Canvey Island (2 page)

‘Into the street,' Mum shouted. ‘Keep hold of the torch. The water's faster than a bus.'

I looked down and saw her hand bleeding from the broken window glass. The blood was dark, almost black, and her hands were inky blue in the torchlight.

She pulled at my arm. The water was almost up to my waist. It rushed against us, knocking us down. We were half-walking, half-swimming.

‘It's no good,' Mum said, ‘we must go with the tide.' We turned south towards the high street. ‘O Jesus,' she said. ‘O Jesus, get us out of this.'

I couldn't tell what was going to hit us next; it could be water, wood or brick. Everything was so dark.

‘Get out! Get out! The flood comes,' a man was shouting. He sounded foreign.

There were green electrical flashes in the night sky. I thought I could see two dead horses. Their heads were lolling flat amidst the foam, bodies twisted away, the hair of their manes separating off in strands. I didn't know the difference between air and water but I could tell, in the sparks of light, that a bungalow across the street had been lifted from its foundations and torn away.

Then Mum's ankle gave way and she stumbled, holding on to me to save herself from going under.

‘What's wrong?'

‘It's all right, son, stay with me.'

She tried to move her leg but couldn't.

‘Damn.'

She was stooping, as if she was an old woman. Then she tried to lift and turn, freeing herself from whatever lay below, but she couldn't make herself upright.

‘Are you stuck?' I said.

‘I don't know.'

Mum looked ahead, out into the night. ‘Shine your torch into the water. Can you see anything?'

‘It's too dark.'

‘It must be a cattle fence.'

I put my hand down to my mother's leg. There was barbed wire. I felt it cut into my hand.

‘Careful,' she said, losing her footing again. ‘You'll have us over.'

Again, she tried to shake herself free. ‘It's no good. We'll have to wait for help.'

‘I can do it, Mum.'

I pulled at her nightgown but she overbalanced, falling sideways towards me, pushing me down so that I felt us both go under. The water bubbled up into my face.

I thought I was drowning. I knew I had to surface as quickly as I could but the current was taking me away. As I came back up I heard my mother calling, but she was no longer close. I realised I had dropped the torch.

‘Get help, Martin, get help.'

I had to keep my head and body high, I had to try to let the water support me, and I swam towards the lights in the distance. Everything was noise. There were children shouting and distant sirens, but I couldn't tell where any of the sounds came from. I was going in circles through the darkness, calling my mother's name, alone in the rising flood.

I thought I heard her voice – ‘Martin, where are you?' – but I couldn't trust anything I felt or heard. All I wanted was light and dryness and for everything to stop and right itself and for the world to be still again.

A piece of driftwood bumped against my shoulder. If I could half-stride, half-swim then I could survive, but I found myself underwater and out of my depth.

A group of coffins floated towards me and I wondered if I was dreaming my own funeral. I prayed in my head,
O Jesus, save me
,
and heard the prayer echo back in my mother's voice. Then I heard something else, not my mother, a man shouting through the darkness, urging me to take hold, telling me to use the wood as a float that would carry me to the end of the floodwater. I found an edge and a lid, and held a coffin sideways to my chest.

The wind cut into my lips. I could feel them cracking. I thought perhaps I could rest for a while against the wood. I stopped trying to swim and held on, not knowing whether I was heading out to sea or back towards the marshes and the railway line. The nearest objects were hidden by spray, and everything was covered in the smoke of fog, foam and water. I closed my eyes and thought of fields, horses and daylight.

I tried to imagine summer: on Dad's shoulders, Mum taking our photograph.

I pushed the coffin forwards, fending off everything around me: glass and doors from porches and garden sheds, old tyres, bits of wood and metal. I thought I could see an ‘Old Bill' carnival head bouncing on the water by a stone rum jar. Nearby, a pig was shrieking, caught in a mass of debris. I let go of the coffin and turned on to my back, kicking hard, away from the danger, following the current. There were no lights in the buildings and the flood took me on, further inland.

I thought of my mother, still trapped, and of my father, still dancing.

My arms ached, and I wanted to sleep, but then I saw the outline of a group of houses in Point Road, and Ivy's sweet shop where Dad always bought the papers. I realised I was near Leigh Beck School. I could just make out shadowy figures moving quickly, carrying what looked like rugs, carpets and linen, even battered suitcases, as if they had a train to catch or were waiting for a ferry through the flood.

I felt my left foot scrape against the ground. The tide was on the ebb and the water had lost its force. I could make out the torches of a family in the distance: a man with a girl on his shoulders, a woman with blankets and a baby.

I lowered my arm on to the road and felt the hard wet surface. Then I tried to stand.

The man shouted, ‘Come on, son. You're nearly there.'

Scattered groups of people were making their way to a shelter lit by a car headlamp. The engine had been left running to show them where to go. They slid through the mud, the men with their hats, the women holding their skirts up against their waists, following the light. By the side of the road were ridges of salt from the water and a slew of chicken carcasses. An elderly woman in a dressing gown held a dog in her arms, a white poodle with bloodshot eyes, its body smeared with mud. Her husband carried a parcel of wet blankets tied with string. I could see another dog roosting in an apple tree and a woman rowing a dinghy with a pair of crutches.

‘Are you coming?' the man asked.

‘My mum,' I said.

‘What about her?'

‘She's stuck.'

‘She'll be all right. The police are out. And the fire brigade. Loads of people to help, don't you worry.'

‘I have to find her.'

‘You can't go back there. Come into the school.'

‘Someone has to help her.'

Then the man said, ‘You're Lenny Turner's boy. He can't be out in this. Where is he?'

‘He went dancing.'

‘And left you alone? Couldn't he tell?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Are you all right?' he asked.

‘No,' I said.

‘Come with us,' said the man's wife. ‘We'll look after you.'

A woman was pulling a drowned pig down the street. I wondered if she was going to roast it.

The shelter didn't look anything like school. The playground was filled with washed-up furniture. Survivors were brought on inflated rubber rafts, tin baths, skiffs and prams. A coil of rope led from the edges of the flood to the doorway. I looked at the faces of the people coming in. They were old and afraid.

I thought of my mother and prayed that she was inside. I tried to imagine her smile and the sound of her voice:
There you are, Martin. Come here. It's all right. It's over now
.

Perhaps we would be together again after all and my father would return from the dance, his hair slicked and his shoes polished. He would take us back to a home that would be exactly as it was when he had left it, a home where no flood had ever come, and my mother would kiss me again and for ever.

The step into the school had been covered with newspaper to stop people slipping. One man sat in a corner looking through a damp photograph album with his son. It was a boy from school, Ade. We played football together. He looked up but neither of us knew what to say. I don't think anybody did. Everyone was doing things so they didn't have to talk. Another man was carrying a kettle and two mugs, uncertain where, even in the middle of the flooding, he could find clean water. The others stood drinking tea: half-ghosts, staring out into the darkness.

Then a woman with a kind voice came and told me to get out of my wet pyjamas. ‘You'll catch your death,' she said and handed me a towel that made me feel as if I'd just come out of the swimming pool. Then she gave me an army blanket and a pair of plimsolls and told me to get warm by the fire while she tried to find clothes in my size.

I could see a woman leaning forward on a chair. ‘My home, my home, everything I love. All that I have is there. Take me back. Please, someone, take me back.' The straps on her shoes were broken and they left raw marks where they had been buckled.

I went over to the fire but I couldn't see anyone I knew. There was no one apart from a thin girl sitting with her knees together and her feet apart. It was Linda from the sweet shop, Ivy's daughter, but we had never spoken and I didn't want to go up to her. She had a red dress and a white band in her hair. Someone had given her colouring crayons and she was drawing. When she looked up, she put her arm round the work as if she thought I was copying.

Then there was another woman standing at the far side of the room. The light was behind her and I couldn't see her face but I recognised the dark-red ball-gown and the gloves up to the elbows.

‘Martin?' she asked.

It was Auntie Vi.

We were singing ‘Ten Green Bottles' on the way home but the bus broke down and we all stopped. I think that's when people began to worry because it was a filthy night and we couldn't get any further than the bridge. The driver was swearing and telling us that it was our fault for taking so long to get away from the dance. Len set off home straight away because he was worried about Lily and the boy but George and I stayed by the shelter.

‘No point going any further than this,' said a policeman and I agreed. I didn't want my dress getting splattered: taffeta, it was, and strapless. You don't get that in Canvey. And we were all so cold. I knew I should have worn thicker stockings, it was stupid of me not to, but I'd planned to be indoors and I never liked dancing with hot legs.

At the shelter I saw Martin. He had a towel round his waist and was shivering in a blanket. ‘Where's your mother?' I said. ‘And your father? He was searching for you both. Didn't he find you?'

The boy looked at me as if I was the one who was supposed to know. ‘No,' he said.

A woman came and gave him some P.E. kit and an old school coat. ‘Here,' she said, ‘try these.'

At the far side of the room, George was already on the shakes, rocking away, shivering and stammering, muttering the names of men he had fought with. ‘Oh, so cold,' he kept saying, ‘can't go down there, no, no, can't go down there.'

He had been a handsome man had my husband, everyone said so, kissed the girls and made them cry, but he had lost all his
confidence in the war. His cheeks had sunk and his eyes had begun to scare people. Now he looked a bit like some great daft bird, his head turning in quick movements without ever taking anything in, and he kept muttering things that I couldn't always understand:
tracer, incendiary, tracer, armour piercing
.

It was five in the morning.

‘Oh, where have they gone?' I said.

‘Mum,' said Martin, ‘she was stuck.'

‘Where?'

‘Near the house. Has Dad gone to fetch her?'

‘Of course he has.'

‘But why is he taking so long?'

‘I'm sure they'll be here soon. You get changed now.'

I gave Martin a rub with the blanket and then handed him the shirt and shorts. He could have done with a vest but there were so many people in need around us and beggars can't be choosers.

‘What about you?' I asked. ‘What happened to you?'

‘It was dark,' he said. ‘I couldn't see. Will Mum be all right?'

I ruffled his hair to try and cheer him up. ‘Of course she will. Let's have a cup of tea. There's a woman with an urn. I saw her when I came in.'

‘I don't like tea.'

‘Well, you can fetch me one,' I said, ‘there's a good boy.'

George asked me what was going on and said he wanted to go for a walk. God knows why, but I could hardly stop him.

All that waiting was getting on my nerves. Where were they all?

Dirty night. Had to send out an SXX. Water rising, ship listing, gangway blown to hell. No tin hat for me. I was sick with the rolling and shivering like blazes. Had to get a brew on to calm us down. Ask men to find blankets for the survivors. Requested assistance to get them off the bridge floor. Hoped for a mine-sweeper.

Hid in the wheelhouse for a bit until things got quieter. Kept away from the trouble. So cold, I started to rattle. Thought I'd better have a walk about. Assess the situation. See what was required and if I could be of assistance. Get the ship on an even keel and head for home.

But then I saw these kids. What the hell were they doing on the ship? A woman was trying to cheer them up and they were singing:

Oh, what a glorious thing to be
A healthy grown-up busy, busy bee
Whiling away the passing hours
Pinching all the pollen from the cauliflow'rs
.

The children looked too tired for playtime. I told them they should get out. This was no place for a bunch of kiddies. But people said I should leave them alone. They didn't know where their parents were. Perhaps we were taking them somewhere. Evacuees. That must have been it. But what a night. Two enemies. Gerry and the weather. Could do with some whale oil. Makes you smell of fish but keeps the cold out.

Soon be home, though. Have a bit of a dance with Vi and that nice sister of hers: Lily, the shy one. I always liked her. I wondered where she'd gone.