Twenty-One Green Bottles
By
Della Galton
It is dark and rank and we are so far below ground I can feel the whole weight of the hill bearing down upon our heads. Only the drip, drip of water and the scrape of Bob’s boots on the rock ahead of me breaks the echoing silence.
I’m no longer sure I like potholing. It had been fun when we set out. I was as captivated as he was by the yawning beauty of the first cavern we came across and the perfection of the stalactites that poked down from its ceiling like crystalline daggers.
Now I just feel cold and fed up and if I’m honest a little afraid, which isn’t like me. I’ve never been the nervous type. My sister, Natasha, is a girly girl who loves dressing up and cooking and having friends round for dinner parties. I’ve always preferred the dirt and dust of the great outdoors, but right now I’ve had enough of it – or at least I’ve had enough of the great under-the-ground, which has always been Bob’s domain.
“Will we be heading back soon?” I call towards his torch, which is a thin beam of light picking out moisture-darkened rock and the odd bat.
“Yeah.” He slows. “There’s a bit of a ledge up here. Let’s have a breather.” I see the dark shape of him move upwards and I realise he is sitting on a jutting out piece of rock. He reaches out a hand and pulls me up to join him.
The whites of his eyes flash in the gloom. “Sorry, pet, have you had enough? I should have asked you before.”
“I should have said.” I snuggle into his warm bulk and immediately feel better. Bob has been potholing for years. He’s as much at home tunnelling through these dark warrens as he is ambling down the cobbled streets of our Northumberland village.
His great, great grandfather, like mine, was a miner. Bob reckons poking about underground is in his blood. I’ve told him many a time that no one went down a mine because they liked it. They did it because there was no other way to make a living.
But the upshot is that Bob loves caves – and because I love Bob, I decided to come with him today when the mate who’d promised dropped out.
I’ve been on other expeditions, but none as long or as tricky as this one.
“So, does the tunnel get much narrower than this?”
Bob hesitates. “To be honest, I’m not exactly sure where this tunnel goes.”
A shiver touches the base of my spine, but I try to keep my voice light. “I thought you knew these caves back to front and inside out.”
“So did I.” He nuzzles my hair. “We must have taken a wrong turning. Don’t worry, pet. I know roughly where we are. We’re in a section near the old mine. It’s a bit further east that I’d planned, but not completely uncharted territory.”
“Well that’s something I suppose.”
“You really have had enough, haven’t you?”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Although I’ve seen enough bats and slimy walls to last me a while.”
He laughs. And that’s when we hear the sound of distant voices.
* * *
The noise was the first thing Thomas heard. An ear splitting crack like the roof of the world was coming down on his head. A heartbeat later he realised it was. A whole crush of timber and stones rained onto the floor around him. He curled right back against the wall of the shaft, covering his head and face until the worst was over.
When he’d opened his eyes and had checked he was still in one piece, the first person he saw through the choking dust was his Uncle George. They’d been working alongside each other, but Uncle George hadn’t been so lucky. Blood oozed from a gash on his head and he half lay, half sat a few feet away.
Scared there might be another rock fall Thomas crawled on his hands and knees towards him.
“You all right, Uncle George?”
“Aye, Thomas. You all right?”
“I think so. Is it a rock fall?”
“More than a rock fall, lad. I’d say the shaft’s gone. That was the cracking sound we heard. We’ll be stuck here ‘til they get us out.”
For the first time Thomas realised the entrance was blocked by a mountain of rubble. When he looked closer he saw the toe of a man’s boot sticking out beneath it, and the bloodied fabric of his trousers. He swallowed hard and tried not look again. All around, other men were stirring and moaning.
His stomach churning, he turned back to his uncle. “They will get us out, won’t they?”
“Course they will, lad.” He heard his uncle’s deep chuckle in the gloom. They’ll be getting the rescue party together as we speak.”
* * *
“I guess we’re not the only ones doing a spot of potholing,” I say, and Bob nods.
“At least we can ask for directions if we get lost,” I quip.
“We’re not lost.” He sounds pretty confident but I’m not so sure. And when we start moving again we are going towards the voices. They’re quite loud so we must be close.
We reach a junction in the tunnel. The left side looks too narrow so we take the right. Almost immediately the voices grow fainter and we don’t get far before we reach a dead end.
Bob turns back. For the first time he looks worried. “I’m sorry. I think we should have taken the left hand fork.”
* * *
“How about a song, eh Thomas? There’s nothing like a song to keep your spirits up.”
“And the rescue party will be able to hear us, won’t they, if we’re singing.”
“Aye Thomas, they will.”
They sang ten green bottles to kick off, their voices rising in a crescendo of defiance to the dark. Then they found ten wasn’t really enough and after some discussion they sang twenty-one green bottles.
“Why twenty-one, Uncle George?”
“Because, there are twenty-one of us, stuck in here, lad. A bottle each. I tell you, I could do with a bottle right now.”
“A bottle of beer, Uncle George?”
“Aye, Thomas, a nice cold bottle of beer.”
* * *
Perhaps my imagination is on overtime, but the voices are beginning to spook me. They are men’s voices. They rise and fall and they dip up and down in volume, sometimes so faint they’re almost gone and other times so loud I’m sure we will come across them at the next junction. But we never do.
Bob is stubbornly optimistic. “We’re not lost, just misplaced,” he says, as we take another breather. In the torchlight I see sweat and grime streaking his forehead.
“What if we can’t find our way out?” I try to make it sound like a throwaway line.
“Of course we’ll find our way out.”
* * *
“It’s been more than a day now, Uncle George, hasn’t it. And they’re not here yet.”
“No, lad, they’re not.”
The last light had gone out a while back and to Thomas’s super sensitive ears his uncle’s voice sounded weaker, although just as stubbornly cheerful. But Thomas was worried. He’d heard him retching earlier. A lot of the men had been sick, and although he was trying to look on the bright side as much as anyone, he knew it had been a lot more than a day.
Three bloody days for all he knew, or maybe even four. It was impossible to tell in the endless dark. They had no way of counting time. Day and night rolled into each other in a dizzying blur.
At least they had supplies. Uncle George and Robert, the butty, had rationed out food and water at the beginning – it was one of the first things they’d done. He’d heard them talking in low voices.
“Enough for more than a week if we’re careful. Rescue party should be here by then.”
Thomas was sore from lying on rock, his head felt muzzy and the tiny cuts that hadn’t bothered him at first now throbbed to the beat of his heart. As he lay in the pitch dark of their prison, he longed for his mam, even though she’d died two years hence. Sometimes he had to stuff his hand in his mouth to stop the tears. At eleven and a half he was too old to cry.
* * *
After a while it strikes me that the voices are singing. It sounds like Ten Green Bottles, although I could swear the last verse was twenty-one green bottles. I’m getting used to them now. We both are. They sound comforting, not spooky.
“I know this is going to sound mad.” Bob takes my hand and kisses the back of it. “But I think they’re leading us out. Every time we take a wrong turn they get quieter and when we’re back on track they’re loud again.”
“It doesn’t sound mad,” I say. He’s right. I’m beginning to think the voices aren’t even underground, but above our heads on the hillside like some sort of marching choir. Once or twice think I hear the soprano of a child amongst the deep baritones of the men.
And then we both see it at the same time: a circle of light up ahead, brighter than an angel’s halo.
“Oh, thank God,” I say, choking between laughter and tears.
“I told you we weren’t lost,” Bob says.
* * *
There were a few moments when Thomas thought they might not get rescued.
The first was the moment Uncle George started to scrape something into the rocky wall behind them.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a message to your cousin.”
“Why are you writing her a message?”
Uncle George didn’t answer and Thomas wondered if he should write a message. Only he didn’t know who to write to. He’d lived with Uncle George and Janet since his mam had passed over.
Then there was the moment when Uncle George tried to rouse Robert and he wouldn’t be roused. Their prison grew more silent as time passed.
Then there was the moment when Uncle George himself couldn’t be roused. And Thomas crawled along the floor and one by one he felt the cold faces of the men. When he got to number twenty and he knew he was the last one alive he crawled back to Uncle George and lay down next to him, but he still hoped they’d be rescued. As he closed his eyes he fancied he could hear the tap tapping of rescuers getting closer.
* * *
Ensconced within the beer-scented warmth of The Goodfellow’s Arms that night, the fear and darkness seem a long way away. Although I know nothing on earth will get me in a cave again.
Bob is talking to an old guy at the bar. When he comes back, he looks a bit shaken.
I touch his arm. “What’s up?”
“I was just telling Albert about our adventures. He did a lot of potholing when he was younger. He knows the area better than anyone.”
I glance at the old man and he raises his glass in my direction.
“Did you tell him about the voices?”
Bob’s eyes darken. “Yeah, I did. I half expected him to laugh.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. He told me about a disaster that happened back in 1860. In those days it was legal for mines to have only one shaft so if there was a problem, say a rock fall that blocked the shaft, they’d have no way of getting out.”
“Christ.”
“It wasn’t a big disaster in terms of numbers – there were twenty-three fatalities. Two were buried under rubble, but the other twenty-one weren’t so lucky. One of them was an eleven-year-old lad.” Bob’s eyes filled with tears. “They lasted about a week before they either suffocated or got poisoned by noxious gases. When they were finally dug out the rescuers found the bodies lined up in a row beneath messages they’d scratched in the rock to their loved ones.”
I swallow hard.
“Under the little lad’s body were the words, ‘from the dark, let my spirit bring light.’ Albert thinks it’s a reference to the bible.”
I can’t speak, and Bob’s voice is husky as he goes on: “Apparently, we’re not the first lost potholers who’ve been guided out of the darkness to the tune of twenty-one green bottles.”
