Kilburn, September 1943. Something in the breakfast news bulletin made him prick up his ears. ‘They’ve just given the weather report for the channel. That’s the first time I’ve heard that –’ he was going to say ‘since Dunkirk’, but remembered Laurence – ‘in more than three years.’
Eileen looked at him blankly, sipped her tea and glanced back to the Times. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘they can look out the window like everyone else. Rain, usually.’
‘Don’t you see? It means they don’t care if the Germans know what the channel weather will be. They’ve conceded there’s no risk of an invasion. They’re telling us the war is as good as won.’
‘The rest of us have known that since the Yanks came in. It’s all here in the Times. Perhaps the Germans don’t read it.’
‘It means we can start thinking about the future.’
He finished his tea, saw her off to the bus stop and headed for the tube. It was his day off and he was on the scrounge. They had all put up with scarcity for years, some grumbling, others not, but the war’s grittiness and privations had a way of hitting you with a series of unexpected blows. Just as you’d got used to the state of things, the soles of your boots started leaking, your bootlace snapped, soap became even coarser and more reminiscent of sandpaper. That morning it had been razor blades. His last remaining blade had become so blunt that his attempts to hack his stubble off had left his face red and raw. He’d heard that supplies were back in the shops, another convoy having got through, and was determined to get his share. There was no point in trying the high street stores, or the usual black market sites, which were under the thorough watch of the authorities, so he headed for the most likely place: Islington.
The morning was hot and the stench of the tube nauseating. He emerged at The Angel, crossed the main road and descended into the sunken alley of Camden Passage. Before him stood a curved row of smoked-dunned three-storey houses with front doors that opened onto the street. Uniformed sailors and soldiers, probably home on leave, stood in the doorways, smoking and talking, waiting for the pubs to open, some keeping an eye on prams parked out front. At number thirty-one stood a junk shop, although not a promising one. Through the dusty window he could see nothing but rubbishy fragments of old metal, worn-out tools and lengths of lead piping, some of which he knew had been there for years.
He left, noticing the grimy exterior of the Camden Head pub and the bomb site opposite. He crossed the main road again to Chapel Market. The stalls were selling dreary winter vegetables, tins of corned beef, packets of ‘coffee’ that smelled more of chicory, and varieties of oily fish, unknown before the war, which had been dredged up from the floor of the North Sea. He stopped and used some coupons to redeem a tin of orange juice with the word ‘California’ printed on it, and realised that he could barely remember what an actual orange looked like.
At one stall a group of women were jostling noisily for new pots and pans, which had become almost unprocurable since vast supplies had been melted down to make tin helmets back in 1940. The stock had just run out and he could hear some of the unlucky women shouting abuse at the stallholder, accusing him of favouritism and of holding some of the wretched items back for friends. If only the damned workers would get angry about something more important. They were, he surmised, like ants: able only to see the little things, not the big ones. Another stall looked promising – it had a row of shaving soap and other men’s toiletries, a few combs and even boot polish. He selected some items and put them on the makeshift counter.
‘Do you have any razor blades?’ he asked the shopkeeper, who had oily hair and was in a collarless shirt.
‘Any what, sir?’
‘Razor blades. Do you have some, by any chance?’
‘Well, razor blades,’ he said. ‘I might have. I guess it depends how desperate you was after ’em, sir.’
It was always like this nowadays: the underdogs had become the upper dogs. As a socialist, he was aware he should be happy about this fact, but he wasn’t. He took off his hat – the instinctive action of the mendicant – and opened his wallet, pulling out a sum that pre-war would have bought him half a gross.
‘I can see from the state of your chin, sir, that you’re a needy gent indeed.’ The stallholder reached below the stall to a box hidden under a canvas tarpaulin and pulled out a small packet of twelve blades – American, most likely pilfered. ‘Most obliged, sir.’ No change was offered.
The swine, he thought. All shopkeepers were fascists. Moving away from the stall, he looked up to see three heavily tarnished gilded balls. Ah, this place was always promising. He entered and looked about. The shopkeeper wasn’t to be seen, as usual, although he could hear the setting down of a tea cup and the turning of a newspaper behind a curtain in the shop’s rear. Rows of picture frames clogged the floors, and above them the shelves were crammed with items of indeterminate value: conch shells, Jubilee mugs, a rusty muzzle-loading pistol, ships in bottles and a collection of glass paperweights, one of which contained a piece of coral. These were rare and fantastically expensive. He picked it up, weighing it in his hand.
‘Anything take your fancy, sir?’ said an elderly, thin man with longish grey hair, who emerged from the rear. ‘I see you’ve taken a fancy to that paperweight. That’s a fine old piece, that is. South Pacific, from the time of Cook, I should think.’ The man looked more closely at him. ‘I remember you – you bought that young lady’s keepsake book from me. Back during the Blitz, wasn’t it?’
The diary. He remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Can’t find its like now.’
Like most second-hand shop dealers, the man seemed somehow too refined to be in such a place. His common accent was inconsistent and obviously fake. A defrocked clergyman, he guessed. ‘Any boot-laces?’ he asked. ‘Bed sheets? Pyjamas?’
‘Well, no, alas. No one’s giving them up nowadays, what with the shortages and everything. But I might just have another nice writing book. Came in last week, from some blitzed house in Chelsea, I think it was. Now, let me see … Just here, it was.’ The old man began pawing about on a messy shelf, pushing aside a sad little collection of children’s toys, including a few broken bits of Meccano that couldn’t make anything and a rather crude-looking set of Snakes and Ladders – constructed, it appeared, from a recipe of cardboard and glue. ‘Got it!’ The book had a maroon cover and marbled edges. ‘Not as grand as the last one I sold you, but feel that paper.’
He hesitated. It was bound to be ridiculously overpriced.
‘Go on, sir.’
He took it in his hands. It was certainly too good for scribbling notes in or using for accounts.
‘From before the Great War, I imagine. Quality, that is. I remember the things you could buy back then. Books … they were beautiful, not like now. There was this one book I had, you should have seen the binding. Stitched by hand, I reckon …’
He had stopped listening, recalling the news report from that morning. The war was petering out – things would soon free up. Life would get back to something resembling normal. It meant only one thing: a novel. He interrupted the man mid-sentence. ‘I’ll take it.’
‘That will be nine shillings and eightpence, sir. And a further ten shillings for the glass weight.’
He left the shop with the feeling of having been hit over the head with a rubber club.
*
Arriving home, he went immediately to his study, sat at his desk and, pushing the diary aside, set the new notebook in its place. He opened to the first page and wrote a title decisively: ‘For The Quick and the Dead’. He settled in for an afternoon of creative work, in a state of excitement he hadn’t experienced for as long as he could recall. He would be taking his holidays soon – a whole three weeks – and he could make a decent start in that time.
The story had been brewing in his head since 1940. It was to be a ‘proper’ novel, the sort every writer needed on his list, with its ‘proper’ subject of England in decline. Over a pot of tea, which he stewed several times, he worked up the themes: the fading pull of the Church; the men marching off in 1914, only to return on stretchers four years later; the coming of modernity, with its tractors replacing carthorses; the pointlessness of moneyless middle-class life; the protagonist’s death in Spain; Dunkirk. It would make him the novelist he’d always wanted to be, a sort of Galsworthy of the left.
After several hours’ work he read the notes over. Something was wrong. It could have been the script of In Which We Serve, which he’d recently seen at the movies. He knew the problem: it was a novel for 1940, and as outdated in 1943 as a 1914 recruitment elegy had been after Passchendaele. Something about the war – this war – had got inside people’s brains, changed them, threatening to make even the victors less free and their lives more squalid. That’s what any book about it had to explain.
By now his high spirits had faded, and a familiar feeling of failure enveloped him. He was still a journeyman hack, still chained to his Remington beneath his hand-painted shingle – ‘Reviews and essays £5’ – and still earning no more than a prole at his lathe. Little more than a drab clerk. The war had used him up and left him with less to show for his efforts than the wounds a soldier brings home from a campaign.
His mind wandered once more, so much so that he barely noticed what he did next. Turning a dozen or so pages, he wrote five words, underlining them to make them into a title: The Last Man in Europe. He knew what it had to be about: the revolution betrayed, man betrayed, the end of the utopia! That was the only story that mattered right now. Understand the great betrayal of human hopes over the previous decade and you understood everything; even the war could somehow be explained by it. Everything else he was writing had to be pushed aside.
He turned the page and kept writing. Ideas gushed out like water from an unblocked pipe, and it took him barely an hour to get the outline clear. Newspeak – rectification – the position of the proles – dual standards of thought – the ideologies of Bakerism and Ingsoc – the party slogans (War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.) – the Two Minutes Hate – war with Eastasia in 1974 and with Eurasia in 1978 – A, B & C present at a conference in 1976 – the disappearance of objective truth – the love affair – the rebellion of the individual – torture, confession and the recognition of insanity.
It was a nightmare world, to be sure, but would people think it too nightmarish, too fantastical to be taken seriously? Doubts began to crowd out his positive thoughts. No one would be interested in a story such as that … After all the people’s sacrifices, they want to be told things are going to get better … No publisher will touch it …
He was back where he had started. But something stopped him from ripping the notes out and returning to his previous idea. It was a conviction, which he could feel in his belly, that he was right. Life had changed for the worse, and if life had once been better, it could be better again. The future could be altered.
He went to the cupboard and rummaged around. Soon he found it: a box that had once contained expensive handmade chocolates, the sort of thing that could only have come from before the war, and which he vaguely remembered had been a wedding gift. He took it back to his desk, opened it and tipped out the clippings he had stored in it. Leafing through, he found what he had been looking for: the reports of the 1938 show trials. There they were, the photographs of Yagoda, Rykoff and Bukharin. No doubt the three of them had been written out of Soviet history books by now, but there they were, in the Times. He was right: the past had been altered. The revolution had promised so much more but had been betrayed. The past still existed, though, and its existence could be proved.
He read over his notes. It was all very rudimentary but he knew what he had to do: resign from his job and get writing straightaway. In two months’ time he would be free.
*
BBC recording studio, 200 Oxford Street, October. He was sitting next to the sound engineer, cigarette in hand, a pair of earphones on his head, helping with the flash cues at the recording of a radio play he had adapted from Ignazio Silone’s short story ‘The Fox’. He presumed the audience for these plays to be tiny, but it was better than producing propaganda.
A light came on and the recording began. The script before him said ‘PIG EFFECTS’ and the engineer added in the sound of several pigs snorting and squealing. When it stopped, he pushed a button to cue the actors, several of whom were poised behind the studio’s glass partition. One of them, playing the narrator, his hand over his left headphone, began reading from the script held in his right.
‘The birth started well and three little pigs hardly bigger than rats had already come into the world. There was practically nothing for Agostino to do than find a suitable name for each little pig as it appeared. There was some trouble with the fourth one, but after that it went well and there were seven altogether. Agostino held up the fourth pig, the one which had not wanted to be born.’
A second, more handsome, actor leaned into the microphone and began to read. ‘That’s a very poor pig. We’ll call this one Benito Mussolini.’
The sound engineer inserted an extra loud squeal and waited for him to hit the flash cue button again, but he was too slow. He had been distracted by a new idea.
*
Kilburn, December. He was sitting on the sluttish armchair beneath the lamp, reading to Eileen, who was wrapped in a blanket on the couch.
‘So, Snowball is Trotsky, right?’ she asked.
‘Right.’
‘And the chickens who’ve just confessed to working for him – they’re in the Show Trials?’
‘Yes.’
‘About to be slaughtered?’
‘Pour encourager les autres.’
‘How very sad.’ She took another drag of her cigarette. ‘The hens … Why haven’t they got names? You named all the others. Even the goat! Which, by the way, you should change to Muriel.’
‘After that fussy old dam of ours.’
‘She wasn’t fussy at all. Just intelligent; she had your measure completely. You know, for some reason I always picture goats wearing glasses.’
‘Yes, that’s a good point.’
‘Anyway, the hens?’
‘Best not to give hens names; makes it harder to eat them.’
‘We ate our old cockerel, Ford.’
‘We were hungry, remember? Anyway, he was a right bastard, as I recall.’
‘This book – it’s going to be your most successful yet, I can just tell. Even children will like it.’ She took another drag. ‘Although I suspect parents might have to censor it for the really little ones.’
‘Especially when I kill off the carthorse.’
‘Oh, poor Boxer! Say you won’t! There’ll be tears at bedtime.’
‘Revolutions never have happy endings – that’s the whole point.’
‘When I read it to our little boy or girl – if we can ever find one to adopt – I shall say Boxer joined the circus to give rides to children.’
‘Believe me, darling, upbeat endings never work.’