Haweswater (21 page)

And at night, on the slow, painful walk home, the white dust-ridden faces are as expressionless and fixed as the faces of the morning. They are caught somewhere between the living and the dead. Lanterns remain extinguished, it is not yet dark at six. After the fake Christmas trees the men remove their handkerchiefs, it is now safe to breathe. Mouths are strangely pink, or clown-red against the powder-caked eyes and foreheads. They might be fools but for their persistence, solemn, withdrawn, and the final product of such an alarming endeavour, a captured lake.

Industry lit up the quiet blue-green valley and overwhelmed it with noise. From West Cumberland labourers were bussed into the narrow dale to begin on the body of the construction. In the west of the country at that time sea ports were closing, the dockers laid off with little warning, and unemployment was high after the Depression. Jobless men seeking work from all quarters began to arrive in the valley, from Workington and Barrow, from Halifax and even Lancaster.

They caught the company buses in the market places of their towns, which were free and had the orange logo of Manchester City Waterworks painted in tall letters on the side of the vehicle. During the journey they signed their names on a list which was passed round, or asked a man next to them to do so if they were not literate. They were informed on the buses that the weekly wage was to be two pounds, four shillings and eightpence, and that accommodation would be provided for them, the rent deducted automatically from their pay. The labour would be varied and in shifts of twelve hours. A prior health check was not necessary, but any man failing to meet the requirements of his job would have to make his own way home. For the manual labourers, it was pressed that families were not allowed to accompany the men, as housing was limited. The buses rattled their way into the quiet corner of the
country, one after another, spilling out men.

Others arrived in droves on foot, startling the valley’s population, which joked that there had not been such an influx of foreigners since the Border Raids. Often a farmer’s cart had to swerve wide around a corner to avoid a walk-in, a half-wave of apology from the man in the road. They arrived often in only the clothes they stood up in, a few possessions perhaps tucked into a handkerchief, or a deep pocket. They walked into the valley like a disparate army of discharged soldiers, searching for discipline and orders, routine.

Many of the walk-ins were navvies, an odd, dying breed of labourer that led a semi-nomadic existence. These tramped in silently and were not turned away from the site as there was much of their type of basic work. They stood before the foremen like emancipated slaves, brought back of their own accord, stood absolutely still, with pale-blue eyes keenly set on a point in space in front, until direction and wage were issued. Men seldom breathing so much as a word, let alone a name for contract. And such unquiet, intense blue eyes!

The arms of these men were dark and sinewy, their boots were always cracked and worn. Oil on their skin formed a sheen over the sun-opened pores on their faces. Dirt and the sun’s work were often indistinguishable. They moved from job to job, without fuss and with little forethought, beautiful, ugly men, who wore heavy jackets and moleskin trousers tied at the knees. They were silent, secret characters, aloof and enigmatic, who rarely spoke, either to passers-by or among themselves, but were always polite when questioned. The navvies had great strength, their bodies were enormous, or wire-thin. But broad or svelte, each was a tight drum from the hard end of lifting and dissembling. To watch them work was to witness a ballet of fine, constant movement, incredible stamina, a pace which never faltered. The men ran on one speed only, that which was of their own choosing, and they were quieter than the other labourers, more keenly introverted. They did not learn the names of their colleagues to shout across for equipment,
as the ex-dockers and factory workers did. Ah, George! A hammer if y’please! Instead they moved like graceful birds to collect a tool, like proud, independent stags.

Speculation about their identities was always rife. They were a cauldron for rumour. Some recognized photographs of wanted murderers among them, others murmured that they must be released convicts, dead now to society for their past crimes, the rapes, the arson, the robberies of previous years, and saved from hanging only by a loose feather of justice, no doubt. So, they were moving to be free of their own guilt’s shackles, just as the country would no longer accept them back, and here they were as good as nobodies anyway. Condemned to pick up the worst, back-breaking employment. Common gossip had them down as ex-gypsies, Hungarians or Russians that had slipped into the country via the coal-bowels of supply ships in the Scottish ports. With only enough language to get by, they remained outsiders, solitaries. Or perhaps they were the residue of the closing fairgrounds, the carnival spirit having melted away to leave hollow, masculine vessels, seeking fill. Once bold spirits, now without tongues or traditions.

There was some cryptic quality about the navvies which intrigued and unsettled those who came into contact with them, though the farmers appreciatively acknowledged the manner in which they stood humbly back on the verges as cattle and vehicles passed, unlike their colleagues. The foremen held deep-rooted suspicions about their lifestyle and were, in truth, afraid of these men. They could not be dominated as the other workers could. There was no assumed authority. And they ghosted away as quietly as they came, at any point in the work which they saw fit.

MCW
began construction of a new sub-village in the thick spruce trees near the site of the dam in the autumn of 1936, and in a month it was complete. By late October over four hundred
men were housed in cheap, prefabricated bungalow-huts erected in the woodland a mile and a half from where they would toil daily. These new dwellings were largely for the unskilled labourers responsible for building the hundreds of metres of dam wall. They were basic in comfort, would prove to be hot in the swelter of warmer months and freezing in winter, when the bitter north-westerlies howled through the boards. Eight, ten men or more shared a sleeping room, packed in tight. There were bunk-beds nailed to the walls, and drying racks for work clothes. Washing facilities were shared.

The bungalows smelled of lime-dust and sweat, which clung to the wooden walls at night, mixing with the scents of oil-smoke and human secretions. On the colder nights in the huts the men warmed their hands in the back fold of a bent knee, drawing the issued blankets up over their bitten ears. At five in the morning a siren sounded in the village for the men to wake. Six in the morning was when they began work, and it was a twenty-minute walk to the site. The canteen hall served oatmeal for those with an early stomach and prepared the lunches for the workers to take to the site. Then they trudged out and began the day.

From the mountains on each side of the valley, the swarms of workers looked like insects, undulating in lines, patterns of lifting and digging and climbing ants. The machinery was as a child’s toys. In winter, they toiled until the light died and they could not see the rock wall in front of them, then walked back to the huts hidden in the wood, the square ants’ nests, with lanterns lit to guide them through the trees as the days grew shorter.

The new shanty-village was called Burnbanks, though the
Herald
and
Gazette
reports of the settlement preferred the nickname ‘Aquaville’. It was largely self-sufficient, made up of fifty bungalows, including a concrete mission room, where all denominations of Christianity could worship on Sunday morning or in the evening, a large canteen, in which a sandwich supper cost a shilling, a recreation hall, a shop and a
dispensary, which had a resident nurse and was visited by the district doctor bi-weekly. Badly injured workmen were stretchered back from the dam through the woods and driven to the hospital in Penrith, bleeding on to the floor, a limb bent back on itself. In the first four months two bodies were lost down into the hollow embankment walls, the first recovered by a team of workers with ropes, the second too difficult to reach in a narrow trough between the east buttress and the valve system, so it was left, broken-necked and cemented over, inside what had become an enormous mausoleum. There were also many near-fatal accidents. Blades from the angle grinders used without guards so that an untidy arm would be half-severed, arteries split, nerves luckily cauterized by the heat of the blade. The excruciating pain would take an hour to materialize, but when it came it was like hot steel inserted every second into the arm. Two men broke their backs falling from scaffolding. Another four lost sight in an eye from flying debris and metal. The hundreds of men working on the project suffered thousands of fingers broken, re-broken, toes fractured. An Achilles tendon was sliced cleanly through by a falling beam and recoiled up the back of the man’s leg like elastic, nails were torn out and became infected under permanently damp gloves. Once a navvy was impaled through his gut by a piece of piping which had been left too close to an area of gelignite blasting. He walked back to the village holding it protruding from his stomach, an inch away from his spleen. The injuries were listed in a file kept by Manchester City Waterworks, any major operations necessary were initialled by the doctor, otherwise the nurse was left to minister treatment. The men came back from work each day with bruised and broken bodies, open wounds, infected sores. They might have been returning from the front lines of trench warfare for their so-often sorry states.

So it was that hundreds of men lived in the woods for a year. In the blink of an eye the population of the valley had increased over tenfold, and a whole village materialized with
startling speed in the slow wet district. The buildings came up quickly and discreetly, like mushrooms growing stealthily in the night. They were made from redwood timber, some with a concrete facing, these being favoured as they proved warmer in winter, and they were roofed with asbestos and tile. Most were lit by hurricane oil lamps, although the larger buildings, those provided for the foremen and their families, the accountant and the hut keepers, had electricity, generated by water power, three sets of Ryston and Hornsby diesel engines and dynamos. There was a good water supply for the village from Blea Water, a tarn with an inconspicuous weir, a wet pocket in the High Street fells which was swiftly harnessed.

The village was served by Bedford motor vans from Penrith. There were Saturday bus excursions to the town where workers and their wives and children would go to the market, or to an afternoon matinee at the New Picture House, to watch Joan Crawford and the other modern working girls, or to be terrified by Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula, his back-lit eyes and Renfield’s awful, slow, madman’s laugh. They watched newsreels and re-runs of
All Quiet on the Western
Front
. Members from Burnbanks came back to the Westmorland hideaway quoting Hollywood scripts. Happy times, boy. Happy times. From the town dancehalls they came back singing ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ and ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’, as aware of new music as any city dweller.

On Saturday mornings the men played football and, having a good selection of athletes, soon set up a team, which travelled the district and won several trophies. They played on a sloping field beside the river, calling themselves the Haweswater Boys, and
MCW
sponsored their kit of Company orange. They were renowned for their second-half stamina, perhaps due to the vigorous training routine of hard labour, perhaps having the advantage at home games of being used to uphill play, or exploiting the downhill slope against a toiling
opposition. The children of the engineers, foremen and accountants in Burnbanks walked to the school in Bampton, swelling the numbers considerably, rather than going to the tiny school in Mardale, which would soon be demolished. It was a round trip of eight miles, often made in rain and snow.

Burnbanks was an odd village, hashed together out of practicality. By those with an interest in American history it was said to have been, at first, compared with one of the Western gold-rush towns of the previous mid-century, born as it was suddenly, out of the desire for profit, born without the evolution of character and history, a bizarre, ill-fitting encampment. A place of newness, emptiness, inconsistent with its ancient neighbours.