This was on the third afternoon. After the game with the pigeon they grew listless and lethargic. They sat and sprawled about on the broken-up asphalt, now and then gouging up lumps of it and throwing them aimlessly. The sun blazed down. They looked like real prisoners now, idle and demoralized inside the high walls. I thought: They’ve had enough; they’ll go now — their old playground holds nothing for them.
But they didn’t go. They re-appeared the next morning. It was as if there had been some over-night resolution. Between them, they had a pick-axe, a shovel and a long-handled fork. Perhaps they had been stolen from one of the building sites. They began to discuss something in the near right-hand corner of the playground, looking at the ground and marking out imaginary lines with their feet. Then one of them lifted the pick-axe and, rather clumsily at first, began hacking at the asphalt. It was difficult to see all this. Even with my high vantage point, the near wall partially obscured them. But it was obvious they were digging a hole. When one had wielded the pick-axe for a few minutes another would take over, and at intervals one of them would scrape away the dislodged asphalt and earth with the shovel. The unoccupied ones sat around, looking on silently and intently.
I wondered what all this meant. By mid-day they had dug a hole deep enough to come up to their shoulders and there was a substantial heap of earth on the asphalt. Two of them went off and returned later with other tools — trowels, garden forks, a bucket. All of a sudden, I understood. They were digging a tunnel. The hole was perhaps seven or eight feet from the right hand wall. If they dug towards it and for about the same distance beyond it they would emerge in the little triangle of grass — now almost worn away or dried up by the sun — with the solitary bench on it.
I watched them work on all that afternoon and the next morning. They reached the tricky point where they had to turn the angle of the hole so that they could start to dig horizontally towards the wall. Why were they doing it? Was it a game? Had they transformed the playground, in their minds, into some prison camp, patrolled by armed guards and watch-dogs? Their task was too strenuous for a game, surely. And yet, if it wasn’t a game, it was absurd: They were trying to escape from a place they had entered — and could leave — at their own free will. Suddenly, I wanted them to succeed.
“Look Clancy—” I said. Clancy had come in from work. She had a carton of yoghurt with her. She sat down, ripped off the foil and began eating without speaking. “—a tunnel.”
Clancy looked out of the window. “What tunnel?” All she could see was a pile of earth in the playground.
She licked at her yoghurt, bending her face over it.
“A tunnel. The kids are digging a tunnel in the playground.”
“That’s a stupid thing to do.”
I didn’t explain. We didn’t talk much to each other in the evenings now. It seemed an effort.
For several days I watched them dig. I forgot my hands, my irritation, my uselessness. From where I sat, I could see the goal of their labours — the patch of grass to the right of the wall — whereas they could not. I surveyed their exertions like a god. But there was much that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see how far the tunnel had progressed — all I could see was the expanding heaps of earth and, every few minutes, a boy emerging from the entrance hole, gasping and smeared with soil, and another taking his place. I began to have fears for them. Might the whole thing cave in? Had they dug deep enough to go beneath the foundations of the wall? How were they managing to breathe and to extract the earth as they dug? But now and then I would glimpse things that reassured me: odd bits of wood — fragments of desks and the torn-down lavatories — being used for shoring, lengths of hose-pipe, a torch, plastic bags on the ends of cords. On the asphalt over the estimated line of the tunnel they marked out a broad lane in chalk where, clearly, no one was to stand. Their ingenuity, their determination enthralled me. I remembered the pigeon they had kicked round the playground. But I worried about other things that might still thwart them. Might they run into a gas main and be forced to stop? Might they simply give up from exhaustion? And if they overcame all this, might the council men or the demolition workers arrive before they had time to finish? The more I thought of all these things, the more it seemed that their escape was reaclass="underline" that there was a conspiracy of forces against them and some counter-force in the boys themselves.
I did not want to imagine them failing.
I said to Clancy: “My hands will be better soon.”
“Oh — really. That’s good.”
“It could have been worse. Think of all the worse things that could have happened.”
“That’s right — look on the bright side.”
We were quite apart now, wrapped in ourselves. Clancy spent all her time sweating in the pizza house or brooding over her uncle and his absent letters, and I spent all my time obsessed by the tunnel.
It was nearing the middle of August. The sun kept shining. The evening papers Clancy sometimes brought home spoke of droughts and water restrictions. People were complaining of the fine weather. They would have complained just as much if the summer had been wet. On the little triangular plot by the school the thin grass had turned a straw colour and the earth was hard and cracked. I kept watch on this patch of ground now. At any moment I expected the tunnellers to break surface. In the corner of the playground the diggers seemed to be getting excited. The nearer the moment came, the more I exaggerated the dangers of discovery and I willed the council men to delay one more day. I thought of the difficulty of digging up, entombed by earth, against the hard, baked top-soil.
And then, one afternoon, it happened. It seemed odd that it should happen, just like that, without fanfares and announcements. Suddenly, a segment of cracked soil lifted like a lid, only about five feet from the outer face of the wall. A trowel poked upwards, and a hand, and then, after a pause in which the earth lid rocked and crumbled, a head thrust into the air in a cloud of dust. It wore an expression of serene joy as if it had surfaced in a new world. It lay perched for some time on the ground, as if it had no body, panting and grining. Then it let out a cry of triumph. I watched the head drag out shoulders and arms, and a body behind it; and then the four on the other side of the wall disappear one by one into the hole and re-appear, struggling out, on the grass triangle. No one seemed to see them — the traffic went by heedlessly, the bulldozers whined and growled. It was as if they had been transformed and were invisible. They brushed themselves down and — like climbers on a mountain peak — shook each other’s hands. And then, they simply ran off — down the adjacent side street, past the boarded up shops and the empty terraces — covered in earth, clasping each other and flinging their fists ecstatically into the air.
Clancy came in about an hour later.
“Clancy,” I said, “Clancy, I want to tell you something—” But she was waving an envelope at me, a long white envelope with black print on it. Her face was strangely agitated, as if she might be either pleased or upset.