(Continued from Part two)

Everything was quiet…

Several hours after I began swinging the sledgehammer, there was finally peace from the destruction. I pulled up a wooden box and sat on it, wiping the congealed sweat from my forehead onto my arm.

The Lucky Bag ‘number square’ idea from the last post seems to have caught the imagination, so I’ve updated it, below, to reflect the actual dimensions of the Saltpetre – or ‘Salty Pete’ as we have come to know it.

My wooden box/seat was located at 2.

I was sitting, gazing at three mountains of shattered and fragmented red pegboard, broken spars of ancient wood, and the surprisingly intact skeleton of an old wall cupboard. This pile of re-organised carbon took up squares 1, 14 and 11.

Hearing the temporary cessation of the apocalypse, Bernie had taken pity and brought me a large mug of steaming tea. I sipped it gratefully and looked around at the remains of Peter’s Pride…

“Wow,” she said, leaving hastily, before the tall red pile could begin sliding towards her.

Peter’s Pride: I had better explain… We bought ‘The Wharf’, as the property is named, in December 2009, during one of the coldest winters on record. On December 23rd, we literally slid along the pavements in Kendal to collect the keys from the seller’s estate agents, keen to, at least, take possession of what would be our new home – once we had thrown our life savings into rebuilding it.

I clearly remember coming back to open our own front door for the first time. The property was a 1960s single storey bungalow with a large plot of land, the plot running along the line of the old Preston-Kendal canal. The canal had been drained in 1958, but the waterway had been unused for decades before that. A man named Peter and his wife had built the house, and brought up their children there. Their son, Richard, still lives in a cottage next door, gifted, by his mother, to him and his wife before, sadly widowed, she moved south to live with her daughter in Cheshire.

The Wharf was left to its own devices, eventually being bought by an ‘investor’ and becoming a rental cottage. It was overgrown, run-down and had a poor bathroom. The place soon got a bad name in the holiday trade market.

On the Sunday when we deliberately got ourselves lost in the car and inched down the tiny lane with the ‘For Sale by Auction’ sign, we found a very dilapidated house on a large and potentially beautiful plot of Lakeland soil, just outside Kendal. The house was behind a huge stockade fence and unoccupied.

As we approached in the car, a man came out of the adjacent cottage, looking a little hostile. We didn’t know him, but it was Peter’s son, Richard. Seeing we were genuinely interested he spent a few minutes telling us the history of the place. He was eager to have someone ‘real’ take over the property that had been so important in his life. Ironically, the house had failed to sell that very weekend. A local builder had been interested but wasn’t prepared to pay the ‘Investor’s’ asking price. For the sake of about ten thousand pounds, the deal had fallen through. Later, we found that the ‘Investor’ had money problems…

The run-down ‘Wharf’ had potential, but you had to have a lot of imagination to see what it could become. Bernie and I got back in the car for a chat. After a long discussion lasting six minutes, we decided it was our big chance to have our own ‘Grand Designs’… On the following morning, we made an offer, subject to survey… and waited.

Several weeks later, the deal was done. It was two days before Christmas when we entered our new house. It was freezing – the heating had failed – something it did all the time, according to the holiday lettings company. We made some tea with the supplies we had brought and explored, with that lovely feeling that we finally had a Lakeland home – no matter how much needed doing to it!

We didn’t need to stay, as we still had Bernie’s house in Chorley to go back to. But we wanted to have good look round what would one day be our dream home. As darkness was falling, we managed to reset the boiler before we left, wishing our new home-to-be a happy Christmas.

Just before driving off, I said to Bernie that I wanted to stick my head into the old outbuilding. We had no idea, at that time, of its importance in the village’s industrial history. It wasn’t a listed building; we could have just knocked it down… but something said, “No…. wait and see.”

The old door was rusted and hanging off. I managed to prise it open and stuck my head in. It looked to be full of rubbish, but when I peered into the gloom, I could see that all the rubbish on the left side of the building was a faded red colour.

There was no power, so I had to switch on my phone light to take another look. As my eyes got used to the gloom, I could see what looked like a string of cubicles made of red pegboard and hung together with an assortment of cast-off timbers. Months later, I was to find out that Peter – the father of the man next door, who had sadly died five years prior, was a keen radio-ham. The ‘cubicles’ were his radio-shacks, and had been connected to a complex arial system. Each of the huts had a specialised function, but they had fallen into disuse a long time ago. Even his son, Richard, had no idea what they did.

At that point none of this was known. I knew that, whatever the red cubicles were, I would one day have to knock them down. Now, ten years later and sitting on my wooden box, sipping tea, I looked with satisfaction at what the necessary destruction had wrought. The entire length of the radio-huts had been reduced to rubble, and there was an emotional feeling that the ghost of the second Peter had been finally ‘freed’ from the place.

There would be a bonfire that evening. The shattered bits of the old radio shacks would burn brightly in the canal basin. Later, in the smoke-kissed morning, I would have the luxury of the entire left wall to begin my ‘organic reorganisation’ of Salty Pete. Even at this stage, I could feel the place beginning to breathe… though it was still laughing at me. “There’s only so much you can do with a hammer, little man,” it seemed to say.

Giant hammers, I mused–thinking of my boyhood love of the Norse tales–are mighty things. But they are not the only tools in the box…

To be continued…

Other parts of the Locked Down and Armed series:

Part One, Part Two, This is Part Three.

©Copyright Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.