The Yellow Glass (16 page)

“Let the girl have her own dish, Frances,” Major
Dyminge intervened.
 
“If she wants it so
much.”

Mrs Dyminge subsided and picked up her pudding spoon
again.

“Well, I shall just have to put my thinking cap on and
remember who the dickens gave it to me . . .
 
Oh, what a sublime pudding this is, Jerzy!
 
Nectar for the gods!”

I tried a more general approach and threw a question
at the table:

“Is there a glass factory in Dover, does anybody
know?
 
Glass and other ceramics?
 
Only the dish is made in Dover, by the stamp
on its bottom.
 
It says
‘R’co & Son Glassware, Dover
.”

“Bottom!”
 
My
little brother shouted.
 
“Rosa said
‘bottom’!”

“Stop it Sam, I’m asking a serious question.”

My father stood up and blew the candles out.

“Enough, Samuel.
 
Now Major and Mrs Dyminge, would you like coffee in the drawing-room?”

I tried again.

“No, but is there?
 
A glass factory?”

My father took Mrs Dyminge’s arm and led her out of
the room as if they were at the head of a stately procession and I noticed her
smile shyly up at him as they passed my chair.

“Bottom!”
 
Sam
gave it a last whirl and ran out after the grown-ups.

Only Major Dyminge and I were left at table and he
shook out the napkin that had been lying on his lap and placed it by his empty
bowl.

“
R’co and Son
,
eh?”
 
He said.
 
“Would this be the
R’co
who might kill you, Rosa?”

 
So I told Major Dyminge the whole story.
 
He’d led an adventurous life and had plenty
of experience of the ‘genre’.
 
(Besides,
Major Dyminge had once saved me from drowning in the sea, which none of my
family would
ever
forget.)
 
I hoped, in a vague kind of way, that he
might have a few tips for me, but all he’d said was:

“Promise me one thing, Rosa.
 
That you won’t begin searching for that glass
factory all by yourself.”

I’d promised and then he had gone for his coffee and
I’d followed Sam up to bed.

 
Saturday stayed fine and I did something I
hadn’t done for the longest time; something I’d loved to do when I was
younger.
 
I jumped out of the drawing-room
window, still wearing my nightie and slippers, and ran along the beach, certain
that nobody else was up and about and that the expanses of shingle and sand and
mussel-encrusted rock pools that had come up for a breather while the tide was
at it lowest, all belonged to me.
 
However, in the distance, picking his way over the tumble of rocks that
lay beneath Ness Point, I made out the unmistakeable figure of my Uncle Albert,
beachcombing.
 

Uncle Albert was in love with the sea and scarcely
worked in my mother’s millinery business any more.
 
So astonished had he been when first brought
down from London to the coast, that we’d all had to run after him into the
waves to prevent him from drowning himself with glee.
 
  

“He’s gone native,” my mother had remarked, not long
after our arrival at St Margarets (I remember how she’d smiled to see him so
happy).
 
It was as if she had released
him - as you might release a tired pit pony after a lifetime of arduous work in
the dark - setting him down in a lush, green field and watching him gallop off.
  
I didn’t wave; it would only have un-settled
him.

Seagulls swooped about, taking their fill of the
mussels and a tiny crab scuttled sideways when it saw me running and jumping on
the wet sand.
 
Perfect puffs of cloud sat
motionless in the lively blue sky.
 
I got
as far as Major Dyminge’s boat, moored up by the jetty, and sat down beside it.

Over at the other end of the beach, where the road
curved down the hill in a lush, green sweep - for holm oaks and pines and thick
tangles of ivy gave St Margarets Bay quite a Mediterranean look - the girl who
worked at the Coastguard pub brought some empty bottles out and put them in the
pub bins.
 
We knew each other, so I waved
at her and she waved back.
 
We weren’t
completely alone on the beach, you see.
 
Before the war, there’d been more houses and a tea-rooms and St
Margarets had been rather a smart little resort until the army had taken it for
a ‘battle school’, which had pretty much done for it, except for the bit of the
pub that was left standing and the houses we were soon to move into.
 
Since then, the ruins had been swept away and
the New Promenade and a small slipway had been built, instead.

I ran over to the slipway, to where Major Dyminge
moored his boat.
 
The Major’s boat was
his pride and joy and no wonder when she was the prettiest tub in the world.
 
He had spent years sawing away at lengths of
wood and constructed a magical vessel; like the best boat that was ever
launched on Regent’s Park pond, only full-size.
 
Her sides swelled gently and she gleamed conker-brown.
 
It looked like he’d been applying another
coat of varnish because a couple of tins of the stuff were stacked inside,
along with some paintbrushes, upright in an old petrol can.
 
When she was in use, he rigged her up with
spotless white sails that my mother had made on her sewing machine.
 
I ran a hand along
The Rose of Kent’s
glossy flank and wondered whether I might ask
the Major to take me out in her.
 
Perhaps
we could sail through Dover harbour looking for tell-tale signs of a glass
factory, whatever
they
might be.
 
(Sometimes it feels as though knowing a lot
about some subjects only serves to highlight my ignorance about others.)
 
It was obvious I needed to do some research,
if I was to proceed any further with my undercover work.

I ran back down the beach, brushed some of the sand
off the soles of my feet and wriggled through the drawing-room window.
 
I was heading back to my bedroom, where I kept
all twenty-three volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, leather-bound and in
glorious alphabetical order, plus one index volume containing an atlas.

I didn’t waste time dressing, but pulled out the
relevant volume, sat cross-legged on my bed and looked up Glass.
 
There was a satisfyingly lengthy entry (which
I will now proceed to summarize).
 

In short, I discovered that the basic ingredient of
glass was sand, or ‘silica’ to give it its proper name, and that other minerals
were added to it, creating a glass recipe known as ‘batch’.
 
Those other minerals being, generally, soda
ash and limestone.
 
After the batch had
been mixed, it was then melted in a furnace, which had been fired to an extremely
high temperature.
 
If uranium were to be
introduced, it would have been as an oxide, and - as Uncle Tristram had said -
its purpose would be to add colour to the batch.
 
All sorts of colours could be produced with
different metallic oxides:
 
violet-blue
with the addition of cobalt, peacock-blue with copper, pale pink with tellurium
(to give three examples).
 

I also learnt quite a bit about crystallisation, and
the unusual ability of glass
not
to
form crystals – although, should crystals be desired, a controlled amount could
be introduced, creating a type of glassware that was a combination of the best
bits of glass and pottery and, therefore, jolly strong.
 
Then there was the vast subject of
sandcasting, pressing and moulds (which I won’t go into here) and a host of
interesting new words: such as
cullet
,
being broken or waste glass suitable for re-melting,
crizzling
, being deterioration in the fabric of the glass and
annealing
, being gradual cooling to
prevent cracks.
 

I rolled the lovely words around in my mouth with
pleasure and lapped up every fact that Britannica had to give me.
 
Even so, I wanted
more
- encyclopaedias always skimmed the surface.
 
Dover Library did its best, but was unlikely
to have anything more in-depth on the subject.
 
There would be books I could send off for, of course, although I was
sadly short of funds . . but then I was forced to remind myself that I wasn’t
actually going to be manufacturing any glass, personally.
 
Facts were all very well - facts were
wonderful
- but I had a tendency to
overdo the lapping until I was stuffed to bursting and immobilised by them.

I had to try to think in a more general way, if I was
going to progress with a plan.
 
I replaced
the encyclopaedia in strict, alphabetical order and made a start at getting
dressed.
 
As I was putting on my
dark-green linen shirt and a pair of Capri pants, I went over some of the information
that I already knew (for me, going over information is much like re-running a
spool of film).
 
The image of Magnus’
Uncle Reg immediately popped up.
 
Uncle
Reg leaning across the pub table to offer me a lift home:

“Dover?”
 
He’d
said.
 
“What a coincidence.
 
I’ve a factory down there, would you believe?”

I shook my head to dislodge the picture.
 
How interesting that he’d used the word
‘factory’ when I’d just learnt the correct term was either ‘glasshouse’ or
‘glassworks’; he hadn’t wanted to give too much away.
 
But that was just semantics.
 
The main thing was, wouldn’t we have heard of
a big glassworks in Dover?
 
Or anywhere near
Dover?
 
Because it had to be a big
affair.
 
From what I could gather, modern
glass was always produced on an industrial scale simply because the furnaces
had to be so incredibly powerful.
 

Halfway through tucking in my shirt, it struck me that
I’d missed something crucial.
 
I thought
back to Mr Orchard’s office at
Heaviside
Import/Exports
and the dictation I’d struggled to take down while that
American tickled my neck.
 
They’d been
drawing up a contract to export one million pieces to America.
 
One million pieces of substantially sized yellow
glass!
 
Only a truly enormous concern
could produce such an amount for a single order and a glassworks that size
couldn’t possibly be based in our part of Kent without any of us having heard
of it.
 
I sat down on the edge of my bed
and thought it through.
 
Uncle Reg had
two companies.
 
The company on the
contract was
Dilko Arkonnen Vas-Glas
& Ceramics, Finland
and they were evidently huge and perfectly capable
of producing one million pieces of glass to export to
Sambaware Enterprises, Cape Prince of Wales, Seward Peninsula,
Territory of Alaska, USA
.
 
So what
did
R’co & Son Glassware, Dover
do?

I began to brush my long, tangled hair, an activity
that always helped me to think.
 
There
was something else that was troubling me.
 
Just why had my uncle said that the huge quantities of uranium were most
probably being exported to the Soviets when
Sambaware
Enterprises
was an American company?
 
(Not that Alaska was a fully paid up part of the United States, being
only a territory.)
 
I paused with the
hairbrush in my hand and looked at the fool in the mirror.
 
Alaska?!
 

I opened the Britannica with the atlas inside, going
straight to the index at the back and ‘S’ for Seward Peninsula.
 
(They say pulses can quicken and I felt it
happen.)
 
The Seward Peninsula was just
below the Arctic Circle, in north-western Alaska, and only the tiniest sliver
of blue sea separated it from eastern Russia.
 
And there was Cape Prince of Wales at the far west of the Peninsula,
like a finger pointing across the Bering Strait and nearly,
so
nearly, scraping its nail on dry
land.
 
It was like looking at a map of
the English Channel, for just as St Margaret’s Bay was the closest point to
France, so Cape Prince of Wales was the closest point to Russia.
 

I felt as if I were just beginning to catch up with
HQ.
 
The ‘bad Yank’ who’d tickled my neck
- Mr B Dexter, as I recalled from the contract - was a link in the chain of
manufacture and supply that led, eventually, to the Soviets.
 
How tortuous it all was, though!
 
Why make yellow glass in Finland, bring it to
England, export it from here to sub-Arctic Alaska and then ship it over the
Baring Strait to Russia, when Finland shared a border with Russia in the first
place?
 
Was Finland on the wrong side of
the country, I pondered?
 
Could it be
that the uranium was specifically needed on the furthest reaches of Eastern
Russia, where it ran up to the Bering Sea?
 
I studied the map, mouthing the place names: Chukotskiy Poluostrov,
Korvakskoye Nagor’ye, Kamchatka.
 
To me,
they were as outlandish as the mountains of the moon, unimaginable regions of
ice liberally sprinkled with the letter ‘k’.

I slapped the great volume shut and slotted it back
into the bookcase that had come free with the encyclopaedias.
 
I could research Chukotskiy Poluostrov until
the cows came home but it was the ‘English connection’ that
I’d
discovered;
that
was where I’d stolen a march on HQ.
 
As far as they’d been concerned, the glass
had travelled from Finland to
Heaviside
Import/Exports
without a hitch, and all under the eagle eye of that native
Finn Arko Arkonnen.
 
But they had been
wrong.
 
Something else was going on, here
in Kent, something the smugglers desperately wanted to keep hidden - enough to
falsify information about Vas-Glas and it’s managing director and insinuate it
into the files of HQ,
and
enough to
make trad jazz-loving, myopic Reg Arkonnen from Hull impersonate a
Scandinavian.
 
Underneath the secret
negotiations to smuggle uranium-laden glass to the Soviets there was another
secret altogether.
 
An even more
dangerous secret.