Five weeks after the disaster, at the end of July, the islanders trooped from the church of St Helene to the eastern promontory. At the front of the cortège was the vicar and those carrying urns. These men and women tucked the urns in the crooks of their arms, or held them with both hands, solicitous and anxious, or clasped them to their chests. Behind those the rest of the islanders, who carried bouquets and spades. At the back, the small party of cameramen and journalists from the mainland for whom the island’s acrid smell was new and who could be seen now and again flinching where it collected in sheltered dips. Their track followed a gentle descent along the southern edge of the island, bordered by rhododendron bushes on one side and a low unbroken wall of bracken on the other, and to the front a wide blue vista of sea, waves furling and unfurling on its surface.
As they neared the site of the old factory, the track became a tarmac road which led to gates and barbed-wire fencing, and the smell seemed to catch at the air – a chemical smell, almost stinging, though nobody could pin down exactly what it was like. Something burning, no, something melting or rancid, noxious, rasping, corrosive, miserly. At first it had made the throat sore, though lately not so much, now that the body had adapted. When they reached the site, those with urns put them down and a group of men and women began to dig, one grave for each urn, where the small polished wooden crosses marked a spot. Blackened, friable, the earth gave easily. The seams of dried dye that ran through it might have been mistaken for something naturally occurring, like the striking pigments of fossil moths in oil shale, the beautiful greens, purples and blues. In their deepest sorrow the islanders buried the ashes of their forty-six dead, pushed them back into the ground as if these two finished forces, the earth and the ashes, might find comfort in each other.
How discreet the journalists were in their recording of the scene. What could have been crass was made reverent by their light-footedness and silence, and the tender advances of their cameras towards the bent heads of the diggers, an almost maternal care in the way the lenses attended to the greatest concentrations of pain and anguish. There was a feeling of safety and recognition among the islanders, whose eastward gaze naturally enough turned out from time to time towards the faint heathery scrim of colour that was England’s most south-westerly tip; our motherland, they thought, even those who’d usually have spoken proudly for Tre’s independence.
Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground. Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
The vicar stood facing east into the wind, and his reading voice was compromised by his own grief. God does marvellous things without number. To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety.
On the first anniversary, the boats came in. Two of them had gone and two were returning, just as the new tradition had it. There was a quiet wait at the head of the jetty where the islanders grouped, tight-jawed and protective of their children, and then two dark specks expanded into form: there’s the prow, the mainsail, there’s the mizzenmast. When the ketches came into view the islanders stood if they hadn’t been standing already and straightened their backs and anticipated some kind of salvation.
The boats quivered back into the harbour on a soft June wind with their flags and festoons rippling. The larger of the boats was called Xanthippe and the smaller Lamprocles, mother and son, in service of all those child–parent bonds that had been broken a year before. After the disaster it was agreed that to commemorate the dead the boats should be sent out to the mainland the day before the anniversary, where an English dignitary of some sort would greet them and lay flowers on the decks. The boats would moor at Penzance overnight, a meal would be shared between the islanders and the dignitaries, and the next morning the islanders would take the thirty-mile crossing back.
So it was, and on the first anniversary the dignitary was no less than the Leader of the Opposition himself, bowing his head empathetically all the way through dinner. I lost my brother recently, he said, my heart goes out to all your families, a waste, a terrible misfortune. He had to leave before dessert, but not before he’d confessed a love of sailing vessels and asked the three islanders about the magnificent ketches in the harbour. On the boats’ return, the people of Tre collected from the decks the forty-six wreaths of roses and lilies from England and made their way to the burial site. There were still tracks between the crosses where the media had first worn their tiptoed routes, slinking under the weight of cameras; like sheep tracks, somebody remarked – sheep tracks cutting across ground in search of something to chew on. For the anniversary a small number of journalists had come to photograph the laying of the flowers and the raw ceremony was conducted – as had been most of Tre’s events over the last year – under the lens.
Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground.
He is giving the same reading as last year, one or two of the islanders remarked to themselves as they laid their flowers. God does marvellous things without number. He must be busy doing these marvellous things in England then – went the thinking – because He hasn’t been doing them here. Perhaps the vicar protests too much, perhaps he’s lost his faith. The vicar rounded the graves with a blessing for each and when the sun was falling low enough to make the shadows yearn across the ground, he and his community made their way back from the eastern end of the island to the harbour at the south, to the pub, where for the most part they drank one toast and then went home.
The national news reported it with grim diligence at first, and pictures of a beautiful island rendered hellish were splayed across Britain’s living rooms. Uproar hit the nation and for two years afterwards tourism even increased; people wanted to see what a chemical explosion does to houses, trees and beaches, which, extrapolated, meant that they wanted to measure the wingspan of evil in more general terms – how resilient is good to ill? Are creation and destruction equal opponents, in other words, are we locked in a fair battle, us humans; can creation win, can good win? Those tourists were disappointed to find that two years on, the score wasn’t settled. Some of Tre was rebuilt, some was still gnarled and sunken. Good was winning here, evil there, the battle was fought in fits and starts. Then the rest of the world lost interest and Tre was left to its own spoils.
Then malaise. The island had lost a quarter of its people – men, mostly, so that what the survivors seemed to suffer was post-war in miniature. Forty-six people had died and several more had left the island to return to the mainland to find work. The remaining islanders looked hopefully towards Britain. Britain looked sympathetically back. Compensation cheques began to arrive, which for the most part were banked and left untouched for lack of any idea of how such money could be spent; those who had to spend theirs to make up for lost livelihoods did so with parsimony and regret, which became reluctance, which became bitterness.
The normally rinsed and glowing island fell into a state of shabbiness – the hanging baskets outside the shop weren’t watered, the model ketch that welcomed visitors at the harbour grew a damp covering of mould through the winter. The wall that bordered the dramatic drop from the pub garden to the sea became encrusted with gull droppings; so too did the coin-operated telescope at the same site, its eye trained on England – it was even difficult to put your twenty pence in and set the mechanism to work. Services at the church of St Helene gained vehemence as they lost attendance, and in response to his shrinking congregations the vicar began to read more from the Old Testament, declaring those vigorous and spectacular passages in a raised voice that was as relentless as winter waves crashing at granite. One day he realized he was almost shouting, and to a near-empty room at that, and in shame and sudden self-dawning he sat and prayed, and from then on delivered lacklustre sermons that spoke of patience and fortitude and asked for the strength to bear what had to be borne.
It was the rattling, most of them had said, the rattling and shaking as if in an earthquake, and the way their living rooms had seemed to lurch as if startled from sleep. The cat fell off the bed, the doors fell off the cupboards, the glass shot like shrapnel from the windows. It had happened on a Friday evening when fewer than usual people were working at the plant; over half had gone home. A fire broke out and vat after vat of dimethylaniline subsequently exploded: one of those situations – so the British government liked to say at least – in which both everybody and nobody was to blame, and where the knife of blame is in any case soon blunted by being driven repeatedly at an impermeable body of grief.
The plant made dyes – acid, acid chrome, reactive, direct, dye intermediates – producing a bounty of colours: Orange S, Copper Blue 2B, Scarlet 4BS, Fast Black G, Turquoise Blue SE-2R. It exported colour to the rest of the world. It had, at the island’s insistence, high environmental standards, higher than average pay for its staff at all levels, very good general staff welfare.
The mushroom cloud produced a curiously perfect circle of smoke and debris that could be seen from the mainland, and every house on the island had its foundations rattled by the blast; most lost windows or doors or roofs, and fourteen of the forty-six killed were not employees at all – just people blown from their bikes or armchairs. Because the plant was situated on the eastern edge of the island, and because of the strong easterly winds that day, the firefighters – who had been trained especially to deal with chemical fires – could not get upwind of the flames to put them out. It took five days to extinguish the inferno completely, which flaunted tropical, beautiful flames where it fed on the dye, and when the fires were gone a deeply hued hell was left where the plant had been, veins of astonishing pigments forking through the blackened ground.
When the plant was built, Tre’s population more than doubled, a coterie of chemists, colour technicians, engineers and administrators relocating with their families. With a population of around a hundred, the island’s genealogy had long been a small stagnating pool, everybody related, the young forced to go elsewhere if they didn’t want to marry their own cousin. This haemorrhaging of youth aged the island in every respect, which further shrank the population. With an economy based largely on farming fruits, vegetables, dairy and flowers, the ageing, shrinking population was struggling to maintain any profitable industry. Skills, money and motivation began to disappear from the islanders’ list of assets.
With the plant came money in generous subsidies, and with the young people and the families came energy, with money and energy some excess resources that manifested as creative pursuits, so that Tre regained, from decades long lost, a reputation for the arts, which deflected attention from the pure hard task of survival. That softer focus brought small numbers of tourists – not enough to fuel an industry, but that was all right, Tre now had an industry, and the island was big enough to accommodate the plant without too much loss of its natural bounty, so the tourists came and went satisfied. The older islanders, who had once farmed and now couldn’t, instead opened up bed and breakfasts from their homes, or ran improvised tea shops in the summer from their gardens.
Yes, there was a fondness for the chemical plant, not just because it brought large subsidies to the island from Britain, but because sometimes, often, the plant really did look almost majestic poised on the easternmost cliff edge glowing orange as it reflected the rays of the setting sun. It had the air of empire, with the cargo ships sailing in and out every week destined for Asia.The resonant chord was upbeat, a zing of enthusiasm at the island’s undiscovered and unspoiled beauty, a bubble that expanded with each week of the plant’s operation. Even an abstract delight in Tre’s new commodity: colour. Colour breaking out in chemical reactions: benzanthrone into dibenzanthrone by alkali fusion, and out streams blue. Sodium hypochlorite added to Yellow 4, and out streams a brighter, mood-lifting yellow that looks sunlit. Something godly about the ability to make colour and send it forth across the oceans.
A year passed and another. For the second anniversary sailing, an MP had come to the Penzance commemorations; for the third, it had been an opposition MP. The day before the boats left for the fourth anniversary, the islanders gathered in the boathouse. After their noon meeting they migrated from the southern harbour and went inland, through fields in which nothing much grew, past the skeletons of old farm machinery and outbuildings collapsed into the churlish soil and couch grass. They dispersed into groups and surveyed the land, tried to assess its condition, tried out rudimentary calculations. When the boats came back two days later, the islanders took the forty-six wreaths, bequeathed this time by the Mayor of Penzance, not to the buried urns at the old chemical site but to the church of St Helene, where they were all but forgotten and where the roses held long onto a papery life preserved by darkness and coolness.
What people seemed to forget – what the islanders themselves had forgotten those recent solemn years – was that there’d been industry at Tre before the dye factory, that Tre had prospered in other ways and could prosper again. It had tried shipbuilding in the nineteenth century, a little smuggling, tin mining. In between the collapse of each of these industries the island went back to its trusted dependence on the land and sea – fishing, kelp harvesting, flower farming, grape growing. Flung thirty miles out to the south-west of England on a huge heft of mostly submerged granite, the island lies low and constantly negotiates its boundaries with the ocean. Each incoming tide goes out again with some of Tre’s geology, never to return it. All its granite neighbours have long since drowned. Each onslaught of Atlantic wind hacks back at the protective gorse that covers the westernmost end of the island, and bends the trees a little more eastward; and this is perhaps to say: if the sea doesn’t drown you, we the winds will push you back to England. Either way you will lose yourself.
A quarter of our population is gone and what do we get in return? one of the older islanders had asked in the boathouse. Flowers. Once a year, flowers. With all due respect, Britain can keep its flowers. That’s one thing we could grow ourselves. We’ve asked if perhaps one year the dignitaries could come to Tre’s shores for the commemorations, instead of us going there.
Show them the graves, show them our community. But no, always this yawning indifference from the mainland, this recumbent slump it assumes while it clicks its fingers and beckons its lessers to come running. They say they’re too busy, there’s Afghanistan, there’s trouble in the Gulf, there’s a disaster in Bangladesh. We are British, yet the country carries on as if we’re nothing to do with them.
What we should really ask is this: instead of wreaths, which die every year out in the sun and winds on the corrupted ground where our dead are buried, might we have our compensation claims reassessed? Might we not be entitled to a little more than these paltry, token sums that have already run out – can’t we look again at the contracts that were signed when the government agreed Tre would have the plant? Might we not re-examine the evidence we were given when we were told the plant was safe?
What the listeners realized as this speech was made was that Tre’s acquiescence to Britain’s ways had become, over the years, more an act of apostasy than of homage. The expedition to the mainland was less an exercise in national goodwill and more a defiant act of proof that Tre still existed; and if the festooned boats sailed into Penzance with a cheery serenity it belied only anger. They give us flowers! We will show them a thing or two about flowers. The people set to work. The former factory engineers who’d stayed on Tre, and the men who were good with their hands, went about fixing the broken tractors and farm machinery; they retrieved ploughs from part-burial and went to work on cleaning up the main frames, the skimmers, the disc coulters, checking the hydraulics, fitting them to the tractors to try out a piece of ground, estimating the furrow size, testing the extent of pulverization. Others who had knowledge of farming, or who were business-minded, went about calculating how many bulbs and seeds could be planted in how much soil, what yield, which flowers would grow in Tre’s warm but wet conditions, how many greenhouses they would need, how much irrigation, what potential profit, what possible risk.
Export subsidies were requested from Britain so that Tre could compete with the flower industries of Europe, and each request was gently rejected. At the next anniversary dinner with the dignitary – once again the Mayor – the island representatives asked again. If we have no subsidies we can have no industry. We are all set, we have business plans, we have expertise and farming is our heritage. If only we have the word from Britain we can go ahead and plant. May we count on Britain’s support, do you think? We are, after all, a part of Britain – at least you take our taxes as if we were; we are British ourselves. The Mayor had looked down at his girlish, hairless hands and the piece of hake collapsing on his fork and had asked cautiously, Flowers? Yes, flowers, he’d been told. Subsidies? Yes, subsidies. It isn’t for me to say, answered the Mayor, I do Remembrance Day ceremonies, I open bus stations. Well, to be fair, Mr Mayor, Your Worship, we used to have dinner with an MP, we once had the Leader of the Opposition – now it’s you representing Britain. What do you say? I will have words, he said.
The answer remained no. Tre’s plight was understood with great sympathy, but flowers were not a priority in the UK’s commercial plans. Nor was a further inquest into safety at the chemical plant seen to be necessary; the explosion had been found to be an unfortunate accident, the risk of which had always been inherent to such an industry, no matter what lengthy precautions are taken. Everybody should rest assured that all precautions had been taken. As for the flowers, at the commemorative dinner next year, the sixth year, they would send along a more senior dignitary and one of the government’s business advisers who would willingly take away with him accounts, business plans, profit and loss forecasts, and perhaps then, once Tre’s ideas had had a couple of years to mature, they could reassess. Meanwhile, if the island did manage to produce any flowers, Britain would, as a gesture of goodwill, pledge to buy from Tre some 70 per cent of the national quota of flowers for official state events, a business deal that they hoped Tre would regard as an honour.
And every year there were the forty-six wreaths, which went to St Helene’s where they passed indecipherably from life to death next to a wall carving of the Confessions of St Augustine. They were cheap Dutch freesias and carnations, and the over-scented lilies that stained the nose with rust-coloured pollen when one went in for a smell and whose sweet heady vapours filled the sinuses with a thick wooziness that began to feel provocative, mocking, even when dampened by the stone in the church.
The islanders marked out, ploughed and fertilized the fifteen square miles of available land, ordered 400 greenhouses, 10,000 metres of irrigation pipe, 5,000 metres of horticultural fleece, a million daffodil bulbs in forty different varieties, a million each of tulips, freesia, lilies, amaryllis, a 100,000 ragged robin, anemones and iris, 12,000 rose bushes and 40,000 chrysanthemum cuttings, which then cruised in on ships from the mainland over the course of the next few weeks, the islanders waiting at the harbour with sleeves rolled up, ready to take delivery of their goods.
Here it is, a slab of granite bordered by white beaches of finely ground shells, and atop it strips of colour that blow in the wind, flanked by sweating, sweet-scented greenhouses. The sun glimmers off the glass and weaves rainbows through the water from the irrigators, and picks up the sparkles in the sea. The sea moves with seals. Where the bulb fields are idle for the summer, corn marigolds grow in a joyous upsurge of yellow that falls down to the cliff edges. From the air it is the most beautiful sight. Colour colour colour, no longer stored in vats and shipped invisibly away, but rising from the ground like an ensign for the first birds migrating back to Europe for the winter.
Flowers everywhere, except at either end of the island. At the western end, bashed by the winds that have built strength all the way from America, nothing but trees, gorse and bracken will grow. At the eastern end, where the winds are broken by Tre’s highest hill, a patch of slightly blackened uncultivated land where the chemical plant used to stand, with its rectangle of little crosses. About thirty-five of the islanders leave the pub one Saturday lunchtime to get spades from their sheds and farms, and then they converge back at the harbour. The summer’s morning tilts into an afternoon of rain-flecked wind and, almost without words, and with spades shouldered, they head towards the little nub of land at the island’s far east.
Fog, one of them remarks, and from the north they see it begin to roll in and dissolve the bright day. The island fogs are infamous and when they come Tre is alone for the duration – nothing comes, nothing goes; no post, no excursions to or fro, no imports of food and goods. They are quite prepared for it, and when the fog appears now they lift their heads to the damp chill that precedes it and welcome its enveloping. The road that leads up to the site of the old chemical plant is potholed and yielding to weeds. They pass the fallen barbed-wire fencing that nobody has removed, perhaps because nobody has wanted to take away that one last defence between themselves and what happened. With the fence there the old site is like a sick animal kept in quarantine.
Among the islanders is the vicar who is aware he’s fallen to the back, no longer the shepherd but the sheep, spade in hand, hoping his poor over-curved lumbar will hold out for the afternoon. The crosses are serried on this piece of slowly recovering land and the tracks between them have healed, so that you’d never know this was once a place of great interest to anybody outside of Tre’s bounds. Even the islanders no longer come much now; over the years more permanent and personalized granite memorials have been scattered around the island – three benches at the southern foreland, another nine at the western end to catch the sunsets, some in families’ gardens, a cube of stone tucked within a clump of gorse where it could enjoy the long season of almond-scented petals, one piece of granite hewn into a heart, inscribed and placed on a cairn at the island’s highest point, a little set of carved circular table and stools in the school playground for the two children who died.
Who in their right mind would have chosen to bury their husbands, sons, sisters, mothers in stained and barren ground? Why did we not scatter them out to sea where they could be free of all this? the islanders ask themselves as they take up their spades. They have come to agree that they were coerced into doing so in the name of drama, so that the news channels could put on a good show – of course not openly coerced, but steered in the time of their greatest weakness when the comfort of another’s arm in yours, leading the way, is enough to take away the worst of the pain for a moment or two. They agree that it’s enough, they’ve been weak, and now they should stand up for themselves.
They feel no irreverence at digging up the urns; they only wonder why it’s taken them so long. The past is full of turning points. The present is just a matter of one foot in front of the other. It curves and veers, but it doesn’t navigate. Yet the past, when looked back on, is mapped, is itself a process of conscious mapping. This afternoon, the present takes on the characteristics of the past and becomes full of panoramic purpose. As the islanders dig they can feel a rare significance in their action as if, finally, they are lifting themselves from a pit. Enshrouded by the fallen fog, and a spadeful at a time, they free the earth until metal hits metal. For lo, the vicar speaks as they dig, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. They exhume the ashes of their loved ones with hands that shake with bitterness and hope.
Photograph © Nadège Mériau
