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were lost, some man said on the radio, and that is true, but only if it’s human lives you’re meaning. I stood and looked down across the valley the next day when the tide had ebbed a bit, though there was still more water to see than fields, and there were sorry grey humps of feathers which had been wild geese, left washed up like litter on a beach. You’d wonder why they didn’t fly away to higher ground and safety, but maybe the waters rose too quickly and their wing feathers became saturated, or they were disorientated in the darkness by the strange, altered landscape.
    There was the saddest story in the local newspaper, about the pub at the bottom of the hill between the Maltings and Snape village. The landlady was fattening turkeys for the Christmas menu, with its being December. They keep their own animals for organic meat: Gloucester Old Spot pigs and a few sheep and goats as well as the turkeys. Anyway, the police came round in the afternoon to tell them to evacuate. High tide was due for ten at night and they wanted them out by six at the latest to be on the safe side; it was already well past lunchtime when they heard the van with the loudhailer on top, instructing them to pack up and go. So of course they forgot about salvaging their belongings or trying to protect the fittings in the bar, they were so concerned for the livestock. They managed to find a nearby farmer with some empty sties and some transport to move the pigs, and the sheep and goats were taken by a neighbour with an empty field – but this took up the whole afternoon. It came to half past five and the policeman was insisting they really must be leaving soon, and there were still the turkeys in the barn. So the landlord dragged some straw bales in there and stacked them up to give the birds a place to roost that would be out of harm’s way, and they shut the door and left them. When they came back three days later once water levels allowed, every one had drowned. The bales had disintegrated in the swirling tide, leaving the turkeys no place to escape. Forty birds, and not one left alive.
    â€˜I couldn’t stop crying,’ the landlady was quoted as saying, as she described the scene of desolation that they found. Which some might think odd, when the turkeys were all to have their necks wrung for the table within a few short weeks, but I didn’t find it odd at all. I completely understood.
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    There was one more victim of the big storm surge, another unlucky refugee to add to the hundreds of people who still can’t go back to their homes. I found him – Mr Napish says he’s definitely a ‘him’ – by the side of the road that leads down to the Alde at Langham Bridge. I thought at first it was a sodden sandbag lying there in the long grass, because the farmer down there had brought in piles of sandbags to try to protect his house and outbuildings, and a lot of them had been washed away. It was sort of humped and the right kind of colour, a dark, musty grey which must have been the river mud, because when I came nearer I could see that on one side there was a lighter patch, more of a reddish-brown, and that’s when I knew what I was looking at: a dead fox. Except that he wasn’t dead. I’ve no idea what made me go and take a closer look. I’m not squeamish about dead animals – I’m not some seedypuff who’s never skinned a rabbit – but there’s no reason, is there, to go peering. It’s a feeling about dignity, I suppose; I shouldn’t want folks staring at me when I’m ‘a corpus’ as my dad used to say. But for some reason, as I say, I was curious, and when I leant down the thing gave a sort of shuddery twitch, like sometimes when you are just falling asleep. It lay still then and I thought maybe I’d imagined it, but when I watched carefully I could just make out the tiniest movement across the middle of the hump, the barely