by Brian Clarke
On the morning of the third day, before the cock could crow or the heron could shake his feathers or the sun could touch the rim of the tunnel where the vole lay sleeping, the hen settled into a scoop that she had made and felt it right and the cock fish moved up beside her and felt it right. Then the law of continuing touched them and the bright light that had aimed each of them there drew in on itself and grew brighter and brighter and resolved to a piercing point that seized and held and made a high note; and the cock fish trembled and the hen fish shook and the eggs streamed and the milt flowed and the eggs streamed and the milt flowed and the eggs and the milt flowed and flowed.
Year 3, January
it was almost as though the plan had been mislaid.
The plan for the springs had always been that they would flow strongly in winter, but after two parched summers and coming on for two dry winters the springs were lower in winter than at any time in the old man’s lifetime. The plan for the stream had always been that it should be running fast and deep in winter, but after two parched summers and coming on for two dry winters the trout with the scar and his mate had to look hard to find any water at all that was fast enough for spawning.
The plan for the plants could almost have been forgotten. The plan for the water crowfoot had been that it would thrive in the kinds of places where fast water had been decreed, yet everywhere that fast water had been the water crowfoot was beginning to die for want of flow. The plan for the slow-water plants was that there should be few of them anywhere yet everywhere slow-water plants were taking root.
It had certainly been the plan that there should be lots of insects in the stream, even if in winter they would mostly be only half-grown or hiding away and yet there were fewer nymphs and grubs and all the others because so many of them needed water crowfoot if they were to thrive and multiply and the water crowfoot was on the wane.
One thing that had seemed central to the plan was that there would be little chokeweed in summer and almost none in winter because the water would be too cold and fast, but matted clumps of chokeweed that had grown in summer were holding on wherever the trout with the scar and his mate looked for a place to spawn.
By the time the two fish were busy on the gravels and the silt that the hen fish disturbed with her digging was clouding the water and putting a catch in the gills of the fish digging behind, it seemed as though the law of continuing had forgotten the plans. Or perhaps was making others.
Year 3, February
paul Tyler was just flicking through his diary to see what he could move to fit in a visit by the executive from Top Oil when the speck that had once been part of the chipped grey flint at Middle Bend drifted downstream and settled onto one of the eggs in the gravels that the trout with the scar had put a light inside.
David Hoffmeyer was just touching down in Boston feeling well pleased with himself and the deal in Beijing when what had once been part of the root of the alder leaning out over Top Bend settled onto a second egg.
The man from Gothenburg – the one who so admired England that he had decided to spend all his holidays there from now on – was just going to bed and the Japanese who had been near him while the Minister was making his statement were all just getting up, when a minuscule piece of the old tile on the stream bed opposite the farm and the tiniest fragment of wood from the jammed branch upstream of the place where the salmon rode and soared and lifted like young things, settled onto the third egg one after another.
By the time a dark fleck was settling over the sixth egg, the young man was showing the old man the plans he had made for the farm and saying oh, by the way, he had found the letters from the bank at the back of the drawer.
By the time Nick Brewster was staring into the bottom of his glass in Buenos Aires on his fifth trip there in as many weeks and wondering what he was doing with his life and the old man was telling the young man he could not change the way he was and that he would hold onto the farm as it was until the last possible moment because once made the changes could never be unmade, the lights in many of the eggs that the trout with the scar had lit had been dimmed by the specks of shadows and gone out.
On the same day that the trout with the scar began to edge downstream towards the willow that had fallen in the flood, the pump was switched on. The column of water that was 55 metres high and a metre wide in the fold in the hills that was so far from the Broadchalk and the Clearwater that neither could possibly be affected by its loss, lifted smoothly up the borehole lined with concrete and steel and began its silent journey through the pipes.
Year 3, March
the young salmon that had hatched from the gravels near the lodged twig and the white stone was finding it difficult to win a place for himself. Every space that could sustain a salmon fry had a salmon fry in it and had been fought for and won.
The young salmon that was longer than the light switch on the bank manager’s wall, maybe as long as the first joint on the finger the young man used to work his calculator, often rose up in the water and made his eyes blaze and opened his jaws so other fish could see how great and terrible they were, but he found that the young fish everywhere he went were just as big and terrible and needy as he was and they drove him away.
All during the time Jim Hampton of Hamptons was humming and hahing about the number of redundancies that would be necessary and the case of the last tunnellers was being argued out on a technicality in the courts at Farley, the young salmon was being driven from stone to stone and gravel patch to gravel patch, always further downstream and nearer the bank.
The place where he settled while the big demonstration was being planned by Jo Hamilton of SAVE and Peter Althorpe of One Earth was not a good place. It was not a good place even though that place had often sustained salmon before. Though the space was as big as a waterhen’s wing, silt had filled in the spaces between the stones and joined them all up until the stream bed was as smoothed and raised as an upland plateau.
The stream was like this wherever any of the salmon fry went. Where once everything had been clean and clearly defined and the stones had risen like ridged mountain ranges above a young fish lying near the stream bed, the stones now lay beneath the silt like low, domed hills. Where once the high stones had hidden young salmon in the valleys between them so that each fry could not see the others and knew it owned the whole stream and all the food it carried, the salmon fry could now see one another whenever one dashed to the surface to snatch anything that could be eaten. Each fry when it saw another attacked it because the other should not have been there and one fry of the two was always driven away.
The young salmon that had hatched beside the lodged twig and the white stone lay in the space that was as big as a waterhen’s wing from the day the last of the young protesters in the tunnel issued his defiant warning and said he would stay there for ever no matter what anyone did, until the day when the court gave its ruling and the police dug him out. That was the day when the salmon from beside the small, lodged twig and the round, white stone, saw the other salmon fry enter his space and attacked her.
The young salmon that was longer than the light switch on the bank manager’s wall poured all his gathered energy into the rush across his space and he opened his jaws and flared his gills at the intruder. The law of continuing had told the little male fry that he could not afford to lose his space and the hen fry that she must win it and so when he flared his gills and opened his jaws so that the intruder could see how great and terrible they were, she did the same; and when each could see that the other was not to be frightened away the two fish twisted and turned and snapped and chased one another in tight circles so that the silt was lifted and the nearby leech drew into himself and the dead caddis grub that the wading cow had caught with her hoof, was briefly exhumed. The two fry fought until the cock fish that had been driven away from the place near the lodged twig and the white stone was exhausted and bitten on the tail and the side; and he left his space to the hen fish because he could fi
ght no more.
The young cock salmon allowed the current to carry him downstream beyond the place where the chokeweed was growing as thick as fur and where the nymphs and shrimps and grubs were having to clamber over it or to force their way under it to get anywhere. He was pushed and harried downstream by other fry everywhere he sought to rest. He was driven past the place where the water caterpillars were having to reach and grope like blind worms to find places where they could take a hold amid the flecks of shadows that were settling everywhere over the plants around them. He was bullied and jostled towards the bank where the seeds that had fallen onto the brown ribbon along the edge were beginning to split in their delineated places and to send down roots white as hairs and to push up shoots that stretched and unfurled as though awaking from a sleep so that the exposed silt could be claimed for the land. It was only when he came to the deep scoop close to the Otter Stone that nothing attacked him and he settled down into it among the other fry there. The defeated salmon fry all huddled together over the silt that half-filled the scoop, waiting for the food that the slowed current could not bring them and for the heron and the kingfisher to return.
Year 3, April
it took only a few minutes to put the development onto most television screens in the Western world. It took one five-hundredth of a second to put it onto every front page in Britain, onto the front page of Le Figaro in France, Die Welt in Germany and into the Foreign News pages of the Washington Post. The Asahi Shimbun ran the picture and an extended caption because the Osaka development had at last hit the headlines over there. The Prime Minister’s office called for a briefing on the incident in case someone mentioned it at the Environment Summit.
Lisa Pearce had gone to cover the demonstration that SAVE and One Earth had organised on the approaches to the Frontage. So had Steve Jones, the staff photographer on the Guardian whose forte was finding the alternative view. The late, knotty obstacle dreamed up by Charles Cullinger QC, the civil rights activist, had been cleared out of the way at last. The work near the Frontage that had been stopped by the court so unexpectedly, had been given the go-ahead again.
The demonstration all looked pretty routine. There was the usual phalanx of security men and a scattering of police on one side and the usual motley collection of protesters, hopelessly outgunned in everything except conviction, on the other. It was precisely because the demonstration looked so routine that Pearce and Jones had broken away from the main site, to look for something different.
It all looked straightforward to Jo Hamilton and Peter Althorpe as well, at least at first. They both knew the real purpose now was not to save the Frontage or the Hangers – the last battle for those had been lost with the Cullinger hearing. The main purpose now was to keep the media interested and the development lobby on the hop. If enough fuss and public anxiety could be generated about this site – not about the development in principle because that would only alienate the public after the recession, but about the damaging way the plan had been tackled and in particular the absence of a tunnel – then maybe the Minister would give the next decision more thought and apply a different set of values to the one after that.
All the same, as with any crowd, there could be trouble. That was why Althorpe, when he mounted the stepladder and spoke, made the point about needing to avoid confrontation at all costs. Their sole aim was to show the public at large ‘the real price they are paying for what they are getting – socially and culturally and environmentally,’ he said.
By the time Lisa Pearce and Steve Jones had found their ways independently to the lower slopes of the Frontage where they could overlook the scene and put the whole thing into context – police, demonstrators, advancing machines, scarred ground, green fields, the part-completed buildings away in the distance – Hamilton was mounting the stepladder herself and getting her own wider view.
Same as usual. A few hundred, a thousand, who could really tell? Old, young and middle-aged, every class – amazing how things like this united people the way they did. Country jackets and ragged sweaters, cavalry-twills and torn jeans. Dreadlocks and ponytails and short-backs-and-sides. Tunnellers and tree people, weekenders from London. A couple of labradors on leads, some whippets on strings.
A few faces registered. Major Croft, crisp and upright and eighty if he was a day, there in the front as usual. Jane Sanderson’s drop-out daughter, all earrings and metal and black. That woman she could never put a name to when they met, the one who kept writing letters to the Herald. The police inspector looking at the crowd looking at her. The odd, heavy silence the low murmuring made, nobody quite speaking out loud.
At the very moment the teams from Cogent Electronics and the Ministry started to discuss delivery dates for the products the Government had agreed to buy and the mayfly in its burrow near the island was casting its skin for the last time before hatching and Jo Hamilton was clicking on the megaphone to start speaking, it happened. One minute there was the sudden roar of engines from heavy earthmoving equipment to the left, then there was some shouting and part of the crowd surged forward, then the police vans were coming up the track from the Stinston road with wire mesh over their windscreens.
Pearce and Jones zoomed in their cameras from the hill. Neither noticed the lone figure away to the right, the figure in the white shirt holding the child by the hand, walking across the shattered earth. Nor had anyone else noticed until, a few minutes and five arrests later, there was a boom like an artillery gun as one of the earthmovers backfired and all fighting stopped and all eyes swung around.
‘In all my years as a reporter, I have seen nothing more remarkable,’ Pearce was to say on that evening’s news. ‘It was an act of folly, of courage, of gross irresponsibility, call it what you will – but on the edge of the battle that was raging a man in his late twenties, holding a small boy by the hand, deliberately put himself in the path of a line of vehicles that had broken away from the main convoy. Then he faced them head-on. Here is what happened next …’
She had been pleased with the pictures. Ken had done a good job. He had got it all. The lead vehicle was one of those huge, earth-moving machines. It was belching black smoke and roaring like a tank. A dozen other huge vehicles, all tracked like tanks, rumbled and roared behind it. The young man in the light trousers and white shirt with the little boy holding his hand, both of them looking pathetically slight, were dead ahead.
The lead vehicle that could have lost the two of them under one track drove towards the young man in the white shirt and the boy as if to force them to move, but the young man held his ground and the great machine stopped short, still roaring. It hesitated as if to go this way and that around him, and then headed to the young man’s left. The young man took a few deliberate steps sideways, placing the boy and himself directly in its path, confronting it again. The huge vehicle stopped, hesitated a second time and then headed for the young man’s right. The young man in the white shirt holding the child by his hand stepped sideways a second time and barred its way. Again the gigantic vehicle hesitated and turned and again the young man blocked its path and held his ground. It went on for a couple of minutes.
‘Finally,’ Pearce said over the pictures, ‘the machine stopped and the engine died. There was a moment of complete stillness. It was as though the crowd and the police had been paralysed by fear of what might happen, or too fascinated by it to move. Then the police and some of the crowd ran to the young man and the boy and the rest of the crowd cheered.’
The next day all the papers were filled with images snatched from the television screen and reporting how Paul Chapman, 28-year-old father of two and Hero of Stinston, had been taken into custody and then released without charge. They all quoted the same words: ‘I didn’t really think at all. I just wanted to do something. I wanted to make a statement. I wanted my son to be a part of it. It’s not just my world they’re destroying here, it’s his as well.’
Several of the overseas newspapers that used Steve Jones’ syndica
ted shot quoted the the Guardian editorial because it rang bells in their own countries. ‘This one photograph says much about Western societies today,’ the leader had said. ‘In a single image we see man versus technology and human frailty versus brute force. We see the natural environment versus our hunger for material advancement. We all see questioned yet again our ability to define a future we will be able to live with – in every sense of that term.’
Even as the battle was being fought and the newspapers were being printed, the pump that was so far away from the Broadchalk and the Clearwater that it could do neither river any harm was being speeded up steadily. In the stream that was so far away it was beyond all conscious thought, the stoneclingers were edging sideways towards the middle again and the water caterpillars were reaching and looping further down their stems again and the trout with the scar was on the move towards the willow again to find deeper water.
Year 3, May
the old man had gone to the stream especially. He always tried to spend an hour there in late afternoon when the mayflies were hatching. The massed hatching of the mayflies, he often said, was one of the wonders of England’s countryside. Some countries had their wildebeests and caribou and lemmings, we had the mayfly. The scale of its hatches, the suddenness and predictability of its appearances and departures, amazed him.
The great flies would hatch from the stream in numbers beyond imagining, but only for the last two weeks of May and maybe a couple of days in June. Then they would disappear until the same time the year after. Their appearance was so short, their disappearance so abrupt that by July it was easy to think they could have been an illusion. The flies were so long and so lovely, so elegant and slender, they reminded the old man of fairies or the ballerina he had seen on television that time, dancing Swan Lake.
