Sandlands (3 page)

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 Napish 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.

‘There's one thing about the sand round here, though,' I said presently, to break the silence as much as anything. ‘It means when it does rain the water drains away again quickly.' It's true in my own garden: you go out after a shower and there are puddles all over and an hour later they're gone. Or you can come in with what looks like mud all over your wellies and stand them on the mat; as soon as they're dry it just falls off them. They're clean again without a wipe, and there's just a pile of fine grey sand to sweep up.

It's different with the roads and fields, though, those places where it floods. I'd come by one of them again that morning on the way to High House, on the lane that leads down to the level crossing. There was water standing right across the road and into the entrance to Joe Wakeling's big beet field. To get past I had to scramble through a gap in the hedge and pick my way round in a wide circle through the beet tops. Even then I was hopping from ridge to ridge across furrows half full of cold, black liquid. Kezzie Hollock claims it's the big machines they have nowadays, the harvesters and loaders and those great wide tractors that crush you into the bank if you meet them on our narrow lanes. She reckons they're too heavy, so they compress the soil and wreck the drainage, and too wide, so they flatten out the grips and gullies all along the verges. I asked Mr Napish what he thought to Kezzie's theory, and he stroked his beard and seemed to be giving it consideration. But I think he was actually miles away. His eyes were back on his map, and he just said vaguely, ‘Perhaps.'

When I was doing the dining room later on and I looked out of the French windows, I was surprised to see that the lawn had barely drained at all. The cat was gone but the puddles were still there.

 

Mr Napish was right twice over. He was right we were due for another tidal surge, like the one in ‘53. But also that this time we couldn't say we hadn't been warned.

They were talking about it on the radio for days beforehand. The news is all about the weather these days, and the weather's like the news. They were saying how high the water was likely to reach, and where the weakest spots were that were most at risk, and all the damage to expect. Not that there was all that much you could do, it seemed to me, if you lived along the seafront or somewhere low down near the river or the marshes. Except to get out before the flood came, and that's what they had to do, poor souls, knowing they'd be coming back to a scene of ruin. It's the smell that's the worst, according to a lady in the paper shop at Snape this morning, who's staying with her brother up the hill. ‘I can't go back to that terrible stench,' she said. The drains started flowing in the wrong direction, she said, even before the tidewater reached them. Just imagine it, raw sewage bubbling out of all the sinks and basins. And she hadn't had time to take up her carpets.