Beneath the bowling green

Text 1: Under the Green, by Tomasz Reed

An original contemporary article.

Most people in Highbury Vale walk across the reservoir every week without knowing it. It lies under the bowling green: a rectangle of mown grass, a wooden pavilion, a sign asking players to wear flat shoes. Beneath the grass, since 1871, have lain eleven million litres of the town’s drinking water. Once every ten years the water company drains it to check the brickwork, and this year, for the first time, they let a few of us go down.

We went in through a steel hatch beside the pavilion, one at a time, down a ladder that seemed far too long. I counted the rungs and lost count. At the bottom the engineer switched on a floodlight, and I said a word I will not repeat.

It was a cathedral. That is what everyone says, apparently, and I resisted it for a full minute, but there is no other comparison. Rows of brick pillars marched away into the dark in every direction, each one rising into a curved arch, arch after arch after arch, until the light gave out and they went on without it. The bricks were the colour of a fox. Here and there a pale stalactite of lime hung from a joint, thin as a pencil. A few inches of water still lay on the floor, absolutely still, so that every pillar stood on its own upside-down twin and the whole place seemed twice as deep as it was.

Sound behaved strangely. A dropped torch rang out like a bell and kept going, travelling away from us down the aisles and coming back changed. Without agreeing to, we all began to whisper.

The engineer pointed her torch at one pillar. Pressed into a brick at head height was a thumbprint, and beside it the initials J.W., scratched with a nail by someone who knew that nobody would see them once the water came in. Every brick here, she said, was laid by hand. There are about two million.

Upstairs, an hour later, the bowls club had started a match. A man in white bent down, rolled a wood across the grass and stood watching it curl, as though there were nothing under his feet at all.

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