THE GOOD OVEN *Wattpad Featured* (aka 'Re Ply')

Bill the Diviner

They scattered in all directions from the explosion of dust, rubble, and flames. In the next street, all seemed quieter, safer. Families regrouped, breathing in a moment, looking round, taking stock.

One boy's voice shouts, 'We're lucky, Mam, aren't we, cos ours didn't go off!'

'Ours?'

The boy pointed, and there it was, poised at a jaunty angle across a half-collapsing bed, its iron frame sagging where the bomb reclined.

Horror. Scatter. Run. Call. Fetch. Shout.

Bob. Get Bill!

And  when the wardens had cleared the street and only wardens hovered near, Bill rolled up. He was a builder before the war broke out. They put him on bomb disposal because of it. He knew how a building might fall, which walls might hold, or what was too risky to rely on. Well, he knew, as much as anyone.

When it came to bombs, though, Bill was like a doctor, listening to tickings, hummings, silences. A musician. A tender of bomb flocks, gathering in the lost ones, healing the breach.

He followed procedure, but it didn't work for everyone. Something about Bill made it work every time. He had an inexpressive face, showing no fear or excitement.  He would defuse those bombs if he could, whatever the colours of the wiring. He would save buildings or shells of buildings if he could. And then, nod, shift his cap a little sideways back on his head, ready to go.

They all thought, rightly, he knew his trade. He was a master. Yes. true.

He never once got it wrong.

Later, in his seventies, he worked part-time for the council, as a water diviner. He was on the payroll for finding lost water pipes or hidden pits, and underground streams. ( There is more going on beneath our feet then we might suspect, especially in mining regions.) He just walked over the land, quietly attentive, with two twin sticks, and waited for them to jump.*

Also a master.

And we always wondered, but no-one dared ask, if secretly in days gone by, he'd been divining bombs.

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*Dowsing, divining - old way of finding water, using the earth's magnetism (quantum physics). You just take 2 twigs and hold them parallel pointing ahead of you and start walking. If one starts to turn in or jump it might indicate a change in the environment. But you have to hold lightly and be focused.  There are lots of examples of this not working at all. And before you ask, it isn't magic. Sorry if that's disappointing! The best evidence for it working is the fact that government agencies employed people to do it and may still do. 

Master - A term describing approval of expertise by peers in Medieval Guilds, still used for master craftsmen and women today.

On 16 December, 1914, the first attack on British soil occurred when the German fleet bombarded the coastal towns of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough. Hartlepool was poorly defended and badly  hit. There was an unexploded bomb photographed lying across a bed in a house that lost its wall, which in part inspired this story. The Bill I knew lived further south..his son was called Bob so that's why I mentioned that name at the top.

The loss of life during world war one was extreme among the people of Hartlepool, as the numbers of men to join the friends' battalions was particularly high there, in response to this first attack on the country. Hence the tragedy of all the men of the village dying in another story in this collection:  'Waiting for Fred Astaire'.