The Underground Watch

The tunnels breathe, and he breathes with them.

The tunnels have always been there, even when the world forgets them. They smell of iron and smoke, of brine and scorched time. In the blackout nights of 1941, when New Brighton shook under the weight of fire raining down across the Mersey, the tunnels hummed like arteries. They weren’t just hiding places. They were alive.

He walked them with the same slow certainty he’d carried for centuries. He was known only as “the watchman” to the women who worked the munitions lines — 200 of them, sleeves rolled up, lips red with dust and fatigue. They joked about him in whispers, saying he’d never aged. Not that they’d seen him much. He kept to the shadows, leaning against the walls as if he was listening to the stone itself. Which, in a way, he was. He could feel its pulse.

There was a time, long before the Luftwaffe came, when his hands carried gunpowder barrels from the sailing ships docked near the magazine. He remembered the creak of wood, the sweat, the peril of one spark. The tunnels had been smaller then — carved for men like him to vanish into with their dangerous cargo. He’d walked into the dark, year after year, with the sense that he’d return. And he always did.

Now the dark was different. The Blitz turned everything upside down. The ground shuddered with bombs meant for Liverpool, and the women on the lines would freeze mid-task, heads tilted, waiting to know if the sound above was survival or ruin. The watchman never froze. He could feel the difference between fear and danger. He’d learned it across lifetimes.

Sometimes he’d take a bullet from the conveyor, hold it up to the single dangling lamp, and think of all the hands it would pass through — the soldiers who would load it, the enemies it might find, the lives it might end. The tunnels were a place of protection and creation, but also of endings. He knew this too well.

When the air-raid sirens split the night, he was the one who moved silently down the tunnels, securing doors, checking that the fireproof walls were sealed. He could sense the bombs before they struck, the vibrations carrying through his bones long before the blast reached the earth. Some said he was lucky. He knew better. It wasn’t luck. It was listening — to the stone, to the silence between heartbeats.

He didn’t talk about the past. He didn’t talk much at all. But sometimes, as the factory lights dimmed, he’d sit on an old crate and close his eyes, and the tunnels would open for him. He could see them as they once were: the smugglers’ paths under the town, the damp scent of salt and rum, the powder magazine where men prayed their cargo wouldn’t ignite. He’d see faces he couldn’t name anymore — faces long dissolved by time — and he’d feel the weight of all the lives these tunnels had sheltered.

The women felt it too, though they didn’t have words for it. On the hardest nights, when bombs shook the promenade and the factory rattled with fear, they swore they felt someone standing behind them, steadying them, holding the fear away for just a moment. They’d tell stories about him on their breaks — some called him a ghost, some an angel. He didn’t mind what they called him. He wasn’t there for recognition. He was there to keep the memory of this place alive.

And now, decades later, when people walk the ghost tours of New Brighton, pointing at the rusted machinery and peeling paint, they think they’re seeing history. They’re not. History is just a story about things that stopped moving. The tunnels are still moving. They’re still breathing. And so is he.

Some nights, if you stand quietly by the sealed entrances near the old Palace site, you might hear a sound — not the echo of your own footsteps, but something heavier, deeper. A man’s breath. A hand sliding along stone. The old watchman, still walking. Still listening.

Because as long as the tunnels remember, so will he.

RW