Waterland by Graham Swift Page A

standards) that they got Ideas – something the stick-in-the-mud Cricks rarely entertained.
    Before Vermuyden came to the Fens and encountered the obstinacy of the Fen-dwellers, an Atkinson forefather, on his bleating hillside, conceived the idea of becoming a bailiff; and his son, a bailiff born, conceived the idea of becoming a farmer of substance; and one of the fourth, fifth or sixth generation of idea-conceiving Atkinsons, while land was being enclosed and the wool trade fluctuating, sold most of his sheep, hired ploughmen and sowed barley, which grew tall and fruitful in the chalky upland soil and which he sent to the maltster to be transformed into beer.
    And that is another difference between the Cricks and the Atkinsons. That whereas the Cricks emerged from water, the Atkinsons emerged from beer.
    Those acres of land he ploughed must have been special, and Josiah Atkinson must have known a thing or two, because word got around that the malt made from his barley was not only exceptional but there was magic in it.
    The good – and exceedingly good-humoured – villagers of west Norfolk drank their ale with relish and, having nothing to compare it with, took for granted its excellence as only what true ale should be. But the brewers of the nearby towns, eager men with a flair, even then, for market research, sampled the village produce on foraging excursions and inquired whence came the malt. The maltster in his turn, a simple fellow, could not refrain while praise was being heaped on his malt from declaring the source of his barley. Thus it came about that in the year 1751 Josiah Atkinson, farmer of Wexingham, Norfolk, and George Jarvis, maltster of Sheverton, entered a contract, initiated by the former but to the advantage – so it appeared – of the latter, whereby they agreed to share the cost of purchase or hire of wagons, wagoners and teams of horses to convey their mutual product, for their mutual profit, to the brewers of Swaffham and Thetford.
    This partnership of Jarvis and Atkinson thrived. But Josiah, who had already conceived another idea, did notdeny himself in this agreement the right to send his barley, if he so wished, to be malted elsewhere. Atkinson foresight told him that in his son’s or his grandson’s lifetime, if not in his own, the brewers in their market towns would find it expedient to operate their own malting houses, close at hand, and that Jarvis, who for the present believed Atkinson to be tied by their joint commitment to the brewers, would suffer.
    So he did – or, rather, so did his successors. While across the Atlantic the first warning shots were being fired in what is known to you as the War of American Independence, William Atkinson, Josiah’s son, began sending his barley direct to the brewers. Old George’s son, John, perplexed, enraged but powerless, could only fall back on local trade. His malting business declined. In 1779, with the boldness of a man only pursuing an inevitable logic, William Atkinson offered to buy him out. Jarvis, humbled, broken, agreed. From that day the Jarvises became overseers of the Atkinson malting house.
    William, nothing compunctious, had only to complete the well-laid stratagem of his father. On his sorrel horse, with his tricorn hat on his head, he went visiting the brewers of Swaffham and Thetford. He announced that as for his barley, there was none finer, as they well knew, in the region; nor was there any shortage of it (for was he not even now bringing more land under the plough?) but henceforth no brewer was to have it unless it was malted at the Atkinson maltings.
    The brewers protested, arched their eyebrows, pushed back their carved oak chairs, snapped the stems of their clay pipes. What of their own malting houses, built at considerable expense and for the express convenience of proximity? William replied that, by all means, they should continue to use them – to produce an ale that their customers would surely judge inferior.