An Audience with an Elephant (20 page)

He claims never to have suffered ill-health, though there was a hernia once. No indigestion? ‘Noooo.’ And never any spillages, or dry-cleaning bills? ‘Nooooooo. Apart from the wild chickens, the. . .’

And we were off again.

The Cricketer

THINK I FOUND
his grave last week. Everything added up, the date cut in the stone near the east gate, among the older graves, where I remembered seeing it, newly dug seven years ago, with the ink on the little wreath cards just beginning to smear. So this was his name. Mr Hands. Sydney Hands.

Napton Hill is an extraordinary geographical feature. Not part of a ridge, it rises so abruptly out of the Warwickshire plain it could have been designed as an exclusive viewing platform. The plain sweeps past it to the horizon, to Leamington and Rugby, and you have the feeling you could be on Mount Olympus here, with the gods. And you are.

It was March 1987, and I was walking through the churchyard, which is at the very top of the hill. I have loved this place ever since the time I was climbing it with my wife and daughter and came upon a two-ton Hereford bull ambling down the road towards us. A man likes to be reminded he can still do the hundred yards in 13 seconds and feel able to abandon his family at the drop of a hat. The bull’s name was Ferdinand.

But on that wet March morning there was no sign of him, and I was walking among the graves looking at the inscriptions and coughing as dramatically as George Formby’s father, for I was just getting over the ’flu. I had entered by the North Gate where the new graves are, and had been struck by the number of young people who had died in Napton. I walked round the church, noting the deep gouges in the porch pillars that some say were put there by our ancestors sharpening arrow heads, when I saw the wreaths in the rain. They were among graves where, as far as I could make out, there had been no other recent burials.

I don’t know whether you read them, but there are few things in life more moving than the little hand-written messages. The balder the language, the more they tug at the emotions: ‘Goodbye, Pop’, ‘Forever in our thoughts, John, Mary and the Kids’. You see those and you peer at another death, that of words. Only that morning in Napton there was an inscription of a different kind, a simple statement of fact I have not been able to forget; I don’t think I ever will. ‘The village team of 1926 is now complete.’ Homer could have written that.

Who would they have been? Carpenters, labourers, farmers, perhaps the village schoolmaster. You will not find their names in
Wisden
, but that does not matter, as 60 years on one man remembered he had seen the gods saunter down that hill, before whom the teams of Warwickshire must have gone down like grass. I suppose I could have tried to find out about the cricketers, but I didn’t.

It would have been too sad had I failed, as I probably would have done. How many now, in a village of a thousand people, have been born there? I doubt at the end of the 20th century there are more than a hundred; the houses become more and more immaculate, and the man who came yesterday shares in no folklore. You will not see anything like that inscription again.

I don’t think a Christian wrote it; it had a quiet paganism as the writer implied that soon the wickets would be falling again. It made me think of those lines by Tennyson:

The magic is in the casual pride of the last phrase, ‘whom we knew’ Sydney Hands. I should like to think he was a slip-fielder.

Relics of Wars Past

The Big Bang

OST VILLAGES HAVE
some private folklore: what the last squire did on Mafeking Night; how much so-and-so had to drink the night his car was found in the swimming pool; why the reading room was sold. So it is not surprising the inhabitants of Hanbury, Staffordshire, have something they, and it seems only they, remember. It is what they remember which is bewildering.

Men heard the bang in London; seismographic equipment recorded it in Casablanca, and in Geneva it was logged as an earthquake the morning the bombs went off 90 feet under the fields of Staffordshire. It was 11.10 a.m. on 27 November 1944, when 68 people died in and around Hanbury. Eighteen of them, together with the biggest farm in the area, 300 acres of it, were never seen in any form in this world again when between 3,500 and 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs stored in a gypsum mine went off, the biggest explosion ever to take place in Britain. And be forgotten.

People assume a D-notice was slapped on, but when you go into the local pub, completely rebuilt after the explosion, the walls are lined with newspaper accounts and photographs of the debris. ‘They stare at these and are completely baffled,’ said the licensee.

Until Hiroshima, its blast equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, this was the biggest explosion in the world. Yet even though
The Guinness Book of Records
records the 4,061 tons of high explosive used to blow up the U-boat pens in Heligoland, it does not mention something that took place in England within living memory. And it was as though Hanbury wanted to keep its terrible hurt to itself. For years the only memorial was a framed list of names hanging in the church, and that included the seven villagers killed on active service in World War II. Then, four years ago, those who had died in the explosion were given their own memorial, a slab of marble provided by, of all people,
the Italian government
because seven Italians, all POWs, also died. But the real memorial lies a few feet beyond this: a crater so big you would be unable to recognise members of your own family standing on the other side. At 11.09 a.m. on 27 November 1944 that crater did not exist. A minute later it did.

‘See that air shaft?’ said John Hardwick, a retired civil servant. ‘A chap called Bill Watson was last up that from the mine and when he got out, he looked around him and didn’t know where he was. It wasn’t shock, it was because the landscape he walked through every morning was so changed he no longer recognised anything.’

Hardwick, a farmer’s son, was 21 when the blast happened. He was working in a field about half a mile away when he saw a 2½-acre wood go up, rising as steadily as a Saturn Five, until the trees were lost to sight. Farmers ploughing in subsequent years found some of the trees, only they found the roots first, then the trunks, as though these had been thrown like darts.

Roy Gregson, a retired farmer, was seventeen. ‘Yes, I remember the sound. It was an enormous HOOOOOMP and up she went. . . and up. . . and up. The sky went black as the soil went up and I could see boulders rolling about up there, boulders in the sky.’ A piece of alabaster weighing 20 tons came down three-quarters of a mile away.

Some died instantly, blown to bits, including an insurance salesman who had been on his rounds. Years later, Staffordshire County Council announced its intention of turning the crater into a tip, estimating, in its sensitive way, that 20 years of rubbish could go into that. But people objected on the grounds that the crater was a mass grave. Men, animals, machinery and buildings disappeared into its 150-foot depth, and all that was left when the sun came out again was a piece of mattress on the edge. They worked out who had gone only when these people did not reappear, and a local police sergeant walked in front of the earth-movers day after day.

Some died minutes later, when a reservoir holding 6 million gallons of water gave way. The mine was at the foot of the escarpment; reservoir, farm and Hanbury were at the top, so water, mud and stones rolled downhill, breaking into the surface buildings of the mine, killing 27 men there.

Chance played a part in some deaths. The farmer at Upper Castle Hayes was on his way to market, but had stayed on at the farm because a delivery of grain was late. He did not die in the explosion but in the wave of rubble that engulfed the car in which he and his wife were sitting.

‘We didn’t realise people had been killed,’ said John Hardwick. ‘They used to test the odd bomb, and we were used to explosions, so the first thing I did was to see whether the cattle were all right. I began to walk up to the village and met one lady leaning over her gate, and I could see from her face that she suspected the worst, for her husband was in the mine. He was dead, and they had seven children under twelve. She still lives in the village.’

He then began to see the scale of the damage: roofs had gone, all the chimneys, the pub was down, and the village hall, a wooden structure, had been blown into a field. And all the time news was coming in, that Upper Castle Hayes farm had gone, so it was becoming clear that what they had feared for some seven years had in fact happened; the entire bomb stock under the hill had gone up.

Hanbury is on an escarpment known as the Stonepit Hills, which have been quarried for alabaster or gypsum for as long as records exist. In the church lies a twelfth-century knight, Sir John de Hanbury, ‘the oldest alabaster and cross-legged knight in chain armour in the county, possibly in the country’. Heated to remove water, this rock yields plaster of Paris, and in the late 1930s as many as 75 men were employed in the mines at the foot of the hill. But some workings were not used, so at this time the Air Ministry began moving bombs into the hill. After all, there was 90 feet of rock and earth above, to which was added a 2-foot 6-inch concrete lining. You would have thought such a store invulnerable, yet it had some odd features, to start with, the operational mine next door; but the planners thought the natural wall between them, varying from 15 feet to 30 feet in thickness, would absorb any blast.

Then again, it was not just a bomb dump. Bombs were not only stored here; they were also repaired whenever one was retrieved that had not gone off. And the repairs were carried out in the store itself, the equivalent of opening a welding shop in an oil refinery. A man who worked there remembered, ‘It was like Aladdin’s cave. You went from one cavern to another by passages ablaze with electric light. In the dark corners of the caverns you could see faintly the tiers of enormous HE bombs.’ Some of these were 4,000-pound high-capacity bombs, the heaviest and most delicate in use, demand for which ran at 100 a day in late 1944.

For what nobody had anticipated was the strain an all-out European war would put on such a place. In the months around D-Day some 20,000 tons of bombs were being moved in and out each month, and John Hardwick remembers being told that this figure was its maximum capacity. Had that amount gone up, it really would have been Hiroshima in England.

And there is more. They were short of staff, the senior appointment at the dump having been vacant for two months. So, incredibly, 194 Italian POWs had been recruited, although, with Italy out of the war, they were known as ‘co-operators’. None of these men had any experience of working with explosives, and afterwards were at first made the fall-guys. Then, as more information came out, it was revealed that the police made no checks on anyone entering the tunnels, except for smoking materials; this allowed people to talk of sabotage.

So what did happen? You will have gathered that anything could have happened at any time, and even now new theories are being floated. There was an article in the local paper which suggested that the dump had been bombed from above, which is absurd, considering the amount of earth and concrete that would have had to be penetrated.

What most people now believe is the statement made to a Services’ inquiry by an armourer who was just leaving the caverns and so survived. He said he had heard a small explosion first, and only after that did the whole lot go up. But shortly before this, he had seen one of his colleagues using a brass chisel to remove a broken detonator from a bomb that had been returned. The use of such tools was expressly forbidden.

In the caverns, 26 men died instantly in the blast. In the farm above their heads, five farm workers and the farmer’s sister-in-law were all killed. In the working mine next door, five men died from carbon monoxide poisoning; others made the long climb up the air-shaft to safety and a world in which the top-soil had gone from 1,000 acres of land, being scattered throughout the countryside. Some of it had gone up to 11 miles away, and what was left looked like the Western Front – only the Western Front became what it was after years of bombardment. This was instantaneous. There was so much mud and so many craters that they left the dead animals where they lay, and in the spring collected the skulls and ribcages left by the foxes. The stench was terrible.