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Only, as he drew closer to Jowan’s cottage on the opposite side of the flood water he knew for sure there was no way he could cross its path. So he screamed for her.
Nothing. No movement at all. The door was closed and curtains drawn. If Alex was in there, she’d be standing in the doorway or at the window, like the others were. She’d hear him shouting over the tumult. She’d come to him.
From his spot in a stranger’s garden almost at the foot of Down-along but not quite at the turning point into the harbour, he could make out one corner of the Siren’s Tail where, in an upper window, Bella and Finan peered out, waving, with the Austens behind them. They were calling to him.
He squinted and cupped his ears, only to find they were bellowing the same words at the same time, desperate to make themselves heard. ‘Get back!’
They threw their arms as if they could force him to stay where he was, frantically trying to prevent him making an attempt for the harbour.
He raised a hand to them, telling them he couldn’t go any further anyway. It was useless. His path was blocked. There were no more gardens to climb over.
He tried to scramble onto the roof of the stone storehouse before him. From up there he might be able to get on top of the lifeboat house and then the old lime kiln and get a good view of theDagalienon the beach, but there was no way to climb up, nothing to use as a foothold. He couldn’t get to Alex.
If he’d had the benefit of Bella and Finan’s vantage point he’d know already that the entire beach was lost under the brown swell. TheDagalien, along with the harbour’s Christmas tree, all the pub benches and every net and lobster pot that had been stored along the sea wall, had been swept away in the sudden surge of water, right out of the harbour mouth and into the rough Atlantic.
When, seconds later, the helicopter flew low over the village and hovered over the harbour, surveying the scene, ready to drop ladders and airlift souls in need, Magnús knew he’d failed.
He’d have screamed himself hoarse for Alex if it hadn’t been for the woman’s voice calling for help somewhere Up-along.
He turned and vaulted back over the garden railings and fences, his trousers growing heavier and clinging horribly as they soaked up icy water, until he came to the howling woman.
Mrs Crocombe’s front door was open and she stood helplessly inside, her slippers submerged in filthy ankle-deep water behind the stone threshold.
‘My shop,’ she cried. ‘It’s under water.’ She flapped her hands helplessly and shivered so much Magnús knew he had to walk her back inside. There was no safe way up or down the slope; they’d have to wait for rescue.
With blankets over their shoulders they watched the rescuers from Mrs C.’s bedroom window. Three more helicopters had arrived within seconds of the first and the airlifts began.
All they could do was watch the village transformed by the surge. This was what helplessness felt like.
When it was their turn to be lifted from the slope, Mrs C. refused to put her arms inside the harness, but Magnús told her firmly that she’d be all right, he’d be next and they’d fly out of there together. Eventually, she agreed and was winched up into the sky from the casement, crying piteously while the men and women worked heroically to evacuate the stranded.
Left alone for the five minutes it took the coastguard to drop down his winch for him, Magnús stood stiff and wide-eyed, telling himself it would be over soon, that they’d find her. She’d be waiting for him at the gathering point when he arrived and the very first thing he’d tell her was that he was in love with her and he wasn’t ever going to let anything bad happen to her ever again. He climbed out onto the windowsill, his legs dangling in the air, his body buffeted by the down draught, and the man strapped him into the harness, shouting instructions and reassurance and all Magnús could do was holler back over the rotor noise, ‘Alex Robinson? Have you found her?’
Switchboards across the area were jammed with 999 calls. RAF Chivenor saw all rescue units scrambled while RAF Kinloss was on standby to fly at any moment. The coastguard helicopter crews worked tirelessly over the village while three lifeboats patrolled the coast.
News rooms listened in to emergency frequencies and reported live, interrupting Christmas programming, to tell the whole country that two publicans from the Siren’s Tail, a family with a newborn, one elderly woman shop owner, a male holidaymaker, along with three other residents in their seventies and eighties, had all been airlifted out of the way of danger.
Then followed reports of a man in his sixties conveyed to safety by a coastguard rescue unit after being found caught in the currents, wading across the edge of the estate towards Clove Lore’s Big House, struggling against the swell and with a shivering little dog zipped inside his jacket.
News vans arrived quickly on the scene and drone footage, that immediately went viral online, showed a local vet and his fiancée assisting the RSPCA in evacuating a stable yard. Shaky, bird’s eye images showed one especially stubborn old donkey refusing to walk in convoy through the receding waters on the bridle path, now a slippery, muddy mess.
Viewers, glued to their screens, watched as the creature was secured in a harness and airlifted twenty feet into the air and over the grounds of the manor house where it was unclipped and dragged up the grand front steps by a stoic-looking blonde-haired woman in a green bodywarmer and wellies.
In all, it took forty minutes to evacuate Clove Lore.
Rescuers being interviewed on camera soon afterwards said they dreaded to think how much harder it would have been if seasonal tourists hadn’t been kept away by the bad weather of the past week.
One by one, village residents arrived at the Big House to be counted, and to drink tea made by Izaak and Leonid – who, in their quick thinking, had dashed to the flooding cellars and rescued as much of the House’s store of firewood as possible, and the few folding beds, chairs and tables the house owned, as well as the vast tea urn Minty kept for big events in the garden. They’d be required tonight, they knew.
Thinking again, Leonid had rushed back down the stone steps in the dark, just as the water table became overwhelmed and the dampness seeped in through the foundations, slowly flooding the basement with filthy water. He grabbed the crate containing Minty’s family photo albums including the folio of pictures capturing the now devastated chapel and camellia grove in Clove Lore’s halcyon days. At the last second he’d rescued the very last case of Minty’s mother’s vintage Madeira brought home from her travels in the late seventies. Everything else in the cellar was now under water, but the house itself was safe.
By lunch time on Christmas Eve the whole world had seen images of the flash flood that had swept through the sleepy Devonshire village leaving material devastation in its wake.
‘No lives lost,’ the reporters repeated all morning. ‘Only one person yet unaccounted for.’
