Miss Martha Mary Crawford

by Catherine Cookson (Catherine Marchant)

  She drew her head and shoulders back from him and glanced towards the window again before saying, ‘No, no, I can’t. Why…why do you ask? It can’t surely get up this far.’

  Now his voice was scarcely audible as he said, ‘The way it has risen in the past hour it could swamp the two end wings, never mind this part of the house.’ Then shaking his head, he added, ‘Why didn’t they put attics on them too when they were at it, or better still use some forethought and build the place further back on the rise?’

  She had often thought this herself. It seemed madness when you came to think of it to build a habitation where the foundations were below river level.

  ‘Listen to that.’ He was still whispering, ‘The wind’s rising into a gale.’ He now raised his eyes towards the apex of the sloping ceiling and said, ‘There’s an ornamental parapet, partly covered with ivy, isn’t there, running across the front?’

  ‘Yes…Yes, there is.’

  ‘It’ll be just above these windows, not right on the top?’

  She too looked upwards and nodded, then lowered her gaze towards the window again, and when he saw the stark fear in her face he caught hold of her hand and said softly, ‘We may not have to do it, but we should be prepared. If the water reaches the top of these windows and we are trapped in here…Well!’ He made a small movement with his head. ‘But once outside on the roof there’s always the ridge to cling on to.’ He now brought her hand and pressed it tight against his ribs for a moment before whispering hoarsely, ‘We’ll make out, never fear.’

  Her voice seemed frozen in her and it was seconds later before she could murmur, ‘Aunt Sophie…we could never get her up there.’

  ‘It’s amazing what can be done when you’ve got to do it. I think that if this window was open and you stood on the sill you could almost pull yourself up, at least we could, and if we can do that we can hoist her between us. But…but it won’t come to that; I’m just preparing for the worst. It’s a habit of mine.’ He smiled widely at her, then said, ‘What you must do now is to rest. There’s room for you on the mattress.’

  ‘No, no, I couldn’t…’

  ‘You’ll do what you’re told. Peg and I will keep watch; we’ll talk to each other.’ He now looked towards Peg’s small white strained face and ended, ‘I like talking to Peg, I always learn something…’

  She was glad to lie down on the mattress. Aunt Sophie was sleeping peacefully, and in this moment she envied her, for that’s what she wanted to do, sleep peacefully for a night and a day and another night and a day…Would they have to climb onto the roof? But they’d never get Aunt Sophie up onto the roof, never. And what if she wouldn’t attempt to leave the room? The question was left unanswered in her mind when sleep overtook her and her head fell to the side on the pillow.

  Harry watched her for some time before beckoning Peg towards him, where once again he was seated on the floor, his back against the wall, and when she was kneeling beside him he whispered to her, ‘She’s well away, we’ll let her sleep, eh?’

  ‘Aye, doctor. She’s worn out; with one thing an’ another she’s worn out. Will the water come in, doctor?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Peg. It’s got to stop some place, and I think it’s almost reached its bent. Bring your blankets and sit down here beside me.’

  When she was settled by his side he leant over her and whispered, ‘Now you go to sleep, everything’s going to be all right!’

  ‘I don’t feel tired, doctor.’

  ‘Well, you will shortly when I say, “Come on, now’s your turn to keep your eyes open and do your watch”, so go on with you, lie down.’

  She peered up at him. ‘Everythin’Il be all right?’

  ‘Everything will be all right. Don’t you worry.’

  Slowly she eased herself onto her side and rested her head on her crooked arm, but it must have been a full hour later when her lids drooped and she gave in to the drowsiness, and she, too, fell asleep.

  He waited another fifteen minutes before he moved; then quickly he took off his boots and laid them aside and, rising slowly, he picked up a candle and held it over the glass shade of the lamp until it ignited.

  When he reached the door it creaked as he turned the handle, and he looked back towards the sleeping figures, but none of them had moved. A moment later he was looking down the well of the attic stairs where the candle’s pale gleam showed the water lying seemingly still, halfway up them.

  He turned and now moved cautiously towards the door opposite the schoolroom, and when he opened it and held the candle aloft he saw it was a storeroom. There were pieces of old furniture and trunks scattered around, and here were the same type of windows. And these were repeated in the other rooms he entered.

  What a situation. He was even beginning to feel panicky himself. It would have been different had he felt fit; in that condition he could see himself hoisting them all onto the roof one after the other. But what did one do in a situation like this? Pray?

  What for? Noah’s Ark? A boat?

  He must use his wits, but how? There was nothing to grapple with. If that water touched this floor they would have to get out, or when the river finally went down the rescuers would find four corpses, for once the water passed the top of those low windows they’d be trapped completely.

  At this side of the house the wind sounded more menacing. There were constant bumps and thuds against the structure, and he guessed that this was the debris caught up for the moment against the walls. The wind had an eerie sound similar to that which you got on a high mountain, wild, unfettered, menacing in its freedom. He imagined it levelling everything it touched before whirling into endless space.

  He shook his head against his fancies, and went softly back to the schoolroom.

  They were all lying as he had left them and once more he settled on the floor with his back against the wall …

  He hadn’t intended to fall asleep; in fact he couldn’t imagine himself falling asleep for his mind was too active with worry, but he knew he had been asleep when he started bolt upright from the wall and gazed about him for a moment trying to recollect where he was.

  Something seemed to have hit him in the back. He turned round and peered at the wall before he decided that he must have been dreaming.

  It was as he settled back that it came again, a dull thud like a blow aimed at his buttocks.

  He was on his feet now and peering out of the window, and once again for a moment he imagined he was dreaming. The moon was shining, the sky was adrift with scudding clouds, and everywhere his eyes flicked in amazement was water, seemingly at his feet, and not just water for on its surface, forming grotesque shapes and angles was debris, all kinds of debris, and all flowing fast as if in a mad race against the clouds.

  A few yards away he made out a roof. He didn’t know if the house was beneath it, it passed so quickly. Then came a horse caught up in a wall of timber; likely its stable. But just below the window, little more than a foot below it, was what looked like part of a floor, an old floor; the joists sticking out were big and rough-hewn, and one of them, somewhat longer than the rest, had got jammed in the wooden scrollwork that formed the eaves above the windows on the first floor.

  ‘Oh dear Lord!’

  He jerked his head to the side to see Martha standing, her hand tightly pressed across her mouth. Instinctively his arms went out and, pulling her to him, he held her close for a moment, and she in turn clung to him. Then gently pressing her from him, he whispered, ‘There’s only one thing for it, we’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘Oh no! No!’ She shook her head in a despairing fashion.

  ‘Yes! But yes. Listen. Now listen, Martha.’ He was gripping her hands tightly. ‘Once the water comes in and reaches halfway up the window there’ll be no chance at all of getting out; the upper frame is fixed, the panes are too small for even a dog to get through, let alone us. Look.’ He pointed ‘That down there seems an answer to an unspoken prayer; it’s a wooden floor of sort
s, it’ll float. We must all get on it, then push it off from the house and cling to it for dear life.’

  ‘You…you said we’d get out onto the…the roof.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. But we’d never manage it in this wind. I can see now it was out of the question. I doubt if I could have got up there myself the way I’m feeling, never mind Miss Sophie. Now look.’ He paused; then his voice lower still, he said, ‘Be brave, Martha dear, because we must survive. Do you hear? We must survive. Now do as I tell you. Wake them up. I’m going to force open the window now, and I’ll hang on to the platform or whatever it is until you’re all through…’

  ‘No! No! I’ll…’

  ‘Martha!’ It was the doctor speaking now, the overbearing individual. ‘Do what you’re told! And do it now because by the look of things in a…a very short while it’ll be too late.’

  ‘Peg! Peg! get up. Aunt Sophie! Aunt Sophie!’ She sounded hysterical, even to herself. ‘Come on! Come on, Aunt Sophie! Sit up.’

  ‘What is it, dear? It isn’t morning.’

  ‘Aunt Sophie, please.’

  ‘All right, dear, but…but I’m very sleepy. Where are we going?’

  She had Sophie by the shoulders now, shaking her into full awareness as she cried, ‘We are leaving here. The water’s still rising, it’ll soon be in the room and we must get out. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand, my dear. And don’t shout at me.’

  Martha straightened her back and tried to steady her trembling hands. It was ridiculous, but of the four of them her Aunt Sophie was the most calm, but that, she thought, was because she didn’t realise the danger.

  A minute later when Sophie stood by the open window and the wind tore at her hair and lifted it from her brow upwards, she laughed, and looking down on Harry, where he was now leaning well out and hanging on the structure below, she cried excitedly, ‘I always knew I’d go down the river in a boat one day, I said so to Martha Mary not so very long ago, didn’t…?’

  The thrust of Harry’s right arm as he twisted round and made a grab at Peg pushed Sophie aside while at the same time Peg retreated from him, crying, ‘Eeh! no, doctor. Eeh! No, I’m frightened. I am, I am.’

  ‘Martha!’ He looked up desperately at her. ‘You go first. If the beam slips out I doubt if I’ll be able to hold it.’

  Martha stared at him for a second. Her mouth opened, then shut; she gulped twice in her throat, then, kneeling down, she put the upper part of her trembling body through the window and grabbed at the black beam below her. But having done that she made no further move towards the tossing platform below. The wind screaming in her ears, the moon showing up the great mass of whirling debris, was so awesome that she became frozen with her fear. Even her scream was lost to herself when she felt her legs hoisted upwards and she tumbled in a heap down onto the heaving wooden floor.

  Her hands now madly gripping the jagged edge of a floorboard, her eyes gazed down in terror at the bursting bubbles and dirty scum just below her face; then she cried out again, this time as Peg’s whole body landed on her back.

  She was lying flat on the platform now, the wind knocked clean out of her, and there she would have stayed petrified, and motionless in her terror, had not Peg’s arms, which were around her neck now, tightened with such force that she was on the point of choking.

  With an effort she turned onto her side, and now she was screaming at Peg, ‘Lie down! Hang on to this.’ She thrust the thin arms into the water and around a beam.

  What happened next indeed seemed like a dream for in the present situation it was as out of place as the events in any dream, because now she was kneeling on the platform, one hand gripping a thick stem of ivy attached to the wall, while with the other she was steadying Sophie as she let herself down from the window.

  It was the older woman’s calmness that created the sense of unreality, for once her feet touched the heaving floor, Sophie let herself down onto it as gracefully as if lowering herself into a drawing room chair. And she did not attempt to lie on her face and clutch the timbers for support, until Martha, thrusting her hands downwards, cried, ‘Keep a hold, Aunt Sophie! Keep a hold!’

  Harry was now climbing out of the window and Martha saw that he more than any of them needed support, and she held on to him until they were both kneeling facing the wall and clutching at the ivy. Gesticulating to her, he now indicated she should lie down, and when she didn’t his bawl, whipped away on the wind, came to her like a thin scream. ‘Get down, woman! Get down!’ With one hand he pushed her roughly and blindly backwards, and she landed sprawling over Sophie’s feet and only a foot or two from the far edge of the platform.

  He let go of the ivy and crawled towards her, and, his arm about her, he tugged her towards the middle of the floor, the while mouthing something at her that she couldn’t hear.

  The next thing he did was to try to push Sophie flat onto the floor, but she resented this, and for the first time her manner changed, and she struck out at him. Turning now onto her hands and knees, she attempted to get to her feet, and had almost succeeded when both he and Martha, grabbing at the skirt of her coat, tugged her sharply downwards, and so sharply did she fall that the whole platform was submerged for a moment, and within seconds they were mostly wet through. At the same time the jerk had released the trapped beam from the eaves and the next second they were swept away to join the great stream of madly whirling debris.

  Harry, clinging for dear life at the extreme edge of the platform, raised his head and glanced towards the huddle of bodies in the middle of the floor. Then he thought it had all been too much for him on top of the blows he had sustained, for now he was having hallucinations, because the bodies seemed to be piled high on top of one another. When the wind swung them round once again he realised that it had been filling Sophie’s voluptuous coat. Now, having subsided somewhat, it looked like a curled sail, a silvery grey sail, an unearthly sail.

  Hand over hand now he painfully pulled himself towards them. Peg was nearest to him. He put his arms about her. Her wet body was as stiff as the plank she was clutching. She made no movement, nor sign, there could have been no life left in her. He now put his arm across her and gripped Martha’s shoulder, and when her head turned stiffly towards him, he shouted, ‘It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. Just hang on,’ and he was surprised that he could hear his own voice. Still shouting, he ended, ‘The wind’s going down. It’ll be all right.’

  When she made a small motion with her head he smiled at her and again called, ‘We’ll land up on the river bank somewhere.’

  ‘I…I want to sit up, Martha.’

  Now he bawled, ‘Stay where you are, Miss Sophie.! Do you hear me? Stay where you are! If you don’t, I’ll have to tie you down.’

  What he would have tied her down with he didn’t know, but the threat seemed to have its effect for she lay still. Yet her head was back on her shoulders and she gazed about her as the raft swirled and dipped first one way then another among the debris …

  … How far they travelled before the platform rocked itself to a stop, none of them could even guess, but to Martha the time had seemed like a long life spent in terror. The moon had disappeared, buried behind a maze of white cloud that turned grey, then black.

  ‘We’ve stopped.’ She whispered the words first to herself then louder. ‘We’ve…stopped!’

  ‘Yes.’ Harry was a moment or so in answering. ‘But stay still until we find out where we are. There’s bound to be a lot of stuff piled up, so don’t move until the moon comes out again.’ Yet before he had finished speaking he himself was moving. Cautiously, he now reached out towards the end of the platform and immediately his groping fingers became buried in the sodden wool of a sheep. Then, when his hand, passing beyond the sheep’s body, came in contact with something soft yet stiff he gave a slight start. Then after his fingers had examined it blindly, he drew himself back from the edge and towards the middle of the platform again.

&nb
sp; ‘Are you there?’

  He answered her trembling voice, saying, ‘Yes, I’m here. It’s all right.’

  ‘Where do you think we are?’

  ‘I haven’t any idea except that we are jammed in a pile of debris…Ah!’ He glanced upwards, ‘Here’s the moon coming out again, we’ll soon see now.’

  It was but a weak glow at first; then the clouds passing, the moon revealed their position to them. A dark shape away to the right of them looked like the top of a hill, but between it and them and for a great space all around there was piled debris of every shape and size.

  Martha drew herself slowly up into a kneeling position and gazed in amazement over the upper part of a chair that had been blocking her view, and she couldn’t believe what her eyes were seeing. Everywhere she looked were dead animals: horses, cows, chickens, and in some places they seemed to be merely resting for amid boxes and tree trunks and odd pieces of furniture they were piled upwards on top of one another. The wind had gone down but the noise about them was more eerie than any wild wind, for it was made up of creaks and groans and deep sucking sounds.

  She imagined that she heard a duck quack and at the same moment she had almost to pounce on Sophie to stop her crawling towards the edge of the floor.

  ‘Don’t, Martha Mary. Don’t, Martha Mary. Leave go of me, do. I just wanted to get the duck; it’s under the chair.’

  She was right. There was a duck floating under the chair, and it was alive.

  It was Harry who stretched forward and lifted the animal onto the questionable safety of the floor. Then on a shaky laugh, he looked back at Martha, saying, ‘Would you believe it! It’s incredible.’ He glanced now from the squatting animal to Sophie’s bright countenance, and putting his hand out, he gently touched her wet hair, saying, ‘And you’re incredible too, Miss Sophie.’

  ‘Well, I knew it was a duck, doctor. Anybody should be able to recognise a duck.’