The night the street went dark

The power went out on Tuesday just after eight, the whole street at once, the particular soft thud of a neighbourhood losing its hum. I know that sound now. The fridge stops, the streetlight outside the window dies, and for a second everyone in every house is doing the same thing, which is standing still with a hand out, waiting to see if it comes straight back.

It did not come straight back. And after the first flurry, the hunt for a torch, the checking of the box on the wall, the fault reported into the dark, there was nothing to do but wait, and so I did the thing I always do, which is go outside.

I have written about the sky for years and I still was not ready for what was over the road. With every light on the street gone, and the glow from the town knocked out too, the sky I keep telling people is up there was actually, finally, up there. Not the dozen tired stars you get on a normal night in a lit street. Hundreds. The proper wash of them, the faint band of the galaxy that most people who live under streetlights have genuinely never seen, poured right across the middle of it like something spilled.

And here is the part I came out to tell you. I was not the only one who came out.

One by one, up and down the road, doors opened. People drifted into their gardens and onto the pavement, holding cooling cups of tea, and looked up. A man I have nodded at for six years without once speaking to him stood at his gate and said, to nobody, to all of us, that he had not known you could see that from here. A child was carried out in pyjamas and held up, which does nothing for the child's view and everything for the person holding them. Somebody laughed, quietly, the way you laugh when a thing is bigger than you expected.

For about forty minutes the street I live on became a group of people standing in the dark together, necks tilted back, saying very little. Nobody was on a phone, because the phones were being saved for the torch. The urgent thing that is always on the screen had, for once, no way to reach us, and in its absence the oldest urgent thing in the world got a look in.

Then the lights came back. All at once, the streetlight blazing, the hum returning, and the sky above us dimmed in the same instant, the stars retreating behind the glow as if someone had turned them down. There was a small collective groan, half a joke, and people went back inside to their reheating fridges and their reconnecting screens, and the road was just a road again.

I stayed out a while longer. Not because I was cross about the streetlight, which I need as much as anyone. But because I wanted to sit for another minute with what the dark had shown, which is that the wonder was never far away or hard to reach. It was directly overhead the whole time. We had simply, very sensibly, and at some expense, arranged to light it out of view. It takes a fault somewhere down the line to remind a street that the ceiling it lives under is, on a clear night, the most extraordinary thing any of us will ever be shown for free.