FOR many days after that first night we worked on, like all London, waiting for the next blow. It was not until news from the rest of England began to assemble that we realized that we had perhaps seen the end of active warfare. It took us even longer, a week perhaps, to discern the meaning of the news that was coming in; and even longer still to see that there was nothing we could do about it. We lived an improvised, all-hands-on-deck, air-raid shelter, darts and sandwiches sort of life that, as the days passed without further attack, seemed more and more senseless. Fresh provisions, of course, were soon in short supply; but it was surprising how little the government measures of food control carried real urgency to us who lived such a picnicking troglodytic life. The destruction of the ports from Southampton to Glasgow seemed far away; and for some time the Government ban on the use of roads and railways out of London except by special permit – a ban enforced by armed police – disguised from most Londoners the fact that few of these roads or railways still existed. Many, of course, had made this discovery, but they were not able, even had they wanted to, to return to tell us.
It is often said now that the riots that broke out in one district of London after another were fomented by members of the Uni-European Movement. I doubt this myself: if there was one thing in which the Government showed themselves absolute it was in the rounding up of suspected dissidents although their action was far too late. I discovered this when, a few days after the outbreak of war, I tried to contact old Mrs Englander. The procedure was a lengthy one, not because the bureaucrats concerned were inhumane. Indeed, although I was not related to the interned woman, had never even spoken to her, I was eventually able to send her extra clothing, books, and a small food parcel. No, the delay arose because of the vast number of people interned. Of the name of Englander alone there were some hundreds. The Government, in fact, uncertain of the extent of the underground movements, had on the basis of the census register made wholesale arrests, including, for example, all persons with European sounding names. From my observation, the rioting began solely as a result of even more stringent food rationing, insufficiently explained because the authorities did not wish to reveal the extent of the damage to our roads, our ports, and our shipping. Public disorder finally came to a head, when, with the idea of transferring popular anger from themselves, the Government released the text of the Melbourne Declaration. I remember perfectly well the arguments and discussions both at the Zoo and at my local defence post about the culpability of Australia, New Zealand, and our African allies. Nobody among us cared much to blame them for refusing to run the superior enemy atomic submarine blockade. We all found more reason to revile a Government that had failed to feed us.
For ourselves, however, I must say that it was a fortnight before we knew any serious want of food; a little longer than that before I saw demonstrations parading in the streets; and nearly three weeks before I witnessed police action against rioters in Camden Town. This was largely, perhaps, because I seldom stirred from the area around the Zoo. Martha, at first, did nursing work that kept her away from home. Then when there was no more nursing to be done, she worked at a Government food provision centre nearer our home. Somehow we managed to live our grey, somnambulistic lives apart. Yet all half designed measure smeet their end. One night I returned to the improvised inside cellar-bedroom which we still occupied to find that at last we had failed to be on opposite shifts. Martha was reading, sitting up, in an old sleeping-bag that survived from the days of my youthful naturalist expeditions. We were both intensely nervous. I strayed upstairs and fussed around in the bathroom far longer than I needed, hoping that she would pretend to be asleep when I returned.
When I came down she said in a hard, bright voice, ‘I really wonder, you know, whether there’s any point in this sleeping down here. Obviously nothing is going to happen and if it did, our being here wouldn’t help.’
‘The greater proportion of the people who were killed in London that night were killed by blast.’
‘Yes, but it’s rather absurd when we’re about outside all day. I think all these precautions are imposed on us by leftovers from the last war who are so excited to get back to the old days. You should hear them at the Food Centre, old women gossiping about the last war. They feel young again, I suppose. I think I shall sleep upstairs tomorrow.’
‘I should feel much happier if I knew you were down here.’
Martha looked up at me, but she changed the subject.
‘You saw Hester’s letter and the little notes from the children that I left in the hall?’
‘Yes, I’d just written to Reggie. But now I’ve heard about his sore throat, I’ll write again.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s anything. Hester’s very good about that sort of thing. She never pretends. But I’m trying desperately to get a phone call through …’
‘So am I.’
‘Oh! … Well, I went to the American Embassy. There’s just a chance they can do it for me.’
‘Martha, why don’t you ask them to get you an air passage back? It can be done. I’ve found that out.’
‘Thank you! I suppose that means you don’t want me here.’
‘It means, as you very well know, that I can’t bear you to be in this danger.’
She had lain her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. When she said nothing, I went on.
‘And also I don’t know that we have any right to risk leaving the children orphans.’
She was tense now, her eyes open but hard.
‘You can’t suppose that I haven’t thought of that. Or is that a nice way of getting rid of me?’
‘You speak as though only you cared for the children.’
‘I speak because I want you to say you care for me.’
She began to sob, a sobbing that swelled and shook her whole body convulsively like a terrible fit of hiccoughs. I held her tightly, running my fingers across her shoulder blades down her spine, trying to relax her tension.
‘Do you think I’ve bothered about what that bitch said,’ I asked.
‘But you thought it was true.’
‘No. I didn’t think anything about it. Jane just wanted to hurt that was all. Even then she couldn’t pretend that anything had really been wrong …’
‘But you thought it had. You thought I’d let Bobby seduce me, didn’t you? Otherwise why have you kept away from me like this?’
‘Circumstances have … Martha, what’s the sense of dragging it all up? I Was jealous when you saw such a lot of him in California, yes. I was lonely and unhappy. And I suppose when Jane spoke like that the other day, it brought it all up in me again.’
‘But, for Jesus’ sake, Simon, why couldn’t you come and talk to me about it?’
‘Because jealousy’s a squalid emotion of which I’m ashamed. It was disgusting enough hating Falcon irrationally after he came back. But to suddenly find myself hating you!’
‘Well, if there had been any truth to it, you’d have a right to hate me as much as Bobby. More really.’
‘If it had happened!’
‘Well, Simon, it almost did. At San Francisco. No, that’s not true. I couldn’t really with anyone but you. But perhaps it ought to have done. As Jane said, I led him on. Out of muddled feelings I didn’t know I had. But I ought to have done.’
She was crying almost soundlessly now. I bent over her and ran my fingers along the line of her cheekbone. She kissed me excitedly, then she lay back.
‘Come in with me, Simon,’ she said.
It was a very tight fit in the sleeping-bag, and with the exhaustion of overwork and undernourishment, our love making was hungry rather than satisfactory. Perhaps happily I burst the rotted seam of the canvas, got my leg caught, then, trying to extricate it, I rolled the bag entirely over. We were released by farce, but when our laughter had died away, Martha said,
‘He seemed so desperate. And you don’t know him. You never will now. But he’s far more than a pathetic buffoon. Anyone who’s been something, I suppose, keeps some of it. And he certainly has been someone. Not just a figure, Simon, or a charmer or any of that, but somebody who’d realize a lot of what he’d always wanted. And he was desperate. And to have me seemed so important to him. I see now it was all part of the craziness. Do you know he thought you’d made fun of his being impotent? Something to do with what you said about that Filson boy’s injuries. He couldn’t forgive you. And it wasn’t for me to deal with that. But, after I’d persuaded him to take an interest again – that old Amazon trip – I thought I couldn’t let him drift back. I let him take me around, I made a fuss of him. I thought I could stop him going too far. But not before he’d humiliated himself.’
‘Well, darling, you’re not a psychiatrist. He was mentally sick.’
Martha giggled. ‘Sometimes you seem like the comic American, not me.’
‘All right, he was off his chump.’
‘Yes. I know. But he was sexually starved too.’
I kissed her and said, ‘We’ve talked about it enough.’
I tucked her into the sleeping bag and went to my own mattress against the other wall. Then a fear that she had gone to sleep seized me.
I whispered, ‘Martha.’ She did not answer. Then I said loudly and casually, ‘In any case he was too old to be your lover.’
She said, ‘Stop tormenting yourself, Simon. I couldn’t with anyone. I don’t think I care that much about sex with anyone but you.’
I sighed and relaxed.
She said, ‘Anyway your old formula – no sex without real affection – wouldn’t have kept me on the straight and narrow path. I truly am very fond of Bobby. I must tell you I went today to the hospital to ask about him. He’s been allowed to go home. Oh don’t worry. I shan’t go near him again. I’ve done enough harm. But I am very fond of him, and I was very, very sorry for him.’
‘But you can’t mix up being sorry with sexual love.’
‘Can’t I, darling? I’ve told you I’m a very confused person. Awfully maternal anyway. I think I’m always very ready to be protecting someone I love. And when I feel protecting I want him to take me to bed if it gives him pleasure. I think that’s the basis of all sex for me really. Oh, I don’t know.’
She sighed and seemed almost immediately to go off to sleep. As for me, it was as though she had suddenly hit me over the head with a heavy stick. I lay confused and awake for hours.
*
Happily my life at the Zoo was still a very busy one. It was not the back-breaking navvy work of those first few days after the raid. Then, in the tension born of hourly expectation of long agony or annihilation, all personal differences seemed to be effaced, all identity almost to be lost in united toil. The closer the threat of general devastation, the harder we worked to preserve. Against a background of ruins and stench we banded together to save the collections – and for a week at least did not quarrel over priorities of what should be saved. Beard, with the support of Pattie Henderson’s research boys, advanced the priorities of current research; Matthew preferred birds, and, within the bird kingdom, some mysterious parrot-crowned hierarchy of his own; it was left to me to put forward the twin claims of rarity and cost. Somehow in those first days of revolutionary fraternity, we made a blend of these claims that disguised all factions. Apart from the fear of further enemy attack, we worked already under a hot May sunshine that showed the ruins in all their grisly details and rapidly turned the carrion to a stench of putrefaction. Each day we could see the condors and vultures wheeling high above us in the clear blue sky.
Sanderson said, ‘It’s extraordinary, isn’t it really? Like the prisoners who were released from the Bastille, they know no other home.’
I pointed out that they had come after food not home.
‘One would like to say that Nature provides,’ he said.
But even he could not say it. We were not on the Veld and we had to do our own scavenging. So for the first three days we buried our dead, or such as remained of them. More difficult proved the disposal of the huge, swollen hippopotamus carcasses that surfaced in the canal; and the vultures did aid us in this slow task before we had done. At last, the twisting, hovering, wheeling circles in the sky were seen no more; or only at a great distance. Sanderson remarked on this and hoped that they were getting fed. It was the only time when I saw Beard relax during those days.
He smiled and said, ‘Oh, I’m sure people are feeding them, Sanderson.’
So, shirt-sleeved and short-sleeved, we worked. Huge and red-faced Pattie Henderson, in linen trousers and an odd straw sun-bonnet like a donkey’s, worked side by side with Matthew, who in hot weather, trailed clouds of expensive scent behind him. Strawson dug and I buried. Newton netted and Nutting caged. Even the wives came to help – Mrs Barley, cockney in every crisis, got even Mrs Purrett laughing at her near-the-knuckle ‘cracks’. How happy everybody was, we are told, and I suppose they were – some English love improvisation and ‘do it yourself’. But I belong to the other English, who don’t like the right pigeon-hole used for the wrong papers, or the wrong label on the right box. I chafed under all this glorious dissolution, chafed for law and order. Or perhaps it was that I had invented the old order, and now Beard – as Sanderson had said, ‘the man of the hour’ – was imposing his new order on the chaos.
‘Get things away to Woburn’ was his command – and, given an orderly conventional war, he would have been right. But if annihilation did not come neither was the last war reborn. For a few days lorries managed to get through by roundabout routes to Bedfordshire. Then two returned because roads were impassable; then one because police had refused to allow it beyond Hendon. Then a lorry driver trying to get through at night undetected overturned in a sudden crater near Welwyn Garden City; by some mischance two leopards escaped and added panic to the neighbourhood. We received military orders that no more live beasts were to be evacuated. At first Beard seemed unwilling even to notice this setback.
‘We must find someone to override this,’ he said, ‘we can’t give up in midstream. You know the various Ministry chaps, Carter.’
It was true – I did and he didn’t; I also knew that nothing could or indeed should be done. The Committee of the Society or such of them as were available in London had confirmed Beard as Acting Director; but they were too busy to do more than urge him ‘to do his best’. With some difficulty he got through to Lord Oresby, who, on Godmanchester’s death, had become Acting President; but – sign of the times! – that kindly patriotic old liberal Tory country gentleman strongly advised a quietist policy.
‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘quite frankly nobody knows what on earth’s happening and the situation’s so very fluid that I think it’s most unwise for the Zoo to get mixed up in any sort of action. Between ourselves I’ll tell you that, in my opinion, this is the time when the true patriot retires to his country seat and awaits events; but unfortunately there’s not the faintest chance of my getting through to Wiltshire. But certainly my advice to you is to do nothing. And as far as day to day administration goes, rely on Carter.’
I think Beard would have contested even this if he could have rallied the support of the staff around him; but the same spirit of wait and see that had infected Oresby and most people in high places outside the immediate Government circle had now begun to spread to the population at large, and the Zoo staff was no exception. The glorious comradeship of the barricades was waning, a new feeling of sceptical boredom on which the Europeans were soon so cleverly to trade by withdrawing all their troops from England, was now in the air. Sanderson, for example, with his insect kingdom all but vanished, felt the pull of other ties.
‘I think it’s the turn of the humans now, don’t you,’ he said. The proposal he based on this was less reasonable. ‘I wish you’d open to the public again, Beard. There’s a hundred poor souls who’d find a walk in the Gardens something to take their minds off things.’
When this was refused, he began to appear less and less among us. I learned later that he’d collected a number of his protégés including Paper Bag Peter, and assembled them at his rambling old Wimbledon home. There, under protest from Mrs B. and Miss D. he managed somehow to keep alive a party of fifteen on the dwindling rations of three. Young Newton was summoned to military medical work, but Pattie Henderson and Nutting retired once more to their research. I was soon hearing new complaints from Pattie.
‘I say,’ she said, ‘this chap Beard seems to be off his chump. He’s evacuated all the wallabies. He must know that Nutting’s working on Marsupials. But to crown all he has the cheek to tell me that the tachyglossus was killed in some lorry smashup. I don’t know what Newton’s going to think. I promised to look after his interests while he’s away on this army business and now this fool’s let the only living monotreme in the country get killed. Can’t you suppress him or something?’
Beard was not checked by his staff’s lack of enthusiasm any more than he was deterred by physical impossibilities or military vetoes; but for some days he looked anxious. I thought, indeed, that the responsibility of his family might be weighing on him – anyone with a family in London at that time was likely to be worried, but a family of lunatics, cardiacs, spastics and hysterics might reasonably be too much for any man. When I asked him how his family had fared, he answered,
‘Thank you, Carter. People in that condition don’t change, you know.’
‘I meant rather what arrangements have you been able to make for them at this time?’
‘Arrangements? They’re on these borough evacuation lists, if that means anything. I suppose they’ll have the same chances as anyone else.’
A few days later I learned what had been the real source of his anxious frown.
‘I don’t like doing it, Carter,’ he said, ‘but I think we may have to modify our plans. I’ve decided that we can’t hope to evacuate live animals as things are except for a few essential breeding specimens and they’ve mostly reached Woburn. I don’t know how much it matters really. The basic concern in my case is with the anatomical specimens, especially since South Kensington lost everything in that raid. I’ve secured the co-operation of a small refrigeration plant near Dunmow. I can work on them at leisure there for future preservation. It’s too small to interest anyone militarily and it generates it’s own electricity supply – that part of Essex appears to have been so devastated that it is unlikely to be brought into this war again. There are ways and means of getting there by side roads, I suspect.’
‘Don’t you think that we’ve gone beyond the point of evacuation, Beard?’
He said, ‘Oh, Lor’!’ and vanished.
I knew this well enough now to wait for his return. Sure enough he came back an hour later, and said,
‘It’s bad enough, Carter, you know, to have to alter my schemes without your backing out in this way. Of course, I’m well aware that things may get worse so we must be very selective in what we send.’
Thus began a massacre of the animals by selection. It occasioned a breach between our acting Director and his closest ally, Matthew. There were some patriots, of course, who even at that stage of the war refused even to consider defeat – Matthew and Diana Price were among them.
As Matthew said, when I asked him after Diana, ‘My dear Simon, she’s happy doing all the things that women must in war-time.’
For himself, he confessed, he would have liked to rejoin his regiment, ‘only some ghastly man abolished it years ago’. Meanwhile Beard was his C.O. and I was soon to learn what that meant for Matthew. One morning I was imitating Beard’s curious capacity to dictate absolutely in a hesitant and tentative way.
‘Er, look, Carter,’ I was saying, ‘this is … er … something I want done. I mean it’s … er … got to be given an absolute priority.’ It could be a trial and a bore, I said.
Matthew snubbed me sharply, ‘It’s hardly a time to criticize the Director,’ he said. ‘In any case it’s not a question of putting him up for one’s club, is it? Though, of course,’ he added, egged on by loyalty, ‘I should be delighted to do that if he asked me.’
Their admiration for each other’s single-minded industry in the face of the enemy was mutual.
Beard said, ‘It’s rather a pity Price has that foppish manner. He’s done so very well during these weeks. We shall have to let the Committee hear about that when the time comes.’
Matthew, in his regard for his new chief, even showed him the little inner sanctum of the Parrot House, a favour reserved only for his intimates. In this room he kept three or four parrots bought in the Docks whose wide vocabulary of obscenities was a source of constant delight to him. Even this failed to alienate Beard.
‘Price showed me what he calls his “special parrots” last night,’ he told me. ‘I’m afraid I’m not a good enough ornithologist to grasp what he thought important about them.’
Matthew, indeed, even postponed the evacuation of a large number of parrots, cockatoos, and macaws because Beard’s list did not give them priority.
‘Once you’ve been in the army, you see, you learn to take orders,’ he told me.
Yet it was over these parrots left behind at the Zoo that the split between them now came.
‘You might give me a list of the birds you want sent into cold storage, Price, will you? Then we can have them killed straight away.’
Matthew gulped. ‘I don’t think I quite understand what you said.’
Beard repeated his statement. Matthew swayed and went out of the room. I could see that for him Beard was now some Captain Bligh or Commodus against whom even the most loyal praetorian officer or first mate might be driven to mutiny. The next day he came into the office.
‘About what you said, Director, there’s no need for any further evacuation of my collections,’ he said.
Beard was surprised, but he had other things to think of. A Ministry memorandum had arrived ordering us to hold ourselves in readiness to slaughter all the animals and to await the visit of an inspector of food who would decide what was suitable for human consumption.
Beard brought the order into my room. He read it out loud.
‘I don’t think we need pay any attention to it, do you?’ he said.
As Rackham was in my office collecting the weekly pay cheques, I said only, ‘You needn’t wait, Rackham.’
But Beard went straight on, ‘As a matter of fact, I think I told you, I always get my evening snack at the Lyons’ at Earls Court. A chap there, who seemed to know, told me that this Government’s rather insecure now.’
I waited until Rackham had gone, then I told Beard that, although he was probably the last person to hear this whisper, he was also probably the first to shout it out loud.
‘It’s very unwise, you know, to say that sort of thing publicly in a beleaguered city when a war is going rather badly.’
All the same I suddenly warmed to him for his naïveté.
‘Oh, I’m not at all political, Carter,’ he answered, ‘I don’t think as a matter of fact that it’s ever been the tradition here, though we did get a bit too mixed up with that chap Godmanchester. Our job’s to care for the collections. At the moment that means preventing some idiot from cooking them all. We shall have to get the vital specimens away before that inspector comes.’
‘I’m not sure whether carcasses can be called vital,’ I said. Then when I saw him frown at my levity, I felt remorseful. ‘We may have to obey the order, but I agree with you that we shouldn’t. After all it’s only a propaganda token gesture on the part of the Government. And in any case there’s shortage but no starvation in London …’
‘That’s hardly our concern,’ Beard told me.
The next day my resolution hardened. One of the two ‘independent’ news sheets that was allowed to circulate carried a chirpy little note that read, ‘Are we to eat Leo and Ebony? Most London citizens would be sad to see the familiar lion and black leopard go the way of all flesh. Some would say we should all have to be a lot hungrier than we are now – thanks to our navy’s campaign against the enemy’s atomic submarine fleet – before we should store lion or leopard in our larders, though there might be something to be said for a gazelle or antelope steak. But Food Ministry officials, anxious to conserve any potential stores of food, have given the Zoo the red warning light. “It’s not only a question of eating lions,” one official told me yesterday, “it’s a question of what the lions themselves are eating. Wild beasts consume an awful lot of meat, you know, and a nation at war just can’t afford meat for lions.” Reaction of the average man: sorry to see old Leo go, but the family comes before the pets. Reported reaction of the Zoo: Acting Director Langley-Beard, concerned for his research – the Government demand is nonsense; they will take the animals over my dead body. Big words, but there’s a war to win, Director Beard.’
My reaction was to write a full statement of the diet of our surviving animals pointing out that the carnivores were fed on a diminishing stock of smaller fauna. I asked Beard to sign it and sent one copy to the Ministry, and another to the news sheet.
‘I don’t see why we need bother with that rot.’
‘Have you seen some of the crowds that have collected lately, Beard? Have you witnessed any clashes with the police?’
‘My dear Carter, you seem suddenly to have turned into a politician. We’ve got a hard job on here without all this political speculation.’
‘It isn’t political speculation. I want you to send this notice in the rather vain hope of undoing the effect that that poisonous little piece may have had on a lot of angry, bewildered people who read it, and on any loose Uni-Europeans still not imprisoned who are out to find a cause for fomenting trouble. In fact, I doubt if we can do anything to counteract its effect. For that reason I want you to request a special police guard for the Gardens.’
Beard said, ‘Oh Lor’!’ but not this time in the calculated surprise that I had come to recognize, but with genuine alarm.
‘I don’t think we can do that,’ he said, ‘after all it’s difficult enough to get the specimens away to the storage plant against official orders without surrounding ourselves with police. Do you really think anyone would take any notice of that column you’ve shown me? I should never think of reading that kind of stuff.’
‘There are some millions of people in this city who will have read it. If only a few hundred decided to demonstrate against us we should be in a very unpleasant position.’
Beard smiled, ‘The article certainly seems to have had its effect on you, Carter. I’ve never seen you so worked up. If that means I shall get more co-operation from you, it’s not been at all a bad thing.’
‘Will you allow me to get police guard?’
He said, ‘I don’t like it.’
I took this as permission. I telephoned to the local inspector and he agreed to send a small detachment of guards. Half an hour later, he telephoned, to say that he could not spare the men. I then telephoned to the Police headquarters, but they confirmed his view. Either, I thought, the London situation was less stable than the Government allowed us to know, or they were not unwilling to allow a discontented population to find scapegoats. In either case it was not a good look-out for us. It seemed to me that our first duty was to see that no member of the staff should run an impossible risk. Beard was too occupied with what he now called ‘final evacuation plans’ to pay any attention to my views. I took it upon myself to inform the staff. I telephoned to all the head keepers in the absence of the Curators ordering them to withdraw all night staff and to put all the animals under lock in inner cages from that night on. No animal was to be left in an open enclosure or paddock. It was the maximum safety we could ensure for the beasts without danger to the staff. I did not give the head keepers my reasons for these orders; but to Matthew, the only remaining active Curator, I explained the situation. His voice on the telephone was always peculiarly shrill, it came now to interrupt me as ear-splitting as the shriek of any of his parrots.
‘Thank you, Simon. I think I know what to do.’
He sounded offended; but I felt that this was too important to neglect. I tried to reach him with some recollection from the last war, though I found it difficult to take all that officer side of him seriously.
I said, ‘Matthew, you do understand that this is not a time for suicide pilots?’
‘Oh, God! I’m not Japanese, you know.’
I was relieved to hear him chuckle; beneath all his absurdities, he was a very down-to-earth person. I was sorely tempted to put Rackham on a lone night watch. But perhaps he had anticipated trouble, for he suddenly went sick.
I worked late in the board room above the restaurant that night, disregarding the sirens which now sounded at dusk to send Londoners to shelters against dread raids that never came. I sorted out and collected Society minutes and correspondence that seemed to me essential for future historians. After all history had as high a claim as anatomy. I had a cold coming on, and with the low diet, I was finding it hard to fight off. I dozed over my work. My head seemed filled all at once with a roaring sound. I was back in my room at Oxford, shut in, but why? I must have sported my oak. Then it came to me, it must be bump supper night – the roar was that of the college celebrating victory, going perhaps to wreck some poor wretch’s rooms. Then I was wide awake and rushing to the window. There across the Gardens coming from Regent’s Park I could see a mass of electric torch flashes and great petrol flares, sweeping towards me, some moving steadily, others in sudden rushes, now bobbing low, now flashing up against the sky. Here and there the outlines of some square white objects showed up in the darkness. Soon the distant roar neared and split up into drunken songs and shouts, and into a sort of wild wordless yelling; and then again changed, perhaps at some commanding words, into a rhythmic chorus of slogans. Now I thought that I could distinguish the words – they could be ‘We want Peace’. Perhaps it was some orderly anti-Government demonstration. But then I could hear more clearly – ‘Men not Beasts’. The white squares no doubt carried similar slogans. Coming from men, the words had an ugly sound. I turned out my light. Now I could hear the thudding of steps, almost marchlike in their precision. Then for some moments all sounds ceased and the lights seemed concentrated into one glow. The silence was broken as suddenly by a loud clang of metal. Then came shouts of triumph and the glow shattered again into a hundred points of light bobbing towards me and the rhythmic march broke into a clattering, deafening, uneven run. The hoarse roar seemed to engulf the silence of the Zoo, though here and there the cry or scream of an animal or bird joined the human din. At least, I congratulated myself, there was no human to suffer, and, with luck, the crowd would reach very few of the animals. Then suddenly I was gripped with a terror of fire, perhaps my safety measures for the staff and the animals would prove my own roasting. The white gibbon – sole remnant of its tribe – started its melancholy howling. Immediately the crowd was diverted from its rush, away from my window. I crossed the room to follow its glow and, looking three storeys down to the ground below, I saw across the ornamental beds a tall blond figure standing in a feeble pool of light from a small torch. The man held himself as erect as his swaying willowy figure would allow him and held – God help him! – a stick. Matthew stood alone in defence of his parrots. I opened the window, but my voice could not carry above the crowds’ nearing roar. I could see that Matthew had raised his stick above his head and was attempting to harangue the crowd. I thought I heard that familiar voice screech, ‘impermissible trespass’, but it was probably only a sudden rush of wind. I ran from the window and down three flights of stairs, stumbling, even falling once in my haste. At the entrance I cracked my head hard against Beard’s. Stars exploded their pale silver lights before my eyes. Through thick cotton wool I could just hear Beard ask,
‘For God’s sake, Carter, can you drive?’ or so it seemed.
But I brushed him aside, fell over a low stone balustrade, cutting my knee. I was up in a second and across the flower beds to find myself part of the straggling tail of the crowd. Next to me was a heavily built but baby-faced teenager who was shouting hysterically,
‘Do ’im! Do them! Kick the bastards in the balls!’
Part of the crowd was calling, ‘Men not Beasts’, but some others chanted, ‘We want Peace’. Then through the slogans came a battering, hammering noise; and a sudden whisper that rushed back through the crowd.
‘Parrots.’
A big blonde woman turned to me, ‘Parrots, dear,’ she said, ‘I can’t see my lot making much of them.’
But a bobbing, cheering mass in front of me moved on. On the ground, trampled and crushed into the gravel, lay Matthew’s body. Blood frothed from his mouth, streamed from his ears and nostrils. I bent down and began to unloose his silk shirt, I took out my little pocket mirror and held it to his mouth; but he was dead. I tried to lift him, but dizziness overcame me. So I dragged his body under a clump of mahonias. A deep and jagged wound in his temple suggested that he had been killed by a stone. I hoped so. As I pushed his long, dangling legs under the shiny, prickly leaves, I remembered suddenly Harriet Leacock’s dog Rickie. I drew myself up straight and ran away from the snouting crowd and the shrieking birds into the darkness back towards Beard.
He was standing still, blinking in the doorway.
‘Where on earth have you been, Carter? Can you drive a lorry?’
I must have seemed quite uncomprehending, for he suddenly shook me.
‘Good Heavens, Carter! Pull yourself together. This is vital. That driver’s not turned up. We must get the lorry away. Can you drive the thing?’
From behind us, out of the darkness came the shrieks of the birds sounding like a witches’ sabbath, or perhaps with the shouts of the crowd, a holocaust of witches. I rubbed my hands on my trouser legs to rid myself of the feel of Matthew’s sagging body. I was breathing hardly now, and suddenly I began to shake involuntarily. I wanted to run away from Beard, to go to Martha; I loved her more than anything in the world and now this senseless violence was going to separate us for ever. But I had taken on the Zoo job; to give up now would be to make nonsense of all proper order, of anything I believed in. Under my breath I begged Martha to understand why I had to go away from her. The roar and tramp of the crowd was now shifting across towards the Lion House from which came the answering roar of lions and leopards. There was little the mob could do there; for their own sakes I hoped they would not succeed in doing even that. There was little they could do anywhere in the Gardens, and that little we could not stop. I turned to Beard.
‘I can drive,’ I said and followed down through the Tunnel across the canal and out of the North Entrance where the lorry stood. I hoisted myself up into the driver’s seat. As we left, some squawking, gaily-coloured macaws and lories flew across to the trees on Primrose Hill, and a flight of five or six cockatoos passed like a small, chattering cloud overhead.
At one time I had driven a motor car regularly, but a heavy lorry was quite another thing. It seemed to take all my strength to operate the wheel and the gears. My head was spinning, I felt hot and flushed, and my stomach ached so that I had often to stop and bend double in my seat. I wondered if the dysentery, so frequently announced by the doctors to be ‘positively the last’, was about to make one of its squalid reappearances. Beard said nothing, except to give me uncertain directions from a map which he held against the dashboard light and at which he squinted myopically. We got clear of Pentonville and then Walthamstow, districts that were deserted, but untouched by the raid. Then as the road climbed up to the edge of Epping Forest, the lorry swayed and jolted across holes, and I twisted and turned until my arms seemed ready to break avoiding craters that the headlights picked out before me. Ahead of us towards Epping we saw a cluster of lights across the road.
Beard said, ‘Police! We must turn off.’
But I saw that he had no idea where to turn. I knew the area a little from a time when my mother had lived in an Essex cottage and I had driven to see her at weekends in the days before Home Counties private motoring came to an end. I turned the lorry off by side roads towards Chigwell. There had been bomb damage among the housing estates of this area, too, or could it have been looting and burning? We had constantly to turn off the main road but by a zigzag route we came at last into the flattish open country that stretches for some miles to the village of Abridge. Alone of all the immediate environs of London, this rich farming land had never been swallowed up by housing. Now it would be some time before it was farmed again. For miles the green spring shoots of wheat and oats had been charred black; the scattered farmhouses, too, seemed to have been gutted. Yet, by twisting off into side roads, I was able to drive on. I had grown more used to the lorry now. To turn my mind from the griping pain in my stomach, I spoke to Beard. I had meant to talk of other things, but I said:
‘Matthew was there. Matthew Price! He tried to save his parrots. But the mob killed him. He had been trampled on when I found him, but I think he was already dead before they came to him.’
Beard sat muttering. I think, perhaps, that he was praying.
At last he said, ‘Suffering is an impossible thing to measure, Carter.’ Then he added, ‘I had all these specimens to pack into the van myself. Not one of the night staff was on duty.’
I made no comment.
He said, ‘You were rather a friend of Price’s. It should help you to think that his being there may have deflected that mob from surging across to the North Side. I’m not at all sure that in that case we could ever have got away.’ Later he said, ‘You seem to have studied politics a good deal to have foreseen tonight’s troubles as you did. I wonder you didn’t go in for that sort of thing instead of mixing yourself up with zoology. You’re the only untrained chap I’ve come across in our work.’
I wanted to break the silence between us. I needed desperately to make contact with another human being, but when I tried once or twice to speak, the words died away before I had voiced them. It was as though I were throwing a rope bridge across a chasm into a void.
In the high street of Abridge my pains became unbearable and I had to stop driving. I got down from the lorry and leaned against the bow-fronted window of a pub. I was bent double. In the headlights of the lorry I could see that there were two or three other people slumped against the walls of the houses – an old woman, her legs spread wide across the pavement, a boy with his mouth adenoidally open, and a fat man, whose neck and cheeks looked oddly green instead of flushed. I knew that I was entering a deluded world peopled by my fever and I shut my eyes.
Beard said, ‘I’d better see if I can get something hot for that cramp of yours. We can’t afford to hang around here.’
I heard him move away down the street. Hours later, as it seemed to me, he returned.
‘The place is deserted,’ he said. ‘Those who are not dead are dying. You’ll have to pull yourself together.’
I groaned that I was dying. I heard Beard give a prim little laugh.
‘Oh, I’m afraid your sort of dying is in quite another category. That’s just how you feel. But there’s a young chap lying in the street here who really is dying. They’ve been without food in these parts for a week or more, I think. That’s why we must get moving. Hunger makes people rather desperate and they may not be at all as near death as the people here.’
I found it difficult to focus my thoughts on what he was saying, but when at last I had done so, I was revolted.
‘Surely there must be something we can do for them.’
‘I’m afraid not.’
I groaned with a sudden surge of pain. He misunderstood.
He said, ‘I’m afraid I’m very used to the impossibility of doing anything to relieve pain.’
He put his hands under my armpits and began to drag me to my feet. I felt as though my arms were being torn from their sockets.
‘Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Christ attends to his own concerns, but you must help me to get these specimens to Dunmow. All my optic work is there. And I’ve got material for work on the comparative histology of primates’ testes that I can probably never amass again.’
His voice carried such urgency that I forced myself to my feet, but the pain made me cry out. ‘Oh, God, oh God, let me die!’
‘I’m afraid God doesn’t send death to order. No bombs fell on Broadmoor or Cromwell Road to release me from my encumbrances. His mercy and his justice are beyond our understanding, Carter.’
Now suddenly as I stood straight I voided in my trousers and the pain died temporarily away. When we returned to the lorry, I opened the door at the back. Beard had not been entirely truthful: there ranged along one side were a row of cages from which stared great round living eyes. I flashed my torch – chocolate, black, cinnamon grey, ring-tailed, the graceful lemurs crouched, legs bent and tails coiled like a row of long-nosed cobblers; above them, greater eyed, were the more absurd tarsier, potto, and loris. But on the other side of the lorry the huge orange gorilla himalayensis lay dead, last monument to Robert Falcon, the end of the yeti, and sprawled above the carcass the dead body of a young African gorilla and staring at me, like a coconut ritual god, the fibrous fringed mask of an orang-outang. At the sight of the lemurs’ beauty I almost refused to go on – but where else could I go? I got in the driving seat again. Soon our way became more impassable, and we had constantly to turn off by side roads. As we travelled it came to me that we could have fed the starving at Abridge. But we bumped on. At last it was clear that neither Beard nor I knew where we were. We turned off a cratered main road, lurching across a track through a charred field, and, twisting again, were suddenly confronted by the lamps and torches of a little group of people. In the headlamps I could see a tall, stout white-haired woman with some sort of heavy woollen shawl over her head and her shoulders. She was leaning on a stick. A thin young man in a hacking-coat and breeches, two other, older men, and a long-necked, pale-faced, blonde girl in jeans, completed the group. Behind them a large farm-house loomed out of the thickening white mist. I shouted to them for directions, but Beard gripped my arm tightly and said, ‘Drive straight past them.’
Answering me, the old woman stepped forward. She said, ‘You’re not far from Chipping Ongar, but there’s no way of getting there. All the roads are blocked.’
She spoke authoritatively in a deep contralto, redolent of garden fêtes, point to points, and the country magistrates’ bench. She said, as though she were searching for a phrase that would give a peace-time normality to life,
‘They could stay here tonight, couldn’t they, Harry? But I’m afraid there’s nothing to eat.’
The young man, equally grand but gruff voiced, redolent of the County Show and the Hunt, said, ‘Depends who they are, Gran.’
The girl now spoke, in the voice of the Pony Club.
She said, ‘Perhaps they’ve got something edible in there.’ She moved forward but one of the older men held her back.
‘That don’t do, Miss Ann, to go mixing up with what you don’t know about. Where do you come from?’ he called.
The girl struggled with him, ‘I’m hungry,’ she cried, ‘I’m hungry.’
Before I could answer, Beard had leapt from the lorry and was standing before them with a revolver in his hand.
‘I shall shoot anyone who comes near.’ His voice sounded higher than usual but even more prim.
I called, ‘Really, Beard. Don’t be ridiculous.’
With difficulty I lowered myself from the lorry, and stood behind him. The old woman was obviously relieved by the everyday tone of my voice.
She said, trying to sound as conversational as she could, ‘The wireless said there would be helicopters from Norwich dropping food on isolated houses. But that was some days ago …’
As she was talking, I saw that her son and one of the older men had begun to move out of the circle. Beard had seen it too, his body stiffened. I could not take any risks; I flung myself upon him and we fell hard on to the ground. His revolver flew from his hand, scudding across the ground to come to rest at the old woman’s feet. She picked it up and came towards us. For a moment I thought that she was going to kill us, but, instead, she hit Beard sharply across the side of his head with her stick. He moaned and his head fell back on to the ground.
‘That’ll put him out,’ she said, ‘until we know where we are. Such a lot of people lose control at a time like this. Poor man.’
Meanwhile Harry and his companion had forced open the lorry door.
‘Monkey!’ the labourer cried. ‘Now that is a rare old surprise.’
‘Actually,’ Harry said, ‘I think they’re lemurs.’
His grandmother took charge.
‘My dear Harry, whatever they are, I’ve no doubt they can be eaten.’
‘Ah! No! Monkeys wouldn’t go down proper with my stomach,’ said the man who had not spoken. ‘That’d be a tough little old dinner.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Palmer,’ the girl said grandly, ‘it’s only a question of boiling the things long enough.’
I heard a shot.
‘I don’t think I’ll shoot them all at once, Gran,’ Harry said, ‘they’ll be fresher if we kill them as we need them.’
‘My dear boy, I don’t know what you think we’re going to keep them alive on,’ she answered. He had clearly been in the habit of bringing inconvenient pets home as a child.
I got up with difficulty and began to walk away into the darkness, shining my little hand torch before me.
‘You’re leaving your friend,’ the old lady cried. I started to run.
‘Oh, let him go, Granny,’ the girl said. ‘We don’t want to feed half London.’
‘Yes, for God’s sake, let him go, Gran,’ Harry said, ‘who knows whether he’s the forerunner of some bacteria infected invasion from London. You heard the last warnings they sent out.’
‘In that case,’ I could hear the old lady’s voice say, ‘you’d better get rid of this.’ I ran on.
Some little while after I had crawled into the wood, I caught my foot under the thick sprawling root of a beech and fell, striking my head against an old tree stump. The wound on my temple stung fiercely, yet I think that I did not faint, but passed out into a sudden sleep from exhaustion and hunger. I came to once when it was still dark; and then with a cruelly aching head to a pale, white-misted dawn and a deafening bird chorus, yet not so deafening that I did not at once slide off into sleep again; when I woke fully the sun was hot even through beech leaves that cast a dappled pattern upon my naked thigh where I had torn my trouser leg in forcing a way through the undergrowth. Each time I had woken mysteriously to a stink of garlic, and now I could see the tightly furled white flowers and the shiny green leaves smashed and pulped by my fall. With my ball pen I dug up garlic roots here and there until I found a good sized clove, but, as soon as I had munched it, the sharpness burned my tongue and I felt sick. By pushing against the trunk of the great beech tree I managed to lever myself to my feet. For a few seconds the scene revolved before me and I thought I should fall. I leaned against the tree and then, breathing in the clear air, walked on. I heard a cock pheasant crow once, started some wood doves flapping above me, noted high up in a larch tree a squirrel’s drey, but I had no gun with me. Once too a stoat ran across my path, heard me, coiled snakelike and hissed, and was gone into the bramble and the briar. Every now and again I had to cross the narrow beds of dried-up streams that seemed to me in my weakness like canyons. Near one of these where the yellowish clayey soil suddenly changed to an ochre sandy surface I saw what seemed to be long-used entrances to badger setts. And sure enough nearby I saw evidences of badger dung and there were flattened paths through the surrounding growth. There were no berries at that season, not even bracken fronds to be eaten. At last in a thicket of hawthorn I found a blackbird’s nest of three eggs, and fearful lest the clumsy instrument should smash the delicate shells, I punctured each with the tip of my ball-pen and eagerly sucked two delicious yolks. The third had addled and the stench alone almost made me sick. At last I chanced upon a man-made path, dry and hard to the foot from the long season of hot weather. Water avens and some late oxlips flowered at its side; behind them the brambles and briar roses seemed impenetrable. From these thickets came persistent noises of birds stirring or even, perhaps, of some animal, although it was difficult to see what animal would be on the move at that hour. The path turned sharply round a clump of elms and there before me in a clearing was a small wattle and clay cottage, thatched, its whitewashed walls pargetted with a small shell pattern. The garden was bright with early roses and oriental poppies, and at the side, above a plot of onions and potatoes some sheets hung feebly stirring in the light breeze. I could see no sign of life. I began to make my way towards its small iron gate, when, from the briars at my side, stepped a thin, sunburnt boy of about fifteen, dressed in faded blue jeans and a short sleeved flowered cotton shirt. He was pointing an old shotgun at me.
‘Keep away from here. That’ll be just bad for you, if you don’t.’ He spoke with a broad Essex accent. ‘Mum. There’s a man.’
A voice came from the cottage, shrill and even more broad in accent than the boy’s. ‘Ah! Well, he’d best keep right on walking. There’s nothing here for no one.’
She came out – a white-faced, reddish-haired woman of forty in a bright blue sleeveless dress. Mother and son both had freckled arms.
‘That’s all finished,’ she said, ‘we had the last tin of baked beans Tuesday.’ I pointed to the plot of vegetables.
‘Ah! That’s what it looks like coming down to,’ she said, ‘last we saw on the tele before that faded out was they was bringing proper tinned stuff from Norwich.’
‘By helicopter,’ the boy added.
‘Ah, tinned soup, and that,’ she announced, ‘but nothing come.’
‘I reckon old Norwich has about copped it,’ the boy said and laughed.
His mother said, ‘Ah, likely. Then what’s to do, eh?’
I asked, ‘Haven’t you shot anything in the wood?’
She answered for him, ‘Oh yes, he’s brought back pigeons and that. One time it was a pheasant, wasn’t it, Stanley? But I reckon that’s got too cunning, that knows he’s coming.’ She suddenly smiled at me. ‘We could about do with them rabbits now, couldn’t we? He’s never seen a rabbit, have you, Stanley?’
‘Yes, I have. I’ve seen pictures.’
‘Ah, pictures’s not the same.’
‘Well I seen them anyway.’
Their voices, hers shrill and his now falsetto, now in his boots, echoed round and round my head. The pink daisies on his shirt and the bright blue of her dress pulled tight across her large breasts glared in my eyes, fused, drew apart, and fused again. The poppies blazed in fires of scarlet, pink, and flame. The fire flared up at me, licked my face and I fell.
When I came to I was lying on what had once been called a contemporary patterned sofa. I was aware first of its chocolate material with a design in pistachio green thread. Then I smelt hyacinths and moving my eyes with pain, I saw the tightly twined blue locks, now half dead, above a paper-frilled flower-pot. I turned my head and there was the boy, holding my coat with one hand, and going through its pockets with the other. I closed my eyes.
‘You oughtn’t to do that, Stanley, that’s not right.’
‘That’s what they do on the tele.’
‘Well, that don’t make it right.’
‘Well, it don’t make it wrong, do it? Ah and that might be this travelling sickness that was on the tele that come from gas,’ the boy looked very knowing. ‘I reckon we ought to get rid of him.’
The woman said in a very final tone, of resignation and of determination, ‘You can’t get rid of a sick man, Stanley. That wouldn’t be right.’
I thought that I should scream if I had to live with this cross talk act for long. I asked for water.
‘Ah! Now the water all went when the soldiers was at Chelmsford.’ I could make no sense of this. ‘There’s well water,’ the woman added. ‘Get him a glass of that, Stanley. But there’s nothing to eat. That all went Tuesday when we had the last tin of baked beans.’
I did not believe her. I said, ‘I think I could show your son where to get food in the wood.’
‘In the wood?’
‘Yes. I’m fairly sure there are badgers, but I’m too weak to get there unless you can find me something to eat first – the potatoes in your garden?’
The boy came back with the glass of water.
She said, ‘’Ε says there’s badgers in the wood.’
‘Ah, that might be, Mum.’
He sat down. The woman turned and hit the television screen.
‘Still nothing out of that thing.’
‘I reckon old Norwich has copped it.’
‘Ah! That’s what too.’
I said, ‘You could live off badger meat for a long time. It’s like pork.’
It took them a lot of talk to decide that my scheme was sensible. I lay back and closed my eyes. I was woken by the woman shaking me.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘that’s a last tin of steak. Or pretty well. What’ll we do after that?’
The boy said, ‘That could be something to have them badgers, but that needs a lot of digging out, don’t it? I reckon we haven’t got the strength to dig.’
I asked the time. ‘That’s after five now.’
‘Wake me at half past eight and I’ll take you there.’
She woke me with a plate of tinned steak and diced vegetables.
She said, ‘That’s seven o’clock.’ Then she pointed to two tins of soup on the table. ‘That’s all there is and that’s the truth.’
This time I believed her. The food brought back my stomach pains; but, with the sleep, I felt stronger. I did not intend to waste my energy by walking to the wood before dark. As the woman and her son ate, I read an old newspaper.
But at last the light began to fade, and it was time to set out on our errand.
We stood before an old ash tree with the breeze running in our faces. A hundred yards away across a patch of dying oxlips beaten down to form a path for the animals, I could see the openings in the yellowish sandy soil. The boy had a lucky and remarkable power of stillness; because of my stomach pains I found the wait more difficult. But we had not to wait long, not more than twenty minutes. First a snout, then a flash of black and white, then a heavy boar badger trotted out and stood sniffing the wind. He moved across to the midden. A few minutes later, came, more cautiously, his mate. She was followed by two young cubs who began at once to snap and roll over each other in mock fighting. The sow joined in the play, and soon even the old boar was sliding and rolling with his family. This was the happy family play whose healing innocence I had been cheated of again and again in the days of watching at Stretton. I nudged the boy’s arm. He fired and the boar fell, screeching, on his side. Instantly the mate was down the sett, followed by her cubs. But before they had reached the entrance, the boy had fired again and one of the cubs lay dead. The boy walked over to where the old boar lay, only grunting now; he knocked it on the head with the butt end of his rifle, half crushing its skull. Even together we had not the strength to carry the body back. The boar must have weighed around forty pounds. So, for the next hour, in the clear light of the now risen moon, I hacked away at the carcass; and the boy and his mother made journeys to and from the cottage, carrying badger joints. The cub required only the one journey.
It was long after ten when we had done; and yet, I knew that until I had washed the slimy blood from my hands I could not sleep. To my surprise neither the woman nor the boy would let me carry the pails of well water to the detached bath house. Though they still talked to one another in endless desultory chatter, they seemed somehow to regard me as a part of their life there.
‘That was a right little old job we had to do,’ the boy said.
‘Ah, that’s brought us together like,’ the woman added.
I tried to smile, but I felt I must be grimacing like the third murderer. After my wash, they settled me, dressed in some pyjamas that had belonged to her ‘old grandad’, on the sofa. They wrapped me in blankets, but I spent a weary night, journeying to and from the outside privy. At last towards six, I fell into a heavy sleep to awake to a smell more nauseating than I ever thought could be. Mother and son were feeding avidly at the table.
‘That’s proper good that old badger of yours,’ the boy said.
‘Ah, you’d best have a piece of that,’ the woman told me.
Nausea fought with hunger in me. I sat up on the sofa, conscious of the ludicrous effect of the ill-fitting pink candy-striped flannel pyjamas. But neither of them laughed. The woman brought me a plate of what appeared to be pinkish, greasy, fried pork.
‘That’s real good,’ she said. ‘That’ll put body in you.’
I cut a small piece, and, to my surprise, it tasted rich and delicious. In a short while I had eaten all but a small piece of browned fat. I speared it with the fork, felt its grease against my lips, and then suddenly I vomited. So violent were the spasms that it seemed as though my body were rejecting all its vital organs. I spewed a flash of light vermilion blood. The room span round. My head fell back on the cushions and everything became dark, became nothing.