The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  Chapter 23

  There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear.

  There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young man not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you. Secondly there is the slow erosion–a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit. It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child’s nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no name. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees’ faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business.

  And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock. It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that. People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.

  It seemed perverse for 1st July 1940 to be such a pleasant day. Without the wind, it would have been too warm; without the sun, the wind would have been too cold, but today these elements seemed to have combined into perfect harmony. The sky was baby-blue, the moon was going to be full that night, and so the men and women passing briskly through the square had a rather downcast look, cursing the heavens under their breath and praying for fog and rain. I sat on the north side of the square above the steps down to the fat, shallow fountains and waited. I had come early–nearly an hour before the specified 2 p.m.–to scout the area for whatever signs of danger I hoped I would be able to recognise. I was a deserter. My call-up had come in 1939 and, aware of my appointment with Virginia, I had fled, to the shame of Patrick and quite possibly my father. Like many of our kin, I had taken care in my fourth life to note one or two useful events, including the clichéd but essential winners of races and sporting events. I didn’t make indiscriminate money off this knowledge, gleaned from a sports almanac in 1957, but used it as a basis to achieve that level of outward comfort and stability that was so important if you were to be considered for a comfortable and stable job. I chose an accent that was almost as parodied as Phearson’s received pronunciation, letting a little of my natural voice drop into it whenever I wished to impress potential employers with how hard I’d worked at my social status. Indeed, that thing I loosely described as my “natural voice” had become so distorted by travels, time and languages learned that I often found myself verging on a parody of my colleagues, unconsciously acquiring their syntax and tone. To Patrick I talked as a northerner, to my grocer as a cockney and to my colleagues as a man dreaming of working for the BBC.

  Virginia, it transpired, made no such allowances.

  “Hello, dear boy!” she exclaimed, and at once I recognised her, though it had been twenty-two years since she had slipped me a penknife in a house in the north. She was younger, a woman in her forties, but still dressed for a soirée where the jazz was cool and the men were willing, no concession made in any aspect of her being for the nannying concerns of the present.

  I stood at once, an awkward formal gesture, which she immediately dispelled by grabbing me by the shoulders and giving me a kiss on either cheek in recognition of a fashion yet to come. “Harry!” she exclaimed. “My goodness but you are young at the moment, aren’t you?”

  I was twenty-two, dressed to convince the world that I was a rather youthful twenty-nine and worthy of consideration in all things. The effect was more of a child playing in his father’s clothes, but then I have never truly mastered my own body. She had her arm hooked into mine and was leading me towards Buckingham Palace–not yet damaged by the Dornier bomber that would eventually hit Victoria station, but that event was only a few months away. “How was the last one?” she asked brightly, sweeping me off down the Mall like a country cousin come to town for a family holiday. “The femoral artery is such a gusher once it gets going, and far fewer little nerve endings round there. I did try to bring you something chemical but it was all done in such a hurry–terrible fuss!”

  “Was death the only option?” I asked weakly.

  “Darling!” she exclaimed. “You would only have been hunted down and interrogated more, and frankly we couldn’t be handling that. Besides–” a surreptitious nudge that nearly knocked me off my feet “–how would we have known you were really one of us, if you didn’t make this meeting?”

  I took a slow, steadying breath. This meeting–this already rather strange meeting–had cost me my life and twenty-two years of expectation. “May I ask, are you going to walk away rapidly in the next fifteen minutes? I only enquire because I have several hundred years of questions, and need to know whether I should start prioritising.”

  She gave me a playful slap on the arm. “Dear boy,” she replied, “you have many centuries left in which to ask whatever you like.”

  Chapter 24

  The Cronus Club.

  You and I, we have fought such battles over this.

  No one knows who founded it.

  Or rather, that is to say, no one knows who has the first idea.

  It is usually founded in Babylon around about 3000 BCE. We know this because the founders tend to raise an obelisk in the desert, in a valley with no particular name, on which they write their names and often a message for the future generation. This message is sometimes sincere advice–

  BEWARE LONELINESS

  SEEK SOLACE

  HAVE FAITH

  –and material of that sort. Occasionally, if the founders are feeling rather less reverent towards their future readership, they leave a dirty joke. The obelisk itself has become something of an object of fun. One generation of the Cronus Club will often have it moved and hidden in a new place, challenging future descendants to find it. The obelisk remains hidden in this manner for hundreds of years until at last enterprising archaeologists stumble upon it and on its ancient carved stone they too leave their messages, ranging from

  IN TIME ALL THINGS ARE REVEALED

  through to the rather more mundane

  HARRY WOZ ’ERE.

  The obelisk itself is never quite the same from one generation to another: it was destroyed in the 1800s by zealous Victorians for being just a little too overtly phallic in its design, another sank to the bottom of the sea while being transported to America. Whatever its purpose, it remains a declaration from the past to all future members of the Cronus Club, that they, the kalachakra of 3000 BCE, were here first and are here to stay.

  The rumour goes, however, that the first ever founder of the Cronus Club was not from the deep past at all, but was instead a lady by the name of Sarah Sioban Grey, born some time in the 1740s. A kalachakra, she was one of the first pioneers to actively seek others of her kin, accumulatin
g over many hundreds of years and dozens of deaths a picture of who else within her home town of Boston might be of a similar nature. Kalachakra generally occur at a rate of one in every half million of the population, so her success at finding even a few dozen cannot be underestimated.

  And of these few dozen, it quickly occurred to Sarah Sioban Grey that they represented not merely a fellowship in the now, but also a fellowship of the yet to come and what had been. She looked at her colleagues and perceived that where the oldest was nearly ninety years old, this would make him a child at the turn of the century, which she was too young to experience; and where the youngest was merely ten, this made him a grandfather by the time of the American Civil War, and thus a visitor to a future she could never know. To the old man from the past she said, “Here is my knowledge of future events–now go forth and make gold,” and indeed, when she was born again in the 1740s, the old man was already knocking at her door saying, “Hello, young Sarah Sioban Grey. I took your advice and made gold, and now you, little girl, need never work again.” She then returned the favour to the child who would live to see the Civil War, saying, “Here is gold which I will invest. By the time you are grown up and old, it will be a fortune and you need never work again. All I ask in return for this investment is that you pass the favour on to any others of our kin you may meet in the future, that they too are safe and comfortable in this difficult world.” And so the Cronus Club spread, each generation investing for the future. And as it spread forwards in time, so it also spread backwards, the children of now speaking to the grandfathers of yesterday and saying, “The Cronus Club is a fellowship of men–go find for yourself the grandfathers of your youth and as a child say to them, ‘This thing is good.’ ” So each generation set out to find more of its kind, and within just a few cycles of birth and death, the Club had spread not only through space, but also time, propagating itself forwards into the twentieth century and back into the Middle Ages, the death of each member spreading the word of what it was to the very extremes of the times in which they lived.

  Of course, it is more than possible that the story of Sarah Sioban Grey is a myth, since it was so long ago that none of the Boston Club members can even remember, and she long since disappeared. It was, however, the story that Virginia told me as she sat me down in a blue armchair beneath the portrait of a long-dead member in what was known as the red room of the London branch of the Cronus Club, and if nothing else, she clearly enjoyed the telling.

  As the Cronus Clubs are hardly fixed in time, so they are rarely fixed in space. The London branch was no exception.

  “We’ve been in St James’s for a few hundred years,” explained Virginia, pouring another glass of finest black-market brandy. “Sometimes we end up in Westminster though, occasionally Soho. It’s the 1820s steering committee! They get so bored being in the same place, they move buildings, and we’re just left staggering around trying to work out where the Club has gone.”

  Where the Club was now was a few streets north of St James’s Park, south of Piccadilly, tucked in between bespoke tailors and mansions for the declining rich, a single brass plaque on its door declaring, TIME FLIES. NO TRADESMEN PLEASE.

  “It’s a joke,” she explained when I asked. “That’s the 1780s bunch. Everyone’s always leaving each other little notes for posterity. I buried a time capsule in 1925 once with a vital message for the Club five hundred years from now.”

  “What’s in the capsule?” I asked.

  “A recipe for proper lemon sherbet.” She saw my face and spread her arms expansively. “No one said it was easy being on the end of linear temporal events!”

  I drank brandy and looked around the room again. Like so many giant properties in the wealthy parts of London, it was a throwback to a time when colours were rich, tastes were prim and mantelpieces had to be made of marble. Portraits of men and women dressed smartly in the garments of their time–“Apparently they’ll be worth something one day. Damned if I know why and I’ve snogged Picasso!”–lined the walls like memorials to the departed in a crematorium. The furniture was plush and rather dusty, the giraffe-built windows were criss-crossed with tape, “To appease the locals, darling. Nothing’s going to get hit round here but the wardens kick up such a fuss.”

  The halls were silent. Crystal chandeliers tinkled gently when planes went overhead, the lights burned low in a few rooms behind the blackout blinds, and no one was to be seen.

  “Countryside,” explained Virginia brightly. “Most of them pack out by July ’39. It’s not so much the bombing, you see, as the ghastly sense of oppression. Our members have been through it so many times before that really they can’t be buggered, so they ship off to somewhere nicer, brighter, with good ventilation and none of this tedious war business to bother them. A lot go to Canada, especially from the rather more oppressive clubs–Warsaw, Berlin, Hanover, St Petersburg, all that crowd. One or two stick around for the excitement but I can’t be bothered.”

  Then why was she here?

  “Keeping the ship afloat, dear boy! It’s my turn, you see, to keep an eye out for our freshest members. That’s you, by the way–you are our first new member in six hundred years. But there’s also several members being born about now–their mothers take such a sentimental view of their boys departing to conflict that, what can I say, discretions are brought into question. One has to stick around to make sure their childhoods aren’t too rough. A lot of the time money solves things, but sometimes–” she took a careful sip from the glass “–one has to arrange things. Evacuation and that sort of business. Parents can be such a bore.”

  “Is that what you do?” I asked. “You… cater for the childhood period?”

  “It’s one of our primary roles,” she replied airily. “Childhood is the most taxing time of our lives, unless of course you’re genetically predisposed towards a ghastly death or some sort of inherited disease. We have all the knowledge and experience of a dozen lives, and yet if we tell some boring linear adult that they really should invest in rubber as it’s going to be the most marvellous thing, we just get a pat on the head and a cry of ‘There there, Harry, go back to your choo choo set’ or whatnot. A lot of our members are also born rather poor, so it helps to know that there is a society of mutually understanding individuals who can see that you get a decent pair of socks to wear and ensure that you don’t have to waste several tedious years of your life, every life, learning your ABC. It’s not just the money,” she concluded with a flare of satisfaction, “it’s the companionship.”

  I had a hundred questions, a thousand, all reeling round inside my head, but I couldn’t pin any of them down so fell back weakly on, “Are there any rules I should know about?”

  “Don’t bugger about with temporal events!” she replied firmly. “You did cause us a bit of embarrassment in your last life, Harry–not your fault of course, not at all; we’ve all been in difficult situations–but Phearson had enough information to change the course of the future, and we really can’t have that. It’s not that we aren’t concerned, it’s that these things can never be fully predicted.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Don’t harm another kalachakra. We really couldn’t care what you do to everyone else as long as it’s not particularly obscene and doesn’t bring attention to us, but we remember, and it’s just not on. Be good!”

  “You mentioned contributions…”

  “Yes, if you do get a chance to make a massive, obscene amount of money, please do put some aside for our childhood benevolent fund. The future generations are so appreciative.”

  Was that it?

  No, not quite.

  “Not so much a rule, Harry darling,” she explained, “as good advice. Don’t tell anyone where or when you’re from. Not in so much detail.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they might kill you with it,” she replied brightly. “Of course I’m sure they won’t–you seem like a charming young man–but there’s been a few, and so you see it’s
not considered good form. Don’t ask, don’t tell–that’s the policy round here.”

  And she explained.

  Chapter 25

  The first cataclysm began in 1642, in Paris.

  The man who brought about the cataclysm was an unassuming gentleman by the name of Victor Hoeness. An ouroboran, he went through the usual traumatic first phases of life before the local Cronus Club found him, calmed him down and explained that actually he was neither possessed nor damned, as far as anyone could tell. The son of a gunsmith, he saw the very worst of the Thirty Years War, a conflict which embraced all the usual early-modern socio-economic causes of war, and then turned it into a crusade. In the name of one, men are permitted to kill; in the name of the other, they are commanded to destroy. Needless to say, most Cronus Club members during the conflict like to move to less fraught areas of the world, such as into the rather more stable heartland of the Ottoman empire, where, while the sultans may be mad during this time, at least their mothers are not. Victor Hoeness, however, refused, insisting that he remain in the Holy Roman Empire. He was counselled against interfering and swore that he was merely acting as a passive observer, documenting all that he saw. Indeed, for several lifetimes the notes of Victor Hoeness provided an excellent historical source, with several kalachakra themselves failing to realise that it was the careful documentation of one of their own kind that had produced such sterling primary evidence. Other members of the Cronus Club were concerned: it wasn’t that Hoeness was unstable; rather, if anything, he was too calm, too collected. He moved through suffering, destruction and dismay, documenting all he saw, like a mist through the forest. He sought no companionship, took no sides, made no acquaintances, removed himself from personal danger where permissible, and even the few deaths he suffered during the war–for no one could fully predict the wild bitterness of those times–he took with a calm grace and resignation, proclaiming afterwards that he wished he had bribed the executioner to put gunpowder into the flames that burned him, or remarking that being impaled on a spear was a far quicker demise if they could just slice open the liver entirely, instead of merely puncturing the gut. His colleagues found themselves in a rather difficult position, for how can you express to a man that his apparent stability and self-control are, quite possibly, irrational, inhuman and the symptom of some deeper ill, when all your evidence for the disease is that it is not there? Over time, Hoeness’s remarkable utility as a primary historical source led him into correspondence with future Cronus Club members. Questions would be posed from the early 1800s or twentieth century, relayed back down through time from the child of the 1850s to the grandfather who would be a child again by 1780, who could then pass it back to the grandparent of the 1710s and so on and so forth until, with as few generations as possible to corrupt the message, one of his own time could put the question to Hoeness directly. He would then inscribe his reply on some well-lasting material and leave it with the Cronus Club to deliver to its future correspondent, and posterity. Many of us who have dabbled in academia have used this technique. Often it is abused for academic advantage as, if we lack a source for a particular time, with some polite enquiry and a little persuasion amplified down the generations, not only may an answer be found, but it can be acquired through genuine documents of the time itself which can withstand the scrutiny of our less imaginative peers. Assuming, of course, you’re still interested several lives later, when the message may finally arrive.