Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  No, no, and no. With due gratitude, but definite; and then they waited, as politely as possible, for her to go.

  The light on this time, they returned to their joint task, Mary’s own memories at this point supplementing those recorded by her brother through that last sweet spring on Flittermouse Hill; one of the loveliest springs in living memory, so green was the reviving grass, so lush the hedgerows at the base of the hill, the elders and wayfarer trees bursting into bud, huge pale clusters among the new leaves, already scenting the warm air, but never, now, to burst into flower. For before the spring had burgeoned into summer, the bright air had become heavy with threat, with the thud and jangle of machinery and of huge lorries. And before long, angry, protesting voices were to be heard too, as the hastily-daubed SAVE FLITTERMOUSE HILL banners tottered amateurishly against a blue incredible sky where, for just a little longer, the larks would be singing; before their nests, their eggs, their fledgelings were mashed into the yellowish slimy ruts being gouged out of the hillside by the giant wheels.

  For there had been a protest, of course there had. Mary herself had been on it, she told Alice, for she’d been home for the Easter vacation just then. She and Julian had stood shoulder to shoulder with a few dozen other stalwarts from Medley Green and the surrounding villages; taking turns to link arms and stand defiantly in the path of the bulldozers and other vehicles of destruction, daring the great cumbersome lorries to mow them down.

  Of course, the lorries didn’t. Of course, the police arrived, and the television cameras, and on the News that evening there was a twenty-second item showing the police breaking-up the feeble little concourse, their banners skewed and flapping, and three of them — no, four — being carried away bodily. Julian, Mary explained, was in fact one of these, but happened to be off-camera at the moment, so his pluck — or obstinacy, or whatever — went unrecorded. Later in the evening, after the News, one of the protesters — a lady from the Medley Green Wild Flower Society — was given her say; but, inexperienced as she was in media-presentation, and not knowing that she was to have less than fifty seconds, she filled nearly all of it with a pre-amble consisting almost entirely of the correct botanical names of various species of wild flower that grow on chalk, and never got to her main point at all. The opposite point of view was presented, far more skilfully, by a Town Councillor who homed in at once on his two most telling points; the first, and most important one, concerning the number of jobs that would be created by this new development; the second (and in its way almost as important as the job-creation aspect), there was the actual need for such a development. Growing population … Industrial expansion … Medley Green bursting at the seams … Influx of car-owning commuters … Overcrowded roads … Inadequate car-parks … Need for a large new shopping centre … The inalienable right of every human being to a decent home with a garage, and central heating, and double-glazing, and constant hot water …

  The speech was recorded in the local paper, and Julian had kept the cutting. It was one of the first to be pasted in, and underneath he had written:

  ‘They’ve done it. It’s happened. It’s happened now, in May, just when the elder flowers are beginning, and I’ve seen the first hover-fly. The man says all that hedge at the foot of the hill is to come down, and of course the ragwort will go with it, and so there will be no cinnabar moths this summer. Nor next, nor for ever. The silver birches are going too, he said — in fact the whole of the copse, including the big oaks with the owls. The barn owls and the tawny owls.

  ‘I wish the nuclear war would start, then the human race would be gone too. At least the cockroaches would be left, for they are more resistant to radioactivity than any other creature.

  May 17th. The same man was there, he’s working one of the diggers. He agreed with me, yes, it’s a bit of a shame to be cutting down the hawthorns just when they’re in bloom — a grand sight, he says, looks like snow-drifts as you come over the hill; but it’s the schedule, see, it can’t be helped. If we don’t keep to the schedule they’ll be taking on another contractor, and then where’ll we all be?

  May 18th. I got up very early this morning, I was at Flittermouse Hill before sunrise and had to wheel my bike over the ruts looking for somewhere to lean it. The handlebars were all wet with dawn, and the great oak I leaned it on was wet too, the bark was slippery with wet, and I noticed they’d already marked it where the saw-cuts are to go.

  A bit further up, I stood very quietly and watched the rabbits while it was still grey, the grass, and sort of misty before sunrise. They are half way up the hill now, I think the burrows further down have mostly been destroyed, and they are scurrying around making new ones higher up, all ready to be destoyed in a week’s time. Or maybe two weeks, depending on the schedule.

  What can we do? There must be something. The demo was useless. Too feeble. Too few. There must be something, though; we can’t just let it happen; we can’t.

  On the way down, I met Mrs Jakes, and told her about it … about the rabbits making new burrows. She’s one of the women who were on the demo, and so I assumed she’d sympathise, and help me try to think what we could do; but she just gave a little laugh:

  “I’m afraid I can’t feel sorry for rabbits!” she said. “They’re nasty, destructive creatures, you know. They damage the trees …”

  Yes, that’s what she said: “they damage the trees”; and actually while she was saying it we could hear the chainsaws in the silver-birch wood, slicing down trees at the rate of seven an hour. That’s what the foreman told me: seven an hour.

  Something must be done; and whatever it is, it must be done by me. I can see that now. I stood there, and I made a vow: I am going to fight them. If necessary, to the death; and if necessary, alone.

  May 23rd. This morning, I stood all alone in front of one of the bulldozers; but of course I was overpowered. No TV cameras this time, they get bored if they have to spend more than half a morning on this sort of thing, and so there is no record of my solitary humiliation. Two of the men were laughing as they swung me out of the way. I raced them down the slope, and got in front again, and we had a repeat performance.

  The third time they’d got a little bunch of police waiting for me, and so that was that.

  They didn’t put me in a cell, by the way; they let me off with a warning.

  A warning!!! I would like to have warned them, but I couldn’t think how.

  I shall, though, I shall.

  June 2nd. The oaks are down now. I watched the last one as they tore it to pieces, the mighty branches groaning and resisting, but giving in, one by one, in spite of their enormous strength. Each one in turn cracks at last, and bends, and then with a last frightful tearing sound it hangs loose for one juddering moment, and then crashes to the ground, where it lies, waiting to be set upon after the tea-break. The young green leaves don’t yet know that they are dead; they go on growing and unfurling themselves on the doomed twigs as if nothing had happened.

  Of course, this is the end of the owls. In the early afternoon I saw a pair of tawnies flapping blindly in the sunlight, their nest of owlets somewhere down there among the shrieking saws.

  June 3rd. It looks like a battlefield; and of course that’s exactly what it is: part of the world-wide battle going on between human beings and every other living thing.

  Last week it was the owls. This week it’s the bats; the little Mouse-Eared Bats that have hibernated in the chalk caves for thousands upon thousands of years, and who gave the hill its name. Now their caves are to be filled in to strengthen the foundations of the new buildings. There is a bat society of some sort, I rang them up, but they didn’t think there is anything they could do, someone is on holiday, and anyway Mouse-Eared Bats are not an endangered species. “They’ll find somewhere else to settle,” the girl consoled me. “Barns, derelict sheds, that sort of thing. They’ll be all right.”

  And perhaps they would have been. At this point in the diary, personal narrative was replaced for several page
s by newspaper cuttings.

  THE BATTY BATTLE-LINES ARE DRAWN was the first, and predictable headline, and throughout the article which followed Julian and his little band of supporters were referred to as the “Batty Battalion”, people, that is, campaigning to prevent the bats being poisoned as well as dispersed. The problem, as set out in subsequent articles and correspondence in the local paper, was roughly as follows:

  The bats, displaced from their ancestral caves, had indeed sought other homes, many of the females with their babies clinging to them as they flew around scouring the neighbourhood for suitable dwellings — barns, derelict sheds and so on, just as the society had predicted.

  But it was in one of these derelict sheds that the trouble had started — a garden shed, as it happened, belonging to an elderly widow. Going into it one evening, for the first time in months, to look for a tin of paint she remembered storing there, she was greeted, as she opened the door into the dusty, dusky interior, by “A terrifying noise … like a great pair of scissors opening and shutting”, and while still in a state of shock from this fearful sound, “a dreadful creature flew right past my face, I thought it was attacking me, I thought my last hour had come …!” The unfortunate lady had had to go to hospital to be treated for shock, and no sooner had the outcry over this died down, than another woman, slightly younger but with bad nerves, had fallen down and broken her arm while fleeing in panic from what she thought was a vampire flying about in her disused garage.

  “I thought it was going for my throat!” she explained to the reporter sent to interview her. “These horrible creatures — it shouldn’t be allowed!” and went on to say that she was thinking of suing the council for damages. “They should do something!” she demanded. “These evil creatures should be got rid of! We can’t go on like this!”

  The council was worried, the argument swayed back and forth, and finally went against the bats. The general opinion was summed up by a letter in the local paper at the end of June:

  “How anyone can plead for a creature that had already caused serious distress and injury to two helpless old women is beyond my understanding,” fulminated the writer. “Does there have to be an actual death before the authorities recognise their duty to get rid of these loathsome and dangerous creatures? How much longer will our old folk have to walk in dread after dusk has fallen, terrified to set foot even in their own gardens?”

  Powerful stuff: the Pest Control Officer got to work, and a week later Julian himself encountered one of these evil and dangerous creatures dragging itself along the roadside in the moonlight.

  Was its wing broken? Or was it dying from the effects of the poison?

  I couldn’t tell, it was humping itself along in the moonlight, in this terrible tortured way, using its wings as a sort of crutch to drag itself along. So slow, only two or three yards a minute, moving in the direction of Flittermouse Hill: for all the world as if it was seeking its ancient haunts, struggling at this snail’s pace to cover the hopeless miles that lay between it and its true home, the place where it would somehow be well again, able to fly again, to swoop, to shout, to feast across the moonlit sky.

  I don’t think this is all fantasy, I think, actually, it was trying to make for Flittermouse Hill, for bats do have a powerful homing instinct, and an unerring sense of direction. It would never get there, of course, long before it had covered the four or five miles it would be dead; but what purposeful effort it was putting into its utterly pointless progress … such indomitable will to keep trying, to keep going, no matter how inevitable its doom.

  I knew I should have killed it, put it out of its misery — but how? I dared not stamp on it, I was terrified that when I lifted my foot I would find it still alive.

  Now, if I’d had a gun …

  I’m going to get myself one. Must find out how.

  And then, a few days later:

  *

  Got gun. Will shoot.

  Chapter 23

  But by now it was not just for an injured bat.

  I can’t bear the fact that I’m a human being. I can’t bear being a member of this monstrous species. A few nights ago we had some people in, and after dinner an argument arose about starlings: should they or shouldn’t they be allowed to come and feed at the bird-table? “Starlings are vermin,” someone said. “Of course you shouldn’t feed them.” “No they aren’t,” someone else argued. “Birds can’t be vermin” — and so the argument went on: were they or weren’t they vermin?

  So later, when they’d gone, I looked up “vermin” in the dictionary.

  Animals of a noxious or objectionable nature … who prey on, or are parasitic on, other species … wholesale destroyers of crops and other vegetation. Old French vermine, Latin vermis a worm.

  How perfect, how apt a description of the human race! Vermin! If you looked down from a high enough satellite, you would see them pullulating on every land-mass like maggots on a piece of meat, swarming like locusts through the forests and the grasslands, leaving dust-bowls and deserts in their wake, consuming and destroying and laying waste the food supplies of every other creature.

  I’ve been collecting cuttings about the human vermin and their achievements, which I intend to paste in here some time, but in case I don’t get around to it, let me summarise a few of them:

  1) In a laboratory in the States they have succeeded in grafting a second head on to a dog. The two-headed creature lived for several days, and they have every hope that the next one will live even longer, though of course more money will be needed for the successful expansion of this line of research.

  2) Somewhere in Japan they have a monkey’s brain, still alive, as proved by the encephalographic apparatus monitoring it. What the apparatus doesn’t monitor, because it can’t, is what the brain is experiencing while it waits in vain to die.

  3) A science correspondent in one of the Qualities writes: The good folk who bewail the disappearance of wildlife have their heads — to put it kindly — in Cloud Cuckoo Land. The truth is that we live on a shrinking planet, with a human population of five billion — a figure likely to be doubled within less than forty years; there simply isn’t room for creatures other than those needed for human food. By the end of the century, or soon after, all large mammals will have to go; and the smaller ones will follow, as well as most species of birds. To put it in practical terms: we just can’t afford them; and anyone who thinks we can should be dragged forcibly out of his ivory tower and made to look squarely at the actual facts …

  4) Another quote: Fish-farms are no longer a novelty or a way-out experiment; they are fast becoming a necessity. Already large areas of the North Sea are so polluted that many of the fish are developing cancer. As the oceans of the world become more and more polluted and less and less able to support life, these farms will become a vital source of essential food …

  5) Meanwhile, while the oceans do still support quite a lot of fish, we have invented a wonderful new way of depleting them … Huge vacuum fishing-domes, the size of St Paul’s, sweeping over the water like a giant Hoover, sucking out of it every living thing, some to be brought ashore and sold, most to be discarded as useless, and left to die. In this new technology for destroying marine life, we in Britain are falling behind, it seems. More money is needed if we are to catch up with our rivals in Europe and elsewhere who are seriously out-distancing us in the destruction of life in the oceans of the world.

  Well, that’s just a few examples. I began collecting them quite a while back, for a sixth form debate on Conservation, but the habit grows on me. The few dozen cuttings I began with have become a few hundred. It’s become an obsession, you could say.

  I have heard people express the fear that the human race will destroy itself. I am more afraid it won’t.

  I have also heard people agonising about how it is that a merciful God can allow earthquakes, floods, shipwrecks, aeroplane crashes etc. Me, I can’t see the problem. A truly merciful God, looking down on the world as it is today, would
surely order a cull of human beings, far more extensive than that entailed by the odd earthquake etc.

  Well, I’m not God. I can’t order this cull of human beings, I haven’t the power. All the same, I do have the power to get rid of one of them. This very night. They will find me in the morning among the ruins of Flittermouse Hill, with a bullet through my brain. In case they don’t know why, I will tell them. It is in order to end my membership of this awful species, and to save those bits of the planet that would have been destroyed to keep me going for the next sixty years or so. Four hundred acres of the earth’s surface, they say, has to be covered with concrete to keep one Western citizen at the standard he has come to demand.

  This is my last message to the world.

  But it wasn’t. On Monday, July 4th, there was a failed suicide attempt to record. As well as the first murder.

  Much of the record was in note form, understandably hasty and incomplete, but not hard to piece together into an approximate account of what had happened.

  It was not quite midnight, and the turf still warm from the long, scorching day, when Julian settled himself among the gorse bushes that still stood in untidy, battered clumps alongside the earthworks that were to become one of the new roads. The moon, a little past the first quarter, was just setting beyond the curve of the hill. Julian had planned the timing like this so that he would have some light with which to locate a suitable hide-out, followed by darkness in which to commit the deed.

  Everything was ready — the loaded gun, the farewell note that was to be found in his pocket; and the thing that delayed him was something quite unexpected. It was that he couldn’t get comfortable. Either he leaned against the gorse, and had to endure the prickles, or else he had to sit straight, unsupported and ramrod stiff.

  Fancy wanting to be comfortable when you are just about to die. I wonder if other suicides have felt this? It’s something the same as taking your last look at things; you want your last sight of the world to be of something grand and lovely, and in the same way you want your body’s last sensations to be of comfort and peace. So anyway, I fidgeted about, changing my position — this way, that way — till at last I got it right. Then I looked up.