The Long Pipe, by Stanley Merriman

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Every boy in Saltney Drove knew about the Long Pipe. It ran under the drove road from Hollow Fen to the pumping station, forty yards of black concrete just wide enough for a boy on his hands and knees, and in a dry September it held only a skin of mud. Neville Barker knew something else, which was that the pumping station switched itself on whenever the fen got too full, and that nobody had ever told him how full too full was.

‘Scared, Barker?’ said Derek Fry, and the three boys behind him laughed the way they always laughed at whatever Derek said, a beat late, like an echo. ‘In this end, out the other. That’s all. Babies could do it.’

Neville said nothing. The pipe’s mouth was round and dark and perfectly silent, like a throat.

He went in. The daylight came with him for a few yards and then gave up. The boys’ voices shrank behind him to a thin noise, like gulls, and then to nothing at all. Ahead there was a coin of grey light that did not seem to be getting any bigger.

Halfway, the pipe hummed. It was a low sound that came up through the concrete into his knees and his teeth, and then, under his hands, the mud began to move. Only a little. Only a thin cold sheet of water, sliding past his wrists towards the station as if something at the far end had taken a breath. Neville stopped dead. Every part of him wanted to scramble forwards, and every part of him knew that the grey coin was twenty yards away.

He thought of his mother, who believed he was at the Scout hut. He thought of the boy from Ten Mile Bank who had gone into a dyke in 1947, whose name was on a brass plate in the chapel. He thought, quite clearly, I am a fool, and it was the calmest he had felt all afternoon.

He did not go on. He went back the way he had come, backwards, because there was no room to turn, testing each yard with his boots as though it might not be there.

Derek was laughing when he came out into the light. Neville stood up, soaked to the elbows, and walked straight past him without looking back, and found that he did not care, not one bit, and that his legs were shaking so much he had to sit down before he could go home for his tea.

How does the writer show Neville’s thoughts and feelings as he crawls into the pipe under the drove road?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Neville
• the writer’s use of language to show his thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.