The Hum in Kent

To city dwellers, the drowsy county of Kent means perfect peace and perfect quiet, dozing to the murmuring of bees, the lowing of cattle, the gentle purl of streams like the Beult, the Great Stour and the Little Stour. But in the Kentish village of Molash, 8 1/2 miles from Canterbury, grey-haired Hilda Hyams, 54, was being driven mad by another sound: a low-pitched, persistent hum. Her novelist husband, Edward, could not hear the hum, but he dutifully checked the water pipes and main, arranged to have the electrical wires near the house slackened, even cut off the telephone. Hilda Hyams went to an ear specialist and neurologists, who found that her hearing was acute and she was in perfect health. Friends hinted delicately that perhaps she was imagining it all.

Mortally Dismal. Last summer a U.S. friend visited the Hyamses in Molash. Her first words were: "Can't you turn off that disgusting hum? It's so mortally dismal." Overjoyed to find confirmation of the sound, Mrs. Hyams fell on her friend's neck and kissed her.

With two women suffering before his eyes, Novelist Hyams wrote to a local newspaper asking if any other Kentishmen were hearing the hum. He was staggered by the response: letters poured in from Maidstone and Canterbury, from Ashford, Wye and Deal. A woman in Australia wrote that she had heard the hum before she emigrated from Kent. Said Hyams: "We could scarcely get through the door because of the mound of mail." Most of the writers expressed relief be cause they had not dared mention the hum before, each thinking he was the only one hearing it.

The descriptions of the hum are surprisingly uniform. It is ugly and penetrating, louder inside a house than out side, and loudest of all at night and on weekends. The hum's pitch never varies, and it seems impossible ever to get "near er" to the sound. "For the majority," reports Hyams, "the hum is just below the threshold of audibility, but for those who can hear it, refined torture." By now, Hyams was himself hearing it on occasion. He took the matter up with the county council, but was brushed off. A local M.P. raised the question in the House of Commons, but got only the stony reply that "inquiries have failed to confirm the existence of the noise."

Down the Road. There was no lack of solutions to the hum, ranging from flying saucers to poltergeists to electric clocks. Many argued that with radio, TV and radar, modern man has filled the atmosphere with pulsating forces.

But last week the suspicions of hum-sufferers in Kent turned to the Chislehurst caves, which have recently been closed to the public. Near Chislehurst, the government has been building a research establishment, but, though the work has been going on for ten years, the building is only one story high. The obvious questions are: How deep does the work go underground, and what is being done inside it? Novelist Hyams went on BBC-TV to ask "why the government cannot say, 'This is being caused by a defense apparatus or a secret weapon. For your own safety, will you please put up with it?'" Instead, he complained, "There have been evasions, lyings, even a sort of shrugging of shoulders and a sneer which has made us all the more determined to find out what it is and damned well put a stop to it." Chorused his hum-struck wife, Hilda: "It can't be Martians, can it? I don't believe it is outer space at all. I believe it's a few chaps down the road somewhere who know perfectly well what they're doing."

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