The Water Clock

pool of light. And then they weren’t. They just moved away into the dark.

‘The bank had gone. A huge slice – almost a hundred yards long. Blown out by the pressure of water. Blocking the breach had narrowed the river – increasing the force on the far side. There was just white water then, crashing out. It was a huge noise. They heard it at the church hall at Earith where the volunteers were billeted – that’s four miles.’

Captain Wright stopped again, taken aback by his enthusiasm for the story.

‘We lit the distress rockets then. Sent out the outboards. But they’d gone.’

The phrase Dryden liked was ‘went away from us’. He knew, even then, that his father had not meant to go away. But he felt lonelier anyway.

The labourer’s body they found a week later at Upwell when it nudged the lock-keeper’s gate one night. But Dryden’s father they never found. He liked to think of him out on the Fen somewhere but suspected he’d been washed out to sea when the waters finally turned north in late March. He didn’t mind that. His father was free there.

‘Death by misadventure’, was the verdict. Dryden didn’t understand at the time. Didn’t understand that it implied his father had taken a risk. Didn’t understand that it robbed them of the insurance money.

In his verdict the coroner added a rider. A recommendation that both men be recognized for their bravery. They never were. Dryden thought that right now. After all, they hadn’t been brave, they’d been unlucky. But the cutting from The Crow said they were brave. So he liked the reporter even more for that.

Thursday, 8th November

22

He got out of the car at just after 7.30 that morning. The dawn was a white cold gash to the east. The sea was a molten lead grey where the light caught the waves still marching south. The shreds of a deckchair flapped from the railings on the front and wind screamed through the iron pillars of the old pier.

He got back in and turned on the radio. The state of emergency in the Fens was top of the bulletin. The forecast was the same. The wind would hold at storm force for another twelve hours piling up the tide, which was due to peak at just after dusk. The temperature had dipped below freezing overnight but was rising again. Some snow and ice would survive until the air froze again at nightfall but until then billions of tonnes of water would melt into the rivers. Disaster was as unavoidable as the setting of the sun.

Humph tracked down two bacon sarnies at the greasy spoon next to the town’s cab rank. Most of the drivers had been out all night ferrying people around in the gale. All had stories of fallen trees, flooded roads, and stranded families. They filled Humph’s flasks with tea and drove south under clouds stained with cordite. The gale, tailing them, buffeted the car. In the telegraph wires straw hung and the chaff blew past them on the wind. The first set of traffic lights they met were without power. At the second a military Red Cap directed the traffic.

The main A10 ran like a backbone through the Black Fen, the peatlands which surrounded the Isle of Ely. A breach in the main river would bring disaster swiftly by nightfall, but first each of the individual fen basins would have to fight its own, miniature battle of the banks as local dykes and drains filled with melt water. An ice-blocked culvert, a weak earthwork, a fen where the peat had shrunk to take the field level below sea level, there were a hundred different reasons for the same result: inundation. Already the waters were creeping up into the fields.

Dryden studied his Ordnance Survey map, matching it to the one the water authority had produced of the danger areas. He found what he was looking for, a mobile home site on a fen six feet below sea level. To the east of them, Feltwell Anchor was already a grey sea. The water had brimmed up out of the main dyke an hour earlier and now flattened an already two-dimensional landscape. The wind whipped up a swell and the wavelets broke against the drove road sending spume flying into the field beyond.

They pulled off the road to the east and followed a drove. The cab rocked in the sidewind.

‘Jesus,’ said Dryden, looking east.

They’d found the Feltwell Anchor caravan site, the location for nearly a hundred mobile homes. But it wasn’t where it should have been. It had set sail, a flotilla of caravans, drifting south towards the road. The mobile homes dipped and nudged each other in the wind. Most of the families had got out but Dryden could see small groups clinging to the roofs. A dog howled from one caravan which, snagged by a fence post, had been left behind by the drifting fleet.

Ahead of them, coming west, a line of emergency vehicles was threading its way along the edge of the fen. Seagulls, blown inland, followed them in a cloud, mistaking them for tractors ploughing the land.

The unmistakable chains aw whine of an outboard motor cut through the wind. Humph parked in a passing place on the single-track drove and handed Dryden a pair of binoculars he kept in the glove compartment, then he struggled out on the driver’s side, stood for a second in the buffeting wind, and retrieved a camera and tripod from the boot.

Humphrey H. Holt, thought Dryden. Man of Action.

Six inshore rescue dinghies were out on the fen, edging their way forward in the flood, checking half-drowned farm buildings. One farm stood alone about half a mile from the drove road, the apex of its roof dotted with half a dozen people waving towards the boats. A barn, twisting in the gale, collapsed like a piece of origami, a cloud of chickens briefly rising from the debris.

They heard the crash on the wind, and something else.

‘Dryden!’

Running towards them from where the emergency vehicles had parked up was Gary. He was fully kitted out for the operation: ankle-length leather coat, wrap-around fighter-pilot dark glasses, and black fake leather slip-ons. By the time he got to them the weight of the coat had almost done for him. Each slip-on had acquired about a hundredweight of cloying peat.

Unbelievably he was smoking. ‘Hi,’ he wheezed, ‘this is a good one. They got most of them off before the water came over but there’s still about forty out there…’ The cigarette was torn out of Gary’s mouth by the wind. He fumbled for a replacement.

A dog came ashore by the cab and shook itself before trotting off towards the nearest fire engine. ‘Bill sent me