Haweswater (27 page)

Samuel bent to his knees in front of Janet and begged her just to take his hand while Ella held the newborn in her arms. He searched the fells for his daughter when she slipped away from the house and found her rocking by the river or sleeping too close to the current. He watched the star ending, a little more light melting away each day. It was as if the rage, her energy, so bright in her youth, had been too much, had come too quick and fully, life had used her up, so when fate dealt the most reeling blow, she had no characteristic fury left with which to hurl herself headlong and screaming back at it. Or pull through. She had burnt away. He wept openly against her skirt with his big hands in the earth, and the river rocking past.

Isaac brought her flowers from the meadow, stroked the velvet petals on her neck and cheeks, he became garrulous, reading to her, stumbling over uncorrected words, long poems. He found smooth stones in the mosaic of the riverbed and gave them to her, explained patiently that they would not shine best until placed in water. It was their secret, he said, they must be where they belonged in order to come to life. She regarded him with air-focused eyes, perhaps then a faint smile, too slight to say for certain.

The weeks passed and the veins came to the surface of her hands.

Then, as spring gave way to summer, for a time it did seem she was getting better. Her mother would find her dressed in the morning, standing by the crib, though never holding
Miriam, the dark-haired baby. Instead, an extreme masculine spirit descended on Janet, as in the hub of her youth. She began helping with tasks on the farm, herding cows and even birthing the last of the lambs. She changed wheels on the farm vehicles, oiled the chains in the dairy. From a distance, thin and with her short hair tucked under an old cap, she might have been mistaken for a young boy. In the kitchen, if asked, she would cut vegetables, though her mother watched the knives closely, the black bird filling up the cavity of her chest. Because she saw something. Because the air around her daughter stayed bent as she moved through it, like she had not made peace with the passage of her life yet. And Ella sensed a violent composition somewhere in the air in front of her.

The man who replaced Jack Liggett at
MCW
had never been to Mardale. He had never been to Cumberland or to Westmorland. As a boy, he had holidayed with his family not in the Lake country, where one could never be sure of fair weather or a downpour, but on the south coast of France, where he built moats for castles in the sand, waiting to see if they would withstand the tide. He had never jumped a train to escape brutality or city, had never climbed any of England’s brown peaks, and he had never selected a character for himself that was several leaps away from his upbringing. Then renounced it. Thomas Wright was not a man given to leniency or sentimentality where profession was concerned, and his knowledge of the tiny village was not visceral, not personal. Though he could sketch out a plan of the dale with exact measurements, mapping the distance from the Dun Bull to the shore of Low Water in inches, he could not have told that the upper fields were ploughed lengthwise like rice fields for better drainage. That nine of the slates around Goosemire’s chimney were missing, that Whelter Farm was built purely from sight with not a single true right angle existing. Or that if the wind changed and moved east to west across the valley, the weather vane on the church twisted backwards to create a shadow on the roof which appeared like that of a rampant lion.

What Thomas Wright was aware of was that his title and role as overseer to the Haweswater project was nominal. He was a shadow minister. He might as well have been a portrait of himself. He was the silent undertaker who would tend to the body of Jack Liggett’s work, laying it like a giant sarcophagus to rest. He had graduated within the company to an
empty seat, where the tasks were already fulfilled. Some days in the new office, Jack Liggett’s seat did not even feel vacated, rather there was a ghostly presence, the legacy of a man imbued with inordinate opinion and respect. He had become a corporate legend, his recent abstraction from the company seemingly forgotten. Neither glory nor fame would belong to Thomas Wright in such imposing circumstances. As such, his position was clear. There would be no unnecessary preservation or delay with matters. The project was to be completed, it was to be closed, it was to be put aside. Then, and only then, would he have the opportunity to pry open a few oysters of his own and hold aloft a pearl or two. First, a little catharsis, a little devastation, a little washing away of sandcastles was in order. An exorcism.

In the smoky, silent Waterworks boardroom, Thomas Wright gave a convincing speech. In it, he maintained that the Waterworks had always prided itself on a certain code of conduct that was the essence of good taste and safety. Jack Liggett, he said, with all due respect, had let things slip a fraction, through no fault of his own, doubtless, for what man could maintain stamina throughout such an immense and lengthy project whilst also tending to local matters. His memory should be celebrated by a proper culmination of the scheme. There was the question of what was to be done to the village next. Mardale would be drowned by the new reservoir, yes, but for the existing structures a plan was needed. There were over thirty buildings. To leave them standing would be both hazardous and unsettling. A village underwater and perfect? There was something sinister about it, was there not? It would look like slaughter, or like murder, like martyrdom, certainly incriminating. Something was to be done. And, if he might so venture, he himself had a solution. He outlined it, simply, persuasively. The executive board took a vote on the proposed course of action. And it was decided that the village would be razed.

By June of 1937, Mardale had been almost completely abandoned, except for the Hindmarsh family in High Bowderthwaite Farm, who had the advantage of a little extra time as theirs was the highest inhabited point of the valley. They continued to farm the steep fields and the fallow paddocks, herding sheep alongside the near-vertical drystone walls, crooks in hand, dogs working with heads tucked down and forward. They would continue to work their land until finally evicted three months later, when the Waterworks revoked the last of the hill-farm tenancies.

Aside from the Hindmarshes there were, quite often, a few other folk about in the deserted village. Locals returned, lingered, surveyed their old homes, especially on days when there was activity from official quarters. It was as if they could not bear to allow intruders into the lives they had left behind. Samuel Lightburn was one of these stragglers. He was drawn back often, even though he had secured another farm tenancy on the high land between Bampton and Butterwick, the Staingarth property, a five-hundred-year-old, ramshackle dwelling with tumbling barns and stony fields. When he came back to Mardale he wandered through the village, kicking at loose stones, or stood on the hump-backed bridge watching the river flow past. It appeared as if he was looking for something, some forgotten piece of his family that had been left behind, his daughter’s spirit, perhaps, for it seemed she was soulless now. Or he was simply waiting, bent over on the bridge with his elbows resting on the parapet, waiting for a time when he would be able to leave completely, a dismissal, which for now was not forthcoming.

Isaac accompanied his father on these nostalgic excursions. He was a persistent child, wound within his own beliefs, maintaining a relationship with Measand beck whenever he could, and the inhabitants of the cold, plunging streams. He wallowed in the rocky pools with a piece of piping that he
used as a makeshift snorkel, so that he could remain submerged until his father was ready to leave, or until the crest of a current splashed over the tube and he came up spluttering. They were a strange pair, the father on the bridge tracking ghosts in the land, the son a spirit swimming among the underwater territories. Both biding time.

The valley received other visitors. An occasional photographer, a tourist, those with a morbid curiosity who had heard of the fate of Mardale and wanted to see the condemned place before it perished.

The final chapter in the history of the valley was not long in coming, for Thomas Wright was indeed keen to move ahead with the project, then move on. When the wrecking began the relief among the villagers was almost palpable, and though such an abrupt, emphatic end to the village was deeply disturbing, it brought with it a sense of closure, a sense that now they could in earnest begin again.

No local explosives expert was hired and brought in from Carlisle. The dynamite blasters of the region’s quarries were out of luck and a decent wage. Thomas Wright had other ideas with regard to
MCW
’s plan for the demolition. Ideas altogether more grand and demonstrative. Instead, the assembling British Army was sent for, forty territorial officers of the Royal Engineers, members of the 42nd East Lancashire Division. They arrived in green canvassed wagons and set up a temporary camp in a field just on the outskirts of the village. Borrowing barns or squatting in the empty farm buildings was strictly against orders. There were to be no temporary attachments. The officers set up tents, dug holes in the thick Westmorland soil for latrines and observed the village from without, as if studying the enemy’s habits.

These were cheerful, polite men who went about their business slickly, as if each man were running on rails, and
able smoothly to turn corners. The men whistled popular tunes. They snapped their fingers as they walked, hummed songs as they banged signs into the ground surrounding the village, stating that passers-by did so at their own risk. Their uniforms were new, not yet faded by north European rain or south European sun, not yet darkened by blood or torn by wire. It was a smart, enthusiastic group that had the pre-war optimism of the young. The soldiers kept a fire going for the entire sixty hours that they were present in the valley, and there always seemed to be tea brewing in a kettle and men drinking from tin cups, day or night, leaving old, swollen tea leaves spattered on the ground.

Witnessing the sudden appearance of the men, the Hindmarsh family strolled down the fell to chat with members of the odd encampment. Teddy saluted the superior officers, shook hands with one or two of the other men and was delighted to relate the grisly details of his missing appendage, though conversation between them was cropped, un-abutting, and Teddy’s hopes for an insight into the contemporary military remained hindered. The weather was mentioned, the roads, the dam. The weapons factory that had been set up within the pink-turreted hangar of Lowther Castle. The Army denied all knowledge of the base.

But gradually the mysterious presence of the forty officers became apparent.

The Army had been given permission by the Waterworks to test new plastic explosives on the abandoned buildings as training for a forthcoming war. Another war seemed inevitable and understood, as the political powers of Europe gathered aggression. New explosive devices were already being manufactured in Germany, and subsequently in the factories of Britain, the arms race was under way. Before they could be used in the field, the British military wanted them to be given a fair trial. Any home testing-ground was useful in the present, fraught climate. The Waterworks had been only too happy to oblige and a stout little village had been offered up for target practice.

Teddy grimaced at the news, put his sleeve back into his pocket. After serving his country well, his country appeared not to be reciprocating. This was nothing less than an insult to his home, to the church where he had been christened, the pub where he had drunk ale and thrown darts. Had they any idea of the age of this place, he asked. There was no reply. A shrug or two. He said nothing more, saluted again, and led away his blushing sisters, who were unhappy to have been removed from the company of the charming young officers, back up to High Bowderthwaite. Soon the rumble of the ancient tractor could be heard as it ground up and down the incline. Teddy was taking his disapproval out on the landscape. The two sisters hooked up the horse and dray and trotted off into Bampton with fresh butter for sale and news of the recent development.

The Army continued with its initial organization. Everything was done in true military fashion over the weekend, from beginning to end. On Friday afternoon the camp was set up and by Monday morning it had been struck and was gone, as if the appearance had been ghostly, like a phantom sighting of Roman legionnaires, marching south from Hadrian’s Wall. Equipment and supplies were checked a dozen times. There was over 600 pounds of explosive to be unloaded from the wagons and transferred to a secure location, a plot of land free of quartz and flint, which was covered with hefty tarpaulin. A local policeman, stationed in the village of Bampton, was deployed to the valley during the day to help guard the explosive material, kept in a tent on the very outskirts of camp. The precise, volatile nature of the new substance was as yet untested and unrecorded, so it was considered prudent to keep it at a safe distance from the men and the spitting camp-fire.

The first building subjected to the bombing was Measand Hall, a building so old and run-down that it appeared already to have been the target of some heavy shelling. As it stood a little away from the rest of the village, it had been selected
first, thus the predicted shudder and radius of the tremors would not affect any of the other buildings, rendering them perilously unstable. The roof of the Hall had been pulled down and transported away, as had the old oak panelling inside it. Carpets and chaise longue were gone, valuables auctioned-off at the town hall in Penrith. It had been gutted. Only the thick walls remained, and an unfinished painting, which was leaning against a wall in the long hallway.

On Saturday morning a handful of villagers gathered to watch the proceedings, among them Samuel and his family, the Nobles and Lanty Farrow, the Hindmarshes, Joyce Carruthers. Sylvia Goodman brought a wicker chair from which to observe the proceedings and had with her four lace handkerchiefs for the purpose of mopping her rheumy, grief-filled eyes, which she did in the manner of a righteous old dame who might be prone to sniffles at the opera. There was also a reporter from the
Cumberland and Westmorland Herald
newspaper, who slouched at the side of the group, holding a pad of paper with a pencil attached to it by string, seeming utterly bored by the whole situation.