Far From The Madding Crowd

The first sound was always the wind.

Not the clean kind. Not the breeze forever rushing along the riverbank. Or the sudden gusts that rattled the rooftop vents. This sound was slower, heavier, steady in compulsion, like breath. Air moved slowly inside the building’s ribs. Slid along the steel girders, like a bow drawing across a string; a low sonorous hum. Sometimes I thought I heard the building sigh, a sudden outbreath, or release. Though the pressure remained like a breath that held too long.

These sighs seemed less made of air than of memory.

For though The Arsenal had lost its purpose, its lives, its people, their wars, and all that; all that had come before, they seemed to resonate here, in those choral wheezes of time.

And it was the slow wind that remembered. The wind that breathed life into each and every step taken, every shell constructed in service to each victorious dream. The stamp of boots outside. The call of the engines carrying away the munitions and the bombs with their explosions. Something remembered. The building, the bones, the fen beneath the foundations, I did not know. Only that back then, as a young boy, porous, a container for the world my mother created for us, I knew something did.

Gentle and delicate was the wind that lived in the bones of The Old Arsenal. And deliberate it was, when it exhaled any memories that had become dislodged from the brickwork. Its sigh was fitting for the wisps of a memory loosened of its hold on the past.

At times it felt like the hum was rising through the floorboards themselves, a vibration that crept into the soles of your feet, into the bones of your ankles, until I was carrying the building’s music in my own body.

It was not unpleasant. It was not uncomfortable. Not frightening.

It was the wind.

It was The Hum as Callum and I named it.

The first and last sound of the day.

Days came. Days passed.

Days looped over and over.

We bore witness to the night as it tumbled into day, that in turn drifted slowly into night.

Nights of quiet contemplation.

Days of stasis and my mother’s absorption.

Stillness and suspense.

Waiting; waiting and hiding.

We were Keepers of time, of a time.

One in which I was never present.

We lived in a place once designed for destruction.

A birthing place for the devestation of explosives, shells and suchlike.

We lived in the roof of a bomb that had never gone off.