by A. N. Wilson
Charles decided, before he went back to the office, to sit down in his dark suit on a bench near the statue of Queen Victoria, and to hear a few more of Penny Whistle’s songs. When the old sailor began on
As I walked down a London Street
A Press Gang I did chance to meet,
They asked me if I’d join the Fleet
Aboard a Man o’ War . . .
Charles fell suddenly deeply asleep. By this stage of the morning, his son Josh was finishing the last quadratic equation. Within the next hour, he would have changed into whites, and gone down to the cricket pavilion. Ella, at the zoo, would be about to witness the terror of the animals as their cages were ripped apart by the mad invisible giant.
There was assembly – the children sang ‘Morning has Broken’. Then the three Year One classes collected their packed lunches, little yoghurt pots and triangular cream cheese or ham sandwiches, and an apple or banana depending on luck of the draw, and lined up to climb into two hired Macnaughton’s coaches. The drivers of both these vehicles sat, a little slumped, behind the wheel. This was partly because the glorious February sunshine was already hot. It was also because there was nothing they disliked more than these school trips. The best thing was Scenic Seniors, driving oldies to beauty spots, listening to their yacketty-yak all the way down towards the mountains, or the sea; pausing with the other drivers in the car park of a wayside boozer or eaterie; and then driving them back, full of our best Island Riesling, or sherries, beers, gin and tonic, and hearing the comforting susurrus of their unconscious breath, the reassuring honks of the louder snorers. Rugby fans could be difficult, course they could, and they were loud. Driving them back from an International in Carmichael’s Callaghan Park could be hairy – the repetitive, coarse songs, the lager tins rattling down the aisle of the bus.
Relatively few of them, however, actually puked. Whereas on these school trips, puking was the norm. Both drivers laid some of the blame on the teachers, who – they thought – put it into the heads of the suggestible children that they might throw up.
—Stig, let Karyl sit in the front.
—But I was here first, Mrs Chambers.
—That’s not the point, Stig. You know Karyl gets motion sickness.
Why tell her? That was what the drivers wanted to know. Why tell kids like Karyl that they might puke? Some of the kids threw up almost as soon as you turned the ignition key. And if they’d been on outings which involved a packed lunch, fizzy drinks, and – worst of all – time in a playground, where they’d been whizzed round and round on carousels, or whooshed up and down in the swings, then the aisles of the bus were full of that stench. Some of the coaches in the Macnaughton’s fleet were never quite free of it. Nothing more nauseating than nausea. Even on the rare occasions when the nippers did not actually throw, there was the noise of their tinny voices, which went on all the time. No post-prandial Zizz for them. The cockatoo chatter never stopped, often acrimonious, and needing the intervention of a teacher. Some of the drivers had approached the foreman at Macnaughton’s about the possibility of demanding extra pay when driving school parties, but the company was not having any of it.
—Now when we get to the zoo, Mr Pollard was yelling down the bus at his lot . . .
And Mrs Chambers, who was one of the lucky grown-ups who somehow could get children to be quiet, was saying,
—What is it we all do when we get to the zoo?
And her lot, in one of those sing-sing collective replies, were chanting,
—Stand-in-a-LINE, Miss-Iz-Chaym-Buzz.
—That’s RIGHT, stand in a LINE. And what do we NEVER EVER DO?
—Push-our-fin-guzzz-thru-the-BARS, Miss-Iz-Chaym-Buzz.
—Because we are all fellow creatures, we all share this planet, don’t we?
They seemed to accept this on Mrs Chambers’s bus, whereas Mr Pollard’s lot, closer in their writhings, attempts to stand up on their seats to pull funny faces at those sitting behind, or to lean forwards, and pull or, better still, glue to the safety-belts, with wodges of chewing gum, the plaits of the little girls immediately in front of them, seemed closer to their simian cousins. Unlike Mrs Chambers, who transformed all her announcements into Q and A, Mr Pollard was trying to issue injunctions – no feeding of the animals, no going away from the crowd, you’re to stay in pairs, remember, stay in PAIRS – but could scarcely make his voice heard as the bus lurched out of the school gates into Prince Alfred Parade. By the time he was trying to issue two orders at once – NO, You CAN’T EAT YOUR PACKED LUNCHES until we get there, and remember, Don’t WHATEVER YOU DO put your fingers through the BARS – some voices at the back were calling,
—Sir, Sir, Emma-Jane says she’s going to throw, Sir.
—I think it would be better, Ella Nicolson informed Mr Pollard, if Emma-Jane sits nearer the front of the bus on the way home.
—She wasn’t actually ill, was she, Ella?
—She felt ill. She might have been sick.
Ella’s intense bespectacled little pale face appeared to be correcting her teacher. Her mum and dad had a thing about false gentilities. Being ill and being sick were different in their English, though not in Mr Pollard’s.
—We are NOT GOING IN THE SHOP, bellowed Mr Pollard to the rest of the class. Their actions belied his words. They were stampeding towards the emporium which contained mountains, piled high, of nylon-furred wallabies, kangaroos, lemurs, crocodiles, lions, wombats, duck-billed platypuses – and a sweet counter which Mrs Chambers had already reached. As she cleared the premises of Opportunity One pupils, this sensible woman told the assistant that the sweets should never have been allowed in such a shop. Did they care NOTHING for the dental health of future generations?
—Besides, you’re asking for shoplifters if you put all that stuff at their level, she said, pointing an accusing finger at the liquorice snakes, candied mice and sea-horse-shaped humbugs.
—Where did we agree we wouldn’t go? asked Mrs Chambers.
Even Mr Pollard joined in the rhythmic chanting of In-the-shop-Miss-Iz-Chaym-Buzz. In answer to a girl called Amy’s relentless questioning, this highly competent person replied,
—How urgent is it, Amy? You went just before we left the school.
Later, Ella asked Mrs Chambers,
—They’re right, aren’t they, Miss?
Mrs Chambers answered,
—Maybe, Ella. Maybe.
The group pointed out by the child were standing in silent witness beside the tiger enclosure, holding a banner which read, ‘TIGERS BELONG IN THE WILD, NOT IN THE ZOO’.
Eleanor stood beside her office window drinking coffee. She had seen Charles Nicolson approaching, and retreated to the depths of the room where she was invisible to the outside world. He had become a figure of nightmare to her. What had begun as a rather flattering flirtation was now a thing of total embarrassment. She had encouraged him. That was the undeniable, infuriating fact of the matter; but only because it had never occurred to her that he was, as far as she was concerned, a lunatic. Love – or whatever it was – had sent him round the bend. She felt threatened. If she had not been crazy enough to encourage him, just a little, in the initial stages . . . If she had not gone with him that time to the Botanic Gardens . . . If she had not yielded to his kiss, rather than pulling away, perhaps even smacking his cheek . . . Then, what?
The strong baritone of Penny Whistle had begun in the morning sunshine, which was already blazingly hot. Eleanor reflected upon the fact that she had been there for over three years, and he had sung every day, even on Christmas Morning. Apart from his occasional sallies into the hymnal – when he would, for example, sing Christmas carols – and Good Friday, during the hours he was not in the Cathedral, was devoted to ‘There is a Green Hill’, ‘When I Survey’, and so forth – he hardly ever repeated himself. His repertoire was prodigious. Not for the first time, she indulged the fancy that he had always been there – had stepped ashore in the 1700s with the famous sea-captain and the
eminent botanist, and remained ever since, a man of the eighteenth century still chanting his old lays in the twenty-first.
Farewell an’ adieu to you fair Spanish ladies,
Farewell an’ adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For we’ve received orders for to sail for old England,
An’ hope very shortly to see you again.
We’ll rant an’ we’ll roar, like true British sailors,
We’ll rant an’ we’ll rave across the salt seas,
’Till we strike soundings in the Channel of Old England,
From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-four leagues.
Penny Whistle wore capacious, frayed, blue cotton shorts, a red tee-shirt, already much-stained round the armpits, and – in readiness for another hot summer day in February – a wide-brimmed straw hat. This object, possibly the gift of a tourist, had begun its life as a sombrero. It now recalled the roof of a ruined cottage through which the sun’s rays, the wind or the rain could make their incursions. Through the many gaps, the sun dappled Penny Whistle’s weather-brown cheeks with flecks of light.
Her mind was in a state most conducive, in an almost literal sense, to reflection. That is, she was not forming coherent thoughts, but she was absorbing impressions, a hangover from her half-hour of liturgical observance in the Cathedral, when the repetition of familiar words, like the singing of an old song, or the hearing of a piece of music, moves the sensibilities into a receptive frame of mind without knowing what it receives. Is this what old song, old liturgy and serious music all make possible for us as human beings? And is it what amplified music, or new and unfamiliar liturgy, and all the artificial noise which we create around ourselves in a modern city drowns out? The possibility of being a reflective person? Penny Whistle sang so defiantly, his jerky blind head and his muscular shoulders moving in their marionette rhythms, and seeming to say – this is enough, this song, these words, the strange worlds which the words, which are not mine, evoke. To this extent, he was bardic, even hieratic. This was what the Church ought to be, but so seldom was. Because it wanted to interpret words, stories, rhythms and music which did not need to be interpreted? She put down her coffee cup. Time for a different sort of work. Woman goeth forth unto her work, and to her labour, until evening.
*
Some of us heard the bang, and then saw the effects. Others of us saw the effects – the trees swaying, the cars rising in the air and descending upside down on top of other cars, the liquefaction of the earth, the unroofing of houses – and then heard the bang, louder than any explosion anyone had heard, even the army veterans among us, even our oldest inhabitant, Mr Tooth, a hundred and four years old, who had fought in Crete and Italy during the war, and taken part in battles where the pounding of high explosives went on for several days at a time. Mr Tooth was in a retirement home now, where the twenty residents and their carers were gathered round the television in a downstairs room overlooking the garden. It was a bungalow structure, built to modern specifications and quake-proofed, so that they were lucky. The building did not collapse around them. But the favourite soap opera which some of them enjoyed watching disappeared from the enormous plasma-screen as all the power went down. The two Chinese care workers, who were wheeling in a trolley of tea and biscuits, were thrown across the floor, the tea-urn upset, scalding one of them badly, and the biscuits suddenly flew up like a crowd of malignant insects.
The zoo, as all visitors to Aberdeen will remember, is on the edge of Gladstone Park.
Deborah Roskill, sixty-eight, a retired nurse, tall, bespectacled, summer-skirted, neat-bloused, was walking in Gladstone Park, near her flat in the suburbs. She strode briskly, in spite of the heat, occasionally whistling and calling to Finn, her energetic black Labrador, who bounded ahead of her in search of other dogs to play with. She saw the dog stand stock still, about eighty yards ahead of her. As she approached, he turned and ran back to her.
—What have you done? she asked. He was staring at her with wild, scared eyes, and he leapt at her with muddy paws.
—How did you get yourself so muddy? Her first thought was that he had been rolling in excrement, because the summer heat had seared the park, and there had been no mud when they set out on their walk. Now she looked, however, and saw human figures running. Some of them were screaming, but those who passed her had faces frozen with shock. All around, the parched lawns of Gladstone Park had split into fissures, and were oozing. This was not ordinary mud. It was liquefaction, and the park was turning into a swamp. We’d all seen this, six months before. She and Finn turned back from the lawn and made for the concrete path and the huge ornamental cast-iron gates, erected to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V in 1935, which were now swaying like flimsy reeds. King George himself, who stood on a Lutyensesque plinth in the middle of the park beside the bandstand, was doing what, in life, he seldom did: he was wobbling.
The road which passed Gladstone Park, leading from the suburb of Kensington into the centre of the city, was already log-jammed with traffic. One woman was standing beside her immobile car shouting,
—My kid’s in school in Benson Square! My kid’s in school in Benson Square! Opportunity One!
No one could deny this, but nor could anyone do anything to help her. The traffic had come to a standstill. Hundreds of people, at the same moment, had formed the idea of racing into town by car to rescue their children, their wives, their friends. The concrete verges were cracking like cookies, and dusty grass had turned to a grey, smelly ooze as the liquefaction slopped onto the road. It was soon lapping the doors of the stationary cars. The woman yelling about her kid was now standing ankle deep in slime and the liquefaction was rising fast towards her waist.
The solid bronze statue of George V’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, which had stood on its white stone plinth in the centre of Argyle Square opposite the Cathedral since 1903, swayed from side to side, as if that empress, as she sometimes did in life, had been overindulging in good Highland malt. It tottered and fell on a camper van in which a young family had taken refuge. As it ripped through the roof of the van, it crushed a seven-year-old boy to death. At the same moment, the movement of the road beneath the van was hurling it about. The mother of the surviving two children, a gentle-faced hippy with black hair woven into plaits, was openmouthed and screaming.
She was not the only person screaming. Many in the square had lost all control of themselves. Some yelled. Some shat themselves. Bodies were being tossed as high as ten feet in the air before crashing back to what had been the ground, but was now a surging muddle of broken tarmac and liquefaction. Somewhere a gas main must have burst because the smell of gas was overpowering.
A policeman, who had risen to his feet again and was trying to stand upright, endeavoured to answer a woman in shorts and tee-shirt, who was yelling,
—Oh, where . . . where’s MY . . . Where?
Was she searching for lost children? A dog? Her mind?
The bright summer day had turned into a scorcher. The shirtsleeved policeman, Garry Hughes, touched her shoulder, and she flung herself into his arms. He stroked her mouse-coloured hair and squeezed her quivering body. Over her heaving shoulders, he could see Argyle Square, and the length of what had been King Edward Parade. The eucalyptus trees on either side of the ex-street were writhing as if in a hurricane. The branches were lashing out as if some vindictive maniac was using them as a carpet-beater. Many of them were uprooted, and were falling across what had been the surface of the road, but was now a great expanse of bubbling mud. In the time he had stood, trying to comfort the quivering woman, the young police officer could watch the city crumbling before his eyes and then vanishing in the clouds of dust which so much destruction caused. Some of the brand-new buildings which had been erected since the consciousness of seismology kicked in, a decade or so ago, were withstanding the Quake. Some, very few, older buildings had been quake-proofed. In Clarence Terrace, a parade of Edwardian shops and offices, some of them had been quake-proof
ed, others not, so that you saw about four out of twenty properties withstand the blast, while the rest quivered, rumbled, fell. Through billowing dust, you could dimly make out the old Adelphi, the most luxurious hotel on the Island, wobbling and turning to powder. Those police who were near could hear, through the din of collapsing masonry, the anguished, unchecked human screams.
All the Government offices at the end of King Edward Parade had already fallen.
When the woman had wept a little longer, she disentangled herself from Garry’s arms and walked away, dazed, without a word.
—You must go to . . .
He wanted to tell her that there was some assembly point where people might find support, news of loved ones, hot sweet tea, which was supposed to be of comfort in times of disaster, though he had never been able to see why. He knew of no such place, however, and his mobile phone received no signals. Turning his body, he could see that the wreckage visible down King Edward Parade was repeated in all quarters of the city. Jubilee Park was filled with crowds. Most of them were standing still, some were looking upwards – as if expecting the Second Coming. Waikuku Road, Howley Street, Longden Road were no longer there – there was just a broad wasteland of rising dust and smouldering ruins. Further to the east, he could see the spire of the Cathedral snapping like an ice cream cone. Then the tower itself seemed to wobble.
Charlie woke up on a bench which was floating from side to side like the seats in a roller-coaster at the fair.
—If the Cathedral goes, we’ve all gone, said a voice at his side, but by the time he had taken in the fact of being addressed, the speaker, a red-faced man, so hot that he might just have been halfboiled, had vanished in the dust plumes which now filled the air.
