Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

I watched, transfixed, standing upon the flat roof of the asylum as the great wave rolled in — a massive, surging comb of water, turned brown from alluvial shearing of the Tewkesbury Cut, turn browner still from all the earth it had scoured up from below. Within the wave there churned and tumbled everything that had stood or lain within its path to the north, both the inanimate and the animate: uprooted trees, a horse trough, an old harrow, the side of a barn, a pony-chaise without its pony, paddock palings still linked together, an abandoned, insentient cow, and that most tragic sight of all: a Dinglian man riding the waters in arm-flailing terror — riding the waters to his imminent death.

The waters swept over the entire valley, immersing the downs and the agricultural fields and the charred apricot orchard; toppling and dismantling Mrs. Wang-Wang’s proud pagoda; sweeping away the black sticks that had once been Alphonse Chowser’s lifelong pride. I could see it all from my perch upon the roof of the asylum, in the company of my brother and his family, along with Maggy and Vincent, and Vincent’s brother George; near Chivery and all of Newman’s other attic companions; each of the four Pilkins and Jemima’s embittered brother Walter Skewton who had not let off celebrating with hoots and whoops the death of his medical tormenters upon the Summit, even as the approaching waters put thoughts of everything but the flood from the minds of all of the rest of us. Hannah Pupker stood next to me. Although her look was vacant, her brain still muddled from the drugs she had been given, she took my hand, and squeezing it tight, refused to let go.

There were several hundred of us wedged tightly together upon the Bedlam rooftop, several hundred Dinglians and their silverware and their shaggy dogs and their squirming, indignant cats. Just as hundreds more of their kinsmen and kinswomen clung to their spots upon the pitched All Souls roof two blocks away, and hundreds others stood and lay upon all the floors and stairs of the church’s sheltering campanile. And there were still others: still more Dinglians that had crowded themselves into the church’s sanctuary, for several of the town’s carpenters at Graham’s behest had taken immediately to the task of boarding over the stained glass windows and closing off every other place that the waters could invade.

I regretted that more of my countrymen could not be saved — so many there were who had not attended the warning. So many there were who had climbed to the tops of their own houses, thinking that they should be safe there. And miraculously, a good many were. For though Professor Chivery had been accurate with most of his calculations, there were a couple of things he had got quite wrong, in our favour. The stone cottages of Tavistock had largely withstood the initial wave and did not wash themselves away. They had been built by Dinglians — by men who took pride in their work and would never build a house that wasn’t solid and sturdy. A number of Milltown structures also held together — more so than Chivery had predicted: the Library and the Burghers’ Hall and the flower and vegetable pavilion (though the Petit-Parliament building a block away fell quite quickly, it having been most shoddily constructed by one of the corner-cutting Pyegrave brother contractors). This select group of buildings had defied the professor’s projections to provide additional harbourage to those less fortunate Dinglians who found themselves apart from the asylum and the church, and floundering in the muddy sluice, clambering for a dry berth.

The wave washed through Milltown with slightly less force than it had exhibited farther north, slackening as it spread out width-wise across the valley. By the time the brown waters reached the opening that had been blasted in the Belgrave Dam, there was little of a discernible wave left, the swollen turbid river passing out of the valley in an almost orderly fashion, though it be choked and knotted with debris and scourings of every possible description.

Magwitch and Melchisedech and Elwes and two other fortunate deputies watched from the opening of the mine as the waters rose to slosh their feet and then rose no more, and as an Outlander rifleman, hiding himself in that same spot to fire upon Dinglians when the time came, was discovered and “electrifried” into a bug-eyed ball of human convulsions.

From the roof of the All Souls Church, Alphonse Chowser and his ward Jack Snicks studied the waters as they rose and then settled, the church holding itself firmly in place. Tattycoram sat thinking of her father and praying in vain for his safe return. Next to her, Mr. Meagles took the gavel that he had devotedly carried with him since his employer’s brusque departure and tossed it contemptuously into the snuff-coloured water below. To himself, he said, “Good riddance to a judicial bastard. May you rot, sir. May you rot!”

The remaining members of the Scadger clan, including Harry and Matilda and their five children, sat not off to themselves, but intermingled with all their fellow Dinglians. “Look, Papa,” said David to his father, “the water came nowhere near us.”

“Aye,” answered Harry, distracted by thoughts of his younger brothers Mel and Ephraim, the heroism that marked their character making him proud to call himself a Scadger apricot-eater.

Florence remarked that she would write of this some day, when she was well, and when the consumption had been cured. And Matilda, for the first time since her oldest daughter had taken sick, believed that such a thing could now come true.

High within the campanile Susan Fagin, her father Herbert, the doctor Mulberry Timberry and his other medical colleagues ministered to the sick of Dingley Dell, carried from their beds, sometimes on litters but often on the backs of their caring family members or neighbours to this high tower of refuge, to this place that like ancient Babel climbed into the sky, but, unlike its Biblical predecessor, was filled with those who spoke the same language and shared a part of the same great heart that was Dingley Dell.

Here in the campanile were Mrs. Lumbey and her friend Antonia Bocker, and Mrs. Gargery and her maidservant Sarah. Here were Charles and Julia Timberry who had lost their Punch and Judy puppets in the flood and would now have to make new ones to entertain those children who in the coming days would so desperately need to laugh. Here were Upwitch and Graham, founding members of the Fortnightly Poetry League, who knew that were it not for their delving, enquiring league no one should be sitting dry within this great edifice and Dingley Dell should be washed away.

And here sat the full contingent of distaff members of the Euphemia Trimmers Memorial Society.

“I won’t say that I told you so,” said Antonia Bocker to her friend Georgianna Milvey.

“Good,” returned Georgianna. “And I won’t say how you continue to be insufferable even when we are faced with the likelihood of a swift, wet demise.”

“Fine. Because I don’t wish to hear it,” said Antonia.

It was Mrs. Potterson who spoke next. She tapped Graham on the shoulder. “Mr. Graham? My dear Mr. Graham, when do you think that the waters will drop to a point in which we should be able to vacate this tower?”

“What is it, madam?” Graham’s head was out of the open arching window. He was using his field monocular to determine if the stained glass windows had held, if indeed the sanctuary of the church had withstood the flood. It appeared at first sight that all of those who had taken shelter within the structure had been saved. Putting Dinglians into the church instead of on top of it, directing carpenters early on to board over the windows, had been his idea, for he had made his own calculations to discover if Chivery had fallen short here. If he was right, he should be a proud man to know that his own scientific brain had served as well as the most brilliant mind in the Dell. And unlike Chivery, he still retained his wits in the bargain!