Bunker at Trottingdean

Trottingtown Dungeon

Janet's job was boring. At seventeen, people said, "Work
hard! Later on, you'll be promoted." Or "The work doesn't
matter. You'll get married soon."
In the office, there were piles of tenants' housing and
council tax benefits applications to be checked. Assiduously
she worked, day after day and in her break time chatted to
Doreen. In the council office in this small town, the women
were segregated from the men and not encouraged to talk.
Janet wondered how to get promoted, since the routine work
gave her no training. Her parents required her to catch the
six o'clock bus home each evening, and after eight in her
village, there was nowhere to go, so she wondered how to get
married soon.
Janet was good at arithmetic, and when the office supervisor
noticed this, she was transferred, and did the calculation of
housing benefits on one of the office computers.
This did not last long, because a new supervisor decided to
transfer her again to inspecting and destroying outdated
documents and gave the computer work to a new trainee. The
old papers were kept in a basement, reached by stone steps
leading under the council offices. Here Janet spent her days,
dismal and alone.
When Christmas Eve arrived, Janet felt more cheerful, as there
would be an office party in the afternoon. She was looking
forward to a little relaxation. She spent the morning as
usual in the basement deciding which documents to destroy.

There was a door at the end of one corridor of filing cabinets
which was usually locked, but today it stood ajar. Tempted by
curiosity, she peeped inside and felt for the light switch.
She did not find it immediately and stepped over the
threshold. To her consternation, the door slammed behind her,
leaving her alone in the dark.
She fought against claustrophobia and panic and prayed
silently, "Oh, God, please help me," as she felt for the door-
handle. It would not turn. Then she ran her hand slowly and
carefully up the wall, and found a light-switch. Stone steps
were leading down into a deeper basement. She tried the door
again but it was jammed shut.
She was a Catholic, so the prayer, "Hail Mary, full of grace
.... pray for us now and at the hour of our death," came
naturally to her.
She descended the steps, thinking that it was no use staying
put and knocking on that stout, locked door. No-one from
upstairs would hear. And today of all days, they would be
getting the drinks ready and would assume that she had slipped
out early. Mrs. Frost, the manager was known to turn a blind
eye to this on the eve of Bank Holidays. With one hand
pressing against the wall to steady herself, she went forward,
wondering what lay ahead? Perhaps the archives of
Trottingtown Council? At the foot of the steps was another
door, which opened easily. There were scraps of cardboard
lying about in the passage and with these she wedged it open
and switched on the light in the next room. Meeting her eyes
was a furnished apartment.
"Bunks for twenty people," she estimated.
From a further room came a humming sound. It was a small
generator of electricity, run on oil. There was a screen
facing her, serving as the visual display unit for a computer.
Fortunately, Janet had begun to study computing. She walked
up to it and switched on.
The instructions said, "CTRL key held down and C pressed wakes
up the computer," so she woke up the computer.
The message that appeared was, "Nuclear Emergency. This is a
Regional Control Centre. Questions welcomed."
"Is it real?" thought Janet. "And if it is real, I'm alone
here, and so, I am the Regional Control Council."
Practicality and coolness overcame her fear, and she typed in,
"Is the ventilation system working?"
"All life support systems working," answered the computer.
"Oh, it is a friendly computer," thought Janet. "Please, God,
help me to stay friends with the computer."
"Where is the food and water?" she typed.
"Under the bunks is a supply of tinned food. Water is in the
kitchen."
Not far away she found the kitchen, containing a sink, an
electric cooker and a toilet.
"All worked from closed systems, she thought. "I did not know
that preparations for defence against nuclear warfare were so
far advanced."
Next she tried the telephone and phoned her mother, but there
was no reply, only the steady note of the number unobtainable
tone.
She asked the computer, "How does the telephone work?"
~Have you a code number?" asked the computer.
"No," replied Janet nervously.
"Intruder present; systems cut off," replied the computer and
went dead.
Janet retreated to the kitchen, anxiety producing a lump in
her throat. It was a pristine, immaculate kitchen; there were
cups and cutlery, and running cold water. Janet drank her
fill. She needed something to eat and looked under the bunks.
There were only stores of canned food and she could not find a
tin-opener.
"I hope there's some tins with keys like sardines," she
thought.
She had to dismantle mounds of corned beef, tinned salmon,
rice puddings, prunes in syrup and vegetables in brine. None
of these were easily accessible foodstuffs. At the back she
found the sardines complete with keys. Thankfully, she ate
the contents of a tin of sardines, then lay limply on one of
the lower bunks, looking frequently at her quartz watch, and
at eleven o'clock that evening noted, "Day one has passed."

Janet was rather a moody person and in the silence, with
nothing to mark the passing of time, this tendency was
heightened. For days she could be as cool as a cucumber, and
then have a panic attack lasting three or four days. But so
far she had kept her feelings of panic in check. That night
she said her night prayers very carefully and this helped.

She supposed that when she emerged that she would find life
going on as normal, because her predicament here must have
been an accident. There had been no recent world-threatening
news, only the usual type of violence at home in the inner
cities and in several countries where civil war was in
progress. This state of affairs often depressed Janet, but
surely there was no real nuclear alert? But how could an
isolated, ill-informed person know? Supposing this was for
real? With these thoughts buzzing in her mind, she determined
that she would work out a routine for the next few days.

Next morning when she switched on the computer, she was
relieved to find that it answered, having apparently forgotten
that it had treated her as an intruder yesterday.
First the computer gave her a bit of good news. "The apartment
is time-locked for fourteen days," it replied in answer to her
question about finding an exit.
Fourteen days was a finite time, a little longer than the
Christmas holidays, but bearable, as long as the world outside
was normal.
"Where is the tin-opener?" she asked.
"Have you a code number?" asked the computer. It was as
erratic in its replies as many human beings.
"Janet did not reply. She was not going to answer, "No" again.

There were many drawers in the kitchen, some of which were
filled with papers, some containing cutlery and some filled
with electronic components which mystified her. Finding the
tin-opener was not vital as she believed the stocks of
sardines would suffice, but looking for it would be useful and
she thought she might find out more about this place from the
documents.
She planned to start her days with half an hour of prayer and
meditation, half an hour of exercise, and a meal of sardines
and water. Accomplishing this, by nine o'clock that morning
she was ready to search. Soon the kitchen floor was bestrewn
with paper, mostly reports of committee meetings, of which she
read only the headings. She found nothing of interest that
day, and before going to bed, marked it off as "Day Two." She
was following the kind of practises that she had read about in
the more melodramatic accounts of prisoners' lives. If the
conditions had been harsh as well as frightening because of
the uncertainty that the outside world was normal, she would
probably not have bothered about this. This was a comfortable
prison.
On day three she opened a file and saw that the top sheet was
marked "Code Numbers."
Excitedly she turned the computer on and typed "Code 1 is ZF
42."
"The Prime Minister's phone number is QN 9966, " was the
reply.
When she dialled this number a telephone answering machine
replied, "The PM is not at home."
When she continued the procedure with Code 2, she was told,
"The police bunker is unoccupied."
Codes 3 to 567 gave her much more information on health
physics and medicine, and the phone numbers of top scientists
and civil servants, but it was completely useless to her in
her present predicament.
Curiouser and curiouser became the information, with messages
such as "The Chief Mole is at X45" displayed on the small
screen.
But then Code 568 made the computer reply, "The tin-opener
will be supplied."
The metal door to a compartment under the computer flew open,
revealing the tin-opener. Retrieving it quickly, Janet went to
the food-store and half an hour later, triumphantly, sat down
to a meal of hot, baked beans, not before saying grace.
Though she had left a plea for help on some of the answering
machines, she did not know whether these were being used by
anyone. Top scientists would not be checking answering
machines unless there was an emergency, but if there was an
emergency, they might be all dead. So she had to wait for the
fourteenth day. The telephone numbers of the American CIA, the
KGB in Moscow were probably accessible to her here, but she
cared little about classified information.
As the days passed, she started talking to herself.
"I must write something in my diary," she frequently told
herself.
"If I get out, I must work for peace," she wrote, "but how do
I do that?" Then followed, "I opened a tin of carrots, and
found it went well with the corned beef. Then I had some
tinned rice pudding. The electric generator makes a noise. I
am glad of it for company. What should I do if it broke down?
I expect mother has contacted the police. Do they know about
these underground cells?"
-------------
On the fourteenth day, she was still keeping up her daily
routine and nothing untoward had happened. Food stocks and
water for twenty people were in store, so she had masses of
supplies in hand. She went up the stone steps which she had
descended fourteen days earlier in the early morning and
waited by the door to the outer office.
"Would it open at eleven o'clock?" she wondered. This was
about the time she had entered on Christmas Eve. "And if it
opened, would the world outside be normal?"
She could no longer remain calm. She sang hymns, but broke
off abruptly. She stood, then sat, then danced on the spot.
She shouted. Quarter to eleven came, according to her trusty
quartz watch. The minutes seemed to go more slowly.
Waiting....waiting....waiting.
Outside stood one of the members of Trottingtown Council and a
police constable. Janet had been listed as a missing person -
but they thought it a 99\\% probability that she was
accidentally doing nuclear alarm drill. A selected group of
councillors, officials, medical staff and police had been
preparing themselves for incarceration for fourteen days, but
most were half-relieved when the authorization had been
cancelled. A faulty computer programme was scheduled for
investigation. At eleven o'clock, they watched as the door
flew open. Janet was sitting on the stairs, with her head
slumped in her hands.
"It's all right now," said Mrs. Humphreys, the town
councillor. "I'll take you home." Janet met Mrs. Humphreys'
eyes, and without asking, knew the world was normal.
---------------
Later that year, her employers offered her promotion - a
position as a computer programmer had become vacant. She
refused.
"What do you want to do, then?" they asked.
"I would like to work as a gardener," said Janet.
The Council gave her a job designing new peace gardens. In
these gardens flowers and vegetables grew together. Organic
gardening was practised. Janet had a unique job, that allowed
her to work manually in the gardens for half her time and as a
computer-assisted designer working on garden plans for the
remainder of her time. It was very fulfilling.
The council decided to make Trottingtown a nuclear free zone.
They did this by opposing plans for the transport of nuclear
waste on the local railway.
Janet prospered. She now worked with Tom, Roger, Susan and
Margaret. The future looked more hopeful. However she
remembered that Trottingtown Council had set up Trottingtown
Dungeon and gradually this became known to more and more
people. Eventually by public demand, the council converted
the dungeon into a public museum. Nuclear alarm drill no
longer took place in Trottingtown.

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