by Angus Wilson
Near the power house, I came on Strawson’s stout figure.
“It looks very fine, doesn’t it, Sir?”
I thought he seemed to be laughing at me.
“What the hell are you doing? Turn those lights off, you fool.”
“Sir Robert’s orders, Sir.”
I tried to push him aside, but his bulk was more than I could dislodge. Reason, I thought before violence—in any case I was not sure of my strength against his.
“Look, Strawson. Surely you see that the Director’s not in his right mind. This display of lights is madness when at any moment ...”
“I doubt if the enemy would need lights to guide their missiles. You’re living a little in the past, Sir.”
I realized then that it was the mood rather than the action that had appalled me.
“We’re on the brink of a war, man.” This time Strawson really did smile.
“We may be on the brink of eternity, Mr Carter. But no siren has sounded yet. Meanwhile a little colour . . .”
The rest of his words were lost in music swelling out from amplifiers in every part of the Gardens. At the same moment floodlights were played on all the houses, tableaux and pools. Woken by the unnatural day, lions and tigers began to roar, birds to scream, sea lions and monkeys to howl. The fountains sent up their coloured showers. And now suddenly, to crown all, with a hissing and a crackling, the great firework set-pieces began to give out their showers of coloured lights—God Save Our Gracious Queen, the British Lion, and the Indian Elephant came alive in glorious sulphurous blue, and demon red and palest amber white. And through it all the music sounded—now it was “Villikins and his Dinah” on what seemed a hundred barrel organs, then brass bands blared a selection from “The Gondoliers”, and now through a sudden stage stillness came a sweet soprano voice—”Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” Everything that was absurd about Victorian England seemed to come from that genteel, sugary, drawing room-parlour voice, and yet it filled me with a deep nostalgia, a willingness to surrender myself to the prettiness and to die. As the last “Home, Sweet Home” died away, I saw Bobby Falcon mounting the high platform erected in front of the Lion House.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he cried into the microphone, and his voice echoed far away across the park, “we are not as many as I could have wished.”
I heard someone running behind me. Bobby stopped speaking. I looked round. It was Jane, in sweating, dishevelled chic, toppling and teetering so precariously on her high heels that I thought she must never have run since she was a girl. Gazing round me, I saw that Bobby had spoken truly. We were not many—a dozen or so of staff, including a horrified Matthew, an angry Beard, a vaguely smiling Sanderson, and a weeping Mrs Purrett; Pattie Henderson stood red faced and foursquare flanked by Newton and Nutting. Suddenly from the Tunnel’s gloom another young woman came running into the floodlit square. It was Martha.
“Simon! Bobby! What is all this noise? Are you all out of your minds? This isn’t a time for music. Why! You can be heard way over in our house!”
She sounded as she so often did when she scolded Reggie or Violet.
Then, maternal still, she cried, “Bobby, you’re sick! Simon, he mustn’t be up there. Come down, Bobby! Come down!”
But if Jane’s arrival had silenced Bobby, Martha’s cries woke him into speech.
“We’re only a few,” he cried, “but we’re the lucky buggers. They’ll all go out in their grey dreariness. We’ll go out as a high old, rare old, bloody beautiful jo’ke.”
Immediately his words were drowned in the belly-churning wails of a hundred sirens. Then there was an absolute silence, followed by cries of panic and some shouts of anger. One or two of the staff began to run towards the Tunnel as to the nearest shelter, others picked up stones and threw them at Bobby. Beard was on his knees in prayer. I saw Barley and the young keeper of the bears advancing towards the platform.
“We’ll get you, you fucker!” Barley was shouting.
And then came the crackling, whistling thudding sound of an explosion that filled the universe. I pushed Martha face down on the grass and threw myself on top of her. There followed in quick succession four more such dreadful sounds but further away from us; and then a vast whistling, rushing wind. We lay still on the ground, waiting as it seemed to me for hours. I held Martha to me stroking her arms. Against the shrieking and howling of all the captive beasts and birds, I could hear Mrs Purrett quietly crying behind me. At last here and there people were getting to their feet. In the distance ambulance and fire bells were clanging, and there were shouts and cries in the streets. I got up slowly as though I must take the world by surprise if I were to survive. Martha lay on the ground bruised and shocked. Whatever had fallen, must have been far off, yet blast had wrecked and twisted Zoo buildings; the Old Zoo was in flames and from it came the agonizing screams and roars of hippos, rhinos, zebras, apes and trumpeting elephants. The roof had gone from the eagle house and high above it great condors, vultures and golden eagles were circling and spiralling up into the sky. The trees were filled with chattering parakeets, and among the beds of broken, bruised flowers lay the little bodies of a hundred multi-coloured tropical birds; for the aviary had been shattered into a thousand pieces. Here and there men were writhing on the turf. In the floodlight the pools of blood stared in technicolour red against an emerald grass. A hundred yards from me lay the body of the boy from the snake house, his head nearly severed by a great sliver of glass. There above us on the top of the bronze lion that crowned the Lion House was Sir Robert Falcon, doubled up with pain, but still wildly shouting, blown on high by some freak of blast, whole though bruised and shaken.
In that next half hour, like all the rest of London, we worked like beavers to repair our dam against a tide that any minute would engulf us and all our works forever. Firemen, staff, wives, all worked like navvies. The wounded were taken in ambulances. Injured animals were destroyed. Fire had spread too far to save any part of the Old Victorian Zoo and in it died most of the giraffes, rhinos, zebras, deer and elephants crammed in by Bobby to make his Roman holiday. Two wounded hippos broke their way down into the canal and we could see them, lashing the bloodied water for a while, until Strawson’s assistant picked them off with a gun and they sank to send a great tide of mud spilling over the banks. The Insect House was a hopeless wreck. Sanderson, tears in his eyes, came to assure me that we need not fear the poisonous spiders or any other venomous insects among those that were now crawling or flying in the ruins.
“I had them destroyed when you told me,” he said. “In a way I’m glad I did it if only because they were dead before this awful thing happened.”
The Area Air Wardens appeared from outside and ordered us all to shelters. But Beard appealed to volunteers to carry on loading for evacuation. A good number of the keepers responded at once. And Matthew rallied the rest to Beard’s cause by making them laugh.
“I can’t imagine anyone will go to the shelters, can you? Unless they want to be gassed by each others’ farts,” he said.
All this while Bobby hung over the bronze lion, his sick old puma face staring out into the distance, as though he were already dead. Jane and Martha and even Mrs Purrett formed a knot in front of the tiger’s cage, shouting, and imploring him to come down, above the roaring of the beasts. At last, when all else had been attended to, I gave orders to the firemen that he should be fetched down by ladder, but when they reached him, he clung wildly to the bronze lion’s neck and resisted all attempts to move him. At last they were forced to play a hose on him. He was carried struggling and shouting to an ambulance, like a half-drowned old cat to the gas van.
Up to this moment, although they had been standing side by side, Martha and Jane had not exchanged a word.
Now Jane suddenly turned and shouted, “Thank you. Thank you very much. You’ve randied him into the looney bin now. I hope that’s satisfied you.”
; “You’ve no right to speak,” Martha cried, “you never gave him anything. At least I tried. I wanted to help.”
Jane stood squarely in front of Martha, looking at her with fierce contempt.
“Aren’t you just a lovely person,” she said in a phoney American accent, “the highest minded little whore that ever almost gave herself out of charity. You make me sick.”
I said, “Shut up, Jane.”
“Don’t you start,” she turned on me, “you’re worse than her. You’re too frightened even almost to give. A lovely pair of lovely people! Get radiant sex health the Carter way! She’ll brush you up and he’ll brush you off.”
I held her shoulders and began to shake her, but she was stronger than I had thought, she pushed me away.
Martha said, “You gave him no life at all and you know it.”
Jane laughed. “Oh you silly little bitch! Why you don’t even know what’s twat.”
She ran from us, and a moment later, despite her tightest of chic skirts and her broadest of smart broadbrimmed hats, she had hoisted herself up the steps of the ambulance and was driven off, holding Bobby’s hand.
Martha was trembling. I looked round apprehensively but everyone was working too busily to have noticed the scene, I think. I gave Martha into Mrs Purrett’s hands and she took her off to the office cellars and gave her hot tea.
VI
MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
FOR MANY days after that first night we worked on, like all London, waiting for the next blow. It was not until news from the rest of England began to assemble that we realized that we had perhaps seen the end of active warfare. It took us even longer, a week perhaps, to discern the meaning of the news that was coming in; and even longer still to see that there was nothing we could do about it. We lived an improvised, all-hands-on-deck, air raid shelter, darts and sandwiches sort of life that, as the days passed without further attack, seemed more and more senseless. Fresh provisions, of course, were soon in short supply; but it was surprising how little the government measures of food control carried real urgency to us who lived such a picnicking troglodytic life. The destruction of the ports from Southampton to Glasgow seemed far away; and for some time the Government ban on the use of roads and railways out of London except by special permit—a ban enforced by armed police—disguised from most Londoners the fact that few of these roads or railways still existed. Many, of course, had made this discovery, but they were not able, even had they wanted to, to return to tell us.
It is often said now that the riots that broke out in one district of London after another were fomented by members of the Uni-European Movement. I doubt this myself: if there was one thing in which the Government showed themselves absolute it was in the rounding up of suspected dissidents although their action was far too late. I discovered this when, a few days after the outbreak of war, I tried to contact old Mrs Englander. The procedure was a lengthy one, not because the bureaucrats concerned were inhumane. Indeed, although I was not related to the interned woman, had never even spoken to her, I was eventually able to send her extra clothing, books and a small food parcel. No, the delay arose because of the vast number of people interned. Of the name of Englander alone there were some hundreds. The Government, in fact, uncertain of the extent of the underground movement, had on the basis of the census register made wholesale arrests, including, for example, all persons with European sounding names. From my observation, the rioting began solely as a result of even more stringent food rationing, insufficiently explained because the authorities did not wish to reveal the extent of the damage to our roads, our ports and our shipping. Public disorder finally came to a head, when, with the idea of transferring popular anger from themselves, the Government released the text of the Melbourne Declaration. I remember perfectly well the arguments and discussions both at the Zoo and at my local defence post about the culpability of Australia, New Zealand and our African allies. Nobody among us cared much to blame them for refusing to run the superior enemy atomic submarine blockade. We all found more reason to revile a Government that had failed to feed us.
For ourselves, however, I must say that it was a fortnight before we knew any serious want of food; a little longer than that before I saw demonstrations parading in the streets; and nearly three weeks before I witnessed police action against rioters in Camden Town. This was largely, perhaps, because I seldom stirred from the area around the Zoo. Martha, at first, did nursing work that kept her away from home. Then when there was no more nursing to be done, she worked at a Government food provision centre nearer our home. Somehow we managed to live our grey, somnambulistic lives apart. Yet all half designed measures meet their end. One night I returned to the improvised inside cellar-bedroom which we still occupied to find that at last we had failed to be on opposite shifts. Martha was reading, sitting up, in an old sleeping bag that survived from the days of my youthful naturalist expeditions. We were both intensely nervous. I strayed upstairs and fussed around in the bathroom far longer than I needed, hoping that she would pretend to be asleep when I returned.
When I came down she said in a hard, bright voice, “I really wonder, you know, whether there’s any point in this sleeping down here. Obviously nothing is going to happen and if it did, our being here wouldn’t help.”
“The greater proportion of the people who were killed in London that night were killed by blast.”
“Yes, but it’s rather absurd when we’re about outside all day. I think all these precautions are imposed on us by left overs from the last war who are so excited to get back to the old days. You should hear them at the Food Centre, old women gossiping about the last war. They feel young again, I suppose. I think I shall sleep upstairs tomorrow.”
“I should feel much happier if I knew you were down here.”
Martha looked up at me, but she changed the subject.
“You saw Hester’s letter and the little notes from the children that I left in the hall?”
“Yes, I’d just written to Reggie. But now I’ve heard about his sore throat, I’ll write again.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s anything. Hester’s very good about that sort of thing. She never pretends. But I’m trying desperately to get a ‘phone call through . . .”
“So am I.”
“Oh! . . . Well, I went to the American Embassy. There’s just a chance they can do it for me.”
“Martha, why don’t you ask them to get you an air passage back? It can be done. I’ve found that out.”
“Thank you! I suppose that means you don’t want me here.”
“It means, as you very well know, that I can’t bear you to be in this danger.”
She had lain her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. When she said nothing, I went on.
“And also I don’t know that we have any right to risk leaving the children orphans.”
She was tense now, her eyes open but hard.
“You can’t suppose that I haven’t thought of that. Or is that a nice way of getting rid of me?”
“You speak as though only you cared for the children.”
“I speak because I want you to say you care for me.”
She began to sob, a sobbing that swelled and shook her whole body convulsively like a terrible fit of hiccoughs. I held her tightly, running my fingers across her shoulder blades down her spine, trying to relax her tension.
“Do you think I’ve bothered about what that bitch said,” I asked.
“But you thought it was true.”
“No. I didn’t think anything about it. Jane just wanted to hurt that was all. Even then she couldn’t pretend that anything had really been wrong . . .”
“But you thought it had. You thought I’d let Bobby seduce me, didn’t you? Otherwise why have you kept away from me like this?”
“Circumstances have . . . Martha, what’s the sense of dragging it all up? I was jealous when you saw such a lot of him in California, yes. I was lonely and unhappy. And I suppose when Jane spok
e like that the other day, it brought it all up in me again.”
“But, for Jesus’ sake, Simon, why couldn’t you come and talk to me about it?”
“Because jealousy’s a squalid emotion of which I’m ashamed. It was disgusting enough hating Falcon irrationally after he came back. But to suddenly find myself hating you!”
“Well, if there had been any truth to it, you’d have a right to hate me as much as Bobby. More really.”
“If it had happened!”
“Well, Simon, it almost did. At San Francisco. No, that’s not true. I couldn’t really with anyone but you. But perhaps it ought to have done. As Jane said, I led him on. Out of muddled feelings I didn’t know I had. But I ought to have done.”
She was crying almost soundlessly now. I bent over her and ran my fingers along the line of her cheekbone. She kissed me excitedly, then she lay back.
“Come in with me, Simon,” she said.
It was a very tight fit in the sleeping bag, and with the exhaustion of overwork and undernourishment, our love making was hungry rather than satisfactory. Perhaps happily I burst the rotted seam of the canvas, got my leg caught, then, trying to extricate it, I rolled the bag entirely over. We were released by farce, but when our laughter had died away, Martha said,
“He seemed so desperate. And you don’t know him. You never will now. But he’s far more than a pathetic buffoon. Anyone who’s been something, I suppose, keeps some of it. And he certainly has been someone. Not just a figure, Simon, or a charmer or any of that, but somebody who’d realize a lot of what he’d always wanted. And he was desperate. And to have me seemed so important to him. I see now it was all part of the craziness. Do you know he thought you’d made fun of his being impotent? Something to do with what you said about that Filson boy’s injuries. He couldn’t forgive you. And it wasn’t for me to deal with that. But, after I’d persuaded him to take an interest again—that old Amazon trip—I thought I couldn’t let him drift back. I let him take me around, I made a fuss of him. I thought I could stop him going too far. But not before he’d humiliated himself.”