HIGHLY COMMENDED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
Golf balls, we called them, like giant malignant tumours nestling among the hills of the Yorkshire Dales. From the top of the ash tree I gazed at the white radomes of Menwith Hill, the American spy base, maybe a dozen, big and little, with a perimeter fence topped with razor wire. I had seen two close up whenever Mum drove past the gate, great towering round behemoths, their looming whiteness listening for enemies. Spellbound, I forgot the crows’ nest Grandad asked me to destroy, till the crow returned with its huge angry beak and I scarpered back down.
Every Friday I went to my grandparents’ for a piano lesson and sleepover, and after the lesson I would shin up a tree to stare at the unearthly white spheres. Mum forbade me to wander near because armed police patrolled the fence.
The day I started high school, Nana died and we moved in with Grandad. She had a heart attack on the drive and he found her. She’d been shopping and the apples had rolled into the road. Afterwards he stayed home and played the piano all day, the same music over and over, called Twilight Peace, which he’d written for her in a manuscript book in blue ink. Mum said he must have an eagle’s eyes to read the minuscule crotchets and quavers in that dim light.
After school I joined him. With his waistcoat and front-creased trousers and immaculate toothbrush moustache he sat straight-backed at the piano in the best room. Dark cypress trees crowded round the bay window, blotting out the sun, and all the furniture except one chair and the piano and stool was draped in white sheets, while his bony hands, barely an octave wide, drifted over the keys. Dust-motes danced in a solitary beam. I sat motionless. A shaft of sunlight sneaked through a gap in the foliage onto his glossy bald crown and his veins twitched till his fingers rested on the last chord. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed behind his glasses. My hand clutched the conker in my pocket.
‘When you grow up, you won’t want to bother with old folks like me,’ he said, his upper lip quivering.
‘Yes I will,’ I said fiercely.
On impulse I thrust the conker into his hand. I had planned to pickle and bake it and impress friends with its size and hardness. It was a giant, a twelver, oily and gleaming with wavy concentric streaks like contour lines on a map. He just stared at the shiny brown lump in his cupped palm and his eyes filled with water again.
Less than a year later, Grandad took poorly in the middle of writing a letter. In the hospital I held the bony hand with paper-thin skin and slate-blue wrists and looked into the watery, pleading eyes.
His voice was frayed. ‘Sorry we left a mess for you young ’uns.’
His hand flopped and his face went blank. I cried as I had never cried before. Mum said old people often pine away when their partner dies.
Soon after, she installed a man with a German shepherd dog. He had Lego hair and a shirt collar worn at the edge, and a four-year-old son who stayed every other weekend. The man said, laughing through yellow teeth, his son barked before he learnt to speak. The man stank of smoke, which Mum didn’t notice. Behind the shed he kept a cut glass ashtray crammed with cigarette ends standing upright in a pyramid, which turned brown with a pool of treacly gunge underneath. She didn’t notice that either. I sat in an ash tree to spy on him in his smoking hideout.
The man scythed Grandad’s meadow almost to bare soil, whipped off the dust sheets in the best room, ripped up carpets, threw out the gas fire and bought an electric one with mock flames leaping behind a glass front. He changed Grandad’s tasselled lampshade for a steel spotlight, and I was allowed to play the piano only till six. The grandfather clock went to auction. He wanted to sell the piano and have a drinks cabinet instead, because I was the only one who played.
‘But Dad left it to Daniel,’ Mum said.
The man glanced round at me.
‘Did he say it must stay in that room? Did he say it must stay in this house?’
I scowled and disappeared. The only vestiges of my beloved grandfather were the piano and roll-top bureau. I salvaged the dust sheets to make a den at the bottom of the garden.
The dog and I were enemies from the start. A sparrow flew into the kitchen and I rushed to the rescue, but the dog got there first.
‘Too late,’ the man said with a smirk.
I was distraught, but Mum just shrugged. I sat and played Twilight Peace and thought of Grandad finding Nana on the drive and the apples rolling round. The dog sat under the table while we ate. Grandad would have had a fit. The man fed it a sausage without Mum seeing.
After tea, I slipped into the best room. I heard the man’s knife-sharp voice say, ‘letting that red-haired one have his own way,’ and launched into the Funeral March. From then on, every day after school I played, for Grandad. One day Mum came in and listened.
‘It is a bit bulky,’ she said with head bowed. ‘Mebbe we could take out a couple chairs.’
The man had the cypress trees felled and paved the front garden. Sunlight filled the room. It felt wrong, disrespectful. I protested loudly.
The man showed his yellow teeth. ‘That’s it. Piano has to go.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ she said.
Next week while she was out, someone took the piano and she never uttered a word.
Years later, I learnt of Mum’s death. I was granted compassionate leave and drove back in a sweltering August. The man was long gone. The house and garden and street were smaller than I recalled, except for the ash trees, and all the front gardens were razed for parking.
In a drawer in her room was a child’s tea set of shiny black pottery wrapped in tissue, and documents including her birth certificate which, puzzlingly, showed her place of birth as P.O. Box 1663. I unlocked Grandad’s roll-top bureau and there, winking at me from a small pigeonhole, was my champion conker, the one I meant to pickle and bake, but gave to him instead for solace. I cradled it in my palm and stared at it for a long time. I remembered him saying, ‘When you grow up you won’t want to bother with old folks like me,’ and felt ashamed. He’d shown me nothing but kindness, and I had hardly given him a thought all through my teens and student years. The papers were immaculately ordered, hundreds of letters protesting the existence of the spy base, and replies. A folder contained information on Menwith Hill which I read halfway through the night till I could stomach no more: snooping on people, including British citizens, gathering data against commercial rivals, facilitating drone warfare in the Middle East, killing civilians in Yemen.... A lump of anger sat in my throat and would not go down. The spy base was accountable to no one, not even UK authorities. I felt as though I were balancing on a queasy knife-edge. For centuries my family had lived here in Yorkshire, yet I, Daniel, was classified as a foreign national on my own soil. I was the enemy, everyone was the enemy. Someone was probably poring over my digital footprint at that very moment.
In a large unmarked envelope I found tiny black-and-white photos of a hall with sedately dancing couples, friends relaxing with a drink at home, a log cabin, people on horseback, a jazz band, groups of smiling men and women, Nana holding a baby, and I wondered why they were not mounted in albums like those of the wedding and family growing up. I tipped up the envelope and a small metal object fell out: a sterling silver tie-pin with a large A and the word bomb between the legs of the A, and round the edge the words Manhattan Project. My heart sank with dawning awareness that my beloved Grandad had helped to build the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I untied a bundle of exercise books tied with a green satin ribbon. The top one was labelled ‘Diary 16th of July 1945—’, the ink was faded to a pale blue and the last page read, in wayward, quivering letters that went increasingly skew-whiff:
16th of July 1945
Still shaking with excitement twelve hours later. Last night we left the Hill by a secret back road in camouflaged buses and arrived at Alamogordo at 2 a.m. to witness the test. The bomb was mounted on scaffolding ten miles away from us. Dance music blasted through loudspeakers. We waited an hour for a storm to pass over and lay face down with our feet towards the site, and put on rectangular dark glasses. Then came the countdown. An eternity. I feared it would fail and feared it would succeed, but I feared failure more: all that hard work, for nothing.
At 5.29 a.m., while it was still dark, I saw a searing white light a thousand times brighter than the midday sun in the sky over the hills. We expected just a flash, but it carried on so long, I began to think we’d started a chain reaction which would destroy the whole world – something we had discussed before. I couldn’t resist whipping the glasses off and peeping round. A purple cloud hung there forever before going up into a ball of orange and purple and green and red and yellow flames. It kept boiling and churning and growing, much bigger than expected, it was coming towards us and I was afraid it would envelop us, ten miles away. I was temporarily blinded. My arms were covered in goose pimples and yet my ears were glowing from the heat of the blast. A full one and a half minutes after the piercing white light there was a huge growling roar, the likes of which I have never heard before.
We were awestruck and euphoric. After all that work and the long hours, an enormous sense of accomplishment and relief came over us. We did it! Back at the lab at Los Alamos we partied and the partying went on for two or three days, Dick was sitting on the bonnet of the Jeep, playing the bongos, and everyone was drinking and singing.
7th of August 1945
Can hardly write, I’m so shocked. Did I really think they wouldn’t use it? Dreadful shaking, couldn’t sleep all night. Yesterday Oppie called us to a meeting in the auditorium in T Building, strode down the isle, mounted the stage and read out a message: ‘Clear-cut results, exceeding TR test in visible effects’. Everyone was cheering and stamping their feet. Me too. But I kept thinking, we’ve killed thousands of innocent people. We’ve let the genie out of the bottle. Now everyone will want one. What have we done?
A trembling started in my fingertips and spread throughout my body. There were no more entries, nor later diaries. Grandad did that. And celebrated.
The ash trees were taller and laden with new keys. From indoors I fetched a large whisky and soda and sat in the blistering evening sun, watching swallows gather. I pondered the angry monsters that lurked beyond and their stranglehold, cradling the conker in my palm and staring at it, as gleaming and oily as ever. The meadow had sprung back after the man’s ravages and the frothy pink flowers of a hemp agrimony were crawling with insects. Hope.
Judy Birkbeck is the author of a novel, Behind the Mask is Nothing, published by Holland House Books. Her short stories have been published in Litro, Lampeter Review, Unthology, Aesthetica, Manchester Review, Leicester Writes, Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Shadow Booth, Lighthouse, Aftermath Magazine, Shooter Magazine and others. Find out more about Judy and her writing at http://www.judybirkbeck.co.uk/