After the Rain Read Online Free Page A

For the rest, we would take blankets and waterproof covers, and find shelter for the nights where we could.
    *
    Rain gives insignificance to any situation. Wendy and Bob Humphries, two people of devotion and strength, parted damply from one another in the early morning. Wendy wept, but her tears went unnoticed in the rain. An improvised ladder led from the first floor of the house to the dinghy below, and half-way down she was taken by a fit of coughing, and we were afraid she would fall in the water. I followed with the bundle of blankets wrapped in water-proofing, and Bob handed down the other stores we were to take. As we pushed away from the side of the house, he leaned from the window to watch us go. “Good-bye, old girl. Keep your chin up,” he said. “Take care of her, John.”
    I said, “I will,” and pushed down hard into the water with my paddle. As we moved farther away down the street, we could see him standing there at the window, stiff and solitary. “Good-bye,” I cried.Wendy had not spoken from the time we left the house, and as she lifted her hand to wave, she began to cough again.
    Bob’s greatest anxiety had been that he could give us no very effective weapons. Not as many people owned guns as the writers of detective stories liked to think; Bob himself, as a member of the Disposal Service, was armed, but he had only his Sten gun, and could not give that to us. What if we should be attacked? We should have to approach towns and villages along the way to get our bearings from time to time. The rubber dinghy would be a temptation to people marooned by the flood; might they not swim from their shelters and try to take it? We had a couple of kitchen knives and a bicycle chain, but Wendy, I was sure, would not be able to use either. I paddled harder for thinking of it.
    I do not like to remember that time. The getting lost—we were lost before we left the streets of London—the days of paddling, the fishing line that trailed behind the dinghy and never caught any fish, the damp nights in deserted houses, and that one night we spent out in the open, paddling on through the slanting rain, while Wendy wept and wept as her paddle cut into the water. He had been a boy that night (it is still confused in my memory); he had been a boy no more than seventeen, and when we said, ‘Get in then, get in, “he had refused because it was the others had sent him, and there was no room for the others, and he had tried to pull the dinghy back with him as he swam, and I had hit him again and again with the paddle, and then, when hewould not let go, with the knife across the knuckles, and he had not even cried out, but only let go, and we did not know whether he got back to the others or not. Only we did not stop anywhere that night, but paddled on while Wendy wept and coughed, and coughed and wept. Her cough grew worse through that night and all the next day, and I knew that we should have to stop and rest for a while.
    Some way outside Faringdon we discovered another house. A sturdy isolated building, it might have been a vicarage, but we could see no church nearby. The ground floor was, of course, submerged, but two other floors rose above it, and these were furnished. In one of the cupboards there were sheets of old newspaper. They were damp—the damp was almost like a mist through the floorboards—but we managed to light them; Bob had given us his last box of matches before we left, and we had wrapped it like a precious thing in layers of cloth and oilskin. We broke up chairs and made a fire, both coughing now and red-eyed from the smoke that filled the room.
    “I expect it’s a nest in the chimney,” said Wendy. Then we realized that, during the whole of our journey so far, we had seen no birds.
    After a while we grew used to the smoke—or perhaps there was less of it—and managed to dry some of the bedding we found in the house. I went out to the staircase to see whether it would be easy to break up the