Saltfleet, by Duncan Moir

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The Ministry sent Tam Galbraith to Saltfleet Marsh in the October of 1952 to measure what the sea had taken. He had a theodolite, a canvas tent, a primus stove, three weeks’ rations and a bicycle to fetch more from the village four miles inland. Nobody else came out that far. The fishermen had told him so in the pub, cheerfully, as though it were a recommendation.

The marsh was not land and not water. It was a flat brown country of creeks and mud and samphire that changed its shape twice a day, and when the tide came in it came in silently, from every direction at once, filling the channels from underneath so that a place where you had stood dry at noon would be waist deep by two. Tam learned to read the tide tables before he read anything else.

On the fourth morning he found the footprints.

They came up out of the mud of the nearest creek, bare and narrow, the prints of someone small, and they crossed the hard ground to his tent in a straight line, as though the walker had known exactly where they were going. They stopped at the flap. They did not go away again.

Tam stood looking at them for a long time with his tea going cold. Then he took a photograph with the Ministry’s camera, because that was what a surveyor did with a thing he could not explain, and went out to his stakes.

The next morning there were prints again, fresh, the mud still glistening in the heels. And the next. Always from the creek, always to the flap, never back.

On the seventh night he did not sleep. He sat inside the tent fully dressed, with the hurricane lamp turned low and a spade across his knees, and he listened. He heard the wind in the sea lavender. He heard a curlew, very far off, crying like a child. At about three he heard the tide come in, a long whispering everywhere around him, and he heard it go still at the top of the flood.

Then he heard someone say his name.

It was not loud. It came from just outside the canvas, low down, near the ground, and it was said the way his mother used to say it from the foot of the stairs in Paisley, as though she did not want to wake his father. Tam. Tam.

He did not move. He sat with the spade in his hands until his fingers ached, and the voice did not come again, and at last the canvas turned grey with the dawn.

When he opened the flap there were no new prints at all. The mud between the creek and the tent was smooth and shining, washed flat by the night’s tide. But his boots, which he had left inside the tent beside him, were standing side by side on the ground outside the door, neatly, with their laces tucked in, and they were full to the brim with cold salt water.

He packed up that morning. In his report he wrote that the marsh was retreating at a rate of some nine feet a year, and that the site was unsuitable for further work. The photographs, when they came back from the Ministry’s darkroom, showed nothing but mud.

“The marsh itself is more frightening than anything that happens there.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how the marsh is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.