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 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.