He rows them towards the dredger, accompanied by two interested American airmen—whose uniforms, as far as Tom can tell, cause Dick to panic.

The traumatic event disrupted the social and economic structures of the region and forced its inhabitants to adapt to new ways of life. Together with his dawning sexual awareness—a process that had begun three years before, when Freddie had put the eel in Mary’s knickers—is a driving need to know about fathers and sons, not where babies come from but who put them there. Family and Relationships: The novel delves into the complex relationships between family members, including the dynamics of power, violence, and betrayal. For those unfamiliar with the book, Waterland concerns the history of two East Anglian families, the Cricks and the Atkinsons, separated by social class and wealth, but linked by a tragic secret.For instance, before the half-way point I was speculating about what Mary did about her pregnancy that left her unable to have children. But there’s a certain historical inevitability to the way later generations find themselves working for the men who really start to transform the landscape. By the end of the next chapter, we are beginning to understand how Crick and his wife, in their mid-50s as Crick tells it, might still be feeling the repercussions.

He teaches them about recognised historical events, his ancestral history, and his own personal history. They were sixteen in 1943, and, after two years of study, Tom does his National Service in war-ruined Germany for two further years until 1947. The whole story, of course, was in diaries kept in that box in the attic, and Tom was always going to get access to it somehow. Major themes in the novel include storytelling and history, exploring how the past leads to future consequences. I’m doing what Crick does, offering thumbnail versions of events in the knowledge that there’s a lot more to be told about them.

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. It would be easy for him to assume that only Mary does, and not him, because ‘in her fifty-third year’ she starts to behave strangely. Waterland is about Tom Crick, a history teacher who is losing his job because history is no longer seen as important by his school's headmaster. But I can’t remember whether he actually reminds her that he wasn’t the one who made the false claim about Freddie being the father.

Whatever the truth might be, after his daughter and unsuspecting son-in-law move into the cottage next to the New Atkinson Lock, he sends over a box and a key that only young Richard will ever be able to use. The confused circumstances of the death, and the narrator’s bland allusion to the fact that the pathologist never looks closely enough to notice the earlier bruise on Freddie’s temple, are irrelevant to her. Historiographic metafictions self-consciously draw attention to how history and the practice of writing history are a construction.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.

If and when it happens—and there are other stories in other time-lines that aren’t fully resolved yet—Swift will have achieved his coup. Dick dives into the water, stays underwater so long nobody ever sees him come up, and he is never seen again. Tom resists this because his leaving would mean that the History Department would cease to exist and would be combined with the broader area of General Studies.

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. However, I want to focus on Crick, and his view of history because, while the other losses this book deals with are familial or personal, the loss of history – the deliberate erasure of the subject from school syllabuses and from the communal consciousness – that became a hot topic in the Thatcher/Reagan era was, and continues to be, a matter for collective grief. It’s a master-stroke on Swift’s part to have this desperate man resort to a kind of narrative sleight of hand, a trick.