The Library House
An extract from the beginning of my work in progress, set in rural North Lincolnshire
Chapter One
‘Woman washed away as river bursts its banks.’ I always listened to those news stories with a kind of appalled fascination, sympathy for the victim mixed with the underlying question, ‘how could they have been so stupid?’
And now the water was racing towards my little red Citroen and I was about to become a statistic of the storm. How could I have been so stupid?
The truth was when I planned this journey, in my warm, dry city flat, the weather warnings and flash flood alerts didn’t seem as though they had anything to do with me. So, I set off blithely on my journey to the wedding with nothing more on my mind than whether my dress would crease and where the photos would be taken if this bloody awful rain continued.
Which was how I came to be deep in the tangled Lincolnshire lanes when the River Trent breached its banks. At first I watched the silvery line of water snaking across the field beside the road, something in my brain refusing to accept the danger, as I kept my foot steady on the accelerator. and flicked little glances from side to side. The water must have been within a few feet of the road when reality hit and I slammed my brakes on with a scream. The road was going to flood, it was going to flood and I was going to drown. There were deep drainage ditches on each side, already brimming with dark water. Ahead of me the water slipped under the hedge, outflanking me, then spread out across the road, covering the surface in a matter of seconds. I slammed the car into reverse, my breathing fast and shallow, not sure I was doing the right thing, only that I had to do something.
I carried on reversing, the car veering alarmingly, as I oversteered. I couldn’t breathe, my head pounding in time with my heart. My eyes frantically sought an escape route, some higher ground so I could abandon the car and scramble to safety. But was there any higher ground in Lincolnshire? All I had seen so far were fields flat to the horizon under a grey sky.
I was half crying, jagged sobs of terror, my brain refusing to function. Then I saw a building jutting out from the hedgerow and a track sloping away from the road. Sloping UPHILL. I wrenched the wheel, tyres skittering on mud and water and I was off the road and driving without thought or intention, just as long as I was driving away from the water.
The track was awash with mud and riddled with potholes so I bounced and juddered between clumps of trees, vistas of wide, watery fields opening out between. A veil of rain made it all appear distant and unreal, the only reality my breathing and the churn of the car wheels. I was beginning to believe I might be safe when the track smoothed out and split in two, reaching round to right and left. And there clasped between the two arms, I saw through the misted windscreen, was a house.