Part 19 (1/2)

”All right. There certainly isn't any use for us here. I don't know why they let us come along. I'll work on that. Look for us next flight. Meanwhile good luck to you both.”

”Good luck to you, Freddy, and our love to Lynn-and our respects to Bocker, if he's there and n.o.body's slaughtered him yet.”

”Oh, Bocker's here. He's now got a theory that it won't go much over a hundred and twenty-five feet, and seems to think that's good news.”

”Well, considering he's Bocker, it might be a lot worse. ”Bye. We'll be looking forward to seeing you.”

We were discreet. We said no more than that we had heard the Yorks.h.i.+re place was already crowded, so we were staying. A couple who had decided to leave on the next flight changed their minds, too. We waited for the helicopter to bring Freddy back. The day after it was due we were still waiting. We got through on the link. They had no news except that it had left on schedule. I asked about Freddy and Lynn. n.o.body seemed to know where they were.

There never was any news of that helicopter. They said they hadn't another that they could send.

The cold summer drew into a colder autumn. A rumour reached us that the sea-tanks were appearing again for the first time since the waters had begun to rise. As the only people present who had had personal contact with them we a.s.sumed the status of experts though almost the only advice we could give was always to wear a sharp knife, and in such a position that it could be reached for a quick slash by either hand. But the sea-tanks must have found the hunting poor in the almost deserted streets of London, for presently we heard no more of them. From the radio, however, we learnt that it was not so in some other parts. There were reports soon of their reappearance in many places where not only the new sh.o.r.elines, but the collapse of organisation made it difficult to destroy them in effectively discouraging numbers.

Meanwhile, there was worse trouble. Overnight the combined EBC and BBC transmitters abandoned all pretence of calm confidence. When we looked at the message transmitted to us for radiation simultaneously with all other stations we knew that Freddy had been right. It was a call to all loyal citizens to support their legally elected Government against any attempts that might be made to overthrow it by force, and the way in which it was put left no doubt that such an, attempt was already being made. The thing was a sorry mixture of exhortation, threats, and pleas, which wound up with just the wrong note of confidence-the note that had sounded in Spain and then in France when the words must be said-though speaker and listener alike knew that the end was near. The best reader in the service could not have given it the ring of conviction.

The link could not, or would not, clarify the situation for us. Firing was going on, they said. Some armed bands were attempting to break into the Administration Area. The military had the situation in hand, and would clear up the trouble shortly. The broadcast was simply to discourage exaggerated rumours and restore confidence in the Government. We said that neither what they were telling us, nor the message itself inspired us personally with any confidence whatever, and we should like to know what was really going on. They went all official, curt, and cold.

Twenty-four hours later, in the middle of dictating for our radiation another expression of confidence, the link broke off, abruptly. It never worked again.

Until one gets used to it, the situation of being able to hear voices from all over the world, but none which tells what is happening in one's own country, is odd. We picked up enquiries about our silence from America, Canada, Australia, Kenya. We radiated at the full power of our transmitter what little we knew, and could later hear it being relayed by foreign stations. But we ourselves were far from understanding what had happened. Even if the H. Q.'s of both systems, in Yorks.h.i.+re, had been overrun, as it would appear, there should have been stations still on the air independently in Scotland and Northern Ireland at least, even if they were no better informed than ourselves. Yet, a week went by, and still there was no sound from them. The rest of the world appeared to be too busy keeping a mask on its own troubles to bother about us any more though one time we did hear a voice speaking with historical dispa.s.sion of ”l'ecroulement de l'Angleterre”. The word ecroulement was not very familiar to me, but it had a horribly final sound...

The winter closed in. One noticed how few people there were to be seen in the streets now, compared. with a year ago. Often it was possible to walk a mile without seeing anyone at all. How those who did remain were living we could not say. Presumably they all had caches of looted stores that supported them and their families; and obviously it was no matter for close enquiry. One noticed also how many of those one did see had taken to carrying weapons as a matter of course. We ourselves adopted the habit of carrying them-guns, not rifles-slung over our shoulders, though less with any expectation of needing them than to discourage the occasion for their need from arising. There was a kind of wary preparedness which was still some distance from instinctive hostility. Chance-met men still pa.s.sed on gossip and rumours, and sometimes hard news of a local kind. It was by such means that we learnt of a quite definitely hostile ring now in existence around London; how the surrounding districts had somehow formed themselves into miniature independent states and forbidden entry after driving out many who had come there as refugees; how those who did try to cross the border into one of these communities were fired upon without questions.

”It's going to be bad later on,” was the opinion of most of those I spoke to. ”Just now pretty well all those who are left still have a few cases of this and that stowed away, and the chief worry is stopping the other fellow from finding out where it is. But later on the worry is going to be the other way round; finding out where the chaps who do have some left are hiding it and that's going to be nasty.”

In the New Year the sense of things pressing in upon us grew stronger. The high-tide mark was now close to the seventy-five foot level. The weather was abominable, and icy cold. There seemed to be scarcely a night when there was not a gale blowing from the south-west. It became rarer than ever to see anyone in the streets, though when the wind did drop for a time the view from the roof showed a surprising number of chimneys smoking. Mostly it was wood smoke, furniture and fitments burning, one supposed; for the coal stores in power-stations and railway yards had all disappeared the previous winter.

From a purely practical point of view I doubt whether anyone in the country was more favoured or as well found as our group. The food originally supplied together with that acquired later made a store which should last sixteen people for some years. There was an immense reserve of diesel-oil, and petrol, too. Materially we were better off than we had been a year ago when there were more of us. But we had learnt, as had many before us, about the bread-alone factor, one needed more than adequate food. The sense of desolation began to weigh more heavily still when, at the end of February, the water lapped over our doorsteps for the first time, and the building was filled with the sound of it cascading into the bas.e.m.e.nts.

Some of the party grew more worried.

”It can't come very much higher, surely. A hundred feet is the limit, isn't it?” they were saying.

It wasn't much good being falsely rea.s.suring. We could do little more than to repeat what Bocker had said; that it was a guess. No one had known, within a wide limit, how much ice there was in the Antarctic. No one was quite sure how much of the northern areas that appeared to be solid land, tundra, was in fact simply a deposit on a foundation of ancient ice; we just had not known enough about it. The only consolation was that Bocker now seemed to think for some reason that it would not rise above one hundred and twenty-five feet which should leave our eyrie still intact. Nevertheless, it required fort.i.tude to find rea.s.surance in that thought as one lay in bed at night, listening to the echoing splash of the wavelets that the wind was driving along Oxford Street.

One bright morning in May, a sunny, though not a warm morning, I missed Phyllis.

Enquiries eventually led me on to the roof in search of hear. I found her in the southwest corner gazing towards the trees that dotted the lake which had been Hyde Park, and crying. I leaned on the parapet beside her, and put an arm around her. Presently she stopped crying. She dabbed her eyes and nose, and said: ”I haven't been able to get tough, after all. I don't think I can stand this much longer, Mike. Take me away, please.”

”Where is there to go?-if we could go,” I said.

”The cottage, Mike. It wouldn't be so bad there, in the country. There'd be things growing-not everywhere dying, like this. There isn't any hope here-we might as well jump over the wall here if there is to be no hope at all.”

I thought about it for some moments. ”But even if we could get there, we'd have to live,” I pointed out, ”we'd need food and fuel and things.”

”There's-” she began, and then hesitated and changed her mind. ”We could find enough to keep us going for a time until we could grow things. And there'd be fish, and plenty of wreckage for fuel. We could make out somehow. It'd be hard-but, Mike, I can't stay in this cemetery any longer-I can't!-Look at it, Mike! Look at it! We never did anything to deserve all this. Most of us weren't very good, but we weren't bad enough for this, surely. And not to have a chance! If it had only been something we could fight! But just to be drowned and starved and forced into destroying one another to live-and by things n.o.body has ever seen, living in the one place we can't get at them!

”Some of us are going to get through this stage, of course-the tough ones. But what are the things down there going to do then? Sometimes I dream of them lying down in those deep dark valleys, and sometimes they look like monstrous squids or huge slugs, other times as if they were great clouds of luminous cells hanging there in rocky chasms. I don't suppose that we'll ever know what they really look like, but whatever it is, there they are all the time, thinking and plotting what they can do to finish us right off so that everything will be theirs.

”I dream about that sea-bottom; the great wide plains down there where it is always, always raining teeth and scales and bits of bone and sh.e.l.ls and millions and millions of tiny plankton creatures, on and on for centuries. There are ranges of mountains rising out of the plains, and in some places huge precipices split by winding gullies, and the things down below send the sea-tanks in regiments across the plains, and the regiments break into strings which go into the gullies, and come winding up in search of us in long, long processions; out of the gullies into the shallow water, and then through the towns which have gone under the sea, still searching for us and hunting us.

”Sometimes, in spite of Bocker, I think perhaps it is the things themselves that are inside the sea-tanks, and if only we could capture one and examine it we should know how to fight them, at last. Several times I have dreamt that we have found one and managed to discover what makes it work, and n.o.body's believed us but Bocker, but what we have told him has given him an idea for a wonderful new weapon which had finished them all off.

”I know it all sounds very silly, but it's wonderful in the dream, and I wake up feeling as if we had saved the whole world from a nightmare-and then I hear the sound of the water slopping against the walls in the street, and I know it isn't finished; it's just going on and on and on...

”I can't stand it here any more, Mike. I shall go mad if I have to sit here doing nothing any longer while a great city dies by inches all round me. It'd be different in Cornwall, anywhere in the country. I'd rather have to work night and day to keep alive than just go on like this. I think I'd rather die trying to get away than face another winter like last.”

I had not realised it was as bad as that. It wasn't a thing to be argued about.

”All right, darling,” I said. ”We'll go.”

Everything we could hear warned us against attempting to get away by normal means. We were told of belts where everything had been razed to give clear fields of fire, and there were b.o.o.by-traps and alarms, as well as guards. Everything beyond those belts was said to be based upon a cold calculation of the number each autonomous district could support. The natives of the districts had banded together and turned out the refugees and the useless on to lower ground where they had to s.h.i.+ft for themselves. In each of the areas there was acute awareness that another mouth to feed would increase the shortage for all. Any stranger who did manage to sneak in could not hope to remain unnoticed for long, and his treatment was ruthless when he was discovered-survival demanded it. So it looked as though our own survival demanded that we should try some other way.

The chance by water, along inlets that must be constantly widening and reaching further, looked better. Our search for a speedboat had been disappointing. We had discovered nothing better than the fibregla.s.s dinghy. Into that I began to stow supplies that I hoped might at least serve to buy us safe transit.

We delayed a little in the hope that the weather would turn warmer, but by late June we gave up the hope, and set out up-river.

But for the luck of our finding that st.u.r.dy little motorboat, the Midge, I don't know what would have happened to us. I. rather think we should have tried upriver again, and quite likely got ourselves shot. The Midge, however, changed the whole outlook. The following day, we took her back to London. Navigation of the more deeply flooded streets was a strain. Only unreliable memories could tell us whether the lamp-standards ran in the middle of the street, or at the sides, and we went cautiously, in constant alarm lest we should hole the boat upon one of them. Shallower parts we could take faster. At Hyde Park Corner we hove-to a couple of hours, waiting for the tide, and then ran safely up into Oxford Street on the, flood.

An uneasy feeling that some of the others might wish to get away, too, and press to come with us now that we had more room, turned out to be baseless. Without exception they considered us crazy. Most of them contrived to take one of us aside at some time or another to point out the wilful improvidence of giving up warm, comfortable quarters to make a certainly cold and probably dangerous journey to certainly worse and probably intolerable conditions. They helped to fuel and store the Midge until she was inches lower in the water, but not one of them could have been bribed to set out with us.

Our progress down the river was cautious and slow, for we had no intention of letting the journey be more dangerous than was necessary. Our main recurrent problem was where to lay up for the night. We were sharply conscious of our probable fate as trespa.s.sers, and also of the fact that the Midge with her contents was tempting booty. Our usual anchorages were in the sheltered streets of some flooded town. Several times when it was blowing hard we lay up in such places for several days. Fresh water, which we had expected to be the main problem, turned out not to be difficult; one could almost always find some still in the tanks in the roof-s.p.a.ces of a partly submerged house. Overall, the trip which used to clock at 268.8 (or.9) by road took us slightly over a month to make.

Round the corner and into the Channel the white cliffs looked so normal from the water that the flooding was hard to believe-until we looked more closely at the gaps where the towns should have been. A little later, we were right out of the normal for we began to see our first icebergs.

We approached the end of the journey with caution. From what we had been able to observe of the coast as we came along there were often encampments of shacks on the higher ground. Where the land rose steeply there were often towns and villages where the higher houses were still occupied though the lower were submerged. What kind of conditions we might find at Penllyn in general and Rose Cottage in particular, we had no idea.

I took the Midge carefully into the Helford River, with shotguns lying to hand. Here and there a few people on the hillsides stopped to look down at us, but they neither shot, nor waved. It was only later that we found they had taken her to be one of the few local boats that still had the fuel to run.

We turned north from the main river. With the water now close on the hundred-foot level the multiplication of waterways was confusing. We lost our way half a dozen times before we rounded a corner on an entirely new inlet and found ourselves looking up a familiar steep hillside at the cottage above us.

People had been there, several lots of them, I should think, but though the disorder was considerable the damage was not great. It was evidently the consumables they had been after chiefly. The standbys had vanished from the larder to the last bottle of sauce and packet of pepper. The drum of oil, the candles, and the small store of coal were gone, too.

Phyllis gave a quick look over the debris, and disappeared down the cellar steps. She re-emerged in a moment and ran out to the arbour she had built in the garden. Through the window I saw her examining the floor of it carefully. Presently she came back.

”That's all right, thank goodness,” she said.

It did not seem a moment for great concern about arbours.

”What's all right?” I enquired.