The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter is a haunting and moving novel about a mother and a daughter, caught between a tsunami and a war.

Yesterday was Alice's wedding day. She is thousands of miles away from the home she is so desperate to leave, on the southernmost tip of India, when she wakes in the morning to see a wave on the horizon, taller than the height of her guest house on Kanyakumari beach. Her husband is nowhere to be seen.

On the other side of the world, unhappily estranged from her daughter, is Alice's mother, Violet. Forced to leave the idyllic Wiltshire village, Imber, in which she grew up after it was requisitioned by the army during World War Two, Violet is haunted by the shadow of the man she loved and the wilderness of a home that lies in ruins.

Amid the debris of the wave, Alice recollects the events of the hippie trail that led to her hasty marriage as she struggles to piece together the fate of the husband she barely knows. Meanwhile, Violet must return to Imber in order to let go of the life that is no longer hers - and begin the search for her daughter.

Joanna Rossiter grew up in Dorset and studied English at Cambridge University before working as a researcher in the House of Commons and as a copy writer. In 2011 she completed an MA in Writing at Warwick University. The Sea Change is her first novel. She lives and writes in London.

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Prologue: The Sea is Never Full

Kanyakumari, India, 1971

It is there before we know about it. Being born. A Persian rug,
unrolling. Our wave, heavy, like death.

‘Up! Up!’ a voice shouts from outside the guesthouse. It
doesn’t belong to James. ‘It’s coming!’

Where is he?

Stone. Bone. Think hard and then harder. That’s how it hits
the shore. It takes the beach in one breathtaking gulp, palm
trees dominoing down and fishing boats scattering as easily as
the seeds of a dandelion. Streets fuse into the flesh of the water,
like new limbs, new skin, until it morphs into a moving city.
Trucks and tuk-tuks roll over and over like shirts in a washer;
houses are picked up whole. Then, with sea-soaked hands, the
water sets itself alight. Flames – blinding and orange – buoy
themselves forward on black, black, mirrorless liquid.

One man runs. And is outrun.

It’s not James. James isn’t on the beach. James gets away in
time. He went, before it came, to pick up breakfast. I was going
to meet him on the beach. I was late, faffing about in the room
with our luggage, remaking the bed. I don’t know where he is.
I don’t know where he is but I was going to meet him on the
beach. The beach. And then it came. He’ll have thought better
of it. He’ll have gone up the hill to get us some lassi instead;
he’ll come running up the stairs any second now. He’ll be here.
And safe.

It’s about to hit the guesthouse. I don’t have time to think
about how thick it is. I just feel its thickness beneath me. You’d

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think that it would strike you once, hard in the face. And then it
would be over. But it isn’t like that. Instead it arrives and leaves,
advances and retreats, bringing more of itself each time.

Our room is about to go under. I reach for Mum’s letter on
the bedside table – it can have everything else. Then I take the
stairs two at a time. James’s last packet of Player’s No. 6 is probably
pregnant with saltwater by now. He could have gone
straight up to the roof, forgetting to fetch me. Please, God. The
staircase is inking up with water, like mercury rising inside a
thermometer. Furniture and luggage froth up from the ground
floor. Everything keeps moving, stirring; nothing is still.

Guests on the floors below reach out into the rising wreckage
as I climb the stairs, eyes hollow with what is brewing beneath
them.

‘My husband. Have you seen my husband?’ The word feels
new and unused, still fresh out of its packaging.

‘What’s the husband’s name?’ asks the landlord. We’re on the
roof now.

‘James. It’s James,’ I say, as if it will help.

‘It’s going to take us!’ blurts the American whose room is on
our floor. He’s still in his dressing-gown and his eyes are glued
to a block like ours across the road, which topples and is carried
off. But our building stays standing, sacrificing its organs – curtains,
windows, cabinets and beds – until we’re left teetering on
its bones.

I’ve gone back to the stairs but the landlord is standing in my
way.

‘Madam.’

‘What are you doing?’ My voice is hoarse and high. ‘I need to
go! Let me go!’

‘Please, madam. It is not safe.’

I tuck the letter – still in my grasp – beneath the padding of
my bra. Then I push past him to the stairs. I’m level with the
water now, and looking. Outside the window, all the inanimate

things – the cars, the trees, the boats and the barns – have been
brought to life, rolling and writhing in the sea. But there are no
human faces – not even a body. These it keeps hidden from sight.

I shout his name. I shout it again. The water is goaded, and
rises . I can’t get back to the roof. It’s ripped my feet from the
floor and forced me through the window. Down the rabbit hole
I go. Like Mum used to say when I stared into space too often
and for too long. Alice is down the rabbit hole, she’d mouth in
code to Tim. She was always afraid that I wanted to get away.
There’s no choice now. It’s taking me. Not forwards, like I
expected, but backwards. Out to the ocean; towards home.

The water feels magnetic: the more I strain, the more it pulls.
Did I not tell you this would happen? Mum would say. Didn’t I warn
you not to go away with him? As if James himself were responsible
for my being dragged out to sea.

The shoreline depletes. I’m flailing about, trying to grab hold
of the horizon and drag it towards me but it’s drifting further
and further away. I can’t keep this up for much longer. It’ll only
take another wave. Send another. Anything but drowning. After
a while, there’s just breath. The sea’s lungs swell in time with
mine until I find I can’t keep its rhythm – chest quivering into a
frantic staccato. Every bit of me aches. So I rest. For a second.
It’s enough for the water to pull me under. I resist its muzzle but
it’s no use.

There is noiselessness underneath. Nothing but the push and
tug of the sea. A giant swell of ocean, colder than the rest, swarms
below. I let go of my muscles, my fists. I give in to lightness.

Chapter 1

Wiltshire, England, 1971

Pete used to say that a place isn’t everything: people can make a
home out of a cardboard box, if you give them half a chance.
He didn’t understand why I clung to Imber as if it were a lost
soul. But perhaps if he were here with me now, standing in the
dip of the church doorstep, I would see something give way in
that flint face of his.

The earth has run its fingers all over the church. Clots of
moss bloom in green seas on the roof. Ivy has prised open windows
and doors and clawed at the fissures in the stonework.
Nesting birds leap up at the smallest of movements – mistaking
every sound for a bullet. As I step into the porch, they splash
through the glassless windows and ghost through the air above
the nave. So immersed is the stone in creepers and lichen that it
is as if the church is Nature’s own creation; born from the
ground like a new breed of tree.

The sight of my mother’s note on the door stills my breath.
The rain has had nearly three decades to invade the ink but,
sheltered as it is by the porch, I can still read its message as if it
had been written yesterday.

We have given up our valley where many of us have lived for
generations, entrusting it to you for the sake of the war. Please
take good care of the church in our absence; to us it is more
than stone and glass. We shall return one day and thank you
for treating the village kindly.

I often wonder whether, if my mother had known the fate of
our village, she would have written something different on the
church door. Would the words have come less easily? Or would
she have gone on believing, blithely, that our sacrifice was worth
all those unborn memories? The ones we would have reared in
the cottages, in the fields, in our very own nook of earth.

Today is the first time I have been back in twenty-six years. It
should have felt like any other day: the same wrestle with the
alarm clock; the same small battles with Tim about when he
last heard from Alice, and who is to blame for the gold- not
silver-topped milk bottles outside the door. Except I woke early,
unsure of whether I had slept at all. I slipped off before the
alarm and left him asleep in bed. Outside the house, the light
was still threadbare.

I began the short drive in Tim’s Cortina through the military
firing range – no more than five miles – across land I had not
touched since I was nineteen.

Boreham Down slipped by on the left. As I drove, the Plain
rose and fell into muddy gullies and chalked ridges, like the peak
and trough of a petrified wave.

I could see the bell tower through the windscreen, pressed into
the cushion of Salisbury Plain. But the rest of the village was hidden
– just as it used to be – below the camber of the Downs.

Shooting targets were pinned, like my mother’s note, to the
nape of South Down where they labelled the land’s anatomy: ‘1’
for the patch where the knapweed grows thickest; ‘2’ for the
hill’s hip; ‘3’ for the spot that is last to capture the sun; and ‘4’ for
the valley floor. The corpses of tanks clung to the side of the
ridge, housing flowers and grasses and empty metal cartridges.
The hills seemed to have borne their scars well. Somewhere
under the grass, I knew there would be bullets, hidden like cysts
in the soil. But in this morning’s light, I couldn’t distinguish the
marks of the shelling from the indents made by the rain. The
Plain has survived what no city or body ever could.

It is necessary to evacuate the major part of the valley, including
your dwelling. The letter was so matter-of-fact. And I had never
seen, only felt, the damage that their shells could do. Even
before the war, explosions as far away as two miles would cause
our windows to quiver and crack, the glass falling from its
frame, like a cloud emptying itself of water. For months after
we were evicted, I dreamt of rain – metal rain – lodging in the
walls of our parsonage and spidering across the mirrors.

I have driven Tim mad with my quietness about this place. It
is as if, by not talking, I talk about it all the time. He told me it
is because of here – a plain on which he has never set foot – that
Alice started to drift. I boxed her in, he said, with my memories.
And so I stood and watched as he packed her bags and let her
drive all the way to India with a man we barely know. Then I
kept silent, so that he wouldn’t drift too.

I don’t talk to him about Imber any more because I know
what he’d think. I’d give him the valley – all its names, faces,
places – and he’d imagine it as something golden and lost. It is
not golden; it is not lost; if it were, I would long since have
escaped its ghost. But I can only ever give him the shell of what
it was – a washed-up periwinkle that you hold to your ear to
listen to, only to be told that it’s not the real sea that you can
hear. Just air. A place made of air.

After South Down, the road eased me into the base of the
valley. To the right, I could trace the old divides: the stone walling
that separated one family’s farm from another. The walls
reared up high in places and crumbled in others, leaving the
fields half finished. The land around the village wasn’t tamed in
the same way as it had been before. Ivy has been left to run over
man-made things, to knead the angles of the outhouses into
unliftable curtains of green.

I half expected to see the army keeping guard but they were
nowhere to be seen.

Inside the ruins of Seagram’s Farm, I kicked a gold-coloured

cartridge across the floor and ran a finger along the graffiti on
the walls. Names and dates of squadrons littered the chimney
breast. I saw a ghost called Clara was carved above the hearth.

Past Seagram’s Farm, the redbrick skull of the post office
gawped across the road at the roofless remains of Parsonage
Farm. If I shut my eyes, I could see how it used to be – the roadside
all cobbled and complete with a ribbon of cottages, villager
knitted to villager, like knots on a length of string. When I
opened my eyes, it was like taking the pin out of a grenade: the
memory was left in pieces, the walls reduced to the height of
my knees and the doorways mangled by barbed wire. Inside the
post office, the divide between upstairs and down had all but
disappeared so that Mrs Carter’s fireplace looked as if it were
built to heat the sky. I wanted to cover the place up, as one does
a body once the life has left it.

I imagined Mrs Carter standing behind the post-office counter,
sorting letters. When she thought no one was looking, she’d
halt the flick of her fingers and stare at the window. She was not
sad or happy; she just stood there, immersed in thought, until a
customer interrupted her and she would carry on with her day.
I would not have picked anyone else to receive the news of the
eviction first; it was hardly a message to which you could put
words. And Mrs Carter, whose hands spent all day ferrying
other people’s words from place to place, was a silent old soul,
not one to speak unnecessarily. Her silence, we agreed, was the
only thing fit for that letter.

I was in a queue of customers waiting to drop off my post
when she picked up an envelope with her own address on the
front. It had a military stamp on the seal – the same as the
others she had sorted that morning. She turned away from
the counter and we heard her slide her fingers through the
paper. She walked out of the room shortly afterwards. I was
sent to fetch her: it was not like her to forget about the customers.
I found her staring into an empty flowerbed at the back of

her garden – the patch of soil where she could make nothing
grow.

It is hoped that you will be able, through your own efforts, to find
alternative accommodation and, if appropriate, fresh employment,
and that you will be able to make your own arrangements as to
removal. I took the letter from her, as if robbing a statue of its
sceptre, and ran into the post office to break the news to the rest
of the village. We were all nosing in on the note – everybody
wanted to read it for themselves before they believed it – when
Mrs Carter reappeared.

‘Don’t fuss, don’t fuss,’ she murmured. ‘There’s one for each
of you in the postbag.’

They moved us out in December, a week before Christmas. I
say they moved us – in fact they had very little to do with the
evacuation. It is necessary, it is hoped. Nobody was going to take
the blame.

There was talk of them sending lorries, only some of which
came. The rest of us were left to depend on Major Whistler’s
kindness; Imber Court had a cart at its disposal, which was duly
loaded with furniture, pots and pans and a bath full of Mrs Carter’s
crockery. Mrs Carter tried to stay calm. It was only china
after all – not even matching china, she whispered guiltily to
me, as she climbed onto the cart; still, if it could survive thirty
years of marriage, it could endure this. As the horse turned out
of the village and down the track to Heytesbury, the chime of
her cups and saucers crossed the Plain. We knew, then, that the
crockery would not make it to town intact.

If my father had been with us, we would never have left in
time. He would have fussed endlessly over his books. My
mother put me in charge of packing them; she could not have
borne it herself. I did my best, placing heavier volumes at the
bottom of the case so as not to damage the lighter ones. It
pained me to think of the books packed away in their boxes
without Father to read them. ‘Don’t you worry, my girl, they’re

all up here,’ he said, giving his head a tap. But I knew better. I
had seen the way he pored over each cover, smoothing down
the pages with care as he read and returning the book with the
precision of a pharmacist to its designated spot on the shelf.
Had he not been ordained, I half wondered whether he would
have become a bookbinder – not that there was any need for
such a thing in Imber. It was a blessing that he wasn’t around to
see the fate of Imber Court’s library, from which he was a frequent
borrower. The lack of lorries left the Major carting clocks
and books and desks down into the cellars. He would never
have said anything but Pete had gone to the Court to ask about
moving Albie Nash, the blacksmith, whom he had found
hunched over his anvil, weeping. He found the servants cradling
piles of books quietly down the stairs like sleeping children.
Pete offered to help but the Major reddened and, in a hushed
voice, asked after Albie.

My father’s books were the last thing we packed. I took them
in their boxes and placed them with our other possessions in a
pile outside the parsonage door. It wasn’t until it came to leaving
that I saw how much there was that I couldn’t take with me.
Walking into my sister’s empty room, I tore off a loose piece of
her rose-patterned wallpaper and placed it in my pocket; I had
always been secretly jealous of it. Having spotted it in a shop
window in Wilton, she had pleaded with Father for weeks to
buy it for her eighteenth birthday. My father often joked that
she would have been better off being born in the city: she battled
constantly against the mud that gathered in strips under her
fingernails and in clods on the soles of her shoes. And she could
not pass through the parsonage hallway without noting the thin
grey skin of chalk dust that coated the floor. I used to tell her
there was no escaping the land – it was in our name. I don’t
think Freda liked ‘Fielding’ much: it was too plain. The name
was a better fit for me: I spent more time on the Downs with
Pete than I did in the house.

With the scrap of my sister’s wallpaper in hand, I took in the
view of the Plain from her window – another thing that I
couldn’t take with me. The grass looked bleak at this time of
year, stretching its rags over the chalk. It used to pain me so
much to see it like this that I would pull out Father’s botany
pocket book and reel off the names of the flowers that sprouted
there in the summer, as if the colour in their syllables could stir
up some magic in the bones of the hill and beckon in spring. I
would miss the shiver of ash trees that flanked the right side of
the garden. The fullness of their branches in the summer almost
masked the Plain from us entirely.

Having taken up his post during the summer of 1931, my
father could not understand the need for the trees; he loved the
view of the plain as much as I did and was in half a mind to take
an axe to them. But the other villagers were quick to warn us
against it and, come winter, we were glad of their advice. The
winds rattled the house to its core throughout February and we
became used to these small fracas, putting up shutters and
sometimes even taking refuge in the cellar. Later, when the
bombs fell in Wilton, I thought of Imber’s winds and how we
rode them out underneath the house with nothing but a candle
and a song from Freda.

At the window that day, I tried to convince myself that I’d
soon come home to see the ash trees clothed again, drinking in
all of August’s light; I would come back for my father’s sake.
But the gap in the line of ashes – where we had felled his tree –
told me otherwise. Like the shadow of a sinking Zeppelin, the
war had started its descent. Only Martha Nash was resolute in
her insistence that we would return within two years. She had
to be, I guess, for Albie’s sake.

After I had finished packing I left the parsonage in search of
my mother who, I knew, would be in the church. I found her in
the tower, staring up at the bells.

‘They will look after it, won’t they?’ she asked after a while,

running her eyes down a bell rope to meet mine at the base of
the tower. Her birth, her marriage and the beginning of each
week had been marked under the peal of these five instruments.
‘No one ever wishes for death, Vi-vi,’ she told me, ‘but there
was always comfort in knowing you would bring me here when
it did come.’ I didn’t like to hear her talk as if we weren’t coming
back. She wasn’t old. She had no reason to think she would not
return in her lifetime. Not like Albie. But ever since the accident
she had handled her days so carefully, aware that they could
evaporate at any minute.

‘Will they let you bury me here?’ she asked me. She had
always been like that, posing questions that were beyond my
reach, as if she were the child and I were the mother. I would
scramble in vain for an answer and always came up short.

The Major’s wife appeared at the door. ‘Are you the last?’ Her
voice skimmed across the nave.

‘We’re just waiting for the ATS girls to come back from Langton,’
my mother replied, standing up.

‘Where are they housing you?’ she enquired.

‘We don’t know. Somewhere in Warminster, I expect. Perhaps
Wilton.’

‘Oh, Warminster . . . I see.’ She picked at the doorframe as
she spoke. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Only I thought you
might like to leave a note. I have paper.’

‘A note?’ I queried, my mother squeezing my hand as a way
of telling me not to pry.

‘Yes. I thought he would want –’

My mother stared at the slip of paper that was held out to
her. ‘But . . . what would he have me say?’ she asked, her question
floundering in echoes around the four walls of the tower.

The years have yellowed the note, curling it up at the edges as if
to check what is underneath. I push the church door open, the
last word, ‘kindly’, on repeat in my ears. The hinges turn in

their sleep and I stand in the base of the tower – this time without
my mother. The air next to me where she would have stood
is as cold as a tomb. There are four bells missing from the cages
above; only one remains. The wind’s chorale enters the tower
from the Barrow. It disturbs the ghost of each bell and carries
their peal in silence across the Plain.