quotes_nov17_2002.htm

‘…I made haste, the river aiding me, but ere I had touched the shoal, the pulse of the stream beat, as it were, within me and around, and, behold, the shoal was gone, and I rode high on the crest of a wave that ran from bank to bank…the rain came and lashed the water white, and I heard no more save the roar of the waters below and the roar of the rain above…’

This is from ‘ In Flood Time’ in ‘Soldiers Three’.

An old man tells a tale of his youth and strength, when he braved the Great Flood on the Barhwi River to meet his love. He finds his enemy drowned by the rushing waters.

“…A tarred road, she shoots every drop o’ water into a valley same’s a slate roof. ‘Tisn’t as ’twas in the old days, when the water soaked in and soaked out in the way o’ nature. It rooshes off they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to descend into the valley…”

This is from ‘Friendly Brook ‘ in ‘A Diversity of Creatures’.

Two men are cutting back an ancient hedge, in November rains, in a field that is drained by a brook in spate. They remember how the brook had been a good friend to a neighbour of theirs, in drowning a blackmailer. Ever since, he had felt he owed the brook something…

…There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide across a jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty minutes. A wide sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on which the house stood, pushed round every corner, rose again and stretched, as it were, yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other sheets waiting for them in unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in one. A puff of wind followed…

This is from ‘My Son’s Wife’ in ‘A Diversity of Creatures’.

Franklin Midmore, Hampstead aesthete turned Sussex squire, is facing the forces of nature with a vengeance on a wild stormy night. But the flood brings him and his love together.