Sandlands Read online

  The final encounter came towards the end of March. A long-delayed spring had finally crept in and taken the woods unawares. The carpet of moss bordering the path had brightened in a matter of days from khaki to emerald, and the creak of timber in the wind had given way to birdsong. The early warblers would be returning soon; last year it was not yet April when Fran heard her first chiffchaff. The tired winter celandines would be smothered by swathes of wood sorrel and pink purslane.

  Everywhere buds fattened, but for now both canopy and scrub were still as sparse as January, letting through broad shards of sunlight to warm the forest floor. It left the deer with little chance of camouflage and she saw them straight away, clustered in the coppiced clearing. For a moment, just long enough for anxiety, she thought the white doe was not with them, but then the group shifted and she became visible, standing slightly apart from the others, away to the rear. Her head was raised and turned in Fran’s direction, her ears alert with communion – or warning.

  The pain arrived from nowhere, a sledgehammer blow. No migraine had ever come like this before, detonating all at once in an intensity of brilliant light, which arced and leapt in tongues of flame from its source at the left side of her head. Every nerve receptor, every synapse was on fire. She clenched her eyes tight closed and clamped her hand hard over her ear but nothing could shut out the pain, the unbearable, all-consuming pain.

  Nor could it hide the slash of the hunter’s knife, the slice of the surgeon’s scalpel, which parted flesh, which severed, divided. She felt its full force, the fatal blow: the final cutting away. My heart is cleft in two. Then she sank to her knees, there on the path among the trodden, rotted leaves, and doubled over, both hands clawing to bury themselves in the crumbling mould. Earth to earth. My bones lie charring on the black coals.

  And slowly, slowly, as pain released its grip, so her tears at last began to fall, tumbling to join the moisture of the dark soil, while away in the trees, half hidden now, the white doe lowered her head, exhaled a soft, sweet breath, and nosed with her muzzle at a clump of coppiced twigs in search of the first green hazel shoots.

  High House

  Folks who aren’t from hereabouts – seedypuffs, as my old neighbour Kezzie Hollock calls them, blown through on the wind like dandelion down – always make out that Suffolk’s flat. Well, it might be true of some parts, over westwards past Bury or up there in the Breck. But my Suffolk’s not flat at all. There’s no field I know without some kind of a rise to it, a top hedge and a bottom.

  You only have to think for a minute to know there’s nothing flat about us round here. There’s not a lane you can take when you walk out from the village that doesn’t have a climb in it here and there – enough to notice on a warm day when you’ve got to my age and have a bag to carry – and between the climbs there’s always a dip. There’s the valley itself, of course, where the land slopes down to the Alde. But even to the south and east, away from the river, there are places that lie low, stubborn places where sand collects in summer and where the water backs up murky brown in the mornings after a night of rain. Oh, yes, you’ll need your wellies on, whichever road you’re taking, if it’s come down heavy overnight.

  It’s why I like to be out and walking, even though I’m on my feet all day with the hoover, at my various houses. Not the puddles, I mean; I could do without them. No, it’s the ups and downs I like. Always a new view round every corner. Not what you’d call a view, of course, if you went on those coach tours like Mrs Fitzpatrick does with the Air Vice-Marshal, and shows her slides at the Mothers’ Union: Switzerland or the Italian lakes. But still, there’s always something to look at that’s not just flat to the sky; when I stay with my sister Barbara up near Lynn it fairly drives me crazy, all those miles and nothing to see. It might not be the Matterhorn but to my thinking you could go a long way and not see anything as pretty as the bit of a sweep below the road to Snape: the river winding through the flood-meadows between its stands of reeds, and often as not half a dozen wild geese, grazing alongside the cattle.

  The village itself is a cheerful sight, too, on its little hill that’s more of a hummock, with High House sticking out at the top. I say ‘the village’ but ours is a village with no proper middle; if seedypuffs stop in their cars and want to know, ‘Where’s Blaxhall?’ I never know quite what to tell them. There’s Stone Common and Mill Common and Workhouse Common, and the row of flint cottages on the road down to Parmenters. Then there’s St Peter’s with the rectory, the Yews and Church Cottage, and another cluster by the village hall, not to mention all the outlying farms. But when I picture ‘the village’ it’s the houses between the pub and the old school that I have in mind: the nearest we have to a street. They’re on both sides of the road there for a short way, before you come to the allotments, and added to that there’s the stretch along the lower road from the pub to where the post office used to be. There must be twenty or thirty homes in all in that small patch. Whichever way I’m coming at it, that’s the view I think of as Blaxhall, with the L-shaped red roof of the Ship Inn at the bottom and at the top that double oblong of High House with its barn at the side.

  ‘You can’t miss it.’ That’s what Mr Napish always says to people, with that sudden awkward laugh of his that he smothers in his beard so fast, you can’t quite be sure if it wasn’t just a cough. It’s what he said to me, that first time on the telephone when I rang about his advert. ‘I’m at High House,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it.’ Though in my case, of course, I knew the place already, as I pointed out: I’ve lived in Blaxhall more than sixty years, I told him. ‘Well, if you ever forget,’ he said, ‘you’ll be all right. Just look upwards and there it is.’

  He’s not one of the snooty ones, isn’t Mr Napish. He might be hesitant until he gets to know you, but he’s never been standoffish. It must be two years now since I’ve been doing for him, and he’ll tell me anything. He talks about all sorts. And he always makes me coffee, every time. Not like some I could mention: there’s one or two who’ll put the kettle on and make a cuppa for themselves and it’s like I’m not there, even though I’m right beside them polishing the taps. I’d rather get on by myself in an empty house than work round some of them – and it might as well be empty for all they speak to me. But Mr Napish makes a pot of coffee every morning sharp at eleven o’clock. It’s one of those smart Italian chrome contraptions that heats on the gas, and he’s liberal with the coffee measure, too. I’ve never liked to tell him that I like my Mellow Bird’s. The first time, I took a sip and started on the kitchen worktops, but he wouldn’t be having that. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘it’s break time. Elevenses. Come and sit down,’ and he opened a packet of garibaldi.

  I know a lot of retired folks who like to keep busy, to keep a structure to their day, and Mr Napish is one of them. He’s often reading, in his study or at the kitchen table, from one of his mountains of books, or else he’s out in that barn. I’m not sure what it is he does out there; he must have some sort of a workshop, the hours he spends. I dare say he’s tinkering, the way men like to do. But rain or shine, inside or out, he stops what he’s doing on the dot of eleven and puts on his pot of coffee.

  It was over our elevenses one day that he told me about High House, and how it came to be there. He was quite an important man who had it built, and the barn as well, back in Victorian times. An engineer, it seems, who designed the sluice gate by the bridge at Snape, and others like it all up and down the coast. I never thought much about those sluices before I met Mr Napish. ‘They’re what keeps your feet dry,’ he said, with that swallowed-up laugh in his beard. Without them, he told me, salt water from the estuary would run in and flood the valley on every high tide, and not only the Alde either, but the Deben and the Blyth, and Butley Creek, and Minsmere Old River and the New Cut. ‘Half the coast would be under water.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s why he built his house up here,’ I said, ‘on the highest piece of ground for miles around? To keep his feet dry?’ But Mr Napi
sh didn’t laugh this time; he just nodded gravely and said nothing.

  This week it seems to have done nothing but rain. I set off on Tuesday to walk to the rectory to tidy round for Mrs Jackaman before her prayer group meeting in the afternoon. I can never bring myself to call her Kimberley, however much she tries to make me. It’s Reverend if she’s in her dog collar, or Mrs Jackaman in her pyjamas – and I had to double back and go right round by Stone Common. The road past Bellpit Field was flooded as it often is, but the lane up from the level crossing was also awash. Not just a short stretch like sometimes, that you can squeeze past by hugging the hedge on one side, but a great expanse of water, dark and swirling with a scum of white on it like you get on the sea, complete with little breakers whipped up by the wind. It looked deep, as well, deeper than the tops of my wellies. To get around it you’d have had to clamber across the ditch a good way back and tramp three sides of Willett’s meadow in a long detour, and even then you’d be half drowned in mud. Mr Willett’s poor cows were huddled together in the far top corner looking forlorn, on the only patch of grass that was clear of the mire. I didn’t risk it; I couldn’t be dripping on the rectory carpet.

  ‘At least I know I can always get to you,’ I told Mr Napish the next morning. ‘You’ll always be high and dry up here.’

  That’s when he told me about the coastal floods of 1953. Not that they were caused by the rain, or not by the rain alone. It was a lot of factors, he said, all coming together at once. A concatenation of circumstances, he called it; he does use some lovely words. Extra high spring tides struck land already saturated by the winter’s rainfall and then, on the final night of January, a northerly gale blew in off the sea, driving the swell before it and raising the water to a great surge fully eighteen feet above its normal tideline. At Felixstowe, he told me, thirty-eight people died.

  He knows all about it, Mr Napish, because it’s what he did for a job, before he retired. An engineer, he was – just like the man who built his house. He worked for some government agency or other, based up in Lowestoft, and his job was to stop the flooding. ‘Maintaining the coastal defences’ is how he put it, and I said he made it sound like the pillboxes, in the war. That made him laugh. ‘It was the sea we were trying to keep at bay,’ he said, ‘not the Germans. Mind you, it was always going to be a hopeless task. We were like so many King Canutes. It was only ever a matter of time.’

  Nor was it just around these parts either, the flooding in ’53. The whole of the east coast was hit, from Scotland down to Kent. Across the water, too, on the opposite shore They had it even worse over there, in fact. Watersnoodramp was the word the Dutch used for it – Mr Napish wrote it down for me so I could remember it – and two thousand of them drowned, poor souls.

  I laid down my coffee cup and stared at him. ‘So many?’

  ‘They didn’t have the forecasting we have today,’ he said. ‘The storm surge came with little warning, so people were unprepared. It’s different now. We know it’s coming. We can take precautions.’

  From what I read the next day in the parish magazine, they’re taking them already. Every village, it said, must have a designated Emergency Planning Co-ordinator. For Blaxhall the job belongs to Raymond Ketch, the publican at the Ship. He’s got the right face for it, at least, has Raymond. Never mind ‘Cheer up, it might not happen’ – he always looks as if it just has. I had a giggle with Kezzie Hollock when we read about it.

  ‘Is that the emergency plan, then? Get everyone into the pub? Or do those pen-pushers think it’s an actual ship?’

  ‘Ha! We’ll all hole up in the bar until it’s over, and drink to forget our troubles.’

  Mr Napish didn’t laugh when I told him the story. ‘The drowning of sorrows,’ he said, and I didn’t know if he was joking or not. You can never tell, with a beard.

  For all he’s a talker once he gets going, it’s nearly always about things. That’s often how it is with men, I find. It’ll be more likely the new rail timetable or Japanese knotweed than their chilblains or the grandchildren. I asked him once how he found retirement and all he said was, he’d been glad to stop shaving. So he must have been retired a while, by the quantity of growth. It makes me think of that Limerick my old dad used to recite to me. ‘There was an old man with a beard, who said, “It is just as I feared...”.’ I shouldn’t be the least surprised to find there were larks in there.

  He’s not one for family photographs either – not like some of my houses, where I’m dusting nephews and cousins enough for Queen Victoria. No... I’d call him a private man, and perhaps a lonely one, too, though he never seems exactly what you’d call sad. He’s a widower – he’s shared that much – with three sons, all married and moved away. So now he has just his cats for company. They’re great fluffy cushions of cats, both of them: pale orange Persians with snub noses and a complaining tone of voice. Enlil is the tom, and Ninlil his lady friend. Daft pair of names, to my thinking, but they’re daft-looking cats, and he had a sort of reason for it. ‘Enlil and Ninlil were the creation gods in Sumerian myth,’ he said.

  ‘Sumerian? But I thought your cats were Persian.’

  ‘Sumeria – southern Mesopotamia – was on the Persian Gulf.’ He showed me in the atlas. ‘This area here – in modern day Iraq.’ He could have been a teacher if he hadn’t been an engineer.

  They hate the wet, those cats – another pair who like to keep their feet dry. We had another soak last night and there were puddles standing even up here this morning, on the front lawn at High House. There was Ninlil as I came up the path, picking her way across the grass with a distasteful shake of the paw at every step. She looked up when she saw me and gave me a glare of deepest umbrage, as if it were her own best carpet and I’d knocked a bucket of bleach across it.

  ‘Hello, Puss,’ I said, but she turned her head away. Neither of them answers to Puss.

  Mr Napish was at the kitchen table looking at a map. He loves his maps; he has them on his bookshelves by the dozen. This one was a map of England with patches round the edges coloured blue, like the sea but one shade lighter.

  I stopped a minute and leaned to take a look. ‘What’s this of, then?’

  It was only politeness really, but his answer had me intrigued: ‘It’s a map of the future.’

  I put down my Mr Muscle. ‘What do you mean?’

  It was a map, he explained, of what the coast will look like if the sea level rises the way the scientists think it might. And very strange it’ll be, too. Barbara will have to move house, for a start: King’s Lynn will be swallowed by the Wash along with half of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, and the Norfolk coast up past Hunstanton. We’ll be on a little island here, according to this map. The Deben and the Alde will join round behind us to cut us off from the west, with Aldeburgh to the north completely under water and Woodbridge to the south a seaport.

  ‘So this will be with the global warming, then?’ I asked him. ‘Melting all that Arctic ice?’ But it turns out it’s not so simple.

  ‘Temperatures are rising, certainly,’ he said, ‘because of our burning fossil fuels. The polar ice caps have begun to melt. But that’s not the only factor.’ It’s another of those concatenations of his, it seems. There’s something in the feel of the word that makes it right for upheaval on this biblical scale, this invasion by the sea. A conquest and a cataclysm. ‘There’s more to climate change as well. Erratic rainfall patterns, more frequent storms.’

  He’s right there. They were saying on the radio only this week that it’s been the rainiest November since measurements began, and it seems like it’s always some new record or other, these days. The hottest, the coldest, the windiest, the wettest.

  The strangest thing he mentioned was one that was new on me, a thing he called ‘continental tilt’. I’m not sure if I quite understood it, but apparently the land is still moving from back when the North Sea formed and divided us off from Holland, all those millions of years ago. Scotland is slowly rising further from the sea,
while down here in East Anglia we are tipping into it, a little more each year. Two millimetres, he reckoned, which might not sound a lot but it was enough to make me feel slightly giddy, the whole idea. I sat down on the chair next to his.

  ‘Dredging,’ he said, as well.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘All the offshore dredging there has been, clearing shipping lanes and taking sand and gravel for construction. It gradually undermines and destablises the coastline. It means that when storms wash away the sand and shingle from the beaches it settles and stays to fill the voids instead of being washed back up by the next onshore gale.’

  Like at Dunwich and up at Covehithe, I thought, where the sandy cliffs are disappearing by feet and inches. But that’s been going on for centuries, before the modern dredgers. I asked him, and he nodded, frowning. ‘It’s the scale of things that’s different,’ he said. ‘The pace of change.’

  The giddiness came back. I think it was the way he spoke the words, and all that pale blue on the map, but I had a sudden image of us running towards the cliffs ourselves, of toppling over them in a tumble of sand, of being swallowed by the waves.

  And that’s another problem, he told me: the sand. We have no hard rock here in Suffolk. The coast is all shingle beaches, soft sandy cliffs and dunes, and low salt marshes lying open to the sea. For most of its length there’s not even a sea wall. ‘The old wooden groynes are being eroded, too, or covered by the rising sea.’

  ‘Couldn’t they build some more?’ I hoped the question wouldn’t offend him: it had been his job, after all. But he didn’t look offended, only a bit preoccupied, as if his thoughts had strayed elsewhere. And then he laughed – his sudden laugh, quickly smothered. ‘The battle is lost,’ he said. ‘The policy’s one of “managed retreat”.’ And I remembered King Canute.