Only two people survived the explosion the night the Shrapnel Academy went up. The other 331, for there were 333 souls in residence that night, all died. The ones who escaped were Mew and Ivor. They owed their good fortune to the fact that the small half-underground section of the Shrapnel Academy which housed the laundry chute remained relatively intact. It was a later Victorian addition to the building, and faced on the outside with Portland stone, which largely protected those inside from the blast and heat. The blast was enormous: snow was melted across a one-mile diameter. Bricks, mortar, stone, furniture, bodies, statues, trees, snow, all hurled into the air, and whirled and whizzed about a bit, and fell again, in shreds.
Edna the taxi driver saw the explosion from the cosy room twelve miles away where she nursed her cold and sat out the blizzard. She saw a singeing, blinding glare on the other side of the woods, so that the line of distant hills could be seen quite clearly, as she sometimes could on one of those cloudy, damp evenings when visibility was oddly greater than ever it was on the brightest day.
“That’s really beautiful,’ she said aloud.
Then there was a surprisingly short sharp bang, and then other noises, messier and more protracted, whooshings and roarings and gnashings, and then a sudden rush of wind which rattled her windows, and then silence. The snow had stopped: she could see stars above: it was as if the explosion had whipped the clouds away: only over where the Shrapnel Academy was – well, had been, thought Edna, because that was surely the Shrapnel Academy going up, and now what would happen to her taxi trade? – a dusty cloud obscured the sky.
The two survivors stayed where they were and waited for help to arrive. They knew it would. Heroic efforts would be made, in spite of the snow. Police, ambulances and fire engines would presently arrive. Insurance investigators and journalists would drop from the sky. Cameras would whirr, newsreader voices lower in respect for so many dead. Such a terrible tragedy! Funds would be raised, every possible kindness shown. The good will of man would be made apparent. Mew would have a story for the Woman’s Times so extraordinary it would not be believed, and not printed. Angered, she would accept an offer from The Times, which paid a good deal better, and did not discourage the wearing of high heels. Ivor would go home to Debbie-Anne and stop brooding about Bella Morthampton: there is no point in lusting after the dead.
Reader, I know you do not like this ending to the story. It seems a cheat just to blow everything and everyone up. I wish there was some other possible ending, but there isn’t. That’s the way the world ends, not with a whimper but a bang, the way it began.
But I will give you something else – just a soupçon, as my grandmother, always a finicky eater, would say when accepting soup. Grass and flowers have grown up through the rubble of what used to be the Shrapnel Academy. It takes only a season or so for Nature to reassert itself. An owl swoops to take a mouse: a spider shrouds a fly. Snap, snaffle, nibble, crunch, gone! That’s Nature for you. But little eddies of lively air do tend to form at a certain point, at first-floor level, above the rubbly green. You can even see the motes dancing on a bright evening at just about the place where Mother Teresa was situated, there where Baf and Muffin took their spectacular pleasure, and butterflies dancing where the cupboard beneath the stairs used to be, which Acorn and Hilda would frequent. And if you listen you seem to hear a voice, mixed up with the songs of birds. It is Joan Lumb: she is speaking to Murray. She is saying, ‘Murray, that was not what we meant at all: it got out of control. But, Murray, wasn’t it all fun!’ Ah, fun: oh, Henry Shrapnel! And how forgiving the God of Love is, after all, that he should have given Joan Lumb another chance to love Murray and suffer for it, for certainly not in this life or the next will Murray ever love Joan Lumb.
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