Crayfish on the lawn

We left a message on Susie's answerphone last night and we still haven't heard from her. "Probably gone to Anne's house," I keep saying. Anne's house is painted bright yellow and, more to the point, it is up a hill. Once Jack found a crayfish on Susie's lawn. Perhaps the whole lawn is under water now, and also the patio with the spiky herbs in containers. La Rochelle, I know, has taken a beating. How far is La Rochelle from there? About an hour down the motorway ... I looked on the websites of Le Monde and Le Figaro, but I couldn't find enough specific information to answer our questions.

Only last week I walked that garden, with its stand of handsome trees at the end. The Gironde used to flow a few yards from there, even within living memory. A creased old Frenchwoman told me once that young couples used to row boats within sight of the village. A couple of kilometres of marsh now extend there, divided by drainage channels. There are pines, and platforms for storks to nest on. So quiet, not like our home town. Peaceful, so long as that embankment holds.

Yet we saw the force of the sea at Talmont. I could have stood behind that parapet for an hour in the stiff breeze, watching those frisky grey waves and that white foam. Round the corner, the water dashes and pounds the church that rises sheer from the sea like an illustration of the Bible text "God is our refuge and strength." All right for me, because I wasn't on that sea.

And Royan? How is Royan? Destroyed by bombs in 1945 and rebuilt, clean white walls and red roofs. What is it like now? That grey concrete church looks like a power-station from a distance, yet its oval interior is so beautiful and calm and spacious, with those soaring yellow slit-windows and the gallery. The windows round the gallery represent the Stations of the Cross, abstract, not easy to decipher, yet decorative and maybe inspiring for some. Let's hope the pleasant atmosphere will not be lost to mildew and flood.

... lapping around the freezer and the cleaning-cupboard and the fragrant wood-burning stove, and the bottles of water in the pantry, and lifting the dirty clothes in front of the washing-machine ...

Or Susie may be sheltering in one of those villages dotted about the hinterland, the houses rendered white or cream or shabby grey-brown, the roofs of curly pantiles in varying shades of red, the windows with their patterned net curtains, a different design for every house; the cold square-towered church with the lichen on the walls; the war memorial and the pollard trees; the water-tower and, stretching away on all sides, the miles of fields, ploughed and brown and reddish, and the newly-pruned vines, tough and gnarled, two-armed against their regimented wires, the trees sporting their unreachable bunches of mistletoe. And the fens and the drainage ditches overflowing their banks and the dykes breached ...

... and water seeping into the carpet that I sat on to watch TV, and into the downstairs bedroom where Uncle sleeps when he comes to stay ... The hall, the foot of those polished wooden stairs which I fumbled down and shuffled back up at night, in pitch blackness, before I remembered the torch in the bedside cabinet. I did not sleep well on the unfamiliar mattress under that cluster of rustic beams, and the skylight on which the rain hammered on our last night while the wind moaned round the walls. Oh, I was glad to get back into my own bed.

We got out of there just in time, didn't we?

How will she cope? She has friends. I can send money to replace carpets but I cannot go there and clean up. My passport expires tomorrow.

Fears increase over time, with the continued silence. Come on, Susie, make contact.

Well, I would contact you, Susie says to herself, tell you I'm safe, if only the electricity wasn't down ...