Barnhill, Jura, April 1947. Animal Farm had succeeded beyond everyone’s hopes, and he could feel Fred Warburg’s impatience for a follow-up radiating all the way from London. He somehow had to hold him at bay – to write under such pressure was intolerable. He stared at the letter he was writing his publisher. Finishing the rough draft … breaking its back … hoping to finish in early 1948, barring illness … he too had begun to resort to imprecisions. The truth was his lungs had worsened over the winter; what he needed more than anything, if he was going to finish the book, was for his health to hold.
He had spent the winter and early spring in London, expecting to find it rejuvenated after its second summer of peace, but the buildings were unrepaired, the trains still packed and the food as spare and revolting as ever. Even bread, which had remained white and unrationed throughout the war, had become dark-coloured and required coupons to obtain – all to help feed starving Germany, which overnight had become Britain’s ally. With coal in short supply, he had been forced to break up old furniture and even Ricky’s wooden toys to use as firewood. Heating water for washing had been out of the question, and he recalled with particular displeasure peeling off sticky socks and underwear to be replaced with others slightly less adhesive. Only the absence of rocket bombs and the blackout reminded him that the war was actually over.
Compared to the sun-touched country people on his island, Londoners were dark and ill-favoured, short and sickly. The heroes of the war had vanished, replaced by a race of beetles scurrying around under the sideboard, competing for crumbs. Churchill, Cripps, the airmen who had nightly flown to Berlin, those who had kept watch for fires, even the women who had made the thingummybobs – all had lost the war’s nobility but not its privations. The war-winning statesmen had become statistic-generating bureaucrats; the aircrew were now factory hands; the firemen now clerks; the Stakhanovite women of the aircraft industries, now widowed kitchen drudges with hungry, screaming children and dust in the creases of their skin. Winston, Julia, O’Brien, Mr Charrington, Parsons and the workers at the ministries, even the proles in their pubs – all now entered his mind like ghosts emerging from the smoking ruins of the London left behind by the failed revolution and the war.
Being in London had brought back something else: the dream. Working on the novel in the horror of the city had been impossible; instead his mind sought out the origins of his nocturnal vision. He began writing about his days at preparatory school.
His mind had started doing this sort of thing regularly of late. The older a man got, he found, the greater the proportion of time he spent living in the past. For hours on end, sitting at his desk, pen in hand, he found himself walking through the world of his childhood. It was a period he couldn’t think about without a certain feeling of terror – of the sort a goldfish might feel if flung into a tank of pike. He remembered from prep the inedible food, the forbidden books which he and Connolly had somehow managed to smuggle into their dorms, the fearsome beatings and forced confessions of misbehaviour, but mostly the constant feeling of being under surveillance. He had associated this with those giant posters of Kitchener, whose eyes and finger appeared to follow you in every direction. It had given him a feeling of being imprisoned; of being denied happiness; of feeling that no matter how hard he wanted something, it would always be snatched away at the last moment.
*
Eton College Chapel, June 1918. ‘Abbey, N.R., Lieutenant, Grenadier Guards, killed France, 12th April. Acland-Troyte, H.L., Lieutenant-Colonel, Devonshire Regiment, killed Mesopotamia, 17th April. Arnott, J., Military Cross, Captain 15th Hussars, killed France, 30th March …’ The list, which the provost, M.R. James, was sombrely reading, seemed interminable.
‘Lascelles, G.E., Second Lieutenant, Rifle Brigade, killed France, 28th March.’
A murmur went through the packed stalls. Cyril Connolly nudged him and said in a low voice, ‘Lascelles – he was in Sixth last year. Fine oar.’
He hazily pictured Lascelles’ face, but the memory faded as fast as it had appeared.
The war! He thought of the parade ground last week, packed with a thousand inattentive pupils and masters. After nearly four years, the Eton Rifles had turned into a ragged affair, it having become fashionable to treat all things military as a bore and to put in the minimum effort. Some of the more advanced thinkers of the senior elections had taken to booing lowly whenever the chaplain, wearing khaki and army boots under his cassock, invoked God to urge them to greater exertions on the range. The war had already been won, several times over – they had been told variations of this regularly since 1914.
But that day something had changed. The commanding officer of the Officers’ Training Corps, a small, greying man of indeterminate age, flourished a piece of paper and read out General Haig’s Special Order of the Day: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight it out to the end.’ A wave of understanding rippled through the ranks: Britain was in danger of losing. There was a straightening of backs and weapons. Even among the worst slackers, he sensed a transformation, an instant removal of doubt. Even he, the most notorious rejecter of orthodoxy, felt it.
Just before, he and the others had thought that the war was futile, that conscripted eighteen-year-old Germans were just cannon-fodder like themselves, and that they, the young, were being hurled into a giant pit by stupid old men for no good reason. Yet now he found it impossible to resist the same nationalistic fever that infected the others. His secret loathing of ‘them’ – the dim-witted, the unthinking, the schoolmasters and even the King himself – was, he found, suddenly turned onto Krupps, U-boats, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser. He felt a sudden impulse to pick up his rifle and smash its butt into the nearest enemy, and knew with a certainty that should a German soldier suddenly walk into the school, that is what he would do. Hate, he realised, is one of the hardest of all emotions to resist, especially when in a crowd. A spontaneous rendition of ‘God Save the King’ rang out and, unconsciously, he’d joined in, singing at the top of his voice.
He dragged himself back to today’s chapel service. The list of names finally ended.
Old James seemed on the verge of tears. ‘Boys, those fifty-four boys whose names I have just read out, who have fallen in just the last term, take to more than one thousand the number of Etonians lost in the service of the King since August 1914.’ James closed his book and nodded to Bobbie Longden, the most admired boy of their election, who marched up and replaced him at the pulpit.
Longden’s loud voice boomed through the chapel: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow …’
Another elegy, he thought, barely listening. Clichéd rubbish.
A few moments later, Longden’s voice became savage. ‘We are the dead.’
Blair snapped to, as if violently kicked. A tremor ran through his bowels. A similar sensation struck the pews of teenagers, the oldest of whom were seventeen and just months from becoming infantry subalterns or airmen. They were corpses waiting to be sent to the grave.
For effect, he suspected, the rebellious Longden paused and repeated the line.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
One by one the war would consume them. As they filed out past the roll of honour, one of the college workmen was already adding the new names to the wall.
‘This war’s never going to end, is it?’ said Connolly. ‘It will be our turn soon. We are the dead.’
‘We’re not dead yet,’ he replied.
*
Something distracted him out of the corner of his eye, ending his reverie: a large brown rat. It must have crept in while he had been motionless, gazing out the window towards the sunny field and the calm sea. With the coming of spring they had multiplied like bacilli in a dish; the farmhouse was crawling with the filthy brutes. He had seen them devouring a dead stag on the path down to the beach and was revolted. Another time he saw a buzzard carrying one off in its claws. Now they were laying siege to Barnhill, drawn by the calving livestock and the food he had stockpiled. He could corner and beat the house’s many mice to death quite easily, but these monsters were too big and too numerous.
He tried to keep perfectly still, looking for something to throw. He inched his hand towards a glass paperweight on his desk, then flung it, but the creature was too fast, slipping through a gap in the wainscoting, and the missile bounced harmlessly off the wall and rolled under the bed.
He completed his letter to Warburg, slid it into an envelope and took it downstairs to the pile in the hallway. Avril was in the kitchen, reading the local newspaper. Along with Richard, they were alone now, apart from holidaying visitors.
‘Eric,’ his sister said, ‘apparently there’s a plague of rats on all the islands hereabouts. Something to do with the dead cattle and the bad spring keeping the hunting birds down.’
‘No surprise there. The swine are everywhere, even upstairs.’
She flinched. ‘Not in the bedrooms?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘It says the medical bods are telling parents to be wary of leaving babies and young children unattended,’ she continued. ‘Two children at Ardlussa have been bitten on their faces while sleeping in their prams.’ She looked up from the paper. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘Oh, yes. In Spain I saw one chew the leather off a man’s boot while he was sleeping.’
‘Ooh! It gives me the shivers.’
‘Rats took over the hostel where I lived in the war. You’d get up for breakfast and the kitchen would be swarming with them, licking the unwashed bowls and cutlery. Revolting.’
She threw the paper down. ‘The bedrooms! We have to do something to protect Ricky.’
He took what remained of the morning off from writing and set to work. Determining the rats’ many routes into the house from their droppings, he blocked up holes and set a number of traps along the run they had established into the larder. He set a number more in the byre. The ancient traps, which he had discovered on a shelf in the barn, were a slightly sinister-looking French type: flat-bottomed cylindrical cages, shaped like hourglasses. They were divided into two chambers, the second of which was entered through a funnel-like opening, ingeniously designed to spring shut once the doomed creature was inside.
The next morning, he entered the byre to the sound of high-pitched squeals and the rattling of metal. One of the disgusting creatures was leaping about in a state of frenzy in its cage. He pictured the floor of the barn crawling with them in the middle of the night, like a moving carpet, and the vision caused him to shudder. It was a massive specimen – one of the largest he had ever seen – and it stood against the wire of its prison and eyed him, baring its teeth in a show of defiance. It seemed to be trying to claw its way towards him through the ancient, rusted wire, alternately scratching and biting the thin iron bars. He had no doubt that, if freed, the creature would attack.
Grimacing, he lifted the cage by its handle, and, holding it as far from his own body as possible, carried it to a barrel of water and dropped it in. The creature thrashed about but the commotion soon stopped. He raised the cage and the drowned body floated to the surface, belly-up, with bloated fleas swimming away from it. He walked outside, clicked the lever that opened the rear of the cage and threw the carcass onto the waiting bonfire heap.