow design) in many of these low lying areas. This cheap type of housing was also popular with the rising post-war trend of seaside holidays especially in places like Essex and were nearly always located very close to the shoreline. The design of this type of house was never intended to withstand such force and many collapsed or were simply washed along with the current, ending up metres away from where they originally stood or washed out to sea entirely.
Lack of warning
That afternoon of 31 January 1953, a number of people noticed a weak tidal ebb. However, it didn’t seem to cause any alarm and people carried about their daily business as usual. Fishing boats still went out as usual and buses still ran their routes along the seafront. It was a typical Saturday for the people living on the coast. The official weather forecast was a slight drizzle and strong winds but nothing regarding waves and tidal flow.
This calm evening was soon to change. At different points during the evening, the tide surged over the sea walls taking many by surprise and leaving no time to warn others. One survivor in Norfolk said it took less than 15 minutes from the water first tricking in, to reaching almost 5 ft inside his property. Those living closest to the sea reported that a wall of water came over almost immediately with many homes collapsing instantaneously with the force of the water rushing in.
The force of the sea also snapped telephone and electricity cables, rendering communication impossible. Similar stories were reported in Belgium and The Netherlands. The coastal residents on both sides of the North Sea were entirely at the mercy of the tide.
The death toll at sea also included those from a number of smaller fishing vessels to the larger passenger ferry MV Princess Victoria, which sailed from Stranraer to Larne with 179 people on board including 51 crew. A rogue wave broke open the already damaged ferry doors whilst sailing in the Northern channel. One survivor recollected seeing one of the lifeboats crashing back into the sinking ferry, capsizing and pulling all the women and children on board down to their deaths. Of all the passengers and crew on board the ferry that night, no women or child survived. 133 lives were lost in total and only 44 men survived.
Immediate aftermath
The preliminary emergency response came from the surviving community itself due to delays in communicating for outside assistance. Outside of the affected areas, the first that many knew of what had happened was many hours after the majority of people had been killed.
In the UK, 1600km of coastline was damaged destroying mile upon mile of sea wall and inundating 160,000 acres of land with seawater, rendering it unusable for a number of years for agricultural purposes. Livestock and domesticated animals were killed in the thousands and washed out to sea. Over 24,000 homes in the UK were seriously damaged. 40,000 people in the UK were left homeless and many people’s livelihoods were ruined. In the Netherlands where the death toll was much higher, 9% (337,300 acres) of Dutch farmland was devastated by sea water. Over 47,000 homes were damaged, 10,000 of which were completely destroyed.
When the official UK search and rescue operation was launched on the morning of 1 February it involved the police, ambulance staff, the fire service, army, the Navy and RAF personnel. The ‘blitz’ spirit was once again in full swing with temporary shelters popping up and soups kitchens opening. The story of the flood went worldwide with offers of help coming in from many places abroad such as Canada, Finland and even from schoolchildren in Kuwait.
In The Netherlands, the US Army (based in East Germany) sent aid as well as other surrounding European countries. A national donation program was implemented as well as international aid pouring in. The Red Cross was so overwhelmed with contributions; they actually gave away funds to other countries in need.
Post flood
Questions soon began to emerge regarding the complete lack of warning given to the population and the consequent number of deaths. UK priority was initially given to repairing sea walls in addition to rehousing the displaced population. Long-term, building new flood defences were based much more on a cost/risk basis.
The Thames Barrier, which I photographed in April 2002) is one such example that was designed and built following the lessons from the 1953 flood. Warning sirens were put in place at the most at risk areas and are still in use today. The response in the Netherlands was immediate with the Dutch government quickly forming the Delta commission to study the floods and eventually the ‘Delta Works’ were commissioned, enabling the closing of estuaries to prevent upstream flooding and included dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees, and barriers. Taxes were implemented and readily accepted with a national mind-set that this must never happen again. Even today, commemorations still happen on every anniversary for the dead.
Weather and tidal forecasting leapt forward in the ‘60s with the use of satellites, which provided more accurate predictions and data. The Met office began working with the National Oceanography centre and the environment agency was created. We also saw the emergence of more immediate communication with TV and regular weather reports.
Despite all the huge improvements made since 1953 and as the famous story of King Canute and the waves showed, man can never control the sea. However, we can be better warned of its actions ahead of time. Sadly for the coastal residents of 1953, neither time nor tide could wait. ‘ Weather and tidal forecasting leapt forward in the ‘60s with the use of satellites, which provided more accurate predictions and data. The Met office began working with the National Oceanography centre and the environment agency was created. We also saw the emergence of more immediate communication with TV and regular weather reports.’
The last passenger train was, as far as I remember, about 6.30 p.m. This was confirmed by the sole station staff member. I arrived in such good time that I went for a walk, returning to see a train departing.
I became further perturbed when I saw the single employee pedalling away. I caught up with him and asked if that had been my train. With a look of terror he informed me that there was only the night train to come and cycled off in haste.
There was a long wait ahead of me. No dining establishments were open. There was a cinema – showing ‘Stand Up Virgin Soldiers’. I bought a large cup of popcorn and settled into my seat – one of three now occupied.
The film was meant to be funny, but I wasn’t in the mood.
The night train got me home in the small hours of the morning.
