Waterland

Tom alludes to a French Revolution guillotine scenario to make the point that people are afraid to watch but too fascinated to turn away. Then, back in the classroom, he asks his students whether this is true of history in general. Afterward he offers up yet another story, this time about the East Wind.

The flu travels from “its birth in the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberia” (271) and ravages the Fens in 1937. Tom, age nine, suffers from it for a week and recovers, but his mother contracts the disease and never recovers.

The night she dies, she becomes delirious and asks for Dick, not Tom. Tom listens to the “wild, pitiless wind” and thinks “surely it is some trick of this deranging wind—the sound of subdued human sobs” (280) when Henry cries over Helen’s dead body. They bury her in the Hockwell churchyard and grow flowers in their garden for her grave.

Tom backtracks by mentioning that his father did not use the word “dead” but “gone” (282) when referring to Helen’s death. Since he and Dick are not able to view her dead body, young Tom believes “gone” implies her return, and wonders, “Well, if she’s gone, when is she coming back?” (283).

The East Wind’s “summer sibling, its winsome, hot-breathed sister” (290) blows in one afternoon in August 1943. Tom meets Mary at their usual place, the windmill, one week after Freddie’s death because he needs to talk about planting the bottle in Dick’s bedroom and Dick’s subsequent disposal of it.

Mary continuously jumps up and down to harm her pregnant body and rid herself of the baby, leading Tom to believe the baby is Dick’s. During this heart-wrenching scene, Tom is engulfed by despair and thinks, “despite wheat fields and poppies and cornflower heavens: everything’s coming to an end” (296).

Tom has a nightmare where he’s involved in a traffic jam after a television announcement about the imminent end of the world states there are only four minutes left. He attempts to reach those he knows and loves, but when he does, they are oblivious to the danger. Somehow, Tom knows they must commit suicide, so they all take suicide pills, only the “funny thing is, in my dream I’m the only one left. I’m not hurt. But everywhere there’s just this dust. And I’m walking round thinking it won’t ever be, it can’t ever” (297).