Leaving the path, we moved up a hill, the blacker black of a large, squat building standing out against the night. You could make out other, smaller structures sticking out of the ground, spotted across the hill like a Stonehenge of bricks.
Even in the dark, you could tell the wind blew through the empty roof and glassless windows, and that there would be a door, rusting and buckled.
We squeezed inside, the smashed tiles and brick grinding as we all slipped in. It smelled like damp cardboard and piss — like the concrete air raid shelters we used to play in as kids, places where giant insects grew and waited for children.
Everywhere you went there were signs of the war. Not far from here was a small bunker, another secret we had been told of, a tiny door hidden at the edge of a field where men were meant to go when the Nazis came. The identity of these men was known only to the local policeman. Their first task when the invasion came: to kill him and so assure their survival. Their job: to fight a guerrilla war. Standing in a tiny brick bunker, I’d wondered what the purpose was of fighting, apart from exacting some tiny measure of revenge. But then I was a child of Thatcher, and we’d probably be much more pragmatic about such things.
A farmer lived close by, so Ricky told us to be quiet. We followed him as he shuffled toward a space in the floor that was blacker than the rest. Slowly he began to descend, and we followed, tapping out the way on rubble-strewn steps that spiralled downward.
We stood at the bottom of the stairs and lit our candles and found we were in a wide tunnel that sloped away from us at a shallow angle, its walls covered in soot and graffiti. With the light came the questions: “How far does it go?” “Where does it lead?” and “Is it safe?” Ricky kept quiet and instead smiled and set off down the stairs, holding his candle like a butler leading his guests into a haunted house.
We followed as fast as our flickering candles would let us, the sound of our footsteps magnified, reflected, echoing down the tunnel and back again. Without warning, Ricky let out a roar that was meant to scare us. So we screamed to show we weren’t terrified, when in fact we were.
After a hundred metres, the tunnel turned to the left and ended at a set of thick blast doors, the entrance to the bunker. Rooms appeared to the left and right, littered with rusty furniture, bunk beds, a desk, a chair, the false ceilings tumbling in on the rooms like old skin. We shuffled around, peering in but sticking together like cowards, excited to be there.
Taking my penknife out, I did what humans have no doubt done ever since we could make our mark: I scraped my name into the concrete near the door, leaving behind a trace of myself, a little piece of immortality.
Laughing and pushing, we made our way to the final room, a giant concrete void, the drop below the doorway of uncertain depth, the light of our candles unable to penetrate far. It smelled of damp black rot. People had once sat in here and watched for an attack from Germany — Battle of Britain stuff, wooden models of planes being pushed backwards by our grandmas, hair tied in buns, glamorous in their blue uniforms, while Spitfires and Messerschmitts fought in the sky overhead.
