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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Amid the mudflats

On the Estuary (Radio 4), Woman's Hour (Radio 4)

The soundtrack of this evocative series of 15-minute shorts (broadcast mid-afternoon from Monday to Friday) had very few words, but instead created vivid aural pictures of that vast wetland wilderness, mudflats shimmering as the sea rushes in and out, thousands of birds wheeling overhead, squawking, squealing, hooting. Knots, dunlins, godwits, redshanks — what ancient, atmospheric names. In the winter months 400,000 of them take over the huge estuary, from Skegness to Hunstanton and Boston to King’s Lynn, fleeing the northern icecap. Grey plovers with their telltale jet-black bibs and chequerboard markings like a Formula One flag, red-breasted mergansers with their spiky punk hairdos and serrated bills, and the pink-footed geese from Siberia.

It’s a desolate, dangerous place for mere mortals, the tides rushing in so fast, the mudflats so unstable. In 1216 when King John was on the move around the country trying to tame his unruly baron lords, he travelled from Lynn to Wisbech by the safe landlocked route but ordered his baggage train to take the shortcut across the Wash causeway. The tide rushed in and everything was lost, including the great crown of England. He died a week later — not so much from a surfeit of peaches as from petulant shame at losing his badge of office.

Listening to The Estuary (produced by Sarah Blunt) was almost as good as being there; such intensity of sound and silence. If you missed it, take your laptop to an armchair by the fire just as the light fades on these dreary January afternoons. You’ll almost smell the mudflats — an intense mixture of silt and salt, seaweed and birdlime — and feel that wind blasting your cheeks.

Another reminder on Radio Four this week that history matters in the Woman’s Hour Drama, which took us back to the beginning of the last century. Writing the Century was dramatised (by Vanessa Rosenthal) from letters written between 1900 and 1912 by Rudyard Kipling, which were interwoven with the diaries of a Kensington housewife called Ada Reece. Ada was born in 1869 and for almost 80 years kept a journal until her death in the 1960s. Two very different views of life from that era — Kipling, the friend of Cecil Rhodes and Stanley Baldwin, flitting between his winter retreat in Cape Town and his idyllic Sussex home at Bateman’s while busily writing Kim and Puck of Pook’s Hill; Ada, a bored civil servant’s wife, beset by servant problems and what to have for dinner.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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