An Audience with an Elephant (22 page)

It is not known for certain how long gunpowder was made in Waltham. The first recorded date is 1665, by which time a former fulling-mill had been converted for gunpowder production, but there is a tradition, perhaps fuelled by the irresistible combination of monks and gunpowder, that it goes back to Crecy in 1346, the first time gunpowder was used by an English army. Guy Fawkes is said to have got his supply there.

The site was ideal. There were the alder trees to provide the wood for charcoal, one of the ingredients of gunpowder. There was the water power from the River Lea to turn the mills and mix the ingredients, also the fact that from prehistoric times the river had been navigable (no one in his right mind would move gunpowder by road). The result was that this became the biggest gunpowder works in the country, so important that the government took it into public ownership on the eve of war with revolutionary France, some 200 years ago, and in public ownership it remained until 1991.

Canals were dug, but the barges floating in and out were like no other, being lined in leather and poled by men, for horses bolted and men did not. Steam power came and a narrow-gauge railway, the trains running on rails made of copper, and in places, wood, to eliminate the possibility of sparks. By the late nineteenth century they were making nitro-glycerine there and gun cotton for the new high-explosive shells. It was then that the strange buildings went up, deep in woods already coppiced for alder, the thickness of which acted as a blast shield. Each building, for obvious reasons, was as far as possible from the others, which was why, when the first developers went in, they thought there had been no plan.

But there was a plan, there always had been a plan. Huge mounds were thrown up, the earth lined with brick, passageways disappearing into the ground itself. The most spectacular of these was the Grand Nitrator, 140 feet high, in the depths of which a man sat on a one-legged stool, in case his attention wandered for a second, overseeing the nitration process. Below him was an oval pit of water, into which the nitro-glycerine could be plunged if the Grand Nitrator threatened to overheat. Names like this, and the goblin on the one-legged stool, are out of fantasy, except all this was real and just half a mile from the town centre.

It was another world in there, down in the woods. The workers wore special uniforms made of calico, with no buttons or pockets, the fastenings made of string. Every day a section of the safety rules was read out to them, and once a month the complete set. At the peak of the Great War, 5,000 people were employed there, half of them women, and it is a remarkable comment on the safety procedures that in all the 300 years of the mills only 200 deaths were recorded. With those there was very little left to bury.

By World War II, with Waltham Abbey in reach of enemy bombers, its importance had declined, and in 1945 it closed as a factory, only to open again the next day as a research establishment, specialising in every form of non-nuclear propellant. The fuel for the Blue Streak rocket was developed here, the explosive bolts on jet-ejector seats, even Giant Viper, that enormous ribbon of explosives shot into minefields which was used in the Gulf War.

The last years were weird and wonderful, with many changes of name. ERDE – Explosive Research and Development Establishment. RARDE – Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment. PERME – Propellant Experimental Rocket Motor Establishment. Most of these had no use for the bizarre buildings in the woods, so the green crept back. And not just the green.

Herons, attracted by the coppiced alder, flew over the wire and made their nests. Time passed and it became the biggest heronry in Essex, with the result that in the 1970s a secret government research establishment was, irony of ironies, classified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, its explosions synchronised so as not to interfere with nesting habits. And somehow, under the wire, up the canals, came otter and deer and muntjak and rabbits, all of them safe within the security perimeter.

It was into this wonderland that the men with the machetes came, followed by men from English Heritage and the Royal Commission for Ancient Monuments. And then Whitehall’s troubles
really
began. ‘The men from English Heritage and the Royal Commission couldn’t understand what they were seeing down in the woods. They’d never known anything like it,’ said Steve Chaddock, later appointed the archaeologist-on-site. ‘They said they needed to do an evaluation, but even before this, English Heritage decided to make it a Scheduled Ancient Monument, listing 21 buildings, one of them of Grade I, the same as Westminster Abbey.’

So it was goodbye the houses as far as the eye could see, goodbye the light industrial use and the golf courses. At the MOD, civil servants peered into the unknown, fearful of what might turn up next. There was the little matter of the waste from hundreds of years, all tipped into the canals, for you don’t get the binmen calling when you run a nitro-glycerine factory. With English Nature, English Heritage and the Royal Commission peering over their shoulders, the MOD could not just send in the bulldozers, and the bill for decontamination alone came to £16 million in the end. All they got in return was £5 million for a tiny fringe of the site, some 10 per cent of it, where houses did get built. Powder Mill Lane, Powder Mill Mews.

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

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.’

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.