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And then Harold heard the news he feared most. Storm clouds were gathering over Europe. No – literally. Storm clouds were gathering over the continent.
The largest electrical storm system in living memory, torrential rain, thunder, lightning, a horrible stew of thick black rolling doom, was already crossing The Channel. The like hadn’t been seen since King Lear’s day.
According to the BBC news, the very worst of the storm would pass right over the Weald, before heading across London, the Chilterns and on up into the Cotswolds.
Was this the promised end?
Harold knew for sure that the tower at Sissinghurst would be struck down by lightning, reduced in a flash to a pile of smoking rubble. For certain sure. But he did not hide away like a terrorised Emperor Augustus in a sunken cistern. True, he succeeded in persuading Vita to steer clear of the tower all day, but this was not too much of an imposition: it was a Sunday.
Harold had a theory that he might be able to monitor the approaching storm using his wireless set. When lightning was striking somewhere you could hear it as a crackle in the
ether, this was a commonplace, a fact of modern life, one that was routinely dismissed as an inconvenient little curiosity; but surely, Harold reasoned, you could chart the storm’s progress by tuning to different stations one after another, noting where the loudest crackles came from, then performing some sort of triangulation.
While he waited for the set in his study to warm up, he lit a pipe and laid out a large map of Europe across his desk. Then he began tuning round the dial, Stockholm, Berlin, Hilversum, Luxemburg, Paris, Eireann, and recorded the results. Again and again and again, around and around and around. From his pipe, neglected in its glass ash tray, there arose a thread of blue-grey smoke, straight, undeviating, pungent in the room’s close summer air – undeviating, that is, until halfway to the ceiling, when, for seemingly no reason at all, it succumbed to violence, acquiring turbulence, dissipating in coils and extravagant curlicues.
Around and around and around some more; but the results were inconclusive. All he knew was that, wherever he was on the dial, the electrical sizzles and spits were becoming louder
and louder and more frequent, until you could hardly hear anything of the programmes at all, just an overwhelming blitzkrieg of crackles. He sighed, he sat back, he picked up his pipe, drew on it two or three times to keep it in… and then switched off the set.
When the skies darkened from black to blacker and the rains came, he stood out on the Tower Lawn under an oilskin cape, trembling when crashes of thunder edged closer and closer overhead and lightning began to electrify the Noonday gloom.
The rain was indeed torrential. It flattened plants and almost washed him away. Then came hailstones the size of tennis balls. But he stood his ground.
The news bulletins were right: it was the most ferocious thunderstorm in living memory, it wrought destruction, a clean corridor of it, up through southern England, High Streets were flooded, trees were brought down, people killed, either outright by lightning strike or felled by falling debris. Towers were struck by thunderbolts.
Sissinghurst’s wasn’t one of them.
Another date with destiny had been dodged.
