This last week our
lives have been dominated by the weather. I am sure that all of you,
no matter where in the world you live, will have heard that there has
been a series of disturbingly violent weather systems streaking
across the North Atlantic and hitting the British Isles with storms:
torrential rain, winds in excess of ninety miles per hour and much
higher tides than usual (thanks to the strong winds pushing more
water towards our coast).
The results has
been considerable coastal flooding twice a day at high tide times –
flooding which in places has done serious damage – and flooding
inland because there has been more rainfall than the rivers could
disperse.
We are told this
is due to the position of the jet stream and the difference in
temperature on either side of it. That all sounds reasonable but then
others say that there is more power in the weather thanks to climate
change and that also sounds reasonable. To be frank I really don’t
know about the causes but I really do know about the effects.
Probably the most
dramatic is the damage to the cliffs at Dawlish. The sea has carried
away all the supports under the railway tracks and they are now
suspended in the air, swinging as if they were made of rope and not
steel. It will be many weeks before this line is opened again. Click here to see video of what happened.
For the people
living down here this is rather a disaster: it is the only railway
line that feeds west from Exeter. Plymouth and Truro, both cities,
plus all the main towns – Newton Abbot, Totnes, St Austell, and
Penzance to name but four – and countless smaller communities are
isolated from the country’s rail network.
It is a line dear
to both of us. So many characters in so many of Marcia’s books use
it. In the Chadwick Trilogy Fliss used it to come home every
week-end when she was at Rolle College. Kate used it to go to London
for the presentation in The Sea Garden. It
has really hit home because the book Marcia is now writing (I shall
call this The Book)
was conceived as she was travelling down on that railway having been
upcountry to visit her son. Furthermore, in the second paragraph of
The Book Claude (you
will have to wait until the autumn of 2015 to meet Claude but I can
tell you that I like him enormously) travels down through Dawlish
from his home in Salisbury on his way to Dartmouth.
Then
there is Torcross. This one hit both of us. I am (as you know)
struggling to finish the first book about Marcia’s West Country –
the one dealing with Dartmouth and Start Bay and the novels set in
that area. The text is all written and I am working through now
popping in the photographs and adding the required captions. Here
follows a photograph I put in on Wednesday and the caption that I
wrote.
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Huge boulders were brought in to protect Torcross from the sea although, on such a placid day as this, it would seem they would never be needed.
It just so happens that on the day I am writing this (5 February 2014) it has been announced that Torcross suffered from another storm last night with a number of houses being evacuated - and that despite the new sea wall. |
I
said “to both of us” because Jemima returns in The Book
– and Jemima is now living in Torcross which is one of the
communities that suffered from those coastal floods. The seas were so
strong that they carried huge amounts of pebble and hurled them
against the houses where they smashed windows and caused other
damage. Some people could not escape by going out of the doors on the
landward side of their homes as the waves were breaking right over
the roofs and there was water – very active water – everywhere.
So,
yes, it has been a worrying time but there have been very few
casualties. What it has done is to make many of us think quite
seriously about the fate of people in other parts of the world. We
are remembering those who died and suffered other losses in events
such as Hurricane Katrina and the dreadful tsunami that followed the
volcanic activity in the Indian Ocean in 2004.
Marcia
and I have escaped unscathed although the noise in the house as it is
being battered by the high winds is sometimes very scary.
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| Meet Percy - a dog that lives in a doggy heaven, s "deli". |
