Haweswater (28 page)

The work of laying charges began at nine thirty in the morning. The crowd was asked not to smoke during the proceedings, if they wished to do so they must retreat to the concrete road at the east side of the valley. Immediately several pipes appeared from pockets.

It was a dry day, with a pale, warm sun, and the men were glad not to have the complication of torrential Lakeland rain to deal with. Nobody much fancied messing with a dripping, effervescent explosive. Two young officers drilled holes in the stout walls of Measand Hall with pneumatic equipment. After the boring had been done, the officers’ superior examined the holes and nodded his approval for stage two. Another soldier marched in with the plastic explosive, which was placed into the walls as carefully as if it were a sleeping kitten. The children in the group strained forward for a better look. It resembled a small ball of odd-looking clay fixed to the
ends of
TNT
. The officer handling the explosive wore gloves, which were consigned to an airtight steel box after the material was inserted. Then he checked the seams of his sleeves for lethal detritus. Connecting-wires were fitted and the soldier checked and re-checked the fixtures, the detonation device. The latter was considered faulty and it was exchanged for another. Then he barked a few curt instructions to the gathering.

– Few hundred feet back, if you please. Over by the hill.

Sylvia Goodman fussed over her chair, struggled with it to the new location, re-sat and drew a blanket over her stout, bready legs, though it was not a cold day. She delicately lifted a tissue from her unsnapped purse and waited. The rest of the spectators did as they were told also. They shifted uneasily. They looked at the noble old building. They fixed a picture of it in their heads. It was 11.56 a.m.

At midday, a one-minute signal was given. Then there were three ragged bangs like shotgun blasts, the echoes of which ricocheted about the valley. Tiny clouds of dust rose from the building and floated upwards, settled downwards. The thick Westmorland stone walls of the Hall remained perfectly intact, except for a slight widening of the bored holes in the centre of one gable. The crowd cheered spontaneously and the reporter scribbled in his notebook. An officer coughed loudly and walked towards the group.

– We were just checking to see if the connecting wires and detonator were in order. Just a test run. Next one should do it. Minimal amount of explosive, you see. More next time. Don’t come any closer.

He spoke cheerfully, matter-of-factly, but his cheeks were a little flushed and there was an almost apologetic smile in his eyes and about his crooked moustache. He walked away, back to the group of officers, exchanged a few words with them and began the job of hastily recharging the holes in the walls, which had deepened and widened and could easily take more explosive. Again the clay-like substance was inserted, again the gloves discarded.

Samuel turned to Teddy Hindmarsh.

– Fellas’ve gotta fair bit more munny fer t’clobber these days, eh?

– Aye. Five paira gloves each bugger.

The men chuckled and Samuel offered Teddy a cigarette. Sylvia’s buttocks squeaked against her wicker chair. She tutted and muttered to herself, and took out a flask from her handbag, from which she took a sip.

After another thirty minutes or so there was a terrific explosion, much louder than the first, which reverberated around the valley. Clouds of smoke and dust filled the air, and when it cleared everyone could see that Measand Hall was not, in fact, a pile of debris and rubble, but simply a decrepit old building, now a little worse for wear, with beams of sunlight spilling through the gable, but still mostly intact.

By now there was much discussion going on among the group of Territorial officers. Clipped voices were raised. A radio call was hastily put in to the military base at Orton, and within two hours a truck arrived carrying another 400 pounds of explosive and extra supplies, by which time the villagers had picnicked on the grass banks of the dale and the Army had gone through several batches of tea and a ration of sardine sandwiches. The new equipment was unloaded quickly and stacked in the supply tent.

One final blast in the afternoon successfully demolished the Hall. It was not blown sky high, nor did it explode in a mushroom of shattered rock and stone. Instead, it folded heavily outwards, wall by wall, almost gracefully as it scattered bricks. It lay open like an enormous stone flower in bloom. Sylvia Goodman let loose her sobs, covering her eyes with the lacy rag. The moustached officer came back over to the villagers. The locals were quiet, but for the weeping woman, standing very still. There was an atmosphere of ill-content and mild disapproval around them. The officer did not quite understand why they were there in the first place, unless it was because there was nothing better to do of a
weekend around these parts, which wouldn’t have surprised him.

– That’s all for today, ladies and gents. The rest will be done tomorrow. Oh-nine-hundred hours, sharp. If you want to be present.

On Sunday, almost exactly the same crowd was present as the previous day, give or take a few extra children, who were keen to miss Sunday school under the watchful eye of the Bampton vicar’s wife, and a few less women, including Ella Lightburn, who were not about to miss church for the spectacle. This time the charges were greatly increased, the amount of explosive multiplied sixfold and more. There was less discussion among the officers and less cheerful belligerence among the spectators. The Army had moved within the confines of the village, and was working around what had once been the graveyard, stepping over fresh rectangles of exhumed earth. The next building to be demolished would be the tiny church.

It was Private William Garry who railed from corner to corner with wires and explosive. He was from Tadcaster, first child of Mr and Mrs Harold Garry, the pride of his family. Gloved-up and bright-eyed, he fitted the charges between the slabs of the building, whistling all the while, though somewhat nervously. He let it be known to the rest of his division that he was amazed by the resilience of these village walls, which had been witnessed the day before, and after the church failed to shatter on the first attempt, he also let them know that he was not just a little worried that the explosive being used was perhaps too weak for the purpose of blowing off enemy legs and arms. After wiring up the church a second time he mentioned his fears to his superior. The old hall had been snared three times, he said, before falling. Perhaps the tacky was dud, not in working order. And it didn’t feel right,
sir, wiring-up a church again that wouldn’t drop. Perhaps He Himself didn’t like it. He was told not to be simple, that the Almighty had better things to do than keep this church upright. And then Garry confided in his superior that he’d heard about a bomb the Germans had that landed first and exploded later, taking out half a city after you though it was dead. A bomb that no one could defuse. Private Garry, his superior almost shouted, less lip and get on with it lad, the nearest farm if he was so damn worried for the church.

As it was, Private William Garry did not have long to contemplate the quality of British arsenal once the Army was mobilized and deployed. He lasted a month in the violent tides of the Second World War before receiving eleven high-calibre bullets from an enemy machine-gun. His suspicions about delayed-reaction bombs were right, however. The country would be digging them up and defusing them for almost the remainder of the century. From under cathedrals, the sand dunes of beaches, wells and mines. Children would swing round them and jump off them decades later without the benefit of historical knowledge to identify the funny cylindrical drums.

But on that day in Mardale, at least, his fears were somewhat assuaged, as the plastic explosive was used more liberally and gradually, one by one, the old walls of the buildings collapsed. The Army recorded the damage with each increase of volatile material. After a while they became heavy-handed with its use, and it was quite a show for the spectators. The sound of the explosions grew louder, and the crowd flinched and covered their ears for each detonation. Odd fragments of debris landed hundreds of yards away from the sites of the bombings. The officers ducked behind sandbags, with rocks clattering off their hard, round helmets. The Bampton policeman moved the crowd back, and further back still, leaving his position at the explosive tent to ensure public safety. A shard of rock landed on the windshield of his motorcycle and he ran over to find it shattered and hanging loose from the Norton.
This duty was more than he had bargained for.

At one o’clock that day the Hindmarsh family retreated indoors for their traditional Sunday lunch. From their high vantage point they could still see the damage being done, the smoke rising in blue-grey clouds above the trees and hedges, and they could hear the blasts as they grew louder. Outside the cottage the dog was barking furiously and throwing itself against its chain. But the family was determined that their Sunday roast would be consumed, come hell or high water, and they would not leave their home even when a young officer knocked on the door of High Bowderthwaite, issuing a polite order to leave for an hour and have the lunch cold later, and making the sisters blush. He was chased off by the one-armed Teddy with a carving knife and the ferocious barking of the ratty terrier in the kennel outside the farm. The family sat eating their roast lamb and mint sauce, blocking their ears from the booms and crashes down the hill. The cottage walls shook and glass cracked and tinkled from the window panes. Teddy’s younger sister, Sandra, took her hand away from her ear and looked at it. There was a small patch of blood on her palm. A trickle of blood ran from her ear.

By Sunday afternoon the damage was done. Everything was razed within the village and on its periphery the rubble spread outwards, scattered up grassland. Riggindale Farm, the Dun Bull, Whelter Farm Cottage. All the houses were blasted to ruin except for the school house, which had been dismantled in the previous March and rebuilt exactly as it had once stood in the next valley over, and the church, which held on, gaping and groaning. Dust began to settle over the wreckage of Mardale and it was only the battered tower of St Patrick’s that remained at any substantial height. It shook and crumbled with each bomb detonation but withstood the shocks, and though by the end of the day it appeared that
only one ounce of explosive would have brought it crashing down, there was no explosive left in the guarded tent to be used. So, finally, the Army left the church be. It was gradually knocked down with sledgehammers and pickaxes over the next few months by
MCW
labourers, reduced to a pile of brick and stone and stained glass. It was said throughout Westmorland that the noise of the bombing could be heard in a twenty-mile, corrugated-mountain radius, but that sheep and cattle across the fells continued to graze silently, oblivious and unconcerned.

After the bombing, the village lay in a smouldering heap for a few days before the dust finally blew to the earth and the last bricks toppled. If Britain had happened to look in on the valley for a moment, it might have found some way in which to prepare itself for a sight destined to become common over the next few years. Cities and towns decayed by the fury of explosives, bombs rained down from carrier planes and enemy aircraft. It might have seen a vision of the Blitz.

Years later, in 1979, when a severe drought would take the water levels down further than they had been since the flooding, and would turn the lakebed into dry, parched skin, the shallow skeleton of the old village would rise again, crumbling, out of the desert-looking earth. The bridge in the village would be almost perfect, even after a vast, inverse river had been flowing over and above it for almost fifty years, though the mason’s mark on its keystone would be eroded to nothing. It would be discovered that the cellars of some of the buildings were still insolently intact, despite the British Army’s vigour, and items within had been preserved. They were collecting mud quietly after all the years of separation from their upper structures. Like forgotten war veterans. Or skeletal prisoners left in a concentration camp.