Sally had stopped twice more to try telephoning but now the line to The Roundel was also down. She had no option but to keep driving. For all she knew, the road behind was blocked by now and more policemen in waders would have been posted. It was getting dark and even with the headlamps on full she had to screw up her eyes and peer over the steering wheel like an old woman to see where she was going.
A part of her was excited by what was happening. As a local schoolgirl, she had been told time and again how the countryside of her birth had been won from the sea. Like many children before and since, she had marvelled at the thought of fish and whales swimming where she climbed trees, of seaweed uncoiling where wheat now waved. She had walked on the top of Sedwich Dyke with friends, peering down into the eerie depth of water it held back and tossing in stones to hear the hungry plopping sound as they were swallowed up in peaty blackness. She had imagined the excitement of climbing onto roofs to escape flood water, the fun of rowing past secretive neighbours’ bedroom windows and peering in. And as an adult there were many times when she had scared herself witless on the way home from the chest hospital by imagining a great wall of water in inexorable pursuit of her motorbike.
At first it did not seem to be a real flood. She imagined Sedwich Dyke had burst and covered a road, but that the water had swiftly dispersed into the surrounding fields and waterways with no harm done. Then she twice drove the car through puddles which turned out to be deep as fords, and offered prayers as she felt the engine splutter. When she saw a terrified horse frantically pounding its bloodied way through a fence to vault out of a flooded field where ducks now swam, when she saw a family bicycling in the opposite direction, backs laden, faces white, a chill of comprehension made her shudder so badly it caused the car to swerve.
Many of the fenland roads were built from filled-in, redundant canals and so ran along high banks, along unnaturally straight routes. This was one such. When it joined another to make a T-junction, she had to scrabble for her torch and consult the map, briefly disoriented. She faced a decision. One fork led back to her parents’ village and Miriam, the other, on to Edward and The Roundel. She flicked off the torch, tossed it aside and began to drive towards Wenborough then bumped to a halt, flung the car into noisy reverse and backed swiftly to the junction so as to turn and drive on to Edward. It was simply and unsentimentally decided. Miriam was with her parents. Edward was alone.
She was close now. She recognised the road and dared to drive a little faster. Then she hit what seemed at first to be another big puddle. She drove into it warily then slammed on the brakes as she felt the road dip deeper into the water ahead of her. She backed up a little, turned the wheel slightly to the left and started forwards again. Suddenly she seemed to be surrounded by water. The head-lamps gave her no help in finding where the road lay but merely confused her further by setting the surface water aglitter. Once more she had pointed the car the wrong way. Once more the bonnet lurched sickeningly downwards. She thrust her foot down on the brake. She cursed her stupidity. The road clearly bent somewhere around here. Why could she not remember it? She began to reverse, gently at first, then slamming her foot down wildly on the accelerator as the tyres lost their hold on the submerged turf and the car began to slide. Then water reached the exhaust pipe and the engine died. For two, maybe three seconds, as the rain clattered on the roof, she was paralysed with fear, then the car ploughed down the bank and crashed into a clump of trees beneath the water line.
Sally yelled as a sharp branch shattered the windscreen and freezing water slammed onto her with the force of a punch. Somehow she found time to snatch a whooping breath before she was entirely submerged. She thrashed out of her seat and forced herself to open her eyes. The water was filthy, however, and night had fallen. She could see nothing. Beating out with her hands, thinking she might be able to swim out through the windscreen space, she found it blocked by branches. She felt her way back along the seat to first one door handle then the other. Both doors were wedged against something. One opened only slightly, the other not at all. She knew the rear window was too small to be worth smashing. Lungs burning in her effort to resist the urge to breathe, she returned to the front and began to force her way through the tree. The branches seemed to grow thicker and more tangled as she pushed on. Then her coat caught on something. She tugged it wildly before she realised Dr Pertwee’s idol, still in her pocket, must have swung out in the water and locked itself into a fork. Trapped like a bird in lime, she stopped struggling. She dared to let out a few bubbles of breath, then released one, long, suicidal sigh.
Had she climbed sideways out of the tree rather than heading instinctively through it to the surface, she might have escaped. The rain stopped within hours and the flood grew no higher. When it subsided after only a day, Sally was found wrapped in branches and dislodged ivy, her bare feet dangling some fifteen feet above Thomas’s wrecked Wolseley. Edward was shown the body only after it had been restored to dignity, but the farmer who had taken a ladder to retrieve it needed several whiskies to restore his nerve.
‘She looked like a broken bird,’ he told the barmaid in the Lamb and Flag, pale at the memory. ‘She looked like she’d been blown up there by some great wind.’