The Night the Lights Went Out

The storm was forecast for four days and arrived, as they do, about two hours before it was supposed to and rather harder.

The power went in the north of the town at twenty to eleven on the Wednesday night, and across the ridge villages by eleven, and in the centre — including Prendergast Street, the carpet showroom, and the two rooms above it — at four minutes past midnight, which is fifty-six minutes before Small Hours goes on the air.

Bickerstaff Community Radio has a generator. It is in a cage on the flat roof outside the studio window, it was bought secondhand in 2014 with a lottery grant, it runs the transmitter, the desk, the playout machine, two lights and nothing else, and it is tested on the first Sunday of every month by Prit personally because he does not trust anybody, including himself, and does it twice.

It started on the second attempt. Rowan was on the stairs in the dark with her phone as a torch when she heard it catch, and Prit came down the stairs past her at a speed she had not previously seen from him and said, "We are on. Do not go home." Then he stopped four steps down and said, "There is no heating. It will get very cold in there by three."

What was off, across the town, was: every domestic light, every television, every wifi router, the two mobile masts on the ridge within about forty minutes as their batteries went, the street lighting, and the eastbound carriageway signage. What was on was: car radios, battery radios, the infirmary on its own generators, the paper mill on its own, and 106.1 FM out of a cage on a flat roof above a carpet showroom.

Rowan went on at one o'clock and said the thing she says every night, and then she said: "If you are hearing this you probably do not have very much else. So I am going to tell you what I know, and I am going to keep telling you, and I am not going anywhere until it is light."

She stayed on until twenty past nine in the morning. Eight hours and twenty minutes. Ashleigh could not get in from the ridge, the breakfast show did not happen, and the only other person in the building for the whole of it was Prit, who answered the phones from one until nine and who at about half past four brought her a cup of tea made with water boiled on a camping stove that he had produced from somewhere and about which she has never been given an explanation.

It stopped being a radio show at about ten past two and became something else, and neither of them decided it, and Rowan has said that she could feel the exact call on which it happened.

A woman rang from Culvert Lane in the north of the town to say that her mother, who is eighty-nine and lives four streets away and does not answer the phone at the best of times, had a stairlift, and that the stairlift was electric, and that she could not get out of her own road because of a tree.

Rowan put it on air. Not the address — she said the street, and said that the caller was the daughter, and asked whether anybody on Culvert Lane was up and mobile and would go and knock. Two people rang in ninety seconds. A man went round with a torch at twenty past two and the mother was asleep in a chair downstairs with three blankets, entirely fine, having decided at nine o'clock that this was the sensible thing to do, and the man rang the station from her doorstep and Rowan put him on and he said, "She is fine, she is cross that we woke her," and eleven hundred people in a dark town laughed at twenty-five past two in the morning.

After that it just ran. Prit took the calls and typed them into the queue and Rowan read them out and matched them up: who had a generator, who had a gas ring, which roads were blocked, that the ridge road was blocked at two points and not one, that the pharmacy on the square would open at seven regardless and that the pharmacist wanted anybody with insulin in a fridge to ring the number she was about to give.

Serafina rang at ten to three from a lay-by and gave the roads the way she gives the roads, and then said that she and two other drivers had stopped taking fares and would move anybody who needed moving for nothing, and gave the rank number, and rang off, and Rowan repeated that number every fifteen minutes until nine in the morning.

The infirmary rang, not for a record. Ward Nine had lost its television and the day staff could not get in and a healthcare assistant wanted to know whether Rowan could just — keep talking, was the phrase — because there were eleven people on that ward awake in the dark and the radio at the desk was the only thing in the room.

Rowan said that she would keep talking until it was light, and then she said, on air, at twenty past three in the morning, to a town with no electricity in it: "Ward Nine, I know it is dark. It gets light at eight minutes past seven. That is three hours and forty-six minutes. I will count you down."

At ten past three the withheld number came up on the monitor.

Prit answered it, because Prit was answering everything, and Rowan saw him say hello twice and then look up at her through the glass with an expression she had never seen on him. She got out of the chair with a six-minute record running and went into the outer room and took the handset.

"It is Rowan," she said. "It is all right. I am here."

Nothing. Breathing, and behind it, this time, no television and no fan, because there was no electricity, and instead something Rowan had never heard on that line in three years, which was the sound of the storm, quite loud, as though a window somewhere was not right.

And then a voice — and Rowan has said that she does not know, and will never know, whether it was the fear or the dark or the eight hours of a town holding onto one another over a radio station, and that it does not matter — a voice, thin and about seventy years old, said: "Is it going to be light?"

Rowan Kestle stood in the outer room of a community radio station above a carpet showroom with a handset against her ear and the storm going over the roof and said, "Yes. Eight minutes past seven. Three hours and fifty-seven minutes from now. I am on until it is." And there was a long pause and the voice said, "Thank you," and the line went.

She went back into the studio and did four more hours. She has never mentioned it on air. She told Prit the two sentences at about five and then neither of them spoke about it for nine days, and when they did, it was Prit who raised it, in the kitchen, and what he said was: "Three years." And Rowan said, "Three years." And he said, "And you said the time. Out of everything you could have said, you gave them a number." And Rowan said that it was the only true thing she had, and Prit said that this was the whole job, and went and tested the generator again although it was not the first Sunday of the month.

The caller rang again eleven days later, at twenty past three, and did not speak, and Rowan talked about nothing in particular for two minutes and forty seconds and did not once refer to the storm, and that is where it stands.

The power came back to the centre of town at twenty-five past six in the morning and to the ridge at about nine, and Rowan played out at twenty past nine to a town that mostly had its lights on and mostly had not been to bed.

She does not remember the last hour. She has listened to it and describes the woman on the recording as somebody she does not know, talking very slowly and rather well about nothing at all, and says the most striking thing about it is that she can hear that she was not tired, which she certainly was, and that she has never been able to do that on purpose since.

Prendergast Street at half past nine on the morning after was full of people and vans and a tree across the top end and a queue outside the bakery on Fern Row that went past three shopfronts, and Rowan came down the stairs from the carpet showroom into all of it in the coat she had been wearing for thirteen hours.

Somebody clapped. She has been extremely firm, on every occasion this has come up since, that it was one person, that it was a man outside the bookmaker's who was almost certainly still drunk from the night before, that it did not spread and that the correct response to the version of this story in which the whole street applauds is that it did not happen and that she would like people to stop.

What did happen is that she walked twenty-two minutes home past four separate people who said good morning to her by name and one who did not say anything at all but held up a battery radio, and that she got in at about ten and slept until six in the evening and then went and did the show.

The regional press picked it up eleven days later. There was a piece with a photograph of her outside the carpet showroom looking uncomfortable, and a paragraph about the generator, and the phrase lifeline broadcasting, and an approach from a station four hundred miles away that Prit intercepted and told her about six weeks afterwards, when it was safely dead, which is a thing she found out about a year later and which they have never fully resolved.

And the thing that actually changed, the only one that lasted, is that the station's overnight now has a printed sheet taped inside the desk drawer next to the laminated card, with the pharmacy, the taxi rank, the two ridge road blockage points, the infirmary switchboard and the number for the water, because Prit typed it up on the Friday and said, "We were making that up as we went along and we got lucky, and I am ninety per cent sure luck is not a policy."