When we bought the house, we didn't know that it had a fallout shelter. The estate agent's flyer mentioned all the usual things: kitchen, dining room, original features - all the things that you would expect to see. But there was no mention of a fallout shelter. The house had been built during the 1950s, at the height of Cold War paranoia, so maybe we shouldn't have been that surprised. According to our new neighbours, the previous owner - who had owned the place from new - had been something of a stranger. But we hadn't been able to confirm that for ourselves. We had bought the house as part of an estate sale, complete with all its fixtures and fittings. So, when we found the fallout shelter, we were quite surprised.
The entrance to the shelter was through a trapdoor in the floor of the cupboard under the stairs. It was concealed beneath a pile of junk that seemed to have been there forever. My wife found it first, as she was cleaning out the cupboard. "I didn't know we had a cellar," she said.
I put down the box I was carrying and went to see what she had found. There, set into the bare, concrete floor, was a metal hatch. "Nor did I," I replied.
Together we hauled the hatch open., swinging it up on rusty hinges. Beneath the hatch was a deep shaft with a ladder on one side, leading downwards.
"Looks dark," my wife said.
"I'll get the torches."
My wife was the first one down the shaft. I stayed at the top, shining my torch onto the rungs of the ladder as best I could. She went down about fifteen feet, then stopped. "Hey!"
"What?" I called back.
"There's a door down here. I'm going to take a look."
"Hang on!" I began. There was the sound of metal scraping against concrete, and my wife vanished from sight. I waited a minute. "Are you alright?"
Her breathless reply drifted up the shaft. "You have to see this."
I stuck my torch into my belt and climbed down the ladder to see what she had found. At the bottom of the shaft was a small, boxlike room with two thick, metal doors. Beyond it was ... "Wow!"
"Definitely 'wow'," my wife said.
Just inside the second door was a large, concrete-lined space, easily as big as any room in the house above. Utilitarian metal shelves had been bolted to the walls: each one filled with tins, bottles and boxes with faded labels. Old furniture - two bunk bed frames, a table and a handful of chairs - had been neatly positioned around the room. Another door promised access to more.
"What is this place?" I asked as I swung the beam of my torch around the room.
My wife picked up a couple of brittle-paged pamphlets from a counter top. She looked at them for a moment before holding them up for me to see. I could make out images of mushroom-shaped clouds and various logos. "I think it's an old shelter," she said.
"Great." I began to laugh. "More junk to get rid of."
The fallout shelter did have a lot of stuff in it. There was food and water, but this had long since passed its expiry date. There was some bedding and household supplies as well, but these were too old to be useful. What there was, was a goldmine of old books, board games and manuals - "They should be worth a bit to some collector," I remarked - and, best of all, a vintage AM radio. I opened up the back to check if it was still in working order. The bakelite casing was in good condition, and the wiring and valves seemed to be intact; but the batteries had split and were covered in white crystals.
My wife held up a greasy cardboard box. "I've got some spares here." She used a screwdriver to prise the old batteries from the radio, replacing them with a fresh set from the box. That done, she fiddled with the knobs on the front of the radio. The tuning dial lit up, and there was a loud burst of static from its speaker. "Looks like it still works," she said.
