Salt by Jeremy Page Read Free Book Online Page B

thick, depressing winter layer of altostratus - inching eastwards from Cromer. There’s not much sky left! The poor woman and her child are starting to look very small indeed down there on the marsh. And it looks like they’re going to get wet.
    â€˜Mum, Mum,’ Lil’ Mardler says, pulling her mother’s arm. The young girl’s getting scared, her eyes are darkening with fear. Tarred by the brush of having a weak mind and worried it might be her inheritance. ‘Mum, I don’t like it!’
    But Goose is doing her best, of course. Working fast. Assessing individual speed, height, internal movement, light, shape and texture. She’s listening to the clouds, hearing all these stories filling her head.
    As a final touch, let’s pull out the stops, man the pumps, check the gauges and pull a thick pea-souper sea-fret from over the Point and cover the whole marsh. Ha! Got you there. The two figures sink into darkness as the mist rolls round them. All those juicy clouds giving away secrets - and you can’t see a thing! There’s several million tons of meteorology up there now - all bristling with thunder as the rag cloud whips up a hell of a storm. Lightning forks viciously on to the marsh and the whole scene smells charged with iron and salt and while you two struggle home to the cottage against a terrible squall, here comes the rag cloud’s rain . . .
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    The date when all this is happening - 31 January 1953, and the worst storm and coastal flood in living memory is about to be unleashed on North Norfolk. All the way from the Essex estuaries to the Wash, the North Sea is gathering to leap on the land. Goose and my mother have chucked off their coats and are running to the cottage while the sky takes on an eerie twilight and the sea begins to boil in the Pit behind them.
    When they get to the cottage Goose shouts at Lil’ through the teeth of the wind to go get sandbags and the young girl, not yet eight, runs up the lane and straight into the arms of a man clutching a storm lantern yelling into the wind and rain and only when he’s got her tightly in his grip does she see he’s tied to a rope and all round their feet is cold, icy North Sea water. Lil’ Mardler screams for her mother, she thrashes like a fish in his arms, he carries her to the church where the rest of the village are huddled like rags while the men pile sandbags against the doors.
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    Goose slams the cottage door against the fury outside and runs straight to the window. Water is blowing vertically across the pane in trembling fingers, while each gust of wind brings with it a stinging shingle of rain. She imagines this is how it looks on a trawler as it pitches through boiling storms off the Dogger Bank, staring through the flat glass of the bridge’s windows while the sea breaks across the bows, windscreen wipers as fast as scissors but doing no good. Everything is dark, and when the lightning flashes there’s no marsh out there, just the angry foam of the North Sea leaping off the backs of waves. It feels like the cottage is already not part of the land any more, but has drifted far out to sea, listing, taking on water.
    Still she tries to read the clouds. Sheet-lightning makes the sky flash like an X-ray, letting her see deep into the storm. She marvels at it. Giant boulders and cliff faces and ice-capped summits tower above her. She thinks of all the storms she’s seen, tries to remember the shapes she saw, the sound she heard in her chimney each time, the smell they left in the air. Because like the clouds themselves, she believes each storm is unique and each storm has a name, a year when it last visited, and a full inventory of all the lost and drowned it has claimed. Goose believes these storms never blow themselves out, but instead drift into some eternal vortex of the North Sea, waiting to return one day. So the storm that hit North Norfolk a thousand years ago, drowning