The Landscape Beyond the Tunnel

What is there beyond the tunnel?

On the other side of the tunnel, there used to be a narrow path that was almost covered by the growth of vegetation on each side of it in the summer. Even though the path was just one, it was usually called “The Lanes”. A bit further on,  there were some tumbledown hovels that the children called “the Cottages”, ignoring the fact that it was an extremely grand name for such collapsed dwellings. All around the place, there were pieces of damaged objects,  children with ragged clothes and “misshapen dogs”. An abandoned farm was also located in “The Lanes” and it was important because it marked the frontier between the Cottages and, as Stephen called it, “no-man’s land”.

The description gives us a clear idea of how desolate that place must have looked. Stephen described it as an ancient land, which had not reached the stage of urbanization. After passing the Cottages there was a half-dried-up pond, a disused chalk pit and then absolutely nothing: only weeds in a landscape as bleak and dreary that Stephen referred to it as a “moonscape”. For Stephen and probably for everyone else in the Close, it was like visiting the end of the world. This land at the end of the Lanes was called “the Barns”, even though there were no barns to be seen. Again, the name seemed to be too pretentious for the place it described. Even the trees there were useless: they were elders, whose wood is not good for anything, not even for a bonfire.

Somewhere in this “nothingness” there were collapsed sheets of black corrugated iron. Under a few of them, there were some steps leading into the ground, probably to the remains of a cellar.  It was here that the man Mrs Hayward was helping was taking refuge. The place where he lived marked his low position in the social hierarchy: he was at the very bottom of it. He lived in the middle of nowhere, with no comfort or company at all: “(...) without even a dog to speak up for him. Without even a privet to go to the lavatory in.”

To conclude my post I want to summarize the landscape of that ancient land beyond the tunnel. If we could pass the tunnel and had a general view we would firstly notice the amount of nature and weed there was. Then, the poverty of the buildings and the families. And finally, the desolate sea behind the Cottages that was literally an ocean of green that meant the end of civilization.