The Hopkins Manuscript, page 26
But unbeknown to these struggling little communities, men in other places were gathering the threads of government, mobilising labour for work upon things wider in scope than mere self-preservation. Roads were cleared of wreckage, machinery repaired: communications re-established between town and town, and then, when radio sprang to life, between nation and nation.
It would need volumes to describe in detail that ‘Epoch of Recovery’. I can only reveal its progress as it came to Beadle in sudden, surprising ways.
There was an afternoon in late July when I was disturbed from my work in the garden by a shout from Pat. I can still conjure up that picture of her, waving her arms from the library window and calling out: ‘Come here – quick!’
For a moment I could not understand the weird glow that filled the library: it was as if the sun were suddenly, abruptly setting in the middle of the afternoon. And then I realised what had happened: the electric light was on!
It was shining from every room in the house, for on the morning after the cataclysm I had gone vainly from room to room, pressing down every switch, and failing to get light, had left them on. Two months and fourteen days, and here was light again! My house seemed to blink in wonderment, like a blind man to whom suddenly the miracle of sight has been restored.
‘Pity they didn’t come on when it was dark,’ said Pat. ‘What a thrill if all the lights had just popped up as we were groping into bed!’
And then the day when a motor-cyclist came bumping down the village street. Bearing in mind the patronising manner of our young airman friend I was careful not to be too effusive this time, but our visitor turned out to be a pleasant, freckled young man with a shock of red hair and a disarming grin.
‘Beadle, isn’t it?’ he said – and then consulting a small typewritten paper: ‘Four of you, is that right?’
‘Quite right,’ I said, with a sudden respect for the organisation. ‘Four of us and an excellent fowl named Broodie.’
‘Then one of these will be enough,’ he replied, drawing a folded paper from a haversack.
It was like a very roughly printed newspaper, headed: ‘Government Bulletin No. 1.’
The young man refused Pat’s offer of refreshment. ‘I’ve got a long round to make,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be back next week, I hope – you’ll have a bulletin regularly now until the ordinary newspapers get to work again.’
We read that priceless little document from beginning to end a dozen times, taking it in turns to read in silence, taking it in turns to read aloud.
It was upon rough, grey paper, in type so blurred that parts were almost indecipherable, but it was a feast for news-starved people like ourselves.
It began with a brief summary of events that led up to and followed the cataclysm. This we knew to some extent from what the young airman had told, but it gave much detail that was new to us. It dwelt very little upon the dreadful destruction and toll of life, for that was over and beyond all remedy. It concentrated entirely upon an inspiring call for reconstruction.
The British Government had established itself in Oxford, partly because Oxford stood well in the centre of England and partly because that stubborn old city had suffered less than the majority from the tornado and the flood. The massive structure of its colleges had stood up to the shock as placidly as they had withstood the assaults of time and criticism. As a Cambridge man I could not but deplore the Government’s choice, but Cambridge was no doubt severely flooded.
The ample buildings of Christ Church were now the Parliament House, and each Government Department had taken a College for its own use. The Exchequer was in Magdalen, the Home Office at Balliol and the Ministry of Transport at St John’s. Wisely they were not attempting to organise from this fountainhead downwards: orders had gone out for every town and community to form its own council to undertake urgent services of food and health and to clear their immediate localities to the best of their ability.
Each town was to provide one representative to a ‘County Parliament’ to sit in the principal County Towns and organise their scattered communities. Above this authority was a council of representatives from the Counties themselves to sit in Oxford in close touch with Parliament.
The survivors of the Parliament sitting at the time of the cataclysm were mainly engaged upon National Reconstruction: of railways, water supplies and affairs that went beyond the localised authority of the Counties themselves.
Money values existing at the time of the cataclysm were no longer legal currency because this would have led to the whole population wasting valuable time in a feverish hunt for cash amidst the ruins. A primitive system of barter and exchange of goods was organised pending the issue of a new currency by the Government – and examples were given for the guidance of organised communities: –
4 potatoes = 1 egg
4 eggs = 1 rabbit
4 rabbits = 1 chicken, etc.
It was announced that radio programmes would begin once more upon the 1st September, and the bulletin even provided a column of domestic notes: ‘Reconstruction in the Home’. Oiled muslin, it stated, if nailed across broken windows, would provide light and protection from rain until such time as glass was available!
The keynote of the bulletin was ‘work! – work! – work!’ – and the whole country responded with excitement and joy.
One morning I was awakened by a steady clanging in the distance, and went down to discover a gang of men repairing the railway. Three days later a luggage train went through: a long, groaning train made up of every conceivable kind of truck. We shouted and waved from the hillside, and our greeting brought a grimy hand waving in reply from the engine cabin.
On another day a lorry came bouncing ponderously down the village street and we went to meet three severe-looking gentlemen in mackintoshes, with blue armlets marked ‘RM’. They were members of the ‘Reconstruction Ministry’ and had come to investigate the future of our village. We could offer them no information concerning the baffling disappearance of the people of Beadle and they could give me no promise as to the removal of the King Lear. After inspecting my house they informed me that no rebuilding of Beadle would be contemplated for the present at least. For purposes of organisation we were to consider ourselves citizens of Mulcaster. It was our first contact with Government officials and I was relieved when they departed, leaving us in peace.
Summer passed to autumn. The days were surprisingly, often distressingly hot, accompanied by heavy, tropical rains. Old Humphrey prophesied a bumper wheat crop and my own vegetables throve prodigiously in the steamy warmth that followed the torrential downpours of that strange summer.
Robin had made ingenious plans to guarantee fresh food supplies. With large quantities of wire netting he had constructed his own ‘rabbit farm’ which he stocked from the burrows in Widgeley Copse, and by damming the river behind the church he had created his own ‘fish reservoir’. Sources of fresh food were now close at hand in times of severe weather, and although we were getting rather sick of rabbit, we kept extremely fit and well.
But the little town of Mulcaster was the mirror through which we watched the steady stride of progress, for Mulcaster, in common with thousands of other towns throughout England and Europe, was hammering out its own destiny and forging its own primitive but effective scheme of organised life.
We soon established regular communication with the town. Robin had salvaged three old bicycles, and every Saturday we ‘rode to market’, taking with us a bundle of rabbits, a can of fish and any vegetables I could spare from the garden.
Although its roof had disappeared, Mulcaster Town Hall had been cleaned up and turned into an ‘Exchange Market’. We would hand over our farm produce to the ‘Reception Officer’ who gave us coloured vouchers in exchange. With these vouchers we could go around and purchase goods we needed from surrounding stalls. In place of our rabbits we would take back a slab of butter: our fish-can returned to Beadle full of milk and I usually set aside the vouchers gained by my vegetables for small domestic necessities, such as darning thread for Pat, floor polish, new curtain hooks, etc.
There was a fine spirit of comradeship in the town; a spirit that compared most favourably with the local pomposities and smugness of pre-cataclysm days. Its two hundred survivors were mostly in youth and early middle age, for unlike a war that destroys the best and strongest, the cataclysm had weaned away the weak and the infirm, leaving only the sturdy ones to survive the tornado and the privations that followed it. No man passed another without a friendly greeting: every man and woman was busy from morning till night, for each, beside his own personal occupation, gave three hours of his day to ‘The Council of Reconstruction’ for community work.
The destruction of the big combines and chain stores had brought individuality back to English life: the return of the craftsman and the master-man. It was a happy experience to walk down the main street – to hear the ring of the hammer and the hack of the wood-worker: to listen to sounds long silenced by the mass production of remote factories.
All through a scorching week of August we worked together in our wheat field. Humphrey and Robin scythed the corn while Pat and I stacked it into sheaves.
Humphrey threshed it himself in a primitive but effective manner and by autumn the apple shed was stacked with twelve good sacks of golden grain.
We kept three sacks for ourselves, hired a waggon and took the rest to Mulcaster. For our crop we received no less than nine red vouchers, the highest notes of currency, and as I locked the priceless little tickets into my bureau drawer I was able to say to Pat: ‘We are now bloated capitalists!’
I was able to turn part of our new wealth to excellent account. One morning in Mulcaster I was stirred by the sight of a dish of new-laid eggs in the Exchange Market: their price was prohibitive, but through exhaustive enquiry I traced the eggs to an old man who had by some means collected together enough poultry to run a small breeding farm.
I was so excited that I kept missing the pedals of my bicycle as I rode out to his farm, but I returned in triumph with a cockerel!
I had to pay the atrocious price of two red vouchers for it, but cockerels were naturally worth their weight in gold. It was a common-looking little bird, with mean little eyes and a conceited strut that betrayed its obscure descent. It was utterly unworthy of Broodie, and I felt ashamed to introduce it to my fastidious, blue-blooded old hen. Broodie looked him up and down with obvious surprise and distaste. She had never met a cockerel of this type before, and at first declined, very naturally, to make the slightest response to his advances. But after a night’s reflection she realised her duties towards the shattered fortunes of the poultry world. She submitted with patient but thinly disguised revulsion to her ordeal, and when at last she presented me with nine mongrel but healthy little chicks I was very pleased at the determination with which she prevented her vulgar little spouse from taking any part in their upbringing.
It was during one of my visits to Mulcaster that the mystery of the Beadle dugout was suddenly and unexpectedly revealed to me.
I had almost given up hope of solving the baffling problem of that solitary open door – the waterlogged dugout and the uncanny disappearance of the Vicar, Sapper Evans, Dr Hax and all the villagers.
In vain I had enquired of the people in Mulcaster and scanned the streets for a familiar Beadle face: in vain we had searched the downs for some clue to help us, and then one evening, as I was returning from Mulcaster Market to join Pat and Robin for our journey home, a little woman passed me with an armful of firewood.
Some of the faggots slipped from her grasp and fell into the road. I picked them up for her, placed them in her arms and found myself looking into the wizened face of a Beadle villager!
The old lady stared at me as if I were a ghost. It was Mrs Chaplin, wife of a labourer who had lived in a cottage upon the Widgeley road.
‘Mr Hopkins! – ‘owever did you get out?’
‘Out of what?’ I asked.
‘The dugout,’ she replied with a shudder.
‘I didn’t go to it,’ I explained. ‘I stayed at home’ – and then in trembling fragments I drew from her the tragic story.
The fatal evening had begun quite well in the Beadle dugout. Directly the doors had been closed, Charlie Hurst and his Trio had begun a programme of popular music and the Vicar had organised a small whist drive for those who desired to play. At eight o’clock there had been a light supper of coffee and sandwiches, and as far as Mrs Chaplin could say, they had neither felt nor heard the hurricane raging above them upon the hillside. Towards nine o’clock, as they were arranging their blankets for the night’s rest, they had felt ‘a sort of shudder’: several coffee-cups had fallen over: one or two children had cried and Charlie had called out: ‘That was the moon, that was!’
‘The dugout seemed to dip down and come up again,’ explained Mrs Chaplin, ‘but when nothing else happened, we begun spreading our blankets.’
And so the people of Beadle had prepared for rest – unaware of the fatal wound in the structure above them. For it seems that the earthquake had brought a deep fracture to the chalky hillside: a fracture that had distorted the concrete beddings of two of the doorways and forced open wide cracks in the chalk surrounding them.
Some of the people were already asleep, and Mrs Chaplin herself was dozing when urgent cries of warning came from the men upon watch. The villagers had scrambled from their blankets to the nightmare of great streams of muddy water gushing down the steps of the two fractured entrances. The tidal wave was upon them.
Fiercely – desperately the men had worked under Sapper Evans – struggling to block the crevices with blankets and canvas sheets. But relentlessly the chalk had crumbled: one by one the men had been swept from the stairways by the increasing torrent. The mud upon the dugout floor was around their ankles – around their knees – it crept up to their thighs.
Then Sapper Evans had shown a last heroic resource. The third entrance to the dugout remained secure. To have opened it in an endeavour at escape through that awful flood would have been suicide, but the upper section of the stairway would form an airlock against the rising water.
Into this airlock the Sapper had forced the women and children – forty of them, huddled upon the fifteen steps with one man – Mrs Chaplin’s husband – who understood the mechanism of the door.
Mrs Chaplin had only the vaguest recollection of the horrifying hour that followed, and I do not blame her. They had watched the water creep to the roof of the dugout: listened to the last sounds beneath them which mercifully their own cries helped to drown.
Within half an hour the atmosphere upon the steps was unbearable, and rather than face certain death by suffocation her husband had unbolted and thrown open the door. In a dream they had seen the pallid sky and the turgid flood receding.
For a while they had lain upon the slimy hillside, powerless to move and powerless to think. The village lay far beneath the tidal wave, but as dawn came they saw the ruined church tower slowly creep to view.
Her husband had tried in vain to open the jammed doors in the hope of finding someone still alive, then he led his little party of survivors away across the downs and came at last to the ruined town of Widgeley.
They had found shelter with the survivors of the town and settled there to live. Mrs Chaplin had come to stay with a friend in Mulcaster but she did not think that any would have the courage to return again to Beadle.
I never told Pat and Robin of what I had learnt. They had almost given up the puzzle of the dugout and I saw no purpose in oppressing them with the thought of that tragic tomb so near at hand.
They found me very silent on our journey home that night: but even in my sadness I found pride in the memory of the gallant men of Beadle.
Autumn turned to winter. At one time I had dreaded the season of darkness, but it passed happily enough in Beadle Valley. A little petrol was now available and Robin doctored up the old Ford car for our journeys to Mulcaster. There was now a picture house that produced each Wednesday night a scratched old film of pre-cataclysm days, and it was strange to see those pictures of an age that now seemed so dead and far away. Every Saturday we stayed on after Market for the weekly Dance and Concert.
For my own part I should have been happy enough at home, but I encouraged every opportunity of going out for the sake of Pat and Robin.
With the beginnings of my new poultry farm the cup of my own contentment was filled, but I felt a growing concern towards those two loyal young partners of mine.
It was not natural for a boy and girl with the spirits of Pat and Robin to live in monotony and solitude. In the early days, throughout the spring and summer, gratitude for being alive and the need to work for one’s very life swept all thought of other things aside, but as the dark evenings came – as life was gradually eased from its first primitive strivings, I knew that a longing must often have come to Pat and Robin for the life and companionship of young people of their own age. It was impossible to sit, night after night, and talk of our daily doings. Sometimes we would read aloud or play cards and I devised several amusing but rather childish games with dice and racehorses cut from paper in order to break the monotony. But often our conversation after dinner would languish into gulfs of silence, and at last, one evening, I summoned the resolution to voice the thoughts that were oppressing me.
Pat was at work upon some new curtains from material we had bought in Mulcaster that week, and Robin was curled upon the sofa with a book of adventure.
‘I’ve been wondering for a long time, Pat, if you ever feel that you would like to go away from here.’
I was looking into the fire as I spoke, but I felt those two young heads jerk up in surprise. I felt their keen eyes upon me and I continued with a leaden heart. I was sure that my words were going out to them as keys to freedom: that they would grasp them eagerly, and go …
