It’s only a short walk from our house to the Eagle Recreation Ground, where the dogs can run freely. We go there nearly every day, via a short quiet street of new-ish development, past the flats and through a clanking metal kissing gate, onto a canal path, then over the footbridge, past the ugliest building in Leamington (and possibly the whole of the Midlands, for its size), and onto the green, littered spaces of the Eagle.
Today: the canal path. It passes under a railway bridge and a footbridge. For years men in grey suits came from time to time, and looked earnestly at the railway bridge from underneath. They made notes on their clipboards. There came a time (am I remembering this correctly?) when they wore bright yellow hard hats: the uniform of the engineer. The bridge was being watched. You could hear the drivers throttling down, and crossing the bridge on dead slow – another sign of mistrust.

Passenger trains were on their run-in to Leamington station, but some were massive freight trains that took ages to cross. Those huge blank-sided freight cars that look as if they are secretly transporting nuclear waste rumbled heavily past in endless lines, or else there were flat-beds filled with cars, or the long chains of exotically-named containers (orange Hapag Lloyd, grey Maersk,), bringing a whiff of the ocean deep into our Midlands.

I felt well justified in running through under the bridge if a train was coming, and found myself thinking in newspaper headlines (‘Freak Bridge Collapse’ or ‘Dog Walker Killed’). A train that fell through the bridge would drop a carriage, slanting down, jagged and awkward. It was always a plunging carriage that my mind’s eye offered, never a locomotive. And of course it would be the gruesome deaths and the injuries to the passengers that would be reported, not the dead dogs underneath. We would be small fry to them.

the Tay Bridge disaster -
Primitive gothic images of rail disasters flickered in my mind.
Superstitiously – that primitive belief in sympathetic magic – I tried not to think these thoughts, in case they brought bad luck and actually made the bridge collapse. Then my son started to be afraid of trains: he was lying awake at night, listening for them, and it turned out that he actually knew the timetable – knew when to expect them. Goodness knows how long that had been going on for. How long does it take a nine-year old to detect these things? So I had to start to conceal my fear – maybe I had created his. Long afterwards, out at the stables where I rode, my horse started to refuse to go under the railway bridge there. One day I tried to make him go underneath it while a train was crossing, and he bolted with me. A complex and humiliating experience – matter for another day.
Then the day came when workmen arrived, tearing up the Eagle to make a road, ripping out the fine lime tree that stood by the railway line, cutting through the pleasant bank of silver birches that gave the Rec its sense of privacy and enclosure.

I chatted to workmen – they were busy but friendly. The bridge was being replaced – they needed the road the bring through the biggest crane in (somewhere – the world? The Northern hemisphere? The UK?) Anyway, it was going to be enormous.

monster crane
The change could only happen on Christmas day as that’s the one day of the year when the line could feasibly be closed. They would work all night and in twenty-four hours it would be running again. It felt like something from myth – a heroic feat of co-ordination and planning, of skill and machinery and sheer manpower. And on Christmas Day, too, that central mythic moment of the turning year. Would the crows or the odd late rat speak to them as they worked?
“That’ll be good overtime” I said, not wanting them to claim too much martyrdom. “Quadruple?”
“Oh, more than that,” they happily replied.
“But what about all the destruction? This damn road?” I was starting to feel more accepted – courageous.
“That’ll all be put back, good as new. That’s part of the contract.”
“You can’t put that tree back – they take fifty years to get to that height.” It had been at least ten feet around the base, and the stump had a raw desperate look that made me feel sad and angry, both at once.
They weren’t embarrassed – something else could grow there.
It was exciting then: to have this inside information. I planned to go out late on Christmas Eve and then early Christmas morning. Such a marvel of engineering doesn’t often happen locally.
Late, in the dark and cold, all that very still evening, their arc lights made the scene brilliant. It wasn’t even very noisy. The canal path was roped off, and so they were working in the distance, tiny yellow figures clambering about on their coldly-lit stage, and the crane moving infinitely slowly through its parabolas of lifting and lowering. Dismantling was taking a very long time.

Xmas Eve demolition


slow demolition
Christmas being what it is, I didn’t actually get up quite in time to see the climactic moment when there was a gap – when the bridge was down and nothing at all could cross it. It must have happened around five in the morning, I guess. By the time I was there again, great dark green pieces of metal were being tenderly swung into place, and already it was anticipating completion.

lowering gently - seen through wire mesh
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