Waterland

Tom implores Price not to apologize and suggests they leave the pub since drinking doesn’t help. He refers to people in history who have “felt it”: Saxon hermits, Egyptians, his father, his grandfather, and Mary. He defines “it” as “the old, old feeling, that everything might amount to nothing” (269).

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.