by Jeremy Page
Further up the lane the last villagers of Morston were fleeing their property, climbing over their sandbags and wading to the church for refuge. From the church windows they might have looked down on the lost cause of Lane End. Might have seen the waves break the front door and a second later seen the woodsmoke cease from her chimney. Poor old gal . . . ain’t nothin’ to do now, boys and maybe the odd disrespectful can’t drown a witch might have been uttered. Even in a church. Lil’, forgotten on the tiles, her hair in soggy ringlets, clutching a now useless pile of sandbag sacking, on the verge of being orphaned. There was no way out - the cottage was already a quarter of a mile into the sea.
Across the marshes, pit props are pulling out of coastal defences like corks from bottles. They jostle savagely in the waves and come knocking on the doors of Cley with the grace of battering rams. The village is already under water - the tide rushed the doors and windows, filled the rooms, failed to leave and now another tide’s coming on top. Fish dart wild-eyed through the water, into houses, under furniture, become stranded where the water laps menacingly up the stairs. A table floats below the ceiling, bearing a half-eaten meal and a cat. Outside the wind howls through the cables with an eerie wail, deafening and unnatural, and in the darkness all that can be seen is white foam hurtling off the backs of dark metallic waves and the brief flashes of seagulls as they’re spat from the storm.
Then rolling up the high street comes an unearthly vision. It’s an iron buoy, clanking viciously between the walls, shattering windows like a wrecking ball - the water looks restless around it, as sinewy as eels - and all over the village there’s the sound of tiles smashing as people finally break out of attics to escape across the roofs.
‘Hain’t there! Hain’t there no more!’ A man is shouting, waist-deep in water - his mouth filling with rain and sea each time he opens it. Torchlight is bent against the wind and in its beam the storm seems full of six-inch nails, driving horizontally. Help! is heard again and another torch is lit. There ain’t nothin’ there! the second man shouts to the first as hard as he can - though both men are holding each other and are lashed together with rope. And when the torchlights cross in the shattered branches of a tree they see the ghost of a boy up there, like a wet shirt blown from a washing line. Haf to get him - he in’t hangin’ on long! one shouts, and together they haul themselves back along the rope tied between telegraph poles to an army boat brought down from Weybourne. Six men row or punt and keep their backs down to bail, and at the front they throw an anchor and heave the boat up on it and when they reach it they throw another anchor forward. It’s the only way they can move. The sea boils against the boat, reeds whip their faces and distantly someone claims he sees Lonnie Lemmon’s haystack - the entire thing - floating down the coast from Salthouse to Glandford, where it’ll be found in two days’ time. They hear pigs, squealing in the waves, unable to get through the fences beyond the houses. When they reach the tree the anchor is flung round its trunk and the boat slams hard against the bark. Above them they see the terrified boy, as white as his fear, dissected by branches and twigs as though the storm has torn him apart, and throughout the tree they see the branches are covered with rats like as many wet leaves. Some of the rats jump for the boat, the men scream, then more rats fall into the water as if they’re coming from the clouds themselves and each rat drowns quickly and without fuss the way things do when there is no hope.
The boy is moving down through the tree. As they grab his ankle he’s pulled right out of his own shirt, as if part of him wants to cling up there still. It’s the Langore boy, one of them says, recognizing him. John, ain’t it? he says, their faces almost touching in the dark. Kipper, the boy whispers, the nickname he’s called himself. Then suddenly the boy panics, flailing wildly at the men while the boat tips to its gunwales, and one of the men sees through the dark rain the army bo’sun knocking the boy cold with a fist the size of a pile-driver. And though the storm still rages, both men share a big grin at that.
Back at the cottage, Goose claims the same tin bath in which Hands feared he might be cooked or drowned all of a sudden popped up like a life-raft. Into it she went. She rocked about all night long in that thing, shivering against the icy metal sides - sluiced from one corner of the room to the other a couple of feet beneath the ceiling, with bread, pans, cups, saucers, cupboards and all the driftwood she’d collected over the years spinning in a dismal galaxy around her.
Through the night she plundered this flotsam. She ate a jarful of pickled eggs, oh boy, drank an entire shelf’s worth of elderflower wine. Roaring drunk, some time in the middle of the night she began to hear the noises she’d been dreading. Along with the wind, the crashing waves, the surging tide, she heard the moans of all the people who’d drowned in that storm over the centuries. There were thousands of them, going back through history, and before the night was out, there’d be hundreds more. Danish longshoremen caught on a sandbar three hundred years before, tumbling rudely into the cottage, cursing the night away as they clung to what was left of the bed. In Olde English, men calling out the names of their faithful dogs as the waves overran them. Bales of Norfolk wool - five hundred years old - rolling in the waves outside. Sheep too - so she says. And against the awful din of the storm she even claimed she heard the death throes of a mammoth - one of Norfolk’s last, she supposed - which had drowned in the same storm fifty thousand years before.
Early the next morning, a sombre line of men tied themselves to each other along a rope, then waded to her cottage through the freezing water to collect her body. They found her snoring like a good ’un in the bath, now wrecked on top of the bed.
She lived through that storm and spent years dreading the day it would return. Not out of fear for the tin bath, but because she wasn’t keen on meeting the hundred and forty people who died in Suffolk and Norfolk that night: Millie Eccles, stoker of rumours about Goose, who died on her bike; Ned Boddy, whose bungalow was swept away and who Goose owed money to - found standing in a pit with his boots filled with shingle when the water drained away; Jackie Rudd, who’d once bought a dozen bad eggs from Goose - never forgiven. They were all drowned that night, and they’d all be back to get her, she thought.
The last day of January - that’s the date of the storm. A night of mysteries, of vanishings and appearances. And as each year passed, Goose was more wary of that date than any other in the calendar. I always thought it was part of her nonsense, until I experienced my own vanishing on that night, many years later.
The flood retreats leaving a filthy stink and a dirty brown tidemark along the fields and marshes, further inland than it’s ever been, and when we look closer we see the tidemark is partly made of thousands of rats, mice, voles and rabbits. A rat won’t be seen for years to come. And the same tidemark threads its way through Cley, Blakeney, Salthouse and Morston. On tree trunks and flagpoles, the tidemark is there - it even runs halfway across the sign of the Albatross Inn, and finally, about a foot lower than the ceiling, the same tidemark girdles inside Goose’s cottage.
She looks at this mark, and knows ill things arrive on a high tide. Demons are left floundering in such places. She walks along the tideline to a newly washed-up boat - the Thistle Dew - which now sits lopsided on the marsh a couple of hundred feet from her cottage. It’s going to be a significant place for her, and me, in its time. But she doesn’t stop there, she continues along the tideline picking up drowned rabbits for an early supper, always on her guard, waiting for what the storm has left, and when she’s nearly back at Lane End, she sees it. It’s two days after the flood, and she notices a boy crying down by the creek. But he’s not crying about the storm . . .
... I see my grandmother once again in her cottage, with a young daughter allowed for the first time to sit at the table. The young girl is staring bug-eyed at a length of boiled calf’s tongue curling on to her plate. The young child looks up anxiously at the trembling tip of the meat as it winds its way through the air towards her. Other children her a
ge would be running wet fingers along the glass-topped counters of Mather’s Stores in the hunt for sherbet. The tongue is still intact, boiled limp and skewered with a steel knitting needle, but the end has unwound itself in the pan and now seems to point accusingly at the young girl’s mouth. As the tongue passes over the knife and fork it seems to wriggle before breaking free from the needle and, with vigorous life, springs on to the bare table. There it lies, stunned, before curling slowly - as if injured from the fall - into a foetal position, till it hugs the cool circular rim of the plate.
Apparently the calf’s tongue began its journey to my mother’s mouth when Goose approached the crying boy down by the creek. The boy was new in the area. Not washed up on the tide, as it turned out, but staying with his great-uncle, who ran a farm on the heath. My grandmother had seen him eating pickles from a jar and beating off flies in August. He was either too weak or too clumsy to use the farm machinery, so had spent his days wandering the pasture as a kind of scarecrow, plucking the grass and bronzing his face, and the evenings with his knees trembling under the dining table of Will Langore, his great-uncle. Will Langore, who’d battled and lost to Hands over the poker table. After several months of forcing the farm’s food down the lad, the old man had leaned over the marbled remains of a joint of beef and pinched the boy’s biceps till they bruised. Satisfied, the tyrant stabbed a long curved knife into the table and said: ain’t a boy no more, best you kill that sick calf next week. Don’t kill it in the shed, walk it to the truck first or we’ll have to carry it. And that was that. The boy shot a pleading glance over to his older brother, found only betrayal where he’d hoped for support, flung his chair back and ran to the creek, where his tears could be drowned in all that water.
And my grandmother had found the boy as he cried, sat by him, watched him throwing stones into the mud of Morston Creek. Self-pitying rage shook the boy when he thought of the sick calf with the weeping eyes, who refused to suckle from its mother. Just a drink from the udder and it might live, you know. My grandmother made sounds of sympathy - while her mouth watered with the thought of tasty cuts. She’d have to play her hand well. First slaughter? she asked, and when he nodded his head she shook hers. Oh, thass rough, it is. Rough. I ain’t never killed nothin’ that big an’ I don’t reckon I ever will.
Calf liver and bacon? Calf-feet fricassee? Calf-head pie? That old bastard Will Langore would claim every ounce of meat an’ he’d want the liver too an’ this lad ain’t up to carryin’ a head. Best be the tongue, oh yes, simple, on the skewer. Bit o’ salt an’ pepper.
Her trap was easily laid. Course you gotta give that tongue away. Don’t you go leavin’ that tongue in its head or you’ll start hearin’ that dead calf lowin’ every time you slaughter. That ain’t no fun I tell you. I seen grown men haunted, oh God haunted, till they take no more of it . . . And the boy looked at my grandmother and maybe she briefly saw the dreamy expression of faraway eyes she’d last seen in the man who’d vanished on the Pip. But it wasn’t enough to stop her in her tracks, and as the boy’s blue eyes flooded with the horror of what the marshwoman was saying, she pretended to slice her own throat with painful, drawn-out agony. An’ there ain’t no escape, she added, swallowing her spit, thinking the boy was close to taking off that night. Time to be a man, she muttered, turning to the horizon to conceal her grin. And maybe the boy thought of his older brother, grey-eyed and calm with it, well on the way to being just that.
Next morning, my grandmother woke before dawn. She saw the pale wood of her white picket gate swinging open in the gloom, and listened to the heavy tread of the boy as he walked up her path. Out come the knives, pestle and sewing kit. The tongue landed with a slap on the front step, and the boy walked off, leaving her gate wide open, to eat his silent breakfast with the men. That was the boy who gave my mother the tongue. And Goose, you did everything to make that boy stay, and yet just a few years later it would be everything to make Shrimp Langore leave.
5
Lil’ Mardler
Lil’ Mardler had a childhood with no friends. She live on the marsh an’ there ain’t no father. The mum’s a rum ’un too - she scare the babies. Lil’s diff’ernt, thass all I got to say. Alone on a saltmarsh among gulls swallowing cod heads on the tideline. She’s no longer a little scared girl. She’s sixteen. She inhabits a landscape that is so big and flat it seems the edges slope up into the sky all round, where mud meets cloud banks and seems to continue up there till traces of creeks and water can be seen there too - she often thinks she stands in some vast and dreary dish which has no end. She’s lived like this for years. She’s learned how to walk in mud with her heels pointed down, the depths of the creeks and the strengths of the tide, knows where mud cracks are so deep you might break a leg - it’s as if she has it all etched on the back of her hand. She knows the calendar by the buds on sea blite, the flowers on campion and dry seeds on curled dock. By the number of joints on a stem of samphire. And she never treads on a tern’s egg, even though its shell is made of shingle.
Sandpipers pass her, skimming the creeks with wing-tips so fast they seem blurred. The tide slowly rises and falls in its long-fingered weave through the marsh. And in the centre of all this is the wreck of the Hansa. She knows its every detail, from the gannets and storm petrels carved along the gunwale, to the whale on the mizzenmast and the spirits of the North Sea rising towards its broken top. The grooves of the rough letters cut into the planks, so faint you could easily miss them as scratches: Jeder macht mal eine kleine Dummheit: we all have times of a little stupidity.
She’s there, in the wheelhouse, her hair long and brown and as thick as rope, tied in a simple knot behind her head. Salt marks on her cheeks and forehead, lips slightly blue with cold. The sulky, defensive expression she used to pull as a child no longer fits her face. In the last year or two her cheeks have lost some of their softness. Her eyebrows have grown fuller and seem to sit on top of her eyes with a permanently hurt expression she can’t shift. Her skin is less soft, the salt is finally getting in there too. She’s grown tall and strong and with it she’s grown petulant, and here, right now, she’s fuming.
Because she’s not alone. Sitting over by the prow with his chin resting awkwardly on the handrail is a young lad. We’ve met him before. He killed that calf just after the storm eight years ago, and now he spends much of his time out here, strung up on the wreck, his dreamy eyes not entirely without pain.
Lil’ Mardler stamps about behind him, kicks the wheelhouse, slides about on the bones of the pilot’s chair while she looks at the sagging shoulders of the boy sitting on the wreck. Her wreck. The wreck her father carved. She thinks nasty thoughts but the boy doesn’t move. The pilot’s chair grinds painfully as she swings it from side to side, then she paces over to him and stands so close a boy his age should go cold with fear that a girl like her might do something unexpected. Laugh at his face, scratch him on the arms, kiss him on the mouth like an adult. Lil’ is sixteen and girls write the rules and she knows she’d get away with it, but something about his posture shows she wouldn’t win this battle, so she goes back to the wheelhouse and makes the chair squeak like a gallows.
Then a strange thing happens. There, in front of her, she sees the boy’s shoulders tense like someone’s wringing water out of them. She looks beyond him and sees something, approaching them - a perfect wake spreading gorgeously across the water of the Pit. It looks like a float on a fishing line being reeled in. Then an arm is raised, followed immediately by another, and a no-nonsense front crawl breaks out. Another lad is heading for the Hansa, and my mother grips what’s left of the wheel like a storm’s coming.
The second lad’s older than the first, taller by the inch or so to make all the difference, and where the first boy’s eyes are as pale as a dawn sky, his brother’s are grey like smoke. He clings to the side of the wreck, breaks a bit of rotten wood off the hull and chucks it in the water and Lil’ thinks about kicking him in the face and how it was preferable before and
decides to stay in the pilot’s chair because he’ll know she’s done that deliberately. But the boy hardly notices. He’s calling to his brother and making a big fuss about being pulled from the water and suddenly she’s watching the dreamy one hauling the other one out and it seems the two boys have taken over the wreck entirely, because to them that’s all it is - a wreck.
The taller boy’s got a strong hard body and his face is bony and severe. He sits on the planks and takes some deep breaths to show how good his swim was. His hair’s as wet as an otter’s and the water streams down his back in fast, quick lines. Then he turns to her and grins and she’s immediately disconcerted - because the boy grinning at her seems, for a second, to be entirely different from the one who climbed up on deck. Same person, same features - but two faces in one.
‘Mornin’, cap’n, where we heading?’
Lil’ Mardler pulls her ugliest most sarcastic smile and looks away.
‘I’m Kipper and he’s Shrimp,’ he says. ‘You got a name?’
‘He said his name was George,’ my mother replies.
‘Well, it isn’t.’
‘My name’s May.’