Graham Edward Porter

The Fitter's Son

Graham Edward Porter was born on the 12th of October 1961, in a terraced house in Bedminster, on the south side of Bristol, the second of three children in a family that had lived within a mile of the River Avon for as long as anyone bothered to remember. He was named for his father, Edward Porter, a maintenance fitter at a Bristol waterworks who spent his days underground among pumps and pressure gauges and came home smelling of grease and chlorine. His mother, Margaret Porter (née Coombes), kept the house and, for a stretch of his childhood, the till at a greengrocer's on East Street.

It was not a household that wasted words. Edward Porter was a competent, undemonstrative man who believed that a job done properly was its own kind of affection, and that a son was best loved by being taught to be useful. He took Graham down to the pumping station on Saturdays, showed him how a centrifugal pump moved water uphill against its will, and corrected the boy's mistakes without ever quite praising the things he got right. Graham would spend the rest of his life mistaking that arrangement for the natural order of fathers and sons.

His brother Keith, two years older, was the family's charmer, a boy who left school at sixteen to become an electrician and never regretted it. His younger sister, Diane, born in 1963, was the warm one, the one who filled the silences the men of the house left lying about. Graham sat between them as the studious, watchful middle child, the one who did his homework without being told and took apart the wireless to see how it worked.

He was, from early on, unmistakably clever with numbers. Where Keith saw a wall to climb over and Diane saw a person to befriend, Graham saw systems — the river, the pumps, the tide tables his father kept pinned in the scullery — and a quiet, abiding satisfaction in understanding how they held together. He was not an unhappy boy. He simply learned, in that house of practical love and unspoken feeling, that the way to be valued was to be capable, and he set about making himself capable with a seriousness that unsettled his teachers as often as it impressed them.

The Avon ran through all of it. He grew up watching it swell brown and dangerous in winter and shrink to mud-banks in summer, watching the tide push up past the city and fall away again twice a day, and somewhere in those years the river stopped being scenery and became a problem worth a lifetime — a force to be measured, respected, and held in its place.

Family Tree

The First to Go Up

Graham was the first person in his family to go to university. He went up to the University of Bristol in 1979 to read civil engineering, a fifteen-minute bus ride and an entire social distance from Bedminster, and the dislocation marked him. He arrived among the sons of architects and solicitors with his father's flat vowels and a single good jacket, and he responded the way he responded to everything that made him uneasy: by being better prepared than anyone else in the room.

He found, to his lasting relief, that engineering did not much care where a man came from. A calculation was either right or it was wrong; a structure either stood or it failed; and in that hard, indifferent honesty Graham discovered something close to belonging. He was not popular and did not try to be. He was respected, which suited him better, and he left the bar and the rugby club to others while he worked through problem sets with a thoroughness that bordered on stubbornness.

He specialised early in hydraulics and water engineering, drawn back, as he would always be drawn back, to the moving water of his childhood. His final-year project modelled flood behaviour on a tidal reach of the Avon, and his tutors marked it highly and privately noted that the young man had a rare instinct for how water actually behaved, as opposed to how the textbooks said it should.

He graduated in 1983 with a first-class degree and a profound sense that he had escaped something, though he could never have said what. His parents came to the ceremony in their best clothes, proud and faintly bewildered, and his father shook his hand and said, "Well done, son," and Graham carried those two words for years as though they were a medal, because they were the most his father had ever given him.

Holding Back the Water

He went to work for the Wessex Water Authority, the public body that then managed the rivers, reservoirs and drainage of the West Country, and he stayed in the water trade for the whole of his working life. When the industry was privatised in 1989 and the authority became a company answerable to shareholders, Graham watched the change with the wary distaste of a man who believed that flood defence was a public duty rather than a balance-sheet item, and he never entirely forgave the decade for it. But he was too good at his work to be pushed aside, and he adapted, as engineers must, to the world as it was rather than the one he would have designed.

His specialism became flood management and water conservation — the unglamorous, essential work of keeping rivers in their channels and water in supply through dry summers. He designed culverts and flood-relief schemes, supervised the maintenance of embankments and pumping stations, and spent long muddy days on the Somerset Levels, that low, soaked, beautiful country where the line between land and water had always been a negotiation rather than a fact.

He was, by every professional account, a careful and conservative engineer. He distrusted clever solutions and elegant economies; he would rather over-build a defence and be mocked for caution than under-build one and read about the consequences in the newspaper. Younger colleagues sometimes found him immovable, a man who could not be argued out of a safety margin, and once or twice his insistence on robustness over thrift made him unpopular with the accountants who increasingly held the purse strings. He bore their irritation without much caring. He had seen what water did to a house, to a farm, to a family, and he was not prepared to gamble other people's lives against a saving.

The work he was proudest of was a flood-alleviation scheme for a small Somerset town that had drowned twice in living memory, a long, dull, contested project of relief channels and raised banks and a pumping station he had argued for against the budget for the better part of two years. It was not the sort of thing that made the newspapers, except in the negative — there was no story in a town that did not flood — and that suited him exactly. Years later he would drive through the place on the way to somewhere else and feel, looking at the dry streets, the nearest thing to joy his work ever gave him.

It was honest, useful work, and he was quietly, deeply proud of it, though he would have died before saying so. He measured his life in schemes that held — in winters when a town he had defended stayed dry, in a culvert still doing its job thirty years on. The recognition he wanted was not applause but the absence of disaster, and for most of his career he got it, which was as close to contentment as Graham Porter permitted himself to come.

A Marriage of Two Quiet People

He met Lillian Hughes in the middle of the 1980s, on a joint project where her hydrology met his engineering, and they recognised in one another a kindred reticence. She was a hydrologist of formidable competence and few unnecessary words, raised on the Welsh borders, more comfortable with a catchment model than with small talk; he was a flood engineer who had never learned to flirt and saw no reason to start. They courted in the way two careful people court, over fieldwork and shared lunches and long technical conversations that neither of them wanted to end, and somewhere in among the rainfall data they fell, in their undemonstrative way, properly in love.

They married in 1988 in a small register-office ceremony with Keith and Diane and a handful of colleagues, and they built a marriage that bewildered more expressive people and suited the two of them entirely. They did not say much. They did not need to. They were companionable, loyal and mutually respecting, and the warmth between them ran underground, like everything else in Graham's life, where it could not be seen but could be relied upon.

His own family thinned and scattered as families do. His father, Edward, died in 1996 of the heart trouble that ran in the Porter men, and his mother, Margaret, followed nine years later; Graham organised both funerals with quiet efficiency and grieved them privately, in a register no one else could read. Keith stayed in Bristol, fitting wiring and raising a noisy brood; Diane married a teacher and moved to Taunton and rang Graham dutifully at Christmas, and remained, to the end, the one member of the family who could make him laugh. He was the success of the three of them and the most distant, and he knew it, and could not seem to do anything about it.

Children came late and came only once. Whether by circumstance, by biology or simply by the unexamined drift of two people who never quite found the moment, Graham and Lillian had a single child, and they had him when they were already settled into their careers and their habits. When Nathan James Porter was born on the 9th of April 1993, his father stood at the bedside in a maternity ward, stiff and out of his depth, with an unopened briefcase of coastal-runoff diagrams in the corner of the room.

When the boy finally cried, Graham's first instinct was not to reach for him but to reach for the camera, to record the fact of the thing the way he would record a gauge reading or a flood mark, because documenting an event was a language he had and holding a feeling was not. He would not understand for another twenty-five years what that reflex had cost. On the day itself he only knew that he had a son, that the boy was healthy, and that he intended, in the only way he knew, to do right by him.

The Only Language He Had

Graham loved his son in the grammar he had inherited from his own father, which was the grammar of usefulness. He did not say the warm things; he was not sure they were his to say. Instead he taught. He took Nathan down to the Severn and the Somerset Levels as soon as the boy could be trusted to hold a survey staff, showed him how to read a hydrograph and recognise the smell of a river about to breach its banks, and gave him, on those grey weekend mornings, the most precious thing he had to offer — the trust of a real task on real ground.

He corrected the boy's errors patiently and let the successes pass with a nod, never grasping that the nod was not enough, that a child can drown in the gap between being corrected and being praised. When Nathan excelled — and he excelled often, at Bristol Grammar School and beyond — Graham felt a pride so large it frightened him, and he expressed almost none of it. He told himself the boy knew. He told himself that giving a son rigour, competence and a way to be useful in the world was a deeper kind of love than the easy, sentimental sort, and there was even some truth in it. But it was not the whole truth, and some buried part of Graham suspected as much.

When Nathan completed a schoolboy study of flood mitigation on the Somerset Levels — the very country Graham had spent his career defending — and won a flicker of recognition from local environmental groups, Graham read the work twice in the evening quiet and found it genuinely good, the work of a mind that had understood water rather than merely studied it. He told his son it was "a sound piece of analysis." It was, from Graham, extravagant praise. Nathan, who had spent his whole childhood learning to decode his father, understood it for what it was, and was grateful, and went on wishing all the same that the man would once, just once, say the plain thing.

They were, in the end, too alike to reach each other easily — two reticent, capable men who loved through competence and waited for the other to speak first. Graham never doubted his son's worth. He doubted only, and rarely, and never out loud, whether he had ever managed to tell him.

The Problem He Could Not Solve

The winter of 2013 and 2014 was the great test of his late career. He watched the Somerset Levels flood that season, watched the water stand for weeks across the low country he had spent thirty years defending, and felt the bitter, ashen vindication of a man whose old warnings about dredging and maintenance had been proven right at the cost of other people's homes. It was the worst kind of being right. He gave evidence to the inquiries that followed and advised on the recovery with his usual flat competence, and went home each night to Lillian more tired than the work alone could account for.

He retired in 2015, his working life closing on a note of sorrow rather than triumph. The structure that had organised every day for more than thirty years simply fell away, and Graham, who had never learned how to be idle, filled the gap with routine — the morning walk along the Avon towpath, the careful tending of a garden that did not much need him, the newspaper read front to back. Lillian, easing out of her own work, kept him company in the undemanding way they had always kept one another company. For a year or two it was almost peaceful.

Then, in 2018, his son took a position with a private firm called Killerton Enterprises and went abroad, and the quiet later life Graham had built for himself came apart at a seam he had never thought to reinforce. He had distrusted the company on principle and the secrecy around the posting more, and he had said so, once, in the flat declarative manner his son had spent a lifetime mistaking for indifference. They parted as they always did — a handshake, a few practical words, the warm things left unsaid on the assumption that there would be more time.

There was no more time. Whatever the work was, it took Nathan somewhere past the reach of any ordinary contact, and from the day he left there was simply nothing: no letter, no telephone call, no message passed through any third party, no visit, no return. Graham had braced himself for a son grown distant. He was not prepared for a son grown utterly silent, without warning and without explanation, as though he had walked clean off the edge of the map and left no road back.

He did the orderly things first, because the orderly things were the only ones he had. He wrote to Killerton Enterprises and received boilerplate, and then nothing. He made what enquiries a private man could bring himself to make, and established only that his son had gone of his own free will and was therefore no one's idea of a missing person — that there was, officially, no problem to solve. And so the man who had spent forty years measuring, modelling and managing the one force that frightened him most ran headlong into the discovery that some losses do not yield to process. There was no calculation, no scheme, no margin of safety that would bring the boy back.

The years closed over the silence the way water closes over a dropped stone. He did not speak of it often; that was not his way. But it sat in the house with them — in the empty chair at Christmas, in the photograph on the mantelpiece he could neither put away nor easily look at. In the long evenings he turned the question over and reached, as a guilt-prone man will, for the explanation that punished him most: that his own coldness had at last driven the boy too far to come home. He never knew whether his son was alive or dead. He knew only that he was gone, and for a man who had organised his whole life around certainties, the not-knowing was its own slow cruelty.

Lillian carried it differently, and they carried it together in their wordless fashion, two ageing people in a quiet Bristol house learning to live alongside a grief that had no shape and no end. They did not fall apart; they were not the sort. But something went out of the house in those years that never came back, and the silence that had once been companionable became, in places, simply the silence of a thing that was missing.

He grew old the way he had lived — steadily, dutifully, without fuss. Into his sixties he kept walking the towpath each morning, watching the brown Avon push up past the city and fall away again on the tide as it had done his whole life, indifferent and reliable and entirely beyond his control. He had built a career out of holding water back, holding costs down, holding feelings in, and he had been good at all of it. Only late, far too late to do anything with the knowledge, did it settle on him that the thing his son had most needed from him was the one thing he had spent a lifetime teaching himself to withhold. He had loved the boy in the only language he had ever owned. He would have given a great deal, in the end, to have learned to say it plainly while there was still someone in the house to hear.