The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

With its gun-toting defenders on patrol, it was good to have a reason to get out of the vicinity of that village sharpish. It was a fair walk to our second target of the night; and even with our quick start, we only just made it there as the sun rose. As it was though, we hardly needed to fear the sunlight for being seen,

  ‘What is this place then?’ I asked, not having seen a sign of habitation for miles.

  ‘It’s not our usual sort of target,’ said Wareing, consulting the papers, ‘but was on our way, so the Major asked if we couldn’t take a look in. From the maps it also seemed quite deserted, so looked a good place to rest up today and plan for this evening.’

  I still couldn’t see what was before us; yet as we neared the site at daybreak I realised that this was no single dingy man-made structure in the ground we were approaching, but instead a whole complex of them; no, not even that… but a complete pillbox vista! The land before us was spread out smooth and green and for as far as I could see; and yet was dotted with small and lumpen buildings, sheds, shapes without obvious form and some with odd antennae on the roof. There were concrete fencing posts dotted about also, and as we got very close I made out the chicken-wire strung between them. And then, at just the right angle, previously hidden within the contours of the ground, appeared an enormously wide strip of tarmac.

  Wareing was clearly overjoyed to have navigated us straight here over open country and at night,

  ‘The airfield was decommissioned sixteen years ago,’ he summarised from the Major’s notes as we jogged to the perimeter. ‘It was earmarked for development, though it reads as if no use could be found for it, it being so far from any centre of industry or civil life.’ He checked the map and pointed, ‘This was obviously the airfield, and over there is where they kept the bombs.’

  ‘Bombs?’ This was itself an incendiary dropped into conversation.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s a million-to-one shot we’ll find anything they missed.’

  I wasn’t reassured. So, it turned out that our target was on an airfield; and not a cosy radar station or air traffic control tower, in which to rest our legs after a night of marching and being stalked by locals with shotguns; but instead a series of – quelle surprise – secret bunkers: in this case, as Wareing explained as we approached, those used to store the bombs carried by the Vulcan bombers that once used the airfield. I may have been Army and not Air Force, but even I knew we were talking here of nuclear warheads.

  After scrambling under the old fence, in an area of what looked like wasteground some way from the airstrip and buildings, we came upon two parallel rows of uniform bobbles in the earth, a veritable cul-de-sac of Hobbit houses. Walking along the strip of lowered ground that ran between them, I saw each bobble was its own earthen igloo. Each had a round metal door opening into the strip, the doors looking like side-turned versions of the manhole cover of the previous evening.

  ‘You start one side then, I’ll start the other,’ instructed my partner. ‘We’ll have it done in half an hour. Then we’ll find shelter in one of the airport buildings – it looks like the weather’s turning.’

  And it was, I only popping open the third of the eight doors along my side of the avenue before the threatened rain arrived. Most of the round doors weren’t even locked, only a couple needing the jimmy. At the last one, seeing the same gloomy cave-like interior as all the others, empty of whatever apocalyptic potential it once contained, I climbed in and sat cross-legged on the dry ground.

  Across the way I watched Wareing fighting with his final door, quite hapless with the crowbar.

  ‘A little help?’ he called forlornly in the rain.

  ‘Use the other end,’ I hollered back from the dry, ‘you’ll get more leverage.’

  It crunched open for him in a second, the damp concrete imploding around the lock. Wareing had a quick nose around inside and then ran across to shuffle in with me. I noticed a slight clicking sound accompanying him, and saw he had a tiny electronic device in his hand.

  ‘Radiation meter?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, an update of the Geiger counter.’ (I had already noticed his flitting from his side of the avenue to mine to check the bunkers I had opened up.) ‘No readings though,’ he confirmed, ‘no old leaks gone undetected. That was what the Major feared you see, people settling in an isolated place like this for safety and unknowingly poisoning themselves.’

  ‘But surely someone had been checking?’

  ‘Oh, they were, until the airfield was decommissioned; but after that the records become sketchy. The Major just wanted us to double-check.’

  He continued, ‘You know, I do despair for us as a nation had there ever been an incident here. ‘These doors were meant to contain a mushroom cloud? Twenty years in the British weather, and we can pop them with a burglar’s kit.’

  I shook my head in sympathy with his point; but not thinking of those particular bunkers, but rather of those with the opposite use, the kind that Wareing had blown up in Tommy’s town and which we had climbed down into in the farming village: the kind of structure intended to keep the radiation out, not in, and protect whoever was lucky enough to get into them in time as Russian bombs were falling from the skies. Questions I hadn’t known to ask before were forming: How long was a nuclear half-life? How long had we been intended to live in those burrows? How long were the authorities expecting this concrete and iron to stay intact below the ground?

  Neither of us seemed to fancy going back outside in that weather – my wet hair was still dripping on my collar, the drips collecting inside the lining of my coat. And so, despite the damp and the cold and the hunger, and the knowledge that this was an awful place to let myself nod off, for the second sleep in a row I leant back against my pack and let my head fall back upon it.

  Over the next four or five days our daytime routine was the same: a series of uncomfortable sleeps beneath burning sun or under shelter from rain, and kept going by grabbed mouthfuls of whatever Wareing could spear with his spinning dagger (not as clean a kill as with a spear or an arrow, he explained, but the Major had allowed us to carry nothing more conspicuous than a stabbing blade). This mangled bounty, cooked over open flame, would be washed down with iodine-tasting water from an aluminium canteen as we planned that night’s activities. These would generally be to head generally north-eastward, while stopping off at whatever sites were specified in the papers.

  During that time I got to drop myself into more unsafe underground structures at night than anyone would surely wish to: bunkers of all shapes and sizes, underground stores, electrical substations, water plants, even a television relay station. That particular site, unlike some of the more antique installations we met in our travails, was still in use immediately pre-E-Day. The building itself was an office just off a high street of a deserted small town. It seemed quite normal at first, the decor and computers of the rooms above ground shocking in their newness – it felt as if the staff had left that minute (and a shame to think these commonplace machines might never be powered up again).

  Yet at the end of the ground floor corridor was a strong but unremarkable locked door. Wareing had the keypad code in his folder – how thorough the Major was! – and heading down the stairs that lay behind this door, we soon found ourselves in a reassuring world of municipal architecture from another age. It reminded me of doctor’s surgeries and Council payment offices, taken to as a child with my mother twenty years before.

  Down there were eggshell-painted walls, cork notice boards, absurd warning signs: ‘DO NOT PUT CIGARETTE BUTTS OUT IN THE SAND BUCKETS’, a passageway featureless but for a local artist’s line drawings of the town’s church. The jade-coloured floortiles were pockmarked by a thousand stiletto heels. The final room, behind another key-locked door, was like something from an Open University film, with a line of (surely derelict?) tape relay machines along one wall, and great shoulder-high devices bolted to the floor along the middle, their beige-painted metal casings scuffed like postroom doors. Seeing these, I was re
minded of those photos of the Beatles recording at Abbey Road in the Sixties, their tape machines on castors and pushed around like tea trolleys.

  Coloured tubes hung from brackets along the farthest wall, in a way that gave the impression that they continued on out through either wall of the room, a room that I guessed to be at least two floors below ground level. The tubes could have contained almost anything, but for the clue that there was hardly a thing in the room that didn’t bear the yellow warning sign of a man falling through a triangle while being struck by lightning.

  And then the strangest thing struck me: we had happened to arrive at the building dangerously late in the morning, the sun already reaching the upstairs rooms, and so their being filled with light was unremarkable; yet here we were two storeys underground, and the stairs, the corridor, this room…

  ‘The lights!’

  ‘Yes,’ acknowledged Wareing nonplussed, as though a row of buzzing striplights were something we saw everyday still. ‘Good job with the emergency generators, whoever you were running this place. You didn’t make it back here though, did you, after the crisis. God bless you.’

  We stood a while surrounded by the still machinery.

  ‘What was this room again?’ I asked.

  ‘A terrestrial television relay station, boosting the signal from London as it headed off underground to masts around the country. Climb through that hatch,’ he pointed to one corner of the room where the coloured cables ran into the wall, ‘and there’s a tube you could fit through that would take you all the way to Bristol. That side,’ he spun around, ‘the same to London; not that we have any business there.

  ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I’m not sure what the Major intended us to check for here, perhaps just that it hadn’t been trashed. He certainly didn’t want it secured. This should all be put in use again, it’s too important to destroy.’

  We went back up, re-locking the security doors behind us, even pulling the building’s back door to so that our breaking in could not be seen.

  ‘The first regular troops we see we’ll let them know of this place and that it needs guarding.’

  Regular troops. This reminded me of how irregular we were, not even wearing uniforms in our own country – couldn’t you be shot as a spy for less? Of course the Major had explained, ‘Imagine the survivors in a ransacked town, cold, scared, hungry. If they saw the soldiers who were bringing them food then drive out of barracks to blow up the Town Hall, how could we then ask them to trust us, to work with us? That’s why we need people like you, to do this work in secret, to have no involvement with the soldiers winning hearts and minds.’

  I noticed the sign by the front door as we left: ‘BBC Regions, Production Office’. So small a thing as a sign by a door, yet so reassuring, it seemed to represent everything Britain had been before.

  Chapter 10 – Thoughts on a Couple Found in Their House, and on a Young Man in the Road.