by Neil Spring
I let go of the fence and noticed that Price was studying my face intently, but suddenly he swung round.
‘What is it?’ I asked, and held my breath as he lifted his hand, instructing silence. I heard nothing. Not even a bird.
After a few moments, he shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, without concern, and pointed up ahead. At the far end of the valley, the skyline was steepled with an ancient five-pinnacled church. ‘This way!’
There wasn’t a bird to be heard or any person to be seen. On all sides of us were steep hills, dotted with rusting tanks left out for target practice. One hill was covered with thick woodland; that must be where Sergeant Edwards had suffered his excruciating ‘accident’.
Edwards had told us that before the apparition of the boy, before the whisperings that drove him to set himself alight, he had been on a night-time training exercise. His men had vanished, he said, leaving the woods and the rest of Imber completely deserted . . .
‘Sarah, you seem most jittery this morning,’ Price commented, his voice accusatory.
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Quite sure? We don’t want old problems resurfacing, do we?’
‘Old problems?’
‘I mean with your nerves.’
I let that go. We both knew to what he was referring. ‘Lead on, Harry.’
As we rounded a corner, a military sign in red and black lettering confronted us:
NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC
DANGER!
IMBER VILLAGE AND THE CHURCH
ARE CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC
YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED
IF YOU ARE FOUND OFF THE
MAIN CARRIAGEWAY
The ‘main carriageway’ was a long, gloomy road coated in chalk dust and sprouting weeds. Thirty yards or so from the road were the cottages, with roofs of corrugated iron and red-brick walls, blackened in patches from explosions. Their gardens were separated from the pavement by a wall made of mud and rubble and lime.
There was no sign to tell me so, but I knew this was Imber’s main street. A road of ruins, barely recognisable.
Except I did recognise it, because I had seen it before. Eighteen years ago, on a snowy afternoon. Back then it had been a bustling street lined with market stalls and thriving with life.
I placed my hand against the wall and closed my eyes, picturing Father standing right next to me, his hand in mine. Perhaps Price thought me eccentric, but what did I care? For a moment, I was a child again, right back in 1914, watching some of the villagers bury one of their own.
I heard again my father’s voice:
‘Sarah, my angel, if ever we are parted, if you should find yourself alone, then close your eyes and remember this place. I’ll always be here.’
Reaching for the memory was like trying to catch the drifting snowflakes that Saturday afternoon. In a vague and confused way, I saw myself as a young girl, remembered the sadness on Father’s face as he took my hand and looked down at me with all the interminable pain a parent feels as they are about to be parted from their child. I’d silently wished for him to tell me why he’d driven me all this way to Wiltshire.
He’d known the village would be taken over by the army. He’d known he was to be posted here for training. And he kept those truths from us. But why had he brought me here before the village was evacuated and his training had begun? Was it to keep a memory of me, his cherished daughter, with him?
Eyes open, I gazed at a settlement transformed. There was the low stone wall that skirted the hilly churchyard. There, the schoolhouse, the ruins of the village pub. And in the far distance, the rotting timbers of the old blacksmith’s forge.
‘I was here, Harry. Before the war. I stood right here, with Father.’
Price caught my gaze, and looked away quickly, almost as if . . .
‘Harry? You knew my father trained in this village? How?’
Price nodded, looking shifty. ‘I didn’t want to upset you. I couldn’t be sure it was him, but his name appears in small letters, under the photograph on the wall in the commander’s office.’ He met my gaze and I felt myself go numb in the wind whipping around us.
I gazed at the track, the pitted stone cottages and the low stone wall, and allowed a perfect stillness to hold me. A silence spanning decades.
‘Sarah?’
In that dreamy moment, it seemed to me that a fragment of the precious time I had shared with Father was still right here, amidst these ruins.
Then the deep, rich note of the church bell rang out. Low. Slow. Melancholy.
‘Good Lord!’ Price sounded thoroughly startled.
He looked towards the high wire fence that barricaded the church, past the Out of Bounds signs and the rows of grey headstones, to the lonely bell tower.
‘A funeral bell,’ he said, with a mixture of intrigue and wonderment.
That made me think again of the funeral in the snow on this very street, eighteen years ago. Curiosity and a little fear crept into me. ‘Harry, we have to get inside the church.’
The bell tolled over the deserted village as Price led the way, the wind tugging at my mud-streaked skirt as we stalked towards the ten-foot-high chain-link fence that shut off the churchyard from the rest of Imber, making it look sinister and dangerous. Just before the fence, nailed to an elm tree, was a battered sign that read, in white letters, ‘Consecrated ground’.
Quickly, we passed through a black wrought-iron gate, which surprisingly was not locked, and walked up a steep hill, into the churchyard. On all sides of us, among the shrubbery and straggly trees, there were crooked gravestones, some so ancient they were in danger of being swallowed by the spongy earth.
Before we could get to the church door, more bells began to toll, as if warning of imminent danger, and Prize froze. On his face, quiet caution replaced certainty and arrogance. He rubbed his hand against the side of his head, saying nothing, his eyes flicking distrustfully between the bell tower and the church door.
‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted, starting forward, reaching for the great wooden door.
And just as his hand grabbed the black door handle, the bells ceased.
As their echo fell away, there followed a vast and hollow silence. I shivered. Neither of us spoke. It was an eerie moment.
‘Harry, look,’ I said, and drew his attention to the faded note pinned to the door. Handwritten. Black ink. I was glad the military had had the presence of mind to protect it from the rain and wind with a clear cover sheet.
‘One day, we, the people of Imber, will come back. Until then, time will honour this place, and we hope you do too. Our homes will remain homes. And when men are free and the war is won, Imber will live again.’
The words of the family of the last resident to leave Imber: the blacksmith, Silas Wharton, found by his wife slumped over his anvil, crying like a baby when he heard he had to leave. Silas Wharton, who vanished during the evacuation.
‘Now then, let’s see,’ Price said, fishing in his coat pocket and producing the jagged church key. He wriggled it into the lock. The door shook, but didn’t open. He tried again, with no success. ‘Blasted man! That warden gave us the wrong key!’
Maybe. Or perhaps something in there doesn’t want us to come in.
‘I’m sure you’re right, Harry,’ I said, though I could have sworn I felt the smallest chill brush my neck. ‘Let’s try the bell tower instead.’
We needn’t have bothered; the path to the base of the bell tower was completely obstructed by thick underbrush, and judging from the light masonry forming the shape of an arched doorway, this entrance had been bricked up long ago.
The peal of the bells haunted me as I followed Price back towards the churchyard exit. As I traced that winding, overgrown path, what troubled me most was not the bells themselves, resonating in the cold morning air, or the mystery of wh
o was ringing them, but the childhood memory of the funeral their tolling had awakened for me. The palpable, sinking sense of loss.
I could see them at the corner of the low stone wall – a huddled group of mourners, shadows in my fragile memory. A young woman, sobbing with grief. Her husband, grim-faced, at her side. How old was the child they had laid to rest?
I was struck by a possibility that seemed so feasible, so probable, I was surprised it hadn’t come to me earlier: was it Oscar Hartwell and his wife I had seen attending the funeral all those years ago?
And what were the villagers thinking as they had watched the casket being lifted from its bed of flowers? Why had some of them looked so suspicious, so afraid?
I had not thought of these questions since I was a girl, but something about the memory whispered to me that there was more to the story, waiting for me here.
And if that was right, I fully intended to find out what it was.
– 14 –
SEEN AND UNSEEN
I was surprised by how quickly we lost track of time that Saturday morning. Except ‘lost track’ isn’t quite right. As we moved along moss-spotted paths, intruders in this secluded valley, haunting the once bustling streets of thatched, half-timbered buildings, it was more as if time had slowed down.
As bizarre as it sounds, that is what I felt. Time had blurred, as though what was left of the village existed in a reality that was entirely separate from the outside world.
Silence reigned, brooding, biding its time.
I tried pushing the thought away from me as Price took out his camera and snapped a few photographs.
As we made our way amongst the ragged houses, I kept remembering what Commander Williams had told us: of phantom balls of light moving through the ruins; fires dancing around buildings before fading away. In the cold light of day, none of that seemed remotely plausible. But even if there was no truth in those reports, Imber’s shell-damaged buildings still looked far too dangerous to enter; the roof over the nearest cottage had almost completely fallen in.
Still, that didn’t mean we weren’t curious to get a better look.
So we explored a little around the nearby cottages, marvelling at the discarded personal belongings long ago left behind by vanished residents.
On a patch of barren scrubland barricaded with Keep Out signs were two farm wagons, once loaded with coal and corn and pushed by calloused hands but now rotten. Forgotten.
Outside the Bell Inn, we found grimy fragments of broken beer bottles protruding jaggedly from the earth.
The wind stalked us as we approached the old schoolhouse and peered in through a shattered window. What we saw inside was unsettling: a crumbling classroom, with names above the pegs. Tattered, faded workbooks, scrawled pictures on the walls.
I felt sad gazing at those relics, and a powerful sense of disconnectedness. Absence. It was as if we were looking into a parallel reality, another time.
As Price took another couple of photographs of the classroom, I remembered the blacksmith who had worked and lived here and vanished after the evacuation. Silas Wharton.
I turned and looked across the road at the remains of the blacksmith’s forge. I pictured him now, hearing the news, his face crestfallen, totally stunned. Then, hunched forward over his anvil, with his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. A broken man.
We were told that after the evacuation of Imber, this poor soul had disappeared, without any word to his family or friends. Why had he left his family behind? And why had no one seen him leave?
A more disturbing possibility was that the blacksmith had ended his own life.
That seemed likely, given that he was reportedly devastated at losing his home. But if he had committed suicide here on the range, where was the body? Hundreds of soldiers had trained in Imber. If there was a body out here, surely someone would have found it by now.
These questions played on my mind as Price looked back at the church tower.
I could tell from his creased brow that he was still troubled by the mystery of the tolling bells. So was I. But it also made me think of his earlier reference to my ‘nerves’, how he had tried once to help me relax using hypnotism. Maybe what I needed now was to recreate that sense of calm, and the mental focus it would bring.
‘Harry, I’m going back to the churchyard. I’d like a few moments alone.’
Price stared at me questioningly. Then, with a curt nod, he muttered, ‘Don’t wander off.’
Leaving Price to take more photographs, I returned to the crumbling churchyard. From here, standing amongst the swaying grass, I had a totally unimpaired view of the high-sloped valley and a perfect sense of its desolation. Feeling a deep sadness, I looked out over the village, the pitted remains of the many tiny cottages, their only purpose now to help men learn to fight and to die. Monuments to the horror of war.
I tried to imagine Imber as it had been before this desertion. Gardens crossed by lines of clothes hanging out to dry on washing day. On the air, the bleating of sheep, horse hooves clip-clopping through the lanes. The mill wheel on the horizon turning its daily grind as chimneys breathed tendrils of smoke into the Wiltshire sky and smartly attired gentlemen played cricket on the Barley Field.
Nothing now. Not even the distant din of agricultural equipment ploughing the fields.
Just silence. Heavy. Oppressive.
I glimpsed something then, a quick movement at the very edge of my field of vision. There were enough trees in the churchyard; it might easily have been a branch stirring on the wind . . .
I looked to the great elm tree at the far end of the churchyard and saw, in the shadow cast by its overhanging branches, an ornate memorial stone fashioned from smooth white marble in the shape of a lamb. On either side of the lamb were two stone urns.
Something told me there was only one family in Imber who could have afforded such a monument.
With weather-worn angels looming on all sides of me, I crossed the churchyard to examine the impressive monument, and wasn’t surprised to find I was right.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF PIERRE HOWISON HARTWELL
APRIL 1925 – OCTOBER 1930
SON OF OSCAR ANDREW HARTWELL
OF IMBER COURT
AND MARIE HARTWELL
OUR LITTLE SOLDIER
There were other graves beside this one, a row of three simple headstones. Each made of concrete, now weathered and spotted with moss.
Stepping nearer the plots, I stumbled on the uneven ground. It seemed to be collapsing around the graves. Crouching, I carefully noted the names on each:
Lillian. Beatrice. Rosalie.
Remembrances of the funeral, all those years ago, drifted into my thoughts: the upright man in the black hat waiting with his wife at the entrance to the churchyard. Hartwell had lost four children. The deaths stretched back as far as 1895, which, if my estimation of his age had been accurate, meant Hartwell was probably somewhere in his mid-twenties when he first became a father. Lillian had been his first, and according to the headstone, she had been stillborn. Hartwell’s first wife had passed away from complications soon after. With Marie he had Beatrice, who had survived until she was two, and Rosalie, who had also died, a little older, and was buried on the eve of the Great War.
My earlier suspicions were correct: it had to be her funeral we had witnessed. The thought came to me then: it wasn’t a funeral my father had brought me to see that wintry morning at the outbreak of war, but even so we had witnessed a funeral, and not just any funeral, but that of Rosalie Hartwell. That had to be significant, didn’t it? Or was it a mere coincidence?
No. If it was a coincidence then it was a colossal one. What about synchronicity, then: meaningful coincidence? In a place as timeless and as battle-scarred as Imber, that seemed more likely to me. The universe’s peculiar way of binding my father and me together, entwined by events p
ast and present, and those yet to come. Yes. If I had never believed in synchronicity, I think I believed in it now.
But looking at Rosalie’s simple headstone, next to her brother’s ornate memorial, I was puzzled.
I thought again of my father, once standing at my side, here in this village.
I thought of the dead children in the ground and the child to whom I had given birth.
And I wondered what my father might have said if he had survived the Great War; if I had been brave enough to confide in him the truth about my secret child.
Suddenly a dam, carefully constructed, broke in me and I wept. For Oscar Hartwell’s children, taken before their time. For their mother’s loss. For my loss – my father and my little boy, gone.
I heard a noise behind me – feet crunching on gravel – so I plucked a handkerchief from my sleeve and hastily wiped my eyes. Turning, I expected to see Price on the path.
‘Harry?’
No one in sight.
No sign of any gravel path either. If ever there had been a gravel path in this churchyard, it had long since been buried under the deep bed of weeds.
The silence thickened, became deep and absolute. I remained next to the tomb, half-expecting the church bells to sound their mournful toll, and resisted the urge to run away.
But there were no more footsteps. No sign of anyone. And now I had some idea how Sergeant Edwards must have felt when his men disappeared in the woods. I’d been thinking about Edwards and the whispers he claimed to have heard ever since we left Westdown Camp. And now I’d had my own anomalous experience here in Imber: the footsteps, the tolling of the bells . . .
I had sensed there could be some truth in Gregory Edwards’ claim to have heard women whispering to him near here, goading him to set himself on fire, and now that possibility seemed ever more likely. And Sergeant Edwards hadn’t just heard whisperings; he had witnessed a wandering child, maybe even the same child I had encountered at the side of the road bordering the woods . . . Was it the child I heard behind me just now?
I turned with wonder, and some fear, to the marble memorial next to me. Just five years old when he died, two years ago . . .
