The Environment and Climate Change

Story · all 20 words

The Line on the Kitchen Wall

There is a pencil line on the kitchen wall of my parents’ house, about eleven inches above the skirting board, with July 2007 written next to it in my father’s handwriting.

There is a second line four inches above it. That one says Feb 2020.

The village is not on a river. That is the part people find hard to believe. It is on a slight slope about a mile from a stream that is two feet wide in August and which you would not notice if you were not looking for it.

In 2007 the water came up through the drains and across the road from a field, and it was in the house for four hours and in the walls for eleven months. My parents lived in a caravan on the drive from September to the following July. The insurance paid, eventually, after a fight.

What I remember most is not the water. It is the smell in October, and my mother crying about a photograph album, which was the only time in my life I have seen her do that.

Everybody said it was a once-in-a-century flood.

It happened again thirteen years later.

I am careful about what I claim from this, because one house is not evidence of anything and I know that. Two floods in thirteen years in one village proves nothing about climate change on its own. The people who study this say the pattern across thousands of places is what matters, and the pattern is that extreme weather of this kind is arriving more often. The same village had a standpipe in the road during the drought of 1976, and the heatwave of 2022 killed both my mother’s apple trees. No one of those three things means anything on its own.

But something did change in that village between the two, and it was not only the rainfall.

Between 2007 and 2020 they built ninety-one houses on the field the water came across, and the field is now driveways and roofs, and water does not soak into a driveway. Nobody in that planning process was thinking about global warming. They were thinking about a housing target.

That is the thing I did not understand until it happened twice: the impact is almost never one cause. It is heavier rain landing on ground that has been made harder, in a place where the drains were sized in 1961.

My father is seventy-nine and he is not an environmentalist in any sense he would accept. He has never been on a march. He calls the whole subject “all that”.

He also, since 2020, has solar panels, a heat pump he complains about constantly and defends furiously if a neighbour criticises it, and a house that is now genuinely energy-efficient because the rebuild made it possible to insulate properly. His electricity comes from a renewable tariff he switched to because it was ninety pounds a year cheaper, not because of emissions. He complains bitterly about the pollution from the A-road and does not connect that to any of this either.

His carbon footprint is a fraction of what it was in 2006 and he would be irritated to be told so.

I think about that a great deal, because the public conversation is mostly about whether people believe the science, and my father is proof that this may not be the important question. He has never once said the words fossil fuels in my hearing. He has, nevertheless, stopped burning them.

The village did not get flood defences. It got a report.

What it did get was a group of eleven residents who now clear the drains themselves every autumn, which is not how any of this is supposed to work, which is in no sense sustainable, and which is currently the only thing standing between forty houses and a third pencil line.

I do not think you can tackle this at the level of a kitchen. I recycle, I have not flown since 2019, our waste goes in the right bins and rather less of it reaches landfill than it did, and I am under no illusion that this is what will decide it. Household packaging and single-use plastic and litter on the riverbank are the visible part, and the visible part is not the same as the large part.

The large part is what heats buildings and what moves lorries and what is built on which field.

But my parents are still in that house, at seventy-nine and eighty-one, and there is room on that wall for another line, and everybody in the village knows exactly where it would go.