‘Nothing. I’m all right. Look! There’s seaweed right up in that tree.’
They were absorbed into the rescue system that had sprung up overnight to deal with the disaster. They were driven into Wittlesham, where Bobby’s school had been converted into a rest centre. Here they were treated with the utmost kindness by people who had been very cool towards Annie ever since Bobby’s birth. WRVS ladies—the women’s voluntary service—and the Salvation Army bustled about providing soup and tea and sandwiches, the Red Cross was there ministering to injuries and illness. Clothes and bedding, children’s toys, even a gramophone and some records were coming in by the minute from individuals wanting to ‘do their bit’. Annie spotted Mrs Sutton and Beryl arriving with their arms full of blankets and Lady Bountiful smiles on their faces. She looked away before they could make eye contact. They were the last people she wanted to talk to.
Everyone commented that it was ‘just like the war’, as if the war had been the best thing that had happened to them. But in a way they were right, for disaster did bring out the best in everyone. There was a post-blitz atmosphere about the rest centre. The volunteers spoke of being rushed off their feet and hardly able to cope with the volume of problems, but underneath the grumbles they were secretly delighted to be part of this emergency and proving to be up to the job.
For the survivors it was all still recent enough for them to be high on having cheated death. They sat around the school hall in animated groups, swathed in blankets and borrowed clothes, swapping narrow escape stories.
Like most other communities on the stricken east coast that day, they did not yet know that this was not just a local disaster. Even the BBC was largely unaware of what had happened, so they heard nothing about the flood on the news. Central government had shut down for the weekend, so from Lincolnshire down to Kent local services and volunteers were struggling to rescue families clinging to chimneys and rafters and to cope with the hundreds of homeless who had escaped with nothing but their nightwear. All night and into the morning, unsung heroes had taken boats from pleasure lakes and winter storage and rowed them down the streets to ferry shocked and frozen refugees to where strangers opened up their homes and gave them warmth and tea and blankets. For many, help came too late. Just along the coast at Jaywick, a village of holiday chalets like Silver Sands, thirty-seven people were drowned, while Canvey Island in the Thames Estuary was completely inundated, with the loss of fifty-eight lives, mostly the very young and the elderly.
For Bobby the extraordinary day was turning into a treat. He ran off to join a group of children playing a rowdy free-for-all game with beanbags. Annie tried to settle her mother in a deckchair that someone had brought in, but Edna refused to sit down. She stood, clutching at Annie’s arm and looking around at the groups of people talking and smoking and drinking tea. The big assembly hall was crowded. The sea had come right up to the edges of the town, making refugees of the inhabitants of the new prefabs and washing through two streets of older houses. ‘I can’t see him. He must be here, mustn’t he? Somewhere?’
For the first time in her life, Annie longed to see her father. Maybe he had fetched up against a tree as she had. Maybe he had reached the Wittlesham road but hadn’t been able to get back. Maybe—but she knew it was unlikely. The moment she closed her eyes she could see again that great wave, feel its terrifying power. It had all been so quick. She recalled the feeling of helplessness as it had carried her along. She saw her father’s face, saw his hand, just inches from hers. Had she really refused to reach out to him? It had all been over in a matter of seconds. First he had been there, then he was gone, swept away into the roaring darkness.
‘He could be at the hospital or something,’ she said, but her own doubt sounded in her voice.
The words were hardly out of her mouth before one of the teachers appeared, a worried-looking middle-aged man in a tweed jacket. He had an exercise book in which he was recording all those who arrived at the school. Her heart thumping, Annie told him that her father was still missing. She found she was holding her breath. The teacher consulted his list, shook his head, looked grave. Then he drew her to one side where they could not be overheard by her mother or Bobby.
‘I have to tell you that there is a man of about your father’s age at the hospital, Miss Cross. He was found washed up near the Wittlesham road and there was nothing on him to identify him. If you’re feeling strong enough, do you want to see if—? Or perhaps your mother had better—?’ For a moment, Annie was confused. Wild hope surged through her. He was not dead.
‘At the hospital? You mean he’s—?’
Then she realised. The man did not mean that her father was recovering in bed in hospital. He was in the morgue.
‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, no.’
She had known it all along, really.
She glanced at Edna. The last thing she wanted was to take her mother with her.
‘No, I’ll do it,’ she said.
But Edna had been watching them and interpreted the signs. She grabbed Annie’s arm. ‘What is it? What’s happened? Have they found him?’
Annie explained. Her face felt stiff, her voice seemed hardly to be her own. Edna nodded very slowly. Her anxious expression settled into hard, bleak lines.
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘Mum, you don’t have to. I can go.’
‘I want to see him,’ Edna insisted.
‘It might not be your husband, Mrs Cross,’ the teacher said. ‘He could be sheltering somewhere else. I only have a list of those who have come to this rest centre.’
‘It’s him. I know it,’ Edna said.
‘I’ll come with you, then,’ Annie said. But first there was another enquiry to make. She wasn’t sure if she could take more bad news, but still she had to know.
‘Have you—have you got the Smiths on your list? Reggie and Gwen Smith from Silver Sands?’
The names were not in the exercise book. Annie felt sick.
‘Who else would know? The police?’
‘Possibly. But—’ The teacher hesitated. ‘Are the Smiths relatives of yours?’
‘No. They’re friends. Very good friends.’
‘I see …’ The man appeared to be considering what to say. ‘Of course, there’s a good chance that they were rescued and they’re now being looked after in someone’s house.’
‘Yes,’ said Annie, eager to grasp at any hope. ‘Yes, of course.’
But part of her was not convinced. She had seen the devastation the flood had caused at the caravan site.
A WRVS lady took them down to the hospital in her car. She kept up a steam of talk about the events of the night, how many people had been rescued, what had been done to help them, how long all the volunteers had been on their feet. Annie glared at the back of her head. She hated these jolly, bossy women. This one was enjoying every minute of the crisis. It was making a nice change for her, a break from her usual routine. In contrast, her mother was perched on the edge of the car seat, hanging on to the strap for dear life and saying nothing.
‘Some people have lost everything in this flood, you know,’ Annie said.
Edna came suddenly to life, looking at her in alarm and hissing, ‘Annie!’ at her. People like the WRVS lady were not to be spoken to like that.
But their chauffeur was oblivious to the criticism in her voice.
‘Oh, I know, my dear. Those poor folk in the prefabs. Quite washed away. So tragic. There was one family …’ And she was off again, an unstoppable flow of information and opinion.
Annie was relieved to get to the cottage hospital.
There were six bodies laid out in the sterile chill of the morgue. Only one was still to be identified. Annie put an arm round her mother’s shoulders, concentrating on her rather than on the shape laid out beneath the cover. How thin her mother felt, her bones sharp even through the layers of shapeless cardigans she was wearing. She gave her a squeeze. Edna was stiff, braced physically as well as e
motionally for the ordeal.
‘Ready, Mum?’ she asked. Her voice came out cracked and croaky from a dry throat.
Edna gave the smallest of nods.
The cover was drawn back. Annie felt rather than heard her mother’s sharply indrawn breath. She stared at the face on the table. He looked smaller in death. Smaller, but just as inflexible, even with grey stubble softening his jutting jaw. There was the tyrant who had ruled all their lives with his sour temper, who had made all of them feel constant failures, unable to achieve the unrealistic amount of work he’d expected from them. She could not remember one word of praise from him, one look of affection. The only time he’d touched her as a child was to hit her. Nothing had ever been right for her father. And now—now he was gone. Dead because she had refused to hold out a hand to save him.
‘Yes,’ she said to the attendant, ‘that’s my father. Walter Cross.’
Beside her, there was a low moan. Annie looked at her mother. Edna’s face was stricken, her eyes bewildered.
‘Oh, Annie,’ she whispered. ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to manage?’
Annie ran a dry tongue round drier lips. It was down to her. She was responsible, she had to say something. She forced some words out.
‘Don’t worry, Mum, you still got me. We’ll be all right. I’ll see to it all.’
Quite how, she had no idea.
Outside, in the grounds of the cottage hospital, the storm wind was still blowing. It howled round the corners of the low building, whipping through the bare branches of the young trees by the gate and bending the shrubs planted to cheer patients looking out of the windows. The WRVS lady’s car was waiting for them at the entrance. Something drew Annie’s eye beyond it to a park bench by what in summer was a fragrant rose bed. A solitary figure sat there—a young man in a beige duffel coat, hunched over and rocking with grief.
‘Reggie!’
Annie was torn in two. Beside her, her mother clung to her arm like a lost child. She could not leave her, but neither could she ignore her friend’s need. Gently, she steered her mother over to the bench and sat her down. Reggie seemed hardly to notice they were there until she laid a hand on his arm.
‘Reggie, it’s me, Annie. What is it? What’s happened? Is Gwen—?’
Slowly, he turned a ravaged face to her. For a long moment he appeared not to recognise her. Then he collapsed into the arms she held open to him.
The words came out raggedly between harsh sobs.
‘I couldn’t save her, Annie … the water … it was like a great tidal wave … I had her in my arms … we were on the roof … but the wave … it took her away. I couldn’t hold her, Annie …’
Annie wept with him, rocking him as if he were Bobby, offering him what small comfort she could in the face of such overpowering loss. She felt helpless. Nothing she could say could make a difference, for nothing would bring Gwen back.
Over the next few days, Annie spent hours listening to Reggie. Together with two of the families from the prefabs, they were given temporary accommodation in one of the smaller sea front hotels. While her mother retreated into a shell of silence, Reggie needed to keep talking. Endlessly he spoke about Gwen, about how they’d met, their courtship, what a wonderful woman she was. Endlessly he went over their last terrifying minutes together. Annie tried to convince him that he had done all he could, that nobody could have saved her from the forces of nature, all the while asking herself what she could have done to save her father and knowing that, unlike Reggie, she had plenty to be guilty about.
The funerals were very well attended. The disaster touched the hearts of the people of Wittlesham and they turned out in force to pay their respects to the victims. Gwen’s in particular attracted people who had never known her in life. The death of a young woman about to become a mother was especially tragic, and the sympathy for Reggie deep and genuine. But nothing could even begin to heal his pain.
‘I can’t stay here, not without her. I can’t face going back there to Silver Sands alone,’ he told Annie the evening after Gwen’s funeral.
The practical side of Annie’s mind knew that every last penny of their savings had been sunk into the caravan site and that their insurance did not cover flood. They had been covered against most other eventualities, but the premium for flooding had been just too high.
‘What will you do, Reggie?’ she asked. ‘Where will you go?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. Anywhere. To my brother’s, maybe. All I know is, I can’t go back there without her.’
‘Don’t worry, Reggie,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I’ll buy Silver Sands off you. Then you can make a new start somewhere.’
Reggie took her hand.
‘You’re a true friend, Annie. I don’t know how I would’ve got through this without you.’
So after that she couldn’t back down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
IT WAS a Sunday like any other for Tom. To start with, there was Moira’s discontent to deal with.
‘Don’t forget Mother’s expecting us at half past twelve for Sunday lunch, not one o’clock,’ she reminded him over breakfast.
Tom shook salt over his poached egg. ‘I’d better meet you there, then,’ he said.
He could almost see the hackles rising.
‘What do you mean, you’ll meet me there?’
‘I’ve got to go in to the yard and see a couple of coaches out.’
‘On a Sunday morning? You never told me.’
‘Of course I did. I told you last week,’ Tom said, though in fact he wasn’t sure whether he had.
‘Mikey come too?’ a small voice broke in.
Tom smiled across the table at his little son. ‘‘Course you can, Mikey-boy. We’ll make sure it’s all shipshape and Bristol fashion, eh?’
‘Bisto fashion,’ the child chanted happily
‘You most certainly did not tell me,’ Moira insisted. ‘And that yard is not a suitable place for a child. It’s dangerous.’
Tom jabbed the egg with his fork. It was perfectly done—the white set, the yolk runny. No one could accuse Moira of not being an excellent cook.
‘Rubbish. I’ll keep a tight hold of his hand,’ he said.
‘I don’t see why you have to go up there just to see a couple of coaches out,’ Moira persisted.
‘Somebody has to be there, and you’re the one who’s always pushing for me to take over the management side from Dad. You should be glad I’m not out driving.’
Moira liked to tell her friends that her husband ran a coach hire company. It annoyed her no end when one of them happened to see him out driving a party to the seaside or a football match. Being a coach driver’s wife was not the same at all.
Moira tightened her lips. ‘I suppose you’re paying them time and a half for Sunday work,’ she said, changing her means of attack. ‘It’s ridiculous what these people expect.’
‘It stops their wives from nagging them for missing their Sunday lunch,’ Tom said.
‘I am not nagging,’ Moira told him.
‘Nobody said you were.’
He escaped as soon as he had finished his breakfast, taking Michael with him on the crossbar of his bike. Moira was dead keen for them to buy a car, but Tom didn’t see the necessity. If he needed a car, he could always borrow his father’s. They had a nice little semi now that he was buying on a long mortgage, he had had a telephone installed and had bought a television, the first one in their street. That was enough for Moira to swank about for the time being.
Once at the yard, he put the stresses of home behind him. Michael trotted happily up and down the aisle of one of the coaches and sat on the driver’s seat pretending to drive, while Tom talked to the men who were going out that day and made sure they knew where the pick-ups were and which routes they were taking.
‘He’s a fine little lad, that,’ one of the men said, nodding at Michael.
‘Yes, he is that,’ Tom agreed.
Michael was the
best thing to come of his marriage.
‘Giving the missus a break, are you?’
‘That’s right. Let him see where his bread and butter comes from.’
Though looking after Michael was no chore. He loved being with his son.
‘Right chip off the old block, en’t he?’
They both smiled as Michael sat on the driver’s seat with his small feet sticking out in front of him, hanging on to the steering wheel and making engine noises.
‘I’ll have him driving round the yard as soon as his feet reach the pedals,’ Tom boasted.
He and Michael saw the coaches off and locked up the yard. There was still an hour to go before they were expected at his in-laws’ for lunch. It was a cold, raw day with the remains of last night’s high wind still blowing, not the most inviting of days to be outside, but still he didn’t much want to go home. He looked at Michael. The boy was wrapped up warm enough in an overcoat and leggings and woolly balaclava.
‘How about we ride up Gough’s Hill before we go to Grandma’s?’ he said.
‘Ride like the wind?’ Michael asked.
‘Ride like the wind,’ Tom agreed.
By the time they arrived at the Butterworths’, they were rosy cheeked and laughing, and glad to be in out of the winter cold. Moira, though she gave him an icy look, was as nice as pie to him in front of her parents and sisters. She was a great one for keeping up a front.
Later on, they all went next door to have tea with Tom’s family. They had just about finished when the wireless was turned on for the six o’clock news. The measured voice of the news-reader rolled round the crowded room.
‘Gales during the night caused abnormally high tides and widespread flooding along the east coast of England, from the Thames Estuary to Yorkshire …’
Tom went cold. He leaned forward, listening intently.
‘There has been loss of life; agency reports put the number of dead at between fifty and sixty. Many other people are missing. Sea walls were breached at various places and huge seas swept inland …’
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