From Georgie, Mill Bank Link
Knew something was up. Two of our shift tumbled into the wax basin and by the time we’d got them out it was too late: a jackplane and a corkscrew. All of us very edgy.
‘We should get out,’ I said. ‘We don’t want to linger here, something’s up.’
And then there was another gone, in the flickering shadows. I almost saw it, Esther that was, one of them from Foulsham. She was sat on the bench one moment and was all of a sudden an hourglass.
I heard the whistles then, all the cooing, right outside it was, like our links had come to fetch us all. Maybe ten of them sounding. That was the alarm, something big up.
‘Come then, I hate you all. Come then and be useful. Stop your bloody snivelling, shan’t help you, shall it? Hardly likely. Come on then, I say. Please to. There, gather these candles up, as many as you can carry, we’re not staying here another moment.
‘Get up, come on and help me, we’ll have such lights if we like. Now take as many bundles as you can, with apologies to God but needs must and all that, and move it! Come, we’ll answer the call now: all must hurry. Let’s get out of here, for here’s the truth on it, I don’t like it as much as I did.’
The porter, now a colander, was on the floor. We slid back the bolts and ran into the night.
From Joseph Blake, Spitalfields Link Boy
It’s all happening tonight. I’ve never seen so many people turned in one night. Whole of the doss house on Dorset Street’s gone stiff and all, and the men and women coming in there are all being thrown out now, so many of them turned railway sleepers, and the foreman goes about them, picking out what he thinks will be useful, prodding over them with his foot. Like there’ll be no people left to London by morning. Strange objects all over the street from people just fell then and there in the middle of their way. I seen a perambulator with a mixing bowl in it, abandoned in the road. And all the buildings about us, making noises in the night, such creaks and groans as if the skin of London underneath was moving, was coming awake. I don’t trust anything any more, not the ground we walk on, not the shoes I’m wearing, nothing. The houses do make so much noise! And door bells clanging though no one is there to pull them. I seen a whole wall come tumbling down in the street and afterwards somehow gather itself back up. I seen a cart moving off without the horse. I seen a whole load of cutlery dancing about the way, rushing off together like they were fish in the sea, only they were floating in the rancid air of London. I seen such stuff. And all that was life, all living things that I knew that were wont to be about us common enough have all packed up and gone away, like as if there’s been enough of humans now and our turn is finished with.
I make the sign of the cross, like that’ll help.
I hear all the pigeon calls then, and do answer them. Joining pigeon whistle with pigeon whistle. Could do with some company. Thought there might just be me left. Me and a thousand shifting objects.
From Tommy Cronin, Mill Bank Link Boy
Couple of hundred of us, must have been, links from all over the city. Georgie’s come with so many candles, we’ll all have some light yet.
We’re all here on the edge of Hyde Park just by the bench where she lies still and don’t move for us, but is only just still there, breathing oh so shallow. I thought she could help us somehow. But she can’t do anything. The ones from Foulsham, they sit by her especially and do try and wake her up but she’s still and hard and cold.
All noises about the city tonight, like it’s being taken down, all chaos – glad we’re in the park, fires started up here and there. I wonder what the city’s like beyond here, I wonder what’s left of them all. We wait for the dawn to come.
And it doesn’t.
Look at her lying there.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘do look at this, I think she’s turned already.’
‘How many turned tonight already, must be hundreds!’
‘She’s stirring!’ Was one of the kids from Foulsham cried that out, all gathered round her, she was so lit up by all the glowing of our church candles, how strange she looked thus illuminated. Beautiful, you might call it.
‘Speak? Can you speak?’
She just looked at us, looked all about us, such a strange expression to her face.
‘Can you speak?’
‘Are you turning?’
She coughed a bit then.
‘That’s a good sign, coughing is.’
‘It’s her insides trying to get themselves working. Trying to remember being human.’
She coughed, a bit of spit in her, that was a good sign, very good.
We gone and cheered a bit then, she looked such a sight. She tried to sit up, but was rather wobbly on the whole and had to be laid down again. She could speak after a time.
‘I thought I wasn’t,’ she said. ‘I saw her, the matchstick lady, my birth object, she was going up in flames, and despite all the flames I just felt so cold, colder and colder. She’s gone, my birth object, a wonder she’d been kept so long. The poor woman, poor frightened woman, wouldn’t have wished that on anyone. But I’m here now, and do breathe. I’ve flung her off, or rather she’s been ripped from me. I may go any moment. I shall be a button before long.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Jenny of Foulsham said.
‘Oh I do, I think. I’ll be a clay button. I’ve been it before, you see. It can’t be long, it only took Rosamud a few hours before she turned. I think the birth objects protect you but if they’re lost then you’re likely to turn double quick.’
‘There’s been so many gone tonight,’ said one of the links.
‘Esther?’ she said. ‘Where’s Esther Nelson? I don’t see her. What’s become of her?’
Jenny shook her head.
‘Oh Esther,’ she whispered, tears in her eyes, ‘I should never have left. What have I done? And Clod, is there any news of Clod?’
‘The square’s burnt out,’ said a Bayswater link boy. ‘I seen it myself, all gutted.’
‘Oh Clod!’ she wailed.
‘And then there was this strange thing,’ the Bayswater boy went on, ‘hard to say it really. But I saw it, with my own eyes, and if you don’t believe it then don’t believe it, that’s your business.’
‘Come on then, let’s hear it.’
‘Speak up, please,’ says Lucy.
‘In the flaming of Connaught Square there was one house that sort of rumbled in all the fire, made great cracks of complaint, huge bangs and screams, you might say, of masonry.’
‘That’ll be the fire, breaking it all up, bursting the glass.’
‘Maybe. Maybe. But then I saw the next bit, didn’t I? Great black shadow in the flames, coming forward, and all the screams of masonry alongside it, like the very bricks had found a voice. And then it keeps coming on, that great black oblong, through the flames, ever on and on. Closer to me, I saw it from my vantage point, coming so close, and then … going on, going on I say, out of the square and away from the fire and down Seymour Street, across the Edgware Road and on it goes, that great black block, on I say, still on, shrinking you might say, losing height no doubt, until it finally comes to a halt just shy of Portman Square.’
‘Well,’ asked one of the links, ‘whatever was it?’
‘Only a house! Only a bloody house!’
‘A house!’
‘A walking house.’
‘However could it, a house?’
‘How’s it possible?’
‘Clod,’ Lucy said, oh and she was crying, so much that was liquid still about her! Still a human then, after all. ‘Clod, he did it! I’d swear to it. He got out. He’s alive!’
‘Well, well! Who’d have such friends!’
‘What a night!’
‘The bridge!’ cried Lucy, sitting up.
‘Don’t excite yourself; take it easy, don’t be a button on us!’
‘The bridge! The bridge!’
‘What bridge? What are you bellyaching about?’
‘The bridge at Westminster! That’s where he’ll be, and all his family. They’ll all be there! The Iremongers! All of them. Piggott said so! On Westminster Bridge at eight o’clock, all to meet there! What time is it?’
‘Who can say since they’ve offended the sun.’
‘Sometime after six maybe, hard to know in the congruous black.’
‘I must go to the bridge.’
‘We’ll take you along. We were going that way anyway, since we’ll have a big day of it tomorrow – yes, since there’ll be so many to light on account of all the crowds come out for the Queen for the opening of Parliament.’
‘That’s why then,’ said Lucy, realising.
‘Why what?’
‘That’s why they’ll gather there, for the opening.’
‘That’s where all the things are rushing together too, piling up, hurrying all in the same direction. Towards Westminster!’
‘Yes! That’s true enough, they all stop around Westminster!’
‘There’ll be crowds all down The Mall, down Whitehall, people waving and cheering.’
‘The Queen will go to Parliament and declare it open!’
‘As if the objects know it too.’
‘I wonder,’ said Lucy, ‘if they’re being summoned. I think they might be, why else would they all come? And if they are summoned it’ll surely be the Iremongers that are doing it. Must be Umbitt, I should think, he’s the worst of them. And if they are all pulled there it’ll be for a reason and the reason will not be a nice one. I think there’ll be murder and all hell will break loose.’
‘But the Queen, the Queen herself shall be there!’
‘Victoria, no other!’
‘Our Queen.’
‘She may have gone absent on us, but she is our Queen, head of our country, and we are British men and true, aren’t we one and all?’
‘We are!’
‘We are!’
‘Shall we let our Queen be murdered?’
‘What, murder the Queen? No, not by our lives.’
‘That’s what’s happening here. Treason, treason and plot!’
‘Happened before!’
‘Happening again! Right now, in just a little time! We must run, gather all up, all the links of all London – there’s going to be murder. We’ve got to stop it! We have. We that are here. It’s up to us!’
‘Clod!’ called Lucy.
Oh such a whistling then, such a great whistling like the weather over London was pigeons.