“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?”
7. Radiation
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.”
“Excellent idea,” I said. “I love a switch.”
I did as he said and, by the simple process of sticking my hand out of the window, found the thing and yanked at it. There was a violent jolt, at which the floor began to rise; the contraption squeaking to high heaven like it needed a can of oil applied to it’s joints. It wasn’t the fastest of lifts, but it did its job and we ascended from what had, at times, felt like the bowels of hell itself, to a pill-box shaped, concrete-walled building just behind Borough High Street. Setting aside the knowledge that we were thoroughly irradiated for one moment (and that severe levels of radiation were wafting about beneath the streets of London), it was bloody good to be above ground.
Nobody much was about at that hour, so we drove over London Bridge and followed the river past bridge after bridge - Southwark and Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster, Lambeth, Vauxhall and Chelsea - until we reached Tite Street, and Tamang and I vowed to keep our eyes closed while Kathleen went to open the front door with the key from her handbag (my front door key having been lost countless pages back in the saga of that evening).
They came at break of day. We’d all soaped and scrubbed ourselves red raw and put on fresh clothes and I’d just rung round the hospitals and was wondering whether to wash the car, when the doorbell rang. I left Kathleen and Tamang at the
kitchen table eating toast and marmalade and went up the basement steps to answer the door. There must have been six or seven of them - a fearsome sight in their masks - barging into the hall and pushing past me to run down the stairs and catch my wife and colleague. They corralled us into the drawing-room, surrounding us in a circle, leaving us nowhere to escape. The main man pointed his instrument at me and I knew that I was for it. But . . .
“There’s no radiation here, sir,” he said, tapping at his Geiger counter, or whatever it was that he held.
“What?” Tamang and I exchanged glances. “There must be.”
The man traced the line of each of our bodies with his meter, measuring us from top to toe, and then studied it again. He shook his head and the elephantine tube that extended from his mouth and nose jiggled about. Then he went over to the window and peered at the thing in the early morning light. He removed his mask apparatus and peeled down his radiation suit until it flapped, like a deflated balloon, around his waist, revealing a well-pressed, white shirt and a conservative tie.
“What made you think there might be, sir?”
“The hat,” I replied.
“The hat, sir?” The man obviously thought I was a complete lunatic.
I looked at Tamang again, for guidance, but he was giving nothing away. All of his inventions came under the aegis of the Official Secrets Act, of course.
I waited until the men had left before I bearded him. At least he had the decency to look upset.
“I cannot think what happened. Why my hat should not have worked. I mean, my ideas always work . . . unless . .”
“Unless, what?”
“Unless it got wet.”
I recalled that underground citadel running with water. Yes, I thought we could safely say that it had got wet.
“The calibrations must have been destroyed by the moisture,” he appeared genuinely mortified. “I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr Upshott. Mrs Upshott.”
“Please don’t give it another thought,” I said. One had to laugh, in all honesty. “Would you say seven in the morning is too early for a whisky and soda?” I didn’t wait for a reply, but made a beeline for the bar in the corner of our drawing-room. “No. Me neither.”
The Yellow Glass Page 7