Despite the grisly battering they had endured, the colonists were resilient young people, and they were capable of high spirits. Gradually – once we were finished with the Bombing radiation deaths, and once it was clear that we should not immediately starve or get washed into the Sea – a certain good humour became more evident.
One evening, with the shadows of the dipterocarps stretching towards the ocean, Stubbins found me sitting, as usual, at the verge of the camp, looking back towards the glow of the Bomb pit. With a painful shyness he – to my astonishment – asked me if I would care to join in a game of football! My protests that I had never played a game in my life counted for nothing, and so I found myself walking back along the beach with him, to where a rough pitch had been marked out in the sand, and posts – scrap timber from the construction of the Hall – had been set up to serve as goals. The ‘ball’ was a palm-nut shell, emptied of its milk, and eight of us prepared to play out the game, a mixture of men and women.
I scarcely expect that dour battle to go down in the annals of sporting history. My own contribution was negligible, save only to expose that utter lack of physical coordination which had made my days at school such a trial. Stubbins was by far the most skilled of us. Only three of the players, including Stubbins, were fully fit – and one of those was me, and I was completely done in within ten minutes of the start. The rest were a collection of strapped-up wounds and – comic, pathetic – missing or artificial limbs! But still, as the game wore on, and laughter and shouts of encouragement started to flourish, it seemed to me that my fellow players were really little more than children: battered and bewildered, and now stranded in this ancient Age – but children nevertheless.
What kind of species is it, I wondered, that inflicts such damage on its own offspring?
When the game was done, we retired from our pitch, laughing and exhausted. Stubbins thanked me for joining in.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘You’re a fair old player, Stubbins. Maybe you should have taken it up as a professional.’
‘Aye, well, I did, as a matter of fact,’ he said wistfully. ‘I signed on as an apprentice with Newcastle United … but that was in the early days of the War. Pretty soon that put a stop to the football. Oh, there’s been some competition since – regional leagues, and the League War Cups – but in the last five or six years, even that has been closed down.’
‘Well, I think it’s a shame,’ I said. ‘You’ve a talent there, Stubbins.’
He shrugged, his evident disappointment mingling with his natural modesty. ‘It wasn’t to be.’
‘But now you’ve done something much more important,’ I consoled him. ‘You’ve played in the first football match on the earth – and got a hat-trick of goals.’ I slapped him on the back. ‘Now, that’s a feather fit for any cap, Albert!’
As time wore on, it became increasingly apparent – I mean, at that level of the spirit below the intellectual where true knowledge resides – that we should, truly, never return home. Slowly – inevitably, I suppose – partnerships and ties in the twentieth century became remote, and the colonists formed themselves into couples. This pairing off showed no respect for rank, class or race: sepoy, gurkha and English alike joined in new liaisons. Only Hilary Bond, with her residual air of command, remained aloof from it all.
I remarked to Hilary that she might use her rank as a vehicle for performing marriage ceremonies – much as a sea-captain will join passengers in wedlock. She greeted this suggestion with polite thanks, but I caught scepticism in her voice, and we did not pursue the matter.
A little pattern of dwellings spread along the coast and up the river valley from our Sea-shore node. Hilary viewed all this with a liberal eye; her only rule was that – for now – no dwelling should be out of sight of at least one other, and none should be more than a mile’s distance from the site of the Hall. The colonists accepted these strictures with good grace.
Hilary’s wisdom regarding the business of marriage – and my converse folly – soon became obvious, for one day I saw Stubbins strolling along the beach with his arms around two young women. I greeted them all cheerfully – but it was not until they had passed that I realized that I did not know which of the women was Stubbins’s ‘wife’!
I challenged Hilary, and I could tell she was suppressing amusement.
‘But,’ I protested, ‘I’ve seen Stubbins with Sarah at the barn dance – but then, when I called at his hut that morning last week, there was the other girl –’
Now she laughed, and laid her scarred hands on my arms. ‘My dear friend,’ she said, ‘you have sailed the seas of Space and Time – you have changed History many times; you are a genius beyond doubt – and yet, how little you know of people!’
I was embarrassed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Think about it.’ She ran her hand over her ravaged scalp, where tufts of greyed hair clung. ‘We are thirteen – not counting your friend Nebogipfel. And that thirteen is eight women and five men.’ She eyed me. ‘And that’s what we’re stuck with. There’s no island over the horizon, from whence might come more young men to marry off our girls …
‘If we all made stable marriages – if we settled into monogamy, as you suggest – then our little society would soon tear itself apart. For, you see, eight and five don’t match. And so I think a certain looseness of our arrangements is appropriate. For the good of all. Don’t you think? And besides, it’s good for this “genetic diversity” that Nebogipfel lectures us about.’
I was shocked; not (I fondly believed) by any moral difficulties, but by the calculation behind all this!
Troubled, I made to leave her – and then a thought struck me. I turned back. ‘But – Hilary – I am one of the five men you speak of.’
‘Of course.’ I could see she was making fun of me.
‘But I don’t – I mean, I haven’t –’
She grinned. ‘Then perhaps it’s time you did. You’re only making things worse, you know!’
I left in confusion. Evidently, between 1891 and 1944, society had evolved in ways of which I had never dreamed!
Work on the great Hall proceeded quickly, and within no more than a few months of the Bombing, the bulk of the construction was done. Hilary Bond announced that a service of dedication would be held to commemorate the completion. At first Nebogipfel demurred – with characteristic Morlock over-analysis, he could see no purpose to such an exercise – but I persuaded him that it would be politic, as regards future relations with the colonists,. to attend.
I washed and shaved, and got myself as smart as it is possible to be when dressed only in a ragged pair of trousers. Nebogipfel combed and trimmed his mane of flaxen hair. Given the practicalities of our situation, many of the colonists went around pretty much nude by now, with little more than strips of cloth or animal skin to cover their modesty. Today, however, they donned the remnants of their uniforms, cleaned up and repaired as far as possible, and, while it was a parade which would have scarce passed muster at Aldershot, we were able to present ourselves with a display of smartness and discipline which I, for one, found touching.
We walked up a shallow, uneven flight of steps and into the new Hall’s dark interior. The floor – though uneven – was laid and swept, and the morning sunlight slanted through the glassless windows. I felt rather awed: despite the crudeness of its architecture and construction, the place had a feeling of solidity, of intent to stay.
Hilary Bond stood on a podium improvised from the car’s petrol tank, and rested her hand for support on Stubbins’s broad shoulder. Her ruined face, topped by those bizarre tufts of hair, held a simple dignity.
Our new colony, she announced, was now founded, and ready to be named: she proposed to call it First London. Then she asked us all to join her in a prayer. I dropped my head with the rest and clasped my hands before me. I was brought up in a strict High Church household, and Hilary’s words now worked nostalgically on me, transporting me back to a simpler part of my life, a time of certainty and surety.
And at length, as Hilary spoke on, simply and effectively, I gave up my attempts at analysis and allowed myself to join in this simple, communal celebration.