by A. N. Wilson
She was in her bedroom, her childish bedroom, in one of those fogbound West Midland towns. Had Dad just finished reading George MacDonald, as he so often did, one of those strange sequences where you can’t tell whether someone is dreaming, or whether the world is being changed, and you’ve stepped into a new place, which both is, and is not, your bedroom? Curdie blinks . . . Is that a beautiful lady or just a pile of straw and sacking? Is it a green carpet, or a meadow, running with streams of living water?
No, it was Smethwick, or Dudley. That was where it seemed to be, but, rather as in that confused state of mind, when we wake in a strange bed, perhaps in a hotel, and are not sure where we are, or as in those ever-vivid George MacDonald moments. Curtains flapped out of existence. The sad West Midland fogs were swallowed in dust and heat. She could see the large yellow helmet at the window, and something resembling an axe smashing the coat of arms of Bishop Gladstone. Her English ears heard a Huia voice calling Ilinor! Ilinor! Only it wasn’t Mum’s voice, it was a man-Huia. Don’t speak to strangers, Nillie. Promise me that, you must NIVER speak with strangers. And she could hear the voice, a man’s voice – Ilinor? Nillie? . . . Are you all right, Nillie – on holiday in Wales when she was nine. She had wandered from Mum and Dad, slithered down some tufts of thick, springy grass and found a spot, just beneath the clifftop, where golden rod and field scabious grew, and she had sat and sat there, with her apple and Oliver Twist, with the great ocean blue beneath her – Nellie! Nellie! Mum’s anxious Huia voice which made her name sound like Nillie – and then Dad – and she had heard the fear in their voices, before she had replied – I’m here . . . But now it was a man calling – Eleanor, Eleanor! She recognized his invisible, sinister, alluring face. Oh, I know you – you’re a Stranger. You are Death. I can’t speak to you. I can’t speak to strangers. Break into a run. Just run for it. Try screaming, even though no sound comes to your mouth. – You just stay nice and calm, Eleanor, we’re going to get you out of there, and she had wanted to say, you can’t come in, it’s not safe, and it was as if she was watching it all happening to somebody else – she could not speak, and when she tried to move she did not know if it was the room moving, her moving, the whole tower moving – I think she’s alive, just dazed, the voice was saying and she was thinking, I’m safe here on my clifftop, don’t take me back to the world, I’m ready to go, I am floating. O, I am so tired, my lover. Take me, Death, take me. Come away, come away, Death, and in sad cypress let me be laid, Fly away, fly away, I’ve got you, now Eleanor, just relax, is that the Angel in a yellow helmet or the firefighter not a friend not a friend greet my poor corpse, oh Nilly, you little silly, as Mum hugged her, coming through the gorse and the bracken at the top of the cliff and finding Mum there – We thought we’d lost you! Oh, Nilly, we thought we’d lost you – but it’s all right now, Mum, I’m here, I’m here – Mum is there now, and she is coming, Eleanor is leaving behind the body in the fireman-angel’s arms, and moving towards Mum. Oh, it will be so easy, so gentle, to die . . . In the bright yellow light beyond her eyes, she can see her mother’s smooth, smiling face. What about Dad? I can’t leave him – He’ll be OK, we’ll soon see him, Our Nill, we’ll see him . . . He’ll follow us, Nilly, he’ll soon be on his way . . . Part of his host hath crossed the flood and part is crossing now . . . Oh, Mum, I’ve missed you so, so much, here all is love, the fire and the rose are one, ma già volgeva il mio disiro e il velle, sì come rota ch’egualmente è mossa . . . Ialemoi tous thanatos apueis . . . she had just been reading that line before the first thud of the Quake, how did she render it? It is the Dead you cry to in your lament! . . . that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body . . . Barnaby? Is that you making love to me? Barnaby Farrell is the last person on earth I have kissed as a lover, and I do not love . . . no, Doug, I don’t want that, no – I want to make LOVE, not be slobbered over by you, Doug, I want to MAKE LOVE, not just HAVE SEX, what a phrase, and our souls washed through his most precious . . . O mistress mine, where are you roaming . . . In the yellow dusty light, through the choking dust and heat, Mum’s arm is stretched out, not Mum’s arm – That’s right, Eleanor, just hold on, hold on, darling. No! It is not Mum’s arm, tugging her towards Death, it is another arm, a young, smooth arm, drawing her towards life and love. Her cheek is held against the hot, dusty, shiny yellow of the fireman’s protective gilet, but it is not his arm that holds her, O stay and hear your true love’s coming, who is this that holds her? Who? Who? The long, bare girl’s arm which reaches out to her, follow it with your eye, Nellie, follow the long white fingers which stroke you, up to the bare elbow, the round white shoulder on which her thick springy mouse-blonde hair cascades, look up into her brown eyes, lover, look at her, look at Ingrid, live for her, my darling.
Rats ran. I’d never been aware of lots of rats in our neighbourhood, but evidently they were everywhere, all over the city. Our Harrow neighbours told me they were scurrying in crowds, across what remained of their floors. You’d go out on the lawn, and feel their fur and their cold tails slithering past your ankles.
George Eliot watched them from her cage. She was beside herself with terror, at all the movement and shaking. The cage had fallen over on its side, and she alternated. Sometimes, in impotent anger, she flapped her wings to be let out, and sometimes, she was just lying on her side.
She heard voices.
—Jeez, Norm, there’s a fucking bird.
—Take it.
As darkness fell, the city was still reverberating, quivering. There were several aftershocks that day. They continued for months. Not every day. But you would suddenly feel the ground beneath you shudder. You’d be in a room and the picture would fall off the wall. You’d be trying to get on your bike, and you’d think – hey, I’m not drunk, but I feel, dizzy, sort of, and you’d fall over. And that was because the ground beneath you, and the bike, had given a little jump. Since the first big Quake to date, there have been over seven thousand aftershocks. So that first day, you wondered, will the earth ever stop moving?
Ever been seasick? When the heaving of the waves just won’t stop, and you’ve thrown up everything inside you and still your body heaves and retches, and the cruel movement of the sea just won’t STOP and you think you are going MAD? Maybe you haven’t. People don’t have that sort of seasickness nowadays unless they are sportswomen/men yachting. Read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. He’s good on the subject. He was sick on a regular basis for three years. In his case, puking became the habit of a lifetime.
It was a bit like that with the Quake. Every time there was a tremor, and aftershock, you thought – Christ, this is another of the fuckers. If you were in a building, you wanted to get out pdq, if you were outside you looked about anxiously thinking – will that car over there fly into the air and land on my head? Will that tree suddenly uproot itself and land on me? It’s just so, SO weird. All the expressions you used to use – safe as houses, firm as a rock, with your feet on the ground . . . They all become jokes. Houses are the least safe things you ever saw. Rocks are like fireworks. The last place you’d put your feet is on the ground, you’d rather put your feet on the fire.
But that first night, we had not got into the aftershocks routine, so . . . Every little aftershock was a torture. I can’t write about all the destruction and loss of that day. Not at the moment. I just can’t go on with describing myself, standing there, looking at the rubble of the wrecked IBC building, and knowing that Mum was underneath the rubble. I just can’t write it. Course, I’ll tell you what’s happened to everyone in our story, but not at the moment. Just for now, it is so upsetting, just thinking about it, that I’m going to have to take a break, as I remember the shadows falling on our city. In fact, I do not even remember anything about the few hours after that man in uniform (police? paramedic?) took my arm and told me there was nothing I could do, while I watched through the clouds of dust, as they took bodies out of what had been the IBC building. One of which was Mum.
Later, later
that day, afternoon, evening, whatever, I was in shock. And I was somewhere in a hospital corridor, shivering, and drinking sweet tea. But I do remember, before They – who were they? Some very kind people – took me to the hospital, I remember one of the truly weirdest things about that day. We were somehow all being led away from the desolation which was the IBC building, back through Howley Street and across what remained of Argyle Square. The police had cleared the whole square. Our ruined Cathedral loomed over the scene, a vast, holed ship about to go under cruel waters.
And as we crossed the square, in the gloaming, with the light falling, and the dust still filling our lungs, and the ground shaking every few minutes, we heard this deep baritone voice, singing through the shadows.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come.
’Twas grace that brought us safe thus far
And grace will lead us home.
As night fell, the town became completely dark. Some electric appliances, funnily enough, seemed to work, even after the Quake, but the street lamps went out. I think I spent that night in the hospital, so I’ll finish this dreadful day with what I’ve pieced together from the accounts of others.
—What would we want with a fucking bird?
—Take it. Yer never know. The cage’d fetch something.
The two men, one of whom was evidently Norm, were standing with electric pocket flashlights in what remained of Deirdre Hadley’s kitchen. ‘Evidently Norm’ because George Eliot was able to tell Deirdre, and later the police, that his friend had kept saying, Jeez, Norm.
George Eliot felt them picking up her cage and setting it upright. For this she was grateful. She stared at the unfamiliar faces which had pressed themselves against the wire meshing.
—It’s a parrot, I’d reckon.
—Course it’s a fucking parrot.
—Could be a budgie.
—Christ, you’re stupid. Don’t open the fucking cage or we’d never get the fucking bird . . .
But there was no need to finish this sentence, because the advice went unheeded, and George Eliot was not one to hang about. She gave a fierce peck to the tobacco-sticky thumb which was resting on the latch of the cage, heard the cry of pain with some satisfaction, and broke free.
—Jeez, Norm, don’t blame me.
—Course I bleeding blame you, I told you not to open the fucking cage.
—Let’s take the cage.
—Put it on the cart.
They piled the parrot cage on top of next door’s lawn-mower, and the small heap of laptops and televisions which were assembled on the large barrow, and moved off into the dark. The random collections continued until the sad dawning of the next day. All through the dark hours, as people were gathered into temporary rescue centres, huddled in church halls and gyms and garages, comforting one another as best they could through each aftershock, their shaken, wrecked homes were being plundered. Scarcely a shop went unrobbed. The scavengers were picking them over even as the earth rumbled and masonry fell. Into vans which could scarcely negotiate the potholes and fissures and swamps of liquefaction which had once been roads, wobbled and lurched from shop to shop, weighed down with loot – washing machines, televisions, computers, clothes, three-piece suites, toys were indiscriminately seized. Most of them were by now broken, or so filthy as to be unsaleable, but it did not stop the greedy hands which reached out for them.
Deirdre knew it was her duty, as one of our MPs, to be in one of the rescue centres. She had got the first train back as far as the small town of Weston, twenty miles north of Aberdeen. From there, it had been quite a journey, not least because the police were urging everyone to leave our city, and there were barriers closing the highway. She’d paid a Tangata cabbie called Elizabeth to defy the police, and somehow or other they’d got through.
The actual drive, until they came to the outskirts of Aberdeen, was relatively easy, except where the road had been torn open by the Quake, and there were large squelchy patches, hundreds of yards across, of liquefaction. The Exodus was crawling the other way, cars crowded with people, with belongings dangling from their roofs – bikes, baby-buggies, one had a harpsichord strapped to the roof, and reminded Deirdre of the moment in Pepys, during the Great Fire of London, when he watched his neighbours carrying spinets out of their houses.
Elizabeth, who was a fearless driver, negotiated the darkness, the potholes, the liquefaction and the fear and they somehow were led, by the wings of the angels, to Harrow, and the cavernous church hall of St Thomas of Canterbury. It was late when they got there. Some of the families were already hunkered down in sleeping bags. Elizabeth ate a well-deserved lamb burger washed down with tea. How many gallons of tea we Aberdonians all drank that night! Deirdre set to work at once, helping to sort out the blankets, clothes, shopping bags full of tinned food, which had spontaneously been assembled. By some wonderful chance, while she was handing out trays of tea in one such meeting place, her phone rang, and it was Barnaby.
—You OK? was his voice.
—Much better now you’ve rung. Stig?
—I thought I’d lost him. He went on an outing to the zoo.
Barnaby’s voice was trembling. Now he was openly weeping.
—Oh, Deirdre, the cages were blown sky high, the animals got loose. They found Stig face to face with a crocodile . . .
—But he’s all right?
—The crocodile took one look at Stig’s Buddy and ran.
There was a moment of laughter.
—Who was the Buddy?
—He says, Dad, Ella’s really scary. Even the croc was scared, Dad . . . Oh, Deirdre, if he’d stayed at school. You heard . . .
—What?
—The new block of classrooms in Opportunity One collapsed. About ten kids were killed.
—Oh, Barnaby, oh my dear.
Down their phones they wept together. We were all having conversations like this with one another over the next few days. They got Mum out of the rubble in the IBC building after she’d been under there ten hours. It was dark, and they did it under arc-lights. Gill Frang, her producer, was dead. Gill was alive when they got her out of the rubble, but she died in hospital. When Mum came to, she told me she’d gone out into the corridor, because she needed to smoke, and was making her way down the passage when the Quake struck. She happened to be standing in a doorway and although she was buried in rubble, the lintel stopped the heaviest masonry from falling on her head.
Of the other figures in our story, not all were so lucky. Charlie Nicolson and his wife survived. Ella, who had saved Stig from the crocodile, and become the heroine of the Zoo Outing, was alive. Her brother Josh had been in the cricket pavilion at St Augustine’s when it collapsed on top of him. He was dead. Many of the two hundred and fifty-three dead in Aberdeen were children.
The Dean of our Cathedral was carried from the tower by a fireman and got away with just a broken arm. From now on, Digby, the sceptical classical scholar, and the Very Reverend Eleanor Bartlett were at one. Their strange divided life was at an end. As a united being, they felt strong to face life’s paradoxes. This became apparent to the people of Aberdeen ten days after the Quake. Services in the wrecked Cathedral were impossible, but ten days after the Quake struck, it was announced that the choir and congregation would assemble to sing Merbecke’s setting of the Mass in Argyle Square. With her arm in a plastic casing, and held up by a sling around her amiced neck, a new Nellie spoke to us.
Realizing that the service would be televised, and that it would attract a huge crowd, Bishop Dionne had telephoned Nellie immediately to tell her that she would preach at the service herself. The Dean had been most uncharacteristically emphatic. It was very kind of Dionne to suggest it, but she, the Dean, had been scheduled to preach that Sunday. She was the Dean of the wrecked Cathedral. She would speak as scheduled.
—What did the Pontiff make of that? asked the Skyped distorted face of her dad.
Christianity came into being because
a city was reduced to rubble. In AD 70, the Roman armies of the Emperor Titus reduced Jerusalem to ruins. The immense temple, built by Herod, was levelled to the ground. The population was massacred or driven into the hills, and hardly a stone of the place was left standing on another. Josephus tells us the story in horrifying, graphic detail – the absolute devastation and loss visited on families, the loss of life for which there could be no consolations.
We tend to think that the stories concerning Jesus, which were written down in the Gospels, must have grown up during his lifetime, or immediately afterwards. This is not necessarily the case. All the four Gospels mention the destruction of Jerusalem, the utter ruin of the city. So we know they were written after the Romans wrecked the place. And not just the place – they destroyed the Temple, which was the centre of the Jewish religion. So in some senses, the Christians, who had all started out as Jews who worshipped in the Temple, were encouraged to believe that in Jesus, a new religion had begun. A complete break with the past had occurred. Perhaps that’s why, when Jesus died, there was an earthquake. Or so it says in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.’
The other Gospels do not tell us anything about this story. So, why does Matthew tell us it happened? One reason could be that some of the Jews, filled with Messianic hopes, believed that when the Redeemer of Israel came, the graves would open and there would be a general resurrection. Jesus is not the only one in Matthew to be raised up. Many other good Jews are raised too, to show the readers of the Gospel that the Messianic Age has truly begun.
Well, Matthew’s account was written fifty years or so after the events it is describing, so what are we to make of this scene painted by Stanley Spencer, of people climbing out of their graves? To tell you the truth, I do not know. And were they supposed to live forever, or did they have to die all over again one day? Matthew hasn’t, apparently, really thought about that.