DREWTON TUNNELS

 

Fourteen was a magical summer, sun hotter than

Any summer since, grass more green and more intense,

Green in the nose, as well as in the eyes,

And the chalk brighter and more white, even, than the fluffy clouds

Piled like confectionery on the horizon,

The sky bluer, and your adolescent girlfriend

More achingly beautiful every day,

Breasts budding, and hair lustrous.

 

Our Eden, though, was innocent, apples unpicked, as we walked

Through deep country silence that stretched back years

Only our clothes said “modern” – otherwise

But for the lack of track, it might have been a hundred years before

Or any time, and all that still to come,

As we walked in silence from the village bus-stop

Wrapped in each others’ thoughts, not even holding hands.

 

On, past the chalk springs rising

Their water much clearer and much colder than

We will ever remember.

 

Into the deep-delved tunnel, impresssively hewn

By heaving sinews of long-dead nameless navvies,

Men who rose before dawn to sniff, and piss, and look around,

Then heft the pick, and drive a few more yards,

While a man in a top hat signs a contract

With a steel-nibbed dip pen, in an office in Hull

With cranes and ship masts filling his window:

 

That way, the docks bursting with fish, the widening river

That way, the West Riding, hungry for fish,

With its forests of chimneys, its mills and furnaces,

Up here, though, only the lark and the birdsong,

And the looming of the tunnel’s deep cathedral gloom.

 

Under the huge arch, confidently-keystoned,

A monument to their extravagance, their enterprise,

We entered, inside the brick-lined cool gloom of underground earth

And seventeen hundred yards ahead, a dot of light, the exit.

 

Passing the refuges cut into the wall;

Imagining crouched there, in the dark

While tons of behemoth metals hurtled past, madly

Chuffing steam, sparks and cinders up the airshafts;

The giant, panting breath of the thing, the scream and groan,

Dread trundle of metal onto metal,

 

All lost on us, its symbolism, trains entering tunnels

Lost on us; the point was, nothing happened,

No fumblings; innocence was affirmed that day, and we walked on,

Exploring the strange new landscape we’d discovered

Between us, still in the dark, still wondering,

Yet striving on, towards a distant spark,

How perfect it now seems, as metaphor,

But, at the time, we strolled on, marvelling.

 

Later, of course, other tracks claimed us, other lines;

Points altered irrevocably,

Changing signals bore us far apart, inevitably,

To different platforms, where new lovers waited

Ready to shed their clothing, even willing, and initiate us

Into the dark of other tunnels,

And all that still to come, that summer’s day,

 

Now sitting, writing this,

My lined face marked out in computer glow,

Strange now to know

That it was all of forty years ago;

 

Even the abandoned can be desecrated –

Especially the abandoned – sometimes,

I know for certain that, if I went back

Nothing would be the same; it never will,

It never is.

 

The grandest monument is, some day, landfill;

“The lost traveller’s dream, under the hill”.