A deep thrumming seemed to make the fabric of the bridge itself vibrate, and a diffuse shadow crossed the river. Looking up I saw a vast Zeppelin, a whale in the sky. The eagle of Imperial Germany was easily visible on its flank.
Once across the river we walked along the Strand a distance, and cut up through Covent Garden. Bunting hung everywhere, and Union flags fluttered, and there were posters of the King and of the heroes of the new military government – Marvin himself, Churchill, Lloyd George. But the streets were grubby, the paint peeling on many buildings, and there were very many beggars. Their hands, open for change, were like grimy flowers.
And I was struck by how many people I saw in uniform, not just bobbies or soldiers. Every public building seemed to have a soldier or two on guard, and even the staff at the hotels and restaurants sported epaulettes and brass buttons. It was the Berlin-ification of London, I thought. And considering that, I seemed to hear an unconscionable number of German accents.
Trafalgar Square looked much as it always had, and I was obscurely pleased to see that Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, who even the Martians had not toppled, had not yet been replaced on his column by a beaming Brian Marvin, hero of Weybridge. We walked up Charing Cross Road which, of all the locations in London I had seen so far, seemed the least changed, still a warren of bookshops and barrows laden with tattered volumes. As a girl I had always loved coming to London, not for the clothes or the cafes or the shows, but for the books, always the books. This feeling, of stumbling upon a fragment of the past, was so strong that I briefly found myself overcome. Philip, always more sensitive than he looked, gave me his arm, and we walked on in silence.
I saw a new book on sale, prominently displayed: General Marvin and Why We Must Fight An Unending War, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
We cut through Oxford Street and Portland Place. On the Marylebone Road we ignored placard-bearers urging us to visit Madame Tussaud’s, where a new diorama showed the ‘true horrors’ of the Martians’ feeding habits. Philip said the exhibit was popular.
It was with relief, for me at least, that we reached the green spaces of Regent’s Park, although the light was fading fast. But even here much was changed; the expanses of grass had been largely given over to vegetable plots, meant as demonstrations for householders urged to grow food in their own lawns. And where once children flew kites and rode their bicycles, now the only youngsters marched in crocodiles or dug at the ground, and even put on what looked like a mock battle.
Later I would learn of the transformation Marvin had inflicted on the education system. The motto of the new movement was an old quotation of Wellington’s, on seeing a cricket match at Eton: ‘There grows the stuff that won Waterloo.’ Well, now Eton and the other schools turned out nothing but officers, while the younger siblings of the scholars were enticed into joining a new movement called the Junior Sappers, organised by Baden-Powell: boys and girls as young as five or six, digging trenches or binding mock wounds. All this was part of a general cleansing of the national moral character, as Marvin’s supporters called it. I was dismayed at what I saw, coming at with unprejudiced eyes from across the Atlantic. Was this the future of Britain – the child soldier?
We passed the Zoological Gardens – now closed up and empty of animals – and crossed the Albert Road to climb Primrose Hill. The view opened up around us as it always had, the hill itself seeming to rise out of the greenery of Regent’s Park, beyond which the great reef of the city was visible, the wounded dome of St Paul’s, the new concrete excrescences of Westminster and Whitehall, the ethereal glitter of the Crystal Palace, and the Surrey hills in the distance.
Here we stood before what had been the landing site of the seventh Martian cylinder, and the nucleus of what had become the largest single Martian construction during the War. This was fenced off as had been the pits in Surrey. But of the three inert fighting-machines Walter had glimpsed here on that hot summer’s day at the end of the War in 1907, one had been left standing, a tripod stark and disconcerting in profile.
A fairground had been set up, a roundabout with cars and horses, a steam organ, coconut shies, balloon races. Thus, around the feet of the ghastly monument, small children played. I looked up at the brazen cowl of the thing, that mechanical component so like a head.
And it was at that moment that I had what Philip described as my ‘turn’.
After I recovered – I sat on a bench for a while, with Philip hovering solicitously - we took a taxi to the police centre at the Barbican, where I was processed with cold efficiency, though it was nine at night before I was released.
I allowed Philip to escort me back to the hotel at the Elephant and Castle, where I retired immediately, taking a cold supper in my room. I slept little, trying not to think of that which had disturbed me, on the Hill.
The next day was free. I felt I needed to see something of the real London, away from Philip’s kind but suffocating embrace, away from the military cynicism of the others. I still had old friends in the city, and I hastily called a couple from the hotel and made arrangements. I left the hotel early, avoiding Philip and the others.
Lunch was at an oyster house in Lambeth. Here I met a school friend who ran a soup kitchen.
For all his grand visions, and whatever he might have done for national security, Marvin had delivered an economy that was faltering at best. I was told that though trade unions and the like had long been banned, there was plenty of agitation, in the mines, the railways – even in Woolwich Arsenal, which manufactured a large percentage of the country’s munitions supply. All of this was brutally suppressed. And at the very bottom, they were opening up the workhouses once again. My friend had plenty of clients. I was lucky to be here in March, in a place like Lambeth, said my friend, for in the summer the bugs came out.
That evening, by way of contrast, I called another old friend, the wife of a banker. We met in a tea shop – I relished the smell of coffee and tea and cigarette smoke, and the rattle of the dominoes – and Hilda loaned me a dress for the evening.
We went to the Savoy on the Strand, which I playfully told Hilda was nearly as grand as the Lusitania. We had caviar and crab and mushroom salad, and a bottle of Hock. The place was full of the usual menagerie, the bounders and the flappers and the roués and the Varsity youth, their cheeks flushed pink with the drink. We danced to the Havana Band, and we let ourselves be charmed by handsome German officers.
There wasn’t much to enjoy in Marvin’s morally uplifted Britain. They hadn’t quite had the nerve to prohibit alcohol, but prices had been sharply increased by tax levies. The government had shut down most sports (none of which I followed anyhow), save for cricket which Marvin regarded as ‘manly’, and football, but only as played by military personnel on leave. But if you had money there were still places in London to spend it well.
The Savoy was relatively uncrowded, I thought, but Hilda reminded me it was not yet the season. For now the upper classes were still mostly ensconced in their draughty country houses, but they would swarm in London during the summer – like the bugs in Lambeth, I thought to myself. The well-to-do had no problems with the new way of things, Hilda told me, unless it was to complain about the reintroduction of wild boar to the English countryside, so the Germans could hunt schwein . . .
Between dance numbers a kind of dumb waiter was circulated around the room. It had to be pushed around, but fine metallic tentacles curled from it, grasping bottles to pour, even mixing cocktails: Martian technology, of course, and a pretty advanced experiment. A glimpse of the industries of the future, perhaps. It seemed grotesque to me. The beautiful people clapped and laughed in delight . . .
We went on, deeper into the wilds of London – to a dance hall in Soho, where a band from America played ‘Tiger Rag’, and the dancing was as fierce as the music . . .
And throughout these foolish adventures I said nothing of what had given me my ‘turn’ on Primrose Hill. In the gloom of that March evening, even as the children of London had playe
d around its tremendous feet, I thought I saw the Martian turn its head.
8
A MEETING AT OTTERSHAW
The next morning, even if I was a little tender, I was ready for Philip and Eden and Cook, and our drive to Surrey. It was March 25, a Thursday.
It was a little after lunch when we gathered at last in Ottershaw, some three miles to the north of Woking where Walter and Carolyne Jenkins had once shared a home – and, though this site was only a couple of hours’ walk from the location of the first Martian landing, it was just outside the Surrey Corridor perimeter.
Marina Ogilvy, our hostess for the evening, had long been a friend of Carolyne’s, though the closest relationship had been their husbands’. Benjamin Ogilvy had been a noted amateur astronomer, with his own small observatory in Ottershaw. In that eerie summer of ’07, he and Walter had watched through Benjamin’s telescope those reddish sparkings on the disc of planet Mars, those gushes of gas, that turned out to have been signs of the firing of a mighty cannon. What a disturbing thrill it must have been for Walter and Benjamin to see it with their own eyes! And the first landing at Horsell, so close to his home, must have been a kind of vindication for Benjamin the amateur – that and the response of the Astronomer Royal himself, who had come out to Horsell: the crowning moment of Benjamin’s life, perhaps. To be followed pretty rapidly by his death, in the first few hours of humanity’s encounter with the Martians.
Despite this grisly outcome, or even because of it perhaps, Marina had kept on the house, and she had maintained her husband’s observatory, neither of which had been damaged during the War. She had even let out the observatory to a local amateur-astronomical group, of which, of course, a profusion had sprung up after the night sky became an arena of threat for all of us. Later, of course, the telescopic observation of Mars by amateurs had been banned by the Marvin government under their Defence of the Realm Act of 1916; now Benjamin’s grand old telescope was without mirrors and eyepieces.
Anyhow, Marina had generously offered to host our telephonic meeting with Walter. Hers at least was one telephone number Walter had retained, even if he had lost contact with Carolyne, his own ex-wife. Carolyne had quickly sold her own house on the Maybury Road in Woking after her divorce. I suppose the reason for the breakdown of her marriage is obvious, if you read the Narrative. But it seemed somehow fitting to be in a location so close to the start of it all.
So here I was, with Philip. Here were Eric Eden and Bert Cook, who had followed us home in my wake, so to speak, both of them alarmed or intrigued by the tantalising promise of Walter’s news.
And of course my own ex-husband had to be summoned to the gathering too: Walter’s brother, Frank Jenkins. Thus the Martians, those interplanetary matchmakers, brought us together once again, for we had first met during the great flight from London. Frank was a medical student then, and I at nineteen a few years younger with ambitions to become a journalist. And for a while it worked. Frank completed his studies, and settled down to what had evidently always been his ambition, to become a general practitioner, and we bought a house in Highgate.
Bur Frank had always had something of his brother’s sense of destiny about him. Though heavily committed to his practise, he would often let himself be called away on what I described as his ‘missionary’ work among the destitute in the East End. And in ’16, when the DORA was passed, Frank surprised me by being drawn to Marvin’s new programmes of military service. He had quickly enlisted in the Territorial Force, a volunteer reserve, which Marvin, with typical cunning showmanship, renamed the ‘Fyrd’, a nod to deep English roots.
‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ I had protested. ‘I can understand a schoolboy enjoying all the marching about. But you - you’re a man of healing.’
‘I heal humans,’ he said. ‘I would kill Martians. At High Barnet, remember, it was your brother’s revolver that saved us from the ruffians who wanted your cart, Julie, and a bit of my boxing from school, not my nascent medicals skills, or even your high spirits. There are times when one must fight . . .’
Well, to be a witness to self-assumed greatness was never enough for me. And besides - it is hard to record this so bluntly, but it was a difference between us – I had never wanted children. Not after the horrors of the Martian War; whatever you may read of Walter, that was its lingering effect on my psyche. Other survivors reacted similarly; Eric Eden, for example, never married. It is just as well the rest of the human race doesn’t share that flaw; indeed after the war there was a sharp rise in the number of births in Britain.
Frank understood, I think, but did not share my reluctance. Since we had divorced, Frank had married again, he had a child, and I was happy enough for him. But I wasn’t terribly comfortable to be in his presence again, here in this relic of our calamitous past, and I dare say nor was he.
So the six of us gathered early that afternoon, replete on Marina’s tea and finger sandwiches: myself, Carolyne, Philip Parris, Frank, Eric Eden and Bert Cook. It was a vivid scene, with our six faces glowing like moons in the light of a single, shadowed electric bulb – there are only dim lights in an observatory, of course. The building itself was a cylinder, topped by its hemispherical dome. The telescope sat on a stone pillar, beside the clockwork that enabled it to track the motion of the sky. That sky itself was visible through the open roof, a slice of blue. I remember the smell of oil and furniture polish and clockwork, with the dome over us adding a peculiar echo to the soft sounds of our voices. The main telescope itself, angular in the shadows, had an eerie Martian-like quality that made me unwilling to turn my back on it. It was rather cold, too. I could feel my own tension rising – a tension that had never gone away since Walter had approached me in New York. Of course it was news of the Martians I feared hearing, yet oddly longed to hear, if only to remove the suspense.
It was something of a shock when the telephone finally rang, right on cue.
9
A CALL FROM GERMANY
Bert Cook had some practical skills, and, with odds and ends from the observatory tool box and the remains of a broken Marvin’s Megaphone, he had managed to rig up a small loudspeaker so that we could all hear Walter’s thin voice, relayed from Germany. Though Walter asked to speak to Philip, that good man firmly passed the handset to the man’s former wife.
Her own voice firm, she said, ‘Walter? It’s me. Carolyne. I’m here safe and sound – we all are.’
‘Carolyne? I . . .’
‘What’s this all about, Walter? And where are you, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I am in Berlin – not in Vienna any more, as when I called Julie in New York. For with the coming emergency they let me out of the nut-hatch and ferried me here.’
I asked, speaking loudly for the pick-up, ‘What “emergency”? And who are “they”?’
‘Julie! I’m grateful you came. “They” are a stellar assemblage here at the Academy of Sciences, drawn from across Germany - indeed across Europe. Drawn to this rather well-equipped bunker under the tennis court, and I can tell you with some authority that many of our crowned heads are in similar bunkers, dotted around the planet: the Kaiser, the Emperors of China and Japan – no doubt the American President – and our own King George with his family is I believe deep in the turf beneath Balmoral.
‘As to who has been gathered here, you might call it a brains trust – with myself roped in on the basis of my Narrative, and I feel as if I am the comic relief. The Buster Keaton of Martian studies. You have Einstein and Schwarzschild and Rutherford, experts on one aspect or another of the atom and its nuclear energy which we suspect the Martians tap for their power. You have Rayleigh and others speculating on novel implementations of Martian technology, and Hohmann and Tsiolkovsky analysing and predicting interplanetary trajectories. They’ve even got the chap – what’s his name? – who once wrote a facetious but provocative essay on the future of humanity, and almost by accident came up with a sort of vision of the Martian form. “The Year Million Man” – it was
called something of that sort. You may have heard me speak of him before. No longer young – about my age in fact - an odd, bouncing sort of fellow, but full of ideas.
‘And you have the astronomical exchange wires buzzing with sightings from Hale in Wisconsin and Lick in California and Nice in France - though that’s now under German control all of it organised and marshalled by Lowell’s team at Flagstaff; shame the old man himself isn’t alive to see this. Even the Vatican observatory at Castel Gandolfo has pitched in . . .’ Philip took the handset and spoke more sharply. ‘Get to the point, Walter. Sightings of what? What are you on about? What is it they are all observing, man?’
Again my own inner tension tightened a notch, and I could see it in the faces of the others.
But Walter named a planet we were none of us expecting: Jupiter. We all stared at each other, confused. But then, Walter Jenkins was nothing if not a wounded oracle.
Jupiter!
Philip snapped, ‘Walter, damn you! What about Jupiter?’
‘Why, a sigil has been observed on its cloudy face.’
‘A sigil?’
‘A mark, luminous and sinuous – entirely contained within the feature we call the Great Red Spot, as it happens, but easily visible from the earth. Indeed Dyson in England claims to have seen similar sigils on Jupiter’s larger moons, but that is disputed.’
Eric Eden said, ‘A sigil? You mean like the marks observed some years after the War, on Mars and Venus?’
‘That’s it, yes,’ Walter said when this was relayed. ‘The Mars and Venus sigils were identical, aside from scale ’
The Massacre of Mankind Page 5
