Aldermaston

By Kate Hoyland

2121: Wading through a drowned fenland, Jean is searching for a lost village and a hillside church that appears only in dim memories of the world before it was engulfed by rising sea levels, deserts and floods. She is looking for a time capsule buried over 160 years ago, a symbol of hope for a different future.

1958: Coming of age in a drab and exhausted post-War London, Ida finds herself questioning the assumptions of her mother and her Uncle Roy. Wanting more from life, she is drawn into circles of political activism, jazz clubs, and life lived on the margins of conformist society – places where there are as many questions as there are possible answers.

Separated by decades and a planet turned upside down by climate shifts, the lives of these two women begin to draw together. As Jean closes in on the location of the time capsule and Ida prepares to take part in the first Ban the Bomb march to the nuclear weapons research centre at Aldermaston, their fates dramatically collide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cinnamon Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788641173

Kate Hoyland

Kate Hoyland is a BBC journalist turned psychologist. She was born in London and grew up in the wilds of Shropshire. Her working life has taken her all over the world, from Moscow, to Dakar, to Harbin. She has dabbled in kung fu, ukulele playing and crochet, and is happiest curled up with a cup of tea and a good book. She has a son and lives in London.

Book preview

Contents

Dedication

Jean

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Ida, 1957

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Jean, 2121

1

2

3

4

ALDERMASTON

KATE HOYLAND

Published by Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of Kate Hoyland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2021 Kate Hoyland.

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-121-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-78864-117-3

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press. Cover design by Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

The author wishes to thank the estate of Louis MacNeice for permission to quote from ‘Wolves’ — © Estate of Louis MacNeice, reprinted by permission of David Higham.

ALDERMASTON

In memory of John Hoyland

One of the first Marchers

Jean

1

2121. The Broads

I come at night, in the mists, under cover of all manner of dark things. This is my way now: to arrive at a place secretly, intimating that I have done something wrong, that my work is not fit to be seen in daylight.

My work is digging up the past. I have one helper, surly and flat-faced, more muscle than brain; a student from a rich family, unfit for other activities but by tagging along behind me entitled to the accolade ‘researcher’. I can never fully be sure of my own safety—who can be now?—so to have him with me gives me the illusion of security.

Illusions are important. Try hard enough and they can become reality.

My particular illusion is named Reece.

2

The driver is twitchy. He doesn’t like being out here on the Broads, so far beyond the city walls, so late at night. The flatlands; the waterlogged edges of the Island of Britain. The driver (she names him Twitch) grumbles a lot, though she notices he doesn’t complain about the fare. They shudder along, the car stinking of a tank full of gasoline syphoned off from dead trucks a thimbleful at a time, the fruit of years of scavenging.

They pass a dog pack roaming beyond the town walls, all skinny bodies and yellow teeth, too mangy and decrepit to be any sort of a threat; but Reece cranes his head until the town is out of sight. He picks up his screen, watches the connection fade and die, sighs, drops the screen on his lap.

After half an hour of silence, Twitch stirs into life. ‘You don’t know who you’ll meet out there. A little lady like you.’ He cranes his neck and his eyes sweep Reece, but if he has questions about why an old woman should choose such a travelling companion, he does not ask. He clicks his tongue and lapses into silence. A moment later his fingers go instinctively to the radio, twitching at the dial, finding only crackles and sweeps of air.

A half hour more and the car halts. Darkness and the rattling wind.

They unload, Reece heaving her small knapsack onto his wide shoulders and carrying the other necessary things under each arm. She looks out at the grey mist and the darkness, and the little car—despite its loose windows and grumbling driver—seems a warm and living thing, throbbing with black-market gas in its veins. It roars away, and there they stand on the empty road, she and Reece; Reece too stupid to take any action beyond holding their things, too shy to ask her what to do. There are lights in the distance. She suggests the obvious. They head towards them.

She is getting too old for this. The Broads are just that, broad and flat, and the wind scythes across them. She is wearing a thick padded coat over vests and other layers, but these aren’t enough to protect her thin skin and flaking bones. The mist is so thick that she can’t see her feet, and Reece—tramping ahead of her—is soon reduced to dark shadow and squelching footsteps.

‘Reece. Reece, what are you doing, idiot? Can’t you see I can’t keep up with you?’

He grunts an apology, turns and waits. Oh, she would rather be alone, far rather, than burdened by this lumbering reminder of her own fragility, this Boy-Man. But things are what they are. She can carry very little by herself, or not without great effort.

They continue side by side, their breath coming and leaving in unison, no words desired between them. The ground is stony and wet. They are very close to water. She can’t see it but she can hear and feel it, the looming immensity of it, the dull lazy lapping. Water soothes her, mostly; she doesn’t fear it the way others do. However, in the dark it is dangerous, and she is not a fool. She grasps the top of Reece’s arm. He flinches under her touch, but the gesture must have surprised some inner decency out of him, because he turns and asks gruffly, ‘You alright, Professor Van de Volk?’

‘Jean. Call me Jean.’

She takes his silence as non-assent.

They trudge towards the small light. She smells the water and guesses it is thick with mud and decay, choked with algae blooms and other slimy things. She has no idea what: she is an historian, not a biologist. Colleagues could tell her: Hopkins with his shiny suit and his fascination with eutrophication, the choking of waterways with algae, the draining and cleansing of blooms. A more lucrative field than hers.

They are almost at the house. Reece—her security!—falters and hangs back. Really, what use is he? There is nowhere else for them to go, the town is too far to walk back to tonight; besides, it has too many dogs circling it, and even the decrepit ones might bite. And they can’t spend the night out on the Broads: temperatures plummet after dark. If they are to be stripped of their belongings and killed once they arrive, let it be so. She is too tired to care.

She strides towards the door and raps on it with her sharp knuckles. Beside her, she hears Reece’s breath come hard. She gestures for him to step back. He may be afraid, but his size makes him threatening and she doesn’t want the occupants of the house to attack because they anticipate danger.

The door opens. She sees an eye, blue and watery. It belongs to a woman, though it is difficult to tell: on the drowned edges of Europe both men and women have taken on a pinched, hard look. The rest of the face is in shadow.

A whisper. ‘Who is it?’

‘Professor Van de Volk. I wrote to you.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. You did so. You have the papers? Identity, like?’ The voice is nervous, placating.

‘I have this.’ She pulls down her hood, showing her crumpled face and her white hair. ‘You’ve seen my picture, haven’t you?’

A pause. ‘Yes, yes. Seems alright.’ The eye focuses behind her, narrows. ‘And him?’

‘My helper, Reece. I need him, travelling as I do. You understand.’

A nod. The door closes, there are whispers. Bolts are drawn, keys unlocked. The door opens a crack. ‘Money first.’

‘Of course. Always money first.’ She hands over the agreed amount. The door opens further. ‘Please,’ she says, weary. ‘Can we just come in?’

‘Yes, Come in out of the dark.’

3

2055. A Memory of digging

Why the digging, why the fascination with rooting up the past? Most people would prefer to forget.

I remember this one time in my father’s back yard, a sunny day so soft and perfect it hardly seems real now—not in these drab days—but I lived it, so it must have been true.

Home. Our yard. My father was a man with his own obsessions, mostly centred on books—the old kind, paper and leather bindings if he could find them, and titles embossed in gold—shelves and shelves of books, and a big study with books spilling over the desk and onto the floor, and a perpetual air of disappointment hanging over him, a knowledge of being undervalued by the world.

My mother was from New Orleans. She was a woman with tastes and expectations beyond my father’s means, or so I believed then, and the belief comforted me. She left us both when I was three years old. My father never spoke of her, though I had the misfortune to be her spitting image and thus the inheritor (in his eyes) of all of her sins. Mostly, I did my best to stay out of his way. Not that he was a cruel man, or did not love me—he loved me, I guess, in his way—but he had his own ideas of how children should be, and females in general, and I didn’t match up to those. We spent little time with each other apart from at mealtimes, and when he spoke to me then it was to mutter rules, or to express irritation if I forgot them. ‘Jean, don’t chew,’ he’d say, and I would pause, my mouth full, wondering how I was going to swallow my lumps of potato down whole. Once he’d said his piece, he’d generally hunch back over his own meal, shutting me out of existence, his knife clip-clopping on the plate, and I would take my chance to work my jaws quickly, as quietly as I could, and swallow a tiny bit at a time.

Anyway, I was in the yard after supper this one day. I guess it was July, the beauty of the evening making me doubt my memory, because were days ever so perfect, clouds so pink, daylight so heavy with gold? I’d gone out to look at shadows and sit in the dirt and listen to crickets. Our house was lovely, a 1930s beauty with cracked mosaic tiles on the floor and little nooks to hide in. My father had a porch swing and he’d sit on the swing on those summer evenings and drink something out of a cool glass with a sheaf of herbs sticking out of it, as content in his way as he ever could be. He had a beard that was going greyish, and wore little round glasses and had wrinkles around his eyes, and when I dared a look at him, I saw the habitual annoyance and frustration in his face stripped away and an unguardedness exposed underneath, a rawness to his disappointment which I couldn’t understand (I was a child) but which I liked better than the wound-up tick-tock of his public face. In simple terms, he looked sad, I guess.

He was on the swing above me and I heard its creak, creak, and I heard him sipping his drink, and I felt safe and sound and my mind was wandering far away. There is comfort even in the sight of an oppressor, which is how I thought of my father much of the time. I was squatting in the dust, wearing short pants and a big grubby old vest (a hand-me-down of his) and I was scraping at the dirt with a stick. Our yard was scruffier than that of most of the neighbouring houses, with big old weeds growing at its edges and mounds of dirt which I’d shaped with my own hands, and in my mind these mounds were houses and castles and mountains and sometimes lakes I made out of lemonade which dried into sweet-smelling mud. And now, because of the time of the evening and the golden heaviness of twilight, the mounds were full of voluptuous dark shadows and these were wonderful to me.

Our neighbourhood was a good one, just on the cusp of turning bad. A couple of nearby lots were empty, but the inhabited ones were neat and obsessively tended, and while people talked about moving away, that talk was mostly followed with a laugh and a catch-throated joke, the claim that things would surely turn around. And the heat grew, and the dust rose, and people got mad, not at their neighbours but at nameless others who they figured out must somehow be to blame.

I watched a bug crawling up a dirt mound and followed it with my stick, not poking it but encouraging it to move faster, which it did, my heart beating hard and my mouth watering, the little bit of cruelty tasting good. I watched the bug speed up, running in crazy circles and then scampering down the hill towards the lemonade lake. It reached the lake and crawled into a tunnel I hadn’t seen. The earthworks around the bug caved in. Where had the thing gone? Could it live underground? I had questions.

Creak, creak, went the swing.

I began to dig with my fingers. Oh, I’d find out where that thing went. I couldn’t see it so I dug further, under the sticky lemonade mud to where the earth was dry and cracked and under that to where it became dark and damp again, raising a mountain of earth, my fingernails black, my whole fierce little being puffing with effort, wanting to pee but not wanting to go until I’d found that stupid old bug. I wiggled on the ground and my fingers hit something hard.

I took my stick and moved it slowly, probing, breath rasping. The thing I’d hit was too smooth to be a rock. I began to dig in a more concentrated way, focussing on shifting the earth around the hard shape, hunched over the hole so that my father couldn’t see what I was doing. I saw a glitter of gold. I cast the stick aside and used my hands again, pinching a little piece of dirt away at a time until my nails scraped on the smooth gold surface. I levered my fingers around the edges and eased it out. A box with a lid, shut with a catch. Pure gold, I thought then, though I guess it was probably brass. I tucked it inside my vest. Glancing at my father sitting above me, I began to fill in the hole. I spread the sand wide to mask all signs of digging. When this was done to my satisfaction, I climbed up the steps to the porch and walked past my father with my arms folded across my middle, the box pressing onto the bare flesh under my vest, nuzzling my stomach and my bursting bladder. Oh, the lovely cold of it.

I ran to the bathroom and relieved myself, sighing with pleasure. Then I grabbed a knife from the kitchen, scampered up to my room and tipped the box onto my bed, dirt and all. I eased the knife under the catch. It broke easily. Inside was a necklace of different coloured jewels. I held my treasure up to the window, and the jewels sparkled in the light of the just-risen moon. They were made of glass, I know that now, but I didn’t know it then: then, they were priceless, astonishing, buried there especially for me under our yard by my mother, for her own darling daughter.

Whom she must have loved most of all.

4

The family are dredgers. They make their living cleaning choked waterways, draining silt, cutting reeds and managing the weed beds. Consequently, the water around their house is clearer and purer than in other parts of the Broads, and for their pains they are rewarded with the chance to fish a few bloated perch from the flooded canals, and cut peat and sell it as fuel in the town, alongside the fish. It’s not an easy living; but they get by, or so it seems to Jean, her eyes sweeping the neat parlour. The little stone house has been in their family for centuries, the dredgers say. They, and a few stubborn others on the Broads, refuse to leave, though the flood waters draw nearer every year.

They are shy and welcoming once they have gotten over their fear. They usher the travellers in, bolting the door behind them. Reece looks around, cumbersome in the tiny house, clasping his hands as if he’s about to start some business meeting. Jean shushes him, though he has not yet begun to speak.

The dredgers feed them and don’t ask questions, showing a lack of curiosity which Jean, in her exhaustion, welcomes. She and Reece sit at the kitchen table. Their faces grow hot and red from the peat fire.

The couple are younger than they appeared at first sight, in their late twenties maybe, or thirties at most. Jean observes a discarded wooden toy car and a blanket on the floor, and assumes a child or two. The parents’ faces are lined and shiny pink, weathered, spiders’ webs of wrinkles fanning from their eyes, she guesses from squinting against all that wind. After dinner, the woman sits in shadows near the fire, her face turned away as if ashamed of her faded looks. The man is friendlier. He stays at the table and drinks barley coffee with Jean and Reece.

‘You come a long way,’ he says, by way of opening the conversation. ‘We didn’t think as you would come. So far, and so little to see.’

‘I hope it’ll be worthwhile.’

‘Digging, you said?’ He raises his eyebrows, trying not to show too much interest.

‘That’s my job.’ She gives him a small smile, playing the harmless old lady.

‘So far, to dig in a bit of old mud.’ He cracks his knuckles.

‘We’re glad you came,’ interjects the woman. ‘We didn’t believe it. All that money.’ She shakes her head.

‘We’re glad of company too, like,’ adds the man, glancing at his wife.

Jean watches them both and runs her fingers through her hair. She can feel it standing on end in the heat, a silvery halo. She doubts very much the dredgers are glad of their company. ‘I’m looking for a village called Alethorp. Have you heard of it?’

‘No.’ Without hesitation.

She takes out her map and points. ‘Here. That’s where it would have been. Around here. Before the flood. See? The coast was further out then.’

The man and the woman exchange glances. ‘No. Nothing by that name.’ The man looks closely, his finger lingering over the spot which Jean had indicated.

‘A hill,’ she insists. ‘There should be a long flat hill, well, a slope really, not high. It used to rise up to sand dunes a mile or so from the shore, but the sea is right behind it now, I would guess.’ Her heart flutters, and she tries to keep the urgency out of her voice. ‘That’s what I’m looking for, where I want to dig. Do you know it?’

‘There’s a hill,’ the dredger man says, uncertainly, and he glances at the woman again. ‘Just before the sea. But the flood—’

‘You’ve been there?’

The man grimaces. ‘I don’t have no reason to go.’

Jean notes this is not quite the answer to her question. ‘We could walk to it, do you think? Is the water low enough?’

‘You see, there are other places. Further from the water, right? The flood, see—’

‘How far have you been up that way?’

He points vaguely to an area about a mile from the hill. A muscle that has tensed in Jean’s jaw loosens. ‘How long does it take?’

‘Five. Six miles. So, maybe, an hour, maybe two.’ He frowns again. ‘But you won’t find nothing. Water, and then more water, and then the sea. That’s about it.’

Jean looks out of the window at the inky outline of the marshes. She sees a long flat line, the sky a faintly lighter line above, the heavens dotted with stars; all of it fading into immeasurable distance. Patches of wet everywhere, mirrors to the moon, everything damp and decomposing and descending into the sea.

Reece slurps his coffee and yawns. The woman jumps up. ‘I’ll show you where you’re sleeping.’ She colours, stuttering over her next sentence. ‘We didn’t know you was two, did we? So, you’ll have to sleep in baby’s room,’ she says, looking at Jean, ‘If you don’t mind, like. Sorry. We have one room for him.’ Indicating Reece. ‘And we’ll sleep downstairs, here.’

‘I’m sorry to put you out.’

The man shakes his head. ‘The fire’s warm, isn’t it?’

‘We may be here for a week. Maybe more.’

‘We’ll be out most of the day. Working. And you—’

‘Yes. We’ll be working too.’

He nods and rubs his blunt fingers along his face, a gesture redolent of deep weariness. ‘But— I don’t know. There’s the water that way, and the mud flats, see, and most people are afraid of those.’ His eyes shift away from Jean.

Reece puts down his cup and blurts, ‘They said there are men out here, people who’ll kill you, who’ll cut your throat when you’re asleep or something. That’s what they said.’

‘Reece.’

The man shrugs. ‘Dog packs wandering on the marshes, bogeymen who’ll slit your throat, vagrants and migrants ready to rob you and that. Is that it?’ His hands trace the patina of the table. Rough fingers, smooth wood. ‘You afraid, are you?’

‘It’s just what they said.’ Reece falters, awkward.

‘They think they’re better off in the town, ’cause they’re further from the water. The dogs stay nearer town, mostly, matter of fact. More food. It’s rare they come this far. Though some do.’

The woman flaps her hands, agitating the air. ‘You’re tired, must be. Will I show you where you’re to sleep?’

A cloak of immense weariness wraps itself around Jean. Faces melt, the walls and ceiling move closer together. The orange glow of the fire expands, a living thing. Who is to know whether this harassed couple don’t keep knives to slit strangers’ throats? She’s heard of worse, and these two are nervy and browbeaten. Ah, well. So be it. She flashes Reece a glance. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We’ll sleep now.’

She stumbles as the woman leads her up the stairs. She feels her hands, small and much stronger than she had expected, hard against her back. ‘It’s alright, babe,’ the woman whispers, as if Jean really was a baby. ‘It’s alright. You can sleep.’

5

2060. I am twelve years old and about to grow up

My name is Jean Van de Volk. I am one of the few who can still remember.

People tell me—more frequently now than ever—that I have been lucky. I spent the worst part of the second American dustbowl sheltered from things that others lived through: the violence, the dislocation, the awful dread. News of it filtered through to me only elliptically, became background music for the most part, incidental to what, for me, was the main story. My life.

Later they would call it the Crisis, but we didn’t know, then, that it was a crisis that we were living through. At what point does a series of unrelated events become a crisis? A crop failure one year? Drought or disease the next? Brownouts were common, but that was OK: they were easy to get used to, and it was kind of fun to light candles at home and cook on gas. No-one told us that the brownouts were signs of an energy system creaking and breathing its last, or that crop failures one year might mean hunger down the line. Food could be imported, could it not? And for those who had money, there would always be the things that money can buy. We scorned the crazies who saw it all as one big plot, and as for the uneasy sense that things were out of kilter—well, even that can become routine, because living through it, all kinds of stuff becomes normal, just as any life is normal for those who live through it.

Everything before my twelfth birthday, I look on now as a golden age. Despite, or maybe because of, my father’s lack of interest in me, I had a freedom which I was only able to appreciate once it was gone. I learned to exist in a way which seemed not to bother him: I played in the yard, I dug, I wandered around the house while he worked and read and sighed. Alongside my physical freedom, I had a certain freedom of the mind which I did not understand at the time, but which stemmed from my father’s vituperative opposition to what he called brainwarpers: that is, sources of knowledge which he did not control. ‘Do you want to be a zombie, Jean?’ He’d ask. ‘Like those other kids? You want your brain cooked till it melts?’ I complained, but only faintly. As with other things in my life, I feared what I lacked.

As time went on, I noticed that my father seemed to blame me less for the failings of all womankind, and recruit me instead as an ally; someone always on hand to hear out his complaints. He had no-one else, I guess. I encouraged this tendency, seeing quickly how much to my advantage it was.

I used to walk to school along the dusty track that led up the hill from my yard. Each year there were fewer students, and by the time I reached twelve, my breasts budding awkwardly and my legs suddenly too long, there were only ten of us in a single class, overseen by a battered and world-weary teacher who wore her hair in a bun (of all things!) and had a nervous tic in one eye; a creature ripe for my derision. I gathered stories about her for my father, carefully selecting the ones which would please him the most—or raise his ire, which amounted to the same thing.

‘Dad, we did poetry today. You know what? She’s never even heard of Tennyson.’

He put down his book, a soft measured impact on the table. ‘How so?’

‘I quoted from ‘Crossing the Bar’. Everyone ought to know that one, right?’

‘Of course. Tennyson’s hope for the end of his despair in death.’ Dad stood up and began to scan the bookshelves for the right volume, his fingertips stroking the spines.

‘Well, she didn’t know it, Mrs Teale. She didn’t have a clue. You know how you