by Jessica Mann
“So what do you think of Forway’s U.D.I.?” I asked her.
She thought for a while before answering. “I feel it has been forced upon us. It wasn’t an easy thing to decide. But how else can we save Forway? No matter which of the three Powers wins at The Hague, all of them are sure to like the idea of the oil rig. Our arguments about the survival of a small but viable community don’t seem to register when there is oil and money at stake.”
“Is this community viable? It’s too small. Any crisis and you need outside help.”
“Freya’s generosity with the fruits of Pedro Barnes’s genius has made us able to choose where the outside help comes from. We can buy it in.”
“Everything?”
“Well, take my own work, for example; it’s very different from general practice on the mainland. Of course we don’t have those dreadful epidemics now; leprosy was endemic here in the seventeenth century, and there was a fearful outbreak of smallpox in the eighteenth, started by infection from the clothes of an islander who died on the mainland—his belongings were sent home to his family. That was the worst. But then there was cholera in the eighteen forties—the usual story of small isolated communities. And a bad flu outbreak just before the First World War, and another just after. We still suffer from ‘boat colds,’ even now.”
“Boat colds?”
“New infections visitors bring in. Every time a ship used to call, the whole island was sneezing two days later. But that’s more of an inconvenience than a disaster, and I can manage most things, if it’s a case of having to. General practitioners on the mainland would be astonished at what one can do without the high technology. Like the Chinese ‘barefoot doctors,’ I’ve done a course in osteopathy, and in homeopathic medicine, and if necessary, I choose where to send my patients. Dublin, Paris, London … money is power.”
“Muscle is power,” I replied. “Three hundred Forway men won’t be able to fight a detachment of marines. Or a gunboat. Half of you are kids and the other half geriatrics.”
“What can we do but try it, if the only alternative is evacuating the island?” she asked unanswerably.
I said, “I just wish I couldn’t foresee so much trouble. There are too many outsiders who could have an interest in this.”
Chapter 13
This narrative is obviously not about my own experiences only. I have collected the material, to make the story worth telling, so that I know now, as I did not at the time, that Tamara had told Mr. Black that she suspected outside interest too; but then, he had already told her that she was to trace to their source the invisible strings pulling the puppets. She also told him something that I did not notice as soon as she did: that most of the people of what one might call “active age” of Forway did not really have much time to think about politics.
It is necessary to understand that life there was always hard. Even in an era when food could be imported and help asked, except in the most isolating weather, those who lived on the island had to be able to take care of themselves and their dependants, and taking care of people on Forway was extremely time-consuming.
The effect of this simple fact of island life was that while some of the islanders were indulging in theories and fantasies about future independence and past legend (since the days of universal education one often heard allusions to Atlantis, Lyonesse, and Hy Brazil on Forway), most islanders were too busy scraping their livings from land and sea to think much about anything else. Far more important than the threats or plans for next year was the weather forecast for the next day: could one go fishing, plant seeds, repair the roof? Had enough turf been cut? Would it rain to refill the water butt? “It will keep the old ones happy,” I heard one of the Yetts women remark about independence. And Jeannie Windows said it would keep them out of mischief. Mischief was something for which only the very young and the very old had time.
Perhaps it is natural, then, that few people in central London took the reports of the planned U.D.I. seriously either. I have been able to find out a certain amount of what went on inside government circles that May, for the old school network, deplorable but useful, gives me access to some sources of information.
On one side of St. James’s Park, a suggestion that The Visit should be postponed was made only to brush aside, and at the other, Mr. Black’s warning was treated with equal derision. So I hear, at least from my informant—whose identity I will not disclose. But I’m happy to say that Sylvester Crawford told me what went on at an editorial meeting of his current paper, his first since returning from El Salvador. I had mentioned U.D.I. to Thea on the telephone. Nobody had warned me it was a secret. Sylvester had offered the titbit about Forway to his editor, but the story was treated as a foretaste of the impending silly season. The conversation initially centred on dolly republics, Lilliput, and The Mouse That Roared. Flags of convenience, red-light islands, unlimited gambling, and tax havens were also mentioned.
The editor was as solemn and highbrow as his paper. He faced this problem, like everything else he encountered in life’s obstacle race, seeing pitfalls and minefields ahead.
“It isn’t as though they have done anything illegal,” he said.
“Yet,” said the Foreign Editor.
“It’s a nice legal point anyway,” contributed the legal affairs correspondent.
“Incitement to disaffection?”
The Foreign Editor drew a picture of a pimple in an expanse of sea and topped it with a Union Jack. “I don’t think we need pay too much attention. It was probably all dreamed up by their tourist board. Have they got a tourist board?”
“Devolution is in the air.”
The editor decided to send for the defence correspondent, who was in the Athenaeum discussing the defence tactics of the Carthaginians in the first Punic War with an Air Vice Marshall. When he arrived, he demanded maps and charts and his mini-computer and blinded everyone with expertise. The Foreign Editor expanded his doodle, to show a crowd of vultures waiting for the carcass of a dying animal.
“The trouble with independence,” said Legal Affairs, “is that they would be too rich.”
“How do you make that out?” asked the editor.
“I wish we had their problems,” said the Foreign Editor and started drawing pound notes on his doodle.
“Territorial waters, tax haven, fishing rights—and oil. I imagine that’s what all this is really about.”
“So that’s how the milk got into the coconut.”
“Who would have thought that a miserable rock in the Atlantic would be so attractive,” said Home Affairs.
“My dear girl, why do you think our ancestors went round painting them red?”
The editor naturally took for granted that anyone who wrote for the Watchman would not even consider the use of force. He said, “How could they be stopped, anyway?”
“Starve them out?”
“Run a blockade?”
“Sanctions?” said the editor in the tone of one using a dirty word.
“I didn’t necessarily mean food,” Home Affairs said huffily. “They will need other things.”
“And they will have plenty of willing suppliers,” said Foreign Affairs. “I dare say a cargo of gift-wrapped caviar is on its way already.”
“And Hershey Bars.”
“And ships bearing gifts from France, and from Ireland too. Damn it all,” Legal Affairs protested, “we don’t really know whom they belong to anyway.”
“We could refuse them the facilities of the Health Service.”
“There’s an even better one in France. Didn’t France once claim the island?”
“Stop their Social Security benefits.”
“Refuse them landing rights at our ports and airports.”
“Cancel their passports.”
“You’re making me feel quite sorry for them,” said Legal Affairs.
“Well,” said the editor, “I know what the government will do. Sweet F.A. I’ll lay you anything you like that the Prime Minister
is telling the Cabinet that they must be treated like naughty children.”
“Spanked?”
“Shut up in a dark cupboard?”
“Deprived of sweeties?”
“You must have a fine collection of delinquent kids, I must say. No, they’ll do what I always do with a naughty child.”
Several of those present recalled with horror the hacks on the shin and the insults they had suffered from the editor’s numerous children.
“The P.M.,” said the editor, “will simply take no notice at all.”
But as Foreign Affairs muttered to Sylvester as they left the meeting, “If we don’t and the Russians do, the Americans will.”
So Mr. Black, and his nameless colleagues, were the only officials to take the rumour seriously. He had his own plans, both of which he had made before ever his masters heard of the problem.
I have seen Mr. Black (in the distance, at a canteen table) since those days on Forway, and I can imagine his enigmatic smile as he read the proofs of an article to appear in that week’s issue of the Watchman. Of that we heard nothing in Forway until later in the week.
Chapter 14
Thetis Lisle invited me to dinner that night. I believe she wanted to protect me from my father, but she said that her son, Humphrey, was longing to talk to me about writing. “He doesn’t often get a chance to meet a real writer. Only the people who come for a trip here and then write something to set it against their income tax.”
“I don’t know that I count as a real writer.”
“Nonsense, Magnus, you won the Peacock Prize.”
So when the time came for me to rise from my bed of pain, I simply walked through the door. Another patient had come by then, Thetty Yetts, who intended to start a new tradition in Christian names. Whatever its sex, her baby would be called Independence.
Godfrey’s grandfather had lived in the Lisles’ house until his wife’s death freed him to begin on The Castle. The formidable Jean Lisle, Godfrey’s grandmother, had left uneradicated traces in the house, and Godfrey and Thetis seemed very snug amid their Victoriana. They had even left the pelmet hanging from the mantelpiece, and the browning photographs in tarnished frames upon it. Apart from their surroundings, however, the Lisles were a thoroughly modern family. The clothes worn by Humphrey and Kirstie could have come—probably did come—straight from the trendy shops of London. Thetis fed us on Greek-style shepherd’s pie, made with aubergines and rather a lot of garlic, and we drank rough red wine.
I asked where the exotic vegetables came from.
“Israel, via Covent Garden.”
“Will you still get them after U.D.I.?”
“I don’t mind using local potatoes instead,” Thetis said equably.
“We may make some separate trade agreements,” Godfrey suggested. “None of these problems are insoluble.”
“What will you do after independence, Humphrey? Are you going to be a doctor or a lawyer, too?”
“I had been planning to go into the Royal Navy, actually. I thought of training to be a marine designer. But in the circumstances …”
“That’s not the only place to do the training,” Godfrey said. “Nice though Greenwich is.”
“Yes, but I’ll have to do something that will be useful here, won’t I? Like you and Mum, I mean. Forway’s going to need it.”
He did not look as though he intended sarcasm. I said, “You feel your place will be here, Humphrey?” He shrugged his shoulders, and Thetis said, “Don’t imagine that we have brainwashed him, Magnus. It’s all his own idea.”
For that matter, nobody had brainwashed Thetis either. She had planned out her life at a very early age. I remembered her well at sixteen, four years older than myself. Elsewhere one might have derided her bossiness and called her “the head-girl type,” and she might even have been a leader of girl guides and hockey captain. On Forway qualities that seem a little ludicrous to the hypersophisticated were valuable, and Thetis was admired then as now for her resourcefulness. I wondered whether Humphrey and Kirstie knew that their mother had once saved my life.
Annie Foggo was too grown-up by then to want to come out fishing any more. She and Thetis were twins, but Annie had decided to leave school and would not have looked out of place on the Kings Road. Thetis still looked like a schoolgirl, unsophisticated in worldly things but wise in coping with natural ones. I rather fancied Annie, since I was precocious, but it was Thetis who kept us company in the boat. She and my mother were friends.
I was twelve, she was sixteen, and when the boom of the capsizing boat knocked me unconscious, it was she who held my face out of the water and propelled my inert body to the shore. During the following weeks it was she who nursed my inert mind, using, from common sense, the methods of psychiatric care that she was later to learn in her medical training. I went back to school at the beginning of the next term without being haunted by nightmares. The headmaster had expected a nervous wreck, which would have been a disaster in “common entrance year,” but he got the same boy who had cheerfully left in July for the summer holidays with his mother; and I got a scholarship to Eton, too.
Godfrey was lucky to have Thetis, though neither he nor she would think of their lives together in those terms, for it had always seemed and been inevitable that they should marry and take over Forway. It looked as though Humphrey was accepting the same responsibility. The Lisles accepted their lifelong duties gracefully. I envied them all.
After dinner we sat by the fire of spitting driftwood, and Godfrey made notes for the speech he would have to make as Island Captain.
“Will you wear your chain, Dad?” Humphrey asked.
“And your red velvet gown?” said Kirstie.
Thetis raised her eyes from her tapestry. “Do, Godfrey, you’ll slay them.”
“I don’t need all that stuff. They know who I am without it.”
“Look.” Thetis passed me two of the photographs from the mantelpiece, one of Godfrey himself, and one of his grandfather, each wearing a swathe of velvet and ermine, with a linked chain and medallion around his neck.
“I like this one best.” Humphrey reached down another picture, of Grandfather Lisle in his regalia surrounded by seven other men wearing similar, if inferior, robes. “Grandfather brought all that stuff from London.”
“It seems incongruous on Forway,” I said.
“We are too dour here,” Godfrey agreed. “That’s what my grandfather told Granny Jeannie when he brought her here from the Clyde. ‘A dour people,’ he warned her. But she said they were no different from people all over. They needed soup in their bellies and tracts in their hands. She was always handing out tracts to seamen.”
“And she wore stays all her life,” Thetis added, stretching her own trousered legs luxuriously. “Can you imagine, stays and crinolines in our winds? She never left them off.”
Kirstie Lisle was lying on the hearthrug colouring in a mathematical doodle. “Do you think we’ll have a dance for independence, Mummy? You could wear a crinoline.”
“Can you see your father on a dance floor?”
“I don’t know,” Godfrey protested. “I might perform the odd gyration in that cause.” He was a mild-looking man with gentle eyes and a soft beard. Not dynamic, but reliable, and at ease with his life. He was surrounded by now with quotation dictionaries. “Do you think I should quote Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury?”
“What’s wrong with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg?” Thetis said seriously. She had never been frivolous; even as a child, her work was directed and her words well spent.
“Or the American Declaration of Independence, that’s a good model,” Humphrey said. He began to declaim. “We hold these things to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
“I have been looking through the reference books,” Godfrey said. “Cicero. Demosthenes. Winston Churchill. I feel there ought to be grand phrases for the occasion.”
“The trouble is that all the modern equivalents have been debased,”
I said.
“I know. I don’t want to stand up in The Square and talk about things like the Devolution of Power, or Self-Determination, or even Independence, really. All the words have so many overtones.”
“Or undertones.”
“I thought perhaps I could find some language that modern commentators hadn’t used already,” Godfrey said anxiously. “Something stately.”
“Darling, you are silly,” Thetis said. “You can’t make stately speeches. That’s not what Forway needs. You’ll probably say something like ‘That’s it then, folks. On our own now.’”
“And the church bells will chime,” said Humphrey.
“And we’ll say three cheers,” offered Kirstie.
And I said sourly, “And the parachuters will float down from the sky.”
“I shall almost expect the skies to fall after that,” Godfrey said in a sombre voice. “Don’t imagine we’ve reached this decision lightly, Magnus. I once swore allegiance to the sovereign we are deserting.”
“But in those days you believed that the sovereign would protect you in return,” Thetis reminded him. I have often noticed that women are less influenced than men by such considerations as oaths and formal loyalties.
“Never mind, Daddy, perhaps they’ll make you a sovereign instead. Then I can be a princess.”
A peaceful family scene—interrupted, at that moment, by a distant noise, a low, reverberating rumble.
“Is that thunder?” Thetis said.
But Godfrey was already on his feet, shrugging himself into his anorak and doing up his shoe-laces. “Come on, Humphrey,” he said. Humphrey was already at the door. I followed them.
“Not you, Magnus, you aren’t well,” Thetis called, but I went out into the windy night with the men and stood watching them as they quartered the sky with nose, ear, and eye, like hounds. Other people were coming out onto The Square too, more puzzled than alarmed.