Part 1: Thigh-Deep in Floods
Ruthie (Mobile): Morning! What's your footwear like? Am thinking the fields are gonna be mudtastic! xxx
Me (Mobile): I've got waterproof walking boots in prep for ruralness. =P And flat ballet pumps for later! xxx
Ruthie (Mobile): My kinda girl! xxx
And to think I was proud that I'd thought to wear my waterproof walking boots...
This weekend I was visiting my good friend Ruthie, who lives in Leicester. It was a very last-minute thing, Ruthie having finished her first year postgrad medicine exams and had the news of passing, and we were also playing in a very last-minute concert later that evening (more on that in Part 2...) She lives in a lovely village near Sileby, which I've visited once before. It's very green, and the sort of place that many people in the city wish they could escape to now and again.
Knowing we might be crossing some damp fields to get from Sileby station to Ruthie's house, I donned my trusty walking boots. I was dimly aware that there had been flooding across the country, but Leicester hadn't really been in the limelight in the news, so I assumed it'd be okay.
I could not have been more wrong.
I got to Leicester station from London St Pancras with my big Sainsbury's bag full of lovingly decorated and packaged cupcakes, which I had baked the night before for Ruthie, her husband Tom and her friends (who'd be providing me with food later) as a 'thank you' for having me.
I was in the station café whilst waiting for my connecting train to Sileby, nursing a rather lackluster and disappointing hot chocolate and the biggest banana muffin I have ever met, when my phone rang.
'Hello!!' said Ruthie.
Slosh. Slosh.
'Hi', I said, ignoring the weird watery sounds and the obvious double exclamation mark in my friend's voice for the time being. 'I'm just in Leicester station about to get the Sileby train. Y'allright?'
'Yes!! Er... yes! I'm sort of in a field...'
It turned out that the sloshing sound was Ruthie wading through knee-deep water, the flood already way over the tops of the wellies she had had the insight to wear to come and meet me at the station.
'Okay,' I said, after I'd gotten over my initial disbelief at the mad situation my poor friend was in, 'We can take a road route instead of going cross-country and avoid the worst of it.'
'The road we took the last time you visited?'
~FLASHBACK TO LAST WINTER~
Ruthie and I walked along a very non pedestrian-friendly road from the station in pitch darkness, with nothing but her slightly smashed up phone as a source of light, serving more as a warning to oncoming cars than as a way for us to see ahead and not fall into a ditch in the countryside that flanked us. When a car did come, we jumped into the bushes and flattened ourselves out as best we could whilst trying to avoid nettles and thorns invisible to us in the dark of night.
It was either this, or walk across the fields in the dark of night and potentially fall into a river.
~ END FLASHBACK~
'At least it's light out this time?' I offered.
Eventually I got to Sileby and sure enough met Ruthie, her jeans very obviously sodden well past her knees. We set off on a route we hadn't taken before, after consulting Tom (Ruthie's husband) over the phone. The 'ROAD CLOSED' sign should have been a clue. In fact it probably did register at the back of our minds- but at the time it was the only real option we had other than going across the flooded fields like Ruthie had. So we soldiered onwards.
As we went along the road, Ruthie pointed out to me how flooded the fields around us were, and indeed it was like they had been transformed into lakes, with the tops of bushes and trees sprouting from them.
When we came to a fork in the road, one of the paths was completely submerged, and Ruthie called Tom up again to make sure we took the right one. Thankfully we needed to take the dry one- although our celebrations were premature, as you'll find out in a moment. As we set off down the right path, a small white van with the words 'boat hire' came splashing through the flooded one.
'Now that's just what we need,' I joked to my friend- an unknowing and, now that I think about it, almost chilling fortelling of what we were about to face.
As soon as we came to our first flooded patch, it was instantly clear that my waterproof boots weren't going to do me an ounce of good. As for my friend, who had already had her wellies submerged and then some, her wellies had actually stopped being watertight, so even though at this point her footwear should have given her some protection, she was just as bad off as I was.
The water rose higher and higher, and the current got stronger and stronger. Soon it was mid-way up to our thighs, and we were struggling with wading in a straight line and hitching our bags up to protect our belongings from getting damp- and of course, the precious, precious Sainsbury's bag of cake.
At some point Ruthie relieved me of cake duty and took a turn at carrying the bag high in the air above the water, since we were pretty much consistently up to our thighs in flood water now. Here's where some perfect, perfect irony happened.
Whilst Ruthie was on cake duty and we were joking about how the cake was the most important thing to save, I told her a story about how I'd sacrificed myself to save a cake a few years ago (a story I haven't posted here). Back in my teaching days, I'd baked a nice big Victoria sponge with jam and cream as a Christmas present for my class for the last day of term before the holidays. It had been snowing heavily for days, and the ground had frozen over, overnight- it was very, very icy. During my morning walk to the bus stop, the inevitable happened, and I went flying- and my first instinct was to save the cake. So I dived forwards with my hands outstretched, ensuring the cake would never impact against the ground. My face, however, did.
It had barely been five minutes that I'd told this story when Ruthie suddenly slipped off the pavement and into a ditch, having not seen where the pavement had ended beneath the deep and murky water. She was now waist-high in muddy flood water, arms windmilling and wobbling to keep some semblance of balance- but with the bag of cupcakes safely held high over her head.
(I'm almost ashamed to say that at this point I plucked the bag out of her hands and took a picture of her to put up on Facebook later).
And so we continued, encountering a few brave cyclists, one who actually went over sideways (an old gent who was a real trooper when we spoke to him), a jeep that had also been flooded, a brave and frantically swimming vole we attempted to rescue and, both strangely and beautifully, an array of bright blue dragonflies and red admiral butterflies flitting around, clearly in their element. Less beautiful were the occasional biting horseflies, which turned my friend and I, usually both quite confident with Mother Nature, into flailing and squealing little girls (but seriously, have you seen the damage those little bastards can do?). At one point we also came across a flooded pub car park, with one lone and very confused duck swimming around. We were most definitely, however, the only pedestrians that had braved the route.
We eventually emerged from our watery path, my boots now squelching and heavy with all the water they had soaked up and Ruthie pausing every so often to perform an almost balletic pose, where she'd lean over forwards and crook one leg upwards so the flat of her foot was pointing skywards, to drain her wellies of flood water. We thought of all the drain water that we must have waded through, and decided a shower was very much in order when we got to hers.
Ruthie told me during all this that she was glad it was me that she was with, because I have such a good sense of humour. To this I say: how on Earth could you get yourself into this situation, and not laugh?
 | |||
| The cakes are safe! |
~End of Part 1~
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