Rosamond Lehmann: When the Waters Came

Rosamund Lehmann

When the Waters Came

Very long ago, during the first winter of the present war, it was still possible to preserve enough disbelief in the necessity for disaster to waver on with only a few minor additions and subtractions in the old way. The first quota of evacuated children had meant a tough problem for the local ladies; but most of them, including her own, had gone back to London. Nothing very disturbing was likely to happen for the present. One thought, of course, of sailors freezing in unimaginable wastes of water, perhaps to be plunged beneath them between one violent moment and the next; of soldiers numb in the black-and-white nights on sentry duty, crammed, fireless, uncomforted on the floors of empty barns and disused warehouses. In her soft bed, she thought of them with pity—masses of young men, betrayed, helpless, and so much colder, more uncomfortable than human beings should be. But they remained unreal, as objects of pity frequently remain. The war sprawled everywhere inert: like a child too big to get born it would die in the womb and be shovelled underground, disgracefully, as monsters are, and after a while, with returning health and a change of scene, we would forget that we conceived it. Lovers went on looking on the bright side, stitching cosy linings, hopeful of saving and fattening all the private promises. The persisting cold, the catastrophes of British plumbing, took precedence of the war as everybody’s topic and experience. It became the political situation. Much worse for the Germans, of course. Transport had broken down, there was no coal in Berlin. They’d crack—quite likely—morale being so low already.

The climax came one morning when the wind changed, the grey sky let out rain instead of snow. Then, within an hour, the wind veered round again to the north, the rain froze as it fell. When she went into the kitchen to order the day’s meals, the first of the aesthetic phenomena greeted her. The basket of vegetables had come in folded in a crust of ice. Sprouts, each crinkled knob of green brilliance cased in a clear bell, looked like tiny Victorian paperweights. The gardener scratched his head.

‘Never seen nothink like it in fifty years. Better be careful walking out, ’M. There’ll be some broken legs on the ’ill. It’s a skating rink. I slipped up a matter of five times coming along. Young Bert’s still trying to get up to the sheep at the top. He ain’t done it yet.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s a proper pantomime. The old Tabbies’ll have to mind their dignities if they steps out to-day.’

The children ran in with handfuls of things from the garden. Every natural object had become a toy: twigs, stones, blades of grass cased in tubes of ice. They broke up the mounds, and inside were the smooth grooved prints of stems and leaves: a miracle.

Later she put on nailed shoes and walked with difficulty over the snowy field path to the post office. The wind was a steel attack; sharp knobs of ice came whirling off the elms and struck her in the face. She listened by what was once a bush of dogwood, now a glittering sheaf of long ice pipes that jangled and clashed together, giving out a musical ring, hollow, like ghostly xylophones.

At the post office, the customary group of villagers was gathered, discussing the portents, their slow, toneless, deprecating voices made almost lively by shocked excitement. The sheep in the top field had been found frozen to the ground. Old Mrs. Luke had slipped up on her doorstep and broken her thigh. The ambulance sent to take her to hospital had gone backwards into the ditch and overturned. Pigeons were stuck dead by their claws on branches. The peacock at the farm had been brought in sheathed totally in ice: that was the most impressive item.

‘I wish I’d seen it!’

Stiff in its crystal case, with a gemmed crest, and all the blue iridescence gleaming through: a device for the birthday of the Empress of China.

That night was the end of the world. She heard the branches in the garden snapping and crashing down with a brittle rasp. It seemed as if the inside of the earth with all its roots and foundations had become separated from the outside by an impenetrable bed of iron; so that everything that grew above the surface must inevitably break off like matchwood, crumble and fall down.

Towards dawn the wind dropped and snow began to fall again.

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The thaw came in February, not gradually but with violence, overnight. Torrents of brown snow-water poured down from the hills into the valley. By the afternoon, the village street was gone, and in its stead a turbulent flood raced between the cottages. The farm was almost beleaguered: water ran through the back door, out the front door. The ducks were cruising under the apple trees in the orchard. Springs bubbled up in the banks and ditches, gushed out among roots and ivy. Wherever you looked, living waters spouted, trickled, leaped with intricate overlapping voices into the dance. Such sound and movement on every hand after so many weeks of silence and paralysis made you feel light-headed, dizzy; as if you, too, must be swept off and dissolved.

‘Oh, children! We shall never see the village looking like this again.’

She stood with them at the lower garden gate, by the edge of the main stream. There was nobody in sight.

‘Why not?’ said John, poking with the toe of his Wellington at the fringe of drifted rubbish. ‘We might see it next year. No reason why not if we get the same amount of snow.’

Where were all the other children? Gathered by parents indoors for fear of the water? The cottages looked dumb. ‘It’s like a village in a fairy story.’

‘Is it?’ said Jane, colouring deeply. ‘Yes, it is.’ She looked around, near and far. ‘Is it safe?’

‘Of course it’s safe, mutt,’ said her brother, wading in. ‘Unless you want to lie down in the middle of it and get drowned.’

‘Has anything got drowned, Mummy?’

‘No. The cows and horses are all safe indoors. Only all the old dead winter sticks and leaves are going away. Look at them whirling past.’

The water ran so fast and feverish, carrying winter away. The earth off the ploughed fields made a reddish stain in it, like blood, and stalks of last year’s dead corn were mixed and tumbled in it. She remembered The Golden Bough,* the legend of Adonis, from whose blood the spring should blossom; the women carrying pots of dead wheat and barley to the water, flinging them in with his images. Sowing the spring.

The children ran along the top of the bank, following the stream, pulling sticks from the hedge and setting them to sail.

‘Let’s race them!’

But they were lost almost at once.

‘Mummy, will they go to the sea?’

‘Perhaps. In time.’

Jane missed her footing and slithered down into the ditch, clutching at John, pulling him after her.

‘It’s quite safe!’ he yelled. ‘It only comes half-way up her boots. Can’t we wade to the cross-roads and see what happens?’

‘Well, be terribly careful. It may get deep suddenly. The gravel must be washing away. Hold her hand.’

She watched them begin to wade slowly down away from her, chattering, laughing to feel the push and pull of the current at their legs.

‘It’s icy, Mummy! It’s lovely. Bend down and feel it.’

Moving farther away, they loosed hands and wandered in opposite directions, gathering up the piles of yellow foam-whip airily toppling and bouncing against every obstruction. She saw Jane rub her face in a great handful of it.

Oh, they’re beginning to look very far away, with water all round them. It can’t be dangerous, I mustn’t shout. They were tiny, and separated.

‘Stay together!’

She began to run along the bank, seeing what would happen; or causing it to happen. It did happen, a moment before she got there. Jane, rushing forward to seize a branch, went down. Perfectly silent, her astonished face framed in its scarlet bonnet fixed on her brother, her Wellingtons waterlogged, she started to sink, to sway and turn with the current and be carried away.

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‘How could you … John, why didn’t you? … No, it wasn’t your fault. It was mine. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It’s all right, Jane! What a joke! Look, I’ll wrap you in my fleecy coat, like a little sheep. I’ll carry you. We’ll hurry home over the field. We’ll be in hot baths in ten minutes. I’m wet to my knees, I’ve got ice stockings—and all of Jane is wet. How much of John is wet?’

‘None of me, of course,’ said John, pale and bitter. ‘Have I got to have a bath?’

An adventure, not a disaster, she told herself unhopefully, stumbling and splashing up towards the garden over the ploughed field, weighed into the earth with the weight of the child, and of her ever more enormous clogged mud-shoes that almost would not move; and with the weight of her own guilt and Jane’s and John’s, struggling together without words in lugubrious triangular reproach and anxiety.

But by the end of the day it was all right. Disaster had vanished into the boothole with the appalling lumps of mud, into the clothes-basket with sopping bloomers and stockings, down the plug with the last of the mustard-clouded bath water. Jane lay wrapped in blankets by the nursery fire, unchilled, serene and rosy. John toasted the bread and put on his two yodelling records for a celebration. Adventure recollected in tranquillity made them all feel cheerful.

‘I thought I was done for that time,’ said Jane complacently.

‘It’ll take more than that to finish you—worse luck,’ said John, without venom. ‘We haven’t had a moment’s peace, any of us, since you were born. To-morrow I’m going to make a raft and see how far I can get.’

‘I’m afraid by to-morrow it’ll all be dry land again.’

She looked out of the window and saw that the water in the fields had almost disappeared already. After countless white weeks, the landscape lay exposed again in tender greens and browns, caressing the eye, the imagination, with a promise of mysterious blessing. The air was luminous, soft as milk, blooming in the west with pigeon’s breast colours. In the garden the last of the snow lay over flower-beds in greyish wreathes and patches. The snowman stood up at the edge of the lawn, a bit crumpled but solid still, smoking his pipe.

What will the spring bring? Shall we be saved?

‘But you were wrong about one thing, Mummy,’ said Jane, from the sofa. ‘You know what you said about … you know.’

‘About what?’

‘Go on. Cough it up.’

‘About nothing being … you know,’ said Jane with an effort.

‘Drowned.’

‘Oh dear, was I wrong?’

‘Yes, you were wrong. I sor a chicking. At least, I think so.’

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* Classic study of folklore, magic and religion, published from 1890–1915, by Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941)