LIFE AT 2MPH

April 18, 2021

Neale James

BY NEALE JAMES

I’m borrowing inspiration from Dominique’s nephew peering through a playground train window and I’ll admit to a late entry, a stretched chain if you will and a false start to this story as initially I followed a more obvious line of inquiry; a trip to a railway station. I even found the perfectly shaped porthole sunk into the side of a passenger train bound for London Paddington. The shape fitted, the story didn’t. It wasn’t and isn’t reflective of my current state of mind. And so I returned, as so often I have during lockdown to a river, a canal, close to my home; my refuge from March 2020 to date.

There are four thousand, seven hundred miles of navigable canals in the UK. Eighty seven miles are immediately available to me geographically, if only I had a boat. When lockdown initially enforced a strict local corridor of exercise, I took to the tow paths of the Kennet and Avon Canal. It’s an ‘as the bird flies’ route that engages the cities of Bristol to the west, and London to the east (via The Thames) which, with modest periods of inactivity thanks to a Victorian growth period of the railways and latterly the arterial motorway system, has been otherwise alive for over two hundred years.

Boating types who frequent these waterways navigate their days at two miles per hour (more if the mood takes but only by a mile or two) and I find watching this, slows me immeasurably also.

I watched a volunteer lock keeper dredging the blackened depths with a magnet on the end of a line, in between making pictures.

He asked me what I was doing. I asked him what he could see.

“Bricks,” he mused?

“Shadows,” I answered, “Deep as the black within which you’re fishing. Anyway, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to find a windlass, (form of winch handle), which I dropped in here yesterday afternoon,” he answered.

“Do you think you’ll find it?”

“Maybe, but I’ve got all day. So there’s a chance I will.”

Life at two miles per hour.

One hundred and five locks - some say one less, there appears a discrepancy of design on one it seems. It’s the one period of activity. I walk the stretch between eighty two and ninety six and watch. The boats rise and fall with the water and though there is activity in the winding of a windlass and pushing of a gate, much of the time is spent watching water flow and listening to it stabilise until you can hear the birds once again. Life at two miles per hour.

January 13, 2021

Neale James

NUCLEAR PHOTOWALK

January 13, 2021

Neale James

BY NEALE JAMES

Sixty three years ago, just after 4pm, on the 28th February, a B-47E Stratojet belonging to the United States Airforce, a strategic bomber designed to strike targets from very high altitude in the Soviet Union lifted from an airbase called Greenham Common in leafy Berkshire, England, sixty miles west of London, a further 1,800 miles west of Moscow. It was loaded with 103,000 lbs of aviation fuel. One minute into the flight, technical problems forced the crew to shut down engines two and three of the six available to this aircraft. The crew requested an immediate go around and emergency landing.

Because of the large amount of fuel aboard the aircraft, air traffic control gave the order to drop their 1,700 gallon external fuel tanks in a specially designated ‘drop zone’ first.

At 4.23pm, the ‘drop tanks’ procedure was initiated, but one tank struck a hanger, and the other a hard stand area, close to a parked B-47E. There are conflicting reports of a pilot being on board the aircraft on the ground and the possibility of a weapon loading operation being in progress. The parked plane is reported to have been carrying a 1.1 megaton nuclear bomb. The aircraft and bomb were engulfed in flames.

I live close to Greenham Common on the ‘right side’ of the now abandoned airfield, not an indication of direction, but a suggestion that the ‘wrong side’ for years had suffered from a cluster of unexplained cancer cases, possibly the result of a nuclear accident nobody wants to talk about. Or was it? Did it even happen?

Last Sunday, I set out to attempt to find the place the tanks landed, the drop zone, Stand 32. I’ll tell more of the story in audio format. Join me on my Nuclear Photowalk.

I’m not one to subscribe to conspiracy, I do think we have a predisposed ability to embellish a story. Our forefathers and those for all their generations before them could and I am sure did the very same. But I’ve always been fascinated by this huge former airbase, once the home to the longest runway in Europe, a most infamous women’s peace camp, enough nuclear warheads to unleash nuclear winter and a story that nobody can quite agree on.

Today you can run, cycle and enjoy rambling across miles of paths across land that would once have been privy to Britain and America’s closest secrets behind razor wire, guarded by elite special forces. The land gives clues to what was once here. Some buildings and landmarks have slowly started to be devoured by bushes, shrubs, trees even. Some will never leave, such as the massive silos used to house the vehicles destined to deploy deadly intercontinental cruise missiles.

White cattle roam freely on this now common ground. This one is walking in roughly the same area as aircraft will have taxied and stood on ‘standby’ in view of the old control tower, very recently refurbished to become a visitor centre, café and pop up wall space for art. Sadly closed whilst we await the end of pandemic restrictions.

Disused fire and emergency buildings with the large central command centre in the background which still houses a special launch bunker. The mock-up aircraft remains as a historical remnant, designed to resemble a C-130 aircraft. It would be doused in aviation fuel and set alight so that firefighters could train to retrieve people and ‘items’ in a worse case scenario.