Haweswater (20 page)

He begged Janet to accompany him on his hikes, but she would seldom leave the quiet school during the mornings, determined that the establishment would not miss out for the sake of her own pleasure. Hazel Bowman had left the valley a few months earlier and Janet was now charged with the establishment’s future, which would hang in the balance unless a new building was erected beyond the reservoir. The pupils of Mardale were being merged with the children of Bampton endowed school, which was an excellent institution in its own right. She was heartened by its reputation for turning out both intellects and undefeatable wrestlers, and she knew the headmaster, Andrew Jackson, to be a decent man of high principles, yet there was a part of her desperate to preserve an aspect of the old Mardale establishment. Her nostalgia was shared by many in the dale and they gave her their blessings to organize a fund. She was busy writing letters, enquiring about aid for a new school building, from charitable organizations, endowments and alumni, and would not be swayed from her task.

Jack Liggett would have to be content with her evenings, or an early-morning encounter, when the scent of her skin was like honey. The two had developed a discreet system for their affair, a paradoxical union of spontaneity and caution, excess care. He urged her to allow him public courtship, but she insisted on the affair remaining private, and he was obliged to grant her wishes. Though it irked him, the taste of her in his life was all he desired, and so he complied.

He was aware that a meshing of his pleasures was probably the key. The fulfilment of a high climb and the sensuality of release as he flooded into her body, each brought a level of contentment above any he had reached in the past. The two at once seemed to offer a spiritual answer. As he thought of it, he lay back into a quiet cave within himself.

Naked, the two of them wrapped in a blanket against the dew of those early-autumn dawns, there was more pleasure than there was discomfort, and he could not manage to summon a severe degree of objection to their subterfuge. Images of her in the Swindale waterfall haunted him. And her frozen body slowly warming after, under the friction of his own. With this joint gratification in mind, he continued to ask for her presence on his outings to the mountain ranges, imagining her limbs angling against a high plateau of rippling grass, the final strands of her hair before an edge of cliff fell away. Moving with her under only the weight of sky. As he had dreamed of it in the George Hotel in Penrith, so he wanted the reality. Pulling up to the cave of her mouth. In that place, he felt he could once and for all explain to her that a truer section of himself had come into being, he felt the infection of it in his blood. That through a metamorphosis in this wild, saturated, palatial land, he was becoming abridged, and finished. A new and better piece. But she would not come. She would not. As she sat in the old classroom next to the lake, he set out into one range of fells after another.

Occasionally Isaac would walk with him to the tarns. He was glad of the company and fond of the odd, dauntless child who was put off by neither climate nor association. The boy loved to submerge his hands and face in the freezing water, searching for life, of which there seemed very little. Jack explained to him that here the water was more acidic, poor in nutrients and fairly inhospitable to all but the most specialized of creatures. And Isaac grinned at him, pleased with such knowledge. When the reservoir comes, there will be fish such as the rest of the country has never seen, Jack said.

During those days of hiking he seldom felt lonely. The traffic on the fells of the Lakeland was constant, if sparse. For centuries the area had been a favourite for sporting activity and
leisure. Walkers traversed the ridges and met one another at summits or on chicaned passes. A few civil words passed between them like a secular prayer. This was enough human contact for the entire day, the sixteen miles of solitary passage, where the wind and a mind full of thoughts were the only other company. A brief encounter with an ancient, buckled-looking shepherd on the peaty wasteland above Mardale, the man’s face rippled like over-sewn leather. Jack Liggett sat with the character against a flock of grass. Here was a man of infinite patience, of quietude, and overwhelming calm. Who might not see another human for weeks, or for months in winter, who was willingly separated, and owned by his work.

Jack Liggett was included in a conversation regarding the unusual weather, about the late rains and the streams low with water, so that next year’s spawn would be affected. And how the mist over the Mardale beck was often like dry skin that the water had shrugged off.

– Yes, yes, that’s right. I hadn’t thought of it before.

The shepherd did not ask him to justify his business, though he surely knew the circumstances. He was required to show no papers on this afternoon, but allowed free passage. As if he, too, now belonged in part to the region.

He watched the early workers preparing for construction of the dam during the first weeks of September, watching from the tops of the hills, on the old Roman route from Galva to Brocavum, which encompassed the fort on Castle Crag. There was, flowing from the green and brown depths, no longer a sense of emptiness of the kind he had felt as a boy all those years ago. Back in 1915, when the country was getting bare of men, when he was learning to step out of the life that had been prepared for him. He knew himself to be entering a new era of reflection and concession. There was a small part of him which felt at home, living as he had been for the past
months within the confines of the village, forging connections with its residents, he allowed himself that. Hostility was ebbing away, now that his initial incarnation had been revoked. There was still time, another year, perhaps slightly more, to stay. The village would not be disassembled until construction of the dam wall was almost complete and the valley was ready for its rebirth.

He was sensitive to the fact that the coming months would prove difficult and irregular for the locals, living as they would be alongside developing evidence of the valley’s new role. He would lessen the blow in any way he could, another pair of arms for lifting as a family moved out, keeping his ear to the ground for new tenancies or work. He would remain there until the end, he was convinced of this, governing, helping with the exodus. For the respect of the woman he loved. For himself, also. He did not like loose ends, not when they included people with whom he had developed some kind of relationship, or in a place where he had some kind of forgotten jurisdiction. He would witness that almighty flood up the slopes of the mountains, the filling cup, would be witness to his own vast influence, because she would want this too, he was certain. She would want him to see it done. And, in truth, yes, he would miss the tiny village he was now so fond of, so settled within. Perhaps a twinge of regret now and again, as he lay within Janet’s arms, his head against her stomach, enough to make him choke. So, his life here would be on borrowed time, with each day another drip of blood out of the heart of the village, as a family secured another tenancy here or there, the contents of a house being transported to a new dale, another town. But treading water did not matter to him. There was still time.

He walked daily on the lower ridges of the mountains surrounding the village, skirting under the knife peak of Kidstey
Pike. The wild bracken crunching and snapping around him, whistling on the side of his oilskin when he sat and moved slightly this way or that. Everything was red and damp underfoot. He sat on the same brow of hill each time, gazing down. Through the waxy mist in the valley he could hear the voices of the men working. The strange acoustics were carried in slick waves through the thick, porous air. Their shouted words were unidentifiable, just tones that were brought to him in spasms, lapping bursts. And when they began clearing trees and topsoil, the sounds of the machines grinding and scraping echoed only very softly around the damp fells. Even when the excavation for the foundations started up three hundred yards from the existing lake, these noises, ear-shattering at close range, were not distracting or overwhelming to Jack Liggett, two thousand feet up in the Westmorland hills. Not the gelignite blasting and the clanking of the caterpillar-tracked crane, the removal of overburden and rock via rumbling cableways and tip-wagons to spoil-banks further down the valley. Not the constant hum from the centrifugal pumps, used for water-displacement and testing the bore holes for watertight pressure greater than that of the estimated, static head of the reservoir. It was cinematic. Sound overlaying a picture and missing slightly.

One autumn day a new self-conscious thought came to him as he looked down on the area below through the low, shifting clouds, seeing only patches of life and movement. Slightly to the left of him was a white blur in the red bracken. He turned his head to identify the interruption of peripheral colour. It was a fell sheep, with its wool ragging down towards the ground and snagging in the ferns beneath. It had been shorn poorly, and on the rump of its hind leg was painted a thick blue H, like a terribly botched tattoo. The tail was clumped with infestation. He imagined its underbelly, riddled with ticks and permanently swollen from probably the full four pregnancies. It must have been lost for some time, unable to fend for itself and close to death.

The sheep looked at him haughtily for a moment, with pale eyes, and in the dampness he could faintly detect the odour of grease lifting from its coat. After a while the animal flipped awkwardly around and limped away. He saw that one of its fore hooves was broken and split wide open. It had been pulled forward on the end of the animal’s leg, tipping upwards, so that it gave the impression of a shoe only half stepped into. He felt vague nausea as he watched the animal’s painful descent of the slopes, which remained a while after the sheep was lost from his sight.

Then, looking back towards the valley bottom, he saw that the mist had lifted somewhat and he noticed that the voices of the workers were becoming quiet without the clouds to conduct noise. It was grand theatre down there, becoming clear but silent. There was a wide foundation along the ground, with two deep chambers at the position of the dam’s future buttresses. It seemed they had suddenly been created, though he knew that they must have been finished for quite some time. The river had been redirected out of the lake and was now flowing within a man-made channel away from the heart of the building arena. Workers swarmed around the construction site. They were ready for the building of the colossal stone arm, the arm of a god, as he had once described it to the villagers. At that moment, Jack Liggett understood that dreams are pinned through with iron and that art might be no more than the materials which line its sides.

Between the spruce trees rocking lanterns throw stray beams of light. The men carrying the lanterns cannot be seen in the morning dusk, only their hands on the staffs are visible, like white-skinned wings high on the birch. They each carry enough water for the day’s work, in canisters strapped over their backs, and a ration of corned beef and bread. In the pockets of their heavy jackets are numerous pairs of gloves, perhaps a cigarette or two left over from the weekend, saved with discipline for Monday morning as an anticipated comfort. They walk in this early hour without life, as if moving from a grave, merely following the ghoulish form in front to create a procession of spectres, lost into the dark, undulating through the rips of trees. Occasionally a man at the back of the line hums, funeral-slow. The ground is soft and giving, a sponge-bed of fallen needles which collects sound, muffles it, though any listener coming closer to the group would hear the minuscule bending and cracking of dead needles underfoot, the squeak of many boots on the spicule-leaf tapestry of the woodland floor. But from a distance, only the flickering lanterns among the trees signal the presence in the pre-dawn murk of four hundred men in silent, wordless convoy.

Other than the man in front and the rocking luminescence, they do not see. As if they have been buried in the darkness underground, eyes removed from sockets and the spaces filled in with leaves, with fur. They are chained by the glow of the swinging lanterns. Already the short distance walked in the hard, steel-toed boots is proving uncomfortable, an uneven rubbing of leather and metal on the soles of their often sockless feet, their toes curling into hard callused balls, with split nails beginning to grow inwards. Old injuries returning, unhealed.

Yesterday’s sweat odour arises from the fibres of their rough shirts as their bodies warm with motion. In this way, they find evidence of their past commitment to the project, the amnesia of sleep falls away and the scent reminds them of who they are, what they must accomplish. As they near the clearing in the forest, nostrils inhale lime-dust, unsettled and still present in the air from its disturbance the previous day. The fresh smell of the pine disappears, a clue to their location. Shallow light from the lanterns reveals a thick coating of white on the spruce trees now, as if Christmas has found its way into the forest early, powdering the branches with festive snow.

Then the trees are suddenly gone and the dark thins, becomes only branchless air. A last star or cut of moon lingers in the dark-blue sky between nocturnal clouds. No chance to determine the coming weather yet, though poor weather seldom halts the work, now that the foundations do not have to dry. At the dam site, a mile and a half away from where the men began their rote and listless trail, they break formation into an untidy mass. They select a space in the rubble, on low-walled platforms, and drive their lanterns into the ground or between rocks, close to where they have been working over the past weeks. The handle of a pickaxe tucks into a palm, a stiff shoulder lifts. Three diesel engines driving dc generators, which supply electrical energy to the site, are started up. Machinery begins to wake, the slush and grind of mixers, metal resounds off stone, and sections of scaffolding scrape and groan as they are assembled. The air-compressor drones; another hums further down the valley at the quarry, when the group of men separated from the labourers’ wake reaches it. Soon an orchestral racket of industrial noise is swelling between the black valley walls.

This is the best energy of the day. The human hands are precise, even without light. No exposure to air has left wet cracks along their knuckles. Under the gloves the skin congeals, splits, digits macerate, but the hand in question does
not stop its movement and will not for six hours. By then fingers and arms are without sensation, knocked numb from gestures against solid material. They could be skinned or sliced open without their owners realizing it, and often are.

If there has been rain in the night the ground becomes as soft as clay and the men lay new boards over the mud where they will need to walk, carry ladders, where they will wheel slopping barrows of concrete and mortar. Perversely, overnight frost is welcomed: trenches harden and the mud forms frozen peaks; movement is made easier on the rigid ground, though ice on the scaffolding boards is dangerous for the men working on the upper wall itself.

These high-wire workers have already peeled away from the main group and have climbed the slopes on either side of the site, parallel to the as-yet invisible structure. They begin work in the darkness also, strapping themselves into harnesses that will let a man fall a hundred feet down into the valley from the skeleton of a buttress. The internal beams are positioned with the aid of flares, so that at places in the middle of the valley it appears that a fire is burning in mid-air, that a falling star has arrested to prolong its end in stasis above the inky pool of the lower valley. White fire burns out and a crucified man hung somewhere in the darkness strikes another star alight. Like a stellar factory. At the corners of the framework, bolts are blindly driven into another piece of scaffolding before the sun issues a complete illumination.

Within the mammoth ribcage of the embankment, foremen look upwards, knowing another portion of sky will be lost that day, ahead or behind schedule. They bark commands, search the site for faults as human bodies flow around them.

The men riddling the ground are stonebreakers, welders, fitters, joiners, construction workers of every kind, and gaffers, who will never have any liberties on the site but will have to fetch and carry ladders, pass and lift timber and rock, undertake the most menial and mundane tasks for the duration of their time on the project, receiving almost half the pay
of other men. They move the most and at the whim of a call or a gesture, swimming through clouds of debris, leaving mud tracks on the boards, whores to the skilled labourers. They are the youngest men, barely men, a boys’ anti-network, almost, used to the sudden rush against each other for a piece of equipment, a bag of sand.

Within an hour of arriving on-site, the men’s lungs are dry with dust from the broken rock, their throats choked with it. Angle-grinders roar and buzz through static, compressed lava a million times faster than glaciers undertook the task of folding it together millennia earlier. The Lower Silurian strata melt under a spinning blade. But the hard volcanic rock leaves a thick wake above the cut, it will not be displaced without first soaking up oxygen and sparkling like planetary rain in the aura of a lantern. The men remove cloths from their pockets and tie them over their mouths, spitting into them to keep them airtight, to prevent the mist of dust from creeping up inside. Saliva forms bloody-looking patches of wetness at the oval of bandage covering a mouth. The men cock heads, squint into the unknown to conjure reality in the singing terrain. They are dependent on sound to know which machine is operating, and at what distance, from the small pool of light in which they work.

As daylight comes up over the hills, the skeleton of the dam is revealed, towering above the workers. The dream of an imaginary construction thaws along with the silver points of the mud, dissolves into reality. Now falling timber can be seen and a dropped hammer avoided as it clatters down through the scaffolding. A fast rope which has come loose from a pulley buzzes by the men attached to the dam; they swing upwards, outwards, and their legs remain free of trenched rope burns. Tea kettles whistle simultaneously at eight points over the site, as if only now in daylight is it acceptable to imbibe the thin brown liquid, though some men will drink from the tin cups through their bandaged mouths to filter sediment. The work buildings erected on the dam
site, a fitting shop, smithy, joiner’s shop, saw mill and the storage yards, begin to emerge out of the greyness, as do the tracks which carry the small diesel locomotives. Three-ton girders are winched into the giant ribcage, now definite visions.

And all around them is paradise. It is the most beautiful vista many have ever seen. A damp, shining valley hangs before them. Used to smoky towns and reshaped ports, the Westmorland countryside is a glorious backdrop for the construction. Screens of foliage fold alongside the mountains. The density of landscape draws their eyes away from rusting apparatus and their mongrel patches of the site. But these distractions of beauty are rare and short lived. Muscles ache with fatigue to remind the crew that the physical world requires them to give up their bodies for premature or eventual ruin, for the sake of a living wage, or less. Still, high up above the site, those who work in rafters of the sky cannot help but dwell on the view. It opens before them, a world of rivers and the quilt of foliage, brown mountains, hills they can easily see over, and beyond that, a land of discreet, unfolding water.

A man calls sideways. The canister of water swings back between the beams and the ropes of the pulley for him to drink thirstily. Far below him the ground is blanketed by dust and he is thankful not to be choking in it. But high on the structure there are other dangers. Heavy showers might give a short reprieve from work, but rain turns the boards into slick walkways, rotting at the joints, and the tubular piping streams with water. It is better to stay tucked into the enclave of the buttress until it passes, rather than risk moving under the tarpaulin at the corner of the scaffold. Wind is the most feared element on the outer reaches of the dam. Rushing up the valley from nowhere, perhaps from the
gathered, unpredictable energy of the north, it can easily lift a man out of his foothold. Or a sudden whirlwind comes down from the top of the mountains, spun into the bottom of the dale as if casually thrown from the gods into a world where they are pawns, expendable. There is no place for the careless, the atheistic. Safety lines and harnesses are, without question, essential measures, attached to the solid dinosaur skeleton itself, which can be relied on for stability. The trapeze artists at the top of the building understand this vulnerability, keeping their superstitions as acutely as they are meticulous with the screws of their heddles. Often a man has walked the distance back to the village to collect a lucky charm, a brass key, a coin bent on train tracks, forgoing half a day’s pay for the sake of the talisman which has hitherto kept him safe.

They move out in air to check drying mortar and rivets and true spirit levels, as to the side of them the wind moans past, a section of scaffolding collapses and crashes, splintering and buckling into the clouds at the valley’s bottom. The two Henderson cableways, luckily, are unscathed by the collapse. From the cabins placed directly over the winding gear the men lean out and signal with flags, an old-fashioned gesture to convey their messages. No harm. Continue. Each Henderson’s lifting capability is vast, as is its span, a commanding reach from the fixed-head mast. Ballast boxes filled with rock provide the machines with stability against overturning. The two Hendersons are responsible for the majority of the dam’s construction and any damage sustained to the apparatus would prove disastrous, not to mention expensive, slowing work down to the organic creep of mere humans.

During lunch, machinery is temporarily switched off to save power. The pieces of meat and bread are unwrapped, consumed without enjoyment. It is bland sustenance. On the ground, food and dust mix in the mouths of the stone-cutters. They eat quickly and rub their hands back to life.

The men strapped to the top of the wall sit back against a
metal pillar and watch over the woods. The valley flows away from them, becoming flatter and then only river on the blue horizon. Small birds flit past, encouraged by the brief quiet, often landing on the metal scaffolding rail, their precise claws ticking against the tubes as they sidestep closer, eyes blinking and heads tilting. They have become beggars, scavengers. The men throw crumbs for them to share and the birds dart inwards. The workers begin to recognize species, breeds. Sparrow, siskin, wren, a raven. They can even differentiate between similar members of the same species. Brambling, almost identical to the chaffinch apart from its white belly. As if they were middle-class retirees, birdwatchers luxuriating in the private aviary of a town-house garden. A glance to the west might reveal a golden eagle climbing the ladders of air pressure or, if they are very lucky, they might spy one piercing the low cloud, if the noise of the machinery hasn’t driven them over to Ullswater to hunt for rabbits. So many times an excited shout from one of the men has led to the minor disappointment of a mere buzzard, dispatched ahead of a group of three as they surround the hillside warrens.

Now that they are not moving about on the scaffold the structure seems to sway slightly in the moving atmosphere, and if they were to sit all day, a slight sea-sickness would eventually overcome the men. Standing up to resume work, the startled birds fall away into nothing. The men urinate against the vast, coming wall, signing a name with piss which will evaporate or freeze, depending on the season. A blast from a foreman’s whistle after thirty minutes of rest and construction is resumed, men limping back to their heavy instruments. But their limbs have already begun seizing from half an hour of sitting and the second part of the day’s work is like swimming through treacle. Arms pour out with inexorable slowness. At a point somewhere too far away from a body’s torso limbs begin to shake spastically, spasming as the lactic acid, built up tightly in cells, refuses to budge or be reabsorbed. The afternoon drags by.