‘Look, Mam,’ he said, and held up two dead ducks.

‘Oh – ’ she said, enraptured.

‘The place is all underwater,’ he explained. ‘All over the bottom of Martin and Lisa’s garden, and the bottom of our garden, and all the ditch, is full of water – and all the grass by the stream with the trees sticking out. Come and see.’

Peter heaved himself up from the bed and as they followed Peterkin out they saw he was soaked to the waist.

‘Don’t leave the ducks, take them with you. I don’t want Tibtab to get at them,’ said Marion.

They went round the cottage, under the ash tree and along the side of Martin and Lisa’s garden fence. Here the ground sloped down and they saw to their amazement how the whole of the marshy area between the stream bed and the ditch was one great sheet of water.

‘It was all a mass of wild ducks,’ Peterkin was saying, dancing about partly to keep warm and partly from excitement, and swinging the dead ducks about by their necks, ‘swimming about, hundreds of them – well, anyway, a lot. I got three with four stones, quick, one after another. They were swimming so thick, you’d be bound to hit some. One of the Plowrights came too – ’

‘Did he hit one?’ Peter interrupted.

‘No, he threw some stones but missed. Lots had flown off by then – but I – I – ’ Peterkin looked furtively at Marion with a sideways glance that was so like Simon – ‘I gave the Plowright boy the duck I’d hit and we got the two drakes. I had to wade in to get them when all the others flew off. It’s not deep there, you can see bits of rushes sticking up.’

‘That’s all right,’ Marion said, to Peterkin’s relief, ‘not but they’ll probably waste it. Is the water moving?’

Peter walked down to the water’s edge, and prodded about with a stick. ‘I don’t think it is yet. Probably a tree down the valley has blown over and blocked it, and leaves and stuff piled up against it have made a proper dam. I wonder if Molly’s pig shed’s flooded.’

‘The bank there’s pretty steep below it. It could be all right; she’s only got hens in it at present,’ said Marion. They all three hurried up the slope again and across the rough grass to the pig shed beside Molly’s garden. Molly, hearing their voices, came out and exclaimed at the expanse of water at the end of her garden. As Marion had said, the pig shed, now occupied by Molly’s hens, stood at the top of the bank, and the water was still a few feet below its walls.

‘Is it still rising?’ Molly asked anxiously. Peter threw his stick in. It landed near the alder tree by what was still the far bank of the stream.

‘Watch it,’ he said. Very slowly the stick floated down stream.