54 – What goes on in tunnels?

A story my brother told me. He was travelling around France in a beat up old estate car with his girlfriend. They came to an old bridge that crossed a deep valley. It was a big wide ancient looking thing that spanned a river. The narrow path that ran along the river had its own tunnel that ran through the great stone wall. There wasn't anything particular about it - maybe it was being out of the sun in the cold air - but his girlfriend wouldn't go through the tunnel. He said she was being silly, there wasn't anything to worry about. She said she'd meet him on the other side. There weren't more than fifty feet between the one door and the other, but the space inside opened up, more like a large room than a tunnel and pitch black after the brightness of the day. I doubt he walked any faster than normal, and he cheerily 'hulloed' the darkness. The walk didn't take more than thirty seconds. At the other end of the tunnel, just at the edge of the shadows and lined up in a neat row, were four dirty old pairs of shoes: a pair of men's boots and besides them, much smaller, three pairs of children's shoes.

I don't know what goes on in tunnels, but I don't like them.

I remember when we were kids on holiday in France, we stopped at a small town on the Loire. There wasn't much there for kids to see or do. The hotel backed onto a railway line criss-crossed with tangled wires. Trains clacked desultorily along the line from god knows where to god knows where. The corridors of the hotel were lit by bulbs on timer switches that would drop you into near perfect darkness without notice. The rooms were small and dull, filled with oppressive dark antique furniture. Only the river was interesting.

We watched the dark water of the river swirling hungrily round the pillar supports of the bridges. It flowed faster than I'd ever seen water flow. I was hypnotised by the thin slice of light that slithered across the surface like a skin, stopping me from seeing in. There was a line drawn on the bridge, with gradations marked off in metres suggesting that the river could crawl out of its bed, rising swiftly and without warning in the night.

Near the hotel, there was a pebble beach of sorts. The rocks were the size of easter eggs, worn smooth and trimmed with dried weed. Complex concrete breakwaters crumbled into scummy pools of stagnant water and rusting ironwork poked out of the surface like the legs of prehistoric insects capture in amber. A pipe wide enough for me walk down without crouching jutted from the river bank. We gazed down it to where it disappeared in the darkness. We shouted into it and threw pebbles to hear the steely reverberating skittering sound they made as they bounced off the walls. It swallowed everything we fed it. The pipe dribbled a thin slaver of water into its mossy beard and nothing would have compelled me to climb up into it and walk even a little way into that darkness.

Where I grew up, just over the cobbled ironwork bridge, between the river and canal was an abandoned factory. It was long overgrown when we first went there, the beneficiaries of the knowledge that passes from one generation of school children to the next more surely than any other mechanism yet devised by man. We dragged our BMX bikes over the token fence, past the warning signs, and cycled through the thin woodland that had come up between the empty buildings. There were two giant silos each the size of a modest terraced house. A tree had grown up next to one and you could step easily from the natural pliant solidity of one to the solid precariousness of the other. Standing on that exposed concrete expanse of roof that tilted gently one way was something I never got used to. From the roof you could peer down into the silo hoppers. Iron rungs sunk into the concrete formed a ladder that led down into the small circle of light at its base. The floor was littered with old torn clothes, cushions, a stained mattress, rubble, broken bottles. We told each other stories of what lived and breathed down there, quietly keeping just inside the shadows.

When you're a kid, you don't believe those things specifically - the tramp, the starving dog were never there - but I think you believe in the darkness from which they all come, that wasteland of folk psyche where children are baked in ovens, where the long haired man with the scissors waits to chop off the thumbs of naughty boys. Tunnels, I think are bridges to that place. Even if they are open at both ends, they pass through it.

And there were tunnels there at the abandoned factory, their entrances grown over with weeds. Sumps of stagnant water, low ceilinged, neither dark, nor long. But why else would they be there, if they didn't pass through another place? What would happen to the child foolish enough to try and make it through to the other side? We never found out. We'd stand at one end and look at the mottled sunlight pooling at the far side and shiver, pushing each other forward in the half hearted way of people joshing on the edge of a cliff.