Jeffrey and Sheila Miles, owners of the Riverside Hotel, had evacuated guests from their rooms and diners from the restaurant sometime after 4:00 p.m., when water began seeping under the back wall, behind which the river flowed. The guests fled quickly; no one paid his bill, but it hardly mattered. Jeffrey had decided that the newer concrete building that housed the Cornish Stores at the other end of the block would be better able to withstand the flood and had hauled Sheila uphill through the now knee-deep water to shelter with the owners, their friends André and Trisha LeSeur.
Jeffrey and Sheila were so intent on reaching the Cornish Stores, and on doing so without being swept away, they barely noticed the fire brigade volunteers frantically working to secure the front door of the Boscastle Bakery against the rapidly rising floodwater. Inside, Ethan and Debbie Churchill and their two young assistants had been baking batches of saffron buns in the bakery's massive gas ovens when, as at the Riverside, water began seeping through their back wall. The fire brigade volunteers, who'd ducked into the bakery to phone for more emergency assistance, knew what those outside did not: that it was suicidal to be wading through the flood at the rate it was rising. They ordered the bakery staff upstairs and, once the outside door was secured, they plodded—in firemen's boots that having been overtopped by the floodwater now felt like lead weights on their feet—to the next shop, the Spinning Wheel Restaurant. Once inside, they struggled to force the doors closed against a thigh-deep torrent. Neither they nor the restaurant owners, Rory and Jennifer Dunn, would ever use those doors again, because at that moment, the wall of water that had crashed through the car park now swept past the shops and instantly raised the water level to halfway up the restaurant's windows. The fire brigade members and the owners retreated to the apartment upstairs.
At the Rock Shop, Sandy White had sensed trouble the moment she noticed water gushing through the street. She did a quick assessment of the shop, locked the front door, and calmly began boxing up what was most valuable: the wine. When she'd carried the last of the cartons upstairs, she phoned her husband, Ron, who was off on a buying trip in London, and told him to double his orders. “I think we may lose some inventory,” she said. In fact, they would lose almost everything.
Next door at the bakery, the river smashed through the back wall and flushed everything in the shop, including the massive oven, out into the street, where it was gripped by the current and ripped downstream to the harbor.
The sheer force of the cresting river shook the Cornish Stores to its foundation, and André and Trisha led Jeffrey and Sheila and a crowd of other people who were sheltering in their shop to what they thought would be the safety of the apartment above. Soon afterward, however, they all fled across the rear balconies, directly above the churning main course of the river, to the apartment where the Dunns and the firemen were. And still the water rose—ugly, brown as porter, and furiously fast—until it had reached half a foot above the floor of the Dunns' apartment. It was time for the crowd, now numbering forty souls, to climb to the roof.
Andrew and Colin, still on the south side of the main bridge, had been astonished when the wall of water Colin had spied failed to follow the course of the river and disappeared behind the Visitor Centre and the Bridge Walk block. Moments later, they watched helplessly as, one after another, waterborne vehicles careened down the road, past the turning to the bridge, and carried on downhill, following the lower ground along the lane that paralleled the north bank of the river. As each sped past, they strained to look for passengers, but at times the rain was so dense it was like a curtain between them and the opposite shore.
Something had been nagging Andrew's subconscious ever since he'd watched people struggling uphill against the current on Dunn Street, and now it came to him: Last Wednesday, on his way to the weekly sing in the bar of the Wellington Hotel, he'd learned that the River Jordan, the main tributary of the Valency, passed directly under the venerable building through an ancient stone culvert. Now, as he and Colin had been left no task other than to watch as what felt like the whole village was being washed into the sea, he yelled to Colin, “Back in a few minutes; need to check something!”
Colin nodded but did not turn his gaze from the flood before him.
Andrew plodded uphill—“upstream” would have been more accurate—along Dunn Street until he reached the back of the Welly. He wasn't surprised to find its owner, Peter Williams, there as well.
Williams looked up, recognized Andrew, and said, “It'll never hold. It's just not meant to carry so much water.”
“We need to get everyone out,” Andrew said.
“My wife's already going from room to room,” Peter said, “but half the village is in the bar.”
“Then you'll just have to evict them, won't you?” Andrew said, grinning, the rain streaming off the tip of his nose.
“And the sooner the better, though I don't imagine they'll much appreciate being driven out into this≔ it's pissing down.”
Peter was right, they didn't. At first, he was genial: “Ladies and gentlemen, neighbors and friends, I know it's far from closing time, but we're closing just the same. I think we may be in danger here.”
There was a rumble of voices, a murmur of dissent. And there was very little movement.
“Right, then!” Andrew said as loudly as he could while still sounding friendly, his arms spread wide. “The landlord says out, and out it is! May I just invite each and every one of you to exit the front door with as much speed and grace as you can manage. I have it on good authority that while it is indeed tipping down out there, you are unlikely to dissolve.”
With remarkable good humor, the crowd dissipated. Andrew followed them and headed down the street to rejoin Colin. Peter and his wife exited the hotel from a door upstairs. Moments later, the River Jordan, carrying a careening burden of boulders, trees, and mud, smashed through the upstairs wall of the hotel, broke through to the floor below, and cascaded through the Welly's famous Long Bar, shattering its beams, flooding it with thirteen feet of debris-choked floodwater, and filling it with 120 tons of mud.
Trudy Walters lived in a cottage on the south side of the river, across the footbridge from her shop, the Harbour Light. She had just brewed a pot of tea. She took a cup to her front window and saw, for the first time, that the main force of the river was no longer in its neatly bordered channel, but racing full throttle down the lanes paralleling the channel, and, on the far bank, sweeping debris and cars through the garden in front of her shop.
At the same moment, floodwater burst through her own front door, quickly filling the ground floor of her cottage. She hurried out the rear, up to the garden terrace cut into the hillside above, and then up a ladder she'd had built to enable her to ascend to the main road, which did a switchback above her house. She had no opportunity to look back. Thus it was that she was spared the moment when the venerable, three-centuries-old Harbour Light building, with a sigh like a last breath, collapsed into the flood and was sucked downstream like so much driftwood. It made hardly a sound, as if its seniority rendered complaint undignified.
Once the car park was clear of people, Jamie retreated to the flood's edge, where crowds, unaccountably, still milled about in the downpour, gazing at the disaster before them as if hypnotized. He tried one more time to urge them up the main road north out of town, and then turned toward the Cobweb, which, because it was on slightly higher ground, had thus far avoided the kind of massive inundation its neighbors had suffered.
Flora met him at the door.
“I thought I told you to stay upstairs,” he snapped.
Flora ignored this and pulled him toward her in a full-body embrace.
“Be quiet, you,” she whispered.
Jamie relented. He was exhausted.
“I've been watching you from upstairs, you maniac. Did you think you could rescue the entire car park?”
“It was worth a try,” he said weakly. “Any chance of a pint?”
Elizabeth, her a
ssistant, and the two-family brood in the loft of the Visitor Centre had been able to keep their spirits up in the dim light by means of the stories, games, and songs she improvised to distract the children. This strategy had been largely successful … until, at about 5:00 p.m., another massive wall of water and debris smashed into the building. The upstream two-thirds of the structure imploded and was torn away in moments, engulfed in the torrent. By some miracle, the loft was in the portion of the building that survived. But when Elizabeth saw that the water now was up to the top rung of the ladder they'd used, she pushed the Velux skylight open as far as it would go and she and her assistant helped the parents and the children up to the apex of what was left of the roof.
Exposed to the downpour, straddling the roof peak and the lower apex of the building housing the Visitor Centre's public restrooms, Elizabeth and her stranded families felt that if they didn't drown from the flood, they would surely drown from the rain itself. Visibility was nil. So when a new sound found its way through the thunder of the river and the scream and thud of collapsing buildings, Elizabeth struggled to place it: a rhythmic whomp-whomp-whomp that throbbed in her bones, not just in her ears.
“And then I realized what it was,” she would later tell a reporter. “I felt like Radar O'Reilly on that American television show M*A*S*H. Incoming helicopters!”
Earlier, in far northern Scotland, the rescue coordination center at the Royal Air Force base at Kinloss, on the Moray Firth near Inverness, had responded to initial police and coast guard reports of a flood at Boscastle by scrambling rescue helicopters based at RAF Chivenor, fifty miles north of Boscastle, in Devon, and the Royal Navy Air Squadron base at Culdrose, forty-five miles to the southwest, in Cornwall. Rescue 169, a big yellow RAF Sea King, was first on the scene. It made its initial pass through nearly impenetrable rain and hail, with lightning strikes happening almost continuously at higher ground. Moments later, another Sea King, the red and gray RNAS 193, approached from the south along the coast. Marine captain Pete McLelland, peering down from his copilot's seat through the teeming rain, watched as a swollen fan of coffee-colored water surged out of the harbor into the bright green sea, followed almost immediately by a churning mass of debris, trees, and automobiles. They dove close to the sea to look for trapped drivers, but could find none, and, in any event, most of the cars were tipped nose down, like feeding ducks, by the weight of their engine blocks.
Responding to a police report, the yellow RAF helicopter went off to deal with a reported heart attack. RNAS 193 then dipped into the mouth of the valley.
Several of the crew members were veterans of the first Gulf War, but what they saw below horrified them nonetheless: the valley, from hillside to hillside and in both directions—indeed, the entire lower village—was one vast, raging river. “My God,” McLelland heard someone say through his earphones. He looked at his wristwatch; it was 5:10 p.m. Then he radioed the rescue center at Kinloss: Pass to all emergency services. This is a major incident. Repeat, major incident. We require all standby aircraft and all available land-based emergency crews, as we are in danger of losing Boscastle and all the people in it. Within minutes, three more rescue helicopters had been scrambled and were en route to the disaster site.
Hovering only fifty feet above the rooftops, Rescue 193 first winched to safety a family of four from a rental property near the bridge. They had barely cleared the helicopter doors when McLelland saw something that clenched his heart: two little girls in pink blouses sitting atop the spindly remains of a structure he would later learn had been the Visitor Centre. The closer they flew, the more survivors he saw stranded there, atop a ruined building that was the first line of defense against the tons of water that tore through the valley.
Anne Trelissick was in her flagstone-floored farmhouse kitchen, warming herself by the Aga stove, drinking tea, and trying to shake off the last vestiges of the cold or flu or whatever it was she'd been fighting for several days. She was listening to the afternoon program on BBC Radio Cornwall, when the host, Rosie Dunkley, was interrupted by Matt Small, the newscaster, with breaking news that roads around Boscastle were being closed due to flooding. Though the rain had been unusually heavy, up on the hills above town there hadn't been the slightest indication that something terrible was happening down in the valley. Anne's first reaction was skepticism. Her second sent her flying out into the rain to the barn, where Roger was mucking out manure.
“Roger! Where's Lilly?”
Her husband looked up, smiling. “In a world of her own, I expect.” Then he saw the fear in his wife's eyes.
“Annie. What is it?”
“The radio says Boscastle's flooding. Lilly told me she was going hunting for newts in the valley today. She's not back.”
“Lilly's a smart, resourceful girl, Anne.”
“Roger! The valley's flooding; she could be anywhere!”
Roger put down his pitchfork, walked up to his wife and gave her a hug, and said, “I'll attend to it. I'll pop down to the bridge below Minster Wood and give a shout.”
Roger Trelissick was by nature unflappable, and while his wife worried about their daughter all the time, he did not. His family had lived in this part of Cornwall for centuries, and the fact that there were “most people” and the “special people” was just second nature to him, passed down through the generations. He didn't discuss it with his wife, but he knew, as certainly as he knew the temperament of his animals on any given day, that his daughter was one of the rare ones. He viewed her with a combination of pride and awe. Lilly knew things. Sensed things. Appreciated things “normal” kids did not. And he felt as if she was a timeless treasure left in their safekeeping. He climbed up onto his four-wheel all-terrain vehicle and raced up the farm track, the little motorcycle engine screaming. For the first time in his life, he was afraid for his girl.
Just beyond Minster church, where the footpath down to the river began, he skidded to a stop and, careful to keep from breaking an ankle or a leg on the steep, muddy footpath, ran as fast as he could down through the woods, calling out his daughter's name. But before he'd descended even two-thirds of the way into the valley, his ears told him what his heart had been trying not to admit: that the valley was inundated. The river's roar was deafening. The charming, pastoral, stair-step shelves of riverbed slate, their shallow, musical waterfalls and limpid pools, were buried far beneath a pandemonium of churning chocolate fury. So high was the river that Roger was forced to stop well above what he knew to be the valley floor. If the footbridge still existed, which he doubted, it was at least ten feet below the current level of the flood. And even as he stood there, stunned, the river was ripping trees whole from the saturated ground and spinning them downstream as if they were made of nothing more substantial than milkweed. The sleepy Valency, he would later tell others, had become evil, a destroyer.
Running, hunched, ducking under sagging branches and stumbling over ivy vines, Roger ran along the hillside as far upstream as Newmills, calling Lilly's name, only to be halted by the fierce rapids of a tributary stream-turned-river that barred further passage. He reversed and clambered back along the same east bank, ducking beneath ancient oaks, weaving around thickets of wild rhododendron and laurel, still calling. But the river was so incredibly loud, like a cacophony of timpani, it was as if his words were snatched from his mouth and drowned before they could become sound.
He did not know what to do but return to his wife, banking, insanely, on the strange but compelling wisdom of his odd little daughter.
When Andrew returned from the Welly, he was elated by the sight of the two helicopters sweeping in from the harbor. But Colin was nowhere to be seen. He glanced around in the murky light and caught a glimpse of the coast guard jacket to the south of him, in the direction of Nicola's cottage on the south side of the river. Colin was clawing his way back upstream; Andrew waded down to help the man, who looked at the end of his tether.
“Had to check the cottages,” Colin gasped as they reach
ed higher ground. “All empty, I think.”
“You think?” Andrew said.
“I hope,” he said between breaths. “Nicola.”
Andrew's head turned as if jerked by a wire. “What about her?”
“I tried to get her out, but she was adamant about having to save someone called Ella,” Colin shouted over the noise of one of the now-hovering copters. “Don't know who she was talking about. A friend staying with her? I couldn't get her to come with me. She said she'd be fine. Nothing more I could do. Now look,” he said, jerking his head downstream.
Andrew looked and was stunned.
Far downstream, he could just make out Nicola's cottage—or what was left of it. The river had gnawed its way through the front wall on the ground floor. The door, the two small, multipaned windows, all were gone, leaving only a gaping hole with the upper story suspended above it.
“I have to find her,” Andrew said. He set off into the water, but Colin grabbed him.
“Don't be an idiot!” he shouted. “She's either safe or gone, and you can't do anything to change that. God only knows how many we've lost already!”
Much as he struggled, Andrew knew Colin was right. The river, if that was even the right word for the roaring beast before them, was destroying everything it encountered in its headlong rush to the sea. He wouldn't have stood a chance. He felt something now that he hadn't throughout the entire afternoon: a crushing personal terror. It swept aside his habitual rationalism the way the flood flushed cars effortlessly to the sea. It was simple and basic. It was beyond analysis. It was pure fear: Nicola might be gone.
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