Where disaster designs connection

Last night our house flooded. One minute I’m admiring my roaring fire, sending off emails and stroking the cat, then Mum is looking out the window at the sea that has formed, licking at our front gate. Then she is donning wellies and taking our broom and standing ankle-deep in it, futilely sweeping water away from a burst drain, gushing like slit throat from a seam in the pavement. Then we are moving carpets, I am pulling the sofa with one hand and dialling the police with the other. Then there are two, three, seven of us, wading through our hall and up the stairs with arms full of baby albums and lamps. Then we are scooping saucepans of water from the floor and throwing it out the door into the back garden like a crew on a sinking ship; they are wringing towels and making barricades to direct the brown floods from one room into the next, protecting what furniture we can. An outer-body moment when I drop a photograph from a bag of memorabilia and it lands face-up in a growing pool on our living room floor - my mum in a wedding dress, younger than I am. I shake it off and run up the stairs in the socks I’ve been wearing in knee-high waters for the last hour. 

Too late and just in time, as the garden brims on our back doorstep and ricochets waves back inside, somebody comes with a pump. Then there is champagne and mud and wellies in our kitchen and hysterical laughter and shaky, drunken relief from all. We have never had such a jovial cocktail party, I think. I have only just met four of these women who have bent next to me in my living room shoveling and bailing water with lunchboxes. 

This morning we have several returnees, armed with firewood and cake and dry towels. The kettle is on. My mum is laughing and crying and hugging everybody for a long time. 

In times of crisis the joining of forces and community heart shines like a beacon, like a reason; like the reason for disaster. Social expectations and standards are no more upheld than the seal on our front door, washed away with the necessity for many hands and sympathetic collaboration. 

Each person bent and sloshed, filled and emptied, mopped and wrung as though the crisis were their own. There was a sense that if one member of the tribe was suffering, then the rest would too; an unspoken three-legged race. The individual blurs into a group identity and we are one in an intra-personal relationship. One common need for saving and surviving supersedes the limits of normative British social boundaries. 

There is a saying in Southern Africa, ‘Ubuntu’, which loosely translates to, ‘A man is a man because of others’. In this culture, the individual and the collective are not perceived as mutually exclusive. Such goodwill is to be expected in much less detrimental scenarios. 

Seeing it in my living room last night gave me faith for the heart of British society, where for so many reasons the tendency is to think predominantly about one’s own home, challenges, health and heart. But the active expression of kindness and unity is both necessary for our human spirit and redemptive for our increasingly individualistic nation. Perhaps the floodgates should open more often if it means we are forced out of our own homes and through the doors and hearts of others, with armfuls of kindness to share.