Riding the test lift

Text 1: The Lighthouse at Brackenfield, by Priya Hallam

An original contemporary article.

There is a tower on the edge of Brackenfield that has no floors. It is a hundred and twenty metres of tapering grey concrete with nothing inside but shafts, and for thirty years the town has called it the Lighthouse, though it has never shone a light and stands about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England. Lift engineers built it to test their machines. Last week they let me ride one.

The engineer who took me up, Dele, had the calm of a man who has fallen many times on purpose. At the base he showed me the test car: a plain steel box, unpainted, with a handrail, a bare bulb and a laptop taped to the wall. No mirror. No music. No little brass plate promising a maximum of eight persons. “We strip all that out,” he said. “It’s only weight.”

The doors closed. The car moved off so gently that I thought nothing had happened, until I saw, through a slot in the door, the shaft wall begin to stream downward, a grey blur stitched with cables. Dele called out the heights as though reading a shopping list: ten metres, twenty, forty. We were travelling at six metres a second. I felt it chiefly in the soles of my feet.

At the top, Dele said, “Now the fun bit.” He was going to cut the power and let the car fall, to prove that the safety brakes would catch it. He said this the way other people say they are going to put the kettle on.

I would like to describe the drop. I can describe the second before it, in which I noticed that Dele had quietly taken hold of the rail, and the second after, in which the brakes bit with a shriek like a train in a tunnel and the floor punched up into my heels. Between those two seconds there is only a white space.

“Three metres,” said Dele, pleased. “Lovely.”

Now, in every lift I step into, I read the little brass plate and think of that bare box, and of the man who drops it for a living so that the rest of us never have to think about falling at all.

Explore how Priya Hallam uses language and structure to present her experience in the lift-testing tower.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.