Chapter 104

After the rather late night / early morning of the Valentine’s Ball, and the chatter and champagne at lunchtime, I dozed on the train most of the way to York. We arrived at nine o’clock, half an hour late due to having to go slowly through engineering works on the line, only to find that the Darlington to Middlesbrough line was closed and all Middlesbrough passengers were having to go via Northallerton and Yarm, which meant an additional change of trains and more delay.

It was well gone ten by the time I finally did get to Middlesbrough, and I hesitated before phoning Mum, in case they’d already gone to bed. Knowing that she would almost certainly worry if I didn’t report my safe arrival, and concerned that she might even ring up Mrs Loftus to check I was there, I entered a phone box outside the station, picked a 10p coin out of my faithful tray purse, and dialled the number.

To my surprise, Mum picked up the phone immediately – I’m not even sure I heard the ringing tone twice. I thought for a moment that I had dialled the wrong number, until I heard her voice saying ‘Hello?’.

“Mum? What on earth are you doing out in the hall this time of night?”

She laughed at my evident surprise.

“Didn’t I tell you? Your grandparents were worried about not being able to get hold of us after we’d gone to bed, so we got the GPO to put in an extension in our bedroom. Your father now thinks that I lie in bed all day nattering to my friends!”

I heard Dad chuckling in the background; of course he well knew that she wasn’t at all like that. I kept the joke going.

“Lucky I’m phoning at night when the phone’s not engaged, then, Mum! Anyway, despite British Rail’s very best efforts, I’ve finally made it back to Middlesbrough. Have Jen and Hamish got home to Reading?”

“Yes, she phoned half an hour ago. She said that Catriona gave you all an exceptionally good lunch?”

“Yeah, it’s Hamish’s 21^st coming up. Even had champagne!”

“I’ll have to remember to post his card. Don’t forget to get a nice one for your sister!”

“I won’t!”

The pips went, we said our hasty goodbyes, and I headed back to the Loftus’s. I was pretty sure that Julie would have got back to Winchester okay, but it would have been nice to know for sure. It was annoying – both Sheila / Adrian and Jen / Hamish were on the phone, but neither of us was easily contactable. I resolved that one of the first things I would do when we finally did get a place of our own would be to get a phone installed – and if it wasn’t too extortionate a quote, getting an extra extension in the bedroom as well might be no bad thing.

I let myself in, quietly went upstairs to my room, and went straight to bed. The alarm clock woke me at a horrendously early hour of the morning, and it was back to work.

On Monday evening I stayed in my room writing letters; to the twins, Catriona Baxter, and of course Julie. I posted them on the way to work on Tuesday morning.

Just before teabreak, I was checking some routine input/output figures to calculate the efficiency of the reaction and hence the likely condition of the catalyst, when someone stopped by my desk. I looked up and saw that it was the site Emergency Control Officer, Nigel. I put my finger onto the point I had reached, and greeted him.

“Morning, Jon, I’m just testing the hydrants outside the building, and I was wondering if you’d got around to visiting the Ops Room at Billingham yet?”

“Err, no, not yet. I keep meaning to, but haven’t got myself organised yet.”

“I’m going up there this afternoon if you want to tag along; why don’t you ask Adam Ransome if he can spare you?”

That was a great idea – I’d have a guide and an introduction to the people, rather than presenting myself there on spec. I grinned up at him.

“Thank you, Nigel, yes please, I will.”

I finished my calculation, noted on the file that the catalyst seemed fine, and I headed off to Dr. Ransome’s office. He was more than happy for me to take a couple of hours out to see the Billingham Ops Room, so I went back outside to find Nigel and his crew. They were just finishing off, so I walked with them to the site fire station where Nigel had left his car, and the two of us set off for Billingham.

Nigel had to hand in some duplicate records for filing and discuss his programme of checks with the firms Chief Emergency Planning Officer, who had an office off the Ops Room. I was introduced to a couple of the other E.P.O.s, and they showed me around. Their Ops Room was far bigger than the Duty Room at Wilton – there were a couple of small offices, a big meeting table that would probably seat 20 people, and even a small soundproofed room which they said was a dedicated T.V. and radio interview room for use in case of a major incident.

The most fascinating thing for me was the map wall. There were four maps and two air photographs, all fixed to the wall and then covered with a thick layer of plastic which was held in place by wooden boxes at top and bottom containing fluorescent tubes. They showed me that you could write on the plastic (which they called ‘talc’) with wax crayons, and the back-lighting highlighted the wax colours, so it could be seen very easily.

I’d seen the large-scale map and photo of Wilton before, the ones of Billingham clearly showed the scale and complexity of the site. I noticed that key points like fire hydrants had little red stickers on the map, and some parts of the plant had been outlined in coloured ink to make them more obvious.

The third map was huge and showed most of Teesside at 1:10,000 scale; all the road names were shown and I could see how this would be really useful in responding to a major incident. The fourth was smaller, and showed most of the North of England at 1:100,000. There was a metal spike sticking out of the talc where the site was, and hanging on a hook next to the map were a number of elongated shapes in transparent perspex.

“What are they for?”

“We hope never to have to use this one, but there are some fairly toxic chemicals round here, and if they started leaking, we’d have to start warning people living downwind.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, depending on the wind direction and strength, and slightly on what is being released, we use the templates to show us where the plume is likely to go, and therefore where we might have to get the police to evacuate people. Most of the chemicals will disperse, but if it’s only a slight wind, or there’s a massive release, there could be sufficient concentration to be a danger. The lighter than air ones are not an issue, as long as they don’t catch fire first, but some of the heavier ones could cause asphyxiation or pose a fire risk. Others, like the ammonia, will make people feel pretty sick. And some, of course, are fairly unstable and will catch fire, possibly explosively, so we’ve got similar templates for most of the storage tanks, to know what their danger areas are.”

I nodded. That made a lot of sense; I just hoped that this map would never be used in anger.

(This was ten years before the Bhopal release of Methyl Isocyanate, and of course well before Chernobyl; although we didn’t have nasties on anything like the scale they did, one wonders how effective an evacuation would have been. Thankfully, we never had to try it for real.)

“So what worries you the most?”

He grimaced.

“You know that we’re using huge quantities of Cyclohexane at Wilton?”

“Oh crikey – like Flixborough?”

He nodded.

“Obviously, we don’t yet know exactly what happened at Flixborough because the site control office and most of the records were destroyed in the explosion, but it sounds like a catastrophic failure in a stainless steel pipe. It’s less than 18 months since it happened, so the Inquiry hasn’t reported yet, but as we run a similar process, we’ve been keeping as up to date with it as we can. We’re doing more regular inspections, but I’ll be much happier when we know what went wrong. It’s probably poor maintenance, or cost cutting, or human error, but if it was poor design of the plant, then we might be at risk ourselves.”

“Yeah, our professor talked about it at the time; he was initially a bit surprised quite how explosive it got, and thought that it might have been contained rather than just gone up like a fireball.”

“The problem is that you’re keeping it at such high pressure you can’t have a sacrificial venting system because that will just become a weak point which is more likely to give. That’s why the failure must have been catastrophic, and why it blew rather than hissed.”

That seemed a fair summary. Although the pressure meters in the system would have shown the leak, it probably happened far too quickly and uncontrollably for anyone to do anything about it.

Nigel came out of the office, spotted us and asked if I was ready to go back to Wilton, so I thanked my guides and we walked down to his car. I was fairly quiet on the way back, and he mentioned that the Ops Room had that effect on most people – it brought home that we were indeed working day-in, day-out with some pretty nasty substances, so constant vigilance was needed. Adam Ransome nodded sagely when I repeated this to him later.

I had a nice letter from Sheila waiting for me on Wednesday when I got back to the Loftus’s from work; saying how much they’d enjoyed the weekend, and admitting that Jen and Hamish had actually travelled back to Reading on what almost qualified as the Milk Train – the half past eleven at night service from Parkway. It turned out that she’d ended up giving Hamish a second and third birthday present, and as her twin had also been distracted by my sister’s demands on his body, none of them had especially noticed the passage of time!

I noted with amusement that this didn’t square with Mum’s account of Jen having phoned her earlier in the evening – my sister had clearly tempered the truth with discretion, so as to keep Mum happy, and had actually phoned from Bristol. Just as well Mum hadn’t decided to phone her back for a longer chat...

I also got a very nice reply to my thank-you note to Catriona Baxter; she mentioned that Mum had invited them up to Jen’s 21^st party, and they were looking forward to that.

Funnily enough it hadn’t been an especially wet winter as far as rainfall totals went – just cold, dark, murky and horrid. Now that I was listening for it, the phrase ‘fog in the Vale of York’ seemed to occur quite often as I listened to the weather forecast on BBC Radio 4 at around quarter past six every morning, just after the Shipping Forecast. It wasn’t very often foggy in Middlesbrough, but there were mornings when you could smell the refineries and chemical works on the damp air.

The rest of February and March was also miserable weather-wise. Not everything was awful – Brotherhood of Man won the Eurovision Song Contest with the sickly but very jolly “Save all your kisses for me” which was amusing the first couple of times – but there weren’t many bright spots. There were some, even if I was effectively wishing my life away by wanting it to be July and the end of my enforced separation from my beloved.

At the end of February, I had my six-monthly review. Adam Ransome and someone from Billingham Personnel talked me through what I had done, and what I hoped to do. It was a very positive experience; I was assured that they would recommend that I be confirmed in a permanent position at the end of the year, and they even sounded hopeful on the subject of starting a Ph.D. – the main big sticking point being my not having yet found something sufficiently precise as the subject for my doctoral thesis. Julie was delighted about that prospect when we talked on the phone that weekend; it looked as if we were going to be able to settle down together with at least three years in the same place so that I could get my Doctorate. ICI took a long-term view, so there was no risk of them posting me somewhere else while I was becoming more valuable to them by improving my knowledge.

Julie made me laugh with one of her letters – she was doing some History teaching practice at the time, and was busy re-learning the names of the Kings and Queens of England since 1066. She’d been given a rhyme to help her, which she wrote down for me:

“Willie, Willie, Harry, Ste,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry three;
One two three Neds, Richard two,
Harrys four five six, ... then who?

Edwards four five, Dick the bad,
Harrys (twain), Ned (the lad);
Mary, Bessie, James the vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again

Will and Mary, Anna Gloria,
Georges four, then Will, Victoria;
Edward seven, George and Ted,
George the sixth, now Liz instead.

I wasn’t convinced that it was a speedy solution to answering a question like ‘who succeeded Richard III?’ – but then of course I’d been brought up with the story of the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and the rather dodgy victory of the Lancastrian Henry Tudor. The body of Richard Crookback had apparently been brought back to Leicester by the victors for display, but had then disappeared. Richard the Third, alias ‘Dick the Shit’, had been one of my favourite historical characters, hunchbacked like Quasimodo, the wicked uncle who’d bumped off the young princes in the Tower, crying ‘My kingdom for a horse’, and of course that wonderful couplet, “The Cat, The Rat, and Lovell our Dog, do rule all of England under the Hog” giving you the name of Richard’s closest supporters, Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell.

Mind you, if you questioned me on William and Mary, or Queen Anne, I’d be completely stuffed – so it was most likely the local interest that helped me remember Bosworth Field. Oh, and Shakespeare – but as he was dependent for his living on keeping in favour with the winning side, the Tudors, it was no wonder that he’d possibly overstated the bad points of the last Yorkist, physical and socially. I mean, it’s not like he had anyone bumped off with a red-hot poker shoved up his fundament, was it?

(That was how they allegedly killed Edward II about 150 years earlier. Sian had kindly waited until we’d all had our tea before telling us the story in all the gory details with which nearly seven centuries had embellished the original rumour. If the historians were correct, they’d stuck a cows horn or something similar up his bottom so that there would be no external burn marks, and then proceeded to use the heat of the poker to wreck his lower organs and cause death. Vee and I had argued that the expression on his face would have given the game away, and the debate ended in a hilarious competition as to who could make the most believable grimace of outrage.)

I wrote back to Julie reminding her that the mnemonic “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” gave the colours of the rainbow – Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet – in their correct order. When I next talked to her, she gigglingly told me that she preferred Cilla Black’s version of “I can sing a rainbow” with its red and orange and green and blue, which she’d often sung to herself as a child.

She was very busy with more teaching practice, and it didn’t look as if we would be able to get together again until nearer Easter.

‘Doctor Who’ finished for the year on Saturday 6^th March 1976 with the sixth and final episode of “The Seeds of Doom”. I’d have to do without my weekly fix for at least six months; the good news being that by the time the next series was broadcast, Julie and I should be living together in a place of our own. It couldn’t come too soon.

I didn’t listen to the radio a lot in those days; there was one in the canteen at lunchtime to provide background music, but Abba’s “Mama Mia”, The Four Seasons’ “Oh what a night” and Tina Charles’ “I love to love” all quickly became old. Perhaps I was just getting grumpy being on my own after having lived with my friends for the past couple of years? The Loftus’s were nice enough, but they weren’t my age, and we didn’t have a great deal in common.

I went home the weekend after my 22^nd birthday on 17^th March to see my folks; Dad had suffered from a filthy cold for a while, which Mum then caught, and they of course were fed up because they didn’t dare risk passing it on to their parents, who were complaining at not being visited...

I did pop over to briefly visit my grandparents and to do a few chores like refilling coal scuttles and log baskets. Grandad was worrying about how he was going to get on digging over his garden ready for planting out; I had a quick word with Dad and we fixed a date for 3^rd and 4^th April for me to return and give him a hand; his father was becoming a little too wobbly for heavy spade work, and with two of us it wouldn’t take long.

Mum mentioned that Jen and Hamish had already started their revision for their Finals; she also commented that Jen wouldn’t be home for the Easter weekend because they hoped to use the quiet time to be in the Library without the distraction of many other people there. I expressed my agreement with Jen that it was a good idea, telling Mum how much easier Julie had found it when the first and second year students were out of the way. I didn’t mention that I already knew about Jen staying at Reading; it was better to let Mum think I had first heard it from her.

Mum went on to tell me how my grandparents were doing. Now that Spring was coming they were getting out and about more, but they had been quite dependent on her over the winter. It was a relief to everyone that Jen’s 21^st birthday was approaching, and we had something positive to celebrate. Mum and Dad had been a little bit surprised that her guest list for her party was precisely the same as mine, but on reflection, they remembered that we’d all been in the caravan together.

Easter Sunday was 18^th April; Jen’s big party was fixed for Saturday 24^th. Mum and Dad insisted that they had it all in hand, so there was no need for us to go back home and muck in with the preparation.

My tour of the Runcorn site went ahead in the first full week of April; it was fascinating to see a completely different side to the firm. The sodium and chlorine raw materials were easily accessible from the Cheshire salt deposits, and readily (if quite expensively) separated by electrolysis of brine, which also produced the sodium hydroxide. The nearby oil terminals supplied the extra hydrocarbons required to make the especially nasty organo-phosphate and chlorine compounds that made up ICI’s range of commercial and domestic pesticides. There was even an island out in the Mersey where there had been a poison gas manufacturing plant during the First World War – I was jolly glad that I hadn’t been around in those days. It was most interesting, but I didn’t take to the place. On Teesside we made fertilisers to help crops grow; here at Runcorn they made effective pesticides to protect those crops, but it didn’t seem quite as positive. Some of these chemical compounds were pretty persistent; there had been several cases of pesticide spills into rivers killing huge numbers of fish, and my gut instinct told me that this was a bad thing.

Dad and I did indeed spend the first weekend in April digging. After an eight o’clock start, we finished Grandad’s vegetable patch early on Saturday afternoon, so went on and turned over Grandpa Shaw’s old beds until dark. We took Grandma home for supper, and both had a shower while she was chatting to Mum in the kitchen. On Sunday we finished her garden, left her leafing through old seed catalogues thinking about what she wanted to grow, and hit the vegetable garden at home. Dad hadn’t ordered any extra compost from old Mr Cutting, so we only managed to double dig a couple of rows before we’d emptied our own compost heap. Dad commented that with only the two of them, they now didn’t seem to generate anything like the quantity of vegetable waste as the four of us used to.

As I had a four day weekend for Easter, I came clean with Mum that Julie and I were intending to meet up at Reading and stay with Jen and Hamish. She had looked at me rather closely before nodding her head.

“You know that you’re all more than welcome here, but I shan’t complain about not having you rampaging around while I’m airing the guest room for the Baxter’s, or sorting things out for the party.”

I took her words in the spirit that she intended.

“We thought that it might be a bit easier for you if you didn’t feel you had to feed us as well. Now, do you need any help in selecting the most embarrassing photographs of a young Jennifer Baker to display at the party?”

She grinned.

“No, we’ve already done all that. You’ll just have to wait and see!”

As she drove me over to Peterborough on the Sunday evening to catch my train, after thanking me again for blistering my hands on the garden spade, she did remind me to make sure that we were all careful at Reading over Easter.

“Give them all my love, and tell them that I’m expecting you all on the Friday night with sleeping bags, even the birthday girl herself. Please get Jen and Hamish to take a break from their revision and to relax, but, no getting blown up, no showing off, and no silliness, okay?”

“Yes, Mum, promise.”

“And I know you haven’t seen her for weeks, but please make sure you take precautions. I’m far too young to be a grandmother yet!”

I blushed bright red, Mum either didn’t notice, or (more likely) didn’t want to embarrass me further. She swiftly changed the subject.

“Now, Easter Eggs. Unless you’ve just sneakily left the largest size Terry’s All Gold Easter Egg cunningly hidden under my bed, you haven’t bought me one, have you?”

“No, I haven’t got around to it yet.”

“Good! That simplifies things. I’ll get the eggs for us and your grandparents, and you and Jen can cough up for your own, and for Julie and Hamish from us, and we’ll call that square?”

“Thanks, that will make it simpler.”

“Oh, and tell that sister of yours, from me, that there’s no actual requirement to eat all your eggs on Easter Day; it is allowed to keep them a little longer.”

I laughed. Mum was being tactful; when we were children, it was me who scoffed the lot, and Jen who saved half for later in the week. My digestive system could take that level of abuse, poor Jen had made herself sick on chocolate when much younger, and I took care not to remind her of the fact.

To ensure that I did get the whole of Easter off (priority for additional days off was given to people with young children) I had volunteered for a Duty Officer stint on Friday 9^th April; all was well, and I even got to go for a swim on the Sunday morning.

Julie had ‘mentioned’ (trans. as ‘told me not to forget’) several times that both she and Jen would appreciate spending some private time with me, so despite the Bank Holiday rush, we met up at Reading late at night on Maundy Thursday – partly to avoid possible engineering works on the Friday, but more importantly to get that extra night together.

I phoned Mum from the call-booth in the foyer of Jen’s Hall of Residence to report my safe arrival; she sent her love to everyone. Then I went up the stairs to my sister’s room, where I found the three of them chatting while they waited for my appearance.

Julie had actually made it there well in time for the evening meal – her college had closed for a fortnight for the school holidays, so she’d been home in Exeter for a few days, and had come back up that afternoon. My train from Middlesbrough had been packed, and if I hadn’t had the sense to buy myself a corned beef roll on the way to the station, I’d have been starving hungry. As it was I made quick work of the cold pork chops that they’d sneaked out of the dining hall, and the two mugs of tea didn’t touch the sides either.

That night I slept in Jen’s bed with Julie; we did of course make love a few times (she said that she didn’t want to overdo it with the whole weekend ahead of us), but mostly we just enjoyed being back together and being able to chat without waiting for the telephone box pips to go. Hamish called us in good time for a shower before breakfast, and as usual we stocked up with milk for our tea, and bread and the little packs of Common Market Intervention butter for toast.

Julie had been tipped the wink by Jen that she and I wouldn’t mind recreating the mad 24 hours of 27 months earlier; the two of them had conspired to come up with some ‘rules’ and turned it into a competition! Hamish and I were let into the secret in Jen’s room after breakfast. After all, what was sauce for the gander (me) was also sauce for the goose (Julie), and she hoped that her honorary brother would do the right thing by her, and give her 24 hours to remember.

Our time was to start at 10.30 a.m. on Friday, and last until the same moment on Saturday. There would be three compulsory meal breaks and the number of orgasms and the sexual positions used were to be noted down immediately after each session.

The telephone rang while this was being discussed; it was of course Mum to check on us. She didn’t stay talking for long; she and Dad had three garden’s worth of chitted potatoes to plant on Good Friday, and needed to get started. The weather forecast didn’t look great, but what else would you expect for a Bank Holiday?

We all had a mug of tea and a couple of custard cream biscuits at about a quarter past ten, and then Julie and Hamish retired to his room. Jen and I had already decided that the bed needed to be shifted to one side so that we could place the mattress directly on the floor and be able to use it rather more vigorously, so we quickly did that before stripping off.

Our first choice was of course cunnilingus; we reckoned that with a bit of luck and encouragement, Gustav could perform maybe eight or nine times in 24 hours (much the same as Hamish could, my inside informant told me), so in order to win the competition, we needed Jen to get a few warmers into the bank before we got Gustav involved. Like Julie and Sheila, my sister had not yet found a limit to the number of orgasms she could have, as long as she was careful to keep herself well lubricated so she didn’t get sore. She did mention that she would almost certainly suffer for it later on, when her over-stimulated and abused tummy muscles would almost certainly give her gyp.

Sis was already hot to trot, and we had three of her orgasms on the scoreboard before Gustav got his head under, and he managed to pull another two out of her before he shot his first bolt. (It very much helped that Julie had already taken care of the urgency caused by two whole months without nookie). We reckoned that we hadn’t done badly; there had been some time pressure with only an hour and a half until we had to be downstairs for lunch, and we even managed a bit of a cuddle before we got dressed – Jen did have to stuff a few sheets of loo roll into her knickers, but we were out in the corridor on time and using her key to let ourselves into Hamish’s room. They too were ready, of course, but we discovered that we were one ahead – Julie had only managed to come four times. Not that she was complaining.

Lunch wasn’t bad for Good Friday in a University Hall of Residence dining hall – there were very few people about, so the cook had waited until the last moment before getting the stuff ready. There was a decent french onion soup with chunks of bread, a choice of mixed grill or rissole (we all had both) with chips, and a cherry pie and custard to finish with. While we were eating, Jen jokingly tried to renegotiate the rules with Julie, suggesting that additional points should be awarded for particularly athletic positions. My girlfriend had more sense than to accept; she knew that Jen was in better shape with swimming training, and correctly suspected that someone was trying to pull a fast one. Jen laughingly admitted her guilt and changed the subject to the twins. They had gone home for Easter, but were looking forward to coming up to Stamford for her party, and she’d invited them to spend a night at Reading on the way back to Bristol. (No prizes for guessing what was likely to happen then!) I knew that I’d have to be back in Middlesbrough, but I suggested to Julie that she might as well join the ensuing orgy. Her wicked grin was my answer; she was clearly ahead of me on that one!

Grabbing a couple of pieces of fruit each on our way out, we headed back to our bedrooms to crack on. Jen and I took a few minutes to work out a game plan – we had roughly four hours until tea, and a choice as to whether to try for Gustav to have two or three ejaculations in that time. It didn’t take us long to decide to go for two, so as to save him for the long overnight stretch. If Hamish went for three now, he’d almost certainly tease us by claiming that he was well ahead, but we both reckoned that would be a tactical mistake on his part. The story of the Hare and the Tortoise? No, we weren’t going to cheat, but we weren’t going to have an unnecessary rest either. Besides, we intended to have as much fun as possible along the way!