Salt (6 page)

You know - I think she's stumped.

While this ugly rag cloud squats on top of her, a line of cumulus fractus rolls down towards her. The sky becomes masked with a fine, milky steam of cirrostratus. Some cumulonimbus, up they waft - giddy and rowdy, jostling to get down there too. Out at sea now, some of that North Sea water whips up into vapour plumes: Folkestone Pillars tower along the horizon like as many demonic chess pieces. Festoon clouds, caught up in the Holkham pines to the west. A thick, depressing winter layer of altostratus - inching eastwards from Cromer. There's not much sky left! The poor woman and her child are starting to look very small indeed down there on the marsh. And it looks like they're going to get wet.

‘Mum, Mum,' Lil' Mardler says, pulling her mother's arm. The young girl's getting scared, her eyes are darkening with fear. Tarred by the brush of having a weak mind and worried it might be her inheritance. ‘Mum, I don't
like
it!'

But Goose is doing her best, of course. Working fast. Assessing individual speed, height, internal movement, light, shape and texture. She's listening to the clouds, hearing all these stories filling her head.

As a final touch, let's pull out the stops, man the pumps, check the gauges and pull a thick pea-souper sea-fret from over the Point and cover the whole marsh. Ha! Got you there. The two figures sink into darkness as the mist rolls round them. All those juicy clouds giving away secrets - and you can't see a thing! There's several million tons of meteorology up there now - all bristling with thunder as the rag cloud whips up a hell of a storm. Lightning forks viciously on to the marsh and the whole scene smells charged with iron and salt and while you two struggle home to the cottage against a terrible squall, here comes the rag cloud's rain . . .

 

The date when all this is happening - 31 January 1953, and the worst storm and coastal flood in living memory is about to be unleashed on North Norfolk. All the way from the Essex estuaries to the Wash, the North Sea is gathering to leap on the land. Goose and my mother have chucked off their coats and are running to the cottage while the sky takes on an eerie twilight and the sea begins to boil in the Pit behind them.

When they get to the cottage Goose shouts at Lil' through the teeth of the wind to go get sandbags and the young girl, not yet eight, runs up the lane and straight into the arms of a man clutching a storm lantern yelling into the wind and rain and only when he's got her tightly in his grip does she see he's tied to a rope and all round their feet is cold, icy North Sea water. Lil' Mardler screams for her mother, she thrashes like a fish in his arms, he carries her to the church where the rest of the village are huddled like rags while the men pile sandbags against the doors.

 

Goose slams the cottage door against the fury outside and runs straight to the window. Water is blowing vertically across the pane in trembling fingers, while each gust of wind brings with it a stinging shingle of rain. She imagines this is how it looks on a trawler as it pitches through boiling storms off the Dogger Bank, staring through the flat glass of the bridge's windows while the sea breaks across the bows, windscreen wipers as fast as scissors but doing no good. Everything is dark, and when the lightning flashes there's no marsh out there, just the angry foam of the North Sea leaping off the backs of waves. It feels like the cottage is already not part of the land any more, but has drifted far out to sea, listing, taking on water.

Still she tries to read the clouds. Sheet-lightning makes the sky flash like an X-ray, letting her see deep into the storm. She marvels at it. Giant boulders and cliff faces and ice-capped summits tower above her. She thinks of all the storms she's seen, tries to remember the shapes she saw, the sound she heard in her chimney each time, the smell they left in the air. Because like the clouds themselves, she believes each storm is unique and each storm has a name, a year when it last visited, and a full inventory of all the lost and drowned it has claimed. Goose believes these storms never blow themselves out, but instead drift into some eternal vortex of the North Sea, waiting to return one day. So the storm that hit North Norfolk a thousand years ago, drowning Vikings by the boatful, could return a few hundred years later to add herring fishermen and Dutch traders to its grisly cargo. In her time she claimed she'd heard shouts in Old Norse across the marsh, heard chainmail thrashing in the breakers, had listened to the sickening crack of wood as longboats hit the banks off Blakeney Point. Danish sailors crying like babies in the mist, and she'd smelled their last meal of herring and oats as the galley-pot tipped when the boat went down. She is familiar with all the storms, but as the waves stave in her front door, she's never known a storm like this.

 

Further up the lane the last villagers of Morston were fleeing their property, climbing over their sandbags and wading to the church for refuge. From the church windows they might have looked down on the lost cause of Lane End. Might have seen the waves break the front door and a second later seen the woodsmoke cease from her chimney.
Poor old gal . . . ain't nothin' to do now
,
boys
and maybe the odd disrespectful
can't drown a witch
might have been uttered. Even in a church. Lil', forgotten on the tiles, her hair in soggy ringlets, clutching a now useless pile of sandbag sacking, on the verge of being orphaned. There was no way out - the cottage was already a quarter of a mile into the sea.

 

Across the marshes, pit props are pulling out of coastal defences like corks from bottles. They jostle savagely in the waves and come knocking on the doors of Cley with the grace of battering rams. The village is already under water - the tide rushed the doors and windows, filled the rooms, failed to leave and now another tide's coming on top. Fish dart wild-eyed through the water, into houses, under furniture, become stranded where the water laps menacingly up the stairs. A table floats below the ceiling, bearing a half-eaten meal and a cat. Outside the wind howls through the cables with an eerie wail, deafening and unnatural, and in the darkness all that can be seen is white foam hurtling off the backs of dark metallic waves and the brief flashes of seagulls as they're spat from the storm.

Then rolling up the high street comes an unearthly vision. It's an iron buoy, clanking viciously between the walls, shattering windows like a wrecking ball - the water looks restless around it, as sinewy as eels - and all over the village there's the sound of tiles smashing as people finally break out of attics to escape across the roofs.

‘Hain't there! Hain't there no more!'
A man is shouting, waist-deep in water - his mouth filling with rain and sea each time he opens it. Torchlight is bent against the wind and in its beam the storm seems full of six-inch nails, driving horizontally.
Help!
is heard again and another torch is lit.
There ain't nothin' there!
the second man shouts to the first as hard as he can - though both men are holding each other and are lashed together with rope. And when the torchlights cross in the shattered branches of a tree they see the ghost of a boy up there, like a wet shirt blown from a washing line.
Haf to get him - he in't hangin' on long!
one shouts, and together they haul themselves back along the rope tied between telegraph poles to an army boat brought down from Weybourne. Six men row or punt and keep their backs down to bail, and at the front they throw an anchor and heave the boat up on it and when they reach it they throw another anchor forward. It's the only way they can move. The sea boils against the boat, reeds whip their faces and distantly someone claims he sees Lonnie Lemmon's haystack - the entire thing - floating down the coast from Salthouse to Glandford, where it'll be found in two days' time. They hear pigs, squealing in the waves, unable to get through the fences beyond the houses. When they reach the tree the anchor is flung round its trunk and the boat slams hard against the bark. Above them they see the terrified boy, as white as his fear, dissected by branches and twigs as though the storm has torn him apart, and throughout the tree they see the branches are covered with rats like as many wet leaves. Some of the rats jump for the boat, the men scream, then more rats fall into the water as if they're coming from the clouds themselves and each rat drowns quickly and without fuss the way things do when there is no hope.

The boy is moving down through the tree. As they grab his ankle he's pulled right out of his own shirt, as if part of him wants to cling up there still. It's the Langore boy, one of them says, recognizing him. John, ain't it? he says, their faces almost touching in the dark.
Kipper
, the boy whispers, the nickname he's called himself. Then suddenly the boy panics, flailing wildly at the men while the boat tips to its gunwales, and one of the men sees through the dark rain the army bo'sun knocking the boy cold with a fist the size of a pile-driver. And though the storm still rages, both men share a big grin at that.

 

Back at the cottage, Goose claims the same tin bath in which Hands feared he might be cooked or drowned all of a sudden popped up like a life-raft. Into it she went. She rocked about all night long in that thing, shivering against the icy metal sides - sluiced from one corner of the room to the other a couple of feet beneath the ceiling, with bread, pans, cups, saucers, cupboards and all the driftwood she'd collected over the years spinning in a dismal galaxy around her.

Through the night she plundered this flotsam. She ate a jarful of pickled eggs, oh boy, drank an entire shelf's worth of elderflower wine. Roaring drunk, some time in the middle of the night she began to hear the noises she'd been dreading. Along with the wind, the crashing waves, the surging tide, she heard the moans of all the people who'd drowned in that storm over the centuries. There were thousands of them, going back through history, and before the night was out, there'd be hundreds more. Danish longshoremen caught on a sandbar three hundred years before, tumbling rudely into the cottage, cursing the night away as they clung to what was left of the bed. In Olde English, men calling out the names of their faithful dogs as the waves overran them. Bales of Norfolk wool - five hundred years old - rolling in the waves outside. Sheep too - so she says. And against the awful din of the storm she even claimed she heard the death throes of a mammoth - one of Norfolk's last, she supposed - which had drowned in the same storm fifty thousand years before.

Early the next morning, a sombre line of men tied themselves to each other along a rope, then waded to her cottage through the freezing water to collect her body. They found her snoring
like a good 'un
in the bath, now wrecked on top of the bed.

She lived through that storm and spent years dreading the day it would return. Not out of fear for the tin bath, but because she wasn't keen on meeting the hundred and forty people who died in Suffolk and Norfolk that night: Millie Eccles, stoker of rumours about Goose, who died on her bike; Ned Boddy, whose bungalow was swept away and who Goose owed money to - found standing in a pit with his boots filled with shingle when the water drained away; Jackie Rudd, who'd once bought a dozen bad eggs from Goose - never forgiven. They were all drowned that night, and they'd all be back to get her, she thought.

The last day of January - that's the date of the storm. A night of mysteries, of vanishings and appearances. And as each year passed, Goose was more wary of that date than any other in the calendar. I always thought it was part of her nonsense, until I experienced my own vanishing on that night, many years later.

 

The flood retreats leaving a filthy stink and a dirty brown tidemark along the fields and marshes, further inland than it's ever been, and when we look closer we see the tidemark is partly made of thousands of rats, mice, voles and rabbits. A rat won't be seen for years to come. And the same tidemark threads its way through Cley, Blakeney, Salthouse and Morston. On tree trunks and flagpoles, the tidemark is there - it even runs halfway across the sign of the Albatross Inn, and finally, about a foot lower than the ceiling, the same tidemark girdles inside Goose's cottage.

She looks at this mark, and knows ill things arrive on a high tide. Demons are left floundering in such places. She walks along the tideline to a newly washed-up boat - the
Thistle Dew
- which now sits lopsided on the marsh a couple of hundred feet from her cottage. It's going to be a significant place for her, and me, in its time. But she doesn't stop there, she continues along the tideline picking up drowned rabbits for an early supper, always on her guard, waiting for what the storm has left, and when she's nearly back at Lane End, she sees it. It's two days after the flood, and she notices a boy crying down by the creek. But he's not crying about the storm . . .

 

... I see my grandmother once again in her cottage, with a young daughter allowed for the first time to sit at the table. The young girl is staring bug-eyed at a length of boiled calf's tongue curling on to her plate. The young child looks up anxiously at the trembling tip of the meat as it winds its way through the air towards her. Other children her age would be running wet fingers along the glass-topped counters of Mather's Stores in the hunt for sherbet. The tongue is still intact, boiled limp and skewered with a steel knitting needle, but the end has unwound itself in the pan and now seems to point accusingly at the young girl's mouth. As the tongue passes over the knife and fork it seems to wriggle before breaking free from the needle and, with vigorous life, springs on to the bare table. There it lies, stunned, before curling slowly - as if injured from the fall - into a foetal position, till it hugs the cool circular rim of the plate.

Apparently the calf's tongue began its journey to my mother's mouth when Goose approached the crying boy down by the creek. The boy was new in the area. Not washed up on the tide, as it turned out, but staying with his great-uncle, who ran a farm on the heath. My grandmother had seen him eating pickles from a jar and beating off flies in August. He was either too weak or too clumsy to use the farm machinery, so had spent his days wandering the pasture as a kind of scarecrow, plucking the grass and bronzing his face, and the evenings with his knees trembling under the dining table of Will Langore, his great-uncle. Will Langore, who'd battled and lost to Hands over the poker table. After several months of forcing the farm's food down the lad, the old man had leaned over the marbled remains of a joint of beef and pinched the boy's biceps till they bruised. Satisfied, the tyrant stabbed a long curved knife into the table and said: ain't a boy no more, best you kill that sick calf next week. Don't kill it in the shed, walk it to the truck first or we'll have to carry it. And that was that. The boy shot a pleading glance over to his older brother, found only betrayal where he'd hoped for support, flung his chair back and ran to the creek, where his tears could be drowned in all that water.