Sandlands

by Rosy Thornton

‘There’s one thing about the sand round here, though,’ I said presently, to break the silence as much as anything. ‘It means when it does rain the water drains away again quickly.’ It’s true in my own garden: you go out after a shower and there are puddles all over and an hour later they’re gone. Or you can come in with what looks like mud all over your wellies and stand them on the mat; as soon as they’re dry it just falls off them. They’re clean again without a wipe, and there’s just a pile of fine grey sand to sweep up.

  It’s different with the roads and fields, though, those places where it floods. I’d come by one of them again that morning on the way to High House, on the lane that leads down to the level crossing. There was water standing right across the road and into the entrance to Joe Wakeling’s big beet field. To get past I had to scramble through a gap in the hedge and pick my way round in a wide circle through the beet tops. Even then I was hopping from ridge to ridge across furrows half full of cold, black liquid. Kezzie Hollock claims it’s the big machines they have nowadays, the harvesters and loaders and those great wide tractors that crush you into the bank if you meet them on our narrow lanes. She reckons they’re too heavy, so they compress the soil and wreck the drainage, and too wide, so they flatten out the grips and gullies all along the verges. I asked Mr Napish what he thought to Kezzie’s theory, and he stroked his beard and seemed to be giving it consideration. But I think he was actually miles away. His eyes were back on his map, and he just said vaguely, ‘Perhaps.’

  When I was doing the dining room later on and I looked out of the French windows, I was surprised to see that the lawn had barely drained at all. The cat was gone but the puddles were still there.

  Mr Napish was right twice over. He was right we were due for another tidal surge, like the one in ‘53. But also that this time we couldn’t say we hadn’t been warned.

  They were talking about it on the radio for days beforehand. The news is all about the weather these days, and the weather’s like the news. They were saying how high the water was likely to reach, and where the weakest spots were that were most at risk, and all the damage to expect. Not that there was all that much you could do, it seemed to me, if you lived along the seafront or somewhere low down near the river or the marshes. Except to get out before the flood came, and that’s what they had to do, poor souls, knowing they’d be coming back to a scene of ruin. It’s the smell that’s the worst, according to a lady in the paper shop at Snape this morning, who’s staying with her brother up the hill. ‘I can’t go back to that terrible stench,’ she said. The drains started flowing in the wrong direction, she said, even before the tidewater reached them. Just imagine it, raw sewage bubbling out of all the sinks and basins. And she hadn’t had time to take up her carpets.

  The winds had already got up the day before, and by the morning of the surge it was blowing a rare old gale, in confirmation of the forecasts. They knew exactly when high tide was due, of course, which was good in a way but also terrible, like a bomb ticking down against you. It’s why no lives were lost, some man said on the radio, and that is true, but only if it’s human lives you’re meaning. I stood and looked down across the valley the next day when the tide had ebbed a bit, though there was still more water to see than fields, and there were sorry grey humps of feathers which had been wild geese, left washed up like litter on a beach. You’d wonder why they didn’t fly away to higher ground and safety, but maybe the waters rose too quickly and their wing feathers became saturated, or they were disorientated in the darkness by the strange, altered landscape.

  There was the saddest story in the local newspaper, about the pub at the bottom of the hill between the Maltings and Snape village. The landlady was fattening turkeys for the Christmas menu, with its being December. They keep their own animals for organic meat: Gloucester Old Spot pigs and a few sheep and goats as well as the turkeys. Anyway, the police came round in the afternoon to tell them to evacuate. High tide was due for ten at night and they wanted them out by six at the latest to be on the safe side; it was already well past lunchtime when they heard the van with the loudhailer on top, instructing them to pack up and go. So of course they forgot about salvaging their belongings or trying to protect the fittings in the bar, they were so concerned for the livestock. They managed to find a nearby farmer with some empty sties and some transport to move the pigs, and the sheep and goats were taken by a neighbour with an empty field – but this took up the whole afternoon. It came to half past five and the policeman was insisting they really must be leaving soon, and there were still the turkeys in the barn. So the landlord dragged some straw bales in there and stacked them up to give the birds a place to roost that would be out of harm’s way, and they shut the door and left them. When they came back three days later once water levels allowed, every one had drowned. The bales had disintegrated in the swirling tide, leaving the turkeys no place to escape. Forty birds, and not one left alive.

  ‘I couldn’t stop crying,’ the landlady was quoted as saying, as she described the scene of desolation that they found. Which some might think odd, when the turkeys were all to have their necks wrung for the table within a few short weeks, but I didn’t find it odd at all. I completely understood.

  There was one more victim of the big storm surge, another unlucky refugee to add to the hundreds of people who still can’t go back to their homes. I found him – Mr Napish says he’s definitely a ‘him’ – by the side of the road that leads down to the Alde at Langham Bridge. I thought at first it was a sodden sandbag lying there in the long grass, because the farmer down there had brought in piles of sandbags to try to protect his house and outbuildings, and a lot of them had been washed away. It was sort of humped and the right kind of colour, a dark, musty grey which must have been the river mud, because when I came nearer I could see that on one side there was a lighter patch, more of a reddish-brown, and that’s when I knew what I was looking at: a dead fox. Except that he wasn’t dead. I’ve no idea what made me go and take a closer look. I’m not squeamish about dead animals – I’m not some seedypuff who’s never skinned a rabbit – but there’s no reason, is there, to go peering. It’s a feeling about dignity, I suppose; I shouldn’t want folks staring at me when I’m ‘a corpus’ as my dad used to say. But for some reason, as I say, I was curious, and when I leant down the thing gave a sort of shuddery twitch, like sometimes when you are just falling asleep. It lay still then and I thought maybe I’d imagined it, but when I watched carefully I could just make out the tiniest movement across the middle of the hump, the barely noticeable rise and fall of the ribs. He was breathing.

  Goodness knows the diseases you can catch from a fox, let alone the ticks and fleas, and this one wasn’t just filthy, he was dripping wet like a mop in a bucket, but I couldn’t leave him there. I think it was with my thinking he was dead, and then his not being; I couldn’t just let him die after that. As I picked him up, though, and he didn’t struggle or snap but just flopped there all limp while I wrapped him in my long Fair Isle scarf, I didn’t give much for his chances, either way. That scarf is for the dustbin now, too, and it took me an age to knit.

  It was Mr Napish I thought of, right away. I suppose it’s with his having been a scientist, even the wrong sort – and who else was there to ask? Folks with livestock know about animals, but they can’t abide foxes! My arms were aching by the time I reached High House, and the mud and water had soaked right through the Fair Isle and stained all up the front of my coat, and the fox still hadn’t stirred so I wondered if it was too late anyway and the whole thing had been a wild goose chase, if that’s not an ill-fitted phrase. But Mr Napish didn’t seem to think so. He didn’t bat an eyelid, which I knew he wouldn’t – nothing seems to get him in a fluster.

  ‘Ah, Plathubis, bringer of rain’ was the first thing he said, which struck me as rather peculiar, but he took my bundle from me and carried it to the Aga, where he opened the warming oven and laid it gently inside. Then he turned to me and gave a slow nod of the head. �
�Leave him with me,’ he said.

  The river is still in high flood, even after more than two weeks now. Mrs Jackaman kindly gave me a lift to the shops at Saxmundham in her big old estate car on Monday after I’d finished doing round for her at the rectory; she said she needed to pop into Tesco herself. As you come down Langham Lane it’s like another world, a world all turned to water. You can’t tell what’s river and what’s land. On a day like today, with the sun on it, there’s just one smooth, flat surface like mirrored glass. If it weren’t for the line of trees on one side and the fence posts on the other you wouldn’t know where the road goes at all. At least the crest of the bridge is visible now, just clear of the water, where a week ago it was submerged. ‘Something to set a course for,’ Mrs Jackaman said gaily.

  Even so, I’m glad it wasn’t me driving. There was something unnerving about striking out into all that expanse of silver without knowing what was underneath. A pair of ducks drifted alongside: life returning, I thought. We set them bobbing as we went by; we were leaving a wake behind us like a boat.

  Against the odds, my fox is still with us, and appears to be on the mend. It has to be said, Mr Napish has worked miracles with him. He’s still rather groggy and listless, but I dare say it’s just as well or he’d have your fingers off. But with all the mud cleaned off him and his fur dried out you can see his proper colours, which are a rich orangey-red on top and soft, pale grey underneath, except it isn’t really grey at all when you look closely but white with a sort of darker down showing through at the roots; and his coat’s not straggly either but in pretty good condition, considering. Mr Napish thinks he’s a young one, maybe this year’s cub. He’s winter-thin, though: when he stretches you can see the outline of each rib. ‘We’ll soon do something about that,’ Mr Napish says. He’s giving him prime minced beef with Ready Brek and warm water mixed in. And he’s made him a box to sleep in, closed in except at one end – ‘So that he feels secure but not trapped,’ he explained. It’s a lovely piece of work is that box. It turns out Mr Napish is quite a woodworker. That’s what he does in that barn of his: he builds things out of wood. I suppose it fits, with his having been an engineer. ‘What kind of things do you make?’ I wanted to know, but he didn’t give me much of an answer. He just gazed towards the window absently and rubbed his beard. ‘Whatever’s required.’

  He’s filled the box with clean, dry leaves and it looks extremely cosy. Enlil and Ninlil, I’ve noticed, give it a wide berth; they stalk past at the far side of the kitchen, the tips of their tails twitching. This morning the fox was asleep, his eyes two tight black slits, although his whiskers flickered when I moved close by with my duster. And when I looked again his eyes were open and fixed on me without blinking, a hard, glassy orange the same colour as his coat.

  ‘Tough little fellow, isn’t he?’ I said when we sat down to our elevenses. ‘To have come through all that and survived.’

  ‘This time,’ said Mr Napish.

  It’s one of his pet themes, and not a very cheerful one, I must say. Just because we’ve had one tidal flood doesn’t mean that’s an end to it; there’ll be more to come, he insists, and worse. When he worked in coastal defence, he told me, they used to call it The Big One, like they do in that place where they get all the earthquakes – Japan, did he say, or California?

  I must have been looking a bit cast down because he caught my eye, then, and seemed to soften. ‘There’s certainly some spirit in him. Animals have a tenacious instinct for life. There will always be those that survive.’

  Well, that’s Christmas and the New Year come and gone, and still no sign of any winter weather. Nothing I’d think of as winter, anyway: you expect it to be sparkling cold at Christmas, don’t you? No snow, no ice, and scarcely a frost to speak of so far, though we’re well into January. Instead, it’s been unseasonably mild with week after week of leaden skies. So dampening to the spirits when it’s grey at this time of year, I always think. The days are short enough anyway, and when it’s dull and overcast it feels as if the sun’s never properly got up at all. I need the lights on to see what I’m dusting, even at midday.

  And rain – it seems to have been non-stop. I can hardly remember a morning when I haven’t woken up to the sound of water splattering down from the corner of the outhouse roof and onto the coal bunker. I must remember to get that gutter fixed. There’s water standing round the lanes in places where I’ve never known them flood before, and all the fields are waterlogged. They were talking about it on the radio: how usually you’d think of rain in January as good for the winter wheat, but how this year the soil’s so wet that the plants are starved of oxygen. One farmer said that half his crop had rotted.

  It’s a trial for the livestock, too. Mr Willett’s cows are gone from his big meadow. I heard he’s having to pay for grazing for them over Framlingham way because he’s no fields here that aren’t half under water. And I saw Joe Wakeling’s daughter’s donkey the morning after a recent storm with filth up to its hocks, marooned on a tiny island of grass in its submerged paddock. The poor thing was too scared, Joe said, for them to lead it through the water and bring it under cover. They just had to leave it there to take its chances, and now it’s lame with the mud fever – and little wonder, poor creature.

  The tidewater along the Alde has fallen back some way at least since the night of the surge, but it’s left behind a patchwork of small lakes and cut-offs. In places the river is still far wider than it should be, while in others, where it’s back between its banks, it’s swollen and churning like a pan on the boil and nothing like its familiar, lazy green self. The fields that have re-emerged from the departing flood are in a sorry state, the turf silted a greasy grey and littered with broken reeds and branches. Clearing up the mess will be the least of it, according to Mr Napish. The real problem, apparently, is the salt. The water from down below the sluice that came flooding upstream was saline. It was estuary water: seawater, more or less. The ground that it covered was standing feet deep in brine, and the salt will have soaked down into the soil. It will be there long after the water has drained away, he says, contaminating the land and leaving it toxic to cattle and infertile for crops. It could be barren for decades. Such an odd, almost eerie notion: an invisible poison, and it’s something as ordinary as salt.

  There was a rare break in the weather after breakfast today when I walked up the hill to High House. There was a bit of a wind and the clouds were less like a military blanket; they had risen and were shifting so you could see shapes and colours in them, and at least the rain had stopped.

  I’d called hello and was pulling off my wellies in the hallway when Mr Napish appeared from the kitchen. ‘No, keep them on,’ he said, ‘and come with me.’

  He led me across the patch of lawn to the side of the house and over to the barn. I’d never been this close to it before, let alone inside. It’s a great, tall hulk of a thing, not made of wood like most barns hereabouts but brick like the house. It must have cost him a pretty penny, that Victorian engineer. Goodness knows what he’d be wanting with it, unless he farmed as well as building sluices. You could fit half the village in it.

  There were heavy double doors, the old-fashioned kind, high and wide enough for a big farm wagon. He slipped the bolt and dragged one of them open. It was evidently quite a weight; he had to put his shoulder to it. Inside it was pitch black, and even when he’d felt for the switch and flicked it on, only one patch near the door was properly lit up, with a big workbench and a stack of timbers leaning against the wall. The rest of the barn was looming shadows.

  ‘Over here.’ He led me to the bench, which was arrayed behind with saws and planes and chisels and allsorts, hanging neatly on rows of hooks. But he was pointing underneath, beside a stack of those extra-large catering tins: chopped ham and marmalade and Heinz beans. Empty ones, I can only imagine, and used to keep his nails and screws in. It wasn’t the cans he was pointing at; it was something next to them, beside a pile of shavings. The box with my
fox in it.

  ‘Oh, how is he?’ No longer needing to be inside by the Aga, at any rate, which had to be a good sign. I stepped nearer to take a look, and saw that there was a second compartment now, built on behind the first. It was also roofed in at one end, while at the open end I could just make out the tip of a whiskery orange snout. Another poor washed-up soul. I wondered where he’d found it.

  ‘This one’s a vixen,’ he said. ‘She’ll be a mate for him.’

  He showed me something else as well. High up above the workbench, above where the bulb shone, there was a small hole in the brickwork which sent a pale, round shaft of daylight slanting in from outside, lighting up in a haze of circling dust a sort of wire mesh cage. In it were pressed together on a dowel perch a pair of birds – what looked like pigeons, or in fact more likely those collared doves. One of them, I noticed, had half a leg missing on one side. Not just the foxes, then.

  My eyes must have been adjusting to the darkness because I could also make out more clearly what I had taken at first for some kind of partition, maybe a part of an animal stall. It towered up through the gloom, a smooth, sheer wall of wood. But now I saw that there was an unusual curved shape about it, and the more I peered the more it held my attention, until I realised what I was looking at. It was the hull of a boat – a big boat.

  Mr Napish was looking towards me, but his back was against the light and I couldn’t make out his expression.

  ‘Well, standing here and chatting,’ I said, the way my old dad used to, ‘won’t buy the old lady a new hat. I’d better go and make a start on that hoovering.’

  When I stepped out from the barn I saw that the sky had grown darker over the valley. It was beginning to rain again.

  Ringing Night

  Thursday night was ringing night. It always had been, for as long as Jack could remember. With Dad away for long spells when she was small, and Mum working late, Jack was often left in the charge of her namesake, old Jack from next door. If it was a Thursday then she knew she mustn’t dawdle over tea or daydream in the bath if she wanted time left for a story, since old Jack was a ringer and had to be at the church for seven o’clock. The day and the time had never varied since.