The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

With the advent of full summer came the ‘Epoch of Recovery’, a wonderful period which lasted for well-nigh two years, until the autumn of 1948.

The sweeping power of it – the conquering energy of it – left even its leaders breathless and amazed. So pregnant were those years with the striving genius of man that even now, as I think back from the twilit wreckage of these final days, I feel a surge of pride that rides triumphant through my misery and weakness. My anger at the senseless destruction of that glorious Epoch has spent itself now. I seek only to live my last lonely days with the memory of what was great and fine, for that, I know, is the way that Pat and Robin would have expected me to face the end.

For two months the world lay stunned, but even with civilisation numbed beneath the cataclysm, people were groping back towards life in small communities – even in twos and threes, like Pat and Robin and me. Tiny sparks of life: twitching muscles in the prostrate body of humanity, determined, if need be, to rebuild the world with our own unaided hands.

But unbeknown to these struggling little communities, men in other places were gathering the threads of government, mobilising labour for work upon things wider in scope than mere self-preservation. Roads were cleared of wreckage, machinery repaired: communications re-established between town and town, and then, when radio sprang to life, between nation and nation.

It would need volumes to describe in detail that ‘Epoch of Recovery’. I can only reveal its progress as it came to Beadle in sudden, surprising ways.

There was an afternoon in late July when I was disturbed from my work in the garden by a shout from Pat. I can still conjure up that picture of her, waving her arms from the library window and calling out: ‘Come here – quick!’

For a moment I could not understand the weird glow that filled the library: it was as if the sun were suddenly, abruptly setting in the middle of the afternoon. And then I realised what had happened: the electric light was on!

It was shining from every room in the house, for on the morning after the cataclysm I had gone vainly from room to room, pressing down every switch, and failing to get light, had left them on. Two months and fourteen days, and here was light again! My house seemed to blink in wonderment, like a blind man to whom suddenly the miracle of sight has been restored.

‘Pity they didn’t come on when it was dark,’ said Pat. ‘What a thrill if all the lights had just popped up as we were groping into bed!’

And then the day when a motor-cyclist came bumping down the village street. Bearing in mind the patronising manner of our young airman friend I was careful not to be too effusive this time, but our visitor turned out to be a pleasant, freckled young man with a shock of red hair and a disarming grin.

‘Beadle, isn’t it?’ he said – and then consulting a small typewritten paper: ‘Four of you, is that right?’

‘Quite right,’ I said, with a sudden respect for the organisation. ‘Four of us and an excellent fowl named Broodie.’

‘Then one of these will be enough,’ he replied, drawing a folded paper from a haversack.

It was like a very roughly printed newspaper, headed: ‘Government Bulletin No. 1.’

The young man refused Pat’s offer of refreshment. ‘I’ve got a long round to make,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be back next week, I hope – you’ll have a bulletin regularly now until the ordinary newspapers get to work again.’

We read that priceless little document from beginning to end a dozen times, taking it in turns to read in silence, taking it in turns to read aloud.

It was upon rough, grey paper, in type so blurred that parts were almost indecipherable, but it was a feast for news-starved people like ourselves.

It began with a brief summary of events that led up to and followed the cataclysm. This we knew to some extent from what the young airman had told, but it gave much detail that was new to us. It dwelt very little upon the dreadful destruction and toll of life, for that was over and beyond all remedy. It concentrated entirely upon an inspiring call for reconstruction.

The British Government had established itself in Oxford, partly because Oxford stood well in the centre of England and partly because that stubborn old city had suffered less than the majority from the tornado and the flood. The massive structure of its colleges had stood up to the shock as placidly as they had withstood the assaults of time and criticism. As a Cambridge man I could not but deplore the Government’s choice, but Cambridge was no doubt severely flooded.

The ample buildings of Christ Church were now the Parliament House, and each Government Department had taken a College for its own use. The Exchequer was in Magdalen, the Home Office at Balliol and the Ministry of Transport at St John’s. Wisely they were not attempting to organise from this fountainhead downwards: orders had gone out for every town and community to form its own council to undertake urgent services of food and health and to clear their immediate localities to the best of their ability.

Each town was to provide one representative to a ‘County Parliament’ to sit in the principal County Towns and organise their scattered communities. Above this authority was a council of representatives from the Counties themselves to sit in Oxford in close touch with Parliament.

The survivors of the Parliament sitting at the time of the cataclysm were mainly engaged upon National Reconstruction: of railways, water supplies and affairs that went beyond the localised authority of the Counties themselves.

Money values existing at the time of the cataclysm were no longer legal currency because this would have led to the whole population wasting valuable time in a feverish hunt for cash amidst the ruins. A primitive system of barter and exchange of goods was organised pending the issue of a new currency by the Government – and examples were given for the guidance of organised communities: –

It was announced that radio programmes would begin once more upon the 1st September, and the bulletin even provided a column of domestic notes: ‘Reconstruction in the Home’. Oiled muslin, it stated, if nailed across broken windows, would provide light and protection from rain until such time as glass was available!

The keynote of the bulletin was ‘work! – work! – work!’ – and the whole country responded with excitement and joy.

One morning I was awakened by a steady clanging in the distance, and went down to discover a gang of men repairing the railway. Three days later a luggage train went through: a long, groaning train made up of every conceivable kind of truck. We shouted and waved from the hillside, and our greeting brought a grimy hand waving in reply from the engine cabin.

On another day a lorry came bouncing ponderously down the village street and we went to meet three severe-looking gentlemen in mackintoshes, with blue armlets marked ‘RM’. They were members of the ‘Reconstruction Ministry’ and had come to investigate the future of our village. We could offer them no information concerning the baffling disappearance of the people of Beadle and they could give me no promise as to the removal of the King Lear. After inspecting my house they informed me that no rebuilding of Beadle would be contemplated for the present at least. For purposes of organisation we were to consider ourselves citizens of Mulcaster. It was our first contact with Government officials and I was relieved when they departed, leaving us in peace.

Summer passed to autumn. The days were surprisingly, often distressingly hot, accompanied by heavy, tropical rains. Old Humphrey prophesied a bumper wheat crop and my own vegetables throve prodigiously in the steamy warmth that followed the torrential downpours of that strange summer.

Robin had made ingenious plans to guarantee fresh food supplies. With large quantities of wire netting he had constructed his own ‘rabbit farm’ which he stocked from the burrows in Widgeley Copse, and by damming the river behind the church he had created his own ‘fish reservoir’. Sources of fresh food were now close at hand in times of severe weather, and although we were getting rather sick of rabbit, we kept extremely fit and well.

But the little town of Mulcaster was the mirror through which we watched the steady stride of progress, for Mulcaster, in common with thousands of other towns throughout England and Europe, was hammering out its own destiny and forging its own primitive but effective scheme of organised life.

We soon established regular communication with the town. Robin had salvaged three old bicycles, and every Saturday we ‘rode to market’, taking with us a bundle of rabbits, a can of fish and any vegetables I could spare from the garden.

Although its roof had disappeared, Mulcaster Town Hall had been cleaned up and turned into an ‘Exchange Market’. We would hand over our farm produce to the ‘Reception Officer’ who gave us coloured vouchers in exchange. With these vouchers we could go around and purchase goods we needed from surrounding stalls. In place of our rabbits we would take back a slab of butter: our fish-can returned to Beadle full of milk and I usually set aside the vouchers gained by my vegetables for small domestic necessities, such as darning thread for Pat, floor polish, new curtain hooks, etc.

There was a fine spirit of comradeship in the town; a spirit that compared most favourably with the local pomposities and smugness of pre-cataclysm days. Its two hundred survivors were mostly in youth and early middle age, for unlike a war that destroys the best and strongest, the cataclysm had weaned away the weak and the infirm, leaving only the sturdy ones to survive the tornado and the privations that followed it. No man passed another without a friendly greeting: every man and woman was busy from morning till night, for each, beside his own personal occupation, gave three hours of his day to ‘The Council of Reconstruction’ for community work.

The destruction of the big combines and chain stores had brought individuality back to English life: the return of the craftsman and the master-man. It was a happy experience to walk down the main street – to hear the ring of the hammer and the hack of the wood-worker: to listen to sounds long silenced by the mass production of remote factories.

All through a scorching week of August we worked together in our wheat field. Humphrey and Robin scythed the corn while Pat and I stacked it into sheaves.

Humphrey threshed it himself in a primitive but effective manner and by autumn the apple shed was stacked with twelve good sacks of golden grain.

We kept three sacks for ourselves, hired a waggon and took the rest to Mulcaster. For our crop we received no less than nine red vouchers, the highest notes of currency, and as I locked the priceless little tickets into my bureau drawer I was able to say to Pat: ‘We are now bloated capitalists!’

I was able to turn part of our new wealth to excellent account. One morning in Mulcaster I was stirred by the sight of a dish of new-laid eggs in the Exchange Market: their price was prohibitive, but through exhaustive enquiry I traced the eggs to an old man who had by some means collected together enough poultry to run a small breeding farm.

I was so excited that I kept missing the pedals of my bicycle as I rode out to his farm, but I returned in triumph with a cockerel!

I had to pay the atrocious price of two red vouchers for it, but cockerels were naturally worth their weight in gold. It was a common-looking little bird, with mean little eyes and a conceited strut that betrayed its obscure descent. It was utterly unworthy of Broodie, and I felt ashamed to introduce it to my fastidious, blue-blooded old hen. Broodie looked him up and down with obvious surprise and distaste. She had never met a cockerel of this type before, and at first declined, very naturally, to make the slightest response to his advances. But after a night’s reflection she realised her duties towards the shattered fortunes of the poultry world. She submitted with patient but thinly disguised revulsion to her ordeal, and when at last she presented me with nine mongrel but healthy little chicks I was very pleased at the determination with which she prevented her vulgar little spouse from taking any part in their upbringing.

It was during one of my visits to Mulcaster that the mystery of the Beadle dugout was suddenly and unexpectedly revealed to me.

I had almost given up hope of solving the baffling problem of that solitary open door – the waterlogged dugout and the uncanny disappearance of the Vicar, Sapper Evans, Dr Hax and all the villagers.

In vain I had enquired of the people in Mulcaster and scanned the streets for a familiar Beadle face: in vain we had searched the downs for some clue to help us, and then one evening, as I was returning from Mulcaster Market to join Pat and Robin for our journey home, a little woman passed me with an armful of firewood.

Some of the faggots slipped from her grasp and fell into the road. I picked them up for her, placed them in her arms and found myself looking into the wizened face of a Beadle villager!

The old lady stared at me as if I were a ghost. It was Mrs Chaplin, wife of a labourer who had lived in a cottage upon the Widgeley road.

‘Mr Hopkins! – ‘owever did you get out?’

‘Out of what?’ I asked.

‘The dugout,’ she replied with a shudder.

‘I didn’t go to it,’ I explained. ‘I stayed at home’ – and then in trembling fragments I drew from her the tragic story.

The fatal evening had begun quite well in the Beadle dugout. Directly the doors had been closed, Charlie Hurst and his Trio had begun a programme of popular music and the Vicar had organised a small whist drive for those who desired to play. At eight o’clock there had been a light supper of coffee and sandwiches, and as far as Mrs Chaplin could say, they had neither felt nor heard the hurricane raging above them upon the hillside. Towards nine o’clock, as they were arranging their blankets for the night’s rest, they had felt ‘a sort of shudder’: several coffee-cups had fallen over: one or two children had cried and Charlie had called out: ‘That was the moon, that was!’

‘The dugout seemed to dip down and come up again,’ explained Mrs Chaplin, ‘but when nothing else happened, we begun spreading our blankets.’

And so the people of Beadle had prepared for rest – unaware of the fatal wound in the structure above them. For it seems that the earthquake had brought a deep fracture to the chalky hillside: a fracture that had distorted the concrete beddings of two of the doorways and forced open wide cracks in the chalk surrounding them.

Some of the people were already asleep, and Mrs Chaplin herself was dozing when urgent cries of warning came from the men upon watch. The villagers had scrambled from their blankets to the nightmare of great streams of muddy water gushing down the steps of the two fractured entrances. The tidal wave was upon them.

Fiercely – desperately the men had worked under Sapper Evans – struggling to block the crevices with blankets and canvas sheets. But relentlessly the chalk had crumbled: one by one the men had been swept from the stairways by the increasing torrent. The mud upon the dugout floor was around their ankles – around their knees – it crept up to their thighs.

Then Sapper Evans had shown a last heroic resource. The third entrance to the dugout remained secure. To have opened it in an endeavour at escape through that awful flood would have been suicide, but the upper section of the stairway would form an airlock against the rising water.

Into this airlock the Sapper had forced the women and children – forty of them, huddled upon the fifteen steps with one man – Mrs Chaplin’s husband – who understood the mechanism of the door.

Mrs Chaplin had only the vaguest recollection of the horrifying hour that followed, and I do not blame her. They had watched the water creep to the roof of the dugout: listened to the last sounds beneath them which mercifully their own cries helped to drown.

Within half an hour the atmosphere upon the steps was unbearable, and rather than face certain death by suffocation her husband had unbolted and thrown open the door. In a dream they had seen the pallid sky and the turgid flood receding.

For a while they had lain upon the slimy hillside, powerless to move and powerless to think. The village lay far beneath the tidal wave, but as dawn came they saw the ruined church tower slowly creep to view.

Her husband had tried in vain to open the jammed doors in the hope of finding someone still alive, then he led his little party of survivors away across the downs and came at last to the ruined town of Widgeley.

They had found shelter with the survivors of the town and settled there to live. Mrs Chaplin had come to stay with a friend in Mulcaster but she did not think that any would have the courage to return again to Beadle.

I never told Pat and Robin of what I had learnt. They had almost given up the puzzle of the dugout and I saw no purpose in oppressing them with the thought of that tragic tomb so near at hand.

They found me very silent on our journey home that night: but even in my sadness I found pride in the memory of the gallant men of Beadle.

Autumn turned to winter. At one time I had dreaded the season of darkness, but it passed happily enough in Beadle Valley. A little petrol was now available and Robin doctored up the old Ford car for our journeys to Mulcaster. There was now a picture house that produced each Wednesday night a scratched old film of pre-cataclysm days, and it was strange to see those pictures of an age that now seemed so dead and far away. Every Saturday we stayed on after Market for the weekly Dance and Concert.

For my own part I should have been happy enough at home, but I encouraged every opportunity of going out for the sake of Pat and Robin.

With the beginnings of my new poultry farm the cup of my own contentment was filled, but I felt a growing concern towards those two loyal young partners of mine.

It was not natural for a boy and girl with the spirits of Pat and Robin to live in monotony and solitude. In the early days, throughout the spring and summer, gratitude for being alive and the need to work for one’s very life swept all thought of other things aside, but as the dark evenings came – as life was gradually eased from its first primitive strivings, I knew that a longing must often have come to Pat and Robin for the life and companionship of young people of their own age. It was impossible to sit, night after night, and talk of our daily doings. Sometimes we would read aloud or play cards and I devised several amusing but rather childish games with dice and racehorses cut from paper in order to break the monotony. But often our conversation after dinner would languish into gulfs of silence, and at last, one evening, I summoned the resolution to voice the thoughts that were oppressing me.

Pat was at work upon some new curtains from material we had bought in Mulcaster that week, and Robin was curled upon the sofa with a book of adventure.

‘I’ve been wondering for a long time, Pat, if you ever feel that you would like to go away from here.’

I was looking into the fire as I spoke, but I felt those two young heads jerk up in surprise. I felt their keen eyes upon me and I continued with a leaden heart. I was sure that my words were going out to them as keys to freedom: that they would grasp them eagerly, and go…

‘Mulcaster is becoming quite a lively place now,’ I went on, ‘there’s no doubt that both of you could find valuable work to do – more interesting and varied, perhaps, than here.’

‘What are you getting at?’ came Robin’s curt voice. The boy had an overbearing abruptness at times that irritated me, but on this occasion the challenging tone gave my heart a bound of hope: it seemed almost as if he were defending the home – against me!

‘I’m getting at just this, Robin. The day after the cataclysm I invited you and Pat to share my home. But I distinctly said: “until things get straight”. There’s no question they are getting straight now.’

Robin put down his book and rose from his couch.

‘You mean that you want us to go?’ he said quietly.

‘I want you to feel absolutely free,’ I replied. ‘I know that life must be very dull for you here… at times. In Mulcaster you might take a leading part in recovery and in the end find a place in the world more worthy of…’

‘Do you want us to go?’ demanded Robin.

Pat looked up from her work. ‘Robin!…’ she began.

‘I think it would break my heart if you went,’ I said. ‘I simply want you to understand that you must not stay for my sake. That’s all.’

I realised that despite all the consideration I had given to the words I should use, I had spoken them clumsily and hurt Robin’s pride. I had suggested that the boy was not doing all that he should do in the work of recovery, when in fact he was doing magnificently…

But Pat, with her deeper understanding, realised what I was trying to say. She rose and came to me and laid her hand upon my shoulder.

‘It was good of you to say that, Uncle – to think of us like that. But Robin and I have talked it all over a good deal these last few weeks – we’ve known about it for a long time.’

‘Known about what?’ I asked in surprise.

Pat laughed. ‘Known that you were bothered about us: by the way you’ve bundled us into Mulcaster for those funny little dances: by the way you’ve worked up all kinds of crazy little games for these winter evenings. I knew exactly why you did it, and loved you for it! – and Robin has, too… although he’s too tough to say it!’

‘My dear Pat!…’ I began.

‘You’ve had your say!’ interrupted Pat, ‘and here’s our answer. It’s good to know that Mulcaster is getting along so well… good to know that we can go there when we feel like it – but it’s better still to be self-supporting: grand to be independent and to make our way by ourselves. If Robin and I were to go away from here, it would be like cutting a slice off both of us. It would hurt like blazes, because we love this house, and the work we are doing…’

I was almost overwhelmed by my relief. I could only press Pat’s hand as it rested upon my shoulder and say: ‘Thank you, Pat… that’s grand… that’s grand… we’ll have our last bottle of champagne for dinner!’

‘The first sensible thing you’ve said this evening!’ remarked Robin.

How gladly I would dwell for the rest of my story upon those happy days! – of the spring that came in a blaze of glory and that sunlit summer when progress towards recovery reached its zenith. In August 1947 it seemed as if we had cleared the last of the cataclysmic wreckage: the world was ready: upon the brink of an even greater epoch in which recovery would give place to creation. The Government published a magnificent ‘ten-year plan’ for the rebuilding of our cities, the laying out of public parks and the reconstruction of public services. A ‘ten-year plan’ in which a new and finer Britain would rise from the ruins of the old.

In Beadle our progress can best be recorded by the news that we actually went for a two days’ holiday!

The fashionable thing to do that summer was to take a ‘trip to the moon’. The Railways displayed great enterprise in this respect, for the eastern edge of the moon overlapped Cornwall to within three miles of Penzance. Immediately the railway was sufficiently repaired the authorities announced their ‘Weekend Excursions to the Moon’ that became remarkably popular that summer and autumn.

In this connection I am forced to confess to an error of judgement which occasioned me much heart burning. It concerned a financial transaction that I had carried out before the cataclysm, the details of which the reader may remember.

When first I received the secret information that the moon was likely to strike the earth I sold £2,000 of Debentures in the Southern Railway (which seemed of little further value), and purchased in place of them 4,000 shares in Wigglesworth & Smirkin, the well-known manufacturers of china crockery. It seemed to me, with every reason, that a collision with the moon would cause sufficient destruction of crockery to create a boom in the above-mentioned shares and greatly enhance their value.

As it happened my judgment was completely and disastrously at fault. Beyond question vast quantities of crockery were destroyed, but so also, unfortunately, was the firm of Wigglesworth & Smirkin, whose factory collapsed and was never heard of again. Not only were my crockery shares completely valueless, but owing to these railway trips to the moon I had the chagrin of seeing a boom in the Southern Railway Debentures which I had sold!

However, it is no good crying over spilt milk, and I was sportsman enough to patronise the railway by purchasing three weekend excursion tickets to the moon for Pat and Robin and me.

It usually happens that ‘stunt’ excursions of this type fall short of expectations and our ‘excursion to the moon’ was no exception to the rule.

We went off in high fettle to catch the train at Winchester. It was a long, tiring journey, often at snail’s pace over stretches of temporary line, and after spending a night in tents near the ruins of Penzance we were taken over miles of barren fields in a charabanc fitted with ‘caterpillar wheels’ to negotiate the hideously broken countryside.

When at last we arrived, the anticlimax was pitiful. We had been burning with such excitement throughout the journey that nothing, I suppose, could have risen to our inflated expectations. All the same we at least expected some awesome, majestic sight – some towering lunar mountains and giant craters.

But when at last the charabanc pulled up, and the guide said: ‘Here we are, ladies and gentlemen,’ I looked around me in bewilderment. Only after careful study of the barren countryside did I observe that it sloped gently away and steadily upwards towards the west. We were only, of course, upon the ‘fringe’ of the moon’s broken surface and all that we saw was what appeared to be the edge of an immense slag-heap of grey, broken slate stretching as far as we could see across the land and far into the distant sea like some gloomy, ghostly continent of primeval times.

Several members of our excursion openly expressed their disappointment. I think that the less imaginative expected to see an immense globe towering above them, with the familiar face of the moon upon it: one gentleman, in fact, went so far as to say that it was a swindle. ‘Have we come all this way to see that!’ he exclaimed.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the guide, ‘but nevertheless, this is the moon.’ And he poked his stick into the edge of the slaggy plateau where it spanned the road.

‘It’s terribly smashed up,’ put in an old lady.

‘Lucky for us it is,’ replied the guide. ‘If the moon hadn’t broken up when it hit us, we might have been broken up instead.’

Some of the members of the party expressed approval at this reasoning, and we followed the guide up a twisting, broken path until we came to a small tea shop labelled in large letters: ‘First House on the Moon’.

We bought some picture postcards and a small fragment of the moon upon which was painted a little effigy of the moon’s face as we had once known it. Around this effigy was written ‘What I was’ and upon the slaty substance was painted ‘What I am’. It was an interesting novelty which I determined to keep for Aunt Rose if ever I should see her again.

‘How horribly dreary,’ whispered Pat as we walked back to the charabanc.

I nodded in silent agreement, but to me there was far more than dreariness in that ominous expanse of grassless, treeless waste. There was something menacing and sinister in it that made me shudder. I wished that I had never seen it. I had led myself to believe that the moon was done with and harmless now that it had arrived and hit us, collapsed and settled down. I had grown to regard it as another Sahara, another Siberia that might in time become the haunt of animals, even, perhaps, of a few lonely human beings. But I went away from it with a strange, indefinable dread: a haunting conviction that the terrors of its arrival were trivial beside the horrors that it held in store for us.