out because of them…’ Gary pointed further east, across a dry fen, to a line of terraced houses set bizarrely in a north-south line atop a raised bank. ‘Lode Cottages. Apparently they don’t want to move. The army’s bringing in food and stuff. Bill wants me to do the story’
Dryden felt the familiar wave of professional despair. ‘And this?’ He pointed out at the floating caravan site. ‘Isn’t this a story?’
‘I guess,’ Gary shouted. All three of them stood leaning into the gale.
‘Stay with it. The most important thing is pictures. Got a camera?’
Gary opened his leather coat flasher-style. Underneath were three cameras.
‘Take hundreds. We’ll do the cottages. Catch us up.’
Lode Cottages were flotsam from the agricultural revolution. A lode was a fossil riverbed. When the rivers moved, snaking their way across the Fens over the centuries, they left behind their clay beds. Over time, as the Fens were drained and the peat shrank, the lodes were left as high clay banks, ideal for beaded villages. Lode Cottages were built for agricultural labourers in the early nineteenth century. They stood fifteen feet above the peat. In 1947 this had proved to be ten feet too low.
The dozen houses had been built as tied cottages for the farm across the fen. They were red-brick Victorian, an out-of-place remnant of an industrial suburb, strung beside the drove road facing west. From the high ground Dryden looked towards the cathedral, a distance of some fifteen miles. The Ship of the Fens was just that, a black solid superstructure on a watery horizon. A patchwork of drowned fens and peat-brown fields lay at their feet.
Water, rising. His father’s body was never buried but his mother took him to the funeral of the labourer who had died with him. It had been Dryden’s first Fen burial. Like all of them it had been wet, distinguished by the sound of a pine coffin being dropped into the black peat water. An unspeakable fear. Not only drowned in water, but buried in it.
The familiar panic came with a preliminary rush of adrenalin to the muscles, the pulse audible in his ears, and then the slight constriction of the stomach and the first intimation of a heave, like the barely perceptible roll of a boat as it leaves harbour.
But he had a mantra: Keep talking. Keep breathing. Keep thinking.
He retrieved the binoculars from his rucksack. To the north he could trace the course of the Old West River from close by the cathedral to his old home at Burnt Fen. The farmhouse still stood high and dry, sitting on its own miniature island.
It was time for ‘T’ to send another message.
Two ten-ton army trucks arrived with a crashing of gears. They were loaded with sandbags and soldiers – TA volunteers. A dog barked from an upstairs window in Lode Cottages. Out on Feltwell Anchor the mobile homes were still living up to their name. The flotilla had drifted towards a grass bank and the inflatable outboard rescue boats were circling them like sheepdogs. He could just make out Gary’s flapping leather coat amongst the gaggle of emergency rescue vehicles on the bank.
The wind, suddenly, dropped. If Dryden had known anything about meteorology he would have known this was a very bad sign.
He found an old man pulling up winter vegetables in his back garden. A pile of beet was at his back and he’d just moved on to the sprouts.
‘Remember the last time?’ asked Dryden.
The old man straightened up. ‘Hardly likely to forget it, lost the wife.’
First prize, thought Dryden. Idiot question of the year.
The man was sweating in the wind. They both looked out over the fen.
‘Pneumonia: that’s the real problem. All this gets in the papers but we ain’t gonna drown up here, are we? It’s a winter in a damp cold house that’s the killer. Everyone forgets when the water drops.’
‘Here long?’
‘All my life, sixty-eight years. Born here. Not this one, one on the end. We moved when we married.’
‘How high did it get last time?’
‘Made the bottom of our stairs. I sent her away, sister’s. I sat on ‘em for a week waiting. Freezing. At night there’s a commotion. I come down and ground floor’s aswimmin’ with rats. Ratking, they calls it, just like a ball of string. Live string.’
Great, thought Dryden. I have to find the village doomsayer.
‘I left in the end. Got back a week later. Lost everything. Roof went. I ain’t going again. We’re’s all stayin’. Even the young uns. Ask ‘em.’
Out in the fen to the north the water was beginning to edge along the furrows. An army amphibious vehicle climbed up from the fields. A white-haired officer with three crowns on his collar flipped open the top hatch and spread out an Ordnance Survey map.
Dryden approached with due deference. ‘Hi. Sorry to interrupt. Dryden, Philip Dryden, local paper.’
‘Talbot. Captain. Peter, TA. Good ter meet ya.’ The accent was upper-class singsong slang. They shook hands in a very military kind of way.
‘How many men have you got out, sir?’ Army drill, always call ‘em sir. Talbot began to fold up the map.
‘All the county TA – about three thousand. Cambridge-shires.’
Dryden flipped open a notebook. ‘These people don’t seem to want to move.’
‘We can live with that. We’ll sandbag ‘em. Bringin food. Can’t have you chaps filming us dragging them off the land, can we?’
