There’s a Victorian pub on the way there. I passed it the other day and it’s being decorated, smartened up with cream paint. Everything else is that depressing sort of sixties modernity, big blocks of sand-colored flats. The footpath dips down and just before the opening into the underpass is one of those barriers only pedestrians can pass through. A sign on it says: CYCLISTS DISMOUNT. Up above is a three-tier rack of throughways, the exit road and the twin decks, one above the other, of the Westway. When I went down there at twenty-five past one on that Thursday it was the quietest time of the day for traffic but still the passing vehicles traveling at high speed made a continuous roar and throb. I saw someone come out of the tunnel mouth and turn up toward St. Mary’s churchyard. Cautiously, I passed through the barrier.

If you see a woman looking warily about her before going into an underpass, you know she’s nervous of encountering someone down there who’ll mug her or rape her. Those perils never crossed my mind. There was no one, anyway, to see me enter the tunnel and stand on the threshold, close by the wall.

An enormous relief came. The underpass was much shorter than I’d expected, surely no more than sixty feet long. I could see a brick wall facing me at the end and daylight. The passage is lined with tiles, whitish, ribbed, dirty. I made my way along it, my hands on the tiled wall, telling myself that six months before, when I had come here in the tube, I had been underground in the tube for half an hour, and survived without weeping or screaming. Compared to the tube this was nothing, this was a pussycat. Yet all my relief had gone. I still don’t understand why this airy, quite light, spacious passage frightened me so much, why it crippled me so that I could scarcely walk. I crept along, each instance of setting one foot an inch before the other a victory. The tiles felt cold and, worse, seemed to move a little, to wobble under my hands as if made of jelly, the walls and ceiling swelling and shrinking, and the floor like shifting sands.

But the brick wall was just ahead, and the fresh air. I reached it, gasping, still pressed against that undulating, slightly sticky wall, and found myself in a roofless circular space, open to the sky. An amphitheater without seats, it was also without windows, was interrupted only by the tunnel exit from which I had come—and a second opening leading to the rest of the underpass. I hadn’t reached the end, I was halfway through.