The man who drove the taxi had been right. The road was under water, brown, muddy and swirling; there it lay, an encroachment of the river upon the dry land, with the high-pitched bridge rearing up out of the water like an island. In the centre of the road, on the part which any vehicle would use, the water must be above axle level.

She pressed the switch of her torch, as she had been pressing it every now and again since leaving the empty house, and swinging the beam from side to side, assessed the situation. Knee high. Maybe rather more.

But the road on each side was slightly banked. Above the brown swirl, she could just see the extreme tips of the withered weeds, the little bushes which had marked the road’s boundary. Holding well to the left, she pushed on, and the cold water lapped no higher than her ankles. She reached the bridge, crossed it and, on the far side, found herself wading through mud as thick and viscous as porridge. She used her torch, but on this side the road boundaries had vanished, and there was nothing to do but plunge ahead. Thick, sucking mud, halfway to the knee, and then to the hem of the new mackintosh, and then to the knee.

Her breath began to fail. I’m not going to get there. I’m going to get stuck here, in this mud. Stick-in-the-mud, a denigratory term, so lightly used; and how few of those who used it ever knew what it meant. It meant lifting one leg out of a vice, with an effort and a strain which took your whole strength and being, and then putting it forward a few inches – how long was a normal step? – feeling it engulfed again. And having done it once, do it a second time, and a third.

Bedded in the sticky mire up to the knees, she bowed herself forward and gasped. Something to lean upon, just for one minute while she mastered her breath. A rail, a stick, a post, anything . . .

It came, the support she needed, but in the strangest form. Miss Benson’s cheerful, careless voice, saying – such a long time ago, before all this started, at a time when she could take such a remark at its face value—

‘You see, we have good grass-growing weather. Cattle need pasture, and for that you need rain. Most of East Anglia is dry, compared with the rest of England. But just in this corner we seem to get what rain we need.’