'These were the nights when the German bombers growled through the sky, their bellies full with steel and cordite. When the moon was low their dark shapes and still darker shadows came over the coast. Several hours later they'd return again, wearily, lighter in weight, fewer in number, dropping the occasional bomb on the forgotten land of creeks and channels beneath them. On one of those nights it all began for me - war, after all, starts many things, and even though I wasn't born for another twenty-five years, my story began there.'

It is May 1945 and as church bells ring out Victory in Europe over the Norfolk saltmarshes, Goose's daughter Lil is born. But as Lil enters Goose's world, her father leaves it, in a makeshift boat bound - or so the story goes - for Germany, his home.

Forty years later it is Lil's son, Pip, who begins to make sense of his family's fragmented history. Who was his grandfather, who fell from the sky into Goose's life and then disappeared as suddenly as he came? What was the truth of his mother, Lil, who lived and lost her way between the creeks and the samphire? And what does it all mean for Pip, whose heritage of flood, fireworks, fish and clouds, has left him ill-prepared for life beyond the marshes?

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1

Mud

Finding a man buried up to his neck in mud. That’s how it’s meant to have started. Him in the mud and her pushing a pram towards him over the saltmarsh. He’s on one side of a creek and she’s on the other. The pram is full of samphire and there's more of it in her hands and by her feet. Bright green samphire on black, oily mud, the start of this story has very few colours. And against the mud — quite unexpectedly — she’s seen the shocking blond hair of the man.

She said she nearly tripped over him. That her wellies nearly kicked him like he was a washed-up fishing buoy, till at the last second — the very last second, which was also their first — he’d smiled politely, and said hello.

It’s a pretty start to a story. Across the mud slicks and estuary there’s a boat, which was wrecked many years before the man was. It’s called the Hansa, and because it’s sinking in mud and a rising tide the man has felt an affinity with it all morning. He’s certainly had little else to look at, and the rest of the landscape fails to make sense — the sky is so watery blue and the sea so cloudy grey that just to look at it makes him feel upside down. Of course, what he cannot see - yet - are the clouds. A thin smoke-signalled line beyond the Holkham Meals. But she sees them all right, saw them the second they appeared, and for a moment she doesn’t know what to do — should she run? She thinks better of it because she knows it’s too late. The story of her and the man she found has already started. And another thing, she’s seen the tall wooden figure of a longshoreman on the creek's other side, looking like a cracked mast stuck in the mud, tattered rags of sails blowing from his shoulders.

So this young woman, some kind of creek-hopper, in that instant, with mud on her face and a man's coat on her back, boots on her feet, made a decision. She moved quickly, scattering samphire on to the man beneath her, weaving the muddy roots into his conspicuous blond hair and laying out bundles by the dozen along the bits of his arms and chest where they poked through the mud, and as the longshoreman began to wade into the creek she arranged the last of the samphire on the mound of his belly, finally running out when it came to his 'down there’. No, not even a solitary stalk was unaccounted for. She left that bit exposed, and in the seconds before the longshoreman arrived, she sat on her pile. Three an' six, two shillin’, two an’ six, she muttered. Needless to say the longshoreman had spent too many years staring at the horizon, talking to fish heads hanging from his hook or herring strung from his belt to notice anything odd about the woman counting her crop.

Though he’d meandered an unnecessary hundred yards across the marsh to see my grandmother, he had nothing in particular to say when he arrived. That being the usual path in Norfolk and this being the usual way of the marsh. They got by in silence, listening to the larks. The longshoreman sniffed, shifted his weight, moved off again. The young woman kept a wary glance on him and the herring swinging from his belt as he began to splatter some drops of weak piss on the mud, and as he shook himself dry she looked at how the fish hanging from his belt danced, their wide-mouthed expressions so close to a smile.

'Guess what I seen,’ he began.

She continued the samphire count.

'Guess what I seen yes’ day.’

'What?'

'You ought a guess.’

'Why?’

'What I seen.’

'Well, what was it?’

'Ain’t you guessin?’

Ill at ease, he ground his foot into the mud like all marshmen do. 'I ain’t told no one.’

'Thass because ain’t no one listen to you.'

The longshoreman frowned and sucked his breath in. 'You put me off my count, thass trouble,’ she said.

'Last night,’ he said, 'I seen a man fell right out the sky. Out the moon maybe. Fell right out down here an' I been lookin' for him.’

She saw tufts of that blond hair poking through between the samphire. 'five an’ six, ha’ penny...'

'What them clouds say?’ the longshoreman asked, chuckling to himself. He gave her a wink and began to head off. He was, after all, infatuated.

Halfway into the lagoon — known as the Pit — with the water up to the hem of his waders, he turned back, looking a little more like a drowning man than usual, and shouted I ain’t lying no how! between the circling shrieks of gulls and tans.

And to the man struggling under her samphire pile she whispered you keep it quiet now ‘cause that one’s got a long tongue. But the man she'd uprooted from the marsh like the samphire itself had other things on his mind. Maybe it’s just a story, but the story goes that once he was down there, the man weighed up his options, found to his surprise that this young woman wasn’t made entirely of mud, that she was probably still in her twenties, that her skin was smooth and smelled like warm dry flints. The story has it that even while the longshoreman’s waders and flapping oilskins were approaching through the creek, the buried man was thinking she must be worth a go, thinking about all a man can think about when he knows his number's up.