The Last Man in Europe Page 11

  The sound engineer inserted an extra loud squeal and waited for him to hit the flash cue button again, but he was too slow. He had been distracted by a new idea.

  *

  Kilburn, December. He was sitting on the sluttish armchair beneath the lamp, reading to Eileen, who was wrapped in a blanket on the couch.

  ‘So, Snowball is Trotsky, right?’ she asked.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And the chickens who’ve just confessed to working for him – they’re in the Show Trials?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About to be slaughtered?’

  ‘Pour encourager les autres.’

  ‘How very sad.’ She took another drag of her cigarette. ‘The hens … Why haven’t they got names? You named all the others. Even the goat! Which, by the way, you should change to Muriel.’

  ‘After that fussy old dam of ours.’

  ‘She wasn’t fussy at all. Just intelligent; she had your measure completely. You know, for some reason I always picture goats wearing glasses.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a good point.’

  ‘Anyway, the hens?’

  ‘Best not to give hens names; makes it harder to eat them.’

  ‘We ate our old cockerel, Ford.’

  ‘We were hungry, remember? Anyway, he was a right bastard, as I recall.’

  ‘This book – it’s going to be your most successful yet, I can just tell. Even children will like it.’ She took another drag. ‘Although I suspect parents might have to censor it for the really little ones.’

  ‘Especially when I kill off the carthorse.’

  ‘Oh, poor Boxer! Say you won’t! There’ll be tears at bedtime.’

  ‘Revolutions never have happy endings – that’s the whole point.’

  ‘When I read it to our little boy or girl – if we can ever find one to adopt – I shall say Boxer joined the circus to give rides to children.’

  ‘Believe me, darling, upbeat endings never work.’

  5

  Greenwich, July 1944. The sirens sounded once more, and the drum roll of the distant barrages resumed, getting louder as the firing crept closer and closer. When its moment in the symphony arrived, the battery of 3.7s in the park opposite opened up, rattling the walls and windows and sending little showers of plaster dust falling to the floor. Incredibly, the new baby slept through it. Orwell turned to Eileen and whispered, ‘They’re conditioned to it in the womb nowadays.’

  They had named him Ricky, short for Richard Horatio Blair. The first name after his friend Sir Richard Rees, the middle one after the only English hero not automatically taken for a Tory. He’d always secretly admired old Nelson up on that plinth in Trafalgar Square, facing down Britain’s enemies. If only, he thought, Churchill had been a socialist. The boy was a war orphan, left to some unfortunate girl by a Canadian soldier now presumably trembling in a foxhole in Normandy.

  He got up and stuck his head out the open window. It was a foolish act, certainly, but if a doodlebug were to hit the house, what would it matter? The rapid-fire flashes of the anti-aircraft battery lit up the streetscape. Here was the world the boy would inherit, with its bomb-chipped footpaths, boarded windows, empty lots and hastily filled craters. His mind went to Wells’ glittering, antiseptic world of glass, steel and snow-white concrete. Yes, he had been right about H.G.

  Through the blasts and the whining of night-fighters they could hear the terrifying purring of a pulse-jet engine. Around fifty of the rocket bombs were being launched every day, with about half making it through the coastal defences to drop on the city’s terrified people. ‘Don’t let it stop,’ he prayed. ‘Let the engine die out only when it’s well past.’ When it did go silent, Eileen hugged him tightly and braced for the explosion, which was nearer than any they had experienced before.

  ‘Always going clean over us,’ he whispered, conscious the baby was still sleeping.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Oh, I can tell. When they’re getting really close, your heart beats faster. Never fails.’

  ‘Superstition.’

  ‘Like the Cockneys say, at least you can hear doodlebugs coming and dive under the table before they hit.’

  ‘We didn’t dive anywhere.’

  ‘No, but we’ll be looking back fondly on the old doodlebug one day. The next weapon won’t give as much warning.’

  Shrapnel from spent anti-aircraft rounds tinkled onto the roof above their bed. Ricky began to cry.

  ‘The class of ’64 has woken up,’ Eileen said. They weren’t going to get back to sleep in a hurry.

  He got up and brought Ricky back to her, picking up the bottle of milk that was still warm from the summer heat. It had been a trial trying to find a plastic teat – anything made from war materials like rubber was impossible to buy. The ack-ack started rolling towards London again.

  ‘Darling, what sort of world is our little boy going to inherit?’ She pressed the baby to her chest and began feeding while he tenderly rubbed the boy’s cheek with the back of his index finger, putting his other arm around her back as they sat up in bed. Richard’s arrival had brought them closer together, and his affairs had stopped, especially after the frightful row over his secretary Sally McEwan. And as far as he could tell, she too was no longer straying.

  ‘That depends, I suppose, on us. What we do and what sort of world we leave him.’

  ‘He won’t be our age until the 1980s. Seems like forever. At least this war will be well over by then, I suppose.’

  ‘He deserves a better life than we’ve had, doesn’t he?’ He thought of the shabbiness and drudgery of their lives. This far into the war, all but the wealthiest Londoners had taken to patching their clothes and eating cabbage. He thought he could see ceiling dust in the pores of Eileen’s skin. Somewhere across London another doodlebug hit the ground with a dull thud.

  ‘We should take him to the country. A little farm cottage, with a wood fire and a vegetable garden and roses growing across the veranda. We could live off almost nothing – the way we used to in Wallington. Send Ricky to the village school. Be a proper little family.’

  ‘Like the proles; they know how to live.’ He pulled her and Ricky closer.

  ‘You could even escape from the stupid literary life and get back to writing novels, now that you’ve broken your drought with the fairy story.’

  The fairy story. He’d pushed the frustrations of not being able to find a publisher for it out of his mind. Stupidly, he had allowed this to stop him from starting his other planned novel, and now it seemed that might come to nothing. More time wasted! ‘Talking of farms … David Astor’s told me about a place on Jura that might be available for rent.’

  ‘Jura? Where’s that?’

  ‘Scottish Hebrides. Inner. Apparently the laird is a decent sort who went to Eton with him. I can’t imagine the Germans or the Russians wasting their doodlebugs on a place like that.’

  ‘Sounds a long way away from anywhere.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Across London the rain of rocket bombs continued as all three of them drifted off to sleep.

  *

  He rose early, leaving Eileen and the baby sleeping peacefully in bed, and breakfasted with Gwen, Laurence’s widow, in the kitchen downstairs. Gwen, like Laurence a doctor, who had arranged for Ricky’s adoption, had thought it better for them to be close by in the early days, and like everyone else believed Greenwich to be safer from V-1s than Kilburn. A rumour had got around that Churchill was using false news reports to trick the Germans into aiming their missiles at the working-class suburbs. The BBC was playing the morning exercise program that was part of its wartime fitness drive. The instructress’s voice was exhorting the listeners to bend over and touch their toes – a task he knew would leave him battling for his next breath, even though he was only forty-one, an age at which fit men were still expected to be on the front line. To escape the wretched babbling, he polished off his meagre breakfast and went out.

  Returning home
to collect the mail, he found the Kilburn flat a ruin. A near miss by a doodlebug had taken out the windows and brought down part of the ceiling. Maybe, he thought, the rumours were right. Through a crack in the wall he could see the world outside. Their furniture was covered by a thick layer of plaster fragments, and his books lay scattered across the space that was once his study. Then he remembered what he had come back for. Getting down on his hands and knees, he scrabbled through a pile of letters that had been pushed through the door, spotting a large brown envelope. He picked it up, brushing off fragments of brick and glass.

  He was hoping for just a letter but it was the manuscript, returned again. First Gollancz, then Deutsch, and now Cape. He read the letter enclosed with it:

  I mentioned the reaction that I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to ANIMAL FARM. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think. My reading of the manuscript gave me considerable personal enjoyment and satisfaction but I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are …

  He guessed immediately what had happened: the Ministry of Information had been penetrated by the communists. Everyone knew the literary world was full of silent party members who were as good as Soviet agents, their ultimate allegiance being to Russia. This racket of writers worshipping Stalin had been going on since at least the early ’thirties, and now even the Tories were too gormless to insult him. It wasn’t that long ago they wouldn’t insult Hitler. He seethed. To hell with them! Why not publish the story himself, as Swift would have done? His anarchist friends would have some paper hidden away for the revolution. He collected everything of value he could fit into two suitcases; the rest would have to wait.

  The summer had turned baking hot, and his journey across London was sapping. The war was as good as won, everyone thought, with the fascists in retreat on all fronts and the church bells ringing out victory after victory. Yet he had a strange feeling that the fighting would never end. Each advance brought fresh horrors: new weapons to cower from, and new stories of atrocities in the east that would whip the British population to new heights of patriotic indignation.

  At a Lyons tea house he sat down to rest, pulled out the typescript and wrote a fresh covering letter by hand.

  This MS has been blitzed which accounts for my delay in delivering it. If you read this MS yourself you will see its meaning is not an acceptable one at the moment, but I could not agree to make any alterations. Cape or the M.O.I., I am not certain which from the wording of his letter, made the imbecile suggestion that some other animal than the pigs might be made to represent the Bolsheviks. I could not of course make any change of that description.

  He stopped at the post office, bought an envelope and posted it to T.S. Eliot, c/- Faber & Faber, 24 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1.

  *

  Four weeks passed. He opened the mid-morning post before heading out to Tribune, where he had a new job as literary editor. There was a letter from Faber:

  We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time … After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them; so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs … I am very sorry, because whoever publishes this will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity. Miss Shelden will be sending you the script under separate cover.

  So much for the judgement of the great T.S. Eliot! At the start of the war, he’d accused Eliot of having a soft preference for fascism, and now here he was, in thrall to the Reds. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, he thought, but the really well-trained dog is the one that somersaults before the whip appears. He had one more publisher on his list. He made for the city.

  *

  He entered the crush of the main bar of the Bodega in Bedford Street, just off the Strand, and was hit by the sour smell of beer and sweat from the draymen drinking there. He was in time to catch Fredric Warburg, who had just finished his lunch. He looked at Warburg: tall, heavy-set and expensively dressed, with Brylcreemed hair and a cigarette holder clamped between his canines. It seemed a strange place for a successful publisher to eat, and he guessed he was trying to avoid the legions of journeyman poets who swarmed like blackbeetles around Fitzrovia.

  ‘Sergeant Orwell, what brings you here? You should have made an appointment; we could have eaten together.’

  ‘I need to talk to you, Fred. I went to the office but they told me you were here. I’ve only got a minute.’

  They went over to the bar and sat down. Warburg ordered two half-pints of dark ale, which they downed immediately.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been bombed out again, Orwell? These damned doodlebugs.’

  ‘I have, actually, but that’s not what I’m here about. The commos at the MOI have blacklisted my latest book. Harmful to the war effort, damaging to Anglo–Soviet relations, nonsense like that. That coughdrop Eliot has fallen for the same line. Well, it’s yours now if you’re interested.’ He unbuckled his dispatch case and pulled out the slim typescript, now marked by additional sets of grubby fingerprints. ‘Here’s the bally manuscript. You get last dibs on it, Fred, if you can find some paper to print it on. If you don’t want it I’ll publish it myself, underground, with Astor’s money.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Animal Farm.’

  ‘Unusual!’

  ‘It’s about a lot of animals that rebel against their farmer – and it’s very anti-Russian. Too anti-Russian even for you, I’m afraid.’ He knew, though, that Warburg, who had published Homage to Catalonia when no one else would touch it – and lost money doing so – was the most courageous publisher in England.

  ‘You’re thinking of my wife, Orwell. Pamela’s as pro-Russian as it gets. Thinks Stalin morally infallible.’

  After leaving the Bodega they walked eastward down the Strand, their ears alert to buzz-bombs. They halted near the bomb-damaged Royal Courts of Justice, opposite the burnt-out ruins of St Clement Danes, which had been destroyed in an air raid three years before. Orwell looked again at the ruined church, which seemed forgotten on its lonely traffic island, with its blackened walls and its steeple sprouting branches and weeds. ‘Oranges and lemons,’ he mumbled. ‘Have I ever told you, Fred, that I’d like one day to produce a book of nursery rhymes?’

  ‘There’s actually a jolly good market for that sort of thing, you know. I should be interested, Orwell … if ever the paper could be found.’

  They looked up to find themselves beneath the statue of Samuel Johnson reading from his dictionary.

  ‘They say it’s a poor likeness,’ Orwell said.

  ‘Eight years that dictionary took him, Orwell. Did it all himself.’

  ‘It’d be a committee job now. And much shorter.’

  ‘Why do you think the old boy bothered? Money? Ego?’

  ‘It’s a celebration, Fred. Of words.’

  ‘One hundred and forty-two thousand of them, apparently.’

  ‘Nowadays people want to destroy words.’ Orwell paused. ‘Or at least their meaning. In Johnson’s day governments were too disorganised to do such things. You know, they actually gave him a royal pension for creating that dictionary. Wouldn’t happen now.’

  ‘No, not now.’ Warburg slapped the burnt ruins. ‘The same raid that destroyed this church sent my warehouse up in flames. Hundreds of thousands of volumes, turned into smoke. Including some of yours, as I recall.’

  ‘Destroy literature, Fred, and it becomes ea
sier to destroy people. You’re even allowed to commit murder these days as long as you call it something else.’

  Warburg looked at the bomb-battered street and cocked his head. ‘Area bombing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Warburg’s usually placid face hardened. ‘Solving the Jewish problem.’ He turned back to the statue. ‘I suppose you’ve heard the stories too.’

  ‘Sadly, yes.’

  ‘What sort of world have we created? Women, children …’

  ‘One can only guess at the horrors, Fred.’

  ‘The bastards! The bloody bastards!’

  Orwell touched his shoulder. ‘Old Johnson’s a man for our times.’

  ‘He certainly is that.’ Warburg turned back around. ‘This new book, Orwell. You say it’s anti-communist?’

  ‘And anti-Nazi.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling Pamela’s going to be very unhappy with me indeed.’

  They shook hands. ‘Until next time we meet.’

  Before setting off down Fleet Street, Orwell looked again at the gutted St Clement’s. When words lose their meaning, we bomb the past into the ground. It sent his mind back to that ruined church in Barcelona where he had spent the night hiding from Stalin’s agents. He tried to remember the rest of the rhyme, but could only recall the ending:

  Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

  Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

  Chop, chop, chop, chop,

  The last man’s dead.

  6

  He walked another thirty yards down the Strand, entered the front door of the Outer Temple and went through to the headquarters of Tribune. It was a tiny office that had once been a barrister’s chambers but now was crammed with an assortment of furniture, which gave the place an air of impermanence that reminded him of lodging houses he had endured ten years before. He poked distractedly at review copies of books piled on his desk, noting only The Road to Serfdom by that Austrian economist with the Nazi-sounding name of F.A. von Hayek. He couldn’t face reading any unsolicited poems and essays, so he collected them up and slid them into an already stuffed drawer, pressing them down with a wooden ruler so he could push it shut.