The Wreck of the Zanzibar Read Free Page B

wreck.
    I long for Mother to tell me that everything will be all right, even if she doesn’t mean it. But she’s stopped saying anything. I think maybe she’s dying inside.
    I went to the top of Samson Hill this evening and looked out to the open sea. There was a big swell building, and the sky was very low and grey over the sea.
    I tried to make my eyes see over the horizon as far as America. It’s the closest I can get to Billy. He was out there somewhere on that sea. I could feel it. I could feel he was still alive and I was suddenly happy in spite of everything. I just wish he would come back home. If only he would, then everything would be all right again. I’m sure of it.

SEPTEMBER 6TH
    A GREAT STORM IS GATHERING, THE SEAS huge, the skies full of anger.
    We went to fetch Granny May this morning. Her roof looks as if it might blow off at any time. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to be a trouble. Mother paid her no heed and we took an arm each and brought her home.
    All day we huddled together around the fire in the kitchen trying not to listen to the howling outside. Father saw to the cows today. He’s shut them in the shed now, out of the storm.
    It’s a high tide tonight. Father says there’ll be flooding. The sea will pour in across from Great Porthand make another island of us – it’s happened before.
    On nights like this, when I was little, I used to go into Billy’s room, climb into his bed and we’d talk till morning. We could pretend we weren’t frightened and if we pretended hard enough, then we weren’t.
    Now I sit alone on my bed and listen to the roar of the storm outside and the whistle of the wind in the windows and I am afraid. I can only think of all that sea pounding our little island, trying to suck us down and sink us forever. I am so afraid.
    Where are you, Billy? Where are you? Why did you go and leave me?

SEPTEMBER 7TH
    THE STORM HAS PASSED, BUT IT HAS RUINED us utterly. I went out early to milk the cows. The meadows were a great lake and the cowshed on the hillside had gone. The gate into the meadows was off its hinges. There were no cows to be seen, not at first. Then I saw them. Celandine and Petal were lying drowned and swollen where the sea had left them, legs stiff in the air. I ran home.
    No one would believe me, because they didn’t want to believe me.
I
didn’t want to believe me. They followed me out. Father knelt beside them in the shallows and sobbed. Granny May and Mother led him home, his head in his hands.
    I stroked the white patch on Petal’s neck, where I always patted her after milking. She was so cold. Her big, blue eyes gazed up at me, unseeing. I ran off and later found myself outside Granny May’s house. Her whole roof had gone this time, but that wasn’t all. When I went round the side I saw the end of the cottage had collapsed around the chimney. Next to it the Jenkins’ house too was beyond repair, like a giant had trampled all over it.
    I walked all around the island. Hardly a house had survived intact. When I got home I found the hen-house gone, the hens with it, and the kitchen window had been blown in.
    Several boats, not ours, thank God, have been driven on to the rocks and smashed to pieces, and the chief has lost his crabber altogether. Bryher is wrecked. It’s like a nightmare. I want to wake up and find none of it is true. We are all ruined and done for and we shall have to leave. Everyone says so – except Granny May. But she hasn’t been told about her house yet. Father won’t do it and Mother won’t do it. They just can’t bring themselves to tell her, and neither can I.
    When Granny May had gone up to bed thisevening Father said, ‘It’s like the beginning of the end. In a few years’ time Bryher will be like Samson and Tean, abandoned and deserted, left to the rabbits and the birds.’
    He cried and I knew I didn’t