Open Writing

Landseer had clearly knocked up the sky over Holme Moss.

It was a hefty Victorian sky done in oils, with lots of bilious yellow and green bits mixed in with all the bluey greys and purples, like a very nasty bruise. It cried out for words like “lowering”, and a selection of highland cows and stags at bay outlined against it.

It didn’t look very promising if you were thinking walks or picnics.

We were just debating cutting our losses and diving for cover when, with a complete disregard for artistic continuity, the sky launched into 1930’s fretwork. Instead of a belching eighteen-hundreds sky from a dark corner of the art gallery, we were suddenly into a big yellow sun with neatly outlined sunbeams pouring down from right to left the way you’ve seen them on endless suburban garden gates, or the fronts of old radio cabinets.

Patches of sunshine were beginning to wander about over the moss and the surrounding landscape, so instead of turning Blunderbus round and running for home, we took the Holmfirth Bypass over the moors from above the Sovereign.

We were thinking Dunford Bridge, but as we passed Winscar, it looked like we’d got there just in time for the cabaret. There was something parked down by the water, something buzzing around out on the reservoir and something pretty big in the car-park, which wasn’t usual, so we pulled in ourselves.

It turned out to be the South Yorks Police Underwater Rescue Unit, or that’s what it said on the Something Pretty Big in the car-park.

I swiftly debated calling the newsdesk to alert the local paper to Dastardly Murder On Doorstep, Reservoirs Dragged. But I thought I’d better find out what was going on first.

The rubber dingy attached itself to a buoy, and lots of large chaps in wetsuits fell out of it backwards from time to time, whilst another chap stood up and waved what we took to be charts.

We waited for something to come up, but it didn’t. Apart from the large chaps, which was quite a relief.

We watched for a while, supping the contents of a large hot flask, feeling rather glad we weren’t in the water with them. In spite of the fretwork sky, it looked distinctly parky out there.

In a bit, the dingy buzzed back shorewards, and the thing parked by the water, which was a police land-rover with a winch on the back, started winding it in. We waited until we were sure that the land-rover was going to pull the boat in, rather than the other way round, and then whizzed down for a word with the large, damp chaps.

“Was this just a dry run?” I asked. “Or is something going on??”

The large damp chap gave me an old-fashioned look. “It was a dry run,” he said, dripping gently. ”For when we go on a deep dive tomorrow.”

“How deep is it here?” I said.

“We’ve just been down to 41 metres,” he said.

I’m not very metric, but it sounded like a lot of cold wet stuff over your head to me.

I decided to give deep water dives a miss, at least until the spring.

The fretwork was showing distinct signs of turning back into Landseer, so we went back to the flask of something hot, and left them to do the same.

There are a whole lot of cabaret turns just around the next corner on the Holmfirth Bypass, and this has just been one of them.