The Fleethaven Trilogy (112 page)

Ella put everything back into the bag and snapped shut
the fastener. She gave a little sigh: the only thing she had
hoped to find was not there. The key to the wooden box
was not, as she had thought it might be, in her mother’s
handbag.

She looked up to find her grandparents standing on the
other side of the table watching her.

Esther’s voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘There’s a big
blanket box in your room. I’ll clear it out and ya can put
all ya mam’s things in there.’

Tears sprang to Ella’s eyes but she bit her lip and
nodded.

Jonathan cleared his throat. ‘Ella, we – your grannie
and I – we thought we’d ride out to – er – where it
happened. Now, don’t come if you don’t want to.’

But Ella was nodding firmly, pressing her lips together
to stop the tears yet determined. ‘I want to come,
Grandpa.’

Slowly he nodded and his voice was hoarse as he said,
‘All right then, love.’ He cleared his throat, turned to his
wife and said more strongly, ‘Dick Souter’s offered to lend
us his car.’

‘Heavens!’ The expression on Esther’s face was comical.
‘You do surprise me. They’ve never had much time for us.
Well . . .’ she put her head on one side and gave a small,
wry smile, ‘me, really.’

Jonathan lifted his shoulders in a small shrug. ‘People
can be extraordinarily kind when there’s real trouble.’

‘Mmm,’ Esther nodded and there was a faraway look in
her eyes. Then she seemed to shake herself and asked,
‘That reminds me, how’s Beth?’

Ella saw the startled look in her grandfather’s eyes and
there was an incredulous note in his voice as he repeated,
‘Beth?’

‘Yes, Beth. And dun’t look at me like that.’

‘She’s all right, but Danny was saying yesterday that
they don’t think she’ll go back to live at the Point. The
cottages are a mess.’

‘They’d clean,’ Esther said and sniffed with impatience
to think that someone would not take the trouble and
effort. She had worked tirelessly to restore the farmhouse
from the ravages of the sea-water and was scathing of
anyone else without her energy and devotion to home and
land.

Ella, listening to the exchange, saw her grandfather
smile fondly at his wife. ‘Enid and Walter Maine, and the
Harris boys, they’ll go back to their homes, of course, but
Danny and Rosie want Beth to live at Rookery Farm.
They’ve plenty of room there and there’s no reason for
Beth to go on living on her own at the Point. Besides, she
only rented the cottage from the old squire’s estate, didn’t
she?’

Esther nodded.

‘There you are, then.’

Esther shrugged. ‘I’m surprised, that’s all. She’s so many
memories in that little cottage.’ Her voice dropped so that
Ella had to strain to hear the words. ‘It’s where Matthew
lived, an’ all.’

‘Ah well,’ Jonathan said gently. ‘She’ll carry her memories
with her, won’t she?’

‘Aye, I ’spect she will.’ Esther sighed. ‘Good and bad.’
And she raised her eyes to look directly into her husband’s
steady gaze, while Ella’s puzzled glance went from one to
the other and back again.

On Sunday morning, Jonathan drove the Souters’ old
Morris Eight into the yard.

‘Good grief!’ Esther exclaimed, staring at the mud-spattered
exterior, at the running board hanging half-off
on one side, at the cracked window, at the chicken feathers
littering the back seat. ‘Those Souters are a mucky lot.’

‘Now, now, Esther,’ Jonathan admonished gently.
‘They’ve been kind enough to lend us the car.’

‘Mebbe so, but will it get us there?’ Esther muttered as
she opened the door and brushed the torn leather of the
seat. ‘Dust that seat afore you sit down, Missy,’ she added
to Ella, who was climbing into the back.

No one said much above the noise of the engine as
Jonathan drove along the coast road, through Lynthorpe
and northwards.

‘Oh, look,’ Ella heard her grandmother exclaim. ‘Just
look!’

Where the sea had broken through the sand-dunes,
ripping aside the sand and vegetation, the land was a sea
of mud made worse by the lorries, jeeps, tractors, bulldozers
and all manner of mechanical diggers working with
fanatical urgency to fill in the breach. Temporary walls of
sandbags, hastily built by the troops drafted in during the
hours immediately following the storms, kept the sea at
bay whilst the frenzied work to build a more permanent
sea wall went on.

As Jonathan drew the car on to the side of the road,
well out of the way of the contractors’ vehicles, and
switched off the engine, Ella leaned forward and asked,
‘Grandpa, what’s that noise?’

Above the sounds of the traffic came a steady, rhythmic
‘thud-thud-thud’.

‘It’ll be the pile-driver.’

‘Whatever’s that?’ Esther asked.

‘They’re sinking groynes – breakwaters to us – into the
sand.’

‘Why?’

‘The tides bring the sand down the coast. It’ll build up
the level of the beach and, hopefully, be a natural sea
defence.’

‘And in the meantime?’ Esther asked sceptically.

‘They’re also building a sea wall. Just look at the lorries
bringing stuff in.’

In silence they sat watching the stream of tip lorries
piled high with Derbyshire stone, slag, gravel, rubble, sand;
anything it seemed that would shore up the coastline
against the next high tides.

They drove on through a village where people dressed
in boots, thick coats and with scarves around their heads
were digging away the sand piled high against their front
doors. In some places they could see a huge tube going in
through ground floor windows attached to a machine on
the outside.

‘They’re driers loaned by the army, I think. We could
maybe get one, if you like, Esther. It’d help dry the walls
out.’

They drove out of the village and on to the coast road
again, running along an embankment with a sand-dune
above them on their right. On their left the ground fell
away to the fields below. They came to the place where the
avalanche of water had swept Danny’s car away on that
dreadful night.

Again Jonathan parked the car and this time they got
out and climbed the bank on the seaward side of the road.

‘It’s like the marsh at home,’ Esther said, surprise in her
voice. ‘Only they’ve built between the two lines of sand-dunes.’

Though the flood waters had gone, below them the
ground looked drenched. Directly in front of them only
one bungalow remained standing forlornly amongst the
piles of debris that were the only remains of shattered
homes, demolished to matchwood in a few horrific
moments by the might of the sea. They watched as a party
of men in rubber boots, armed with spades, splashed
through pools of water and began digging amongst the
rubble.

‘What are they doing, Grandpa?’ Ella asked in a small
voice. ‘They’re not looking for – for people, are they?’

His arm came about her shoulder and his voice was
husky as he said, ‘No, love, but I expect they’re looking
for their possessions, things they hadn’t time to take with
them.’

Beside them Esther gave a snort of disbelief. Her lips
tight, she nodded towards the searchers. ‘Looters, more
like.’

But Jonathan shook his head. ‘No, Esther, I’ve read
about it in the paper. The authorities have organized
officially supervised parties to search.’

‘I shouldn’t think there’s much to flnd now,’ Esther
murmured, and now there was real sympathy in her voice.
Just below where they were standing, washed up against
the bank was a chair and, close by, a sodden, mud-stained
length of material – someone’s curtains.

‘I wonder if they all got out?’ Jonathan said.

‘If it came as fast as it did with us,’ Esther said, ‘I doubt
they had chance.’

‘Perhaps they got some sort of warning here . . .’
Jonathan murmured but his tone held little hope. ‘Look,
that far line of sand-dunes has almost gone.’

Ella lifted her eyes and looked towards the sea. In
places, the sand-dunes had been completely swept away
and she could even see the waves of the sea beyond. Only
parts of the dunes had been left, little clumps of sand and
trees, left standing like tiny islands in the ocean, and in the
gaps between were the inevitable sandbags.

‘It’s like the war all over again, sandbags everywhere,’
Esther muttered.

Jonathan sighed. ‘When you have an enemy as mighty
as the sea, it’s like a war.’

They turned back down the bank and stood at the side
of the road looking westward now. Even on this side,
pools of water still lay in the fields and the dykes were full
and overflowing. Mud and sand, sea-grass and bushes torn
from the sand-hills were strewn everywhere.

‘They’ll be years getting this land to grow owt,’ Ella
heard her grandmother murmur and as if their previous
conversation had triggered her memory, she added, ‘It’s as
bad as France in nineteen-nineteen . . .’

Jonathan nodded. ‘Well, there’s no trenches, but I know
what you mean. It’s certainly grim.’

‘What’s that over there?’ Ella pointed. Two fields away
from where they were standing on the embankment, there
were three or four mounds lying on the sodden ground.

‘Dead sheep,’ Esther said.

Ella gasped. ‘Do – do you mean they – they were
drowned? Couldn’t they get away?’

Her grandmother shook her head. ‘The water came so
fast.’ She pointed to a field to the left. ‘There’s dead cattle
in that one. Look.’

Ella shuddered. Her poor mother had died out here,
drowned along with the cattle and sheep. She pushed her
hands into the pockets of her school mac and said in a
small voice, ‘Do you know – where . . .?’

Jonathan pointed below them to a place near a footbridge
made out of sleepers across a dyke. ‘The car was
found down there, just near that little bridge.’

The three of them stood in silence just staring at the
spot where Kate had died. Then Jonathan, putting an arm
about each of them, said, ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

Climbing back into the car Ella realized finally that
there was no chance of going back. Her mother was dead;
she had seen where it had happened.

Her grandmother was her closest relative and, from
now on, Brumbys’ Farm was her only home.

But one day, she silently repeated the promise to herself,
one day I’ll run away.

As the new girl at the school in Lynthorpe, Ella was, for a
time, the object of everyone’s interest.

‘Ella, come and play “I sent a letter . . .”’ In the
playground, Alison Clark grabbed her arm and dragged
her towards where the girls in her class were organizing
themselves into a ring.

‘You can be first, Ella.’ The ring formed and Ella, taking
her handkerchief from her pocket as the ‘letter’, stood on
the outside ready to run round as the others chanted, ‘I
sent a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it . . .’

‘Who you sending a letter to, Ella? Have you got a
boyfriend?’

The ring broke formation as the others clustered around
her. Ella shook her head. ‘I don’t know any boys here yet.
At least, only one.’

‘Who?’

‘Rob Eland.’

The gasp rippled around the gathering and there was
almost unanimous awe in their voices as they said, ‘Rob?
Rob Eland?’

Ella nodded. ‘I’ve come to live with my gran at the
Point and he lives near.’

They were staring at her now.

‘Is he your boyfriend? ’Cos you’ll have Janice Souter
after you if he is.’

Ella stared at the girl. ‘Why?’

‘She likes him, that’s why.’

‘It’s scrawled all over the lavvy doors. “JS loves RE
true.” Haven’t you seen it?’

Maybe she had, Ella thought, but trying to decipher all
the scratchings on the insides of the doors in the girls’
lavatories would take a week and a half.

She had been going to say, ‘No. Our families know each
other, that’s all,’ but then her impish sense of mischief
came bubbling up and, returning the stares of the other
girls, instead she said, ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that,
won’t we?’

‘Ooh-er, you’re in for it,’ Alison said and cast a gleeful
glance towards a girl in the far corner of the playground
who, every so often, jumped up, craning her neck to look
over the hedge. ‘That’s her. That’s Janice. See what she’s
doing?’

Ella shook her head.

‘The boys are playing football in the field.’ Alison
nodded in the direction of the playing field beyond the
hedge surrounding the playground. ‘Rob’s ever so good at
football an’ she’s watching him.’

One of the girls from the group had run over to Janice
and was now pulling on her arm and talking urgently to
her. Then she pointed back towards where Ella was
standing. The girl called Janice stared across the playground
at Ella and then, slowly, she began to walk towards
her.

‘So, you’re the new girl, a’ ya?’ Janice was standing
before her, and though Ella was tall for her ten years, the
other girl topped her by two inches. Freckles peppered her
nose and high cheekbones and her long ginger hair was
pulled back into a pony tail. Grey eyes stared directly in
Ella’s.

Facing her squarely, Ella said boldly, ‘And you’re Janice
Souter.’ She was a striking-looking girl, even at this rather
gangly, awkward age; one day she would be really pretty.

Janice blinked and Ella guessed she was not used to
being outfaced. This was only Ella’s second day at the
town’s primary school and yet already she had gleaned
that Janice Souter was a ring-leader in the class in which
Ella had been placed.

‘She walks to school with Rob, Janice,’ Alison volunteered
and then stood back to watch the effect her piece of
information was having.

Her gaze never leaving Ella’s face, Janice said, ‘You
reckon he’s ya boyfriend then, do ya?’

Someone in the group laughed. ‘Her? Get a boyfriend?
With that mark on her face?’