Sandlands Read Free Page B

worktops, but he wouldn’t be having that. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘it’s break time. Elevenses. Come and sit down,’ and he opened a packet of garibaldi.
    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.’
    â€˜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.
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    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.
    â€˜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