by Byron Rogers
But what were they going to do with the rest? The MOD turned in extremis, like most of the nation does, to the National Lottery, and this year the Heritage Lottery Fund announced that it was making a grant of £6.5 million towards the setting up of an Interpretative Site. For having finally worked out exactly what they did have in the woods, they thought they might let the public loose on the mystery. With a final grant of £5 million towards this, the MOD was shot of the whole thing. The Environmental Health people have given it the all-clear, and now only trifling little details need to be worked out, such as where the public will be allowed to go, or whether they will go alone or be guided, and where the entrance will be. Work has not yet started.
So you see it now as the archaeologists saw it, once the men with the machetes had been. The archaeologists made some strange discoveries, one of them, a man who had spent his life studying cast-iron aqueducts, of which just eleven survived in the whole country, finding another four within a few yards of each other in the woods. You come on huge rusted pieces of machinery in the most elegant of buildings (for when they built most of this place they would have found it impossible to build anything inelegant). You look down on the ghostly outline of a huge barge, just under the surface of the canal where it could be the boat which carried Arthur into Avalon. Some of it is on a huge scale, like the stone wheels 6 feet in diameter, each one weighing 3 tons, which were used to grind the sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal into gunpowder, and, their day done, were just left lying around as though some giant child had abandoned them. Nothing was ever thrown away.
You find old wharfs, towers, waterwheels, and then, as you penetrate deeper and deeper into the sort of jungle into which explorers disappeared, you find Aztec temples, the walls thicker than anything in a medieval castle. Then there are the dark places, the tunnels running into the earth. If you remember the comics you read in childhood, there is a remarkable familiarity about the whole place.
Only these were more terrible than Aztec temples. These were the Mills of Death. Some 95 per cent of the propellant for the shells on the Western Front was made here, the Dambuster bombs, and every other form of explosive and propellant before the atom bomb. What came out of this place killed millions, but all that was in another country. It is very weird that after all that, after these mills had stopped turning, that a man should think of this place as the Garden of Eden.
And so it is that just before 3.00 on a November afternoon, I see my first otter in the wild in the British Isles.
Airbase
1
HIS CONCERNS A MAN and an airfield. The airfield was his playground as a boy, and his enchanted place, for it had been so secret no one could ever tell him what happened there, until, 40 years on, the men came back. It is also the story of what follows if you see something in a landscape and, for once, stop.
North of Northampton, the B576 from Lamport to Rothwell rises to a plateau, a bleak place without hedges, its desolation made worse by signs that this was somewhere once: broken concrete, a few brick ruins. And the memorial. It is the newness of the marble which is startling, that and the fact there has been no landscaping around it. The memorial has just been plonked down beyond the fence around a lay-by. There are some fresh wreaths at its foot.
‘We came here in 1954,’ said John Hunt, of Dropshot Lodge, the farm you can see over the fields, ‘and I was nine when I began exploring the old American airbase. It looked then as though whoever had been there had popped out for lunch. A few licks of paint, a few lights switched on and you felt the whole place would come to life again. It was eerie, I even came upon tyremarks in the ground where the planes had been slewed round.’
Six hundred acres of runways, hangars and towers over which a small boy exercised illimitable dominion, and once, clinging to the back of one of his father’s labourers, was driven at 100 mph on a motorbike down the 6,000 feet of what had been one of Europe’s longest runways.
But then in 1960 the lights came on again, so many of them that at night from the farm it looked like Las Vegas. The Americans were back, with three Thor missiles, and it was someone else’s playground. John Hunt was fifteen and had bought a box Brownie camera from a boy at school. With this he took a photograph of the rockets, and suddenly there were military police all over Dropshot Lodge. And then it was 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis.
‘All the rockets came up, and there were fumes coming from them. We hadn’t seen that before. A man who had called to sell my father a tractor said, “Mr Hunt, the end of the world is at hand.” My father said, “Shan’t get much wear out of your tractor then.’”
But he did, for by 1965 the rockets had gone and slowly the ground became farmland again. John Hunt married and succeeded his father in the farm. A huge man now, he remained as fascinated by the mystery as he had been as a boy, but all he knew for certain was that whatever had gone on there during the war, it had been, unlike other US bombing missions, always at night.
‘This old chap was out ploughing at dawn when the planes returned. He stood up in his tractor and flapped his arms at them to show how cold it was, and one plane broke formation. As he looked up, a hand came out, and two beautiful gloves fell. Then another broke formation, and a third and a fourth, until the sky was raining gloves.’
John Hunt will not forget the day all his questions were answered. It was Sunday, 5 May 1985, the weather was terrible, and he was driving in the early evening to check on some cows when he heard a car revving in the lane. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was stop, but I did, and I heard this American accent. “Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for an old airbase which was here,” and this great wave of pleasure went through me.’
Since then, others have called, elderly now, returning, as John Hunt put it, like eels to the Sargasso Sea, as though they had to see just once again the place where they were first greeted by an officer, Tommy-gun in hand. ‘You can get out now, but if you don’t, and you once open your mouths. . .’. The man had patted his gun. ‘All your folks will ever know is that you went missing in action.’
For this was the most secret American base in Britain, from which clandestine flights were made. They told him of people they had never seen before the briefing, and never saw again, a young blonde stepping out into the night over the Bavarian Alps, a French couple kissing on the tarmac who would be dead in six hours, the Germans having been tipped off.
And three years ago they stood by a Northampton lay-by, old men with their wives, some members of the French Resistance, for the dedication of the memorial to which they had all contributed. One thing you will find hard to get out of your mind is the scene chipped into its side, a black bomber and three cottages in moonlight, for when you look again the cottages are there, which were once someone’s last glimpse of safety.
‘I was ashamed of being an Englishman that day,’ said John Hunt. ‘There they were, the men I’d been waiting so long to meet. And it poured with rain.’
2
A badge, a thin enamelled thing, shows a white lion topped by a red star. It cost me 50p. I bought it from a chap with a suitcase full of the things and have put it in the wooden box my father made where I keep my treasures, not because of any value it may have, but because of what the hawker turned up in. He came in a MiG-29.
Such moments allow us to date our own lives. Someone comes back from a war, there is a murder in the next village; the post office burns down; and we remember where we were and what we were doing. But these are events. What is rare is when something allows us to identify a process already at work. This is why I bought the badge.
It was at the American airbase near here, the last air show that will be held, for the Americans are pulling out of Upper Heyford. The Dutch came, the French, there was the last operational Vulcan bomber, and then the Czechs arrived. They came in two MiG-29s. The US technical people swarmed all over them as soon as they were down, for this plane was the great threat of the Gulf War, and is the most manoeuvrable, the most advanced fighter-interce
ptor in the world. They marvelled at the roughness of the finish, the lack of electronic controls (‘man, you really have to work in there’) and the perfect aerodynamics. Each plane costs £10 million.
I was one of a crowd staring at the MiGs when two small men in light grey flying kit approached the barrier and grinned at us, showing rows of fillings. They put two boxes down, sat on some stools they were carrying and opened cheap suitcases, out of which they took some English phrase books and began selling not only cap badges but generals’ stars.
I do not think that anything quite like this had ever happened before. It was as though Napoleon’s Old Guard, still in being and undefeated, had pitched a booth and started selling off its Eagles. Or Hitler’s SS had started flogging daggers and cap badges, not in defeat, but with the organisation intact but bankrupt.
The Czechs were such merry men. I pointed to the phrase book and the one with the amazing teeth laughed, ‘Is good, is English book.’ And all the time my eyes kept flitting to that terrible fighting machine behind him. Later, when they had stopped selling the trinkets that might allow them to stand a single round of drinks in the mess, one took off in the MiG and the thing punched a hole in the clouds. I watched this, playing uneasily with my new badge.
I told an American sergeant about the little stall and he said, ‘Were they really? Whereabouts was this? I guess we should have a photograph for our records.’ But they didn’t, it was too sad for that. Only, of course, it wasn’t sad at all. Good God, there we were, sunk in nostalgia for an Armageddon that hadn’t happened. And it hadn’t happened not because of military might or a sudden rush of morality, but because the books no longer added up. They have the bailiffs in; we just have them peering into the garage.
The last Vulcan, which unlike the MiG, really is a thing of beauty, took off. For a moment it was as decorous as a Victorian lady, with those long wings almost touching the tarmac – until the sound hit us. The American commentator could have been providing the sad-sweet soundtrack to a compendium of film comedy: ‘And so Fatty Arbuckle fades into the sunset, loveable and innocent. . .’. Only he was talking about something that delivered H-bombs. ‘And if no more funds are found, this could well be the last flight of this elegant old aircraft, once the pride of Britain’s nuclear strike force. . .’.
The Vulcan came by at 300 feet, turned in salute and opened its bomb doors in a spectacle of quite staggering obscenity. It really did, and we all clapped, we really did, clapping what could have been the last thing in this world thousands of people saw.
3
About 10 miles to the north of this village, the A5, before that straight as an arrow, goes into a long bend for no apparent reason, except that in doing so it skirts a very large field. Twelve miles to the south-west there is a bustling town surrounded by wire. You might not think there was any connection but, as the old monumental masons used to cut, ‘as the one is now, so shall the other be’. For the second time in British history the legions are pulling out.
That field was called Bannaventa when the A5 was Watling Street; a Roman town covering 30 acres. The town behind the wire is the American airbase at Upper Heyford, which some of you might live long enough to see also become ‘old foundations, the stones of ruined walls and the like ploughed up’. It has just been announced that the bombers are going.
No one knows how a Roman town died, but there was nothing abrupt about it: fallen columns, public buildings used as a quarry, fires upon the mosaics and finally a place of ghosts to be avoided. But the end of Upper Heyford will be abrupt. A paragraph in the national newspapers became headlines in the local weeklies. . . ‘Massive Blow to Local Economy’. Over 5,000 servicemen and women are going, with 7,000 dependants, possible as soon as within two years. Add to this the thousand local people who work there and the many more for the contractors employed by the base, and you get the figure conjured up by someone of a £100 million a year loss to the area.
Nobody could have come up with anything as neat as that for Bannaventa, for in its time the town was the area. It had been there for over three centuries, the American airbase for only 40 years, during which time it could for most purposes have been on the moon. There is a frontier in Oxfordshire: cross that and you are part of an alien economy. The slot machines take dimes; supermarket steaks are half the price they are beyond the wire, pork spare-ribs twice as expensive. There is piped American television and the flats have the verandas of small-town USA, homesickness being held at arm’s length here.
Yet rural Oxfordshire is all around (Flora Thompson’s Juniper Hill is just down the road); its roads go straight through the base, so you can watch the baseball games on the lawns as you go by. What makes it more extraordinary is the official fiction that this is an RAF base. Road signs tell you this, and there is even an RAF Commander, whose flag flies a few feet higher than that of the USAF Commander, in spite of the fact that he has half a dozen men under him, the other, 5,000. Thirty per cent of these live behind the wire, the rest in rented village houses. It is the wives of enlisted men who suffer most – out of the States for the first time and able to afford houses only in remote villages. They keep their curtains drawn day and night and their children we see as pale faces in the backs of cars. They always look so sad, our guardians: little families worriedly ordering in Indian restaurants, hesitating about crossing roads, not understanding a word when you try to address them. ‘Pardon me, sir?’
Of course, you get the odd top gun. ‘Wadda we do? We drop bombs.’ He informed me he had seen a lot of Britain. ‘Only I get to see it fast, from 500 feet.’ He was a funny man. He told me he flew all-weather planes, but when I asked what problems he encountered, he said, ‘The weather.’ Fresh from their desert training areas, some of them, he told me, had not even encountered clouds before. And I thought of Auden’s Roman legionary on the Wall, with the rain falling and a cold in his nose.
I suppose she’ll miss them, the solitary peace campaigner who lives in a caravan with a small daughter on the base perimeter, her cat a present from the military police. The Americans gave her lifts to the shops, and she sounds proprietorial when she talks about the rates of climb in an F-111. But not everyone will miss them. There is a village called Ardley, which has a Saxon church and was a quiet place until 1970, when the F-111s came. At take-off the F-111 with its after-burners on makes as much noise as two jumbo jets, and some mornings there are two hours of continuous take-off. Ardley is just three fields away.
The MOD offered to buy some of the villagers’ houses, but only on the basis of individual decibel readings, so one man might qualify while his next-door neighbour didn’t. The latter appeared doomed to be as tethered to the landscape as a mediaeval serf, for who would buy a house in a dying village? But that threat is lifted, the silence is coming.
As it came to Bannaventa: so completely that for a thousand years men argued as to where this had been.
Fantasies
Up the Workers! (If We Can Find Any. . .)
OT SO ORNATE as the Book of Kells, nor as old as the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Book of Thame is more mysterious than either. Its two volumes, each the size of a family Bible and fastened with pink ribbon, are kept in an Oxford library and are so fragile researchers are recommended to read them on microfilm. The Book is a report on the Oxfordshire market town compiled by its Communist Party in 1955.
That Thame ever had a Communist party is a great shock to its inhabitants. ‘What?’ said Mike Le Mesurier, the Mayor. But the fact that this party produced the most complete report ever compiled on a small town comes as even more of a shock to its members, of whom there were once eight. ‘Never heard of it,’ said Cecil Aldridge, chairman of a party formed in 1953 only to be dissolved a few years later. Mr Aldridge, a retired ambulance driver, alarmed at having his past leap from the phone, refused to be interviewed. ‘I’ve gone off all that sort of thing.’
The mystery, though, is just beginning. Until six years ago, when it was transferred to Oxford for secur
ity reasons, the Book was at Thame library. But nobody at the library has any idea where it came from. ‘I’ve been here ten years and it was always kept under the counter,’ said the librarian. ‘You must admit, the Communists did a wonderful job.’
Everything is listed: the local papers and their political leanings; ‘quasi-military units’ (these turned out to be the grammar school cadet force and the Observer Corps); chapels and churches (there is a detailed aerial view of the vicarage); with the names of every officer of every organisation in the town, including a Miss Lane, secretary of the Society for Promoting the Gospel among the Jews. The Communists even listed the Town Ghost, a priest said to do the washing-up at a sixteenth-century guesthouse.
Almost half a century on, the Book of Thame offers a unique insight into the pre-occupations of a Communist cell in the middle of England at the height of the Cold War. Had it come to Thame, the Red Army would have known exactly where to drink (every pub is photographed), where to shop (every shop is noted, including the one run by a man who kept bees and also managed to fit in being the town undertaker), and when to be on the alert (‘When the Church clock and the Town Hall clock strike together, there’ll be a death in the town’). Ignoring Stalin’s question (‘How many divisions has the Pope?’), the local party went into great detail on the town’s religious organisations. The sermons of a former vicar were listed, including one at Lent on the theme ‘Beguiled. Beset. Bewitched. Beloved. Betrayed.’ The Methodists, the Party noted dryly, were a considerable force in Thame.
Even more care was lavished on the affiliations of local papers, especially the Thame Gazette (‘Whereas formerly it devoted many columns to the Tory cause, and less to the Whig, and very little to the working class, it now keeps clear of all contentious news reporting’). Political organisations were analysed, like the Conservative Working Mens Club (‘Most of their activity seems to be the holding of smoking concerts’). Of their bête noire, the Primrose League, sinister and in the wings, they noted wistfully, ‘It naturally has many supporters in high places, and so can arrange annual fetes in high places.’