by John Bowen
“What happened?”
“The cupboard fell on me.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Frightened.”
It was true. I felt a very great reluctance to submerge again and try to find the cupboard on the floor. When I did so, it had fallen with the door downwards. I surfaced, and swam round the sides of the kitchen, looking for something that might be the entrance to a larder. When I found it, I was already chilled. The water reached to the larder ceiling, and I dived into a black cold box, tight-packed, it seemed, with that hostile choking water. I could see nothing. All my movements were slowed down, and when my outstretched arms touched some sort of a can, I clutched it gladly, and turned to bear it back to the surface.
I couldn’t find the door; I had lost direction. The can fell out of my hand as I beat in slow motion against the larder wall. My head hit the ceiling, but there was no air there; the larder was filled with water. Something in my chest was trying to get out, trying to burst the bonds of my body, and dissipate itself in the blackness. In my fear and pain, I almost lost consciousness. I do not know how, in the end, I found the larder door and the hole in the kitchen ceiling and Wendy’s hands, which reached down to help me, and to which I clung, sobbing, until I had the strength to pull myself up.
I did not dive again that day, but slept by the fire, while Wendy watched, and kept it alight. In the morning, I went back into the larder, diving again and again to bring up cans of metal polish, a rusty tin that had contained salt, pots of spoiled jam, and seventeen of the plastic cans of vegetables.
*
Although I don’t suppose Bob Humphries had considered the possibility—or if he had done so, he must have put all his strength of will to dismissing it—the nature of our situation might have made it likely that Wendy and I should become lovers. Reading back over what I have just written, and remembering how, after she had pulled me from the water, Wendy dried me with a sheet, wrapped me in the fire-warmed smokey bedding, and lay beside me until she was sure I was tranquil again and on the way to sleep, I myself find it curious that we did not. Yet in fact the relationship that grew between us would have made sex into a kind of incest. We were too close together in the dinghy; we had no privacy, emotional or physical. And, although it was difficult and embarrassing at first to discard the habitual bodily reticences, we very soon grew used to doing so, and were as natural as children before they have been taught shame, or like Adam and Eve in the Garden before they had discovered the shattering power and pleasure their bodies could give.
We remained in the house for three days, by which time we had burned the furniture, the bannisters and stair-treads and much of the floor. Wendy’s cough seemed to get no better, but we both felt rested and somehow more secure when the time came to set out again.
So we went on through that flooded countryside. The water covered the fields, and the flat bottom of the dinghy sometimes scraped the tops of hedges. We had left the Thames valley, and we were lost more frequently as we worked our way westwards along the troughs of water that lay between the hills, until every now and again the hills would come together, so that we had either to turn back or slosh through the mud and rain, dragging the dinghy to the next stretch of water.
During those days we saw neither animals nor people. Those animals which had not been drowned would long ago, we supposed, have been eaten, and the people of the villages would either be dead or have been evacuated to areas more easily supplied with food. Only once, as the grey of evening grew deeper before nightfall, we came across a little hillock surrounded by water, from which a single gaunt beast—a child’s pony, by its size—stared at us. We drew nearer, and it lifted its head, and neighed, and as we paddled on into the twilight, the sound pursued us for long after the pony itself had vanished from our sight.
Eventually, still keeping out of the way of towns, we came to Somerset and to Chew Magna, and the only person alive in the flooded and deserted village below Chew Hill was a girl, floating on a piano.
CHAPTER THREE
Under Canvas
We helped the girl into the dinghy, and, with the effort, the top of the piano was pushed under water. It sank at once, and the girl began to weep.
“It’s all right,” said Wendy. “Don’t cry. You’re safe now.
“Silly old thing!” said the girl, still weeping. “I never liked it.”
I said, “I think we’ve met before.”
“Why don’t you have a tuner in, I used to tell them. It’s no good having a piano if it’s out of tune.”
“It was at a party at Bletchley. I spilled some cider cup down the front of your dress. I expect you’ve forgotten.”
The girl stood weeping, and looked at me more closely. “It’s difficult to say in that hat,” she said. “Still I suppose it keeps you dry.”
“You were with a ballet company. On tour.”
“That’s right. It was with the old Cosmopolitan before we broke up. Well, that is strange. I never did get the stains off that dress. One of the girls in Guys and Dolls when we were touring said she knew a way with salts of lemon, but we only burnt a hole in it, and I had to throw it out.”
“How long had you been on that piano?”
“Hours. I got so wet, I must say. And I had to take the inside out before it would float. My name’s Sonya. Sonya Banks. What’s yours?” By now the girl was cheerful and at ease with us, her tears forgotten. I have noticed this trait in dancers. They are astonishingly able to live in the moment, switching easily from one thought or feeling to another entirely different in subject or in kind; Sonya will often do it in mid-sentence if some casual incident diverts her attention.
I introduced Wendy and myself.
“I suppose you’re going to the Camp,” said Sonya.
“Has it started?”
“Well, I don’t know. But everybody’s going to it, so I suppose it must have.”
Wendy said, “My husband’s parents live here. We hoped to stay with them until the Camp was ready.”
“But they’ve all gone. They went without me.”
“Who went without you?”
“Everybody. In boats and things. There wasn’t anything left but the piano.”
Sonya had come to stay with her aunt and uncle at Chew Magna when the company of the musical comedy in which she had been touring was disbanded after reaching Bristol. Bob Humphries, it seemed, had been mistaken in thinking that his parents would have reserves of food. The semi-rural communities were just as dependent on the deliveries of milkmen and bakers as the folk in the cities; no hams hung any longer from their ceilings. The people of Chew had been as cold and damp and hungry as the people of London; their old folk had died, and their young had sickened. While, on the one hand, they had been able to bury their dead and were free of plague, on the other they had lacked even the makeshift feeding services of the L.C.C.
Then the word had come, by air and water, from the Headquarters of Government in the West Country, that they were to prepare themselves to move to a Camp in the Mendips. That was Stage A—the Alert; detailed evacuation lists were to follow, and Stages B, C, D, E and F would see the move completed. But the people did not wait for Stages B, C, D, E and F. They moved by boat and table-top and anything that would flloat, and they moved at once towards the promise of food and company.
There was nobody left in the village, said Sonya, and so it proved. The long, one-storey building on Chew Hill where the Humphries had lived was as empty as any of the other deserted houses we had passed on our way. The window in Bob’s old room had been left open, and the rain blew in on his boyhood books, his home-made radio set and all the healthy litter of his growing-up. The car rusted in the garage, the lawn-mower in the tool-shed; empty coops in the water-logged garden showed that there had once been chickens. In the music-room, Mrs. Humphries’ grand piano stood with the top open as if for a recital; to chop it up for firing was as difficult as drowning kittens.
A picture to remember. We had fou
nd some Friars Balsam among the bathroom medicines, and we heated water to mix with it. Wendy sat inhaling, with her head over a basin, and a towel over her head, while Sonya crouched by the hearth, taking in the waist of a pair of trousers she had found among Mrs. Humphries’ things. The daylight had nearly faded, and the room was lit only by the flames of the fire. Suddenly Sonya put down her work, and went over to the windows. She drew the curtains; the rain was shut out. “There,” she said, smiling at us, “that’s more comfortable, isn’t it?”, and the room and the firelight took on associations I had forgotten, and I was at home again.
*
In the evening of the next day, we arrived at the Mendip Camp.
I remember a sprawling area of muddy and disordered tentage, of huts half-built and over-crowded, of shelters improvised from upturned boats and furniture crowded together and draped with macintoshes. I remember the cold, and above all I remember the stench that seemed to pervade the drenched air, and every day grew stronger; it was like a concentration of all the army latrines I have ever known. There was nothing that the Camp Authorities could do about the stench; when they sent working parties out to dig new latrines, the latrines filled up with water as they were dug, and, although the people tried at first to defecate decently outside the perimeter of the camp, as it grew larger these distinctions ceased to be observed.
There was little, indeed, that the Authorities could do about anything, once the Evacuation Plan had failed. It had been intended that the first arrivals should build huts for the rest. The whole camp was to grow in pre-fabricated squares, stage by stage. An improvised electrical plant would provide power and warmth; the chemists had worked out some method of getting nourishment from algae artificially stimulated to rapid growth. None of this happened. The plant was never completed, and was occupied half-built by folk in search of shelter. The hut-sections, as they were dropped from the air, were parcelled out to supplement the makeshift shelters that were soon the only accommodation arrivals could get, and these were over-crowded, and, when tents were set up, they were over-crowded, and the tents had floors of mud, and so did the shelters. Soft mud was everywhere. The people lived in the mud and rain like animals, and were as docile.
They were docile in their staying, docile even in their dying, but this was only, as it were, in unconscious penance for their first act of indocility, which was that they had ignored the Plan. The Mendip Camp was a trap, but a trap created by its victims; from all over the West Country, they had rushed like lemmings to their damp death. At first the Authorities had tried to turn the people away, but how could this be done?—they had no soldiers, no rolls of barbed wire, no searchlights; nobody had imagined that it would be necessary to defend the Camp. Huts were taken over for a hospital, and then more huts, and then tents, so that by the time we arrived, only the sick had accommodation that had not been improvised. The Camp Commandant, who believed that he should share the discomforts of his charges, had moved the wooden sign marked “OFFICE” from hut to tent to shelter, and, when we went to report, it was hanging crazily from one knob of a chest of drawers.
*
It had seemed to me that there was very little point in dragging the dinghy up-hill in the rain to the Camp. I had suggested deflating it and hiding it.
“How are we going to blow it up again?” Sonya had said.
“We shan’t want to, shall we?”
“Then why are you bothering to hide it?”
“I suppose we might want it,” I had said. “We’d better tie it up somewhere.”
“We don’t want anyone finding it and taking it for themselves. After all it is ours.”
So I had hidden the dinghy in a clump of trees well above the water line. Sonya had promised she would remember the place; dancers’ memories, she said, had to be better than those of other people, otherwise the classics couldn’t be preserved. Our other possessions were all contained in two waterproof bundles. I had shouldered one and Sonya the other, and we had set off at a slow trudge, so that Wendy would be able to keep up.
She was by this time obviously sick. Our slow progress to the Camp had been interrupted by her spasms of coughing, during which tears flowed unrestrained from her eyes, and she kept saying, “I’m sorry to be a nuisance; I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” over and over again.
“Never mind,” Sonya had said. “There’s bound to be a hospital when we get there. They’ll soon have you right again.”
But they didn’t. At first Wendy refused to go into hospital at all until she had found Bob’s father and mother, but we discovered that the Camp Authorities had given up trying to keep records, and that the search for Mr. and Mrs. Humphries would entail making inquiries at every shelter, so Wendy submitted, was taken to hospital, and remained there. The hospital enclosure, we found, covered an area to one side of the Camp; it was surrounded by a rough wire fence, which was continually being enlarged, as more and more tents were taken over. The hospital patients had beds of a sort; the rest of us had not. Sonya and I found quarters in a tiny improvised shelter with the frightened man. Nobody else would stay with him, but even so we had little enough room.
The frightened man sat in the mud against the piece of pre-fabricated walling that formed one side of the shelter. His hands were crossed over his chest; his knees were drawn up to his chin. We found him in this position when we arrived, and he never changed it until the day we left. The frightened man was frightened; that was all there was to him. “I am in a constant, perpetual, all-pervading state of fear,” he told us. “Can you understand what that means? What you feel in occasional moments of danger, I feel all the time. I am a man stepping into an aeroplane for his first flight. I am the schoolboy who has come to the headmaster’s study to be caned. I am the condemned man, waiting in his cell, facing away from the door by which the excutioner will enter, waiting, waiting for the first sound that will tell him that door has opened. I am all fear, do you understand? You two, you still have your façades. That is what personality means; we each of us build façades behind which we shelter from the world, and all our lives we slave on these façades, making them stronger and solider and more handsomely decorated, but what lies behind the facade is what we are, and what I am is fear,” said the frightened man. “My facade is broken, and I am all fear, defenceless and uncontrolled as you see me.”
It was a killing time. There was so little to do. We volunteered for Camp Duties, but in that state of disorganization there were more volunteers than duties, and I found myself in a working party only once. We would join the queues for rations—the same slop (which seemed now to have grass in it) and the same tablets—and we shared our food with the frightened man, who never moved to collect any for himself. We read the notices on the Notice Board, and made little trips of exploration outside the Camp perimeter; since we were always wet, and our shelter leaked, it didn’t seem to make much difference whether we were indoors or not, and we never developed a taste for the frightened man’s company. And every day, for the six days and seven nights we spent at the Mendip Camp, we went to visit Wendy in hospital, standing by the side of the canvas bed on which she lay, and making such scraps of conversation as we could. Then, on the seventh morning, the hospital was out of bounds.
“What does it mean?” I said.
“What does what mean?” said the frightened man.
“The hospital. It’s out of bounds.”
All the short time we had known him, the frightened man had kept his eyes wide open, staring in front of him. We had never seen him close his eyes, but now he closed them. “You know what it means,” he said. He put the thumb of his right hand into his mouth, rolled to one side, and lay there with his eyes tight shut. As Sonya and I left the shelter, we heard him say very distinctly, “My name was Alfred Chester. I had a practice in Chipping Sodbury”.
“Can you be sure of finding the dinghy again?” I said.
Sonya said, “We can’t leave Wendy”.
“No.”
But we couldn
’t reach her. They wouldn’t allow it. The notice at the hospital enclosure said “Out of Bounds”. When we asked at the Camp Office whether they would make an exception, and allow us to visit Wendy, they said they were sorry. “You know how it is,” said the orderly. “We’re not allowing any visitors now, you see. It gets so over-crowded in there.”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
We walked together through the rain to collect our bundles of belongings from the shelter. “Even if they did let us in,” I said, “they wouldn’t let us take her away. Even if they let us take her away, she wouldn’t be able to travel.”
Sonya said nothing.
“There isn’t anything we could possibly do,” I said.
Sonya said nothing.
I began to talk very quickly, explaining and justifying, saying the same thing over and over again in different words. It was quite true; we could not break in, after all; we could not carry Wendy through the wire; she would die in the dinghy, I said, knowing that she would die in the hospital too, alone and friendless after we had gone. I said that we had to think of ourselves, and the risk from infection. It is not bad to be a coward; that is a natural thing. But it is bad to make excuses and feel ashamed. I cannot remember this occasion without shame, but I cannot remember it without tenderness either, for when I had finished speaking, Sonya said gently, “I know, dear,” and I realized then that I loved her, and I felt that she loved me.
As soon as we could, we left the perimeter of the Mendip Camp. Behind the hospital enclosure there was a furnace, intended for baking. It had not been used, because there was not the fuel to make its use worthwhile. But we noticed that it was in use now.
