by Giles Milton
Large people do not necessarily make for loud people, but in Dorothea Trencom size and volume are as interdependent as a chunk of cheddar and a beaker of negus. Rare indeed is the day on which she does not lose her temper with Joshua and raise her voice to a pitch and volume which the king’s household trumpeters would burst their spleens trying to imitate.
We must not necessarily conclude from this that Joshua and Dorothea Trencom are ergo unhappy in wedlock. Not at all. It is just that Dorothea likes to ensure (by brawn if not by brain) that she is the indisputable ruler of the roost. And herein lay the makings of a tragicomedy that was to reach its fifth and final act on 16 August 1774.
Joshua Trencom has, it would seem, been in correspondence with Vasilios Hypsilantis, a rebellious Greek chieftain whose forces have been launching spectacular raids on Turkish troops in the Morea. The letters received by Joshua have convinced him that Vasilios is indeed a power to be reckoned with, and he now announces to Dorothea Trencom that he is planning to ‘make an excursion’ to the land of the Greeks.
Dorothea’s initial reaction is to scoff at the notion that her husband might consider himself of such elevated birth that he could undertake a grand tour of the sort so fashionable among the upper classes of Chelsea and Kensington. But when he explains further, she grows genuinely alarmed. Had not someone once said that there was a plague and a curse on the family?
‘Nah, Josh, nah,’ she says. ‘It kill’d yur farrther and it’ll kill ye. Never, never shall ye leave Trencoms.’
The above exchange is merely the prelude to a marital set-piece battle that will be on a scale not witnessed since the first Duke of Marlborough’s victory over King Louis XIV at Blenheim. Consider: in the rear, right-hand corner of Trencoms stands Mr Joshua Trencom, who is politely informing his wife that whatsoever she might say to the contrary, he intends to sail for the land of Greece. And in the front, left-hand corner (waving her marital banners and standards) stands the burly Dorothea, who fully intends to use her weight, muscle and expansive cleavage in her bid to stop her husband’s crazed project.
Tempers flare. The volume increases. Joshua is as flushed as a glass of claret and wobbling with rage. Dorothea is steaming and has started to hector her husband. ‘You’re a selfish clod, Josh Trencom. A rotten crab – a good-for-nothing turnip.’
He bids her to button up – to fasten her tongue. ‘I’ll fasten me tongue,’ she screeches, ‘if you’ll fasten yur feet. You’ll leave me a widow, ye will, aye, with thirteen little uns, aye, just like Pa Alexander did fur yur ma.’
When Joshua fails to rise to the bait, Dorothea finally snaps. In a tidal surge of fury, she reaches for the nearest cheese – a leaden wilstermarschkäse from Schleswig-Holstein – and hurls its across the shop. It catches Joshua on his nose – just above the bridge – and causes him to reel. He staggers backwards and catches his breath. And then, quite suddenly, a strange transformation comes over his face. His florid cheeks turn deep purple. He gasps for air. And, seemingly knocked off balance by the wilstermarschkäse, his huge frame crashes to the ground.
‘Ow, gawd!’ screams Dorothea. ‘Ow, gawd.’ She rushes over to her Josh but there is nothing she can now do to make amends.
‘I must go to Greece,’ he cries in a desperate, rasping voice. His pulse has weakened and his heart is losing its rhythm.
‘Yes, my darling,’ says Dorothea, who has suddenly come over all weepy. ‘You shall go – I promise you that – you shall go.’
11 P.M., 2 MARCH 1969
Elizabeth Trencom’s concern about the damp in Trencoms’ cheese shop was to prove all too prescient. For more than a week, one of the water pipes that supplied Lawrence Lane and Trump Street had been leaking water into the clay subsoil that entombed the limestone walls of Trencoms’ cellars. Now, on the night of 2 March, the Victorian pipe spectacularly ruptured, gushing more than a thousand gallons a minute into the surrounding clay. The pressure was such that the water soon found cracks and faultlines in the subsoil, punching through air pockets and forcing new channels. Within a few minutes, the first squirts and trickles were leaching their way into the cellars of Trencoms, flowing freely down the limestone walls and forming a small puddle on the flagstone floor.
The immediate cause of the disaster was to be the source of much contention in the weeks that were to follow. But it is not stretching credulity too far to suggest that the deep groaning noise that Edward and Richard had heard in the cellar was in some way connected to the rupturing of the pipe.
It was most unfortunate that the water found a ready passage in the downwards direction of the Trencom cellars. No sooner had it established the easiest escape route from the cracked pipe than it channelled all its energies into widening the gullies and creating its own underground river system. Before long, the single stream of water flowing down the cellar wall was joined by many more rillets and springs. A second puddle formed on the floor of the cellar. And then a third. And just a few minutes later, the first puddle conjoined itself with the other two and made a much larger pool of water.
There was something fascinating about the way in which the water sought to spread itself across the floor of the cellars. It sped rapidly along the cracks and grooves in the flagstones, seeking thirstily those places which were already damp. In following the mortar lines in the flagstones, it flowed in patterns that water does not normally flow, turning abrupt corners, sneaking around right-angles and creating miniature pools in the dents and hollows of the old stone.
The water had first entered in the furthest corner of the smallest chapel – home to the salty goat’s cheeses of the western Sahara. The floor here was several inches lower than elsewhere in the cellar, a happy coincidence for it meant that the water was for some little while contained in one small area. It rippled merrily along the cracks and gulleys until it was halted by the shallow up-step – a cataract in reverse – that led from the side chapel into the principal crypt and from thence into the other five chapels.
Within ten minutes of the pipe bursting, there were more than thirty streams of water spurtling from the walls of the chapel. These were soon joined by fine jets of misty spray which hissed from cracks and faultlines in the old stone. It was not long before the fluvial pools that had collected in the hollows were linked and conjoined by means of the cracks and gulleys. The floor of the chapel was soon more than an inch deep in water.
The backlog of pipe-water was such that it created enormous pressure behind the cellar walls. It was as if five or six strong men were pushing with all their might against the interlocking stone blocks. The medieval masons who had built these walls were skilful in their work. The arched ceiling rested its shoulders upon the solid body of the walls, exerting sufficient downwards force to have kept the structure in position for more than eight centuries. But now, for the first time since their construction, those same walls were facing a competing challenge from the high pressure of the water. It began to percolate and bubble, eddy and whirl, scooping out the wet clay and turning it into liquid soup before disgorging it through the cracks between the stones. Slowly but surely, large pockets of water were being created behind the cellar walls.
Walls built of hewn stone do not collapse in the same way as a dry stone wall. Remove a stone from the latter and – kerplunk – a whole section is likely to collapse. But the masons of medieval England constructed their walls with far greater attention to detail. It has been calculated that one in every five stones could be removed from most cathedral walls and still the building would stand. In the case of Trencoms, the arched ceiling provided such a forceful downward thrust that it is quite conceivable that one in four stones could be dislodged without the wall collapsing.
But water is a more invidious destroyer than the hand of man. It did not seek to tear down the fabric of the cellar and nor did it wish to undermine the foundations. Its sole intent and need was to find an outlet for its every-growing frustration at being trapped behind blocks of stone.
Its time c
ame soon enough. It began to swirl itself into a froth that scoured and scraped at the loosening clay. Soon, several of the wall stones found themselves deprived of support. And at exactly this moment, a sudden torrent of water tore through the clay and hit the wall with such force that two hewn stones were rent clean. At the very same moment, and contiguous with this disaster, a thick jet of yellow-brown water gushed into the once-dry deserts of the western Sahara.
The first cheeses to suffer were the okra-flavoured cheeses of Mauritania. The water hit the wooden crates with the force of a hydrant and the entire stack collapsed to the ground, landing into the water with an ominous splash. As it fell, one of the crates nudged into a stack of Egyptian domiati, causing it to wobble. It might yet have remained standing, were it not for the fact that the bottom crate, made of flimsy wood, had been weakened by the water. That one little nudge was enough to cause the stack to join the Mauritanian cheeses in the ever-deepening deluge.
The flood was increasing at an alarming rate. Within minutes, it had brimmed over the step and was leaching across the rest of the cellars, creeping its way across the principal crypt and thence into the rest of the side altars. It sent chutes and runnels through Poitou-Charentes and Languedoc-Roussillon, then streamed backwards into the fertile pastures of Burgundy. Here, it collected into a little lagoon in a stony hollow before regaining momentum and heading for the meadows of the Rhone Valley. The lowlands of Lombardy were the next to feel its plashy waters; then, just a few minutes later, the whole of eastern Europe found itself under an inch or two of water.
The floodwaters in the principal crypt followed a similar pattern to those in the side chapel. Pools formed. Then fjords. And within minutes the individual gulfs and firths formed themselves into one huge expanse of water. The Iberian Peninsula was already three or four inches deep. Eastern Europe was by now an aqueous marshland. And then, quite spectacularly, these two marish littorals found their confluence somewhere close to the cheeses of Ticino, forming one giant ocean of water.
Boing! The clock upstairs struck one o’clock. Water had been flushing into Trencoms for almost two hours, creating a scene of absolute desolation. In the chapel where it first entered, stacks, crates and piles had all crashed to the ground, spilling their contents into the filthy water. A couple of towers had been left high and dry. The Saharan goat’s cheeses of the Hoggar Mountains were holding out against the billow and surge. So, too, were the ewes’ milk cheeses of Qasr Bint Bayyah in the Libyan Wadi Bashir. But these were lone survivors in this balneal wasteland – fortified cheese castles standing indomitably against the incoming tide.
There was no logic to the way in which the cheese stacks collapsed or remained standing. One might have expected the Danish samsoes to have kept their sea legs for longer than the chevrotins of the Loire. Yet they were some of the first to crash into the water. As the water deepened to more than two feet, the rate of damage increased exponentially. Hitherto, individual stacks had fallen apart, but this had not signalled a widespread collapse. Now, with the bottom cases waterlogged and the rapids sweeping through with increasing speed, entire sections began to fall in on themselves.
One of the most spectacular examples was the cheeses of Aquitaine, which were under attack from waters sloshing from two directions. A ferocious current washing down from the Pyrenees was joined by a second flow of water cascading off the Massif Central. Suddenly, the entire western Pyrenees subsided and then collapsed. More than 400 individual cheeses burst from their crates and plopped into the water.
A similar scene of devastation was being played out elsewhere, right across Europe and Asia. The whole of Scandinavia was under three feet of water. Central Europe was in full flood. Australasia was under a rising tide. North America managed to hold out longest against the waters, for it was separated from western Europe by a large step. But it was not long before the cheeses of the Mississippi found themselves underwater, along with the cornhuskers from Nebraska and poonas of New York.
Eight and a half miles to the south of Trencoms, in the London borough of Streatham, Edward Trencom was having a most troubled night. He had fallen asleep as soon as he tucked himself into bed and – on any normal night – would not have woken until 6.30 a.m. But on this particular evening he woke after about two or three hours and could not for the life of him get back to sleep. ‘What is the matter with me?’ he asked himself. ‘Why can I not sleep?’ When he did finally fall back into a slumber, he was troubled by such vivid and disturbing dreams that his pyjamas were sodden with sweat when he awoke for a second time.
Just two days earlier Edward had brought home all of the family papers and laid them out on the large table in the living room. Now, after tossing and turning for the second time that night, he took the unusual step of climbing out of bed and going downstairs. ‘No point in lying there sweating,’ he thought. ‘Might as well use my time profitably.’ He flicked through the few papers pertaining to Joshua Trencom, searching for clues as to why he might have wished to go abroad. Again it was Greece. And again it involved fighting against the Turks. But why?
He had also discovered to his complete amazement a most intriguing reference to one of Joshua’s sisters, Anne Trencom. In the year 1769, she had been visited in London by an emissary of no lesser personage than Catherine the Great of Russia, who was apparently in search of a wife for her eldest son, the Tsarevitch Paul. Quite why the Russian tsarina had alighted on Anne Trencom, of all people, was a complete mystery. She was a mere fifteen years of age, in poor health and had worked in Trencoms cheese shop since the age of six. Edward thought it unlikely that she could read or write, let alone know how to converse with one of Europe’s greatest monarchs. So why? Why? Why?
He could only assume that Anne had turned down Catherine’s offer, since she had died in London just a few years later. Yet this was an extraordinary twist to the riddle – and one that was no less beguiling than all the others. Greece, Turkey, and now Russia. It made no sense at all.
Edward went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea. Funny. Still no sense of smell. He scratched his head and wondered whether or not he should go to the doctor. ‘But no – what’s the doctor going to say? I’ll discover what’s wrong soon enough.’
He let out a giant yawn and suddenly felt uncommonly tired. ‘Thank heavens tomorrow is …’ He scratched his nose wearily. ‘What day is it?’ he asked himself sleepily as he let slip another yawn. ‘Almost Monday. Oh, dear. I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to go to work. Perhaps I should call Mr George …’
And with that thought in his mind, Edward made his way back upstairs to bed and fell asleep almost immediately. Within seconds, he was transported back into the same disturbing dreamscape.
3 MARCH 1969
It was shortly after dawn when Mr Cooper, owner of the Fox and Grapes on the corner of Trump Street and Lawrence Lane, went to the bathroom and turned on the tap. Nothing. There was no water. ‘Strange,’ he thought, and headed downstairs to try the taps in the kitchen. These, too, were running dry, although they did emit a slight discharge of orange-brown water. ‘Oh, blast,’ said Cooper. ‘’Ow’re we expected t’do business without water?’ And he picked up the phone to call the Water Board.
To his surprise, someone answered the phone. He was even more amazed to learn that they already knew of the problem. Yes, the water had been turned off. No, it wouldn’t be on again for several hours – maybe not until tomorrow. But not to worry, the Water Board would be setting up a standpipe in the street.
‘Oh, great,’ thought Cooper, with customary sarcasm. His day had taken a dramatic downwards turn before it was even completely light.
He gazed out of the window towards the building opposite. His eye was involuntarily drawn to the door of Trencoms. ‘Uh?’ he thought. ‘What’n earth’s that?’
He noticed that water was flowing freely from the little crack underneath the door of the shop.
‘Darling,’ he called. ‘Darling – quick – come an’ look at th
is.’ Mrs Cooper yawned and asked what was going on. ‘No, come down – now. Come and look.’
Mrs Cooper threw on her dressing gown, ran her fingers through her hair and made her way downstairs. ‘Oh, my gawd!’ she said. ‘It’s water! Quick, Albert, call the fire brigade.’ Albert dialled the number and within eight or nine minutes, a fire engine drew up outside.
By this time, Albert and Samantha Cooper were dressed and peering in through the window of Trencoms. The sight that greeted them was alarming, although they had not yet realized the extent of the disaster. They could see water flowing through the shop, but neither of them had considered the inevitable fact that the ancient cellars of Trencoms must – to have created such a flood – be totally submerged in water.
‘Have you got their home number?’ asked one of the firemen as he prepared to force the shop door. ‘Tell ’im – Mr Trencom, did you say? – to come over immediately. This has all the markings of’ – he cleared his throat with a gravelly cough – ‘a disaster.’
He and his colleague forced the door of Trencoms and splashed their way through the shop. When they realized that the water was welling up from the cellars, they both let out a low whistle. ‘Jees! Is this where they store their cheeses?’ asked one.
Mr Cooper nodded. ‘Shh! I wouldn’t wanna to be in ’is shoes. We can bring in pumps but, well, it’s goin’ t’be ruined down there. We need to get the owner to come.’