This story was written and shared as part of the Read Now Write Now workshops which took place during the Look Climate Lab 2022. To find out more about Read Now Write Now, click here.

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We rounded the corner and stared in horror and disbelief at the scene that met our eyes.  We live in Tewkesbury and of course it’s been flooded before, but we were still unprepared for the damage that had been wrought by Storm Eunice.

I’m Julie and I work as a tour guide for the Abbey, so I was anxious to see how bad things were.  I had come with my husband Richard and our two children, Chris and Ellie. Richard teaches Maths at a secondary school and it was half term.  Chris is fifteen and takes more interest in playing football than studying for his GCSE’s, but then again life has been so weird and difficult over the past two years, what with the pandemic, it’s hard to be too critical.  Ellie is eight, and by contrast is a very keen student at her primary school.  This was another reason why we were here.  Ellie was full of a project she was doing about Tewkesbury Abbey, and wanted to have a look round, even though we warned her the Abbey would probably be closed because of the flooding. What we saw stopped us in our tracks.  The River Severn had burst its banks and the area around the Abbey had been turned into a peninsula surrounded by dirty brown floodwater. Some farm buildings had almost been engulfed and trees poked miserably out of the water.  There was a horrible smell in the air.

As we drew nearer to the Abbey, standing forlorn under a steely grey sky, my eyes were drawn to its square Norman tower, and I couldn’t help but wonder what the many generations of monks who had spent their lives there would have made of the spectacle before us now. This wasn’t the first time the Abbey had been in danger.  When Henry VIII had been hell bent on destroying the monasteries, the locals had raised £453 to buy the building from Henry and keep it as their parish church. As a guide I knew this already, but this was something Ellie had been talking about after her history lesson.

“Isn’t it great that they saved the abbey?” she’d said.  “Miss Roberts said it was a bit like crowdfunding that people do now.”

Looking at the devastation around the Abbey today, I felt that this was on a par with the dissolution of the monasteries.  This was destruction caused by nature, but ultimately, of course, it was also man-made.

Even Chris was shocked by what he saw.  “God, I didn’t realise it would be this bad!” he said.  “I can actually see our playing fields from here, and they’re under water!”

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Ellie was quick to answer this.  “It’s called climate change, Chris. Haven’t you heard about it?” Chris was indignant. “Little know-all!” he retorted.  “Who do you think you are?  Greta Thunberg?” “That’s enough!” Richard said.  We had reached the grounds of the Abbey and were walking around it, looking up at the glorious stained glass windows that date back to the fourteenth century.

“Well, the Abbey has survived again this time,”Richard mused.  “But the way things are going, with all this terrible flooding that’s happening, you start to wonder how much longer it will last.” “That’s right, Dad,” Ellie said. “In our geography lessons, Miss Roberts was telling us the sea levels are rising because the planet’s getting warmer, so if we don’t do something about it, one day the water could come right up to the Abbey.”

“Oh God, here we go,” Chris groaned. “Greta’s on her soap box again!”

“But she’s right, Chris,” I said. “If you paid a bit more attention to the news, you’d know about this too.  You saw what’s happened to your playing fields.”

Ellie was very quiet on the way back, and went up to her room as soon as we got home.  She was there nearly two hours.

When she came down for her tea, I saw she had made a poster.

“I’m going to ask Miss Roberts to display this in school,” she said.

I looked at what she had done. She’d written a title in bright green:

CLIMATE CHANGE —WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT

Under the title she had drawn a picture of the Abbey surrounded by water, with the caption: “We saved the Abbey from Henry VIII, now we have to save it again. Everybody can do something to help. Here are some ideas.”

Around the borders of the poster she’d written various suggestions of ways in which climate change could be held back, such as :

Get solar panels for your house ! Recycle your shampoo bottles! Don’t use plastic tea bags ! Get a bamboo toothbrush! Don’t mow your lawn too much and make hedgehog corridors! Think of  wildlife — it’s very important! Eat less meat!  Don’t use toxic chemicals in your house! Don’t waste food! Buy your clothes from charity shops!  Use public transport! At the bottom of the page,she had listed some relevant web sites.

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I was quite taken aback by her efforts.

“Ellie, you’ve worked really hard on this!” I said.

“Well actually, Mum,” she replied, “Chris helped me quite a bit. I think he was shocked when he

saw the fields all flooded.”

“That’s amazing! So you’ve won him over!”

“Yes. He says he’s going to speak to the teachers at his school and see if they can come up with some ways to be more green. I can’t wait to show this to Miss Roberts next week.”

“It looks like Ellie’s really started something,” I said to Richard as he came in from the garden.

“Wait till you see this, Dad!” Ellie shouted as she held up her poster.