Dark Ages. John Pritchard
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rumbling in the air, when the hangars had been open, the aircraft on the prowl. Turning, she studied the empty sky – half-expecting to see a light in the distance: a bright, approaching star. A roaring bomber coming in to land.
A cloud obscured the sun. Its shadow slid across them, the green fields greying out – and she found herself right back where she had started.
It had been an overcast day, that Saturday in autumn ’88. She could almost smell the damp October air; the thinning veil of mist along the fence-line. The bitter tang of jet-fuel as the planes came screaming in.
She watched them land, like hungry iron hawks. The camouflaged ones were bombers, she was told: F-IIIs that could carry nuclear loads. They were followed down by others, grey as ghosts. Those were the Ravens, someone said: the radar-jamming planes.
Ravens. It had struck her, though she couldn’t quite say why; the weirdness of the choice of name, perhaps. Sinister, portentous – but a raven’s coat was black. These grey things came like spirits: like pallid spectres of their former selves …
Her fingers loosened; Lyn’s hand slipped away. And Lyn could only hover, like an anxious hanger-on. Excluded by the memories of things she hadn’t shared.
‘What are you seeing, Fran … ?’ she almost whispered.
But Fran didn’t answer; her mind was too full of restless ghosts.
Of Ravens.
3
It had still been Freshers’ Week when Paul had knocked on her door; she hadn’t even got her posters up. The societies were recruiting fit to bust, of course; she’d seen the cross on his lapel, and guessed what he was selling.
‘Would I be right in thinking you’re a Christian?’ he’d said, after a brief, polite preamble.
‘Well …’ Fran said, and felt a bit evasive. It was true she’d shopped around at the Freshers’ Fair. The Student Christian Movement had intrigued her; she rather liked their radical approach. But the college branch of Greenpeace was the only one she’d joined. She classed herself as C of E, but hadn’t been to church for quite a while. A charismatic-slanted group at school had sucked her in, bolstering her final year with happy-clappy pap; but in pulling up her roots to come here, she’d set herself adrift on that score too. Simplicity had brought no satisfaction: If God gave me brains, why won’t you let me use them? Right now, she wasn’t sure what she believed.
And now this pleasant second-year was trying to tempt her back. Whichever group he spoke for, they were doubtless keen on choruses and earnest Bible study. She shifted with discomfort at the thought.
‘I’m still deciding at the moment,’ she said carefully.
Paul gestured, smiling. ‘Fair enough. But me and some friends are going on a sort of religious outing on Saturday, and I wondered if you’d maybe like to come … ?’
Fran hesitated. ‘Going where?’
‘To Upper Heyford airbase,’ Paul said softly. ‘A place that needs to hear the Word of Life.’
Now that, she’d told him afterwards, was what I call a religious outing.
The base had been the scene of a national demo; the Christian groups had gathered at Gate 8. Walking down the track towards it, the sight of those sombre, vaulted hangars so close to the fence had given her a chill. A brooding sense of threat hung all about them. Paul told her that the bombs were stored elsewhere, but it felt like one was ticking in each building.
The service, in their shadow, was more stirring than she’d dreamed. She’d listened to the speakers, and joined in with the songs; shared the Peace with total strangers; hugged Paul tight. As people breached the wire and got arrested, she’d clung to the fence and shouted her support.
It was a rainbow congregation, lively and colourful; but most of all she remembered the Dominicans, in their solemn cloaks, and their banner behind them: a black dog running, with a firebrand in its jaws.
Paul had led her on down the perimeter path; taught her the difference between Blazer patrol trucks and Hummvee armoured cars (while one of the latter paced them, like a hunchbacked iron toad). An impromptu Mass was being held near the Peace Camp. Paul, being a Methodist, hung back – but Fran went and knelt at the roadside, to take a tom-off piece of Tesco’s Sliced, and sip from the chipped cup of wine. And all the time, beyond the fence, the planes were prowling past, their tailfin beacons pulsing bloody red.
They’d hung around in the waning afternoon, until the people who’d been arrested were finally released. Then one of the Oxford groups invited them back for a social at someone’s house. It lasted late into the evening, and she’d loved it: food and drink and dry good humour, ending up with some decidedly secular songs. She sang along delightedly with those; but the melody that stayed in her buzzing head was one she’d heard at Heyford’s iron gates. The people who stumbled in darkness, their eyes have seen the light…
4
And those who sit in the deepest pit: on them has the day dawned bright.
She ran the lines through her mind again – worrying each word like a Rosary bead; but the gloom was deep and glutinous inside her. There was just that pale, thin gleam on the horizon.
‘How do you feel?’ Lyn asked her gently.
They’d adjourned to a pub in Somerton, north of the airbase. Such a pretty little village, so close to that desolate field. Fran had made for the dimmest comer of the room, well away from the golden sunshine. And still she hadn’t taken off her shades.
‘Glad I came,’ she murmured, staring down at her drink; fingers playing with the stem of her glass. ‘Well no, not glad … but no regrets. I needed to start here.’
‘You came out here with Paul before?’ Lyn said after a pause. Proceeding with exquisite caution.
‘Yeah,’ Fran said. ‘He brought me. And after what I saw that day, my perspectives were all different.’
Another silence, while she took a sip of wine, and set the glass down carefully. Then her shielded gaze rose back to Lyn.
‘I’d never had such a sense of pure evil. You could feel it, coming at you through the wire. You could feel how close the warheads were; their power. Like sleeping suns …’ She shook her head again; more like a shudder. ‘And meanwhile, Cruise was coming out of Greenham, once a month.’
Lyn waited with her own glass barely touched.
‘It scared me – so I had to get involved,’ Fran went on softly. ‘Every time those missiles moved, I had to witness them …’ Behind the shades, her eyes had lost their focus: but now she could see deep into the past. ‘That night, they were headed for the Imber firing range – the most restricted part of the whole Plain. We tried to take a short cut: get ahead of them again. We cut across a comer of Larkhill range, the next one to the east. And Larkhill range was where we came to grief …’ She bit down on the final word, and dropped her gaze once more.
Lyn shifted awkwardly. ‘And they never found that person in the road?’
Fran didn’t answer for a moment; then took a deep, slow breath, and shook her head.
‘Did you hear from Paul again?’
‘Not since he came out of hospital. He just withdrew from everything – like I did. Marie died, and Kate broke her back. He blamed himself for that.’
‘And you … Do you feel guilty – for surviving?’
Fran wavered; gave a shrug of her thin shoulders. ‘It was my fault, as much as his. I said to go for it.’
Lyn took her hand. ‘Oh Frannie, don’t you think that you’ve been punished enough? You were traumatized as well. That’s why you had your … er …’
‘My