The Darkness Lurking Beneath
“I’m feeling very somber today.
Looking down into the hole that was my part time residence for sixteen years, I feel a strange sadness. I will retire now.
The Royal Observer Corps was my employer for that time, and I spent much of it monitoring the equipment, the radio chatter, flight plans and government information, that were fed to me down in that bunker.
My tasks were mundane for most of the time, but there was always a nagging fear. My job was to keep this place functioning, keep it resupplied and keep everything working…..just in case!
Built during the Cold War, the nuclear observation bunker that sits underneath Broadway Tower, in the heart of the Cotswolds, is relatively unknown…..of course it was designed to be that way.
It and many others like it would be sanctuary to my associates and if the worse happened…. A nuclear strike from the Soviet Union! …..we would be expected to live underground for at least three weeks…. Not long enough for the fallout to dissipate, but long enough to monitor the extent of the fallout as weather patterns distributed it over the UK, and feed that information back to whatever government had survived.
As I look into that hole, it is being sealed up. It’s 1991 and the ‘Corps’ has been disbanded as government feels that relations with the new Russia are warming
I wonder what the next decades will bring?!…
This is such a beautiful part of the world…. The Cotswolds are known for that… but there is a darkness that lurks underneath the soil and a stain. Fear of all out war still lingers beneath the gentle hills, the ploughed fields and the historic monuments. I hope this place and others like it will never be opened up again.
But another part of me feels like we are being foolish and that this bunker should remain in use………
Time will tell….. it always does!”
Travel doesn’t always have to be about beautiful places and things. Sometimes we must confront the ‘awful’…..
Life is the same.