Foulness Island: The Abandoned Brain

(from Shadows of the UK, page 28)

During the Second World War, preparations were made for the worst: an invasion of Britain. By the end of 1940, gun emplacements and turrets had been built across the south coast of England, designed as a line of defense should the land be invaded by sea.

The invasion never came; the Battle of Britain did happen in September 1941, but it was fought in the air. After the tide turned, the emplacements were abandoned. You can still see them here and there on village greens and cliff tops, little concrete bunkers, now grown over with ivy, full of leaves and earth. They’ve become places where animals nest and children play. A lot of people born decades after the war ended have even forgotten what the little bunkers were originally there for.

In the Shadow, many of these places have developed in very odd ways. Charged with fear and patriotism, even when they were built, these bunkers burst into the Shadow before they were finished. As time has gone on, local plant- and animal-spirits and the dreams of the people in the nearby areas have transformed the emplacements.

One of the most bizarre examples lies out on Foulness Island, a little to the northeast of Southend-on-Sea, in Essex. While the material counterpart is no different from any other concrete bunker, in the Shadow, the thing looks
like a cracked, overgrown concrete statue of a human brain, surrounded by rubble resembling the broken remains of a huge spinal column. Rain pools in the concrete structure’s cracks and folds.

Inside, it’s vast: leaves sweep into a hall, beyond which is what would have once been the place where the Home Guard watched for the enemy. Tiny spirits run wild across the floor — little skittering notions that rush back and forth
like small leathery nerve cells, and never stay still long enough for their shapes to be properly made out.

Under a lattice of wildflowers and ivy, antique levers and dials can be seen set into the sloping wall underneath the gun slit. They look like they should do something; it’s hard to tell exactly what that is. Pushing back the foliage, there’s a fuel gauge, a speedometer, measured in knots, and what looks like an altitude meter. A reel-to-reel tape machine sits inside a steel cabinet behind a rusted door. An empty bird’s nest sits on top of it, but the tape still turns. It’s very faint, but anyone listening hard enough can hear the tape repeat a brief message. Everyone hears a different thing. Do the controls do anything? And if they can be made to work, what then?

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