Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘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 openin
g, 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.

  The impossibility of turning round added to the panic. Eventually we arrived back beneath the Archdeacon’s Morris, stood up gratefully one by one, drew summer air into our lungs, turned round and continued at a crawl which now felt expansive. Soon we were pushing up the manhole cover and emerging into the dazzle of a June afternoon. There, watching us curiously, stood Mr Sopwith, a vast old man who was the senior English master and much revered because he had written some books. He did not speak until we were all out, blinking and covered in mud, and the manhole cover had been replaced. Then he said mildly: ‘But they will not dream of us poor lads Lost in the ground.’

  Since this was neither comprehensible nor answerable someone said:

  ‘Er, school archaeological society, sir.’

  But Mr Sopwith merely repeated his line. ‘Wilfred Owen,’ he added, ‘in case anybody’s interested. I don’t suppose anybody is.’ And he walked off. By the time I reached the Upper Sixth Mr Sopwith had effectively retired but I sometimes visited him in his rooms in Lardergate, not far at all from where the Archdeacon’s by now almost derelict Morris still squatted over its square of darkness.

  *

  It now seems hardly coincidental that the places which shaped my sense of landscape should also have confirmed my infantile sense that something always lay beneath. As quite a small child I knew the earth was not as solid as it looked, that trees for instance had been extruded from it leaving a hollow underground exactly corresponding to the bulk of wood above. Everywhere, I thought, was riddled and caved, the foundations of the hills bored through with secret fissures, unimaginable caverns. (I loved Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.) Seven years ago I found myself on a lava-field below a semiactive volcano in the southern Philippines and, jumping, made the ground chime. Part of the enjoyment came from not knowing how thin this crust was, whether one might break through and plunge into sulphurous caves or lakes of molten slag. That sense of walking on a thin skin was what I had always known; it was inevitable that I would come to wonder what lay beneath the abrupt peak of Tiwarik.

  The undersea fissure I eventually found was quite wide enough to swim into but entirely filled with water. The three days it took me to nerve myself to hold my breath and go in were coloured with imaginings of an unknown breed of sea urchins or some species of stiff weed whose inwardly-inclined spines allowed access but no backing out again. On the fourth day I took a torch and a deep breath and swam in ten feet. There at the end was a blank wall of rock. I turned and headed out again into the sunlight.

  Now that I knew I could get in and out I swam in again more confidently. This time at the rock wall my torch was reflected from the underside of the water’s surface. I came up cautiously, not knowing if the roof came to within inches of it. But there was nothing, only a cool marine smell. I shone the torch about, hoping for a massive cavern but finding there was no more than a fathom of air above my head. On all sides the rock fell into the water almost at arm’s length. My secret cave system was no more than a sump ending in a pocket of ancient sea-breath. It was like coming up in the end of an inverted ice-cream cone. There were no peculiar sea urchins nor eyeless fish nor strange crystals glittering in the roof; nothing but a dunce’s cap of air trapped in rock.

  Later I perceived how childish my hope had been. More, it was stupid, and not simply because Tiwarik was igneous rock and not limestone. Had I not yet understood the significance of its being an upside-down island? If there were any secrets here outside the reef itself they surely lay not in chthonic gloom, in subterranean darknesses, but in the upper air, in sounds and light-beams running through the grasses. Here on Tiwarik I could actually breathe the hidden and be dazzled by the concealed, for there was nothing more mysterious than the drench of light onto the island, especially in the early mornings. I had never experienced light like it. It seemed out of proportion to the sun’s low angle, out of keeping with what fell on the mainland when I crossed over first thing to fetch water.

  Perhaps it is still the oddest thing about Tiwarik as I write this sentence in a dark room in some city or other, my head filled always with that astonishing light: that paradoxical quality it had of at once making surfaces more brilliant while producing transparence in everything. Uniquely on the island, as opposed to the reef around it, the world beneath the world is light and not dark. It is not a place of tunnels at all but of the invisible bright corridors rowed through by my pair of eagles as they return to their fastness high in the jungle, blood from the fish in their claws pattering in a line across my roof as it did one morning. I once took some half-hearted photographs of the island but in none of them does this transparent quality appear. Maybe the camera cannot tell a lie but it sometimes cannot tell the truth, for it sees neither with the eye of affection nor with that of knowledge.

  5

  Often when I pad past the Malabayabas’ house in the groves at Kansulay Bini is singing somewhere inside. It is a cliché, a sentimentalism that people who have nothing should sing. Her voice rises above the hollow rasping of the kayuran on which she is squatting while chickens squabble over the tatters of white coconut meat spilling out of the bowl. Sometimes when I am up there in my hut on the ridge the wind freakishly lifts sounds from below through the fretted ceiling of fronds. Then I can hear the children playing outside Bini’s house, can even distinguish the words of their songs. In the Philippine provinces children still play chanting games. Even girls of eighteen join in with the little ones, playing with equal absorption, concentric rings of children skipping in contrary directions, couples bowing to each other with odd decorum. The songs they sing are old Spanish nursery songs, Filipino folk-songs, snatches from pop songs and American musicals, all of them with the macaronic air of being in several languages at once, none of which is wholly understood. The games also give the impression of being at once firmly choreographed by tradition and utterly improvised.

  One day I can hear them enacting a dashing Spanish courtship game where a row of eight-year-old girls ritually flinches and giggles at the statuesque advances of eight-year-old caballeros. Above their chanting can be heard an entirely Filipino descant of obscene advice offered by the girls to the boys, ribald suggestions by the boys to the girls, shouts of laughter from everyone. On another day a song in parallel text rises up through the
leaves. It must have been written for use in schools but has now acquired something of the status of a genuine folk-song with its elemental storyline and innocent tune:

  One day isang araw

  I saw nakakita

  ng bird isang ibon

  flying lumilipad

  I shot binaril ko

  I picked pinulot ko (i.e. retrieved, not plucked)

  I cooked niluto ko

  I ate kinain ko.

  Over the years I have become deeply attached to the Malabayabas family. For a start I like their name, eminently ethnic as opposed to Spanish. Just as bato means ‘stone’ and mabato or malabato mean ‘stony’, so bayabas means ‘guava’ and hence ‘Malabayabas’ is whatever adjective you could derive from that fruit: ‘guavery’, perhaps. It is particularly pleasing that their little house is surrounded by wild guava bushes. Sising (from Cezar) is exactly the same age as I am, born in late 1941 not long before the Japanese Occupation. His wife Bini (from Divina, pronounced ‘Dibina’) is two years younger, exactly the same age as my sister Jane. We spend hours at each other’s houses drinking tuba and eating puppy, crocodile, fruit-bat or merely shellfish from the stream, whatever is available. Some night I may be on my hill-top when suddenly from over its curve a flacking orange glow will appear as if a volcanic seizure were sending sporadic flame shooting from fissures in the path below. Then their voices, ascending beneath the blazing torches of lagi, dried palm-fronds artfully bound into flambeaux with their own leaves. Sising, already a little drunk, brings a long bamboo tube of palm wine, Bini a covered plastic bowl full of boiled chicken bits. Nobody drinks without pulutan.

  ‘Good evening, James. Are we disturbing you?’

  ‘Not at all. I was just beginning to feel lonely.’

  ‘No wonder, living up here without a wife to keep you warm.’

  ‘It’s quite warm enough without.’ And we all laugh at our by now ritual exchange; they are fanning themselves after their climb, the sweat on their faces glinting in the dying flames of the torches discarded on the ground.