The Water Clock(86)

A man who had called at Burnt Fen after the accident to talk to his mother sat at the far end of the front pew making notes. When he wasn’t scrawling with his pencil he fiddled rhythmically with a packet of cigarettes, and winked secretly at Dryden when everyone stood for the coroner. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

In the nightmare of the night before Dryden had seen his father’s body stretched out on a settle before the coroner. The blood, black and streaked, and the body white from the days in the water but punctured with yellow bruises. The eyes had woken him up. They were fish-like and a strand of weed had circled the throat like a gangrenous cut. In the dream water dripped from the settle to the floor.

But there was no body in the schoolhouse at Isleham. There was never a body.

He knew the inquest was important but the witnesses spoke a strange language that he could only struggle to understand. So much was unsaid to spare them the truth. Papers were submitted but unread. Euphemisms replaced the facts. But he knew the story in the end. The man in the front pew had written it up in The Crow.

The floods of the winter of 1977 had burst the banks at Southery, north of Ely, and only a few miles from Burnt Fen. The army, already called out to help keep back the sea at Lynn, filled the breach with sandbags. Black and white pictures of the operation were up on the schoolroom wall, showing marching lines of men under a low sky, with the solitary trees bent down in the storm.

But the River Ouse had broken through at a second spot, ten miles south, near the lock-gate town of Earith on the night of 17 December – a Saturday. With the army needed to maintain the wall of sandbags at Southery they called for volunteers. Farmers mostly, with entrenching tools. The pictures, pinned up alongside those of the army, showed a scene as from the Somme. The men covered in the black sticky silt, lit by bursts of arc light, and behind them the lethal gunmetal gleam of the water. Some grinned out of the dark beside a mobile canteen, wisps of ghostly cigarette smoke catching the lights.

The army had brought amphibious vehicles – beaver tanks – up-river to the breach and chained the convoy together as a floating dam. The current had done the rest, drawing them towards the breach where millions of tonnes of water were spewing out into the Fens. Once the floating dam was sucked into place submarine netting was dropped overboard to form the first membrane of a new river bank. Sandbags followed, and then hardcore, dragged along the bank from freight trains at the railway bridge at Earith. By ten that night the dam was in place. ‘Operation Neptune’ was a success. When a pistol shot marked the end of work the volunteers posed for pictures, but Dryden could never find his fathers face.

The words of the final witness, a Captain Wright, Dryden knew by heart – memorized from the cutting in The Crow. Six volunteers were needed to stay behind and mount the first watch.

‘First forward,’ he said of Dryden’s father, and the schoolroom had filled with the murmur of approval. Captain Wright had taken two men to the south end of the breach, two had been put to the north, and Dryden’s father and a labourer from Chatteris had been ferried over the river by amphibious vehicle to watch the far bank.

‘We all heard the noise at the same time, ‘ said Captain Wright, and the schoolroom’s hush was complete; the only sound a squeaking cycle wheel from the lane outside. Captain Wright had stopped then, inhibited, Dryden sensed, by his mother’s careful attention. The coroner nodded by way of encouragement.

‘It was terrible really… a vibration, in the earth. We checked the beaver tanks and they were fine. Our bank seemed solid too. That took a minute, I think – perhaps two. Then I heard a shout from the far bank.

‘“She’s going!”’ His mother had jumped at that – surprised by the strength of the witness’s voice.

‘They were both waving. Not panicking – just signalling I think. And then they sort of went away from us – that’s as best as I can describe it. They had a generator and an arc lamp over there so they were in this pool of light. And then they weren’t. They just moved away into the dark.

‘The bank had gone. A huge slice – almost a hundred yards long. Blown out by the pressure of water. Blocking the breach had narrowed the river – increasing the force on the far side. There was just white water then, crashing out. It was a huge noise. They heard it at the church hall at Earith where the volunteers were billeted – that’s four miles.’

Captain Wright stopped again, taken aback by his enthusiasm for the story.

‘We lit the distress rockets then. Sent out the outboards. But they’d gone.’