Reunion: The Water Tower, Book 1

It was on the day she died that they finally pulled down the Water Tower.

The final demise of the Tower, which had stood for so long as a mainstay of Little Bassington’s post-industrial heritage, came not with a tumultuous roar that signified its collapse in a moment of heart-stopping suddenness, nor a breath-taking spectacle of intensifying destruction; instead, it had happened gradually, minute by minute, hour by hour, almost in slow motion. When it ended, finally – the scaffolding, wrecking balls and cranes all having been weaponised as tools in its unravelling – it did so with an eerie stillness that signified the moment’s conclusiveness, a moment punctuated only by the grit that salted the air and the final rush of dust that was carried on the wind. Tiny particles of history settled unobtrusively over the Village Green on the rooftops of the nearby cottages, scattering themselves along the surrounding cobbled streets. As the footnotes of the past came to rest and the watching eyes readjusted, the landscape that greeted those observing appeared suddenly different – altered – as if it had been warped somehow by unseeing, uncaring hands, remoulded into an image, not of their choosing.

And the Tower was gone.

The winter that year had been endless, the days filled with bitter winds and rain clouds that had dominated the sky wherever they’d turned. The chill had been broken only by the onset of heavy, relentless downpours, which had drowned Little Bassington’s customary colour in perpetual dreariness from sunrise until sunset. When the showers had lifted, and the temperature had crawled above the intolerable lows they had been forced to endure, the trees lined the pedestrianised thoroughfare leading to the Water Tower cast no shadows. Their branches seemed brittle, bent by the unyielding force of the winter weather that had bashed them over the preceding months. Few buds had unfurled; none of the lush green leaves that stood out so remarkably in familiar paintings of the scenery around the Tower were in evidence now. It was like a barren landscape that retained just enough remnants of its past to remind onlookers of what had come before yet coyly avoided any hint of what was still to come.

When he was younger, he and his friends would meet on the grounds of the Water Tower. In those days, when the summers seemed endless and the hours stretched out before them with an inviting earnestness, he would climb over the walls shielding the Water Tower from the Parade and Market Square, grazing his knuckles occasionally as he clamoured for purchase, and hoist himself over the dusty, uneven brickwork before allowing himself to drop quickly onto the safety of the other side.