Page 10 of A Sky Full of Stars
‘You’d think so,’ Brian replied, ‘but Flowerdew weren’t bothered about that. All they wanted was to get it levelled as quickly as possible. The more time it took to dismantle, the more money they were losing while the development was delayed.’
‘So why did they appoint me to come here?’ Charlotte asked, half to herself. But Brian, who she sensed was never one to pass up an opportunity to talk, answered it for her.
‘There was an old covenant on the building,’ he said. ‘The owners of the land had stipulated that, should the observatory ever have to be removed, its salvageable contents should be donated to the University of North West Wessex, to sit alongside the Winslow papers for posterity. Flowerdew nearly missed it, but at the last minute the documents were found, held by some tinpot solicitor in Burnham on Sea.’ He sighed. ‘I’m afraid it’s just another part of the very complicated history of the observatory.’
Charlotte made to ascend the staircase, but Brian reached out a hand to stop her. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you go up there. Since the telescope was removed, it’s been condemned. Rot, rust, you name it. It’s got it all. Shame, really – we had some great nights up in the dome, stargazing and chatting until dawn.’ He grinned. ‘But needs must, and it’s far too dangerous now.’
Charlotte felt a sting of disappointment, but a broken leg, or worse, would have put an end to her work here, so she acquiesced. Turning away from the stairs, she forced a brighter smile. ‘So, what else can you show me? If there’s nothing left in the dome, what am I supposed to be cataloguing and archiving?’
Brian smiled back. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
They moved away from the staircase and deeper into the interior of the building. It felt as though they were about to enter the beating heart of the observatory, and Charlotte could see that this room, right in the centre, had been constructed to keep its contents safe and unharmed by the elements. Brian pushed open the steel door, white paint yellowed with age, and rusted from the damp. ‘This is what you’ve really come to sort out.’
As she followed Brian into the records room of the observatory, she couldn’t help a gasp of surprise. The records room was a dimly lit space filled with towering bookshelves that reached up to the ceiling. The shelves were now empty, but it was an easy leap to imagine them crammed with journals and magazines during the observatory’s heyday. Dust motes danced in the light from the harsh white bulb that flashed on at the flick of a switch. A few chairs and desks were scattered about, their surfaces cluttered with stacks of books and old journals. The musty smell of old paper pervaded the room, a testament to years of neglect. There were green filing cabinets lining all four walls of the room, with handwritten labels on each drawer, which obviously formed the bulk of the paperwork and artefacts that would become Charlotte’s focus for the next few weeks. Magazines from the 1980s and 1990s, such asSky & TelescopeandAstronomy, lay in piles, their covers featuring bold headlines about the latest celestial discoveries and technological advancements of the time.
To say that Charlotte was gobsmacked was an understatement.
‘How on earth is this all still here?’ she breathed, looking around the room in wonder. ‘I mean, all of the rubbish outside… the vandalism… this part looks as though it hasn’t been touched in thirty years!’
‘Something like that,’ Brian said, clearly enjoying her surprise. ‘As I said, Flowerdew have been after the observatory for a long time. Their security was incredible, and they’ve had an option on it for at least a decade, even though the owners weren’t prepared to sell immediately. At one point, there was a team of security guards up here twenty-four hours a day, just to keep the hordes out.’ He sighed. ‘That was another reason why LBAS weren’t allowed in.’
‘But I’m guessing this is all your stuff?’ Charlotte persisted. ‘Why weren’t you allowed in to retrieve it?’
Brian’s face suddenly looked as though it had aged twenty years. ‘After everything that happened with Martin and Laura, most of us just wanted to move on. No one had the heart, or the guts, to pack it all away. Too much water under the bridge.’
‘Martin and Laura?’ Charlotte echoed. She was surprised by Brian’s assumption that she’d know who they were, but then that tended to happen a lot in small communities, where everyone did know everyone else, or at least knew someone who did. She paused before adding, in a gentler tone. ‘Who are they?’
Brian gave a sad smile. ‘Sorry – since you’re staying with Lorelai, I assumed you’d know.’
Charlotte drew in a deep breath, and then wished she hadn’t as the taste of the dust in the air hit the back of her throat. Coughing slightly, she had time to consider her response. Eventually, she spoke again. ‘Lorelai’s told me a little about the developments up here,’ she said, when the cough had abated. ‘But I didn’t like to ask too much, for fear of prying. She seemed to have some very strong feelings about it all.’
Brian paused for a long beat. ‘Well,’ he conceded, as if he was weighing up the wisdom of his next words. ‘I suppose, since you’ll be spending a lot of time at the observatory, it’s only fair that you should know the whole story…’
12
A little time later, Charlotte’s assumptions about the life and times of the Lower Brambleton Observatory had been blown wide apart, and then some.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ she said carefully, after he finally paused for breath. ‘You’re telling me that this place was not only the hotspot for asteroid spotting in the south-west, but also party central. A kind of nightclub for the astronomy community?’ She gave a smile. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were having me on, Brian!’
‘Where else would a bunch of astronomers come to have a good time?’ Brian’s eyes twinkled like the stars that, when night fell, would still gaze down at the observatory. ‘I mean, your generation, with your internet and your YouTube, documenting everything at the click of a smartphone… you’ve no idea of the excitement of seeing something for the first time with nothing but your eyes and a telescope, and the experience of sharing those discoveries with friends of a like-minded disposition. When we knew something big was coming, it was star charts and sky maps to the ready, supplies in and nights under the stars. And if those supplies happened to comprise several bottles of good claret or a decent Scotch, then so much the better.’ He paused again. ‘What goes on in LBAS stays in LBAS. Until now, of course.’
Charlotte considered her own undergraduate studies, and had to concede that she, too, had experienced a few riotous nights under the stars.
‘It does all sound rather idyllic,’ she said.
‘It was a different time,’ Brian replied. ‘Before we all settled down, got more stressful jobs, had families. Small children tend to put paid to pulling all-nighters in an observatory, although there were a few occasions when the children came with us as well. Of course, after Laura and Martin passed away…’ He trailed off.
‘What happened to them, Brian?’ Charlotte asked gently.
Brian’s face fell as he replied. ‘They were killed in a car accident in 1995,’ he said quietly. ‘They’d been up here to shut the observatory down for two months, as was usually done for January and February. There’s no heating up here, and we had to adhere to at least some health and safety rules, or the council would have stepped in and closed it permanently. They left their kids, twins, a boy and a girl, with Martin’s mum, and were spending the evening closing things up, making sure everything was locked down tight until the weather got a bit warmer. The frost was so bad by the time they were driving back down the hill, whoever was driving lost control of the car, and they crashed into an oak tree.’ Brian shuddered. ‘They were killed instantly. I can’t bear to think about what might have happened if the kids had been in the car with them.’
‘How awful!’ Charlotte murmured. ‘It must have been such a shock for everyone. And those poor children.’
‘It was,’ Brian replied. ‘After that… well, there didn’t seem much point in keeping things going. None of us really wanted to, after that. We still meet, from time to time, but it was never the same. You get tainted by tragedy, you know?’ Pulling himself back to the present before Charlotte could respond further, Brian shook his head. ‘You’ll be wanting to look around,’ he said, a brisker tone in his voice. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I don’t know what else you’ll find here that the university will consider of value, but you’re welcome to take what you think is worth archiving. Goodness knows, if you don’t, then it’ll all just go in a skip anyway.’
‘I promise I’ll treat whatever I find with the respect it deserves,’ Charlotte said gently. ‘I’ve been trained to look after things, and even if I don’t find any more evidence for the Winslow archive, I’m sure that the more contemporary papers that have been stored here are worth saving for posterity. It’s not every day somewhere with such a long history is decommissioned, and one with such amazing resources.’ She still couldn’t quite believe the inner sanctum of the records room had been so well preserved, given the state of the rest of the building.
She glanced around the records room again. Apart from the dust, it really was in remarkable nick for somewhere that hadn’t been used in years. She wondered, again, how it had escaped the attentions of the vandals. So many buildings like this, especially those in the middle of nowhere, ended up covered in graffiti and broken beyond repair. But somehow, this part of Lower Brambleton’s observatory had survived relatively unscathed. It was like a time capsule from the early 1990s.
