Norman Townsend and the Climate and Ecological Emergency
This contribution to the Climate Museum UK ‘Extreme Weather Stories’ collection is by author Jessica Townsend. Jessica is a member of the Writers Rebel team and she read this piece as part of their online event with Culture Declares, which explored the impact of floods.
My father-in-law was called Norm, and if I’m honest, he was an odd-looking man with wonky teeth and an amiable manner. He always wheezed a little because he had lost one lung to tuberculosis during the war.
He was clever verging on cunning sometimes. One of his quirks was that he adored a bargain and would bring out his latest triumph: a pair of leather shoes or a woollen jumper and say: ‘guess how much I paid for this?’ And chuckle at our inflated estimates.
His son Chris — given access to the kind of education not available to Norm — became a doctor. He resembled his father though he was a handsome, fitter, new coining of those genes.
I was born into a big Roman Catholic tribe and so the spare lines of my husband’s nuclear family felt claustrophobic to me. But I had fallen pregnant at nineteen with Chris’ child and they welcomed me in without reservation. I think Norm took a romantic view of our predicament.
They had a wide garden with an immaculate lawn and a path edged by tall fir trees. My children used to run between these while we adults drank tea or sherry and talked uncontroversially about roses or the weather. It was always a long wait for the elaborate meals to cook because it was in the language of food that Norm and Vera chose to tell us that they loved us.
I remember my son playing cowboys and shouting at his granny as if she were his second fiddle playmate that she should die better and Vera laughing and trying hard to be a better baddie.
And as the car climbed the Cotswold Hills with sleeping children in the back seat, on our journey home, we looked down at the River Severn snaking in the valley and we never thought very much about it. It was part of the local beauty like the beech trees, the bluebells and the rabbits.
Life seemed to move quite slowly in those days, like a river itself with a calm surface, but the route it took was sometimes unexpected. I later painfully divorced my husband: our young marriage proved not to be built on firm enough foundations and it broke down and with it all our hearts. A decade later, Chris died in a flying accident and our hearts were beaten up again.
I still had family in Gloucester and staying over for Easter, a few years later, my sister took me to visit the docks because the level of the water from the River Severn was dangerously high: almost running over the wooden walkways. There were crowds of people gawking just like us. But I didn’t see it as menacing rather I teased my sister. It felt like the most interesting thing to do on a holiday in my home town was to go look at a water line.
Two years later, I heard that Norm and Vera’s house had been flooded for the first time in the forty years that they had lived there: it made me sad to think of the perfect lawn covered with water, the post-war furniture sodden and ruined and the patterned carpets stinking. My kids were at university by then so I only got intermittent reports, but it was disturbing to hear that Norm and Vera had decided to camp out in a caravan in the garden while the repairs were done because they were terrified of being burgled.
I knew that if Chris had been alive, he would have insisted that they go to live with him. My children worried about Norm spending a winter in a caravan with only one lung and Vera who was already showing early signs of dementia.
I believe they had moved back into the house when Norm eventually took ill and then died of pneumonia. My son organised Tesco deliveries from his office in Hong Kong but Vera began to act strangely hoovering the house in the middle of the night and eventually her other remaining son moved her into a care home.
My daughter rang her every other day. When Vera sounded paranoid she thought her son was scheming to take away her things or her carers were being nasty, my daughter talked her down.
I think these conversations, more than any drugs, kept Vera’s dementia at bay for the two years before she too died. Vera said that sometimes when she felt provoked, she would hear my daughter’s voice speaking calmly in her head saying: ‘Really Granny. Are you sure about that? Maybe there’s a nicer explanation’
Global warming is not just ruining the lives of exotic strangers in sub-Saharan Africa and in India. It is not just laying waste the habitats of polar bears, elephants and rhinoceri. It is already here in Somerset Yorkshire Gloucestershire Norfolk and London. It is in the local news bulletins. It is hiding in plain sight.
