Haweswater (32 page)

The less irrational, less suggestive, believe that Janet Tree means no harm. That she has resided tragically in the bark since her untimely death, the details of which have long been forgotten by most, and are only half-remembered by a dwindling few. Marion is content to share her car with Janet Tree, her hands tensing on the steering wheel when she appears, but never being pulled by a mysterious force too sharply one way or the other. Though she does not like it when Janet appears, let that be made clear. No. She does not like it one bit.

How long the tree has been haunted by the witch, nobody is willing to guess. But older villagers in Bampton will not even speak of her, as if the name itself is full of potency, and dangerous. As if in their living memory they recall a time when the tree was just a tree and Janet was just a girl. Their faces when you ask are slightly sad, their eyes sitting back a long way from you, behind kept stone.

The Haweswater dam is salmon orange on the side next to the water and lichen-mottled grey on the other side, where the sun is mostly absent and the trees are thick, sheltering. It stretches a third of a mile across a slim artery in the fat, wet heart of what is now the united county of Cumbria, what was once one of the last corners of old Westmorland. Its walls are metres thick at the bottom, and slope inwards as they proceed upwards. It is a bizarrely elongated, Egyptian-looking triangle, a structure well out of place in its surroundings, but of no wonder to the modern generation inhabiting the area, who are used to it. They have always lived with it and do not appreciate that in its day it was a unique blueprint, a masterpiece of modern design. Visionary.

Usually the lake is full. This is, after all, an old divining district, with ample water supplies. It takes care of the thirsty further south. In the centre of the dam, between the two buttresses, is a lowered piece of wall. When the reservoir laps over the top of this line, full to its meniscus brim with rainwater and debris, a man from the pumping station, five hundred metres away in the shadow of the dam wall, will open the sluice gates. There are two pipes that travel through the bottom of the dam, belling out into the lake at one end, and at the other spilling into a small pool. This is the source of a small river leading as a tributary to the main river of the next valley, through Bampton and Knipe and Askham. If the pipes are not running water through them from the full reservoir, they lie empty and dripping, like two giant dinosaur nostrils, holding back the weight of the lake with a series of man-made valves.

As the sluice gates open, a miniature tidal wave sweeps up the river of the next valley and threatens its banks with sheer
vertical volume. When this happens Bamptonians will watch patiently out of the window for a recession in the water and then go out to collect driftwood left on the broken banks of the river as a residue from the purged lake. They collect wood like squirrels collects nuts. Storing it for winter. Old women go out sticking with baskets and aprons and young men drive farm vehicles down to the water's edge and saw through logs and throw them into tractor trailers. They look forward to the autumn, when the sluice gates come back into frequent use. The newly collected rains are released then, gathering momentum as they come down the valley, shouldering past streams and sitting down heavily between villages. During the summer, green-brown algae collect and congeal on the surface of the river, around the banks. The smell is putrid, that stagnant odour of low water, of rotting reeds, and of bitter, toxic chemicals that have crept into the liquid from the sprayed fields. Locals look forward to the cleansing rain, to movement.

Half-way through the century, before the sluice gates were ever used, two divers went down into the thick water to check the mechanism for blockage. Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus had improved substantially within the last decade, and the subaqueous world was no longer a domain reserved for the gilled, for the lucky who had not been born into the wrong world. It meant freedom for God's botched jobs.

Isaac Lightburn could at last spend long minutes underwater, as he had wanted to so desperately as a child.

By the time the dam was ready for operation, he had spent many hours cataloguing sea-and freshwater-life in the Scottish Marine Centre at St Andrews, and was an experienced diver, even at the age of twenty-two. From the valleys of Westmorland he had gone to the tall, old city of Edinburgh,
not being the type to remain and farm the harsh fell land as his father had, and being yet another good mind put out by the local schools, and from the city he had moved up the coast to the broad beaches and lively rock pools, where there was work for biologist's assistants, if you didn't mind standing waist-deep in the freezing-cold currents of the North Sea.

Isaac was amazed at the variety of odd and gory life under the waves, sketching each find into his notebooks. Helping with dissections. He was a willing and eager assistant. He was also the guinea pig for many of the early dives, having a unique ability to hold his breath and recover from accidents and failures of equipment in the deep pools of the sea. In the salty water he wore a glass mask, teasing urchins from crevices in the rocks, pressurizing his body in accordance with the stresses imposed by the water.

He became a full-figured young man – like his father he had a broad back which would wear out coats a little at the shoulders. And similar to his father also was his quiet yet unabashed disposition. He would read passages of poetry to his colleagues at the marine centre in the evenings, relaxed, as if reading to himself, or to a familiar audience, walk out over the wet sands watching the lift of a fin on the horizon, the turn of a porpoise. He became a man who would see a phoenix of red fire struggling to get free from the throat of a dying gull. His eyes never did find more colour, remained quite disturbing, in fact, for their clear opacity, though his hair darkened from white to dirty blond. After his sister's death he seemed to grow up quickly, reaching a gentle, welcomed level of maturity. Growing into himself, his mother might have said. There was a shadow against one shoulder which never shifted or left him, though, one that could not be dispelled by friends or family. He wore it close, like material on unexposed skin. His grief was a strange one, of a kind that expanded over the years so that he came to live comfortably and in agreement with it. As if her death made more sense than her life. He did not shed tears for her, nor did he display
any hostility towards the circumstances of her passing. In truth, under that shadow, he managed to preserve a luminous connection with his sister, so deep-rooted that it seemed untouchable, irrefutable, inextinguishable.

At times he would wake in the night believing that he had heard someone calling to him, the woman by his side stroking his hair to calm the panic in his voice. Had he heard the voice again, she would ask. But already he had stifled any emotion, was sleeping once more.

During the day he was at ease, swimming with a tank of air on his back, twenty-five to fifty feet beneath the fishing boats and surface flotsam, seeing a gull cutting white into the ocean to steal a fish, becoming fluid like the sea itself. On weekends he might venture inland, where the hills became more pronounced and there was freshwater which ran quickly through deep channels, tasted of minerals and relaxed ice and reminded him of the lake country.

It was common practice for the marine centre to accept freelance work to bolster its lagging funding. The divers there were skilled and worked in many of the country's lakes and off the coast, retrieving bodies and lost valuables, repairing vessels, or checking mechanisms, bridge structures. When Isaac heard of the request for divers at the Haweswater reservoir he insisted that he be selected for the task. He wanted to visit home, he said. Reacquaint himself with the crayfish and the minnows of the Lowther valleys. Perhaps catalogue the life of such an unusual body of water, which he believed would be home to rare fish. And his local knowledge would benefit the team. He could tell them where a shelf of land gave way to what was once air but would now be water. There was no question that he would not go. So he came back to the district a young man, had left it ten years after his sister's death a wise, introspective student. Though he had written, visits home had been few, Miriam's confirmation, his mother's sixtieth birthday, Christmas, now and again. He did not send word to his parents that he would be coming this time, he
would surprise them after his work was complete at the dam, striding in to Staingarth farm with four trout strung in his hand. Or maybe five.

The divers prepared their tanks, checked their instruments, the pressure gauges, and took a giant step from the small boat at the end of the reservoir into the water. Silt and mud had dissolved into the new lake and the water was murky, but they kept close as their weighted bodies sank, going down in stages, equalizing the pressure in their ears with every breath. Above, rain circled the water's surface, like a ceiling of glass eyes. They reached the valley floor ten minutes after leaving the surface, swam heavily across it to the murky wall. There were no pieces of wood at the base of the sluice pipes, nothing to get sucked into the vast mechanical intestine. Nothing but cloudy water, mud hanging like gas in the liquid and the underwater structure itself like a temple wall in Atlantis. So, they began an ascent.

Before they reached the surface, one of the divers took out his mouthpiece and it flared a stream of bubbles into the water. At fifty feet he removed his mask and tried to blink back the weight of the lake with his eyes, just as he had tried to see through the valley's water years before. As if he thought he might be able to see down the six miles of inky liquid to the drowned village that had once been his home. Or perhaps a voice had called to him, telling him to remember who he was, where he was, remember it with his heart of stone. He stripped away the apparatus. Unclipped the safety line.

Water pushed his eyes closed and snaked into his mouth and lungs. It relaxed its weight upon him as a cave might come crashing down on a thin, single beam trying to hold up its ceiling. The mighty reservoir breathed out into Isaac's chest, and overcame him.

There was that notorious, silent part to his drowning, no doubt. The body defeated by sleep. The spirit becoming dormant. And perhaps Ella felt it in her heart then at that moment, the tug of wings, a black bird, lifting itself again in her, though she thought her son was far away. There would be no comfort for her, she who had seen omens all her life, predicted her son's death in such a fashion. Not even the knowledge that in his drowning there was a beautiful state of peace which he reached, nothing like her imagined violent passing of him, would furnish her with any consolation. And for a moment in her life not even God would lay light hands on her shoulders, or help her up from the cottage floor as a generation of the family was lost.

The diver's partner saw no thumb jerking upwards in an airless sign language, and by the time he caught sight of Isaac the body was sinking slowly, twenty feet beneath him and limp. He went down and took hold of his friend. He took his own mouthpiece and placed it in the mouth of the sleeping diver. But Isaac did not taste the familiar texture of rubber on his tongue from his saviour's mouth plug. Nor did he taste the intimate flavour of the man's wife, which he had kept secretly in his mouth until then after their loving each other that morning. The rubber mouthpiece slipped from the cage of Isaac's mouth. And by the time the two reached the surface moments later, pulled up swiftly by the one remaining safety line, Isaac would never taste or see or breathe again. His body did not have the chance to bubble and fizz inside or send red needles through his skin from coming up too fast, as his friend's did. He was already dead. He was home.

I’d like to express gratitude to R. J. Cooke for allowing me access to his research on Mardale and the building of the Haweswater dam. Thanks also to the following people for help with general and local historical research: Pat Garside, Ben Walsh, Anthony and Elizabeth Hall, Helen and Peter Farrow, Chris Holme, Carl Walters, Adam Ferguson and many others from the Bampton area. Thanks also to EMR for dauntless optimism. And a special thank you to Lee Brackstone.

While inspired by the building of the Haweswater dam in the early part of the twentieth century, this story is fictional and is not intended to depict actual individuals, companies or situations, nor are the dates historically accurate relating to the original Haweswater project. None of the characters are representational of any persons living or dead.