High Water 3

The floods came again, worse than last year (see High Water 1 and 2). For a couple of weeks we watched the puddles in our long garden gradually spread, and the fields between us and the river slowly disappear. Eventually the Thames towpath was impassable, and it became clear that the levels weren’t going to stop rising. A couple of days later the nearby Abingdon Road, one of the main routes out of Oxford, was closed, though some thick-headed drivers still insisted on pushing through the knee-deep waters.

I would have expected the silencing of traffic noise to have left me feeling quieter, as if an incessant buzzing had been flicked off along with a light. But when flood water is creeping up your road, and neighbours are forced to use temporary toilets provided by the council, information – the getting, digesting, transmitting – makes its own buzzing. How far’s the water reached? Will it come in through the doors? Through the floor? Is there somewhere you can stay? How high will it get? Are you prepared? Can we help? Phone calls, email, facebook, texts, conversations in the street, checking websites and weather forecasts – there’s a continuous rattling in the brain. And all the time there’s the “What if? Will it? Has it?”

We were as prepared as possible from early on, with sandbags round the doors, and downstairs rooms half emptied. Our house is one of the highest on the street, so even at its peak the water was a good 20cm away from coming in. Still, the week of the worst floods was unnerving even for those of us who’d experienced this kind of thing a few times before.

I really don’t like the sense of something tugging at my mind all the time, and when it happens, I try to put it all to one side and just notice things. Someone had commented on the Oxford Mail’s live blog about the floods that “this is truly a beautiful disaster”. When I stopped and looked, and didn’t think, I saw that she was right. Everything changes when the ground is covered with water, just as it does after a night of heavy snow. Sound doesn’t disappear though – if anything it’s clearer, because there’s no fug of engine noise. But really the most of the change is in the light. The world reflects.

This reflection is at its strongest when the sun is out (between rainstorms), and silver fills every gap in the inverted images of trees and fences. Birds have a double flight that tricks the eye – up or down? Evergreen hedges look gold on the water’s surface, while along their flanks roll the white bands of the sun’s rays reflected. In the fine intervals the side of our shed was draped with a lacework of moving threads. A young apple tree we planted just a few years ago gleamed around its thin trunk and on the underside of its leaves, even when it stood in shadow.

When the rain returns, the view changes. Leaves hang, discharging their drops into the lake below. Smaller birds disappear, and the larger ones hunch on branches, their reflections continuously distorted. Across the whole surface of the flood each ripple’s circle interacts with those around it, amplifying, collapsing, instantly replaced by the start of a new ring. It’s impossible to capture any part of the water’s top and say this is what it looks like now. And the whole is sheened with grey, as if the clouds insist their colours into the ground.

The interaction of these patterns on patterns is ringed by animal life. As the waters spread across our lawn, birds descended. Blackbirds moved around on the edge of the water, stabbing for the worms driven out of the inundated ground. Pigeons stepped further in, soaking their bellies. The smaller birds that normally peck about the grass, dunnocks and robins, now only appear as shapes zipping across between the hedges and the trees. Blue tits and great tits, which would visit our feeders if we could get across the garden to fill them up, are calls in the twigs high above the water.

The habits of all the usual birds are changed and troubled by the floods. Species that never normally appear start to drop in – a songthrush joined the blackbirds, then redwings. Fieldfares chatter in the cherry tree down by the back fence. Just once, a house sparrow – that emblem of the threats to biodiversity in Britain – sat calling on the shed.

Less usual creatures also put in an appearance. In laying our sandbag defences round the doors, I opened an old recycling box we keep filled with heavy plastic bags. These we use to provide some degree of water proofing behind the sand. As the lid came up, so did a small brown shape, springing from the folds of the bags and then hurtling round the inside of the box. It was a house mouse, all grey form with pink limbs and dark eyes.

I had to get the bags out, and in doing so uncovered another mouse, which fizzed around as fast as the other. They must have been driven from their usual homes into the relative warmth of these old bags. I took the smallest number I could, and gently replaced the box lid. Over the next few days it was bizarrely reassuring to look out of the window across the water to the box, and think of those two animals sheltering there.

It was well into the worst week of the floods when our other unusual visitor arrived. When I looked out of the kitchen window, wondering how much the level had risen in the last hour or so, I thought “How did that dog get in?”

I looked again – no dog, but a deer, a muntjac. Dogs don’t chew the ivy off the shed. A few more leaves disappeared, and I took a couple of photographs. It seemed a long, still time. The deer munched, twitched its nose and moved its ears backwards and forwards round its stumpy antlers.

After a while it came to look at the back door, but didn’t like what it saw. It seems that deer don’t pass the “self-awareness test”; they see a rival where we would see a reflection. It made off down the side of the house.

I presumed that this was where it had got in – somehow bypassing the gates – and went to the front window. Nothing. Nothing down the side of the house either. I went back to the kitchen to make the cup of tea I’d come down for. There it was again, eating, insouciant.

Deer are so common now that this encounter wasn’t really surprising. To someone concerned about deers’ effect on fragile habitats (not that our garden is one) perhaps it shouldn’t even have been welcome. But to be so close to a large animal, to run up against its otherness, seemed to distil all the anger/wonder that I felt when looking out at the floods: “what the hell’s it doing there/how fantastic”.  I suppose that the intensity of my reaction is an indication of how cut off I am from the wildlife around me, despite my attempts to stop and be aware of it.

Well, I had no idea how it got in, and none about how it would get out. I had visions of it trapped and panicky as the water rose ever deeper on the patio, and me having to wade out there, catch it, stick it under my arm and somehow cart it up the road to dry land. Part of me quite enjoyed the adventurous prospect – but only part.

The deer, of course, had its own solution. Human expectation (mine, at least) instinctively is that “nature” needs a hand, needs sorting out. But the muntjac soon made its way along our flowerbeds, built by previous owners several breezeblocks high (and now several centimetres under the surface). At the point where the beds ended and deep water across the lawn began, it stopped. With one foot it uneasily tested the way ahead. Then jumped.

The opposite of a penguin, a swimming deer is not a graceful thing. Its backwash soon filled the whole width of the garden with lurching heaves. Its ears, antlers and nose stood proud of the water only by great  effort, so it seemed.

Soon it squeezed behind the stand of bamboo I’d love to get rid of. It must have pushed its way between the stems and the fence, because finally I saw it eating the buddleia at the far end of the garden, where the ground rises again.

Unlike the mice, the deer was not a constant (imagined) companion, though it returned a few times in the next days, presumably vaulting the fence up there. The floods had driven it out of the playing fields by the main road, where I’d seen it before (and since), and to stave off hunger it was looking for food wherever it could stand only hoof deep. A member of an invasive species it may be, but it had made sure of its survival in the uncertain new terrain of southern England. I can’t be sure that I can say the same.