Four Gated City (102 page)

At the end when I was standing on the pierhead looking back over the past six months I was thinking how very differently we should have done it. (Six months because of our knowledge that we should have four to six months warning of the event.) Our plan that when we knew definitely, from four to six months before, we should-simply stand up, announce and warn and take the consequences, was ill-prepared. Our mistake was, not to have expected the mass hysteria. I suppose it was because everybody had been so jittery and violent for so long that we couldn’t believe things would get even worse? We had not foreseen that the whole country would be rocking with rumours of impending disaster. Many people who had potentiality and who had never developed it (would probably even be angry or frightened if they knew they had it) were ‘picking up’ fragments of the future. And Britain was only part of it. There were as many rumours about the inundation of New York and New Jersey, the partial inundation of Virginia-surprisingly accurate. But the general effect was of a thousand voices crying Woe! ours among them and-when people are frightened, they are cruel and stupid. That’s all. I suppose, if you’re expecting a bad time when people are bound to be frightened, the most important thing is to guard against the panic and the cruelty.

We were too reasonable. We put advertisements in newspapers that would take them; made as it were casual warnings in the course of television appearances; and we called meetings. A meeting in the Caxton Hall coincided with one of the evenings when the streets were full of ‘dancers’. They were like the hordes afflicted with St Vitus’s dance of long ago. We sat waiting for people to come into the hall. Then half a dozen people reeling in, giggling, said they knew they were doomed by they didn’t care, and reeled out again. They were middle-aged people: drunk women, drunk men. Or perhaps they weren’t
drunk: it was hard to see when people were. But that was the way things were happening at the end. It was as if people were damned. As if they didn’t care what happened. At any rate, on that last morning before our party was picked up off the beach we understood that nearly everyone that came had personal contact with one of us: they had responded because of a personal trust or liking. Was that true for your party as well. I wonder? Of course a lot did come at the last moment because we had left leaflets about with addresses. And some came up and said things like: I’ve come because I felt this was the right place. And people brought children that they had rounded up from where they were wandering frightened on the streets. A black man came up to me with his ten-year-old son and said Look after him. He went back, to try and rescue more people. I don’t know what happened to him. And of course a lot of people had left before the disaster because we had been saying: if events take place which make you think our forecast of a disaster about such and such a date is true, then go as fast as you can.

Would you believe that for some days our group were not sure what form the accident had taken?

We were in the north-east helping our people to move west with as many as would go with them. The Government denied the rumours about the gas leaks. People were saying that gas from the North Sea supplies were escaping due to vandalism and lying over a large area of north-east England, held there by a ceiling of warm air. Others said that radioactive missiles carried by the Russian submarine which had been missing for some weeks had sunk, releasing its poisons, in the North Sea. We still don’t know if there was anything in this! But when we left the beaches were piled with stinking fish, the birds were dropping dead from the sky, and for miles inland, there was a creeping death that spread from the sea’s edge. The authorities were issuing statements, then withdrawing them. The Russians did the same. I suppose we can conclude that nobody knew the truth at that time? Anyway, that part of Britain was sealed off first, and no one could go in or out except the decontamination squads. And by that time we were already at our embarkation points on the coasts. The announcement then came, and was contradicted, that a wing of the research station at Porton had caught fire, and that in the confusion, some sort of nerve gas had been released and was affecting everyone. We should be calm, report to the nearest hospital. For all I know this might have been true, and not another of those rumours that swept through the country like fire or a storm. On the same morning that there was a rumour that an accident had occurred at Aldermaston, and that half the country was already doomed, it coincided with an announcement on radio that a Chinese aeroplane had crashed in Oxfordshire. A pilot ‘choosing freedom’ had got into a warplane full of particularly lethal nuclear devices destined for delivery to the guerrilla armies in Brazil.
His crash-landing did for Britain. This announcement was not made by a representative of the Government. All officialdom had descended to the underground war-proof shelters.

Some of them are there still-so I really believe, Francis. I know it sounds absurd. While I know (have seen) that at regular intervals the squads visit Britain to see if it is yet fit for the work of rehabilitation and restoration, I know that there is no map or plan of all the underground shelters that exist in a thick net all over Britain. The whereabouts of some are known, but others not. This is the price that is being paid for the abnormal secrecy, the paranoic envy, among the different branches of the armed services who would not trust each other with such information. It is conceivable that more than fifteen years after the event survivors still live like moles in their concrete tunnels, not daring to come up. I think this is so. I’ve seen a lot of ‘pictures’. But perhaps these are old ones, not recent, I don’t know.

At the end, the announcement of what had happened was made for the most part over private radio stations, set up for this purpose. Those people who were not dead or dying or expecting to die were told to make their way to the western coasts and wait there. For no aircraft would dare to land inside infected Britain.

On our particular station at the coast, we had gathered every kind of scientific gadget and medicine, with people trained to use them. We had money and barterable objects of all sorts. We also had concentrated foodstuffs and quantities of warm clothing and blankets and furs. For in this last and most ‘sophisticated’ of wars it remained more than ever true that the first casualty in time of war is warmth.

We stood with these things stacked up around us and watched waves of aircraft coming in from every part of the sky. They landed where they could, took off loads of people to points in Canada, Newfoundland, the West Indies, and came back again. Ships converged towards us from the horizons. It seemed as if all the world was at its skilled and brave and resourceful rescue work after yet another foreseeable and preventable horror.

There was no particular reason why our party left at the moment it did. I was reminded, as we stood there with our babies and our bundles, of a story told me about the Second World War. A man was on the ‘unsinkable’ battleship
Repulse
when it was sunk by Japanese warplanes within a few minutes. He was an officer. He stood at the foot of the stairway which was already perpendicular from the slant of the ship. Men went past and up, very fast, but disciplined, knowing the ship had only a few minutes to live and that those at the end of the queues waiting to go up the stairs would die. My friend stood there watching. A fellow officer went past him and said: ‘Aren’t you coming? ’ This moved him into joining the stream of men. It had been some sort of sense of honour, or even good manners that had kept him standing there letting others pass while every second meant life or death.

For us it was not a question of seconds, or minutes, or hours, or even days. We knew that with a strong wind blowing from the coast eastwards, we would be safe for a time.

We waited in a body for some hours, surrounded by weeping, beseeching people; and by people who were sober and sensible; and by people dying because they had been too late in leaving; and by children who had become separated from their parents, and were alone.

Our party moved together down on to a small boat of the kind that was used to take people on pleasure trips around a coast. There were about a hundred of us, with the children, and a very great deal of baggage. At the end we hastily discarded the baggage which had the instruments and medicines in it: we would soon be across the Atlantic and in safe hands, and would not need these things.

The sea was calm enough. When we were out of sight of land the wind changed and the seas rose and we were in a bad storm. We believed that when the storm was over we would be picked up by one of the big vessels that were everywhere in that part of the Atlantic. But the boat was not designed for more than travelling from port to port in sheltered waters. It did very well for a day, then the engines went. We were driven northwards by the storm for nearly a week. We did not think the boat would survive, the seas were so high. Several people died: from cold, from the insane rolling and pitching, and from seasickness. We were crashed on to the coast of this island early one morning in the hissing whistling dark of a storm. The boat was held by rocks at an angle which had us huddled together like maggots in the corner of a matchbox. When it was light we saw it was low tide and that the sands began at the boat’s prow. More people had died. We rolled the bodies down off the slanting deck into the sea: later they were washed up and we had to bury them. We staggered ashore on a chilly morning with the sun hidden behind a veil of angry reddish cloud.

There were seventy-three of us left. We were on an island which had been inhabited not long before. A dozen or so stone cottages remained, in quite good repair. There were sheep on the island, and some cattle. Both were very wild. We spent the first day getting our things off the boat when the tides made that possible. We thought the boat would break up, but it did not. It was jammed tight in the rocks. The island is about fifty miles long by twelve. We think it is off the west coast of Ireland. We do not know its name.

First, the problems of physical survival.

Warmth has remained the worst. We had good warm clothes and blankets-fifteen years ago. We have husbanded our sheep, and have made good sheepskin clothes; but fuel is always short. The island is covered by a low scrubby vegetation which makes poor fuel. We use dried seaweed and driftwood. But we burn fires for warmth only in the worst of winter cold and as a result we are hardy. Some of the old people died of cold in the first winters.

Or perhaps it was from the radiation. We lost another thirty people from undiagnosed diseases in the first three years. One of them was our doctor. They were all to do with bleeding-bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes, anus, vagina, ears. Or skin became as if leprous and flesh fell away. Or people got dreadful headaches like migraine, but they didn’t go away like migraine. So they couldn’t stand it and killed themselves. From the start the people who got ill went away from the healthy to the other end of the island where they built huts of stone and lived out their time together.

A few went mad. But our experience did not make it easy for us to say that anyone was mad. We had to tie up one woman who tried to kill others. We tied her with ropes. Then she became sane and we released her. For the years till she died we had to tie her like an animal for weeks at a time and feed her like a baby. When she felt it coming on she would come and ask to be tied. We do not know what this disease is. Lynda would know, or someone like her with experience of mental hospitals.

Food has not been a problem. We luckily had seeds with us. One of us brought seeds ‘just in case’. They were the best thing we had, except for the warm clothes. We kill and eat the sheep also the cattle, but sparingly. We have milk for the children. We catch fish. We have tamed and bred a variety of duck.

We have built many more stone houses, in three separate places. We use clay mixed with some sand and crushed gulls’ eggs for mortar.

We have sometimes joked that a tourist of twenty years ago looking for the unspoiled life might spend days with us before noticing that perhaps there was something odd about us after all! We have all the necessities. But how long before the bad time was it possible for there to be a community without a dog. a cat, a donkey; without goats, horses, mules; without a canary in a cage, without tobacco, or sweets or sugar or tea or coffee?

Perhaps our hypothetical visitor in love with the unspoiled life might swallow all this, but what would he make of there being no radio, no motor car, no bicycle, no motor bike, no typewriter. I suppose there must have been communities without electricity for lighting, stoves and refrigerators? But none I am sure without oil. We use candles made from sheep’s fat for lighting, and soap made of fat and sand.

We have one lack which we regard as unlucky: after all, there might very well have been bees, but we have never found any. Some of us older ones crave for sweetness; the younger ones know ‘sweet’ from the taste of parsnips and beetroot, a taste among many. They suck bits of salt-encrusted rock. We explain to them the food on a modern table, machines, mass-produced clothes, traffic, skyscrapers and methods of war. We talk about libraries, recite poems and tell them stories from the countries of the world, describe orchestras, operas, ballet, a formal ball with dancing. They listen, gravely, taking it all in, knowing one
day they will have to fit themselves to such things. Meanwhile they wear sheepskins or garments made out of old blankets; they have oxhide hand-cobbled shoes; their food is what stone-age men ate. And it is cooked on open hearths in aluminium cooking pots taken from the boat, prepared with the implements of a modern kitchen.

It is these children I want to tell you about.

When we arrived we had half a dozen babies, infants, two of them without parents, a dozen growing children, half parentless, some young adults who soon coupled off, as well as the middle-aged or old. Even the babies we came with are nearly grown-up: they are pairing off. They are seventeen, eighteen, and they take the bad taste out of one’s mouth that is still there from the grown-up babies of our dead civilization. Or perhaps these children would be better off if they stayed here? Considering the small total number of people we landed with, we have given birth to a lot of children. And none of them have died. They are very healthy. Or we think they are. We
don’t know
. Remember that we have no way of interpreting some of our facts. We have no geiger counters, no methods at all of measuring fall-out or possible pollution of sea and land. We haven’t got so much as a rain gauge or a thermometer or a barometer; we only know that some insects like wet, others dry, clouds have certain habits, and birds migrate at certain seasons. Just as we see that among insects and birds and fish there are an awful lot of abnormalities. That is, it’s how we older ones see it. The young ones look at it differently: that kind of bird is sometimes like this and sometimes like that. When a new baby is born we stand and wait for the first glimpse of it, and when it comes in the shape of the old print it is as if we had hauled something alive and safe out of a holocaust. We have had no surprises so far. That is no physical shocks: limbs, eyes, noses, have been in the right place.