The Yellow Glass (8 page)

“How about that!” Tamang crowed.
 
“It works!”
 
He turned to Kathleen in the back.
 
“My distance controlling device works, Mrs Upshott!”

Kathleen’s grey look had returned, but she mustered a
smile for him.

“Fabulous.”

“It works on a similar principle to the controls they
use to open garage doors in America, you see.
 
They are also developing such devices for use on television sets, for
those people who are so unbelievably lazy as to wish to change channels without
getting up from their chairs.
 
Can you
believe that?”
 
He raised his eyebrows.
 
“But I’ve been applying the technology to
lights and, indeed, all electrical circuits.
 
The difficult part is making it universally applicable and that was
where I was less than one hundred per cent certain of the response . .”

I let him burble on for a bit and then I switched on
the headlights.

We gazed down the slide and I pointed the Hillman’s
nose down.
 
There was nowhere to go
but
down.
 
It was more of a bricked pipe than anything
else, a perfect circle of bricks with a mere foot of air between the car and
the wall at all points.
 
If we’d been in
Kathleen’s Austin Princess we’d never have squeezed through - we’d have jammed
like a cork in a bottle.
 
It was clear
that we were inside one of Joseph Bazelgette’s Victorian sewer pipes.
 
It was slick with running moisture - not
sewage, I hasten to add - and the walls were striped green with moss and algae.
 
I wondered whether melting ice from the
February freeze had drained down through the slide and been trapped with
nowhere else to go, for a small stream ran along the pipe, glinting in the headlights.
 
It was a cold, disorientating place to
be.
 

Kathleen tapped my shoulder.

“Let’s make a move, shall we Tristram?
 
I’d rather not sit here any longer than I
have to.”

“Absolutely, darling.”
 
I took a deep breath.
 
“Are we all
set?”
 

Tamang nodded, vigorously, beside me and I caught my
wife narrowing her eyes in the mirror.
 

“Then let’s go!”
 
I slammed my foot to the floor.

The Hillman bombed down the slide, surfing through
water and gaining momentum as we descended.

“Tristram!”
 
Kathleen screamed.
 
“Slow down,
Tristram!”

But it had been one hell of a day and and I needed to
let off steam.
 
And what a way to do
it!
 
How often can a man drive across
London unimpeded by other cars and traffic lights and the endless petty
restrictions of life in town?
 
It felt
absolutely fantastic.
 
Top hole.
 
The tunnel magnified the noise of the car
engine into a magnificent roar and I felt as if I were
 
racing Formula III at Brands Hatch.
 
I glanced sideways at Tamang, to see how he
was taking it.
 
He still had his window
wound down and his black hair was plastered to his skull, but the thrill of the
ride was plain to see in his wide grin.
 
I felt rather glad to be giving him his money’s worth.

However, all good things must come to an end and the
sight of a couple of concrete bulkheads in the distance, rearing up to either
side of the tunnel wall, forced me to brake.
 
The tunnel seemed to be widening and changing until it wasn’t a tunnel
at all, but a colossal cave with concrete slabs laid on the floor and a ridged
and vaulted ceiling.

“What’s this, I wonder?”
 
The acoustics had altered noticeably at that
depth and my voice boomed out.

“It’s the Southwark shelter, you madman,” Kathleen
squawked.
 

“Is it really?
 
Have we come too far, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Mr Upshott,” Tamang said.
 
“ I didn’t see any exits before this, but you
were going so fast . .”

“I
will
kill
you, Tristram.
  
Just you see if I
don’t,” Kathleen was gibbering in the back.
 
“Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?
 
I mean, take a look at
that
,
will you?”
 

She swiped at the back of my neck, drawing my
attention to a poster on the wall.

Important
Notice:
 
Speed not to exceed 5 miles per
hour.

“Good grief, Kathleen, that was during the war, when
the hordes were liable to come surging down the stairs to take shelter at any
given moment.
 
They don’t mean
now
.”

“No, they don’t,” she agreed, “because we’re not
supposed to be down here at all
now
,
are we?”

“Technically, no.
 
But would you look at all this?
 
It’s really rather fascinating.”

And it was.
 
I’d
never been down a shelter of any kind, having spent much of my childhood in the
countryside and then fought abroad in the last couple of years of the war.
 
I switched off the ignition and got out.

Everything had been left as it was, as if they’d
simply walked away on the last day of hostilities and never come back.
 
Ten years of damp and silence, layer upon
layer of it drifting over the concrete toilet cubicles, the wooden seating and
the shelves for bunks.
 
There were
numerous signs and posters, too, plastered all over the walls that had once
been white-washed, but were now grey and streaked with green: exhortations not
to smoke, directions to latrines, refreshment menus.
 
Everything was still down here, except
people.
 
Kathleen came up behind me,
shivering, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her coat.

“Why do you want to look at this, Tristram?
 
It’s horrible.
 
I hated these places.”
 
Kathleen was a Londoner.

“D’you think they used this one much?”

“They’d have used it during the Blitz.
 
Probably not so much after that; too far
down.
 
Do you know
 
. . the Government actually thought that
people might turn into cave-dwellers and never want to leave these deep places,
that they might turn tribal and aggressive to outsiders who dared to venture
into their little patch.
 
Utterly barmy!”
 
She stepped, fastidious in her high heels,
around a green pool that had collected on the concrete floor.
 
“God, I hated the war.
 
So many people seem to hang on to it; our
finest hour and all that.
 
But I hated
it.”
 

“Mmm.
 
I didn’t
exactly have a ball, myself . . .”
 
Just
then, I caught sight of Tamang eyeing up some old crates which had been stacked
up against one wall.
 
“Young Jay would
have been a child, of course.
 
I say,
what’s he up to over there?”

Tamang looked up and beckoned me over, “Mr
Upshott.
 
There is something strange
here.
 
Please look at these crates.”

I did as requested.
 
Five rather bashed-about wooden boxes that had once held tea didn’t
strike me as particularly strange.
 
I
bent down to get a closer look.
 
Somebody
had scrawled the word ‘CULLET’ with an HB pencil on the top of one of them.
 
All the crates were stamped on their sides
with the name of a well-known make of tea, one that was readily available in
every grocer’s in the land.

“I don’t think that this brand was available before,
or during, the war - not under this particular name.
 
And this design was definitely created
several years later.”

He certainly did remind me of Rosa at times.

“You mean that somebody is using this place for
storage?
 
It wouldn’t surprise me,
there’s no shortage of space, after all and, actually . .” I noticed a spiral
staircase that began a couple of yards from where we were standing, “ . .
actually, it’s probably pretty easy to access from street level.
 
If you know where to look and you don’t mind
a few stairs.”

Tamang wasn’t paying attention, having got down on his
knees to wrench off the loose bit of ply that sealed the box marked ‘CULLET’
shut, and plunged his hands inside.
 
He
stiffened.

“What have you got there?”
 
I asked.
 

Rather abruptly, he stood up and took several, long,
paces back from the crate that had so fascinated him the second before.

“Mr Upshott, may I ask, do you have your hat with
you?”
 
He sounded a touch jittery.
 
“And, if s . . so, would you be so good as to
put it on your head?”

 
I shooed Kathleen back to the car and grabbed
the hat.
  
The thing practically jumped
out of my hands.
 
I crammed it onto my
head and it immediately began to play the bongo drums on my brain.
 
The place was alive with radiation.

“Christ almighty, Tamang.
 
Get yourself away from that crate and over
here, instantly!”

“No.
 
I cannot,
Mr Upshott.
 
I touched it, you s . .
see,” he backed off.

“Touched what, man?
 
What the hell’s in there?”

“The glass.
 
The
crate is full of broken uranium glass.
 
I
must not make it worse for you.
 
Please
go.”

He’d raced to the bottom of the spiral stairs and was
all set to bolt.

“What?
 
Don’t be
crazy, Tamang.
 
We’re all in this
together.”

But he’d already disappeared.
 
I took the stairs two at a time, nearly slipped
on the slimy surface, then caught up with him around the second curve, but he
was small and nimble and took off like a shot.
 
Round and round we went.

“Come back, you fool!”
 
I shouted up.

“No!”
 
He
shouted down.
 
“Please.
 
Extreme danger.
 
Please leave.”

“Come back!
 
I
can’t let you go running around the streets of London.
 
Don’t you see that?”

A pause, while my words hit home.

“But . . Mrs Upshott?”
 
He was quieter now.
 
Quiet and
rather plaintive.

“Don’t be a bloody hero, Tamang,” I reached him and
grabbed the hood of his duffle coat.
 
“Don’t
ever
be a bloody
hero.
 
We’ve all caught a dose; put a
match to us and we could probably light up subterranean London all by
ourselves.
 
Come back to the car and
we’ll have a think about how to get out of this mess.”

He was still reluctant, but I didn’t let go of his
coat until I’d bundled him into the passenger seat.
 
I ran round to the driver’s door, yanked it
open and jumped in.
 
Then I started the
engine and swung the car back round to face the tunnel, driving slowly and carefully
now.
 
I didn’t know where I was going,
only that I must get us as far as possible from the source of radiation.

“What’s going on
now
?”
 
Kathleen asked.

I tried to give her the bare facts about what we’d
found, but - being somewhat distracted by events - one thing led to another
and, before I knew it, I’d blurted out the entire uranium in glass scenario and
she’d put two and two together and come up with her beloved niece.
 

“Uranium in glass?!”
  
She was puce in the face.
 
“You
sent Rosa to work in an office full of
radiation
?!
 
Y . . you . .”
 

She was so incensed, she couldn’t come up with a
rotten enough word.
 
(Not that she needed
to; I knew very well what I was.
 
But,
hadn’t I’d protected the girl as best I could?
 
Hadn’t I’d given her strict orders not to touch anything?)
 
I tried to convey all of that to Kathleen,
but she wasn’t having any.

“Do you
honestly
think that Rosa would be capable of curbing her curiosity in a situation like
that?
 
If you do, then you’re not just a madman,
but a complete fool.
 
Rosa absolutely
adores you, Tristram; you must know that, surely?
 
She’s got a crush on you a mile wide.
 
She’d have been thrilled to bits to be
working with you, but she’s the very
last
person to put in a situation like that.
 
‘Strict orders not to touch anything’, my foot!
 
Rosa must have been pulling out armfuls of
glass day after day after day.
 
I swear .
. I’m speechless!”

I stopped the car.
 
Silence descended; we were all speechless.
 
I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not
good with feelings, but, for a moment there, it really did feel . . not so
good.

When Jay Tamang piped up.
 
“I may have panicked,” he said.
 
“Uranium is only mildly radioactive.”

“What?
 
Really?
 
Is that true?”
 
I was a man clutching at straws.

“Yes.
 
I’ve been
working on the subject with the backing of Professor Monkington,
 
but you did
not
hear me say that.
 
You
see, it is when it decays that it becomes truly dangerous.
 
It mutates into other substances, such as
radium, for example.
 
We are beginning to
find links between radium and the growth of various cancers.”

“You mean, Rosa could be unaffected?”
 
Kathleen leapt in.

“No, Mrs Upshott.
 
I didn’t say that.
 
The
conjunction of glass with toxic radiation is a mystery to us at the lab, I must
admit.
 
You see, we have little
experience of the flux - the levels of radiation - when used in these
quantities in an inert product such as glass.
 
When intact, I’d suggest that glass is highly resistant to leaching.
 
In that respect, your niece has only been
marginally exposed.
 
It’s when it is
broken that it would, most probably, become dangerous; in terms of toxicity,
rather than radioactivity, if I make myself clear.
 
You see, we may all have ingested uranium
dust
and that, I’m sorry to have to tell
you,
is
poisonous.
 
A high dose of that would produce kidney
failure and certain death.”
 
But then he
brightened.
 
“However lower intakes might
only cause rashes and breathlessness, and any kidney damage would soon repair
itself.”

“Breathlessness?”
 
I remembered Rosa running after me, puffing and panting as if she’d run
the four-minute mile with Roger Bannister
[16]
.
 

 
“Yes.
 
It all depends on the chemistry of the
mix.
 
Radioactivity, in itself, is merely
a pulse - or quantum, if you like - of energy being powered through space like
a ball off a cricket bat and . .

“And they were willing to stack it up in their
office,” I brought him back down to earth.
 
“That’s a good sign, surely?
 
For
Rosa?”

“I think so, Mr Upshott.”

“But that’s
wonderful
!”
 
Exclaimed Kathleen, tears welling up in the
corners of her eyes.
 
“Pray God she’ll be
alright!”

Tamang smiled at her and said nothing.

I went to start up the car and then paused with the
key in my hand.
 
Alright, uranium might
be only mildly radioactive, but radiation was definitely leaking from somewhere
nearby;
 
if not from the crates of broken
Vas-glass, then from somewhere else.
 
The
hat said so.
 
There was a rocketing level
of radiation in the shelter and we’d been exposed to it.
 
The question was; where should we go?
 
Was it even
remotely
responsible of me to take us above ground at all?
 
Tamang was thinking the same thing; I could
tell.
 
Our eyes collided and I could see
it in them.
 
We had to get out of that
subterranean hell-hole if we were to save ourselves, yet every possible
precaution must be taken to minimise danger to others.

 
Now . . as it
happened, all of us at HQ had been marched off to a course on that very subject
some months back:
What to do if exposed
to unacceptable levels of radiation
.
 
I’d forgotten what an unacceptable level of radiation actually was
(although any level at all seemed pretty unacceptable to me), but I could
remember the first step that one should take.
 
Yes, I could remember that very clearly, indeed and so - from his eyes,
which had shied away from mine in obvious embarrassment - could Jay
Tamang.
 
I was going to have to bite the
bullet and inform my wife.

“Right, everybody,” I announced.
 
“Time to strip off.”

“Excuse me?”
 
Said Kathleen.

“We’ve got to get our kit off and chuck it out of the
window before we go any further, because the radiation will be saturating our
clothes.”
 
I tried to keep it as factual
as possible.
 
“We then drive straight
home and hose ourselves down thoroughly, before alerting the relevant
authorities of our contamination.
 
Assuming I can find some way out of the slide.”

“If you think I’m stripping naked, Tristram Upshott,
you’ve got another think coming!”

“Come on, darling.”
 
I adopted another tack.
 
“You were
as good as starkers in ‘The Furies from Venus’.”

“I most certainly was
not
.
 
A bit of cleavage and
leg is not remotely the same thing.”

“Well, that wasn’t what the Censor
[17]
thought, was it?”
 
I was getting
desperate.
 
“Come on, just bend over,
Kathleen.
 
You’re an old trooper, you can
do it!”
 
I regretted both of those
sentences the very minute I’d said them.

Thankfully, my wife was not one of the ‘How dare you’
brigade of women but, even so, I was willing to concede that I’d given her more
than enough grounds for divorce that night.
 
If it had been down to me alone, I don’t think that anything I could
have said would have persuaded her, but Tamang came to the rescue again.
 
The fact was that Jay Tamang was far more of
a true gentleman than I’d ever be.

“Mrs Upshott,” he said, “I would like to assure you
that I will not be looking behind me at any time.
 
But Mr Upshott is speaking the truth; it’s essential
that we discard our clothes.
 
I am now
taking off my coat and then I will be removing my tie.
 
That is all that I have to say.”

He was as good as his word, struggling out of his
duffle coat and ditching it through the car window.
 
Kathleen subsided into silence, while I
whipped off my shirt, trousers and so forth and dumped them, too.
 
It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a
brass monkey, never mind any-one else.
 
Realising when she was beaten, Kathleen began to remove her clothes.
 
She rolled down the back window and stuffed
her coat and shoes through it, sniffing ostentatiously while she undid her
stockings (not being a true gentleman - and, being her husband, if only for a
limited duration - I may have looked in the mirror once or twice).
 

When we were all done, and shivering like three shorn
sheep on a Welsh hillside, I got the Hillman going and re-traced our steps,
until I found the way out.
 
On our previous,
full-throttled, journey, I’d missed a dark alcove recessed into the brick wall
and positioned just behind one of the bulkheads that marked the beginning of
the Southwark shelter.
 
I pulled up and
got out to inspect it.
 
The alcove was
about the right size for a small car like the Hillman and contained a
rectangular section of false floor, hinged at either side.
 
I looked up and felt the sensation of rushing
air against my cheeks.
  
There was no
glimmer of light to indicate the outside world, but then, it had to be long
past midnight.
 
A steady ribbon of
ice-cold water flowed down the wall, over my bare, white feet and out into the
tunnel.

“I reckon it’s a lift,” I said, retreating into the
comparative warmth of the car.
 
“God
knows how it works, though, or whether it’ll respond to your little box,
Tamang.”

He put his hand on the door as if to leap out and
inspect it for himself, then hesitated - no doubt recalling his lack of
trousers.
 
He gave it a bit of thought
from the safety of the Hillman.

“The hydraulics must be electrically powered,” he
decided.
 
“If this is still used as an
exit, then HQ must have installed some means of power; they wouldn’t have
somebody winching up cars manually.
 
I
think there must be a switch somewhere, Mr Upshott.
 
We should drive in and see if there isn’t a
switch on the wall nearest to the driver.”