Northern Earth Feature

Eclipse - A Cosmic Play by Philip Heselton

Scene One: Wednesday 30th June 1954, lunchtime.

I was eight years old. We were out in the playing fields attached to Kenyngton Manor Junior School, Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, sitting on top of the old air-raid shelters with our pieces of glass carefully smoked the night before with the aid of a candle flame.

The sky was clear and we watched the disc of the moon pass over the disc of the sun till only a crescent remained.

We had learnt in class about eclipses and drawn the diagrams and done experiments with lights and footballs and oranges.

We had learnt the difference between a partial eclipse such as we had just experienced, and a total eclipse - a much rarer event where the moon completely hides the sun and it gets dark. The next one in these islands, we were informed, would be in Cornwall in 1999.

Such a long time in the future, I thought. I shall be 53 by then - really old! But I made a commitment that day - to be there to witness it.

 Scene Two: 10am Wednesday 11th August 1999 - on a hill above St. Ives, Cornwall.

It is cloudy and raining. We find a westward facing rock outcrop - a marvelous location, with overhanging ledges and little pools of water. We establish ourselves there. There are people all over the hill - we can hear them talking but not see them because of the gorse and bracken.

It starts to rain more heavily and the clouds get darker - just about the worst conditions to experience the eclipse, I thought, because of the lack of contrast with normal conditions. What I don't realise is that the effect of the eclipse has started - the dark clouds would not normally be as dark as that.

It becomes a very dull day and, perhaps, a little colder. The rain continues. It gets still darker - we are aware of the eclipse.

And then - silence. It has gone quiet - no birds, no little sounds that we weren't aware of before they stopped. Even the people have stopped talking. But it takes me a few seconds to realise the main contribution to the quiet - it has stopped raining! The feeling of apprehension - that something was about to happen - has been written about so much, but I felt it so intensely at that moment. Something was about to happen.

And then, it gets measurably darker and darker very quickly - no shadow rushing towards us, just what I could only think of as the "cosmic dimmer switch".

The street lights came on, the car headlights shone brightly, hundreds of flashes from the neighbouring hills as amateur photographers tried to capture the essential quality of darkness. It was night. It was dark, apart from a golden band far to the south, the world outside totality.
The explosion of fireworks to the south-west. Or were they? More likely it was Concorde's sonic boom. The flashes continued.

What were my feelings? It was awesome! Something was being done at landscape scale. This was the eclipse - no longer in the future as a permanent point of reference for my life, it was happening now, and totally different from how I had imagined it, with clear skies, the sun's corona and the starry sky at midday.

But this was real, and it was happening to the earth, and it was happening now. Once every three hundred years would this place experience this - perhaps only once in a thousand years near midday. What would the ancient peoples have thought?

Two minutes must be up by now, surely. It must start to get light again. As if on cue, the sky behind the opposite hill lightened, and lightened amazingly quickly - surely someone must be operating a cosmic dimmer switch - and, within perhaps 30 seconds, and for the only time in my life, I witnessed the dawn come up in the west.

And the rain started again. The seagulls started their morning calls, and the horses in the field below, who had gathered together during the eclipse, all turned round and looked up the hillside at us, as if to say "Did you do that? It was quite impressive! But don't do it again!"

And it was a new day. The eclipse was now in the past - we move forward into the future knowing that our own deaths will occur before the next total eclipse to grace out islands in 2090, and we are content.

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