Bears of England Page 6

  ‘He does,’ Stooley was reported to have told him, ‘but it doesn’t bother him.’ Then he turned the fellow around and asked him for more specifics regarding the caves.

  The landowner led the way across the fields towards the pothole’s entrance, all the while denigrating in the most vigorous terms the handful of divers who had already spurned the job.

  ‘They’re all too nervous about getting their pipes caught on the rocks,’ he said, as if concern about having enough air to breathe was an unmanly sort of thing.

  ‘There’s the two caves up front,’ he said, ‘neither of which is anything special, and then just wather.’ The word ‘water’, pronounced thus, gave it an extra splashiness. ‘I wants to know what’s on t’other side.’

  Derbyshire, the landowner informed Stooley, was famous for its underground chasms and chambers. And he was quite determined that beyond the flooded cave, there should be chasms and chambers of the highest quality. When they reached the entrance to the cave Stooley happened to ask what he planned to do about the water-filled cave, if his hopes for those beyond were found to be justified.

  ‘Well,’ he announced, quite casually, ‘I’d just blast an ’ole reet through it.’

  Huxley was standing nearby and looked up, to see if the landowner was joking. It seemed he wasn’t. In fact, the landowner was already describing the many gantries and catwalks he’d commission, for the many paying visitors he expected to file through. Stooley happened to glance over at Huxley. He was still staring at their client as if he was a complete lunatic.

  Again, before the work commenced Stooley took Huxley aside and gave him a few private instructions. The landowner noted how Stooley raised a flattened hand and made a dipping motion, presumably to explain how he was going to have to drop down into the water, before coming up into the cave beyond. Then he fitted the pipes, tightened the bolts and led Huxley over towards the hole.

  Stooley lit the phosphorous lamp and fastened a rope to the canvas belt around Huxley’s waist. The previous evening they had tied their four longest ropes together, to cover all eventualities. Three sharp tugs from Huxley and Stooley would do his best to try and drag him out.

  Stooley worked the pump’s wheel himself and watched as the ground slowly swallowed his colleague. The entrance to the caves was nothing but a small slit in the field. Once inside, Huxley lifted his lamp and carefully made his way through the first cave, then into a second. The lower section was flooded with water, which looked as black as oil. Huxley carried on, into the cold water, and must’ve dropped twenty feet or more down a bank of shale before the ground levelled out again; the phosphorous lamp illuminated the rock’s low ceiling and he began to climb the bank of shale on the other side.

  The first cave Huxley came out into was wreathed in ferns and lilies. The next seemed to extend a quarter-mile to left and right, like an underground ballroom. The third chamber had a waterfall in it – a narrow jet of spring water that fanned out in a spray so fine that it fell as mist on the rocks a hundred feet below. The fourth was a maze of stalagmites.

  Huxley advanced like an Edwardian astronaut. He went as far as his rope would allow. Then he sat on a rock and looked about him. He sat and looked about him for quite some time.

  It just about goes without saying that bears and caves have a certain affinity. Perhaps this is why Huxley was so repulsed by the idea of someone blasting his way through all that rock and having a steady queue of people marching through such a magnificent place.

  When he finally emerged a good half an hour later the landowner headed straight over towards him and was tapping on his little circular window before Stooley could insert himself between the two of them. Stooley insisted he remove the helmet a little way off, without interference – then got his spanner on the case.

  The helmet was lifted off and the landowner watched as the two of them gesticulated wildly at one another. He wondered if some earlier accident had perhaps robbed the diver of his speech or hearing.

  But when, a couple of minutes later, Stooley strode back over to the landowner he had a forlorn expression on his face.

  ‘He reckons … as you say … that it’s just water,’ he said. ‘Just water. Then solid rock.’

  For the landowner it was a bitter pill to swallow. But that particular moment in time has extra significance in that it could be said to pinpoint the beginning of the end of Huxley and Stooley’s relationship. Driving back to their digs that afternoon the air was thick with resentment. Stooley strongly suspected that there were indeed more caves down there, beyond the water – fancy chasms and chambers which they might have been gainfully employed blasting their way through to for months on end. Instead, those same months would be spent driving up and down the country, exhausted, chasing nothing but the occasional day’s work. Stooley managed to keep a lid on it for the best part of twenty minutes before finally exploding.

  ‘You used every last inch of that rope,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the road for a second. ‘Every damned inch of it.’

  *

  Their next couple of jobs were nothing special: a few underwater repairs to the docks down at Harwich and some work on a stretch of the Leeds–Liverpool canal. Then they received a letter from Winchester Cathedral. Apparently, the crypt had flooded and a preliminary investigation had revealed that the foundations actually consisted of great slabs of beech, which were so thoroughly rotten that the whole building threatened to capsize, like some vast stone ship, into the fields of Hampshire.

  Stooley and Huxley pitched up within twenty-four hours and it was Stooley’s private opinion that there was enough work there to keep them going for a good couple of years – maybe longer, if they dragged their feet. But they were still formally assessing the situation on that first morning and Huxley was forty feet beneath the south transept on only his third descent when Stooley fatally took his eye off the ball.

  He’d been staring out towards the water meadows – dreaming of making enough money to buy a house down here and maybe a little boat to go with it … and meeting some local girl and settling down … and spending his Sundays sitting on some sunny porch … and eating bread and cheese, laced with fresh watercress … and maybe taking his young wife out on his boat at midnight for a bit of a canoodle … when the tug on the rope yanked him out of his reverie.

  He’d been rowing instead of pumping. When he looked over at the main dial the arrow lay flat against the pin. Stooley started pumping again – madly pumping – and had the levels back up in less than ten seconds, but he knew better than anyone the possible consequences of his error. As he pumped he wondered whether he might have killed Huxley. Or given him brain damage. But two minutes later, Huxley appeared, fairly brimming with life. Stooley unfastened the bolts, lifted the helmet and still had a hold of it when Huxley floored him with a right hook – or, as the observers noted, not so much a hook as a sweep of an outstretched arm, but with sufficient force to send Stooley and the helmet flying a good ten feet.

  Clearly, a company’s professional reputation only suffers when its principal operators are seen punching and wrestling with each other on consecrated ground, and within the hour they were on their way. The contract was eventually awarded to one William Walker. His work among the flooded foundations of Winchester Cathedral would make him something of a minor celebrity, which did nothing but add to the bitterness already gnawing away deep in Stooley’s gut.

  *

  Ethel Braithwaite was long on years, but short on inches. In her prime she barely cleared four foot eleven, but past the age of seventy, it seemed, every year did nothing but diminish her more.

  ‘The old girl’s shrinking,’ announced Ned, her youngest grandson. ‘If she keeps this up we’ll be burying her in a Weetabix box.’

  Within a month he was rueing such flippancy. And if her coffin wasn’t quite as small as he’d predicted it wasn’t much bigger, and might easily have been mistaken for that of a child. Henry Huxley carried it down the shore of the Mad
dingly Reservoir. He could have tucked it under one arm without too much trouble, but for dignity’s sake Jim Stooley had shown him how to hold it out in front of him. As always, Huxley was kitted out in his diving suit, the only difference being the spade tucked down the back of his belt.

  He walked with measured step into the first few feet of water. This was no time to be tripping or slipping about. The coffin may have been modest but it was a fair old weight, for, as well as Mrs Braithwaite, it contained a dozen bricks to give it some ballast and help it stay where it was put.

  The vicar sat bobbing in the shallows, flanked by two of the younger Braithwaites and their mother. In the boat next to him another pair sat solemnly cranking the pump, under Stooley’s supervision. A third sat over the oars. The remaining mourners were divided between four other rowing boats.

  They watched as the deep-sea diver carefully waded into the water. When he was up to his waist Huxley let the weight of the coffin take it under. He carried on as the last bubbles of air came up from it. And a minute later he and Ethel were out of sight, with just the air pipe trailing after them.

  After a moment’s grace, Jim Stooley pointed out across the reservoir. The rowers leaned forward, then pulled back on the oars. And as Huxley carried on, down into the darker, colder water, the six boats came slowly after and over him.

  It had been Ethel’s dying wish that she be buried alongside her husband – the kind of request which ordinarily would have not been too hard to accommodate. But it had been ten years since the Braithwaites, along with thirty other families, had been removed from their homes, given a small cheque for their troubles, then watched as their village was effectively drowned. They saw the streets where they had played as children rush with water and their homes slowly slip from view. And the church where they had been married and where their children had been christened slowly sank beneath the water, until only the spire stood proud of it. Then the weathervane. Then that too was gone.

  Now here she was again, at her own passing. The first few spots of rain fell among the mourners and half a dozen umbrellas sprung into bloom. One of Ethel’s daughters held hers over the vicar. Jim Stooley had his viewing-box in the water and when his head wasn’t buried in it, monitoring Huxley’s rather stately progress, he was glancing over at the pressure gauges. He had no intention of risking another beating like the one he’d had in Winchester. The bloody lunatic had very nearly broken his neck. If he ever made another mistake of that sort of order, thought Stooley, he’d better go the whole hog and make sure he didn’t come back up at all.

  The vicar sat hunched over his damp little book. His words came out of him in a low drone, like an incantation. Down below, the drizzle made not the slightest difference. The place was locked in a perpetual gloom. Wherever Huxley looked the view was vague and unsteady, like a world unconvinced of its own existence. He’d been given the most rudimentary co-ordinates and now did his level best to carry the coffin in the right direction. But he had walked for a good quarter of a mile and the air pipe didn’t have much play left in it and he was beginning to lose heart when his boots finally struck solid ground. He looked down and saw cobbles – mossy cobbles, with weed sprouting in between. And as he advanced a dry-stone wall took shape to his right and, beyond it, the silhouette of a row of cottages. The next minute he reached the high street. A minute later the church spire loomed up ahead.

  One of the cemetery gates was open. The other had broken free of its top hinge and leaned back, at an awkward angle. Up above, Jim Stooley studied the scene through his viewing-box.

  ‘He’s there,’ he said, his words bouncing around in his box. ‘He’s at the graveyard.’ And the other boats slowly paddled over to that patch of water where Jim Stooley was looking in.

  Now, underwater digging can be a tricky business. Having taken some time to locate Stanley Braithwaite’s headstone, Huxley gently placed his wife beside him, pulled out his spade and set to work. But every shovelful he took up became a cloud of dirt, some of which chose to settle, but much of which seemed to stay more or less where it was, until Huxley all but disappeared from view.

  It took him a while to devise a way of lifting the earth without causing too much disturbance, and a great deal of very careful digging to create a hole deep enough to take Ethel’s modest box. Huxley raised his head and looked up at the reservoir’s surface – could just about make out the bottom of six boats drifting there. He took hold of the rope and gave it a single, sharp tug. Stooley saw the rope twitch out of the corner of his eye. He nodded at the vicar.

  ‘Right, off you go,’ he said.

  The vicar didn’t much care to be spoken to in this manner. On such occasions, as indeed in life in general, he was accustomed to being the man in charge. But his irritation was outweighed by his anxiety about being out on the water. As a boy he’d very nearly drowned on a boating trip in Yorkshire and ever since had done his utmost to keep as far away from boats as possible. At this moment in time he wanted nothing more than to have the whole thing over and done with and to be sitting back at home with a cup of tea, in front of the fire.

  ‘We are gathered here this morning,’ he told the attending Braithewaites, ‘to commit to the earth …’ then faltered as he looked around at all the water. He shook his head and carried on. ‘… Ethel Braithwaite – friend, neighbour and much-loved family member …’

  Down on the reservoir bed, Huxley waited for roughly a minute, then lifted the coffin and held it over the hole. He let the weight take hold and slowly guided it in, until Ethel was finally back at her husband’s side.

  He took up his spade and began easing the earth back over the coffin. When he was done he patted it down and stood there for a little while. He turned and looked about him, much as he’d turned and looked about him in that spectacular cave beneath the fields of Derbyshire.

  Up above, the boats were carefully turning and preparing to head back to the shore.

  ‘You go on,’ Stooley told the others. ‘We’ll be along in a minute or two.’

  Again, the vicar wasn’t particularly happy at having some grubby contractor doing all the organising, and was even less happy at having to hang about out in the middle of the reservoir for some deep-sea diver to plod back to the shore. After a couple of minutes he plucked up the courage to ask how much longer they might be called upon to wait out in the drizzle, but Stooley’s head was deep in his viewing-box.

  ‘Very murky,’ he said.

  As he was saying this, the lads who cranked away at the air pump felt the pressure suddenly plummet and the two of them went flying forward with such violence they almost fell right out of the boat.

  The needles on both gauges dropped to the left, as dead as doornails. And even as Stooley stared at them, horrified, the water between the boats began to boil. The occupants of both boats turned and watched the bubbles break the surface. Then Stooley swore and inserted his head back into his viewing-box.

  When he next looked over at the others his face was ashen. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ he said, suddenly fearing an even more brutal beating than the last one. ‘You’re all witnesses. We did everything right by the book.’

  The boys had ceased their pumping and it wasn’t long before the water merely simmered, then grew quite still, and the only thing disturbing it was the rain. Stooley hauled up the pipe until it writhed about his feet like a great eel. He lifted the ragged end and stared at it, aghast. Then dropped to his knees, put his head back in his viewing-box, but could see nothing – no movement down there at all.

  They rowed in circles for at least five minutes with nothing to show for it, then another five on top of that, until the vicar convinced them that they should return to the shore, if only to get the other boats out to bolster the search party, but the moment they reached dry land he leapt out and disappeared up the lane.

  A whole flotilla of boats rowed from one end of the reservoir to the other, each with a fellow hanging over the side, to no avail. Stooley kept imagining
Huxley emerging from the water like some monster, and each time he did so it got his heart a-thumping and made him feel very sick indeed.

  In fact, years later he would be sleeping quite soundly when that dreaded deep-sea diver would come crashing into his dreams and Stooley would jolt awake in a cold sweat and, sometimes, screaming. Then he would have to get up and splash his face with cold water, just to calm himself down.

  Stooley would always point out to anybody who’d listen how he had done all that could have been reasonably expected to recover his partner. But the world of deep-sea diving is tight-knit and riddled with superstition, and he never did manage to find anyone to take Huxley’s place. He ended his days working the trawlers off the west coast of Scotland, which is about as hard a life as you can get.

  Huxley could have abandoned Stooley on any number of occasions but contrived to do so in such a way as to inflict maximum misery. Bears are renowned for their incredible strength, but less well-known for their impressive lung capacity. A bear that puts its mind to it can hold its breath for several minutes, which in Huxley’s case was long enough to split the pipe with his shovel and set about removing his diving suit.

  The bear clawed away at the stiffened canvas and, just like Harry Houdini, wriggled his way out. And still had enough breath to swim the forty or fifty yards over to the church. We shall never know whether it was just good fortune or forward thinking when, having ripped away some of the spire’s rotten roof tiles, Huxley located the old church bell, rusty now, but still containing a large pocket of air. It was stale air – ten-year-old air – but perfectly breathable and capable of sustaining Huxley until most of the fuss up above quietened down. Then it was another great lungful of air and a swim up to the surface, then over to the shore.

  *

  Jim Stooley went to his grave, still dreaming of blasting holes towards beautiful caverns and of idle hours sitting in the cathedral grounds in Winchester. The last time Huxley – or a bear-like figure – was spotted, he was headed east, through the gloaming, in the general direction of Derbyshire.