The Tunnel Where Everybody Shouts Hello

Under the railway on Larch Lane there is a brick foot tunnel, eleven paces long, with a curved roof and a floor that is always a little damp. On a bright morning a small girl in yellow boots stops at its mouth, takes a breath and calls hello. The tunnel says hello back, twice, in a voice rounder than her own, and she walks on looking pleased with them both.

Everybody does it. Schoolchildren do it at a run. The postman does it in a low, businesslike way, as though checking a piece of equipment. A woman who has walked her terrier through the tunnel for nineteen years says hello going out and good evening coming home, and the terrier adds a single bark on its own account. People who would not dream of raising their voice in a street raise it happily for eleven paces and lower it again in the daylight.

Nobody taught anyone. New families work it out within a week, usually because a child goes first and an adult, glancing behind to make sure the lane is empty, follows. Teenagers go through a silent phase of about two years and then return to it, quietly, when alone. There is a man from the flats who whistles two notes rather than speaking, and regulars can tell, hearing the reply roll out of the far end, that he is on his way to the shops.

Last spring the council sent a letter. The tunnel was to be improved: new lamps, a fresh coat of pale paint, and soft grey panels along the walls to reduce what the letter called unwanted reverberation. A drawing was enclosed. It showed the tunnel looking clean, bright and extremely quiet.

The meeting in the community hall was the best attended in its history. Nobody was against the lamps. Nobody minded the paint. But one after another, people stood up and explained, with some embarrassment, that the reverberation was not unwanted. A retired bus driver said he had been saying good morning to that tunnel since he was six. The girl in the yellow boots was lifted onto a chair and asked the officer, reasonably, who would answer.

The officer, who was young and had walked through the tunnel that afternoon without making a sound, went back the next morning before work. She stood at the entrance for a while. Then she said hello, not very loudly, and the tunnel returned it with interest. The revised plan arrived a month later: lamps, paint, no panels. The lamps are very good. By the entrance somebody has since chalked a small arrow on the wall, in case a visitor needs telling where to stand.

The real idea behind it

Almost everyone has a place like this: a stairwell, an underpass, an empty hall, the inside of a big pipe at a playground. A hard curved surface throws a voice back whole, and something in us cannot walk past without trying it. It is one of the first experiments a child ever runs, and one of the few we go on repeating all our lives, because the result never stops being a small delight. A neighbourhood is partly made of such things, the tiny unwritten customs that nobody planned and everybody keeps. They rarely appear on a drawing, which is why it is worth saying them out loud, preferably somewhere with a good echo.