The Covenant

I love to walk out on a Sunday morning, whilst the streets are still deserted: especially after rain, the pavements shining wet, and in this Victorian part of the town with its small factories and chapels and workers’ cottages, the pavements are uneven to catch puddles and the streets are steep to form rivulets in their gutters, leaving little pools afterwards, where the granite kerbs have worn smooth and even the common dirt and grit is made lustrous by the water.

I pass over a brook emerging from a culvert at one side: a Victorian brickwork arch almost overgrown. All the streams are full now. At the other side of the road I cannot quite see the brook, as it’s doubly fenced off by factory boundaries. I hear a loud rushing sound: at first I thought it was an air-conditioning plant but that’s absurd, for there are no vents to be seen. I realise it must be an invisible waterfall where the stream sinks into the culvert, protected doubtless by an iron grille to prevent children or animals from being swept into the dark channel that flows under the road: how frightening—or even fatal—that would be!

We’ve had drought for several years in these parts, and though it has rained they’ve said that the underground aquifers were still almost empty, and I took their word for it, particularly as the stream which flows through Hughenden Park had become a mere sunken path. I searched there fruitlessly last summer for mint beetles – see illustration – but even the mint had dried up and could no longer support them. As for the “no fishing” sign, where once there’d been a dam with sluice gates and a little island, that had become something to laugh at, and I could not understand why it had been repainted. Now it does have a purpose again, though it may take a while for the fish to return. I see I am not the only one to be joyful at the resurgence of this little river: all the dog owners have been altering their route so as to walk beside it and go over the little bridges recently redundant. Their dogs caught the excitement too and though it’s still February could not resist jumping in to splash and swim.

As a child of five I used to go with my cousin down to the “Wishing Well” which was actually a spring emerging from the mouth of a stone lion’s head into a stone basin, all green with algae but flowing busily. Our ritual was to cup our hands and drink as much as we could, then walk up the other hill in strict silence till we’d gone three times around the Wishing Tree. Then we would each make a wish.

Will the polar ice caps melt and engulf us? Can we wish it away from happening?

Ah, we have the rainbow, that covenant between God and man, so it says in the book of Genesis, 10: 11-17, where the Lord promises not to destroy the earth by flood again. Does this covenant become null and void if the flooding is due to the act or negligence of man? Is there a divine call centre to answer my question?