Playing with Water (10 page)

Wright was brave, no doubt about that. One day he simply went up to Bisley’s son and asked him point-blank to show him the Second Cellars. A strange veiled look crossed the gypsy eyes.

‘How old are you, son?’

‘Twelve.’

‘H’m. Wait till you’re thirteen.’

‘But I’m nearly thirteen now.’

‘Wait till you’re thirteen and just about to leave.
Then
I’ll show you. And one or two of your friends, too, if they’re lucky.’

But something must have happened in the intervening months because Wright never did see the Second Cellars; probably in the flurry of Common Entrance examinations and cricket Elevens he forgot all about them. Still, we would often be changing down there for some sport or other and look up with surprise to see Heathcliff lounging silently
in the doorway, smiling secretly, surveying with his black eyes the little waxy English bodies.

However, certain boys were quite immune to any sense of threat this man implied. Ackroyd in particular was used to a very straightforward relationship with the sort of people who cleaned shoes and stoked boilers. We were down in the boot-room after lunch, a room lined with wooden pigeonholes in which nested the school’s shoes. The atmosphere was peaceful like a library, scented with leather and dubbin and Cherry Blossom polish. Old Bisley and Heathcliff were sitting in one corner, cleaning shoes. Bisley was putting on the polish while Heathcliff was buffing it off; the back of Bisley’s left hand had a black tide-mark of polish across it. Ackroyd went to his pigeonhole, retrieved his shoes and examined them critically, moving beneath the ceiling bulb in its metal cage.

‘I must say I don’t think much of these,’ he said.

The two men went on polishing.

‘I say,’ said Ackroyd. ‘These really aren’t up to much, you know.’

Heathcliff put down his wad of rags.

‘I’m sorry young sir is not satisfied.’ His voice was not very loud; I trembled and prayed for Ackroyd to shut up. ‘You see, we’ve only got eighty-four pairs to clean.’ But he should have known that this sort of mode is lost on the Ackroyds of the world.

‘Exactly,’ said the boy. ‘Give me the cloth.’ He took Heathcliff’s rags and scrubbed at the toecaps of the shoes he was holding. ‘There. Not very difficult, was it? It’s called elbow-grease,’ he explained.

The look Heathcliff gave him would have kept me – did keep me - sleepless for nights but Ackroyd was unconcerned. He simply put the shoes neatly back in his pigeonhole and walked out.

If old Bisley and the threatening Heathcliff added to the psychic resonance of the Second Cellars myth, then plausibility was given by the nearness of the famous Chislehurst Caves. Very occasionally when the school was deemed to have been especially good and deserving (plenty of scholarships and matches won) we were marched in
crocodile along the scrunchy drive between the rhododendrons, past the gate-keeper’s lodge and out into gracious suburbia. Downhill we went past fine examples of Gynaecologist Gothick set on an eminence amid their spacious gardens, down under the railway bridge by the little bosky station where poor drudges called commuters apparently had to go every day, down to where a densely wooded hill rose steeply on the other side. And there, under this hill, was the entrance to the Chislehurst Caves.

These were a natural cave system stretching – some said – for twenty-two miles. Or it may have been forty-two. An essential part of their reputation was that their full extent was not yet known, so terrifyingly labyrinthine was the network. Part of them had been used during the war (then only seven or so years before) as air-raid shelters and were equipped with barbers’ shops, chapels, clinics and stores. At the entrance, a simple wooden gate which did not even reach to the top of the cave mouth, we were handed oil lamps and allotted cocky Dickensian guides, likely lads with the accents of Wapping and the Isle of Dogs who had learned their spiels by rote, including impromptu jokes and warnings.

‘Several blokes ’ave come down ’ere nights and climbed over the gates ’oping to do it all fer free. Nuffing but a bicycle lamp wiv ’em. Poor sods.’

‘What happened?’ we ask, trotting down the passageway in a cloud of lamp soot, our figures thrown onto the walls by the flickering orangy flames we carry. The sense of drawing ever further away from warm sunlight is weighing on each of us.

‘Ah, we always finds ’em
in the end
,’ comes the voice from the darkness. ‘Takes a bit of time, though. Last bloke it was what, Pete, five days?’

‘Wha’?’ shouts back Pete from somewhere ahead.

‘That last geezer what climbed in, ’ow long was it before we finds ’im?’

‘Six days, wannit?’

‘Yus, that’s right, six.’

‘But wasn’t he hungry?’ asks ‘Slug’ Summerbee.

‘’Ungry? ’E was
dead
, wannee? They always is. Dead.’

‘From hunger?’

‘Nah, they go mad. Yer batt’ry lasts, what, three hours? Then yer thinks, better save ’er, use ’er as little as possible. But yer lost, aren’t yer? All these passages looks the same. Yer panicks. Yer turns on yer torch ’cos anyfink’s better’n that ‘orrible blackness pressin’ in and in.’

We can well imagine it now. The feet of the further most parts of our crocodile make a booming and sighing noise in the galleries which open off on either side. The air is cold the chalk walls slick with damp.

‘That last bloke, know where we found ’im? Only thirty yards from the entrance.
Thirty yards.
’E was all - but I’d better not say.’

‘No, go on.
Go on
…’

‘’Is fingers? They was all wore down to the second knuckle. ’E’d been trying to claw ’is way out, annee? But worse ’n that, worse’n that. ’Is eyes? They was all stickin’ out ’is ’ead like organ stops. Great big white starin’ eyeballs and this terrible grin. Yer could go mad just thinkin’ about ’im and I ’ad to look at ’im ’cos I’m the one what finds ’im, innoi?’

After a long time we come to a halt and various torch-beams pool on the uneven roof. What looks like a massive bone is sticking out of the rock.

‘Dinosaur’s leg,’ our guide tells us. ‘The rest of ’im’s still there, buried in the livin’ rock.’

‘Can’t they dig him out?’ someone asks, clearly thinking of the huge and prized specimen which dominates the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum.

‘Nah, ’e’d bring the roof down. Or it might make it unsafe so we’d all be buried ’ere for ever and ever.’

While everybody’s attention is fixed on the ceiling I glance sideways in the reflected light and look at our guide covertly. He is not after all very much older than ourselves. I am fascinated by the smooth line of his throat as he gazes upwards, by the almost imperceptible bump of his Adam’s apple.

‘Funny thing,’ he says in the silence, ‘there’s people what says …’

‘Nah, Brian, don’t tell ’em that one,’ breaks in Pete. ‘I’m
not sure I believes it meself and you’ll only scare the little ’uns.’

‘No, go on.
Go on
…’

‘Well, there’s people what says there’s still dinosaurs livin’ somewhere in these caves, somewhere ‘asn’t been discovered yet. They says they’ve ’eard ’em calling at times, very faint and distant-like.’

‘Dinosaurs …
alive
?’

‘Sort of like the Loch Ness monster. Yer know, left over from pre-’istoric times.’

A shudder runs through the entire school. The little ones are indeed petrified. Unconsciously we huddle together, the uneasy susurration of our feet whispers away along the corridors and galleries, the caverns and passages, rebounds from a hundred surfaces and sets inaudibly ringing the stalactites and stalagmites which bristle in the dark like limestone tuning-forks. And in a few seconds, as from an unknown distance near the Earth’s core, there comes a faint echo which raises every hair on every head. For what we hear is a deep, sad mooing. It is precisely the sound we expect to hear from a prehistoric left-over, a saurian Wandering Jew cut off from time and condemned eternally to pace these nether regions, calling forlornly to its friends of seventy million years ago.

‘What … what was
that?
’

‘Aw, that,’ says Brian airily. ‘Dunno. Yer hears it all the time at this spot so yer kind of gets to pay no attention.’

‘Is that the living dinosaur?’

‘Dunno. Could be, I s’pose. We don’t go any further along ’ere, see. None of us knows what ’appens if yer keep going along this tunnel. Prob’ly nobody knows. Yer’d ’ave to be a bit barmy to head orf into the unknown down there. They’ve offered prizes, yer know. Farzend pahn ter the bloke what’s the first to make a proper map right to the end of the caves. But nobody wants ter do it, do they? Anyone ’ere like to try? Fink of it, a
farzend pahn.
’

A thousand pounds is a stupendous sum. A top managing director like Cheveney’s father gets three thousand a year, and his Rolls-Royce cost five and a half, according to the
Observer’s Book of Automobiles.
But there are no takers
down here in the dark with the cold breath of dinosaurs filling our lungs. In addition to being terrified myself I am bewildered by the idea that even these caves, too, have their Second Cellars. Was there no end to this recession of underworlds? Was there no place which did not have its hidden levels? (Thirty-seven years later I ask this on Tiwarik and am rewarded by a submarine cleft leading straight towards the island’s heart. It takes me three days to work up enough courage to hold my breath and go in.)

The reason why the underlying presence of the Chislehurst Caves made the school’s Second Cellars myth plausible was because the cave system was so close to the school while known to run far down into Kent. Indeed Thompson’s aunt who lived out towards Bexley had a cellar in the corner of which a never-to-be-lifted slab led directly into the Caves. Thompson was not a faint-hearted boy but whenever he and his friends were tempted to prise up the stone and look down into the welling black dinosaur-breath they remembered the fingers worn to the second knuckle, the mad eyes like organ stops, the melancholy and eerie mooing. Thompson once said he was scared that if he opened the hole he might be dragged into it.

‘You know when you go up the Eiffel Tower you get that feeling you might
have
to jump?’ he said. ‘Well, like that. I think it’s so dark down there it’d suck the light straight out of your torch so your battery would be flat almost at once. I bet those people’s torches didn’t last anything like three hours. That dark just sucks the light out of them.’

This observation of Thompson’s remains as graphic a way of conveying an intensity of dark as I have ever heard.

A year or two later I was at school in Canterbury, living within the Cathedral precincts, surrounded by stories of underground passageways linking that with this. In particular it was rumoured there was a tunnel running right round the Cathedral past the Dark Entry (with its ghost of a walled-up woman), under the Green Court and away towards the school dining hall. We consulted Dr Urry the Cathedral archivist, a gentle and sympathetic man who gave lessons in paleography to boys who couldn’t bear PT. Certainly, he said, we must be thinking of the Roman
sewers; and he forthwith dug out a map which showed very clearly how they ran. We called them the Roman sewers but I think they were actually an aquifer the Romans built to bring water down from the Scotland Hills to their town. The question was, how could we get down them?

Dr Urry made it clear to us that because they had long since been abandoned they would be in an extreme state of disrepair and consequently
highly dangerous.
He then told us exactly where one of the entrances was: a manhole plain for all to see on the west side of the Green Court not far from Lattergate. We thanked him courteously, assuring him we would hold it to be an act of stupid irresponsibility for anyone even to think of exploring the passage, still more so to tamper with a manhole clearly in the jurisdiction of the Dean and Chapter.

So a week later half a dozen of us wearing games clothes and carrying torches heaved up this manhole in full view of anybody who happened to be passing and dropped into the hole. We found ourselves in a passageway we could enter only by stooping and which ran roughly along a north-south axis. We turned south towards the Cathedral and moved off, giggling. The floor was muddy but not deeply so; the roof was vaulted and mostly made of narrow Roman bricks. Every so often there was a stone archway complete with miniature capitals. The librarian had been right: the place showed all the signs of somewhere forgotten for centuries. The stonework was cracked and sprouted moss and ferns, the bricks were porous and flaking.

The roof became lower: we were forced onto hands and knees in the mud while the rotten brickwork rubbed off its snails and pink slime on our backs. The sense of claustrophobia grew more acute, the passage now being barely large enough to accommodate a crawling teenager. Word came from up front that there was a faintish patch of daylight ahead. It came from an overhead opening, a short shaft topped with a grating. We took turns to stand upright in this shaft. Beyond the grating was the underside of a car which some expert identified as a Morris. This made sense: from our direction and estimated distance travelled we must be beneath the Archdeacon’s garage and this was
undoubtedly his ramshackle old tourer. The summer air drifting through the grating smelt sweetly of oil and petrol and roses. One by one we dropped reluctantly back and inserted ourselves once more into the cold and ancient tube. The closer to the Cathedral we came the more we imagined the seep of charnel juices and the lower the ceiling dipped. In many places the roof had fallen completely, leaving a mound of mud and bricks on the floor to be slithered over and a dark wound of raw earth precariously above it.

Soon we had to lie on our stomachs and worm along. At this point even the more intrepid started to lose their nerve. No view ahead but the mud-caked bootsoles of the next in line, the tender white gleam of the backs of his knees, his smeared rump filling the hole. From up front came rumblings and mumblings which took on comprehensibility as they were passed back: Can’t go on. Effing floor’s silted up and’s touching the roof. Go back and
get a move on
… There was no mistaking the panic now that everybody had decided to escape before the roof finally fell on our backs and entombed us with two thousand years’ of grave-worms, toads, rotting monks, the gaseous effluvia of corpses. Probably at no point was the tunnel more than six or eight feet down but we might have been in the deepest mine. Somebody said we could fall through into the Kentish coalfields. I was sure these came nowhere near Canterbury but the thought once expressed persisted. The Second Cellars again; the meta-tunnels which appeared to underlie the solidest earth like wormy cheese.