Dead and Alive Read Online Free PDF

adequate I could say. I shook his hand. He turned quickly away and went up to Anne. A moment later he had picked her up and was wading out to the boat with her. With a tow line fixed, the barge came off the sand with barely a sound and Stuart and I watched them chugging out of the now moonlit cove with a feeling that things were going well.
    It was two o’clock before I drove back to the farm, for Stuart insisted on my explaining to him how I intended getting the craft off with the tackle I had borrowed.
    The next day we started on the back-breaking task of building up a boulder and sand causeway between the rocks on which she rested and the one jagged outcrop that lay between her and flat sand. When we were tired there was always some holiday-maker to take over for a short spell. In three days we’d quite altered the appearance of the end of the cove. At night I slept like a log in an iron bedstead that Sarah had insisted on lending me complete with mattress, sheets and blankets. We lived out of tins, except once when Anne came down and whilst Bill laboured furiously with the three of us—the half-wit from the village was now under contract for the hours of daylight—Anne cooked about the biggest meal I have ever seen.
    By the end of the third day we stood back in the red light of a wild sunset and could see how, by raising her stern and shifting her foot by foot, we could swing her on to the flat sand without damaging her. But the sky was flecked with dirty looking cloud. “There’s a break in the weather coming,” I told Stuart. The weather forecast that night included a gale warning.
    It was about four in the morning that I woke. The wind was roaring against the ship’s sides and I could hear the crash of the rollers growing louder as the tide came up the cove. I dressed and went up on deck. Stuart joined me shortly afterwards. Intermittently the moon broke through ragged gaps in the clouds and showed us the water tossing angrily at the entrance to the cove.
    “Is it going to clear?” Stuart asked.
    “No,” I said. “It’s going to get worse.”
    He nodded. “What about that?” He indicated our three days’ work with the glowing bowl of his pipe.
    “We’ve had it,” I said. “And we’ll be lucky if those boulders don’t smash through the plates.”
    We decided to batten everything down and go up to the farm. There was no point in staying on board. There was nothing we could do.
    As we climbed the path to the head in the grey lightof early day it began to rain, stinging, blinding rain that whipped our faces. The tide was high and the waves were already sucking at the sand of our ramp and weeding out the smaller boulders. “By to-morrow morning,” I said, “we’ll not know that we’ve done any work at all these last few days.”

CHAPTER THREE
OFF THE ROCKS
    S ARAH understood our mood as soon as she saw us, wet and angry, at her door. She piled the fire high, gave us a huge breakfast, and left us alone with a chess set that had belonged to her husband.
    Neither of us had played chess for a long time. We played all day, while the rain lashed at the windows and the gale shook the house. We spent the night there for we knew there would be no sleep for us on board.
    Next day the wind had dropped and the sun shone on a drenched world. We went back along the cliffs and saw the sea thundering at the cliffs with blows that looked like depth charges. The tide was falling. When we reached the cove it was just as I’d first seen it. Of our three days’ work there was not a trace. “But what about the boulders?” Stuart said. “Surely they haven’t been sucked out to sea?”
    “Buried under the sand,” I told him. “It’s lucky we hadn’t started shifting her.”
    “There is that,” he agreed. “Once we do start moving her we’ll have to work fast.”
    Two plates had been buckled and looked as though they might have sprung a leak. Otherwise she seemed none the worse. Obviously she’d weathered