The way out of the underland is where nine springs flow clear from the bedrock.
Months after Onkalo, when the year has warmed, I take my youngest son to the chalk uplands a mile or so from our house. He is four years old and I am forty-one. We cycle most of the way, then I lay the bike in the grass and he and I walk hand-in-hand the few hundred yards to a half-acre copse of beech and ash called Nine Wells Wood. Nine Wells lies close to the railway line, close to the hospital, and like many small woods its extent seems much greater once entered than it appears from the outside.
The hour or so that he and I spend together in the wood is happy and calm. There I am able to focus on him, to walk at his pace, to think what it is like to see the world as a four-year-old might see it. The sun is high and strong, and light streams through the canopy, falling in splinters around us.
We make our way to the end of the wood where the springs rise. The springs have organized themselves in a circle around a hollow in the chalk, filling a pool that is perhaps a foot deep and six feet across. The water in the pool is so clear as to be invisible, save for the root-like reflection of the branches above that it carries.
The sides of the hollow are slippery, so I hold on to the trunk of an elder with one hand and grip his arm with the other, and in this manner he and I are able to slither down to the edge of the pool and crouch there.
He is amazed by the fact of the springs. He cannot comprehend that water should issue from the earth like this, that the stone should flow in this way.
We count the springs off, one by one. They declare themselves only by the ripples they stir on the surface.
‘The water is black,’ he says, and this puzzles me until I realize that because the water is so clear he is seeing straight through it to the pool bed, which is dark with fallen leaves and twigs.
To prove the water’s existence I dip a hand and drink. The water – straight from the chalk – tastes different from any other I know; somehow round in the mouth. And cold. Stone-cold. I hold a cupped hand of the water up for him and he drinks from it too, tentatively at first, then greedily, gripping my wrist, enjoying the water’s coolness on that warm day.
Of the nine springs, he likes best the one with the strongest flow. I like the smallest, though, the one on the inaccessible far side of the pool, just below water level. There the chalk is whitest and the spring shows itself only as the faintest of ripples, and as a triangular rift in the chalk giving onto inky blackness.
Sitting there on the ground by the springs, him sitting on me, I let my mind run against the flow of the water, following its path back into the rift in the chalk, and down through the interstices of the rock. I think of what has been excavated and interred here over thousands of years of human presence – Neolithic causewayed enclosures, Bronze Age burial barrows, a sunken Iron Age ring fort, a medieval cemetery, a Second World War anti-tank trench, a buried Cold War observation post a few hundred yards distant, down into which a designated observer was to retreat in the event of a nuclear strike, with no room for his wife or children, who were to be abandoned by order of the government.
I hug my son. A young woman appears on the path above the pool, looks down into the spring-hollow and smiles on seeing us. She is walking her collie. The dog darts around, barking. We talk for a little, low to high, about the springs, the wood, the weather. On her calf she has a circular tattoo of a map that shows the Arctic Circle from Canada all the way round to Greenland, as if seen from a vantage point somewhere above the North Pole.
Lumps of white chalk lie among the ivy, glowing in the day-dusk of the wood. Dragonflies hunt the spring stream where it flows away from us. Beneath and around us, invisibly, the fungal network connects tree to tree.
The young woman walks on, calling for her dog, which has disappeared. My son and I talk quietly about nothing much. We feel small in the universe, and together.
Later, as we are leaving, he runs on ahead down a tunnel of briar and blackthorn. The tunnel is at first in shadow, but as I watch him run he passes into a place where the sunshine falls so brightly that he is burned up by it, lost to my sight, and suddenly the knowledge that he will die strikes me and every leaf falls from the trees around us and the air greys to ash and colour is utterly lost – and then life and hue pour back into the world as quickly as they were drained from it, and the leaves flicker greenly on the trees again.
I run to catch up with him, calling loudly, and he turns to face me at the edge of the wood. As I kneel down on the earth he raises a hand in the air, fingers spread wide. I reach my hand towards his and meet it palm to palm, finger to finger, his skin strange as stone against mine.