The Last Man in Europe Page 2

  *

  London, January 1936. He had finished his novel the evening before, and the typescript and carbons felt heavy in the battered black briefcase he was carrying to the office of his publisher, Victor Gollancz. Although it meant a journey of at least two hours from Greenwich to Covent Garden, he had decided to walk – both to save the bus fare and to fill the day. Without a novel to write, what else was there to do? He might even think up a new story along the way.

  He reached the river, feeling the wind whip up from its surface and cut through his thin coat. He halted and stared across the icy-looking water to the working-class quarter of the East End. Again his mind went anxiously to the manuscript by his side, but this time to Gordon Comstock’s poem.

  Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over

  The bending poplars, newly bare,

  And the dark ribbons of the chimneys

  Veer downward; flicked by whips of air,

  Torn posters flutter.

  It was bleak, admittedly, but not bad; he just hoped Gollancz would agree.

  He started walking. Bleakness. Why did he have to be good at bleakness? Obviously, to represent failure, bleakness was inevitable. But how many writers had become successful by depressing everyone? Such writers were usually famous after they were dead – men like Gissing. You didn’t buy books in order to feel gloomy, did you? For 10/6 you wanted a little happiness and pleasure. Waugh, for instance … but he cut off his own line of thought. Bleakness, it occurred to him, meant he would never be able to afford to marry. He picked up a piece of brick and threw it over the embankment at the water, but it landed in the mud. Eileen had put him off again – not wanting to be a burden on him, she said, which of course meant not wanting to sink lower than she already had. It was for that reason he had changed his novel’s ending.

  Rather than have Gordon, the starving poet, moulder and die of consumptive illness, as he’d originally plotted it, he decided to let him be happy, marry his girl Rosemary, take back his old job at the advertising agency and settle down to suburban contentment, complete with an aspidistra in the entrance hall. It was wrong, obviously, but making the novel a bestseller would solve his problems. He could quit the bookshop and buy a nice house, like Waugh had, although maybe one not so grand.

  Any other publisher would be pleased at this approach, but Gollancz – a socialist, and likely also a communist – probably wouldn’t. Bleakness – that’s what people like Gollancz wanted: failure on a national scale. Only by making people miserable could they get their revolution. He thought of the letter he had written, setting out all his ideas for this new and more upbeat ending, making a case for a larger advance against a more popular novel, and realised what a fool he had been. Bleakness was his destiny. Never again would he artificially sweeten any book he wrote. Down into the mud – that’s where he’d go, and never come up.

  The briefcase once again felt heavy. Why not just fling it over the embankment and watch the filthy current carry it off – the way he’d thrown the manuscript of his first novel down that drain outside the Gare du Nord? Gordon – the original, true Gordon of the first draft, not the gutless, saccharine Gordon of the second – would have done just that, and then leapt in after it.

  He was distracted by a buzzing sound. Watching an aeroplane making for Croydon airport, he wondered what magic a few bombs would work among the shipping in front of him at the West India Docks. That’s what he needed, he thought: a good war. Civilisation getting the unhappy ending it so thoroughly deserved! Everyone knew the war was coming, so why not have it now? The thought should have depressed him, but compared with the alternative of scurrying around like a penniless beetle, even the trenches seemed inviting. He could be a war correspondent. He forgot about the weight of his briefcase and walked on.

  On reaching Henrietta Street, he found Gollancz – balding, with a mass of grizzled hair at each temple framing a sheep-like face – seated in a scuffed brown leather armchair, flicking through a wad of galleys.

  ‘Ah, Orwell. Good. Sit.’ The publisher pointed to the settee opposite.

  He pulled the typescript from his briefcase and handed it over. ‘You got my letter? About the new ending?’

  ‘Yes, well, let’s see how it reads.’ Gollancz appeared to weigh the typescript in his hands, before leafing through it rapidly and setting it on the floor next to the other piles of paper.

  He seized the moment. ‘I know you like your books to have …’ He searched for the right word. ‘Realism.’

  ‘Don’t be worried, Orwell.’ Gollancz reached over to his desk and grabbed a book with a bright yellow dust jacket and held it up. Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier. ‘Just arrived back from the printer. Now, if you want bleak, this makes your stories read like comedy. But I’m expecting it to do well, regardless.’

  He felt like a fool. ‘I mentioned an advance on sales …’

  Gollancz smiled and waited for him to continue.

  ‘It’s just that … You know what it’s like. I’m going to need some income to get on with another book. And get married.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve thought of that,’ Gollancz replied.

  A wave of relief flowed over him. A decent advance, at last!

  ‘A project. Call it a commission, to tide you over, until royalties come through for this one.’ Gollancz picked up Orwell’s new manuscript and read out the title. ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying.’

  ‘A commission?’ His mood deflated.

  ‘I’m starting a new imprint. We’re calling it the Left Book Club. Strachey and Laski are going to help edit it.’

  Communists! Or as near as can be.

  ‘We’re after a book about unemployment, in the north.’

  He groaned inwardly. He knew it! More slumming. More compulsory bleakness. Was that all they thought he could do? They didn’t send the likes of Waugh ‘up north’.

  ‘And, of course, we immediately thought of the author of Down and Out.’

  ‘Haven’t Priestley and Morton already taken that trip?’

  ‘Not with your eye, Orwell. Too sentimental. I don’t want a travel brochure. As you said, we like realism.’

  ‘I feel like I’ve done it before.’

  ‘I can offer fifty pounds in expenses, and a hundred advance, with an agreed proportion on signature. That’s for the trade edition.’ Gollancz leaned forward. ‘And if Strachey and Laski agree to accept it for the new club, quite a deal more.’

  2

  Barnsley, February 1936. Who could possibly take British Union of Fascists seriously? Just look at their flag, hanging behind the podium of the town hall next to the Union Jack: a bright red background, with a navy blue circle cut by a white lightning bolt, like some absurd parody of Nazism and communism. Really, he thought, even Hollywood couldn’t make this up. Then there were the Blackshirts. He counted about a hundred of them, lined up either side of the aisle and at the front of the stage.

  He knew what they were supposed to look like: stormtroopers – tall, broad-chested and hard-bodied, with prize-fighters’ jowls, tight slits for mouths and frightening, pitiless faces like wax masks – but the reality was rather more comic. The one nearest to him had close-cropped greying hair, a crooked nose and so many missing teeth that the few discoloured ones left looked like fangs; the tight black fencing sweater of his uniform tucked into his black trousers revealed a soft belly and flabby arms. What came to mind was an ageing, overfed and unintelligent sewer rat.

  He had been brought along by the local National Unemployed Workers’ Movement organisers Tommy Degnan and Ellis Firth, and sat with the communist and Independent Labour Party contingent, whose members were making something of a scene, catcalling the Blackshirts and ragging them. He could see the Blackshirts muttering among themselves as they looked over the crowd, probably sizing up his hosts and maybe even him for special attention afterwards. They were all clutching lengths of rubber hose; one was slipping on a knuckleduster.

  The hall was called to order by the me
eting’s chairman, and an organ started on ‘God Save the King’, for which they all stood and sang. Strange, the English! As the song ended the yelling began, just like at a football game: ‘Hitler and Mosley mean hunger and war!’ versus ‘Out with the Jews!’ This was allowed to go on for some minutes, though whether deliberately or not he couldn’t tell. Then the Blackshirts began a slow, rhythmical chant – ‘Mosley … Mosley … Mosley …’ – each repetition carrying an unmissable undertone of violence. They were trying to drown out the cries of the communists and socialists, but the real object, he suspected, was to drown out even the possibility of thought.

  A searchlight suddenly illuminated an entrance door behind them and, announced by half a dozen off-key trumpeters, a lean and insincere-looking man with a full moustache and short black hair cropped at the temples entered the hall. He was wearing a black uniform like that of the Blackshirts except for the riding breeches and boots of the officer class. Amid the loud and growing boos there were shouts of worship. Flanked by a number of more impressive guards, the Chaplinesque figure made his way to the stage, stopping at one point to trade kisses with a gaggle of upper-class women no doubt placed there for just that purpose. After their leader had passed, he saw one of the women drop to her knees and bury her face in her hands in what he took to be the act of prayer.

  With the chanting joined by the sound of people stamping their feet and pounding their hands on the backs of chairs, the leader reached the podium to applause and jeering in equal measure. It was Sir Oswald Mosley: inheritor of an estate worth ten million pounds, the reputed lover of beer-baron scioness Diana Guinness, former Tory MP, former Labour cabinet minister, former leader of the New Party, Britain’s number one admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, and now the self-appointed Fuehrer of the British Union of Fascists.

  What a contrast with the German dictator he had seen on the newsreels. Even at his smartest there was something obviously wrong about old Adolf’s appearance that added to his menace: the uniform slightly ill-fitting, the hair that fell over his pathetic dog-like face, the pale skin that spoke of failure and mustard gas, and explained the fixed, monomaniacal hatred of his speeches screeched out in common, guttural German. Yet here was Mosley, neat as a pin, speaking of the struggle for the new world order as if it were a pep talk before a house rugger match at Winchester.

  ‘I have come here to this great meeting tonight to outline the policies and faith of British fascism,’ Mosley began.

  ‘You mean German fascism, you Kraut-loving bastard!’ one of the miners near Orwell yelled out, audible amid the jeers. ‘We fought your pal Hitler at Eep!’ The rat-faced Blackshirt eyed up the offender and gripped his hose tighter.

  Mosley ignored the hostility. ‘If you think the present state of things can really see you through, then it’s idle for this virile faith of fascism to come to you with a new and revolutionary conception of politics, of economics and of life itself.’

  Really! Hitler never used terms like ‘revolutionary conception’; he had hate, which he directed against his enemies like a machine gun.

  ‘And now our men of 1914, our brave men of 1914 to 1918, the grim ranks of ex-servicemen who have again and again been betrayed by our politicians—’

  ‘Yeah, bloody right, mate, after fighting your German pals,’ yelled out someone close by, but he could see some of the older men nodding.

  ‘… we need a Britain worthy of their sacrifices; not a Britain of idle mills and closed pits and dole queues.’

  Mosley was sounding more like Adolf now. He noticed how Mosley had moved from fascism to socialism without so much as a change in syntax. Start mild and reasonable, build up the resentment and hate. A good old hate, that’s what his people had come along for.

  ‘Those brave, forgotten men of the last war should join their hands with the new youth, the new generation that has studied the past and says that England is not dead.’

  A new chant now went up: ‘England! England! England!’ The words were repeated slowly, over and over again.

  Up on the stage, under the spotlight and in front of the huge microphone suspended from the ceiling, Mosley barely raised a sweat as he went through his theatrics, flinging his right arm back and forth like a Roman senator. The chanting continued, interspersed with eruptions of outrage as more vocal members of the audience were dragged from their seats by groups of Blackshirts and thrown through the auditorium’s swinging doors, where others were waiting to deal with them. Finally, Mosley quietened the crowd with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Think of your lives, men and women of northern England. You are born, fed on broken biscuits, forced to toil long hours underground or in mills until the last ounce of your strength is gone, then you are thrown into the workhouse when you can’t work a minute longer, or forced onto the dole with its iniquitous means test when the international financiers decide it’s time to cut production. You, the steelworker; why should you be on short-time, your children shoeless and in rags, when Britain needs tanks and battleships and aeroplanes? Why should you, the unemployed miner, scrabble for coal and watch your children go malnourished to support the earnings of foreign bondholders?’

  The booing continued, but only from the communists and ILP’ers, and soon was drowned out by the applause, which was growing louder.

  ‘Why is this happening? Is it because Britain isn’t capable of supporting the people who work for it? Or is it because your work and the fruits of your work are being stolen from you?’

  ‘By rich buggers like you,’ someone shouted. ‘By capitalists!’

  ‘By the Jews!’ someone countered. The applause detonated.

  ‘You said it, sir, not I,’ Mosley went on. ‘I say we need a new government of men who can make decisions.’

  Degnan stood on his chair. ‘We can’t all live off the estate of our dead wives, Mosley!’ he yelled.

  ‘Or our mistresses,’ another added.

  ‘Aye,’ Firth cried out, ‘no more drinking Guinness for us!’ This provoked laughter.

  ‘You’re a millionaire and a murderer, Mosley. When’s the last time you worked? Where’s your money invested? Traitor!’

  Mosley nodded a signal to his Blackshirts. ‘Send all the world a message: England lives on and marches on! We can make Britain stronger!’ He was purple now. ‘One nation united – miner and shopkeeper, mill-worker and farmer. Yes, indeed, even the Jews putting Britain before Jewry.’

  At this, audience members from both camps rose to their feet, either applauding or shouting abuse. The air throbbed with concentrated hate. As the chant of ‘Mosley!’ went up again, hundreds of fascist salutes appeared across the room in unison, as in a theatrical production. The activists around Orwell raised their voices in response but had no effect. Degnan was still standing on his chair, shaking his fist, his red face a mask of rage, screaming out: ‘Swine, swine, swine!’ A group of Blackshirts was heading towards him.

  Mosley’s screeching continued. As he raved, the rat-faced Blackshirt and his comrades dragged Degnan to the aisle, shoving him towards the rear, where he stumbled and was set upon, large boots thudding into his groin and face. A broken set of dentures fell into the dark pool of blood from Degnan’s mouth. Firth, sitting a few rows ahead, tried to get across to the aisle to help but was blocked by a wall of Blackshirts. Instead he ran forward and tried to mount the stage, thinking this the quickest way across to the other aisle, but as he reached it he too was punched to the ground and whipped with rubber hoses.

  ‘A typical example of red tactics!’ Mosley commented to the crowd, pointing to the scene, which was illuminated by one of the roving spotlights. ‘We do not want to fight, ladies and gentlemen, but if violence is organised against us, then we shall organise violence in reply.’

  ‘Mosley, Mosley, Mosley …’ The rhythmical chanting reached a crescendo.

  3

  Wigan, March 1936. The scene that met his eyes only made sense as science fiction. It was shift changeover time, and thousands of short-
statured, black-faced men in filthy overalls were emerging from the ground like Morlocks. Soon, he and Albert Grey – a small, powerful and balding man of about forty-five, whom the wealthy socialist editor of The Adelphi, Sir Richard Rees, had suggested to Orwell as a guide – were like rocks in a tide as waves of miners surged past, swigging from their bottles and spitting black gargles of tea and coal dust onto the shale and mud at their feet. There was no pithead bath here; these men would go home to be washed by their wives.

  After the morning shift had dispersed, he shuffled to the lift cage, surrounded by the experienced miners with their blue-scarred noses and bad teeth. They were packed like pilchards in a tin; at six-foot-three he had to take off his wooden helmet and stoop, but still his head rested against the roof. Then the floor dropped away, queering his guts, and they plunged into the void. It was only as they decelerated that he noticed the sensation of movement, and that strangely counter-intuitive feeling that one was actually going upwards. As they slowed to a halt, he could make out through the wire cage door passing hints of whiteness, which he took to be the fossilised bones of long-extinct animals. This far down they must have been truly ancient – perhaps enormous reptiles that walked England before the first man was ever seen.

  They stopped, the cage door slid open and they emerged into what looked like a pea-soup fog. A draught of circulating air carried particles of coal dust into his lungs, setting off a tickling cough. He looked around, expecting to find men hacking away at a ledge with picks, but saw only confusion and movement as another pod of men squeezed past him to take the lift for the upwards journey.

  Grey, a miner himself, pointed to one of the smallish holes that opened off the concourse. ‘Pit face is that way, Eric. Mind your head.’