The Wave

Last night I couldn't sleep so finally at four o'clock I got up and made a cup of tea and reached for my lap top:-

Bringing kids up in a pub isn’t easy. You’re trying to be a mum and to keep the customers happy at the same time. Of course the kids get a bit neglected, but The Sailors Rest was right on top of the beach so there were compensations, fishing and swimming, that sort of thing. We got used to the gales and were always well prepared with sandbags and shutters before the wind started screeching in the chimneys and the waves began to pound the top of the beach, but the sea will always surprise you.
I had given up trying to get Mike out of bed in the mornings. ‘Teenagers are all like that’ said my mother ‘You were just the same. He’ll grow out of it and then one day you’ll go in and find another head on the pillow beside him and nothing will ever be the same again.’
It was a day none of us will ever forget; a warm sunny April morning, sea flat calm and not a breath of wind. I had opened all the windows to air the bedrooms, even the attic where Mike lay with his eyes screwed tight shut against the light. I was round the back in the kitchen so I didn’t see it coming. Seems there had been a big storm in the Atlantic. Three great rollers came up the channel, absolutely silent, getting higher and higher until they reached our beach when the first reared up, a huge wave so high it over topped the pub and flooded the house through the attic window. I raced upstairs, my feet squelching on every step, slipping and sliding on the seaweed that had come in with the wave, to find our Mike still in bed, just as my mother had said, with another head on the pillow beside him. She never said it would be a fish!
© Carenza Hayhoe August 2007

By the time I'd finished my room was full of sunlight.