Logs in the beck, by Elspeth Garbutt

An original contemporary memoir extract.

I was not, I should say at the start, a believer. When the young woman from the university first came up our track in a hired car with mud to its door handles, and told me she wanted to help me stop Thwaite Bridge from flooding by putting logs in my streams, I gave her a cup of tea and a polite hearing, and when she had gone I told my husband she was daft.

You have to understand what flooding meant to us. Thwaite Bridge sits at the bottom of our valley like water at the bottom of a cup. In 2015 the beck came through the village at four in the morning, and I stood at the top of our lane in a coat over my nightdress and watched it pour through the windows of the school where I had learned to read. Forty-one homes. The pub. The chapel. My sister-in-law’s kitchen, three times in four years. You do not forget the smell. River mud, diesel and wet plaster.

The engineers’ answer was always a wall. A bigger wall, a higher wall, a wall that would cost eleven million pounds, if the money was found. The money was never found.

Dr Anjali Sethi’s answer was different. The problem, she said, was not the water. It was the speed. When heavy rain fell on our drained, cleared hillsides, it raced off the fields and down the becks and arrived in the village all at the same moment, like a crowd through a single door. Slow it down, she said, hold it back on the hill for even a few hours, and the peak would be lower.

So, for three winters, we slowed it down. With volunteers, students and anyone else who could hold a spade, we built a hundred and sixty leaky dams: big logs pinned across the gullies, low enough to let the normal flow through and high enough to hold back a flood. We planted thirty thousand trees, every one by hand, every one with a plastic guard that I swore at in the sleet. My husband said the place looked like a beaver had been let loose. I began to think he was right, and that the beaver had a point.

Then, in February two years ago, the rain came. It rained for thirty-six hours without stopping, the kind of rain I had learned to dread. At three in the morning I went out with a torch and walked up the beck.

Every dam was full. Behind each one, a brown pool trembled and spilled, slow and steady, into the next. The hill was holding the water, exactly as she had promised it would. I stood there in the dark and I cried, which I am not in the habit of doing.

By morning the beck was high, very high, but it stayed in its banks. The gauge by the bridge showed the peak was lower than in 2015, and it had arrived four hours later. Four hours. Enough for every family in the valley to lift their furniture, or simply to sleep.

Nobody wrote a newspaper story about it. There is no headline in a village that does not flood. But my sister-in-law sent me a photograph of her kitchen floor that morning, bone dry, with a single line underneath: ‘Thank your logs for me.’

I owe Dr Sethi a second cup of tea, and an apology.

The flood project above Thwaite Bridge is described as a quiet triumph. How does the writer try to show this?

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