Source A: The room behind the clock

By the next morning, the river had already gone back to its channel, but the town still looked as if it were waiting for permission to move. Mud covered the market square. A chair hung from the branches of an apple tree. On the wall outside the bakery, someone had written the height of the water in black paint: 1.84 metres.

The official report would later reduce the flood to numbers: three streets closed, forty-two houses damaged, one bridge unsafe. I first saw those figures on a sheet of paper held by Salma, a volunteer in a yellow waterproof coat. Then she folded the sheet and led me away from the square.

We crossed the school yard, where desks were drying in rows beneath the windows. At the far end stood the old council building. Its clock had stopped at 06:10. Salma pushed open a side door and took me along a corridor that smelled of wet plaster. She passed the offices, the meeting room and a cupboard filled with broken lamps. At last she stopped beside the clock's wooden case.

The room behind it was no larger than a garden shed. Inside, the town had been written down.

There were ledgers with cracked blue covers, bundles of letters tied with string and envelopes labelled with names that had outlived the houses they described. One book recorded births. Another listed allotment plots. A third contained the minutes of a meeting held in 1911, when residents had argued over the position of a water pump. The pages were swollen, but the handwriting still leaned patiently across them.

Salma placed a ledger on the table. She did not open it at once. Water had reached its bottom edge, and the pages had fused together. She slid a thin card between them, lifting each sheet as carefully as if it might object. In the margin, beside a list of children who had planted trees along the road, someone had written: 'Remember who did this.'

The sentence was small, almost hidden. Salma read it twice.

Her own grandmother's name appeared three pages later. It was followed by an address that no longer existed and a note about a window repaired after a winter storm. Salma smiled, but only for a moment. Then she showed me the blank space where the next entry should have been. The flood had erased the names of two families.

For the rest of the morning, people arrived carrying whatever they had found. A man brought a tin containing photographs. A child brought a single damp envelope. Nobody asked whether the objects were valuable. They placed them on the table and waited while Salma recorded each one.

Before we left, she returned the ledger to its box. The work would continue for months, she said. Outside, the stopped clock still pointed to 06:10. But in the room behind it, a pencil moved steadily across a new page.