FLOODS are the very stuff of legend, from the actual scale of Noah's spot of dampness in what we used to call the Near East having grown in the telling over the millennia to enlivening moments in the second-most boring conversation at suburban dinner parties.
If a hostess' heart sinks to rock-bottom when someone has to resort to boasting how much his des res is worth now, it rises but marginally when the competition turns to the horrors survived during the sale of his previous home.
However, I switched back on the other day, after smiling blandly through assorted tales about time-wasters who really only wanted to feel superior about the vendor's taste in wallpaper, when the guest from Neasham told how her punter's pen was poised almost literally above the contract when his hand was stayed; not by a query about the precise area of the said heriditament, but by the swish of rising water in her garden by the Tees near Darlington.
It was an incident, larded as it will be over the generations even more thoroughly than by this columnist, set to go down in the family mythologies of both frustrated vendor and reprieved purchaser.
Italy 1967 was my first encounter with watery woes lately converted into aquatic anecdotes. It was six months after the disaster that ruined swathes of the Renaissance treasures of Florence, volunteers from all over the world were still clearing up the mess from what, in Italian, sounds more epically biblical than anything we have in English: Il Diluvio beats Great Flood into a cocked hat.
Santa Croce still had muddy high-water marks drawn with eerie precision 12ft-high across priceless frescoes. Industrial heaters blasted away at the tombs of Michelangelo and Machiavelli. In the green and white geometry lesson in marble that is the cathedral complex, the baptistry's "door of paradise" was minus several of Ghiberti's golden panels of Old Testament stories; among the survivors was the depiction of Noah on Mount Arafat.
Yet what tales of Il Diluvio su Firenze, which happened 34 years ago tomorrow, most readily became part of local mythology? To judge from conversations struck up at a football match watched during our visit to the world city of art - an English old master, Gerry Hitchens, late of Aston Villa, lined up with Fiorentina's opponents - the instant legends were of the popular variety rather than the elite.
Most prevalent was: "The first most people knew of the disaster was a strange knocking in the small hours, heard as they lay in bed. It was their car, afloat in the garage and bumping against the walls."
And there was the one about Fiat being taken for a ride by the flood. When the company promptly announced huge discounts on replacements for vehicles ruined by the flood, it was said that hundreds of opportunists drove their previously dry cars pell-mell into the receding waters of the River Arno.
NEARLY 200 years earlier, also in November, the Tyne did an Arno. Rather it outdid the Arno: on the 17th in 1771 it actually carried away Newcastle's version of the Ponte Vecchio, an ancient bridge which like the Florentine original bore shops and houses. Miraculously, the raging Arno in 1967 merely looted the 17 jewellery shops on the bridge of their riches, leaving the structure bereft, wobbly, but still standing.
In Newcastle, the fearsome noise of the rushing waters wakened people who at 2am were asleep in houses on the bridge and that fact cut the death toll. The middle arch and two towards the Gateshead side were swept away, together with the seven houses and shops on that part of the bridge. One house was carried as far downstream as Jarrow.
A family of five, three of them children, were stranded for six hours on a mid-river foothold 6ft square. They were almost dead with cold before they were rescued. Among the oarsmen who toiled in boats searching for survivors was the young Thomas Bewick, not yet out of an apprenticeship which - as detailed last month - was soon to have him acclaimed as the master wood-engraver of his time.
Eight people perished way up river, at Ovingham, near Bewick's family home, when their boathouse was carried away; two others clung to the roof-thatch before it was stopped after 250 yards by trees, in which they perched for ten hours.
The enduring legend of the Newcastle disaster? That sailors at sea off the mouth of the Tyne, perhaps 20 miles away as the flotsam flies, picked up a wooden cradle. Inside was a baby, alive and well. Indeed, to tell that tale alongside what we would today call urban myths may do it an injustice. It was printed as solid, unqualified fact in a biography of Bewick of 1887.
Compared with, say, the Tees in its Darlington-Yarm stretch and the Ouse at York, the river passing through central Newcastle seems these days to have been successfully contained after causing historic havoc.
In 1339 a sudden inundation drowned 120 people and breached the medieval Tyne Bridge, one that had been rebuilt after it and most of the town had been lost to a fire a century earlier.
THERE'S an Italian link with a second dramatic incident which helps set the scene on Tyneside at the time Bewick was making his name there.
In 1786, two years after Vincento Lunardi made the first hydrogen balloon ascent in England, this young aeronaut from Lucca - another of those architectural gems of towns which litter Tuscany - reached Newcastle during a tour he was making to demonstrate the miracle of manned flight.
Excitement on Tyneside was high. In France the Montgolfier brothers had flown an unmanned hot-air balloon just four years earlier and only in 1783 had their invention carried aloft, first, a sheep, duck and rooster, and within weeks, an adventurous aristocrat and his friend.
All work ceased for miles around the take-off point in a field near the royal grammar school and huge crowds gathered. Bewick and his new wife watched from their garden. Then, as the story was re-told a century later, still 30 years before man's first powered flight:
Lunardi having occasion to draw the plug from the funnel of his machine, the sudden noise and emission of gas created an unnecessary alarm to several gentlemen on one side of the balloon, who rushed from their respective stations. In the panic which ensued most of the ropes which held the balloon were set free. The remaining cords proved inadequate to secure it, and it ascended with great velocity. One of the ropes fastened to the top of the aerial transport was held by Mr Ralph Heron, the son of an eminent solicitor, who had inadvertently coiled it round his hand and arm.
It continues:
He was by this means carried up far above the height of St Nicholas's church steeple. His weight having turned the balloon, its top, to which the rope was tied, tore off, and the unhappy gentleman fell into a garden ... partly erect, upon a tree, and thence upon a flowerbed of soft mould, into which he sank nearly knee-deep and stuck fast.
But there was to be no happy ending. The unfortunate and unwilling aviator was not to go on to further adventures. Mr Heron,though found to have sustained no external injury, expired in a few hours.
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