The morning after my visit to Redwood House, I wake to a silence that is quite different from the rural quiet I have been getting used to over the past few days. There’s no birdsong, no murmur of traffic on the distant main road. No tractors plowing. It’s rather like the silence of a snowfall.

Of course it’s not snowfall. I spring out of bed and open the curtains.

There used to be a field across the road. Now, nothing remains except one lonely hillock of scruffy turf. The rest has vanished under a huge expanse of water the color—Terry Shaw was absolutely right—of under-milked tea. The distant line of willows that normally mark the riverbank are knee-deep, a wake forming round each trunk. This unstoppable mass of water must have been heading toward the village for some hours.

I haven’t the remotest clue what to do. I don’t know anything about floods. But it looks like an emergency to me.

I wash and throw on my clothes. I’m just pulling a sweater over my head when I hear, from downstairs, the unmistakable scuffling sound of a small beast trying to tunnel its way under the kitchen door. Great Scott! I have a dog. I’ve forgotten Bailey’s existence overnight. In the kitchen I warm up his milk and gulp down a cup of powdered coffee standing in the doorway to the back garden while Bailey relieves himself under the hedge. When I give him his breakfast he dips his muzzle in the dish and begins inefficiently to lick up the rusk mixture, shunning my proffered spoon. This is heartening. “Good work, Bailey,” I tell him. “Now pay attention. I’ll be back in . . . three hours.” This is a promise to myself, knowing I can’t leave this creature alone for longer. “In the meantime, blanket drill for you.”

He remains in his box as I leave the room. He has a rather penetrating stare, which I find unsettling in such a small dog.

—

The air outside is aswim with small particles, not quite rain, not quite fog, that swirl past me as I hurry toward my car in Wellingtons and a full set of waterproofs. The road looks passable for a normal car like my Vauxhall, the tarmac visible under a fast, light stream, but by the time I get to the main street the water is deeper, a rushing brook. The houses are mercifully higher than the street, the garden paths climb to the tightly shut, sandbagged front doors. There’s no one to be seen.

I round the corner onto the village green. This is more serious. One half of the expanse of grass is at least a foot under, as is the road on one side.