Haweswater (31 page)

Gregory Barber had followed the farmer through the crowd. He strode forward, shouldering past the men, angry that, after his dutiful watch over the girl for hours, this farmer would steward her so wrongly, so mercilessly. His protestation was vicious, hissed out under his breath.

– Not next to this animal, man, it isn’t right or respectful! She needs proper transport, her family …

But the farmer turned to him, and he opened his face a little. Just enough for Gregory Barber to see inside, to see the howling
eyes and the saliva cobwebbing in the corners of his ragged, open mouth. And the kept stone at the back of his face was breaking. It was the face of mortal love, of a father’s worst imagining made real. There was more horror in it than there had been in the destroyed body of the girl. He saw inside the face just long enough for him to wish he had never seen, and to know that he would never lose sight of it from his memory, that it would visit his own dreams nightly, from that moment on.

In secure, rural places, small villages and insular hamlets, where grand events and theatrical schemes rarely take place, enormous human episodes, when they finally do rip apart the fabric of normal life, sometimes come away lacking clarity. Where you would imagine there should be absolute and utter adherence to the facts of the incident, that uncommon thing which has taken place, because nothing much else goes on in the sticks and this sits up from that nothing, the opposite will occur. Instead, a peculiar, quiet abstinence comes over the local storytellers, and the truth will seldom out, can never be agreed upon if people are pressed on it. Or they veer far away from the event with their tales, like children will elaborate and invent when caught doing something they feel bad about. So, the borders between fact and myth have a tendency to blur in these regions. History fogs, or becomes loose and watery. Bizarre mythologies arise. Half-lives. Half-truths. Events are built up or deconstructed. Leaps of faith are made, often for the strangest of sakes. The past becomes indistinct and subplots continue, subversions. It is not clear why this should be so.

The explosion at the Haweswater dam in 1937 was never fully explained. It remains largely unrecorded in the history of the reservoir. The little museum in the pumping station at Burnbanks makes no mention of it, except for a short police report, which barely describes the one fatality of the accident, and an engineer’s report stating that the damage to the dam took two months to repair. The two offer no collusion. They are separate branches on a wide tree. Nor was the role of Janet Lightburn ever understood within the events. Locals speculated in the coming months and years. Had she been involved
at all? Had hers been an unfortunate but accidental presence there that night? Had insanity sent her wandering randomly in the darkness? And what of the navvy, who must surely have been a bad sort, an uncaught, faceless criminal? Was the attempt on Haweswater his failed Jericho? Did he go on to other black deeds across the region? The slaughter of innocents, high sabotage, eerie disappearances. The girl strangled in Keswick eight months later, the Greystoke robberies. Local unsolved crimes were endowed with his reputation, and it was even suspected for a time that he was the Croglin Vampire.

The notion of a kind of loose and accidental tragedy was spread over the end of Janet’s life. She passed swiftly into folklore. But for reasons no one could comprehend, and she was moved inside other tales, old wives’ gossip, whispers of witchcraft and haunting. Politics and love and that odd union of two opposites seemed all but forgotten. It became irrelevant. People pecked at her corpse like a flock of marauding crows, pulling at the flesh to feed to their bits of stories. Of her mindset to wreak actual and deliberate damage, to commit an act considered heinous and abhorrent in its day and in an era of such moderation, perhaps no one can be sure. But for Ella Lightburn’s convictions, perhaps no one ever will be. Nor can anyone know for sure the details of her troubled affair with Jack Liggett. On this, Ella was always far more guarded, would entertain no questioning, even at the end of her life. Miriam Lightburn, the daughter of Jack and Janet, had to do without their united presence, corporeal or otherwise, as she grew. When her grandmother was dying, and history was finally handed to her, amorphous and streaming from her hand which tried to keep it, only then did she begin to dream and imagine, and speculate about the sort of romance that shakes up history and devastates valleys. People used to say of Ella that she was a fierce woman, cut out from granite by the north wind itself. And so she was. Her soul had a weightiness to it and she was steadfast. And that lent itself to making
her difficult, immovable. Too subjective, perhaps. But even so, the accuracy of her account as she told it does not matter, and the blank sections might not be so empty. There was something else passed along the edges of it to Miriam. Later she realized that her grandmother’s story about belonging to the land was also a story about longing for those who have lived upon it.

There is a photograph of Janet in the Haweswater museum. A photograph taken without her consent or knowledge, it seems. In it, she is sitting on a wall by Whelter Farm Cottage with her young brother. Isaac is standing in front, holding one of her thin knees. She has on breeches which are grey in the photograph. Her arms are defined, masculine, thin like her legs, but her body and shoulders are thicker, powerful. Her brother has on a boy’s tweed jacket, and for once his white hair is dry. There are deep shadows under the marble angles of Janet’s face and a sharp groove splits her forehead in two. She is not beautiful. And yet there is something else to her, even reproduced, spilled into the pores of the old photograph. Energy. As if there is something within that by all means belongs out. It appears as if she is scowling at her brother, as if a deep anger is splitting her head in half. She might be thought querulous for this expression, with a mangling personality, perhaps. But what can a static picture reveal? And how does the moment’s light influence a face that is poured permanently on to paper? It is northern, interfered-with light that often has to make its way down through the saturated sky, after all.

The identity of the photographer remains a mystery. A tourist? A reporter from the
Cumberland and Westmorland
Herald
? Her father did not own a camera until his seventieth birthday, by which point she had been dead many years. And Samuel only took pictures of birds in his garden. Now the photograph of Janet forms part of a display in the informal museum in the pumping station that stands not far away from the high, smooth wall of the dam itself. There are pictures
of the navvies also, working on the half-built embankment as it flexes out of the ground like a taut bicep, or walking in sombre lines like a wake, back to their draughty huts. Their eerie ballet of work. The boys of the 42nd East Lancashire Division are there also, chipper, grinning, immortalized by the lens. Not a one of them surviving the Second World War. And there are pictures of Jack Liggett, standing against his long car with that slight smile of sagacity bridled on his face. It is early on in his involvement with Mardale. He is still very much a product of the city, before the land up here, steeped too full of itself and capable of radical influence, pulled at his blood, and he let go. He was not the first man to come under its spell. And won’t be the last. Though for him the outcome was fatal, for all the liberation. The camera does him many favours. He is a handsome man, in a well-cut suit. The best of the post-First World War generation, some might say. Others might consider this not so, but that he turned out all right in the end. His hair is black, and the dark eyes, they are cast somewhere in the distance. To the high buildings by the Rigg or the crags under Kidstey Pike.

For all the determination of Jack Liggett’s successor, the Haweswater project could not be completed within the decade. External factors of hugely mitigating proportions interrupted that and most other private industrial endeavours, and the country switched its attention to the next monumental catastrophe of the century. During the Second World War building on the dam ceased, just as many other blueprints and architectural plans were locked in safes or left on office drawing boards. So Thomas Wright had to wait, impatient and aggrieved, for the moment when he could shrug off his inherited millstones. It was only after the country began to reshape itself in the next two decades that the aqueduct plans were completed, the draw-off tower came into operation, and soon
after water found its gurgling way down to the grimy city of Manchester, to be held in clean glasses, boiled in aluminium pans. Pipes with a diameter the height of a six-foot man were sunk into the hillsides to catch the flow of water from the largest of the fell becks, and were led down to the foot of the reservoir where they are, to this day, churning the water white into the still, reflected sky. A hundred chisel marks were left in the upper concrete walls of the dam as the illegible, artless signatures of a hundred men who had toiled in all weathers and had slowly bolted together the skeleton and then walled in the anatomy of a huge stone dream. The river channel was arrested and backed up. The valley was sealed. And then the water began to rise, unstoppable, a flood unlike any other. Mardale slowly drowned, and Jack’s green cup filled.

The last villager left not long after this, with his cart of hay taken from the overgrowing fields of his old abandoned farm. A book was left in a locked tool box in the cellar, which spoke of the weight of empty hands, and which would not be found until the lake dried up in the strong grip of the drought of 1979. By then the blue-blonde hair between the pages was dust, and the heart that had grown other hearts inside it, as if one was not sufficient vessel for a man’s grief, had stopped. When he left the devastated valley with his heavy chest, the new lake was rising. As Samuel drove through the village, the sound of water spilling through the wheel-spokes of his cart was like a soft-washing hum. His horse cut through the swirling lake, and his sheepdog swam along next to the cart, fighting the new current.

About that time, in the valleys of Westmorland, strange fables and legends began to be told.

The story of Janet Tree has an uncertain origin. For almost a century the myth of the witch which inhabits the old oak tree at the edge of the Shap road has troubled and intrigued
inhabitants of the valley. It is the only oak tree on that road, and though it is so old that the branches sag almost to the ground, obese with bark, the local council has never reinforced it, or cut it down. You have only to ask around and dozens of sightings come to light.

Marion Benning, who runs the petrol station in the village of Bampton, swears that she sees her every time she drives that road, reflected in the rear-view mirror, sitting in the back seat of her car, knitting. She is a young, blue witch. Bonny, in a way. Her face is that of a cat’s. For others she is old and gnarled, a hag, wearing scarlet lipstick, her hair a bright, wild white and her eyes bloodshot from liquor. She is bad-behaving, always drunk, some say, hanging from the oak’s branches, exposing herself to all and sundry, and she is surrounded by animals that are not found in this country. Leopards asleep in the uppermost reaches of the tree. Impala. Alligators in the bark. She is unlike any other Westmorland ghost, has something exotic to her. Others agree that drink plays a part in the sightings, though not on the part of Janet Tree.

It is also uncertain what kind of luck Janet Tree brings. Some swear ill, having seen her only hours before they receive news of an awful event. Some even regard her as the death-bringer herself, coming like a screaming banshee from the trunk of the tree and chasing alongside their cars, clawing at the window, leaving trails of blood on the glass. She is often said to bleed. From the eyes, the mouth. Her belly. Day or night, she startles the driver of the car so badly that he swerves along the road into a stone wall, into the path of another vehicle, into a hiker on the verge. And it’s knock-for-knock in these treacherous parts, where blame is seldom attributed to an individual motorist, to one protagonist alone. So who can prove her?

Janet is blamed for accidents throughout the valley, but especially on the twisting Shap road. The man from the wrecked car speaks of newly serviced brakes that suddenly fail. But it does not help that, by the oak, there is a nasty curve
in the road which tourists tend always to assume their cars will manage at fifty miles per hour, so deadly a curve that it has been the scene of numerous accidents, many near-misses, several fatalities. Warning signs have been put up in the road to advise people of the sharp corner, but visitors who have been on their way to or from Haweswater tell of having overshot the corner, seeing no such sign, or that a woman was standing in front of it obscuring it from view. A woman who disappeared when the driver of the car walked back around the curve in need of an eyewitness. Nor does it help that the road is usually slippery, wet from intermittent showers, from the rain that gathers energy in the north and west and unleashes itself over the mountains on the roof of England. Or helpful it is not that the view is beautiful from this road, there is a distracting absence of urban hysteria and concrete, the light over the waterlogged fields, the trees, yellow, red, red and shining, a burnt copper sunset, and if you glance to the left you can just make out the Haweswater dam in the distance.