When the canals were drained,
uncovering the victims of the conflict, the clean-up crews removed those
remains that were easily accessible but didn’t bother with excavations. Since then,
by some ungodly process of geological movement, the bones of persons submerged
in the mud of the canal bed have slowly risen back to the surface. One comes
across them regularly along the routes of the Grand Union or Basingstoke canals;
those archaic channels that once linked Britain's industrial cities, but which
are now little more than open air latrines and dumps for industrial waste. A
femur protrudes from beneath a collapsed lock gate; a shattered skull appears
one day from an eroded bank near a long disused sewer outflow. The appearance
of these broken remains, witnesses to a largely forgotten conflict,
seemed designed to remind those local officials still in the area of their
complicity in the clearances and forced migrations.
When the Central Authority
announced their intention to cut all support for rural infrastructure in the
Home Counties no-one expected the regional authorities to put up much of a
fight, hence the formation of local 'Action and Protection' associations made
up of residents of those towns under threat. Lessons had been learnt from the
treatment of smaller towns and villages in the surrounding area over the preceding
years. County law enforcement mounted a half-hearted attempt to relocate the
remaining populations of Farnham and Aldershot into the new reception districts
in the South and West of Greater London. They were often thwarted by these
rag-tag groups armed with weapons constructed at home or acquired after the remaining
army base at Farnborough was abandoned and the squaddies sold their kit on the
black market. Burning cars fortified gated communities; masonry from previous
demolitions was reused to build barricades and permanent watches were
established observing the movement of unfamiliar vehicles in the town
centres.
Teams of specialist ‘rural
administrators’ were then drafted in. Their speciality lay in slowly strangling
the community by isolating the remaining sources of clean water and fuel,
disappearing prominent local people and demolishing entire streets for the sake
of “safety and secure rural development”. They banned the digging of
wells under the pretence that they might be used to plant bombs and access
routes into the area were designated for exclusive use by the security services,
then blocked altogether. The following winter, a year after the expanded rural
consolidation program began, around four hundred residents and their supporters
remained holding out at the appropriately named Gun Hill estate in the north of
Aldershot. By this time they had taken to collecting rainwater via a network of
interconnected gutters attached to the pitched roofs of their modest
semi-detached houses. There is evidence that in January of that year they had
sent communications requesting affiliate status with the independent communes
at Midhurst and Petersfield. No replies have yet been discovered in the records
of either and it is doubtful that if such a request had been accepted it would
have changed the outcome of events.
A note found in the diary of Geoffrey Alsop, a retired deputy governor of the Southern England Central Bank living at Haslemere states he was woken in the early hours of March 3rd by the distant sound of heavy artillery coming from the North. There never has been nor do I think there ever will be an investigation into how this group of former banking clerks, teachers, and middle managers vanished from the face of the earth. In the early spring of that year a report was published by the Ministry for Rural Affairs confirming 100% compliance with the consolidation and relocation program in the Surrey and Hampshire regions and hailing their “economic independence”. It was a pattern repeated across rural England over the next five years.
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