After the Rain Read Online Free

make, had wanted to be able to offer me a cigarette. “I want you to do something for me, John,” he said, “if you will.”
    “What?”
    “I want you to take Wendy out of this. We’ve got people in Somerset.”
    Wendy was Bob’s wife. “Take her out how?” I said.
    “You can use this dinghy. I’ll still have the little one.”
    “But this is silly, isn’t it?” I said. “Why don’t you take her yourself?”
    “I can’t, old man. I’m on duty.”
    Bob had always been known to his friends for what is called straight thinking; his distinctions were never blurred. He had, he reckoned, a duty to his wife to get her away from London, and his duty as a SpecialConstable to stay. The two would be incompatible if it were not for my help.
    “We’d be stealing the dinghy though,” I said.
    “Can’t be helped,” said Bob. “Did you know the water’s rising?”
    “Well, of course.”
    “I don’t just mean the rain. The level’s suddenly begun to rise much faster now, but we’re supposed to keep it quiet. Yesterday it was nine inches. You can’t tell me that was just rainfall.”
    “Nine inches!”
    “There’s something funny going on.”
    I said, “There was a clergyman in the eighteenth century, who explained Noah’s Flood in terms of a kind of Saturnian ring round the earth, which consisted of water, and suddenly descended. I suppose it couldn’t happen twice.”
    “Sounds a bit far-fetched.”
    “Look, it is far-fetched,” I said. “It could be that somebody’s lit a fire under the polar ice caps. It could be that something funny has happened to the pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic. It could be that a whole new Continent has appeared, and we’re getting the displaced water. Which do you prefer, Bob? You can have any of those.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Why it began isn’t important. When is it going to stop?”
    “Don’t know that either,” said Bob. “But I want Wendy out of this. It’s not healthy in London.” Wemoved on along the King’s Road. “Whatever happens, she’ll be better off at Chew.”
    *
    Bob’s parents lived on Chew Hill above the village of Chew Magna, which had at that time the smallest gasworks in England. Chew is not far from the Mendips , and part of the Government’s Emergency Programme , we knew, was that temporary colonies should be set up on such areas of high ground, and there, when some sort of hutted accommodation should be ready together with stocks of chemical foods, medicines and vitamin pills, the population should be concentrated. D-Day for the evacuation had been set for April 2nd, but it would be a process spread over some weeks. Chew Magna itself lies in a valley, but the hill rises steeply from it; Bob reckoned that his people would still be there, and within reach of the Mendip Camp when it began to function.
    We tried that evening to work out a route to Chew, but we had no contour maps, and the green and brown patches of the Ordnance Survey provided only the vaguest indications. “You’ll have to avoid the rivers,” said Bob. “They’ll be flowing against you.” Even as things were, we should be unlikely to cover more than thirty miles a day.
    Food would take up very little room in the dinghy. Londoners had been living on tablets—yeast tablets, dextrose tablets, vitamin tablets and large pills of various colours, labelled “Nourishment A, B, C and D” and packaged by Government laboratories. “YourMeal in a Matchbox! Science reveals that Synthetic Foods are MORE TASTY and MORE NOURISHING than food in its animal state, “I had written in the early days of the shortages, and the matchbox meals were supplemented with a kind of slop, which was mostly fish and water, and was brought round daily to as many houses as could be easily reached by the L.C.C. launches. Bob could steal enough of these tablets to last us for some time, and the slop we could make for ourselves if we caught any fish and were prepared to stomach it raw.