The Tunnel (17 page)

Hugo had found a piece of meat in his soup and when Peter brought in the last two bowls the others were trying to identify it.

‘I think it’s horsemeat,’ Hugo said.

‘Dead Russian,’ said Saunders.

‘I shouldn’t joke,’ Loveday said. ‘We found a cat in it once.’

‘Probably a rabbit,’ Hugo suggested.

‘I know a cat from a rabbit,’ Loveday said. ‘Since when did a rabbit have claws?’

‘Let’s not talk about it.’ Hugo decided he was not hungry and pushed his bowl to the centre of the table.

‘Aren’t you going to finish that?’ Saunders asked.

Hugo pushed the bowl towards him.

‘Gash soup! gash soup! GASH SOUP!!’ It was the messing officer shouting from the corridor. There was a rush of stooges to collect their share of the surplus soup. John came back with half a bowlful. They drew lots for it, and Loveday won.

‘What’s for dinner tonight?’ Saunders asked, finishing the last of Hugo’s soup.

‘Salmon pie,’ Peter said. ‘Come on, step on it.’ He wanted to get the washing-up done so that they could go to Tyson’s meeting.

‘What, again? We had salmon pie yesterday.’

‘We had two lots of salmon this week.’

‘OK,’ Saunders said. ‘Try to pep it up a bit more this time. What’s all the hurry about – anyone would think you were going to the flicks or something.’

The meeting had started when they arrived, and they squeezed in behind a dozen or so prisoners who had crowded into Tyson’s mess at the end of the room. ‘Well, that’s the first two teams,’ he was saying, ‘all men with experience. We shall work two shifts and when these chaps have had enough we can ring a change with one of the dispersal teams. That means we’ll need two dispersal squads and two complete sets of stooges.’

Peter and John found themselves in one of the stooging teams.

‘Now – just a brief outline of the scheme.’ Tyson sounded enthusiastic. ‘It’s to be in the central cookhouse, under one of the boilers which is no longer used. It’s an old tunnel that we had to abandon last autumn because of water seepage. I went down myself yesterday, and it seems to have dried out quite a bit. There have been one or two small falls but I reckon we can shore it up and get it working again. Now I don’t want anyone to come in with any false illusions. As I say, it’s a derelict tunnel and we abandoned it because it wasn’t considered safe. We may work for months and then find we have to give it up again. But that’s up to you.

‘The next problem is how to get the excavated clay away from the tunnel – that usually
is
the difficulty. Stewart’s lot are lucky in that respect because their dispersal is right on their doorstep as it were. So are the chaps who are using our washroom – not that I think they’ll get very far. Now in our case we shall utilize the fact that stooges go to the cookhouse every morning and lunchtime to fetch the tea water. The clay from the tunnel will be carried away in the water jugs.’

‘What about the morning tea?’ someone asked.

‘I was coming to that. At present each stooge collects about half a jugful of tea. In future every alternate mess will collect a full jug of tea, which will be shared with the mess next door. The stooge from that mess will collect a jugful of clay.’

‘It’ll never work.’ It was the same small dark man who had spoken before.

‘Why not?’

‘Suppose they don’t wash the jugs out?’

‘They can keep the jugs separate, and use the same one for the clay each time.’

‘I don’t think the chaps would agree to that,’ the dark man said.

‘Nonsense, of course they will. By doing that we can take out as much clay as we like. The guards are used to seeing a constant stream of men with jugs at mealtimes. The earth will be brought straight back here and then we can disperse it at our leisure. It’s a perfectly watertight scheme.’

There was a roar of laughter, at which Tyson looked surprised. Then he saw the joke. ‘Perhaps foolproof would have been better than watertight – although foolproof is a bit too strong with some of you chaps around.’ He looked pleased, as though he had scored a point.

‘How shall we get the wood for shoring into the cookhouse without being spotted?’ someone asked.

‘Firewood for the boiler. Any more questions?’

‘Yes – when do we start?’

‘Early next week. We’re just making a new frame for the trap, and getting the stooging system organized. We want to work it so that we don’t get too many chaps coming in with their jugs at the same time – and not too few. Everything must go on exactly as it always does.’

‘How far have they already dug?’ John asked.

‘About a hundred feet – there’s still a long way to go. But if everything goes smoothly we should break sometime in the spring.’

‘Where will it come up?’ Peter asked.

‘We’re going under the Russian compound. It’s under their wire already. I have considered coming up and making a dispersal under their huts – but I don’t altogether trust ’em. We’ll do it if we have to but at the moment the intention is to cut straight through and come up on the other side of the main road. Any more questions?’

There were no more questions.

‘Right,’ Tyson said. ‘The first team will meet here at nine o’clock Monday morning.’

For the next few weeks Peter and John did little more for the cookhouse tunnel than they had done for Stewart in the
abort dienst.
They stooged on draughty corners, stood for hours looking out of windows or sat propped against the wall of the White House counting the Germans as they came in and out through the compound gates. But now they had a place in the tunnel, even if they were only thirty-two and thirty-three on the list, and the stooging had more purpose.

As Tyson had foreseen, the digging teams were forced to spend a considerable time in strengthening the shoring and repairing damage to the tunnel walls before they could start to push their way towards the wire. As time went on Peter and John listened to his reports with diminishing hope; it seemed that they would never begin to move.

But their spirits rose again as a number of their fellow stooges and some of the dispersal team, unable to stand this period of frustration and delay, dropped out. Slowly, place by place, they began to move up the list towards a place in the digging team.

When digging finally started in earnest, they spent most of their time as members of a dispersal gang, bringing the clay to the barrack block in the water jugs and packing it into small bags made from shirts and underclothes. They took some of these bags, suspended round their necks under their coats by a piece of string, to the
aborts,
and disposed of their contents in the usual way. The rest of the bags they hid under the bunks, and in the short interval between dusk and lock-up they buried the clay they held in the ground outside the huts. It was slow, tedious, uninteresting work, but it was one stage better than stooging.

Then, one afternoon as they were finishing their lunch, Tyson came into the mess. ‘You two all right for a spell below this afternoon?’

‘On the ball,’ John said.

‘Right. Come to the cookhouse as soon as you can. Wear your tunnelling kit under your ordinary clothes, and bring a handkerchief or something for your heads.’ He went out, leaving behind him an awkward silence, which was broken by Saunders.

‘You didn’t tell us you were on a
dienst
,’ he said. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Oh, not long,’ Peter said, minimising it. ‘We haven’t much chance of getting out, I’m afraid – we’re not in the first ten.’

‘It’s all a stupid waste of time,’ Loveday said. ‘Why don’t you individuals settle down? Settle down and study like I do. I’m improving my mind.’ He tapped a finger on his forehead. ‘It’s a natural psychological reaction to want to escape. When an individual is locked up he wants to get out. You ought to overcome it. Look at Otter here – he doesn’t waste his time trying to escape, he’s an old kriegie. Eh, Otter?’ He poked Otto in the ribs with a large raw finger. ‘We old kriegies don’t try to escape, do we, Otter? We study and improve our minds.’

Peter looked at Otto, who smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

‘How did you two manage to get in?’ Saunders glanced at John engrossed in his book again. ‘Why pick on you two of all people?’

John looked up; innocent. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, they spotted that we were outstandingly good tough types, and asked us if we’d run the tunnel for them.’

‘Good types!’ Loveday shouted. ‘There’s conceit for you. Good types indeed! Nothing but read, read, read. Because we’re not good enough to talk to, I suppose. Captain Clinton has to withdraw himself for the others. Good types indeed—’

‘He was only joking, Alan,’ Otto said it gently. ‘He didn’t really mean it.’

‘Then he should say what he means,’ Loveday said. ‘All this double-dealing and crosstalk. How can an individual live in peace while all this deceit is in the air? Why didn’t you two tell us you were in a tunnel?’

‘Didn’t think you’d be particularly interested.’ Peter was hurriedly getting their football clothes out of the locker.

‘So you didn’t think I’d be interested, eh? What d’you think I am, eh? So you think I’m not loyal to the mess – you think—’

‘Come on.’ Peter threw John’s bundle across to where he was sitting. ‘Time we were going down, John.’

‘OK, chum.’ John put his book on the shelf above his bed and began to change into his tunnelling clothes.

The scene in the central cookhouse reminded Peter of the setting for a modern ballet. The four boilers, like enormous witches’ cauldrons, stood side by side on an apron of concrete against the farthest wall. Beneath the end boiler, now dead, was the narrow entrance to the tunnel, open; and by its side lay the trapdoor made from concrete in a shallow wooden tray. In each of the side walls, small high windows threw their spotlights on to the figures of the orderlies, who tended the boilers, and the early shift of tunnellers, who had just come to the surface. The tunnellers were dressed in woollen undervests and long pants, patched like harlequins, bright yellow from the puddled clay. On their heads they wore woollen caps or handkerchiefs knotted at the corners and, dancer-like, they wore no shoes.

Tyson, already in his tunnelling clothes, was waiting for them. ‘Hurry up, chaps,’ he said.

Peter and John quickly took off their outer clothing and joined the new shift, who were waiting to go below. It was cold and they shivered as Tyson slid under the boiler and, after much grunting and straining, disappeared from view. Peter, following, found a hole in the floor about two feet square. There was a rough ladder fixed to the side of the shaft at the bottom of which the flickering rays of a lamp showed Tyson’s legs as he crawled out of sight. Presently his face appeared where his legs had been. ‘Go easy down the ladder,’ he said.

At the bottom of the shaft was a square chamber about six feet by four in which a man crouched, working a crude concertina-like air pump made from a canvas kitbag. By his side the goon lamp cast its lurid glow across his sweating face as he swung to the rhythm of the creaking pump. The walls and ceiling of the chamber and the mouth of the tunnel which opened from it were of solid wood, bedboards jammed together side by side; but the floor was liquid clay.

Tyson was crouching half in and half out of the tunnel. In his hands he had two smoking lamps, one of which he passed to Peter. ‘Follow me!’ He spoke in a whisper, as though he could be heard through twelve feet of solid earth.

The tunnel, once they had left the chamber, was no longer lined with wood. The walls and ceiling dripped with water which gathered in long puddles on the floor and, as he wriggled after Tyson into the blackness, Peter felt this water soak through his woollen vest and grip him with its icy fingers.

After crawling for about fifteen feet the light in front stopped moving, and when Peter caught up with it he found Tyson crouching over a hole in the tunnel floor, about three feet from where it came to an abrupt end. ‘It goes down another six feet,’ he whispered. ‘The real tunnel starts from the bottom of this shaft. The upper tunnel is only a dummy. We camouflage the trapdoor over this shaft whenever we leave it, and then if the goons discover the upper tunnel they’ll think it ends here. They’ll just fill in the top shaft and this bit of tunnel – and then when the flap’s all over we can strike the lower tunnel from another shaft. That way we only lose the short upper tunnel, and save the lower one.’ He chuckled and climbed down the second ladder into the lower gallery.

Peter, stifling his feeling of panic, followed. This was what he had wanted. He’d got the chance, and now he must go through with it.

It seemed deep, deep down in the earth. Somehow the second shaft seemed a hundred times deeper than the first. It seemed completely beyond help from the surface. At intervals, where there had been a fall, patches of wooden shoring bulged ominously inwards. He had to fight hard to force himself to carry on.

He seemed to have been crawling for about half an hour before he again caught up with Tyson, who had reached the end of the tunnel. ‘You work here,’ Tyson told him. ‘Here’s a knife. Put the clay you dig out into this toboggan.’ He showed Peter a rough wooden trough about eighteen inches long by twelve inches wide. ‘When you pull the rope twice I’ll haul it back to the lower shaft. I pass it up to the top tunnel, and Clinton will send it back to the upper shaft in another toboggan. You see now why we need such a large team.’

When Tyson had left him there was silence; more complete silence than Peter had ever known. It seemed as though the eighteen feet of soil above his head was pressing down, pressing inwards. Then, in the silence, he heard the faint hiss of air pushed by the man at the pump through its lifeline of jam tins joined end to end. This metal pipe, coming along the upper tunnel, down the shaft and along the wall of the lower tunnel, was his connection with the outside world – that, and the rope which pulled the toboggan. He took the knife and began to hack away at the clay in front of him.

An hour later Tyson called a halt. John took Peter’s place at the head of the tunnel, while Peter pulled the clay back to the lower shaft. The rope, thinly plaited from the sisal string off the Red Cross parcels, cut deeply into his hands, and the strain of pulling the heavy toboggan through the thick sludge of the tunnel floor made his shoulders ache. He had blisters on the palms of his hands from the handle of the knife and, as he unloaded the clay into jam tins and passed them up to Tyson at the top of the shaft, he began to realize that there was more to tunnelling than he had thought.

At the end of the two-hour shift they came to the surface. Peter knew now why the earlier tunnellers had staggered as they crossed the kitchen floor. He had been sweating for the last two hours, and his woollen underclothes were wringing wet with sweat and moisture from the tunnel.

The stooges had a hot bath waiting for them; a real, galvanized iron bath. Peter had not known that such a thing existed in the camp. As he sat in the luxury of the warm and muddy water, he began to think that perhaps tunnelling was worthwhile after all.

As the tunnel moved steadily on towards the wire the possibility of escape loomed larger and larger in Peter’s mind. He still played football for his block, still painted scenery for the theatre, talked on the circuit and made sketches of his fellow prisoners; but always at the back of his mind was the tunnel. From waking until sleeping he carried with him the warm comforting thought of that long, dark, slippery, suffocating burrow that would, one day, take him and John under the barbed wire and away to that free, now almost unreal world that lay beyond. Whenever he walked along the path between the cookhouse and the Russian compound he knew that he was walking over the tunnel, remembered lying there and hearing the footsteps walking as he was walking now.

He enjoyed working at the tunnel face. Lying flat on his stomach, picking away unseeing at the clay in front of his head, he felt that he was really getting somewhere, really doing something towards getting out of the camp. Moreover he was alone, lying there in the darkness and dank air of the tunnel: alone in a small world of silence, a world bounded by the feeble rays of the lamp that guttered by his head. He was more alone than he could be anywhere else in the camp. Up there in the crowded barrack block, on the teeming circuit, he was aware all the time of his fellow prisoners; their habits of speech and the almost maddening physical proximity – the body odour and the unconscious elbow in the ribs. But down in the tunnel it was dark and lonely, and he sang to himself as he picked away at the hard clay, and felt sorry when it was his turn to leave the loneliness of the tunnel to go back to his place in the shaft.

One evening, after they had been locked in for the night, he and John sat on John’s bunk talking in low voices about the tunnel.

‘It’s funny,’ Peter said, ‘it’s almost like going to a woman.’ He laughed, conscious of a slight embarrassment. ‘I get a sort of peace down there – the peace you get from a woman.’

‘Sort of symbolism?’ John said.

‘I don’t know, it may be. It’s certainly not entirely because we’re getting out – it’s the tunnel itself. It’s a sort of retreat, almost like burrowing back into the womb. Sounds silly, I expect. You’ll think I’m going round the bend.’

‘This is the bend round which we twain are met,’ John said.

Peter laughed. ‘Does it get you like that?’

‘I’d rather have a woman,’ John said.

Suddenly Loveday interrupted them. ‘I know what you’re talking about,’ he shouted. ‘You’re talking about me. You’re always talking about me. Why can’t you mind your own business?’

Peter looked up in astonishment. ‘Don’t be damn’ silly – it was nothing to do with you.’

‘What was it about then? Why do we have to have secrets in the mess?’

‘It was nothing to do with you,’ Peter said.

‘Clinton kept glancing at me, I saw him.’

‘I was looking at you because you were breathing so heavily,’ John said. ‘I thought you were going to faint or something.’

‘He was doing his Yogi,’ Saunders said.

‘You’re very clever, Clinton,’ Loveday said. ‘You’re all very clever.’ He looked round wildly. ‘But I can defend myself. You won’t get away with it, you know. I’m well aware of what it’s all about.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Peter said. ‘Let’s drop it, shall we?’

‘Very convenient,’ Loveday said. ‘A very easy way out.’

He relapsed into gloomy silence, a silence which grew more and more strained.

‘Let us have an early brew,’ Otto suggested. ‘It is nearly nine o’clock. The jug has been on the stove since six.’

No one replied.

‘Good show. I go to see if it has boiled yet.’ He was about to leave the room when the lights went out. ‘We must now wait for the cocoa.’ He lit the lamp instead.

‘Come on, Saunders,’ Hugo said. ‘It’s your turn to tell a story. And mind it’s a good sexy one.’

‘Shall I tell you about the binge we had in Montreal?’ Saunders suggested.

‘Make it snappy then,’ Hugo said. ‘Cut out all the irrelevancies.’

‘OK. Come in close – I don’t want the chaps next door to hear.’

They gathered round the flickering lamp while Saunders, grotesque in his balaclava helmet and cut-down greatcoat, began his story.

‘It was while I was training in Canada.’ He brushed his moustache upwards with the back of his hand. ‘Well – it was when I’d finished training really. At least, I hadn’t really finished. We were on our way to Gunnery School. We’d failed the Navigation part of it … No, it wasn’t – I’m wrong there. It was
after
we’d finished Gunnery School and were on our way to England—’