by Charles Todd
The amount of gunpowder produced here must have been of immense value to the war effort. The Germans would have been delighted to see the mill put out of business. There had already been a gunpowder crisis that had shaken even the Government. And of course a mill had to be located near water, because water was needed in the manufacture as well as to transport the gunpowder to the scattered factories where shell and cartridge casings would be filled with it. No one wanted to see wagons of gunpowder on the rutted and wretched roads.
“And then?”
“It was assumed that something must have gone wrong, that a spark must have set off the chain reaction. It’s a dangerous business to start with, milling the ingredients and producing something that can be used in shells and ammunition. The powder has to go off, of course, when fired. But God help us, not before. Everyone knew it meant hazardous working conditions. It’s why the pay was so good. But some felt the Government had been pushing too hard to increase production, ignoring proper safety precautions. My father was often at odds with Captain Collier over that. Still, the demand was there. All of us knew it. The Army alone, never mind the Navy, could have used twice the powder we produced.”
He said nothing for a moment. And watching his hands clench on the wheel, I knew there was worse to come.
“Recently, don’t ask me why, there have been different whispers. New rumors. Gossip. Finger pointing. It began with more questions about the fire. How that had started—when—and why it had been so intense. Whether it had been deliberately set.”
“Deliberately—but that’s tantamount to murder.”
“Precisely. It makes no sense at all. Still, it was well known that my father had never been happy with the Government’s terms when they took over, and it was whispered that he was afraid, given the improvements they’d made, that they would refuse to turn the mill over to him again when the war ended.”
“Your father?” I repeated. I had never met him, but I did know Mark, and I knew Mrs. Ashton. I couldn’t imagine either of them putting money before the lives of the people who had worked for them before the war, even though those same people might be employed by the War Office or the Army for the duration. It was impossible to imagine.
“Mark, perhaps you should take me back to Canterbury. I can’t believe your parents will want visitors in the midst of such worries.” He’d meant well, but now I could see it was not the best of ideas. “They have enough on their minds.”
“On the contrary. You aren’t someone, a casual acquaintance. You saved my life. You’ll be good for their spirits. Look. I didn’t intend to tell you any of this, Bess, but I thought, if you’d read about the explosion, you might say something, a sympathetic comment acknowledging what my father must have been through. At any rate, it’s my mother I’m most worried about. She tries to keep our spirits up, but I know she’s afraid for my father if this wild suspicion gets out of hand. I can’t believe it’s likely to go too far, but then it’s my father we’re talking about, and she’s vulnerable.”
“What does your father have to say about the accusations?”
“Very little. He tends to think that anyone who knows him will recognize them as the foolishness they are.” Mark glanced across at me. “My father has always been a proud man. He tries to live up to his duties and obligations and expects other people to measure him by how well he succeeds. Some find that—I think the word would probably be distant, or impersonal. But he’s been responsible for the livelihood of a good many families, and he takes that seriously. I don’t think any of those trying to bring him down understands how much the destruction of the mill has affected him. They couldn’t believe what they do, if they knew.”
We’d been angling north and a little west, and I could hear seagulls in the distance. Out there somewhere to my right would be the Thames Estuary, broad and emptying into the Channel.
“But surely he can tell them where he was, when it happened.”
“That’s just it. He was seen earlier talking to someone just outside the mill. And then when the explosions began, first the large one and then the smaller ones that followed, he was on his way home. He ran back down to the River Cran. It was low tide, so he waded across, and started toward the mill just as the dust was settling. He stopped and just stood there, looking at the wreckage, shaking his head. Others had run toward the blast as well, and they saw him. For some reason, he just turned and started back the way he’d come. He told me later he was going after men and whatever tools he could find, to try to look for survivors. Before he’d even reached that side of the Cran, the first flames were spotted.”
I thought to myself, Oh dear. For those looking for answers to explain the deaths of their loved ones, there was always enough circumstantial evidence to support whispers and rumors and finger-pointing. Sudden shocking death was unbelievable, unbearable, and people needed someone, human or divine, to blame for their loss.
I said, trying for a lighter note, “Surely those who know your father well will prevail. The fact that he rushed to the scene shows he cared, that he would have helped if he could. If anything at all could have been done for those poor men.”
“God, I hope so. I don’t want to go back to France leaving my family in such straits. The trouble is, even our friends have begun to fall away. They’ve made excuses of course, but it’s clear they must be having doubts of their own. Or are reluctant to find themselves included in the rumors and gossip. Whatever the reason, they’ve simply avoided us. My mother’s circle of friends has been particularly distant. She pretends it doesn’t matter, but I know it must hurt.”
We had come down a long hill through the outskirts of the village, mainly Victorian cottages and bungalows, straggling down toward its heart. Soon we were among the shops and a collection of older buildings, a number of which appeared to date to the days when the abbey flourished. Almshouses, lodgings for guests, abbey offices? A few had been converted to other uses, but it appeared that people still lived in many of them. One was particularly charming, with window boxes of geraniums and stone urns beside the ancient wooden door. And then we were in a small but busy square. I couldn’t help but notice the glances as we drove through. Followed by a quick turn of the back as people recognized the motorcar. Even I could see that they were deliberately shunning us. A refusal to acknowledge so much as setting eyes on an Ashton—not even curious to see who else was in the vehicle. I felt an uncomfortable chill. In some fashion their snubs seemed worse than hostile stares would have been.
For Mark’s sake I tried to keep my eyes on the attractive older houses scattered about the square, giving it its charm. But I was well aware of what he must be feeling.
We followed the street out of the square, and soon I could just pick out the roofs of buildings along the river. Three of the roofs looked fairly new.
“Why did you wish to speak to the Canterbury police?” I asked, reminded by a glimpse of the police station down a side street.
“There have been some—problems. Property damage mostly. The local constable isn’t keen on dealing with it. I decided to have a word with Inspector Brothers.” He cast a quick smile my way. “I promise you, no one will come crashing through the windows as we sit down to lunch.”
I was of two opinions about that. But I could also better understand why he felt a visit from me might take his mother’s mind off what was happening. If only for a few hours.
We turned off into another narrower street where I could see the long high wall that must once have enclosed the abbey. As old as it was, the wall was surprisingly intact, with trees on both sides of it and shaded walks following it. A nursemaid with a child in a pram was strolling along there, a brown-and-white dog trotting by her side.
The Major only followed the wall for a short distance, turning away, then turning again, and soon we were running down toward the River Cran. I could now see the sheds by the water, the
sort that seem to line quays everywhere, catering to the needs of ships and boats. Some of them were long enough for sail mending or making rope from raw hemp. Beyond, on the far side of the river, the land rose slightly higher than this side, rough ground at a guess.
I expected the Major to continue to the river, but he stopped just above the sheds, where the road began to slope sharply toward the water. And I could see that what I’d thought was rough ground must actually be the ruins of the powder mill.
I noticed that Mark didn’t turn off the motor. We weren’t getting down, then.
At first I wasn’t really certain what I was seeing. There was so little left to tell me what had once been here.
On the far side of the little river, tall grass had taken over. Scattered through it were stones that were nearly invisible here at the end of summer’s growth. A jumble of them, without definition. About fifty yards farther on was what appeared to be an open wood that had been caught in a very bad storm. A dozen or so trees had struggled to leaf out, but most were torn and shredded and some were even beginning to show signs of rot, limbs dangling, bark peeling. I realized that the mill had been set in the wood, to keep the buildings cool and to lessen the blast force if something went wrong. Only this time the wood too had suffered badly.
Among the trees lay even more rubble from the powder works, and I began, slowly, to pick out the jagged remnants of roofless walls, stumps of foundations, clusters of unidentifiable stones that could have been anything. There were even what appeared to be corners that no longer had sides. It was as if a fretful child had begun to build a village, tired of it, and kicked it over. There must have been a crater as well, just as there would be in France when a shell exploded. But I couldn’t be sure whether I could identify that from here, the land was so uneven, hummocky, and strewn with debris.
Considering a busy mill had once thrived there, it was still a raw and ugly wound on the landscape.
Even in the last century, gunpowder wasn’t made in a single structure but in stages. I knew only what I’d heard discussed by the officers in my father’s command, debating the various kinds of gunpowder and their properties. I knew that it didn’t “blow up” in the traditional sense of the word but expanded as it ignited. And I knew there was a rigid formula that produced the best powder, before being milled into small particles of equal size. Each stage was carried out in its own buildings, to lessen the danger of explosion. And so a powder mill was a collection of structures clustered among trees. Whatever had happened in this place had destroyed the lot. A single explosion powerful enough to create a chain reaction until there was nothing left.
Potassium nitrate—saltpeter—made a better gunpowder than sodium nitrate. And alder trees made the best charcoal for the formula. That was something else I’d heard. But for some time now gunpowder works all across Britain had begun to produce cordite instead of traditional black power, and that was a much more complicated recipe. With far more chances for something to go badly wrong. All I really knew was that the length and thickness of the “cord” in the manufacturing process determined how it would be used in munitions.
In 1915, a severe shortage of acetone, necessary to the process, had nearly shut down works all over the country. The loss of the Ashton Mill on the heels of that must have been devastating.
Though hardly an expert, I’d seen enough of the shelling in France to understand that here too something quite disastrous had happened, and that when it did, a great many people had died.
Pointing, Mark described the scene for me. “The walls were thicker on this side of the buildings, so that any blast would point away from the town just behind us. And the buildings were spaced for safety. Yet there’s hardly a wall standing now. We’ll never know how many survived the first blast. Or if any did.” He paused, to let me resurrect the mill site in my mind. “When they took over the mill, the Government put in railway lines to bring in workers from The Swale villages. This was necessary to replace men who had enlisted. A good many of the new workers were women, along with some older workers from the brewery when it closed for lack of men. Three hundred souls to start with, and more as the demands of the war increased tenfold. Thank God it was a Sunday. The Fire Brigade came racing toward the blast, but there was no way to contain it or what followed. Several firemen were injured trying.”
Turning slightly, he pointed north of where we were sitting. “That’s The Swale.” I could just see a line of blue water far to the right, at the foot of what appeared to be marshland. “It runs between the Medway to the west and the Thames Estuary to the east, and of course the Cran empties into it. Across The Swale from us is the Isle of Sheppey. Quite marshy where it faces us, just as it is on this side. The abbots sent wool and barrels of mutton and hops and other goods down the Cran to ships waiting to cross to France. Much of the gunpowder went out the same way, to the munitions factories where the cartridges and various types of shells were filled. Artillery, Naval guns, mortars—whatever the War Office ordered. There used to be a small fishing fleet in Cranbourne as well, a survivor of the days of merchant ships.”
I looked to my left. There was no sign of any railway station, nor the tracks coming into it. Both must have disappeared in the blast, save for a twisted length of iron that must have come from the train shed. I could pick that out now.
“We’ve never had any trouble. Not in over a hundred years. Not a single explosion.”
I could hear the distress in his voice. The Ashtons had been proud of that record.
I remembered what he’d said earlier, that it was dangerous work, but paid well. And again that it was feared that the Government had been pushing too hard for larger and larger outputs of powder. After all, there was a war on . . .
The Cran was hardly more than a stream now, a narrow channel that must have been wider at one time. It would probably have been dammed long ago to feed the mill. A tidal river, presently at low tide, for the small craft anchored there were literally high and dry, tilted to one side, most of them waiting for the incoming flood to give them buoyancy once more.
I couldn’t see what lay beyond the trees.
From something I’d heard the Colonel Sahib—my father—say, there were munitions factories somewhere out there on Sheppey, where women loaded shells and casings with the gunpowder brought from here. He would have known about them. And about the Ashton Powder Mill, surely. Of course there had never been any reason to speak of them to me. These were military matters.
I looked again at the ruins. Very much, I thought, like the abbey we’d passed, torn down by a very angry King. Only no one had wanted this rubble for Calais harbor. It lay where it had fallen two years earlier.
“Thank God, the tide was out that morning,” Mark was saying. “A Sunday, no one about, no boaters or picnickers, no families strolling along the water. Only the men working inside. Or the toll could have been staggering. As it was, the blast took out windows for miles, lifted roofs right off the sheds on our side of the Cran, blowing in their doors. For that matter, we lost windows at Abbey Hall, and also part of the roof. Masts of ships in the Cran and The Swale were broken like sticks. And the earth shook like something demented. That was felt as far north as Norwich. Even Canterbury was badly shaken. There were any number of injuries all over this part of Kent, mostly from falling tiles and masonry or broken glass. Many people thought the Germans were shelling Canterbury.”
I tried to imagine that morning, and failed. Frightened villagers rushing out of their houses to find out what had happened—and then, finally, knowing. And rushing on in horror to where we were sitting now. Their worst fears realized. A hundred men . . .
“The dust cloud was enormous. Stones rained down on everything. My mother heard them falling all around our house. I’ve always thought it was that dust cloud that set off the fire. Or at the very least fed it. But there’s no way to prove that.”
He sighed
. “The main question after the explosion was, should the powder mill be rebuilt? The Government looked at the ruins, calculating the cost of removing all that rubble before they could begin. Asking themselves where to find the manpower to begin the task. But there was even a division of feeling about that. For some it was sacred ground, where their loved ones lay buried. For others it was well-paid work, and if the mill wasn’t rebuilt, many would be unemployed. In the end, it was decided to expand a mill elsewhere. Although Captain Collier did everything in his power to convince the Army to rebuild, my father was blamed for their decision as well, accused of not fighting harder for reconstruction for the simple reason that the new powder works rising on the site would belong to the Government, not to him. And the mill has always been our greatest source of income. Not the sheep or the fields—the gunpowder. What’s more, we couldn’t begin to consider rebuilding ourselves. The cost would be prohibitive because of what had to be carried away even before we could start.”
I had seen enough, and I was about to tell him so when an egg smashed into the windscreen directly in front of where I was sitting. Before I could stop myself, I threw up my hands to protect my face as it shattered. Another smashed on the bonnet, leaving a smear of yellow yolk.
Mark was swearing under his breath, already out of the motorcar, giving chase. It had happened so fast, I’d caught only a glimpse of whoever it was who’d thrown the eggs. A boy? A man? I could remember trousers—a cap pulled low. Mark, clearly, had seen him too, but I couldn’t tell if he’d recognized the person.