Salt by Jeremy Page

Vikings by the boatful, could return a few hundred years later to add herring fishermen and Dutch traders to its grisly cargo. In her time she claimed she’d heard shouts in Old Norse across the marsh, heard chainmail thrashing in the breakers, had listened to the sickening crack of wood as longboats hit the banks off Blakeney Point. Danish sailors crying like babies in the mist, and she’d smelled their last meal of herring and oats as the galley-pot tipped when the boat went down. She is familiar with all the storms, but as the waves stave in her front door, she’s never known a storm like this.
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    Further up the lane the last villagers of Morston were fleeing their property, climbing over their sandbags and wading to the church for refuge. From the church windows they might have looked down on the lost cause of Lane End. Might have seen the waves break the front door and a second later seen the woodsmoke cease from her chimney. Poor old gal . . . ain’t nothin’ to do now , boys and maybe the odd disrespectful can’t drown a witch might have been uttered. Even in a church. Lil’, forgotten on the tiles, her hair in soggy ringlets, clutching a now useless pile of sandbag sacking, on the verge of being orphaned. There was no way out - the cottage was already a quarter of a mile into the sea.
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    Across the marshes, pit props are pulling out of coastal defences like corks from bottles. They jostle savagely in the waves and come knocking on the doors of Cley with the grace of battering rams. The village is already under water - the tide rushed the doors and windows, filled the rooms, failed to leave and now another tide’s coming on top. Fish dart wild-eyed through the water, into houses, under furniture, become stranded where the water laps menacingly up the stairs. A table floats below the ceiling, bearing a half-eaten meal and a cat. Outside the wind howls through the cables with an eerie wail, deafening and unnatural, and in the darkness all that can be seen is white foam hurtling off the backs of dark metallic waves and the brief flashes of seagulls as they’re spat from the storm.
    Then rolling up the high street comes an unearthly vision. It’s an iron buoy, clanking viciously between the walls, shattering windows like a wrecking ball - the water looks restless around it, as sinewy as eels - and all over the village there’s the sound of tiles smashing as people finally break out of attics to escape across the roofs.
    â€˜Hain’t there! Hain’t there no more!’ A man is shouting, waist-deep in water - his mouth filling with rain and sea each time he opens it. Torchlight is bent against the wind and in its beam the storm seems full of six-inch nails, driving horizontally. Help! is heard again and another torch is lit. There ain’t nothin’ there! the second man shouts to the first as hard as he can - though both men are holding each other and are lashed together with rope. And when the torchlights cross in the shattered branches of a tree they see the ghost of a boy up there, like a wet shirt blown from a washing line. Haf to get him - he in’t hangin’ on long! one shouts, and together they haul themselves back along the rope tied between telegraph poles to an army boat brought down from Weybourne. Six men row or punt and keep their backs down to bail, and at the front they throw an anchor and heave the boat up on it and when they reach it they throw another anchor forward. It’s the only way they can move. The sea boils against the boat, reeds whip their faces and distantly someone claims he sees Lonnie Lemmon’s haystack - the entire thing - floating down the coast from Salthouse to Glandford, where it’ll be found in two days’ time. They hear pigs, squealing in the waves, unable to get through the fences beyond the houses. When they reach the tree the anchor is flung round its trunk and the boat slams hard against the