On 7 February 1996, when I was Secretary of State for Defence, I went to the Salisbury Plain Training Area in Wiltshire to observe the British Army on exercise. The exercise in question was called ‘Phantom Bugle’ and it tested the mettle of the Army’s tanks and armoured vehicles, supported by troops and aircraft, in a simulated battle environment. I remember sitting in a Warrior fighting vehicle and hearing the rumble of military hardware moving at speed over the battle-scarred terrain and the clatter of blank ammunition being fired. And I was dimly aware, at one point, of a group of buildings, the spectral outlines of a village in the midst of all this noise and movement. But I had no idea of the poignancy of the story hidden within its shell-shattered walls.
The name of this ghost village is Imber. More than twenty years later I returned, this time with my eyes open, to find a main street littered with spent cartridges, grenade pins and bullet clips, and lined with pockmarked buildings. Merely getting here was no mean feat, for Imber now occupies the most physically dangerous spot in the United Kingdom. The road in from the nearest town, Warminster, was lined with warning signs such as ‘Danger. Unexploded Military Debris’ and ‘Do Not Leave the Carriageway’, and the surrounding plain was dotted with the hulks of tanks that now serve as target practice. For this is the largest military training area in the realm, with a rugged terrain that is ideal for the testing of tanks and the training of their crews, and Imber is in the heart of it, which explains why it is off-limits to the general public for all but a handful of designated days a year. This limitation dictated the scope of my investigations. I had to get in and out in a few hours. The meetings I arranged, with people who I trusted to unlock Imber’s secrets, had to be conducted with military precision and punctuality.
First impressions were of a dead place. Houses stripped of adornment, windows or gardens, and capped with metal roofs. A cluster of buildings that some people apparently refer to as ‘Legoland’ but reminded me of the green houses and red hotels in the Monopoly board game. There were weeds everywhere. The one structure still intact was a Norman church – oddly, I didn’t recall that from 1996 – set back from the main street on rising ground. Birds sang but in a wistful register, or so it seemed to me.
It felt as if the spirit of this sad, abandoned place had drained away long ago. But this is not quite true – a fellowship of people keep it alive and they are the ones I was relying on to lead me through its history. It is a story about a village with deep roots whose inhabitants were uprooted, ignored and ‘betrayed’ – all in the name of a greater freedom. One of the people I met is the only person still alive who witnessed the crucial moment in its apparent betrayal. His name is John Williams and we talked outside the old schoolhouse – down from the church, on the edge of ‘Legoland’ – where it happened. We’ll come to John, and all the others who believed their lives were altered by a broken promise. On my return to Salisbury Plain I was determined to pay Imber the attention and respect that too many in authority failed to show it over the decades.
If you look at the village on a map you will see it marooned amid the desolate tracts of the western part of Salisbury Plain. A local rhyme sums it up: ‘Imber on the down/Seven miles from any town’. The roads to it from the relative civilization of the nearest villages were once narrow and turfed. Now they are scored with caterpillar tracks and dotted with those broken tanks. The Salisbury Plain Training Area is a secure zone where the Army can fire live ammunition and drive tanks at combat speed on exercises designed to replicate the kind of battle conditions they may be expected to encounter in different theatres of conflict.
The training area occupies half of the plain, which is otherwise notable for its wealth of ancient archaeology. The circle of standing stones at Stonehenge is just the most famous of sites that also include Iron Age hill forts, Bronze Age settlements and Neolithic burial mounds. More recently, the Anglo-Saxons established farmsteads on and around the plain, which has been inhabited and farmed for many centuries.
Imber is nearly as old as the chalk hills that surround it. It appeared in a Saxon charter of AD 967 and in 1086 was recorded in the Domesday Book, the survey of land ownership and tax obligations in England and Wales ordered by William the Conqueror. ‘Imemerie’, as it was then spelled, is noted as being ‘quite small’, with just seven households, two ‘ploughlands’ and three ‘pastures’ – and a negligible taxable value of just ‘2 geld units’. It was never to be a place of any significance or influence. By the mid-twelfth century it had a church, replaced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the present building, dedicated to St Giles, which has traces of medieval paintings on its walls.
Imber’s population peaked in the mid-nineteenth century at about 450. In the 1890s the Wiltshire writer Ella Noyes described it as ‘one straggling street of old cottages and farmsteads winding along the hollow under the sheltering elms’. Set back at one end of that ‘straggling street’ was the church, with the manor house, Imber Court, at the other. In between was a pub, a Baptist chapel, a schoolhouse and a blacksmith. This was the spirit of old England made manifest.
By the outbreak of the Second World War the population had dropped to some 150 people, but Imber remained a sleepy, self-contained community with a way of life essentially unchanged in centuries. Poking around in the weed-bound shell of an old farm labourer’s cottage, I felt only the faintest of echoes from the past. But here, at least, was a hearth – or the gap where it had been. I thought of the many people who must have stood in front of it, warming faces and hands after working in frost-bound fields.
Families were big then – Ann Lewis’s mother, Dolly Rebbeck, who lived here from the early 1930s, was one of eleven children. Ann is one of the Imber stalwarts who return year after year, and though she never lived here it is in her heart. I would have liked to talk to her in Dolly’s old house, which was on the lane leading up to the church, but it was bombed to oblivion a long time ago. So we stood in the main street as she spoke of Imber in her mother’s time, evoking a simpler, vanished world in which children may not have had much in terms of material possessions but their imaginations made up for it.
‘My mum came to live here when she was four years old with her parents and siblings and was here for about ten years,’ said Ann. ‘My granddad worked on a farm here. Dolly loved it, she was very happy. It was a lovely little village. An ideal place to grow up I think. She used to collect stones and put them in little holes in the bank leading up to the church. She would say they were her “chickens”.’
The village blacksmith at that time was called Albert Nash. His great-granddaughter, Jane Paget, who lives in the Wiltshire village of Bromham, is another member of the community dedicated to keeping Imber’s memory alive. As Jane led me up the road towards the church, she revealed that she never knew Albert but feels she did: ‘I was told stories about him by my grandmother. When other kids of that age were being told fairy stories I got told stories about Imber. Albert was just a basic country blacksmith. He kept bees, he had a cottage garden, he grew his own vegetables, he made his own mead from the leftover honey from the bees. He loved Imber – the place, the people. And they loved him apparently.’
There is no trace left of Albert’s smithy. But had Imber continued in its unassuming way, I can picture it today as a little teashop, where Jane could bring her family and pass on the stories. It’s not hard to project forward and imagine the village in the twenty-first century: those thatched cottages, having been discreetly gentrified, now charming country retreats; Imber Court a boutique hotel, and the Bell Inn a ‘restaurant with rooms’. But in the 1940s, as war raged across Europe, the very thing that defined Imber’s character, its geographical isolation, was about to hasten its demise.
The British Army had been using the sparsely populated, open expanses of Salisbury Plain as a training area since at least the early 1870s, when Prussia’s defeat of France and the founding of the German state had persuaded Britain’s military leaders of the need for a modernized, trained army. But it wasn’t until 1898 that they took an official stake in the area, by buying a parcel of 41,000 acres. From this time the War Office continued to acquire land and by 1939 it owned the farms surrounding Imber and most of the land occupied by the village itself.
As the Second World War progressed, everyday life for Imber’s villagers became more and more precarious. From early 1942 US servicemen had been arriving in Britain in increasing numbers as the Allies prepared for their push back against Nazi Germany, and by the end of 1943 much of southern England resembled a vast holding camp for troops. Many American units were based in and around Salisbury Plain where they conducted practice manoeuvres for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe that was to be launched on 6 June 1944: D-Day. Getting in and out of the village was a task in itself as it was accessible only twice a day. The rest of the time, live fire was going on all around, with only a 1,000-yard safety zone around the village to protect its inhabitants. Then, in the spring of 1942, an incident took place that would profoundly affect Imber’s future as a viable community.
To fill in what happened, I met up with Richard Osgood, a senior archaeologist at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), on a hill overlooking the church a little way outside the village. Richard is responsible for sites of historic and cultural interest on MoD land. He unfolded a map from 1940 showing this part of Salisbury Plain. ‘The area in red is owned by the War Department,’ he said (almost the entire map was coloured red). ‘If you look over to the west you will see the small enclave: Imber.’ He swept his arm, taking in the surrounding plain, then pointed down at the church. ‘It’s right in the middle of the training area. And that is marked out of bounds to the military. So it was a small oasis of village life in a colossal area of high-intensity training.’
On 13 April 1942, military planners used the training area to stage an exercise designed to demonstrate the firepower of RAF fighter aircraft against enemy troops and transport columns. Dummy soldiers and lines of old lorries and tanks had been assembled on the ground and the idea was that six Spitfires and six Hurricanes would swoop down and attack the targets with live ammunition. An audience of military top brass had been invited to witness the spectacle, which was effectively a practice run for a similar exercise scheduled for a later date that Prime Minister Winston Churchill was due to attend. They were corralled in an enclosure several hundred yards from the target area. All went according to plan until the final plane appeared low in the sky. ‘This was a Hurricane piloted by Flight Sergeant William McClachlan,’ said Richard. ‘He approaches and attacks what he thinks was the target on the ground. But it is in fact the watching crowd of dignitaries. There were twenty-five people killed, including a brigadier. Seventy-one wounded.’
It was a catastrophic error that nowadays would be referred to as a ‘blue-on-blue incident’. Sadly, in the tumult of war, such tragedies were not uncommon though the scale of this one was particularly distressing. Three days later Churchill attended a similar exercise on the Imber training area that passed off without incident and in the village itself people carried on, apparently unperturbed. But Imber’s card was marked. It had become apparent to the military authorities that village life was incompatible with preparations for war.
This is where John Williams enters the story. I met him back in the village, outside the brick shell near the church that is all that remains of the old schoolhouse. There was not so much as a stub of chalk on the ground to hint at its previous function and John said he had trouble finding it when he first returned in 2002 after a gap of fifty-nine years. ‘I came here as a seven-year-old with my mother, Myfanwy Williams, when she was appointed schoolmistress,’ he said. The year was 1943 and he remembers being struck by all the thatched roofs – where he and his mother had come from, Caernarfon in north Wales, the roofs were made from locally quarried slate.
John Williams is the only person still alive who was present at the momentous, pivotal moment when Imber’s fate was sealed. The date was 1 November 1943 and he had brought along a copy of the relevant entry from his mother’s school record book which he now read out: ‘I dismissed the children at 10 a.m. as the school was needed for a meeting of military importance. I was informed at 12 a.m. that the school was to be closed.’ What happened at this meeting in the schoolhouse, what pledges and assumptions were made, lie at the heart of the Imber story.
John said he could still picture the Army representative addressing the meeting and was adamant about the words he used: ‘The officer said, “You’ll have to leave the village before Christmas because it’s wanted for the military – you all know there’s a war on.” That’s why they [the villagers] went but they went on the promise they could come back. I well remember, during that meeting, the promise being made. The Army man at the front saying you could come back.’
One morning (the date is unclear) shortly after this meeting, the postman delivered an extraordinary letter from the War Office to every household in the village. Undated, and signed by ‘Lt Col A. P. Thorne, Command Land Agent, Southern Command’, it ordered the entire population – of more than 100 people – to evacuate their homes by 17 December, the week before Christmas. There is some confusion about this letter as it appears that only one has survived. Supposedly the others were collected by the Army shortly after they had been delivered – a story that has certainly fed the grievances of villagers and their descendants down the years.
Be that as it may, Jane Paget, the great-granddaughter of the blacksmith Albert Nash, showed me a copy of the letter which she said was sent to Albert and his family. It doesn’t beat about the bush: ‘I regret to have to inform you that it is necessary to evacuate a major part of the department’s Imber Estate, including your dwelling. To this end I enclose formal notice to quit.’ Jane said Albert was devastated: ‘My great-grandmother, Martha, went to the smithy and found him slumped over his anvil, crying.’
The villagers, many of whom had never spent a night away from Imber, had just forty-seven days to find alternative accommodation and sell off their farm stock and machinery. Most found places to stay in Warminster or Devizes, or the little villages that ring that part of the plain. The church’s most precious artefacts (such as the font and pulpit, and two thirteenth-century effigies) were removed for safekeeping, its windows boarded up and the graveyard protected by barbed wire. Last orders were called in the Bell Inn and Imber fell silent and empty for the first time since ancient Britons had made fire and shelter there. That first Christmas for the villagers, away from their familiar hearths and traditional services at the church, was no doubt a bleak one.
Albert took the exile particularly badly, according to Jane: ‘They’d been gone less than six weeks and my great-grandmother, Martha, woke up one night to see Albert walking around the bedroom. She said, “Albert, what are you doing? Get back into bed, it’s the middle of the night.” He replied, “I’m going home, Martha.” She said, “You are home, Albert, get back into bed.” When she woke up in the morning he was dead in the bed beside her.’ Albert’s body was brought back to the village to be buried in the churchyard. Jane took me to see his grave. The inscription on his headstone reads simply: ‘In memory of Imber blacksmith Albert Nash 1875–1944.’
At the end of the war Imber’s erstwhile, now scattered, inhabitants awaited confirmation that they could return. After all, the Americans had gone home and peace now prevailed across a war-weary world. The notion of ever again having to stage military exercises on the scale of those that preceded D-Day seemed highly improbable. But everyone appreciated that the wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly and as the War Office procrastinated the villagers remained patient. By this time the buildings of the village had sustained damage from shells and bullets, and local vandals had ransacked the houses. Gardens were overgrown and the whole site was overrun with rabbits.
Imber was still redeemable as a place of human habitation, but as the months passed and the wind and rain took their toll, the likelihood of the village ever again ringing with life and laughter diminished. It wasn’t until April 1948 that the War Office broke its silence over Imber, by issuing a statement that villagers had been dreading but, increasingly, expecting. ‘Although itself not used for any form of training,’ said the statement, ‘the village has suffered from neglect, accidental damage and weather [sic], and to reinstate it would be very costly.’ The statement added, for good measure: ‘There is no question of a pledge having been given to the inhabitants that they would go back.’
This was not the opinion of the villagers then nor of their descendants now. They believed, and continue to believe with a quiet passion, that they were lied to, deceived, fobbed off. And therein lies the deep, unhealable wound at the heart of the Imber story. Jane said she does not feel bitter about the enforced evacuation. ‘There was a war on,’ she told me. ‘The village was needed and people were being displaced all over Europe at the time.’ But she feels the villagers were deceived over the terms on which they moved out.
‘What I feel resentment about is that they were led to believe they could come back. I think that was a sweetener that was given to them so that they went easily. People were being displaced across Europe – that was happening because of the enemy. This was done by their own government. And that was what hurt a lot of people and still rankles, to be truthful.’ Her interpretation of events was backed up by a soldier, Richard Madigan, who had supervised the evacuation of the village in 1943 and supported the villagers’ attempts to return in the post-war years. I shall examine those campaigns later in the chapter.
Shortly after the War Office issued its 1948 statement confirming Imber’s fate, Pathé News produced a poignant newsreel entitled ‘Imber stays Khaki’. The commentary, in typically patrician tones, declares that ‘Now final sentence of death on Imber has been passed. The Norman church will never again see its parishioners, for the pre-Domesday village is to remain a permanent battle school, says the War Office.’ The flickering black-and-white film reveals the sorry state of the village – broken windows, overgrown gardens, shattered roofs, abandoned equipment.
Nowadays, from what I could tell, much of the original village (apart from the church) has been shot to pieces. Many of the old cottages have gone and new houses, or rather those Lego-like structures, have been added to aid its function as a practice ground for urban warfare. The site was littered with military debris. It wasn’t easy to imagine oneself back among the thatched cottages, the sheltering elms and the rhythmic hammering of the blacksmith.
Nevertheless I wandered along the high street to Imber Court, once the ‘posh house’ at the west end of the village that was owned and occupied by generations of the Dean family. Now, like the rest of the original buildings, it was a scarred husk that could only hint at its former grandeur and the lifestyle it sustained. But it was here that the Imber story finally hit home for me.
Old photographs show a handsome, three-storey, ivy-clad manor house. The third storey has since been shot off and the building capped with an ugly metal roof. The windows, the ‘eyes’ of a living house, are permanently shuttered. Entering the once-grand hallway, I imagined the shooting parties, the social gatherings of Wiltshire’s great and good, and the confident young swells who came here in the nineteenth century when it was an ‘Academy for Young Gentlemen’.
The utilitarian steel stairway to the first floor stands where a fine old oak staircase once wound upwards. In what must have been the drawing room the pocked wall was once hung with a large mirror – still there when the US servicemen left at the end of the war, apparently. Both staircase and mirror were destroyed by machine-gun fire. I suddenly felt a sense of outrage welling up. But this reaction, of course, was as nothing compared to the anger of villagers and their families when they were finally allowed to return on designated visiting days.
For the fight to return to Imber did not fade with that perfunctory War Office statement of 1948. On the contrary, it fuelled the former residents’ ire and determination. Middle England, let it be said, is not known for its militancy, nor for its contempt for authority. But the MoD had met its match in the people of Imber. And at the end of 1960 their resentment flared into direct action. The catalyst was an attempt by the government to make permanent the closure of roads and rights of way around the village that had been introduced as a temporary measure in wartime. Aggrieved locals organized a rally which took place on 22 January 1961 and saw a convoy of vehicles flout the law to descend on Imber and decant some 2,000 protesters.
The Army and the police maintained a deliberately low-key presence as the crowd hoisted a banner that declared ‘Forever Imber’, and the rally’s principal organizer, Austin Underwood, made a cheekily dramatic gesture. He pinned a notice on the wall of the old Bell Inn – still standing, a little way beyond the entrance to Imber Court – which echoed the evacuation letters sent to villagers in November 1943: ‘Notice to quit. We the people hereby serve notice on the War Department to vacate and deliver up to the county of Wiltshire the parish of Imber.’
A schoolteacher and Amesbury town councillor, Underwood occupies a footnote in the Imber story. He wore his political convictions on his sleeve – he was an influential figure in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – but he’d also had a distinguished wartime career and he strikes me as a quiet man provoked to action by the circumstances of the day. In this way he personified the spirit of Imber and its people, and more widely of a nation that had recently resisted tyranny in a world war. His speech that day explicitly evoked the spirit of wartime when he asked, rhetorically, of the government, ‘Do they think this is some Polish village they can grind under their heel?’
A decade after Underwood organized these early protests – with Imber still out of bounds save on selected days, tons more ordnance having further degraded its broken buildings and many of its final inhabitants having died – another local man took up the cudgels on its behalf. David Johnson has no family connection with Imber. He simply became fascinated by the story. And, as I discovered when I met him in the heart of the village, he is another of these mild-mannered English people who prove as hard as oak when it comes to perceived injustice.
‘The more I looked into the story of Imber, the more I was convinced that things here had gone wrong, that promises were not kept,’ he said. ‘If I say to you, Michael, when those people were evacuated they left provisions in their kitchens so that they would be able to return …’ He left the statement hanging.
In 1973, David provided evidence to a government committee set up by Lord Carrington, the then Defence Secretary, which was charged with examining the justification for retaining MoD lands. He was supported by Underwood and by Richard Madigan, the soldier who had overseen the evacuation of the village. According to David, Madigan said that ‘he was told by his superior – an army major – that they were to tell the villagers they would be back in six months, or [by] the end of the war at the latest. He was emotional about the whole thing. He felt it was a breach of faith, in which he unwittingly had been involved.’
From what I have read, and the people I spoke to, there was a widespread belief among the villagers – at least at the beginning – that they would be going back to their homes and resuming their lives in Imber. This starts with the meeting in the schoolhouse on 1 November 1943 in which John Williams, the then seven-year-old son of the local schoolmistress, distinctly remembers ‘the promise being made’. Thereafter, according to villagers, other statements were made, both verbally and in writing, that led them to believe Imber would be handed back. This is hearsay, of course, but David felt he had a piece of evidence for that 1973 committee which would clinch it.
This was a copy of the ‘notice to quit’ letter sent to residents in November 1943 by Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Thorne. Jane Paget had already shown me a copy of this letter. But it seems that for decades no others were known about, perhaps because they were indeed collected by the Army after their delivery. At any rate Johnson introduced it to the inquiry with a flourish, claiming that the following sentence was crucial to his case: ‘… if you are so unfortunate as not to be able to find alternative accommodation, and it is necessary to remove your furniture to store, the Department will refund the cost of removal to store and reasonable storage charges until you can find another house, or until the Imber area is again open for occupation, whichever is the earlier [my italics].’
The committee was unmoved. Its report concluded that the letter ‘does not amount to a promise of return’. Imber was to remain closed except for specified visiting days. In 1991 Imber received its final slight when the parish name was abolished and it officially ceased to exist.
The MoD now owns 94,000 acres of Salisbury Plain, of which 30,000 acres is used for live firing and large-scale exercises such as Exercise Phantom Bugle, which I witnessed on my visit in 1996. Over and over again little Imber has borne the brunt of extreme firepower in the course of highly realistic battle scenarios. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland it stood in for the Republican strongholds of West Belfast and Derry’s Bogside. During the Cold War it was a German village on the Rhine, at risk of being overrun by Soviet tanks. And, perhaps most bizarrely of all, it has doubled as a village in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Through the MoD I managed to track down a soldier who had experienced Imber as a practice battle zone. Mark O’Reilly is a former officer of the Royal Irish Hussars, with whom he served in the First Gulf War. He trained as a tank commander at Imber in the late 1980s, on exercises specifically tailored for Cold War eventualities. When he joined me in ‘Legoland’ he admitted that he would spare a brief thought for Imber’s former inhabitants as he rumbled up that ‘straggling street’ in his 70-ton Challenger tank. ‘For a moment, during an exercise, we would think of the people who lived here and imagine what it would be like to be in that house or walking down that street before we were there,’ he said.
Between 2006 and 2014, British forces were deployed in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province, often on extremely dangerous counter-insurgency missions. Back in Imber, the former Imber Court served as a Taliban compound in pre-deployment training exercises. According to Mark – who now runs a company that helps to recreate war zones for training purposes – he brought in Afghanis living in Britain to double as street vendors within the walls of Imber Court. This strikes me as taking war games to an unnecessary level of authenticity, but I can see that as the Army moves from one potential conflict zone to the next, Imber is always one step ahead.
There is something surreal about a sleepy village mentioned in the Domesday Book standing in for the some of the world’s most dangerous trouble spots. And my research on Imber took a no less surreal turn when I came across the story of when it was ‘invaded’ by peace activists. I invited one of them, Beth Junor, to meet me in Imber, and it was an unlikely encounter to say the least, because thirty years ago Beth would have been – indeed, was – my sworn political enemy.
Between 1981 and 2000, she was one of the prime movers behind the Women’s Peace Camp which opposed the siting of nuclear-armed American cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common near Newbury in Berkshire. Having established a permanent camp at the entrance to the base, the Greenham women regularly broke through the perimeter fence, once gaining access to the control tower, and despite constant evictions they always returned to resume their protests, becoming a real thorn in the side of government. Beth herself was arrested many times for her part in these non-violent actions.
When I was elected to parliament in December 1984, the activities of the Greenham women were at their height. By the time I was appointed Defence Secretary in 1995 they were still encamped there, even though the last of the cruise missiles had been removed in 1991. It is fair to say that these women would not have been the first people I’d have considered inviting round for drinks. So I was a bit apprehensive about meeting Beth. I didn’t want our obviously opposing views on military and defence matters to flare into open warfare, even if this place was purpose-built for it.
When we did meet, on the approach road to the village, the same thought had obviously occurred to Beth and we were both on our best behaviour. As we headed for the village she talked me through what happened. The Greenham women had first learned of Imber when a cruise-missile convoy from Greenham Common held a practice exercise there. On 14 June 1988, she and three colleagues travelled the 40 miles west from Greenham to Salisbury Plain with the intention of ‘invading’ Imber along the same road that we were traversing, in order to interrupt a live-firing exercise. ‘We walked through the dark – this was one, two o’clock in the morning,’ she explained. ‘There were jeeps at the side of the road here, their headlights on. There were squaddies over here brewing a cup of tea. So we walked right through the middle of this army camp. They didn’t stop us. We think that they saw us, but what sense did they make of us?’
The image was a tantalizing one, of soldiers on manoeuvres in the dead of night rubbing their eyes in disbelief and deciding they were seeing things. At any rate the women’s peaceful invasion party proceeded, as we did, towards the village, expecting at any moment to be apprehended: ‘You know the feeling that someone is going to put a hand on your shoulder at any moment and tell you to stop and arrest you?’ When the church tower became visible in the first light of dawn they decided to seek sanctuary in St Giles’s. They made it unchallenged. ‘The church door was open. We just turned the latch and in we went.’
In we stepped, too. The fixtures and fittings had been removed, but of all the buildings in Imber this was the one that still felt as if it had a beating heart. It was a calming space with faded medieval frescoes in the nave and a seventeenth-century bell-ringers’ rota on one wall of the tower that resonated with Imber’s deep history. Here, Beth and her three companions spent nine hours undetected while the military exercise carried on in the village around them.
Finally, wondering what they had to do to get noticed, they went out in to the churchyard and began playing music. This did the trick: ‘It flushed the Army out of those buildings we passed. The four of us were arrested, taken away by the MoD police.’ Job done, by the logic of Beth and her activist friends. On her return to Imber, thirty years on, how did she feel? ‘It’s very emotional, to see the neglect, the damage, the bullet shells all over the path to the church. It’s heartbreaking.’
Beth and I were not exactly political soulmates. But all these years later, meeting in person, we each (I hope) proved to the other that neither had horns. And her audacious occupation of the church in the middle of a military operation left me in no doubt as to the sincerity of her pacifist beliefs. Indeed, she acted precisely in the spirit of Austin Underwood and his band of invaders in 1961. It was also interesting that for Beth, Imber remained a symbol of injustice, and a magnet for activism, fully forty-five years after it was forcibly evacuated.
That magnetism, borne of Imber’s sad history, still exists today, exercising its pull over the descendants of the village’s last inhabitants and the many people who have been moved by their fate. The church where Beth staged her protest, and where countless ancestors were married and laid to rest, is very much the focus of their attentions. For this is where families congregate at an annual service to remember all that’s been lost.
One regular attender is Ann Lewis, who told me she feels umbilically connected to this abandoned place through her late mother Dolly Rebbeck. For forty-five years she brought Dolly back, the last visit being in 2004 when Dolly was ninety. ‘It was a sort of pilgrimage, I suppose,’ Ann told me. ‘She’d show us things as we walked down the street – where the different houses were, where the farms were, where the shop was, where the allotments were. Where they used to live.’ The pilgrimage was a ritual that never lost its power or necessity, however many times it was repeated.
Dolly has since died, but Ann and her family continue to visit Imber. When Ann’s husband Gordon first accompanied them in the 1980s he had never heard of the place. But then he made an extraordinary discovery. He spotted the name ‘Alif’ on memorials in the church which set him thinking, as the same name features in his own ancestry. It turns out that Gordon is also connected to Imber – but at the opposite social pole to Ann: ‘We discovered that my wife’s family had been agricultural labourers and my family had been lords of the manor,’ he told me as we stood in the church.
‘Imber is a story of freedoms won, freedoms lost,’ Gordon went on. ‘We won the war, but the people of Imber lost the freedom to live in their homes.’ The annual visits ‘are part of keeping the village alive or at least keeping the memory of the village alive, keeping the ghosts of the buildings alive. It will never be a village again as it was but, if I use my mother-in-law as an example, she would bring not just her children and her in-laws but her grandchildren and even her great-grandchildren. So in many ways the village may have died, but its memory will always live, as long as there are people to pass it on.’
Had Imber been abandoned through, say, economic necessity – had it just become too tough to eke out a living there, deep on the plain and far from ‘civilization’ – would it continue to exert such a pull? I doubt it. The energy that drives those lasting connections may be partly born of nostalgia for a lost way of life, dictated by the seasons and rooted in the deep past. But it is mostly to do with the whiff of injustice and treachery that clings to the story – and hangs about the very buildings, shot up and broken down as they are.
For make no mistake, Imber had a mournful and disturbing feel. And the question I was left asking myself was, what would I have done if I’d had Imber’s fate in my hands? It’s a classic citizen-versus-state conflict, but my unhesitating answer is that I would have approved its requisition in wartime. And with regret, but a sense of wider obligation, I would not have allowed the villagers back in the post-war years. The idea of maintaining an island of civilian life amid a boiling sea of military pyrotechnics is simply unrealistic. It may be easy to say with hindsight, but I hope I’d have treated the villagers with more respect, and been straight with them from the outset about the unlikely prospect of them ever returning.
As I drove out of Imber the light was fading across Salisbury Plain. Imber had enjoyed a rare day of peace, of birdsong uninterrupted by noisy tanks and machine guns. Now we all had to leave before the witching hour passed and it became a war zone once again. I left with a surprisingly heavy heart, for Imber had worked its spell on me. There’s no doubt that its unassuming inhabitants were treated shoddily and disrespectfully by the authorities. And there’s no doubt either that the very concept of freedom is challenged by this story.
I cannot put it better than the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, who visited Imber in 1961 and wrote: ‘The temptation is to dismiss Imber as a local, sentimental affair. The village may be ancient, but it belongs to the War Department, it is dead, and so what? But if you look first at Imber as part of Salisbury Plain, then at the Plain as part of England, you find Imber speaking for much more than its sagging doorways.’
In other words, the Imber question isn’t just about the rights and freedoms of its displaced villagers, it is about the rights and freedoms of us all.