The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Professor Armitage will not let them stay any longer. He rattles his keys. Meekly, Faro and Steve turn towards him, acknowledge him, and allow themselves to be led away. As they wait for the lift, Professor Armitage speaks dismissively about Dr Hawthorn. Clearly the professor thinks molecular biology and genetics are upstarts in comparison with his own timehallowed pursuits, and clearly he is jealous of their glamour and their funding. He concedes that it will nevertheless be of interest to map the genes of Hammervale and of Britain and of Neolithic Man. He is from over the Pennines, himself. He is Cheshire Man. But who knows what interbreeding may have occurred? He sniggers. This is meant to be a joke, but Faro doesn’t get it. She does not much care for Professor Armitage. He is a silly man.

  She is glad to get out into the open air with Steve Nieman. The university authorities have given her a parking ticket, but on inspection it doesn’t seem to mean very much. At least it isn’t a clamp. She screws the ticket up and shoves it into her tote bag.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ says Faro, opening the passenger door for Steve. ‘Give me directions. I can never get out of the centre of this city.’

  Steve, a nondriver, is not very good at directions, and they go round a featureless multilane stretch of inner ring-road twice before they hit the right exit, but then Faro puts her foot down and they hum along towards Breaseborough and Cotterhall, flying over the motorway and the supertramway and plunging under walkways, bypassing Breaseborough itself, until they reach the valley and the entrance to the Earth Project. Steve knows his way here. Faro would not have recognized it, for all is changed. Miles of spoil and tip have been cleared, the valley has been landscaped, and modern buildings rise and glitter before her. Green glass, sculpted walls of pink-white limestone, yellow wood. She can tell that Steve is proud of it. He wants to show her round his place. This makes her inexplicably happy. Some of the site is not yet open to the public, but Steve has a pass and can take Faro where she pleases. But they have to start, he apologizes, in the Schools Reception Unit, because at the moment that’s the only way in.

  That’s fine with Faro. She doesn’t at all mind becoming a schoolgirl and mingling with the small crowds. She examines the models of the valley then and now, and admires the photographs of wildlife, and listens to button-operated birdsong, and gazes into an aquarium of clean Hammer water filled with humble weed and fish. It is innocent and redeemed.

  She is also interested in the displays in the next chamber, which commemorate Our Industrial Heritage. Old machinery is displayed in glass cases, and there are one or two hands-on exhibits. Here a press of a button produces the simulated rumbling explosions of quarry blasting, or the hiss of natural gas escaping from a bore hole made by a drilling rig. Lumps of coal and shale and limestone are mounted and described. (Faro does not spend long on these. She is not very good at minerals: she prefers the organic.) The walls are covered with photographs of old Breaseborough, Rotherham, Doncaster, Wath. Charts list the numbers of the dead in various industrial accidents over the past century. Four had died in 1906 during the construction of the Cotterhall viaduct, and seventy-five in the Cadeby Colliery disaster of July 1912. Eight were killed by the powder works explosion in 1924, twenty-one in the fire at the cooling tower in Spotforth in 1928, three in the coal washery plant in 1934. One surface worker was hit by a train at Silverwood in 1956. These are not sum totals. They are merely illustrations. Non-industrial fatalities include the drowning of a wood-turner in the great flood of 1880, and the death of a miner after injuries sustained during the violent confrontations between troops and workers at the Burtin Main pit lockout in 1893.

  Faro stares at these grim records, and peers into the sepia past of her great-grandparents, at boys in caps and men in waistcoats with watch chains, at women in aprons and headscarves and girls in Sunday bonnets. Where had all these people come from? They had come in, from the farms, from the villages, from the countryside around. And now it was all over. Production had ceased. The Industrial Revolution had ground to a standstill, here as elsewhere, and the unemployment figures, however massaged, were alarmingly high. For the work had gone, but the people had stayed. Young men, Steve had told her, were hired not even by the day, but by the hour. The girls did better. They worked in supermarkets, in packaging goods for the supermarkets, in homes for the elderly whose greatest pleasure in life had been shopping in those supermarkets.

  Faro pauses in front of a controversial panel giving information about deaths in the past from industrial diseases, and the state of litigation in various current claims for compensation for vibration white finger, asbestosis, nystagmus, silicosis, mesothelioma and other occupational hazards. Steve said this panel was not popular with local employers, who thought it put ideas into people’s heads, but the council, almost as left-wing as it had been in the days of Old Labour, had stood solid and refused to have it removed. So there the panel stood, recording, as information filtered in, long-delayed deaths both in the neighbourhood and far afield. (The deaths of Joe Barron in Surrey and Ivy Barron in Australia are not yet added to the list, but who knows, one day they may be, for no secrets now are safe from the genealogist and the microbiologist.)

  Rose & Rose, says Steve at Faro’s elbow, do not like this panel at all.

  Faro is getting impatient. She moves quickly through descriptions of coal processing, steel-making and pop bottling, and looks in vain for any sign of Barron Glass or any mention of the mysteries of casein. This may be her heritage, but it seems a long way back to her. She is beginning to think it is time to get out into the open air, and Steve seems to read her mind, though as he leads her out he makes her pause before what he says is his favourite photograph.

  ‘Do look at this one,’ he says. ‘What about that for a caption?’

  Faro stares at a vast enlargement firmly dated 1962. It shows a huge and complicated plant, consisting of cylinders, wheels, boxes, generators, tubing, screws, pipes and hoppers, standing in a warehouse beneath a skylight in a sloping roof. It is a serious outfit on a fairly large scale, though it has an element of Heath Robinson fantasy. To the left of the picture stands a middle-aged man in an overall, with an important wallet in his breast pocket. He is staring intently through his thick serious glasses at a metallic object which he is holding in both hands. This appears to consist of two shield-shaped studded plates with scalloped edges, joined by a thin metal belt, resembling a brassiere fit for a Valkyrie. The gentleman’s expression of judicious pride is delightful. The caption reads ‘This photograph shows the workshop at Peat Handworth Ltd on Common Road, Breaseborough. What this firm used to manufacture is unknown. Does anyone recognize this gentleman or what he is holding?’

  So quickly, says Steve, do we vanish from history. And the automated doors open for them and let them out of the controlled lighting into the sunshine, where they blink like owls at the brightness.

  Oh, it is lovely out there, in the fresh air. They wander along the riverbank through the Wild Nature Park, past meadows planted with poppies and cornflowers and daisies, past willow wigwams and water sculptures. Bednerby Main effluent and old landfill had been leaking into canal and river for decades, but it has all been cleaned up now, and the water is clear again, for the first time for more than a century. Reed mace grows in the lagoons of slurry. Fish and heron and a kingfisher have returned, and there is rumour of an otter, though Steve has not seen it. But he has seen daring boys jump thirty feet down off the bridge into the water and come up smiling.

  Steve shows her the pond, and the water house that he built with his own hands. She pats its smooth warm yellow wood, and smiles at him. He is right to be proud of it. It is charming. He is proud of the whole project. He is hurt that the national press has been at best indifferent, at worst contemptuous.

  They have organic sandwiches in their pockets, for their midday picnic, purchased from the organic restaurant. Steve is a vegetarian.

  They wander up the valley, then turn uphill, along a cinder track, towards
the escarpment and the cave. Faro asks Steve about the costs of the whole project. They must be colossal. How can it all be financed? Heritage money, lottery money, and some deal with Rose & Rose and the council. And the Wadsworth Trust had put in a million or two. Who were the Wadsworths? They were pit-owners, they used to own a lot of land round here until they were bought out by the National Coal Board when the mines were nationalized. There was a Miss Gertrude Wadsworth, who lived to be a hundred and who left most of her fortune to local environmental causes. They’d been in a bit of a legal battle with other claimants, but the Earth Project had qualified. Neat, really. Full circle. Polluter pays.

  Yes, neat, says Faro, who cannot imagine possessing a million pounds, and could not care less. Easy come, easy go, that’s Faro. They pass various danger signals decorated with skulls and crossbones, indicating buried cables and high voltages, and climb over a stretch of orange-red plastic netting, and note a dumped armchair, a rusted chassis and nubbles of old coal amongst the cinders. From time to time strange coiling metal snakeheads of wire and cable protrude from the blackened earth and reddened shale, groping upwards from the deserted Nibelung caverns below. They are now in no-man’s-land, between the Wild Nature Park and the natural ridge, where as yet there is no new imported topsoil, and nothing much can grow. But they climb, they will soon be through it, and up on the wilderness of the escarpment. The sun beats gently down on Faro, as they ascend the slope, and a lark sings above them. She gropes in her bag for sunglasses, and wishes she had a hat. Grasshoppers chirp, and butterflies flit about them, as they climb towards Coddy Holes and the scrubby white glimmer of the ridge of limestone, towards a low scattering of silver birch and bracken and gorse and hawthorn.

  There are wild roses in the hedgerow. The air is clear. As they ascend, the view extends, across the valley, towards the white limestone castle and the town. Along this track Faro’s grandfather Joe Barron walked a hundred times and more, with his sisters, with Alice Vestrey, with Reggie Oldroyd, with Bessie Bawtry. If land and air may be reclaimed, may the dead live again?

  They have to climb over a stone wall, and scramble up a steep bank towards the fissure of the cave. It is hard going and Faro’s sandals are slippery. Steve goes first, and reaches an arm down towards her. She shakes her head: she’s afraid of pulling him down with her. She clings to a thorn tree, finds a footing on a limestone ledge, and is up there with him. But the last stretch, leading up to the cave itself, looks impossible. It is almost vertical, and the scree is loose. Faro stands, shades her eyes, looks doubtful.

  ‘Let’s have our sandwiches,’ suggests Steve.

  Faro nods, gratefully. It’s not that she’s not game, she knows she’d do it on her own, but she doesn’t want to get in a mess while Steve is watching. Perhaps she’ll feel better after the sandwiches.

  They are delicious. Tomato and mozzarella, cheddar and pickle, wholemeal bread. They sit on a ledge, dangling their feet, and munch. They are much favoured by their habitat, for even as they sit there a jewelled lizard suns itself upon a stone below them, and a marbled white butterfly perches upon a tough thistle-like purple hawkweed. A three-spot mutant ladybug settles on Steve’s freckled arm, and he lets it wander along through the thicket of his brown hairs. They gaze out over the valley towards the town with its roofs and treetops, and the bowl of land beyond, some of it a dry summery yellow-green, some still rawly raked. Distant Breaseborough no longer announces itself, as it once did from this vantage point, by its spreading pall of smoke. The river glints below them. To their left, where Great-Grandpa Bawtry’s Destructor once stood, is the new generator, fuelled, Steve claims, by chicken shit and chicken litter. Some think this is the last word in recycling, some think it is potentially dangerous. Beyond it, but beyond their vision, lie the little landscaped hillocks of Rose & Rose waste, where seagulls hover and squawk. These too generate electricity from municipal solid waste and landfill gas. Coal is no more, and miners mine no more, but this is still a power belt. There is talk of an anaerobic digester, but it hasn’t been built yet.

  Through his binoculars, Steve identifies a small row of houses, an end of an old terrace, perched perilously on the edge of a bit of property between Rose & Rose’s Greendump Site and the beginning of the Earth Project. This, he tells her, is Goosebutt Terrace, and it is coveted and disputed ground. It has a sitting tenant, in the form of a stubborn old woman who won’t budge. She can’t be bought out, and enjoys making herself difficult. Resistance has given her a new sense of purpose. She’s determined to outlive them all.

  Steve tells Faro about the survival of the marbled white and the grizzled skipper. She responds with a reprise of the tale of the peppered moth, which she and Steve have already discussed on the phone. Faro by now has made time to check it out on the Internet. It is true, as Seb had said (though she does not mention death’s-head Seb Jones to Steve Nieman), that there is a web site claiming that the peppered moth is on the increase in Hammervale. But then there is an awful lot of rubbish on the Internet, and this one may be just a hoax. (Perhaps Seb put it on there himself, just to annoy and entrap her?) Creationists, she tells Steve, hate the peppered moth and all it signifies. They will go to any extremes of denial to reject its humble story. Faro thinks this is short-sighted of the Creationists, for she feels that its humble story may have some hidden hope in it, instead of the ungodly and determinist despair which they believe it portends. She keeps meaning to try to write something about this one day, but perhaps it’s too big a subject for her.

  Steve says he doesn’t know much about the peppered moth, and wouldn’t know one if he saw one, so she fills him in on its evolutionary importance. He listens more intelligently, less obstructively, than Sebastian.

  She is surprised to find how well she remembers the stuff. She tells him about the history of industrial melanism, first suspected in the late nineteenth century when lepidopterists began to observe that the population of the black carbonaria form of the moth was on the increase in the north, whereas the paler typica form continued to dominate the southern woodland. Faro cannot rise to the eloquence of J. W. Tutt, who in 1896 wrote with such feeling of the vast quantities of noxious smokes, gases, fumes and impurities in the air of our manufacturing cities, of the continual deposit on fences, trees, walls, washing lines full of washing and freshly painted greenhouses. But she gives the gist of it. It is, after all, in her bones. She is her grandmother’s granddaughter. And she manages to give a good account of the self-defeating experiment of one eminent lepidopterist, attempting to test the success of the camouflage of the paler typica variety in Dorset woodland. He had released several hundred carefully bred specimens of both carbonaria and typica, and had lost nearly all of the typica. Had they been eaten or were they hiding from him? How would he know the difference? How could he tell? He wandered through the trees calling to them, but none of them answered. He retrieved or accounted for nearly one hundred percent of the carbonaria, but the pale ones—well, let’s not exaggerate, nearly all the pale ones—had simply vanished. Had they been eaten or not? Were they hiding from him in the thick lichens, were they pretending to be the pale mottled bark of the unpolluted oak and birch? The experiment had to be abandoned for lack of verifiable documentation. The moths had escaped from the laboratory, from the experiment, and from man and from bird. Good luck to them. They had flown free from the evolutionary trap. Surely there is some hope there?

  Steve likes this story. He wants to know about current theories about habitat preference. Does the white moth sit on white bark by accident or choice? Does the peppered moth seek the dusky shade?

  Nobody knows.

  Faro Gaulden and Steve Nieman are not well camouflaged, as they perch on their limestone ledge amidst the bracken and hawthorns and small holly bushes, sharing a date-and-walnut slice. Swallows swoop around them, devouring the plankton of the air. Faro and Steve would easily be spotted by an airborne or a terrestrial predator. Steve is wearing jeans and a bright red shirt, she is wearing bag
gy off-white cotton trousers and a periwinkle-blue tank top. They are visible from afar, as figures in a landscape. But there are no predators. They are safe. Nobody is trying to eat them. Nobody is trying to kill them but death itself. But death is greedy, and death is persistent. Death is not vanquished yet.

  A hawk flutters over them, as, fortified, they climb the last stretch to the cave mouth. Shall they dare to enter? Faro had barked her knee on a stone and it is bleeding slightly. Also her legs are nettled. Does she want to turn back? No, she has got this far, and now she wants to see the ancestral ledge. This time Steve has to help her. He pulls her up and together they slither down again over the brink into the darker cavern. Will there be a landslide, will they be entombed together? No, of course not. The cave is not deep, and the sliding pebbles settle. They sit together, on the subterranean shelf where Cotterhall Man had lain unobserved and alone for so long. Faro licks her finger and wipes away the drying blood from her knee wound. Steve takes her hand and gently and solemnly licks the blood from her finger. He kisses her fingers, one by one. He holds her hand in his. Steve is not the simple man he seems. He kneels down, and he kisses her wounded knee.

  Faro has so far forgotten to tell Steve the story of the strange death of Grandma Barron, as she had promised. She has been in no hurry to tell it, for she and Steve have time before them, all the time in the world. She will remember it as they climb back down the hill to her car, and treat him to a version of it. Faro is at best an unreliable narrator, so it might be wiser to follow Chrissie’s account. After all, Chrissie was there at the end.