Down the Green Corridor: The Secret Bunker

Boat full of Daffodils, Anstruther

I want to start off with this picture, which was taken after the bunker, to reassure you all. As you read down, you might become a little unnerved, a little claustrophobic if you tend that way. So here is the antidote, before you go down into the dark reaches of cold war paranoia. Up above ground, it is Spring, and you will be there again, just take a deep breath now, before we go in.

This is the building that disguises the entrance to the bunker. It’s mostly a gift shop, full of crystals and ice cream and lolly pops for sale. Statues of Buddha are all around, little Buddhist prayer-cards, I think, tacked to the wall. D’s stepmother asked about all this, and the man behind the counter said the owners wanted to work to dispel some of the negativity of the below-ground area. If they had said this before we’d gone in, perhaps we’d have laughed, but although I don’t believe in the healing power of stones, I can understand the impulse here, just something held up in shield, however futile.

You pay your nine pound or so entry fee. You go through the ricketting gate.

Down a set of steps, down a long, green-lit corridor that turns on itself, the air cold and musty.

The recorded tour guide tells you that if anyone died in the bunker after a nuclear attack, their body would be wrapped in a sheet, placed in a cardboard coffin, and pushed outside the doors, left there with the tens of millions of other corpses killed in the explosion, firestorm and fallout. This is in fact, the introductory speech as you descend.

As you walk down further, you come to a set of rooms, A guardhouse, a monitoring station, and two 1 1/2 tonne blast doors in red steel.  You have reached the upper parts of the bunker. If you are not meant to be here, the guards can shoot you. The bunker was in peak activity in the mid nineteen fifties, when secrecy and fear were the order of the day.

mannequins are a constant presence too. Eerier, more human, the longer you look at them.

There is a mannequin sleeping in this bed.
Yes, I said 'sleeping'. *shivers*

Once beyond the blast doors, you come to what looks like an ugly office building. Linoleum lined corridors lit in a less unnerving yellow. Now only some of the rooms have that greenish, underwater feel to them:

info-gathering/monitoring room, measuring readings from around the local area, receiving instructions

A plan of Scotland, with possible explosion sites charted on it. And another mannequin.

Where either the women or men who were voluntary members of the Observation Corps would sleep while on practice missions. Or where they would sleep while the apocalypse went on above.

On this, the first level of the bunker proper, there is also a cafe for visitors:

Bunting is cheerful. Posters on the wall advertise for Land Girls (an alternative option to working in a munitions factory, which was to farm the land in order to make up for the deficit of food from overseas) and for the RAF.

But there is also the old doctor’s office, equipped to treat all kinds of injuries, from bumps and scrapes to the blistering caused by a hundred-mile-an-hour radioactive wind.

Cute, this mannequin is a skeleton. But what's that on the bed?

Oh, right, it's a face attached to a leather...shape. Good.

Moving swiftly on, you reach the cinema, which is showing two films. One on protecting your family unit. A man with a classic RP accent guides you through all the steps you need to take. Sand bag your windows, it will stop the radiation. Create a little store of food, turn one of the rooms of your house into a shelter and further secure it with sandbags, possibly brick up the windows in advance of any trouble.

He is relentlessly sincere. He is lying to you. Nothing you do will be of any good. But they had to say something to hold off hysteria. No need to have the police on horseback sent in.

You go into the second cinema, where they are showing a black and white documentary-style presentation describing what would happen to the bewildered populace in the event of the explosion. It undermines everything our sincere friend has said. The actors, particularly the children, are quite convincing as they wail, covered in burns, blinded by the flash, helplessly covered in radioactive ash.

You leave the room.

Corridors long and dark, the nightmare corridors that appear in dreams, leading you on and on.

another monitoring station

Air and decontamination systems - life support for the occupants of the bunker

One of the telephone workers seems to have noticed your entrance.

This mannequin represents the Secretary of State for Scotland. He, in the event of a nuclear war, would have governed the country from this room. He -whoever he had been at the time – would have been granted the power of life and death. One of the orders providing for governance was that martial law would be in effect. Policing, rather than ambulance and aid services would have been the order of the day, and because resources were expected to be short, the idea was that the injured should be shot. The injured, the elderly, the ill of health, the mentally ill were all to be ‘terminated’.

This is the man in charge. He seems to have been drinking. Wouldn’t you?

The Armoury

Though there are rooms and rooms left to see, this will be the last stop on the tour. I expect you are quite keen to leave at this point. These brightly coloured shells line the wall. As do assault rifes, uzis, information sheets on nuclear bombs. 

The audioguide has one last thing to tell you. This is the armoury, the most high-security room in the base. Volunteers were not allowed access. As you can imagine, with all these weapons around. But that was not the only reason. This room contained something else: a store of cyanide pills. If, after an attack had occurred and some time gone by, and the occupants of the bunker had gone above ground, and found nothing remained for them, no world left of any livability, then they had a way out. Or, more likely the voice says, reassuringly in your ear, if the tunnels leading to the surface had been damaged in the attack and were impassible, then there was no need to wait out the dwindling of the food supply or air.

You leave this room too. You wander up towards the staircase, towards the upward sloping green-lit corridor, past the blast doors and the checkpoint, up the second set of staircases, into the gift shop, out, out into the car park to look at the tanks and the missiles on the lawn, and beyond them, to the green field and the blue, warless sky above. And you breathe. And this was never your world, and you thank God for it.

Writing Fear

I’ve been thinking, in the wake of The Little Stranger, what it is in fiction that scares me. What novels have made me shiver, look up from the text to see the day going out, and tell myself nervously, perhaps I shouldn’t be reading this as it gets dark. Or else, what has lingered after reading, tilted the world a few degrees.

From when I was younger – the novels of The Shining and The Exorcist. Unseen malevolence afflicting unstable characters. The immeasurably demonic, the wretchedness of human weakness, in the face of a greater force.

The Red Laugh, a novella by Leonid Andreyev (you can read it in full in that link, if you like). War, brutality, futility, thirst, despair, madness as disease, madness transmittable to others, the attempt to write down ones story, but, in fact, writing nothing, writing illegible scribbles, intent, obsessed, possessed by memory, utterly.

Then, what else?

Ghost stories. I always want to be scared by them, but find this is rare.

The scariest stories I can remember are from childhood. Oral stories like “who’s got my hairy toe?” where a woman finds a toe as she is digging up roots, and takes it home with her, only to hear at night, the owner of the toe calling out for it, coming to get her. Burns’ “Tam O’ Shanter” read by my dad to my brother and myself, on dark nights on Skye. Come to think of it, he read the hairy toe story as well, and I still can remember being scared. Performance can be key.

Another story I read in a book of ‘true’ ghost stories, of a cyclist forced to shelter from the rain in an abandoned house. He waits by a lit fire, but the storm doesn’t pass. He grows tired, midnight approaches. He is woken by the sound of footsteps – damp, slippery steps- coming into the house, moving closer to the parlour he is in. Then he sees the steps, wet, as if of a drowned man, coming towards the fire. He jumps from his seat, just as a shape becomes visible, dripping, to take his place. More frightening than M.R. James, though perhaps because I read it, again, when young.

It is so much easier for readings, but for films especially, to be scary, through the combination of the visual and aural. A person speaks in a hush, then SHOUTS at the most terrifying moment. Or else, something moving at the edge of the screen. A flicker. A mouth distends, a long strange noise comes out, not human. Inexplicable signs. Low music. A girl crawls out of a TV with jagged motions of her limbs, her long, dark hair hung over her face.  Muted colours, abandoned hotels, forests that go on without end, dark and thin-branched.

Fear is meant to be experienced, rather than read of. It’s not enough for a character to be scared, but to transmit their fear to you. Make them afraid for both them and yourself, though none of it is real. How though? How does it work? Freud says, the unheimliche, the uncanny. The banister that squirms. The doorway that vanishes. The room that shouldn’t be there, or the passage that goes down into the dark.

I’m thinking of House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Another transmitted fear, passed from  Zampanò, the writer of the book-within-the-book, The Navidson Record to the narrator Johnny Truant. The physical twistings of the words on the page, printed into labyrinths you must turn the book around to read, is something I have not made my mind up on. The Navidson Record, which is the story of a non-existent documentary on a house with impossible dimensions, is frightening, but only up to a point. I won’t say which point.

I do still have, occasionally, vivid nightmares about rooms suddenly existing behind the walls of wherever I am living at that point in my life,  but I’ve had them for a long time. Something to do with reading Anne Frank’s diary –  a kind of terror of being hidden away, of the knowledge of her eventual discovery, of the last entry in her diary, leading to nothing, to absence, to seeing her father on the children’s programme Blue Peter, old, and alone, mingled with the fear of the uncanny, of a sudden, unmapped and unmappable labyrinth. Is that the first time Blue Peter has been associated with horror? I couldn’t possibly say.

I find myself drawn to writing uncanny moments in my second book, which I had not set out to do. It’s a preoccupation. It’s the sense that a human being, when alone in an unfamiliar house, will, for the most part, find something to be scared of, to resist being scared of. The dark, the untested rooms, the whispering of guilt, the surly neighbours, the howling wind, the scratch-scratch of a branch, though no trees are growing close to the house. I hope, in amongst the story of finding contentment and getting over grief, to unsettle.

I am only writing what scares me, with this compelling urge to pass it on, like a tape, to the next victim…

All in the telling…

Victoria St as it grows night

The closes that slide by either side of my tenement building are full of strange howls and small thuds as revelers celebrate All Hallows Eve. It is seven ten, and has been dark for many hours, and I am in the mood to be feartie.

 

So, I began watching a bizarre Japanese horror from the seventies called ‘Hausu‘ or House. It centres around the relationship between a group of school girls, and happily, the treatment of them (so far) has been far from sexualising or demeaning. Except perhaps the one who keeps being called fat (even though she is rather slender). The atmosphere is really what makes it – dreamy, absurd, and with every film trick in the book (before the advent of CGI). The backdrops and sets are gorgeous and completely unreal, and it is genuinely unsettling, mostly because it is so…odd. It’s been interrupted for now, but I will be right back into it shortly. I’d love to read a book that had the same sense to it.

 

I’ve just finished with Amrita -which ended up being frustrating and enlivening in equal measure, because the naivety of the story marred the occasional sparks of translucent beauty. Now it’s onto Jean Rhys’ Quartet, a different sort of horror all together, that of human nature…

 

 

Drum Roll…

At long last!

Team Little Ed’s film, Scrutiny, is up: 

 Again, warnings for copious fake blood effects, and extreme po-facedness.

 

Some of my favourite films from the night we were shown were much more light hearted. I direct attention towards:

Mon Git A Scran Wae Us (which translates from the weegie (the Glaswegian dialect) as ‘Come on, have a meal with us’ – a parody of the popular reality TV show, Come Dine With Us). The cooking tips made me laugh every time.

Norman, Portrait of a Serial Cleaner – another documentary-style affair about an odd man who cleans the graves up at Glasgow’s Necropolis.

Catch Up – Relationship, and bed-centred, piece, clever dialogue.

 

Considering these were all made and edited within a very short time period, they are seriously impressive.

 

I hope to get involved again in May, for the Edinburgh leg of the 48 Hour Film Project.

 

Up all night, down half the next day

The endurance/creativity test is over; all body parts present and correct, if a little on the trembly side.

Our Team, Little Ed, successfully completed the forty-eight hour challenge in forty-seven.

Everyone participating was given a character to include, a prop, and a specific line of dialogue. So, Norman or Norma MacKenzie, a cleaner, must find his or her way in, the prop was a ring, and the line was “do I know you?”  Hmm, tricky. For the genre, the team captain, A,  put his hand in the bag and pulled out…horror. Sigh of relief that we did not get ‘period drama’ – budgets would struggle to stretch that far.

 

With that to work with, the team began tossing ideas about. Friday night was devoted to blether, beer and story-boarding. Somehow, the eight or so people coalesced around a single concept: a crime scene cleaner, Norman, is observing the aftermath of a vicious murder while he cleans up around it. In monologue, he describes, based on injuries sustained, blood splatters etc, how it must have played out – this is interspersed with flashbacks of the attack. In the end, he finishes up and walks to his car…but I won’t spoil to for you any further.

 

Strangely, the comedy element usually present in Little Ed productions (I’ve been involved in a couple) was completely absent.  There were a lot of effects dreamt up, which always happens. Not many fun-with-computer visuals, as there simply wasn’t the time – so everything was reliant on physical props. Of which, I was one. Two and a half hours of lying on the floor in a puddle of red-dyed golden syrup. Yes, I was the victim – named Velma…okay, there was a teeeny bit of levity in there. We had a pair of 3D glasses lying about, and they seemed to fit with the clingy mustard top and hideous, baggy fronted, rust-coloured trousers A and I bought specifically for the outfit on Saturday. The killer wore a hat brought back from Oktoberfest in Munich, and a scarecrow-style mask made out of a cloth bag, as well as equally ugly clothes. We joked that the big reveal would happen at the end Scooby-Doo style…”I got away with it, no bother from you pesky kids!” Instead, the film turned out to be incredibly serious, and rather grim. I hope to put a link up to the film on youtube after the screening, but be warned – I did have to squeeze a bottle of fake blood quite a bit.

 

What was fascinating was taking part in a collaborative effort, under the stress of time, and having it all turn out well. Even on Sunday morning, as daylight crept up on us, everyone who was awake (A was sent to bed as he had the last scenes in the morning) was committed to the work, but still able to chat and laugh. The editors, J and J, put the footage together, but passed it round to D and I for second opinions and ideas for splicing it together.  By the time 5pm had rolled around, we were done, exhausted, but with a pretty coherent short of four minutes fifty seconds on our hands. We handed the film and the paperwork in just after 6, with not even the energy to cheer, then went our separate ways. I then slept for fourteen hours.

 

Quite a different experience from writing alone in my living room and bedroom. Relay sprint versus marathon.

The power of words

An interesting – okay, unpleasant – thing happened to me today as I was travelling the Glasgow-Edinburgh line.  I fainted, causing a mild ruckus. The culprit:

Booker Shortlisted, Jamrach's Menagerie (taken from The Casual Optimist)

I was reading away – no spoilers here, don’t worry! – the writing steadily getting more grim (which when I began the book, I had not expected one bit) when I suddenly began to feel a bit squeamish.  I remember thinking, well, I’ll get through this, then I’ll take a break. I am loathe to skip anything, because what if amongst the horror is some kernel of intense existential truth? I got through the passage, or part of it, and set the book aside, my breath beginning to get ragged. But too late, my insides went weak, and the light buzzed grey.

Lights out, a violent parody of sleep.

Then I was partially awake again, for some reason grasping about for my phone, panting for air. Still in my chair, thankfully. A woman came over to me to check I wasn’t suffocating, and the ticket inspector asked me if I wanted to leave the train at the small town of Polmont. I think that would only have complicated matters, since I would have had to be handed around like a lost glove for a while, or plonked on a platform bench to recover. Another kind soul gave me his water from a coke bottle, and in the end I made it through to be rescued by D at Edinburgh Waverley.

This is the first time a book has made me pass out completely. I had a little bit of a wobble with Interview with the Vampire,  and American Psycho was affecting in other ways – flashing of certain images, days later, and great disgust, but it was not to the same degree. It was the build up, the unrelenting quantity of believable, physical horror of that part of Jamrach’s Menagerie that did for me.  I quite admire it, really, as much as my body quailed, and feel a great wish to finish the book. Being ‘hooked’ is not always a pleasant feeling, as any fish of experience could tell you. Perhaps I’ll have the fortitude in a few days or so.