Witness account · 4 min read · Set in The Vale of Aldermere ·
High Water at 04:10
A tenant in the dry middle of Aldermere Vale checks her cellar twice a day with a stick. On the storm night the sea in the cellar came up past her waist.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Damaris Winn, tenant and smallholder, Aldermere Vale
We keep a stick by the cellar door, cut to the knee, and have kept sticks down the generations, which is the sort of sentence that gets a family talked about at markets, so let me have the floor.
The cellar at our house floods with sea water. Twice a day, on a clock of twelve hours and twenty-five minutes. I want that written plainly, because everyone hears it first as a figure of speech. It is salt water, and it is the same sea as the sea at Kessin, going in and out at the same times as the tide tables printed for that harbour, to within a few minutes. We are inland, and the water comes up through the flagged floor of one low stone room, bringing sand, shells, and in spring a small sweet flatfish my brother fries on a Friday with no ceremony whatsoever.
It has never once come above the cellar step. The rest of the house is bricks and dust like anyone's. It is the cellar that is on somebody else's tide, and you learn to live around another animal's habits.
We have eaten well off it, is the truth. Mussels from the third shelf. We have not bought salt in my lifetime, and we learn to treat every ledger in the cellar as perishable. The storm night I am setting down was two years back this October. My brother was at his wife's; I was alone, which suited me and had suited the house. I went down at the usual time — the printed tables put that night's high water at 04:10 — with the lamp, no power in the wires, and put the stick down to find the floor —
and there wasn't the floor. The water had risen already. It came up around the stick and then around my hand, cold and fast, with the push you feel at the shins when the sea means business. I watched from the head of the steps, and it rose to my waist. I went down one step to be sure and I should not have; a ladder of cold came through me that I can still find in this chair in bad weather. And on the fourth surging, something came down on the flood and lay still on the flags.
A cap. A sailorman's cap, canvas, the old pattern, ribbon at the back gone stiff with brine. I fished it out with the broom and set it on the range rail to dry: a lamp, a stick, a cap on a rail — the extent of my heroism.
The wireless the next morning — my brother's, working — told me a surge had struck the coast in the night. A trawler gone down; crews ashore; and the cap. The name stitched inside the ribbon I will give only as an initial and a surname, because the man whose name it is is alive and in good odour, and asks for it back politely every year at Christmas, like a measure of sherry.
Corroborated, since the form insists on the word — and I will not contest it, only narrow it. My brother corroborates everything but the waist, and says so every year at Christmas. The tide office corroborated the surge and its hour; that is on their public record. My mother's marbled notebook of readings, kept for fourteen years, matches the Kessin tables to within four minutes in every column.
I will put down one last thing, and then I will get on, because the stick is by the door and the ebb is at 19:40. Nobody has corroborated what I did not see: whether the surge and the cellar are anything more than the same animal in two weathers. The cap lies in the dresser drawer now. Each Christmas the man comes and stands at our gate, and I make him a cup of tea and say again what I said the first year — that we are keeping it until it is asked for in a way we can fill a form about. And each Christmas he says the same kind thing, and I go in and shut the drawer, and I think: one day the cap will not be in the drawer. One tide, or another.