Short story · 4 min read · Set in The Northfield Valley ·
The Roundabouts of My Father's Plans
Clearing a county draughtsman's flat, his daughter finds a plan of the valley that gave every crossroad a roundabout, and the junctions that were built years after fit it drawing for drawing, except the one that was built first.
My father worked thirty-four years in the county surveyor's drawing office, and when the flat came to be cleared I took the plans hutted at the back of the wardrobe and left the better furniture to the aunts. Most of it was routine: widenings, culverts, a horse trough repealed. The one that stopped me was the valley plan, dated October 1968, inked and titled in his hand, CO-ORDINATED JUNCTION IMPROVEMENTS, NORTHFIELD VALLEY.
The valley had four proper crossroads in those days: Birches, Stone Cross, the Halfway, and Nant Farm Corner. There was no crossroad at Foxholes, only a bend in the lane and two farms opposite each other. On the plan each of the four crossroads carried a roundabout, pencilled first and inked over, with kerb radii, a hatched island, and sight lines swept clear at the corners. And at Foxholes, on the bend where there had never been a crossroad, there was a fifth roundabout drawn, drawn the same, numbered the same, sitting in a field My fathers deed plans called Brick Kiln Field.
I knew three of the four junctions, because I learned to drive in that valley and I have taken all of them wrong in my time. They went to roundabout in the ordinary way of things: Stone Cross in 1971 after the mills closed and the grit lorries grew, the Halfway in 1974, Nant Farm Corner in 1979 when the by-pass came off it. Each time the county said the accident numbers or the growth had brought it forward, and nobody at the county looked at any other paper, because the valley got what valleys get.
When I laid my father's plan out on the floor of the flat and measured the built junctions against it, the drawings agreed. The radii at Stone Cross were the radii of the plan to the pin head. The by-pass came off Nant Farm Corner not at the angle any traffic study of 1979 would have picked, but at the angle of the pencil under the ink, which sits ten degrees east of it. I rang my father's old colleague, Mr Sid Doveton, who was a boy at the other desk in 1968, and he laughed at first and then went quiet and said he remembered my father ink that sheet across a winter, and remembered being told, when he asked what the counts were based on, that the counts would be along in their turn.
The part I have not resolved is Foxholes. On my father's plan it is the fifth roundabout, but it was not built fifth and it was not built to planning, because Brick Kiln Field roundabout was opened in 1966, two years before the plan is dated. The county histories call it an early example of the form. What the histories do not do, and what the file at Shire Hall will not do either, I have been down and asked, is say what 1966 needed a roundabout for on a bend where two farm gates face each other across a lane and the grit is spread twice a year. My father's plan does not help. It shows Foxholes roundabout like the others, swept and kerbed and inked, and in the corner by the title it carries the words he always used for a drawing taken off the ground rather than put onto it: PROVED BY PERAMBULATION, to which he has added, in pencil, in the hand I know better than my own, including Foxholes.
I have driven the bend a number of times since. The roundabout does its work: the farms' milk tankers swing it, the school bus takes it, the hedge is cut to its kerbs, and tea-time traffic comes off the new estate and uses it as though junctions had sat there since the valley was named. Nothing is wrong with it that a survey could find.
The question I keep, since the clearing and the drawing and the word proved by perambulation, is which way the proving ran: whether my father inked the roundabouts because he knew where the valley would want them, or inked them because he had already been out in the dark of Brick Kiln Field and seen what the valley was being steered round.