yelled Charles, inspired. We’d just had a load delivered to finish making the drive way. And so – we couldn’t stop the water reaching the fishpool, we knew, but we hoped we might break the force of it and prevent the fish from being swept away – there we were, calf-deep by now in muddy water, frantically standing paving stones on end around the pool when Mr Penny came wading up the lane.
We must have looked queer to him but he looked pretty queer to us, too, paddling debonairly along with his trousers 20
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 20
25/05/2006 14:24:38
Doreen Tovey
rolled up and a big black umbrella over his shoulders. His wife was out visiting up on the hill, he said. He was going up to tell her not to bring the car home. Five minutes later and he wouldn’t have paddled up that lane. The stream, with water pouring down from the hills in all di rections, was now a raging torrent, with boulders bouncing down in it like ping pong balls. For the first time we began to be worried. Was this really happening to us? And what could we do now that it was?
Too late, we realised we were cut off from Annabel.
Between us and her stable, on the other side of the lane, now roared a fast-moving conveyor belt of angry red water and bounding rocks. Not only could we not have stepped into it without being swept away, but – if we had, by some miracle, kept on our feet and avoided being hit – we certainly couldn’t have brought Annabel back with us. She would have panicked and probably drowned us all.
Feverishly we worked out two plans of campaign. The one for Annabel was that, if the water rose any higher, we would rope ourselves on a long line to the back gate, get across the torrent as best we could and hope to dodge the boulders, knock out the side of her stable and get her to the high ground behind it for safety. To that end Charles got the rope from the garage while he could still get the doors open, carried it wherever he went, and I, floundering behind him in water logged gumboots, tripped over it regularly all night.
The plan for ourselves and the cats was that we’d retreat, if necessary, to our bedroom, put Solomon and Sheba into canvas hold-alls (their baskets were already marooned in the tool-shed, with the door unopenable against the water) 21
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 21
25/05/2006 14:24:38
The New Boy
climb out through the side window onto the conservatory roof, and thence to the hill behind the cottage. We and the cats would be on one hill and Annabel on another, like goats on opposite Alps, but at least we’d be reasonably safe.
Always supposing we could get back through the torrent from Annabel, and the glass held in the conservatory roof…
Fortunately it didn’t come to that. The telephone went out of order. Lightning hit a transformer near the cottage and the Valley was plunged into dark ness. The water went on rising until, in the kitchen, which is raised some way above the yard, it lapped ominously, like a high tide round a pier, at the top of the last retaining step… Solomon came out just then, surveyed the candlelit scene from the top of the step and held forth with indignation about this stuff which was in Our Kitchen… Another inch and it’d be in the Refrigerator, he complained; and what were we going to do about the Food? Then he went back, no more concerned than that, to join Sheba in front of the fire and, almost as if he’d been Canute, the water began to go down.
It rose once more after that, as a barrier of stones gave way higher up the Valley, and we held our breath for a while. Then, once again, it subsided. There was still a fast-running torrent between us and Annabel’s stable but it was a foot, now, below the level of her doorway; then eighteen inches; then two feet… At three in the morning, knowing she was safe, we went to bed. At six we were up again, to inspect the damage.
The first thing I did was to go up and call across to Annabel that we’d be over to her soon, now that it was daylight. There hadn’t been a peep out of her through 22
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 22
25/05/2006 14:24:39
Doreen Tovey
the night and we hadn’t dared call her in case, hearing our voices, she’d tried to break out and come to us, and been swept away immediately in the darkness. But now, hearing and seeing me across Charybdis, she let go of her pent-up feelings. WoohoohoohooHOO! bawled Annabel, and never have I heard such relief in a donkey’s voice. Why she’d kept so quiet we couldn’t imagine.
Probably thought the Martians were landing, suggested Charles. And, being Annabel, didn’t want them to know where Annabel was.
To reach her we had to jump a chasm in the ground, in which a torrent still raced where the lane had been.
Later it was discovered that the surface of the lane had given way beneath the onslaught of the water and that this had actually saved us. Instead of flooding any higher across the width of the Valley the water had carved, in some places five feet deep or more, down to the level at which water-pipes had been laid thirty years before and in this gargantuan channel had rushed headlong down the Valley. The lane surface lay spread like some vast moraine over fields and footpaths further down. It lies there still today. It proved cheaper, in the end, to bring in new quarry waste to re-fill the lane. And it took a week of work to do it, with a non-stop shuttle-service of lorries.
Meanwhile, that first day after the flood, all was excitement in the Valley. Fortunately everybody was safe and for the most part had kept the water out of their cottages. But the gardens were flat with mud; those cabbages that Father Adams had brought us were the last he was to grow that year.
23
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 23
25/05/2006 14:24:39
The New Boy
Everybody, unable to get their cars out, stayed at home, and brushed and hosed. All except Charles and I, who were frantically looking for the goldfish.
24
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 24
25/05/2006 14:24:39
THREE
‘What be doing? Burying somebody?’ enquired Father Adams as he splodged through the mud into our yard.
Well might he ask. Now that the water had sub sided, the paving slabs, so hastily erected the night before, stood on end around the fishpool like so many tombstones. Our yard resembled nothing so much as an ancient churchyard uncovered by the sea, the effect being heightened by several inches of mud all over it, a partly dried high-tide line just below the top of the stones and inside the pond itself, a rectangle of thick red oozing mud in which Charles and I were delving with saucepans.
We were looking, we explained, for our goldfish. ‘Thee’s
’ont find any of they’ said Father Adams decisively; proceeding, without wasting any more time, to give us a summary of the disaster as he had so far encompassed it. A horse killed by lightning at the top of the Valley; hundreds 25
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 25
25/05/2006 14:24:39
The New Boy
of cattle lost across the moors; people in neighbouring villages marooned in their bedrooms… ‘Old Ma Wellington twitterin’ the place down wantin’ somebody to get the doctor to see to her nerves,’ he concluded inconsequentially.
Miss Wellington, safe in her cream-washed cottage at the top of the hill, hadn’t lost so much as a tile. Despite the precaution of taking it off its hook her phone had gone out of order with everybody else’s, of course – which was just as well since she couldn’t now badger the unfortunate doctor personally. But her paths were unspecked by mud. Of the assortment of gnomes, rabbits and spotted stone toadstools which so coyly decorated her lawn not one had been so much as moved an inch. She couldn’t even complain about the tradesmen. We in the Valley were reduced, as we were in heavy snow, to collecting our bread from the top of the hill and having crates of milk dumped communally on the corner. Miss Wellington had none of that but she was carrying on, appar ently, as if she were marooned on a desert island.