'The Zeppelin of Kinver Edge' by Tom Bryson

Harry Foley rubbed his eyes for the umpteenth time. Am I seeing things? He shook his head and looked up yet again towards the top of Kinver Edge. Not yet daybreak. He’d only stepped outside his cottage because his head throbbed from overindulgence the night before - and his ribs were black and blue what with Doreen’s elbows trying to silence his snores.

1916. The first glimmers of daylight slowly broke on a country at war. Harry looked up once more towards the Edge. Yes, he’d seen drawings of the airships - even a grainy photograph. He’d heard of the death and destruction they’d already caused in Walsall and Wednesbury, and they talked about these evil monsters wreaking havoc across the country. But surely he was seeing things. He shook his head again and began the ascent to the top of the Edge.

A Zeppelin airship – on Kinver Edge! Harry stopped and pressed his hands tight against his head. Definitely had a drop too much ale last night in the Lock Inn. Or was it the Vine? As he approached the rock houses he stopped to draw breath. His lungs weren’t the best; consumption ran in the family. That was why the army wouldn’t recruit him when he volunteered.

He glanced up. No, he wasn’t seeing things. Germans, bloody Germans. He hurled himself low behind a clump of yellow gorse. Members of an airship crew - scurrying around the craft, gesticulating, two tugged at a propeller shaft, one spoke in a loud whisper while others grunted and gasped as they heaved on heavy attached ropes.

Harry watched. Like a blow, the reality of what was above him struck home. He felt the cold morning air but the chill that ran through him was that of a winter’s night. He knelt down keeping well out of sight; asked himself was he a fool? Should he be here? Several of the crew carried rifles slung across their shoulders, another wore a holster with his hand on a Mauser pistol.

Harry bit his lip. Looking back down the path he couldn’t see a soul. But then who’d be up and about before daybreak? He was alone.

A mad curiosity gripped Harry. He clambered towards Holy Austin Rock, up past the red sandstone houses cut into the hillside. Faint oil lamps flickered inside. He knew the cave residents didn’t take kindly to strangers, especially one skulking past in the early hours. Harry had heard the stories. Passed down the family line. About men who’d disappeared; their bodies never found simply for being too nosey. As a boy he’d been terrified of Mad Molly who lived here. Some said she ate babbies.

Harry crawled on his stomach and the heather and bracken beneath him sounded like he was snapping firewood. He raised his head a fraction. About fifty yards away he saw the grey leviathan, a beast shuddering in the early morning wind, the crewmen fighting to hold the ship steady as the ropes strained. One cried out words in German that made no sense to Harry, except a name; ‘Hans’. A burly man hit down with a sledgehammer loosening a steel stake. He tugged it free then ran to tackle another stake at an opposite corner. Other airmen, bent back at forty five degrees like a tug o’ war team strained to hold the airship steady.

A shouted command - an officer waved from inside the airship to the crew members. They pulled their bodies up into the craft, throwing themselves inside. It only took a few minutes and they were all on board. In disbelief, Harry rose to his feet. Open mouthed, he watched a large engine propeller slowly turn.

A figure appeared at the doorway, screamed above the rising engine pitch and waved a pistol at Harry. A sound like a firework exploding rung in Harry’s ears as a puff of smoke came from the pistol.

Bloody hell, I’m being shot at! Harry hit the earth like a sack of coal chucked off a lorry. He looked up. A final figure clambered into the ship which now drifted into the air; a last rope was dragged inside. The man with the pistol still pointed his weapon at Harry.

Harry gasped as the last airman slipped and fell from the airship, his flailing arms and head struck the side of the vessel as he fought to get a grip. He hit the ground and yelled in pain, gripped his leg.

‘Hans,’ a voice shouted from the airship.

The Zeppelin rose like a surfacing whale. A shot rang out and a shower of Kinver sandstone spurt from the earth near Harry. That was enough. He was off.

He ran down the hillside like a fell runner, leaping over rocks, tree stumps and banks; sliding along shale paths, his hands scraped stones and drew blood. He half expected to feel a bullet slam into the back of his head at any second. Down over sandy scree, down past Holy Austin Rock cave; he glimpsed a pale face – a woman’s – peer through a murky window. Mad Molly, the cave dweller. She drew back, her eyes wide as he ran past like a maniac.

When he reached home he fell through the doorway. Doreen poked at a coal fire, tried to spark some life from it.

‘Where the bleeding hell you been?’ she yelled holding
up the poker.

Harry fought for breath, his chest ached and his hands stung. He slumped into an old rocking chair. ‘I don’t believe it. I just seen...’ he looked at her, unable to spit out the words. He ran outside, stared back up the ridge, shaded his eyes from a brightening sky.

‘What is it? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Harry’s eyes scoured the sky. Several large white clouds floated across. He turned this way and that, taking in every point of the compass.

He pointed up at the sky. ‘A bloody Zeppelin. Airship. I see’d a bloody Zeppelin.’

‘What? Where?’ Doreen ran out to join him, ‘I don’t see nothing.’

‘Saw it. On the Edge.’

‘On the Edge. Not in the sky?’

‘On the Edge.’

‘I think you need taking in hand, my lad. Pink elephants you’re seeing next.’

‘I did, I tell you I did.’

Doreen sniffed, ‘Never mind Zeppelins, you’d best get ready for work. Ironworks opens at seven.’

‘I did, I see’d it.’

Doreen went back inside, pulled on her apron and sawed thick slices of bread from a home baked loaf. She shouted, ‘I worry about you, Harry Foley, I really do.’ She pointed the knife at him, wiggling it like a teacher’s pencil. ‘You need to lay off that ale, I tell you. You go telling people round here you see’d Germans on Kinver Edge – on a bloody Zeppelin airbus or whatever you call it – it’ll be the funny farm for you, my lad.’

Harry staggered inside; he pressed his hands to his temples.

Doreen approached him and rested her hand on his head. She sighed, ‘Go on, love. Get yourself ready for work. I’ll make you a mug of tea.’

Harry went to work with a sore head and a confused mind. He kept looking up at the sky; all he could see were scudding clouds, snatches of blue sky. At the ironworks got through to lunchtime, kept going on strong draughts of cold milky tea from a bottle, and didn’t say a word of what he’d seen on Kinver Edge that morning. But as he ate his cold beef and dripping sandwich, he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer. He told Sam, a floor moulder a bit older than he was. He thought Sam might be able to explain what was going on. Was hop-swollen Kinver home brew giving him the DTs. So, he opened up to Sam. Big mistake.

Within an hour, Harry’s story of sighting a German Zeppelin on Kinver Edge was all over the ironworks. One after another they came and teased him, asked him how much he’d had the night before, that he needed his eyes seeing to.

Over the next few days and weeks matters got worse. Everywhere Harry went in the village, they’d heard about his foray onto the Edge. At the start Harry took it all in good spirit but after a while it got to him. The final straw came when the boys from Castle Street School tracked him down the High Street, chanting ‘Harry Foley saw a airship, Harry Foley is a nitwit, barmy Harry Foley.’

After a few months of taunting, Harry’s will broke. He stayed at home in the evenings, stopped going down the pub, seeing his mates. He turned inwards, became sullen and withdrawn. Doreen got worried about him. She asked Doctor Sawyer to visit; see if he would give Harry something; ‘For his nerves, you know?’

‘You just need to get a grip, lad,’ the good doctor advised. He put away his stethoscope and patted Harry on the arm, ‘Hale and hearty lad like you, just get out a bit more, eh. Fresh air - that’ll put you right.’ But he didn’t help at all when he added, ‘Get up on the Edge.’ Then with a broad wink to Doreen added, ‘Never know what you might see up there’; laughed, and left a dejected Harry and a worried Doreen sitting in silence.

Harry started losing days off work. He was warned. After a two day absence he turned up and the foreman said, ‘You’re finished, son. Don’t have skivers here.’

Doreen got a bit of work taking in washing, cleaning in a couple of the big houses around Kinver, Stourton and Enville. She got a start in a nailmakers shop in the Black Country but even using the tram she was away twelve hours a day. Her health worsened and she had to pack up. One day she looked up from her sick bed and said to Harry, ‘I don’t know what to do, love. I can’t...’ her sobbing broke Harry’s heart.

That’s when he took himself back up to the top of the Edge. He sat on the spot where the Zeppelin had landed, stared into the sky for a long time. He rubbed his hands in the fine, red sand. Got cold. It was dark by the time he came home.

In the bedroom Doreen lay pale faced, a heavy greatcoat thrown over the blankets. Harry said, ‘I see’d it, I know I did. Now – that’s an end to it. In the morning I’m off to Stourbridge, Cradley, the Lye – wherever. I’m going to get a job. And if we have to move - we’ll move.’

And they did move. From Kinver to a rented room in Cradley Heath. Harry worked for ten years in a drop forging works and through hard work rose to a foreman’s job. They visited Kinver regularly to see Doreen’s family – but when Harry was spotted someone was sure to say, ‘Seen any Germans lately, Harry?’ Or ‘Good job the war’s over, Harry. No fear of Zeppelins bombing us now.’ And the schoolchildren’s chant stuck in Harry’s psyche. But he knew what he saw. He believed in what he saw.

1926. Ten years on - the year of the General Strike. Harry travelled to Kinver with Doreen and their two kids on the bus; little Harry was eight and Agnes six, Doreen now carried a third. Money was tight . But Harry wouldn’t be a strike breaker. As the grandparents fussed over the children, Doreen said, ‘Go and have a pint, love. You haven’t been out in ages.’

Harry took himself off to The Lock Inn and sipped a beer as he watched the barges go by. He looked up at St Peter’s Church high on the ridge. He stared for several minutes deep in thought, then downed his pint and strode out along Mill Street, down the High Street to Potters Cross, up Meddin’s Lane towards Holy Austin Rock and The Edge.

He stopped on the approach path that led up to the old Roman Hill Fort on top. The place was deserted, the air still, a couple of wood pigeons fluttered home to their nest. A squirrel darted out in front of him and scurried up a tall sycamore. Harry smiled as he took in the familiar soft sandstone ridge, the caves hewn in the hillside, wisps of blue smoke rising from their chimneys as if from the bowels of the earth. As he sucked in deep breaths of air, a well-dressed man about his own age stepped out from one of the caves, rubbing his knee and flexing his leg. Harry stepped back behind a clump of birch trees, unsettled by the man’s appearance. He smoked a pipe, wore a crisp white shirt and tie, polished black shoes. His blonde hair glinted in the evening sun. He glimpsed Harry skulking behind the trees; saluted him with his pipe. A frown crossed the man’s forehead; then he smiled and slowly nodded his head several times. He knew Harry. And Harry knew him!

A woman’s whispered voice came from the rockhouse; a note of urgency, even fear in her tone, ‘Hans, Hans, come inside, you know how people talk in these parts.’

Molly, bloody mad Molly. Harry remained deadly still behind the trees. He clamped his lips together.

Molly spoke to the man, ‘Good to see you again, son.’

The erect, broad shouldered man limped into the rock house. He embraced the small, elderly woman inside before a heavy curtain was pulled shut across the cave entrance.

A broad smile beamed across Harry Foley’s face. ‘I know I see’d it – I bloody well know I see’d a Zeppelin.’