Storm Surge

by David Rees

  ‘Er . . . the Dog and Fox, I think, at the Maldon turning.’

  ‘That’s about a mile off! How can I do that?'

  ‘I’ll take you in the car.’

  ‘Not the same as a good walk down to The King’s Head.’

  ‘The beer will be just as good.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  Nothing that could be said was of the slightest consolation. Charley suggested that he and Doris went to the army camp, and Grandma and Grandpa went to David’s. Doris looked amazed, but tactfully said nothing.

  ‘Wouldn’t hear of it,’ said Grandma. ‘The idea! Don’t think because we’re old we can’t manage. We’ll be all right, don’t you worry. Haven’t lived this long to let a little thing like this upset me.’

  ‘Be a bit of a strain on you, Bess. Cooking for five.’

  ‘Oh, I can cook, Fred. Why, when I was in service ―’

  ‘That was sixty-five years ago.’

  ‘Don’t think I couldn’t do it, because I could. No. I’ll go where they put me.’ But when it was time for them to go ―, they had to travel in special coaches rather than private cars; it made the administration easier ― Grandma was crying.

  * * *

  The next few days were busy. When the tide was low the inhabitants of Flatsea were allowed back on the island to clean out their houses and tidy up. They had to obtain a special pass from the police, which stated that they were bona fide residents, and this had to be shown to the constable on duty at the bridge. Grandma hated this idea; she had lived on Flatsea for more than fifty years and now she was required to prove it. So she refused to come; she stayed in the camp and sulked, but when Doris and Charley visited the hospital on the Tuesday she did go with them. She was delighted with her first great-grandson. But the news that Martin and Ann were to be married did not please her. She said that a registry office wedding was not a proper marriage, and she would not be seen dead in such a place. Doris, however, was relieved and thrilled, and made Charley drive her to Ipswich on Wednesday to buy new clothes. Charley decided to give a party for the bride and groom. It would be held in The King’s Head as soon as they were allowed back there permanently, and with any luck it would coincide with Aaron’s eighteenth birthday.

  The school had a week’s holiday. Though the number of homeless dropped after the first day there were still plenty of strangers wandering around the building, and too many children were shocked or bewildered by the events of Sunday night for lessons to be resumed with any hope of normal work being done. Several others were away ill after their soaking; some had lost parents or brothers and sisters.

  Monday evening and all day Tuesday saw an influx of pressmen and television crews into Oozedam. Peter and Susan, who had gone up to the school to meet some of the pupils in their class, told their story to the cameras. They were bitterly disappointed that they could see nothing of this on the television, for the town was still without electricity. The papers on Tuesday morning contained the first detailed news of the disaster, and Oozedam people found that their town was just a small part of a much larger pattern; along whole stretches of the coasts of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent, the sea, prevented from ebbing on Sunday by the ferocity of the wind, had surged inwards and smashed down sea-defences as if they were children’s toys. About three hundred people, it was estimated, had been drowned, and every port or fishing village or seaside holiday town had a dramatic story to tell. In Oozedam thirty-five people had lost their lives, ten of them in the first coach of the wrecked train. The stories about Oozedam centred on both this and the collapse of the sea wall that had put the power station out of action, raining pieces of concrete onto it like bombs.

  Peter was in love. He knew Susan felt the same. But neither of them could say so; they were too shy. He slept badly and ate little, and looked at himself in the mirror wondering if his eyes gave his secret away. There was a lightness in his body that was extraordinary: he almost felt no longer part of gravity. He was glad Aaron was not at home. His brother would know the signs and make cynical comments. Mum and Dad were (Peter thought) too old to remember.

  Susan and her parents were staying with her mother’s sister, about a mile from David’s house. When the families went to Flatsea, Peter and Susan went with them, and walked about the island, and the grey level landscape seemed enchanted. Sometimes they went into Oozedam and watched the town’s efforts to rid itself of the sea. They stared at the huge pumping-machines expelling the water from the area near the hospital and the power station, and the cranes and earth-removers piling boulders, clay and sand into the innumerable breaches in the walls. It was the most marvellous week of his life.

  One evening they quarrelled. Peter was hurt when she said his desire to take over his father’s pub was unambitious. One remark led to another, and eventually she ran home, refusing to let him come with her. He sat alone on the edge of a chair, listening to the silence. Was it all finished? He tried to read, but could not see the print. He went out and walked down to her house, wondering if he had enough courage to knock and see her, but he did not dare face her parents; they would know there had been an argument. He stood in the trees on the other side of the road and looked at the house, wishing he had put on a sweater and a coat. As he grew colder, he was reminded more and more of Sunday night and the petrifying chill of that black flood, the start of their happiness. The lights downstairs glimmered red, warm and inviting; they flickered, dulled and brightened, for the town was now using an emergency generator, and was not on full power. Then her bedroom light was switched on; she looked out and his heart turned over. He was sure that she had seen him. The curtains shut with one angry sweep.

  But she came to David’s early next morning and apologized. ‘Why were you standing under the trees?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He blushed and fiddled about with the newspaper.

  ‘It frightened me.’

  ‘I thought it was all over.’

  ‘You’re too . . . intense, Peter.’

  ‘It was silly. Nothing.’

  ‘It’s not all over, is it?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He smiled. Their heads were close, huge, out of focus; her face was soft and loving; he could see every pore of her skin and every fine hair, and he longed to be that face, in it, part of it. He put his hands on her cheeks and said ‘I love you.’

  When Martin and Ann returned from the hospital on Monday it was dark, and there was no boat to ferry them across to the house. So once again they became soaking wet up to their waists. It was the last straw. As they dried themselves Martin wondered whether they should move out altogether for the time being. They were without gas and electricity and it was freezing cold : the front door was still wedged inside the hall; the windows in Kathleen’s flat were broken, and the back door was so swollen it would not shut. The ground floor was completely uninhabitable. Kathleen and her baby had left while Martin and Ann slept; she had gone to stay with some Irish friends on the other side of town.

  Martin thought he should return to Ipswich. He had missed a day at college, and he felt there was no good reason for staying away any longer. His car was a wreck. He decided to thumb a lift, and come back on Wednesday night, as the wedding was to be at mid-day on Thursday. Ann refused to go with him. She had to work in the morning; the registrar could not be expected to clean out the office on his own. When they had called there earlier, he was trying to cope by candlelight with mopping up and sweeping out debris. It would be days before the place was fit to be used again. It was only because Ann was an employee that he agreed to marry them on Thursday.

  Ann said she would stay in the flat. Martin told her she would freeze or starve. In the middle of the argument Lynwyn arrived to say that she was packing, and Ann eventually agreed to go with her. There was a room over the shoe-shop where she worked that was used as a store; they could both camp down there for a night or two.

  ‘And if you’re ready in half an hour,’ said Lynwyn, ‘there’s a boat coming to
pick me up. The man who brought me across after I left the hospital said he’d come back for me.’

  ‘One thing we haven’t thought of, Martin,’ said Ann. ‘During the week I work here and you’re in Ipswich. Are we going on like that, with you coming home Friday evening till Monday morning?’

  ‘We could move.’

  ‘We could. Else it’s another five terms.’

  ‘Come and live with me and be my love in Ipswich.’

  ‘And lose this flat. You wouldn’t want to, Martin.’

  ‘How unromantic you are,’ said Lynwyn. ‘I’ve never met a couple like it. I think this house is horrible, but I can’t afford anything better.’

  ‘You don’t have to be romantic.’

  ‘No.’ Lynwyn sighed. ‘I can see that. Yet you are so obviously lovers. I just can’t understand it.’

  ‘Mutual need.’

  ‘So that’s all it is,’ said Ann.

  ‘Maybe there’s more to it.’

  ‘Go and pack,’ said Lynwyn, laughing.

  Grandpa was looking forward to the wedding, but Bessy grumbled about it so much that he decided he dared not go.

  ‘We never thought about registry offices,’ she said. ‘It’s not right. Weddings should be in church.’

  Grandpa yawned. ‘If you say so, Bessy.’

  ‘Church was good enough for us. Should be good enough for them.’

  ‘People think different.’

  ‘Not my favourite grandson, Martin. Never was. Artist!’ She sniffed disapprovingly.

  ‘He’s a good boy. One of the best. Saved a girl and a baby from drowning on Sunday, didn’t he?’

  ‘Doesn’t excuse living together like that with Ann.’

  ‘Oh, give over, Bess.’

  ‘All this rush,’ Grandma went on relentlessly. ‘What’s the rush for? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘Rush? Why, they’ve been going out together for five years or more. They’ve known each other since they were kids. Young people’s ways is just different from ours.’

  ‘Darn sight worse than ours.’

  ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘That’s right. Leave me in this dump all on my own, while you go off boozing. Just like you.’

  ‘If I stop will you promise to keep quiet? I’ve heard just about all I can stand.’

  Grandma was silent. The problem was simply that the army camp wasn’t home. She was a great worker, devoted to sewing, cleaning, cooking, pottering in her garden, and she fretted when everything was done for her, particularly when it was done with the kindest of intentions. She intensely disliked accepting charity in any form, and the generosity of people to the flood victims really distressed her. Nation-wide appeals had been made for gifts of clothes, bedding and food, and Oozedam was, like other places, inundated by the response. Heaps of second-hand clothes were already piled in the camp store; the canteen had great difficulty in storing all the food parcels it was sent. Sweets and chocolate arrived in vast quantities, many with touching messages, and the inhabitants of the camp, Grandma thought, made pigs of themselves. There was only one way to vent her feelings, and that was on her relatives; Charley and Doris put up with it forbearingly, but Fred, who had to listen for much longer than they did, was aggravated to the limit of his endurance.

  On Thursday she suddenly decided she would go into Oozedam with Charley and Doris, but not to the wedding. The inquest on the flood victims was to be opened that morning in the Town Hall, and she wanted to hear it. Her life-long friend, Nellie Meal, had been one of those who had died, not by drowning, but from shock and exposure soon after she had been evacuated from her bungalow. She was the old lady who had sat, unable to speak, in the police car which had given Martin a lift on his journey back from Flatsea.

  ‘I want to hear what happened to her, Fred. It’s the least we can do for her, going to listen.’ Fred had to go with her.

  Aaron was able to leave hospital on the Thursday morning. There was still some pain in his feet so that he had to walk slowly, and his fingers were bandaged. This spoiled his appearance at the wedding a little, Doris thought, though he looked quite handsome in his pearl grey suit; more than Martin, who had refused to buy any new clothes for the occasion, but wore instead his flowered shirt, blue trousers and his iron cross. She was rather annoyed with Lynwyn for stealing the limelight by appearing in a magnificent traditional West Indian dress. Ron, the stupid fool, could not take his eyes off her; he would ruin his piece with the ring if he did not pay more attention.

  It was all over very quickly. Martin thought they would go to the nearest pub and have a few drinks, but his father had booked a table at the Clarence, the best hotel in town.

  Afterwards, Lynwyn thought she should go back to the shop as she had not been given the afternoon off, and Aaron went with her. Peter followed. He was meeting Susan outside the Odeon. The electricity had been restored that day, and on Ron’s recommendation they were going to ‘A Teenage Werewolf’s Chick’, the first performance of it that had been possible since Sunday night. David went to the hospital to see Pat, and, left with just Charley, Martin and Ann, and relaxed with the drink, Doris decided that she had always liked Ann, always hoped she and Martin would marry, that it was only this spending the weekends together that had bothered her and that was now over : Ann was one of the family. She said all this several times until Charley told her to stop.

  Eventually Martin and Ann left. They wanted to see Pat and the baby before returning to Balaclava Street, where they hoped to spend the night. Charley ordered two more Drambuies.

  ‘Funny sort of wedding altogether,’ said Doris. ‘Why couldn’t she wear white?’

  ‘Their wedding. It’s what they wanted.’

  ‘Can’t help feeling let down, though. This Art College isn’t doing Martin much good.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well . . . Look at the way he was dressed!’

  ‘No good us complaining.’

  ‘I know that. Children aren’t your possessions. They’re just borrowed for a while.’

  ‘So what’s the matter?’

  ‘I just wish . . . well, that he’d compromise a bit. He was never any trouble, Martin, not like Ron. Now I don’t seem to know him any more.’

  That’s not so, Doris. If you had objected that strongly to the way he behaves you would have lost him. Martin! No. He loves us just as much as he ever did. This long hair, wearing beads, all that sort of thing: that’s not what comes to my mind when I think of Martin. I think of him going out on that surfboard to see if he could save his young brother from drowning.’

  ‘It’s all very well, Charley. You just don’t see the problems. Take Ron, for instance. Gone all silly over that Lynwyn . . . she’s a nice girl, I can see that. Made a very good impression, despite that showy dress. But suppose they got serious?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘A lot. Suppose they got married. The difficulties. Half-caste children.’

  ‘Married? Gracious, woman, what are you talking about? They haven’t even been out together, not once! And him only seventeen! You do make mountains!’

  ‘All the same, Ron does make life difficult for himself.’

  ‘I think of him too on Sunday night. I talked to one of the men who was on that train. Said there was nothing Ron didn’t do to try and save John. Complete disregard of his own safety.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing, Charley. If they’d all been a bit more responsible, none of this would have happened. If Ron had come home on the earlier train, John would still be alive. Martin should never have left the pub, and Peter shouldn’t have persuaded them to go. If they’d all done what they were supposed to do, they’d have been safe upstairs. Probably never got a foot wet.’

  ‘Well . . . you can’t expect them to have our judgement. Think they know best, and find out the hard way.’

  ‘So hard there’s a young lad drowned. That’s what I see.’

  ‘You can’t blame Ron for
that. He didn’t make John miss the train. John had to make his own decisions.’

  ‘Yes. And he’s dead.’

  ‘Peter, too. Don’t forget him. Rescued Susan, went up to see if Mum and Dad were all right, started cleaning down the pub.’

  ‘He’s besotted with that girl.’

  ‘Just remember when you were nearly sixteen. Natural thing to happen.’

  ‘He’s so serious, Peter. He’d be broken up if it all finished.’

  ‘Probably break it up himself. At that age these things stop as suddenly as they start.’

  ‘I remember breaking off our engagement twice, Charley. Seems very idiotic now.’

  ‘I thought so at the time. But I’m sorry I’ve lost that ring. I just took it off to wash my hands, like I always do. Now Lord knows where the sea’s carried it.’

  ‘You’re as thoughtless as your sons.’

  ‘Come off it, Doris. If you really felt as bad as you talk, our kids would have cleared off years ago, or be waiting their first chance to do so.’

  ‘I know damn well you can’t interfere once they’re a certain age. It’s not easy, though.’

  ‘There you are . . . we think exactly the same, then.’

  ‘Must be something wrong if that’s true.’

  ‘They’re good kids, I know that. I do love ’em!’

  ‘So do I!’

  When Martin and Ann returned to Balaclava Street they found the Council had been there and put the front door back on its hinges. Pinned on it was a notice:

  WARNING

  These premises are considered to be in a DANGEROUS

  condition and MUST NOT be occupied at the present time

  ‘I’m not going to start married life in a refugee camp,’ said Ann.

  ‘Then come to Ipswich with me.’

  ‘What about my job?’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this. Come on, back to the registrar.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because he’s going to give you tomorrow off. And all next week, if necessary, until we can move back. And don’t argue.’