The Last Man in Europe Read online

  ‘Ah, so you think the two things – happiness and equality – are the same? What about freedom?’

  ‘The poor are always unfree.’

  ‘I take it you got that from Jack London? What if, instead of mandating communism, we gave the people what they wanted?’

  ‘You mean equality, sir?’

  ‘No. What they’re actually asking for. I mean happiness – peace, nice clothes, an annual holiday at the seaside, an ice every day, free beer, oriental mistresses, everyone with their own motorcar and aeroplane. No work, no need to think or worry.’

  ‘A society based on the principle of hedonism?’

  ‘Yes, Blair. Shallow, gutless hedonism. Happiness! With little to complain about or agitate for, people will be easily governed, don’t you think? Isn’t that ultimately what Mr Lenin is promising the Russians – a complete absence of material hardship for everyone forever? Universal happiness? An end to politics?’

  ‘He’s promising it to all the working classes of the world, sir, not just the Russians,’ added Cyril Connolly, his friend. ‘Or was that Trotsky? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Which will make it all just that much more difficult to achieve, Connolly, when the dictatorship eventually ends,’ Huxley continued. ‘And if its goal of material progress and equality fails, what will be left? Mr Blair, what do you think will be left?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Think about it, Blair. What will be left will be the very things you started with: force and terror. The dictatorship of the proletariat, forever.’

  Huxley heard the bell ring for the end of class. ‘A holiday assignment, gentlemen – or should I say comrades. An essay, please: Why dictatorship will be impossible in the future.’ With that, Huxley put on his wide-brimmed hat and his cape, turned and went through the door before any student could protest.

  *

  June 1938. The days and weeks in the sanatorium passed rapidly, spring giving way to summer. Watching from his hospital window, he began to feel like a character in Wells’ The Time Machine as he saw the brown fields turn green, the flowers bud and burst into life, then wilt under the assault of the sun. They said the days dragged when you were ill and forced to do nothing, but they were wrong. Unable to work, he felt time burning up like the petrol wasted by the idling engine of a motorcar. He sat in bed, smoking absent-mindedly, filling an ashtray balanced precariously on a pile of books on the bedside table. He realised he was being watched.

  Laurence, unexpectedly in the uniform of a Territorial Army captain, leant on the doorframe. He tossed over a packet of Player’s Navy Cut, and then a heavy parcel which thudded onto the bed. Orwell picked up the parcel and peeled off the brown wrapping. It was a book: Assignment in Utopia, by someone called Eugene Lyons. He didn’t recognise the name, but on the jacket it said he’d been the Moscow correspondent for the United Press Agency between 1928 and 1934. ‘Another book for your collection,’ Laurence said. ‘Are you sure you have space for it?’

  There was a note inside, on the letterhead of the New English Weekly, which he pulled out and read. ‘They want a review.’ He set it aside and looked up. ‘I guess I shall have to return it.’

  ‘I think you’re sufficiently recovered to resume supporting my little sister. We don’t want her wasting away.’ He had been putting on weight and getting stronger. ‘But only an hour a day.’

  ‘I’ll need my typewriter.’

  ‘I’ll have a nurse bring it in.’

  No intellectual in Britain, he thought, would have believed a tenth of what appeared in Lyons’s six-hundred-and-fifty-page book, which he devoured in little more than a day – but none of them had been hunted by the NKVD. Here was the workers’ state: a nightmare world in which the leader’s portrait hung in every apartment, children routinely denounced their parents as counter-revolutionaries, and even an inappropriate facial expression at the wrong moment could lead to a late-night arrest, a show trial and a bullet in the back of the head. Small details he found particularly chilling – the way, for instance, people methodically removed from their address books the names of colleagues who had failed to turn up for work for more than a couple of days.

  There was something in the book, though, that disturbed him even more than the secret police’s terror. In the early 1930s huge billboards had appeared in Moscow and Leningrad bearing cryptic slogans such as ‘5-in-4’ and ‘2 + 2 = 5’. They were part of a campaign to fulfil the Five-Year Plan in just four years. Like all good advertising slogans, he thought, these ones stuck in the mind. In a way, they were no less silly or illogical than the posters for Bovril which covered half the walls of London. But of course you wouldn’t be arrested and shot for pointing out that Bovril was a swindle – which you certainly would be for criticising the Five-Year Plan. What worried him was where slogans like this might lead. When the cells of the Lubyanka awaited even the mildest expression of non-conformity, and the show-trial judges treated the rules of logic with such disdain, how long could it be until the Party said two and two really did make five – or six or seven – and expected people quite literally to believe it?

  He threw the book onto the blankets and lifted the typewriter from the bedside table. He had learnt a new skill since Laurence gave him back his machine: typing on a dinner tray while sitting up in bed. ‘The question arises, could anything like this happen in England?’

  *

  Mid-July. More books about Spain arrived for him to review, but it seemed wrong to waste such a fine day splitting hairs with red duchesses and closet fascists. What he needed was a picnic. It was a second Friday, usually Eileen’s visiting day, but she was off to Windermere – he suspected in the car of Laurence’s friend Karl Schnetzler, who was in Britain on the run from Hitler’s thugs. He could hardly blame her; he was hard enough to love at the best of times, and the sick are such bores. She was still attractive, pretty even, and deserved to be allowed to get on with life. He was the one who had wanted an open marriage, and he had got one, or at least she had. Who was going to touch him in his present state?

  He put on his jacket and went outside into the sunshine. It was one of those bright summer days that are so hot you can almost take your clothes off, and he could feel the warm air going deep into his lungs. In no time he was through the flowerbeds and out into the shady tranquillity of a small wood. He stopped to listen to a thrush whistling and clicking its song. For whom was it singing? For him, for a missing partner, for a lost chick? Or for joy, for life, for the few summers it would have before it was found dead on someone’s lawn and thrown onto a garden incinerator, its reverie and life noted by no one, except now himself?

  At the end of the wood he found a patch of wild chrysanthemums and delphiniums, their blue flowers reaching skywards. He bent over, without pain, and picked some, thinking to give them to the nurses. He looked up and glanced over the low-hedged boundary of the property. The scene held his gaze. The landscape was somehow familiar, although momentarily he couldn’t place it: an old close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it, and, twenty yards along, a pond covered in duckweed. The Golden Country! The dream! It must have been three years since he’d last had it. I’ll bet there are carp in that pool, he thought. What I wouldn’t give now for some fishing tackle! Before he knew what he was doing, he was through a gap in the hedge and on his way into Rochester.

  He opened his wallet and did some calculations. There wasn’t much, but perhaps enough for the bus and some fishing line and hooks of the sort you could get in Woolworths. He wouldn’t need a rod – a stick would do for a pond like that. If he caught the bus at Blue Bell Hill rather than in Aylesford, whose line went via Maidstone, it would save him sixpence, meaning he could afford a bun and a cup of tea as well. A proper holiday! So what if it was a mile and a half to the bus stop? So what if Laurence had told him not to exert himself? He was feeling fine, breathing like a bellows. In fact, he felt completely cured. Why hadn’t he thought of this weeks ago? These Medway towns may no
t be as beautiful as the Thames Valley, but they were still something to see.

  The bus dropped him in Rochester, the town of Dickens. He took in the cathedral, with its Anglo-Saxon remnants, before walking past the purported model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House. While it may have been a forbidding pile, and a symbol of the unnecessary inequalities of the last century, it occurred to him that, given the choice, the workers would still prefer a world with Satis House next to slums to the world of glass and steel and bureaucratically enforced equality being offered by the screeching dictators.

  He located the gate where Pip must have met Estella, but found the wall next to it pasted over with a poster. It announced a Left Book Club meeting on ‘The Coming Imperialist War’, with an address by some visiting speaker with a vaguely Marxist-sounding name, the famous author apparently of A Philosophy for Modern Man. He could guess it all already: some thin, sharp-faced man wearing a tweed jacket, woollen tie and disc-like spectacles, haranguing the bored, dumb audience with the usual nonsense about why everyone should disarm, except of course for the Soviet Union. Suddenly hungry, he shook his head and walked back to the High Street.

  He found a tea house and sat at a table. Too late, though, he realised just what sort of place it was – one of those mock Tudor ‘shoppes’ with fake beams, nylon tablecloths and pewter plates nailed to the walls, fitted out to impress the day-trippers brought up by the Southern Railway and the charabanc operators. A waitress eventually came over and took his order, which he had to repeat because she was distracted by a radio tinkling somewhere in the background. Predictably, his tea when it came was so weak that it looked like water until he added the milk. ‘Would you like sugar or saccharine, sir?’ the girl asked him. The scone, all air, was already sliced in half, coated in some cream that had bubbles in it and smeared with jam in the unmistakeable shape of something squeezed from a tube. Despite his hunger, he pushed it aside, threw a few coins on the table and left.

  Walking to the bus stop, he heard a loud, throaty noise and looked up to see a black-bellied bombing plane flying fast and low overhead. Back in Spain he would have run for cover. It was one of the new types endlessly talked up in the newsreels as part of the rearmament drive. You couldn’t escape the things nowadays; they were racing about the skies incessantly. From its course he guessed it must be using Rochester Castle as a dummy target, practising for what was inevitably coming. He remembered Laurence’s uniform. They’re getting ready, he thought. It can’t be long now.

  At that moment he could feel the war – it was a physical presence in his life already, pressing down on his chest, with its bombing planes and air-raid sirens, its cratered streets and smashed windows, and its loudspeakers bellowing that our troops had taken a hundred thousand prisoners on some front no one had ever heard of. And after that? Dictatorship, just like there would be in Spain, when the fascist noose was finally pulled tight. Yes, it was all going to go – all those things they were now taking for granted: the England of Dickens and Swift, the bum-kissers with their frivolous novels, strong tea and heavy scones, thrushes singing in the woods and dace swimming in their pools. All replaced by Comrade X and his Philosophy for Modern Man, goose-stepping armies, enormous posters of the leader’s face on every wall, show trials at the Royal Courts of Justice, concentration camps and secret cork-lined cells where the lights burned all night … It could happen in England; it really could.

  He realised with a shudder that the future wasn’t something to look forward to, but something to be frightened of. Yes, it was coming alright. His bus turned up and he stepped on and bought his ticket. He was already at the outskirts of town when he saw a billboard advertising Woolworths, and remembered the fishing tackle he hadn’t bought.

  1

  London, summer 1941. It was a bright, warm evening in August and the barrage balloons were drifting in the sky. He placed his mug of tea on the crumbling wall surrounding the roof of Langford Court, storing the warmth of the sun in his bones for another hungry, freezing winter of coal shortages and limited rations. Just the year before, the German bomber fleets, now busy in the east, had attempted to blot out the heavens, only to be beaten back, leaving England free, or at least what passed for free nowadays.

  He scanned the city, which lay like a brown smudge to the south and east. Here and there, when he looked closely enough, he could see where rows of terraces had been neatly razed by sticks of bombs. In every street stood houses with boarded-up windows, rusty iron sheets in place of missing roof tiles, and long baulks of timber propping up doubtful walls. Near the Thames, large parts of the East End and the docks were completely flattened, just as he’d once imagined. Freedom! The very concept seemed an anachronism in a world such as this. Freedom had taken a holiday and wouldn’t be coming back until the war was over. Even then, it all depended on—

  The sound of a truck crunching down through its gears on Abbey Road broke his line of thought. He tried to summon it again, but the mental effort was beyond him. Then he remembered what he had planned to do. He crushed his cigarette butt under his shoe, threw the cold tea leaves over the ledge and went through the doorway and down the staircase – the lift of course being out of order. The corridor, as usual, reeked of boiled cabbage, and he hurried through his front door to stop the vile smell from wafting into his apartment behind him. The sun was streaming in through the corner window, which, being on the seventh floor, offered spectacular views.

  He spotted the highest building in the city, the University of London’s Senate House, still bright and new and stepped curiously like one of those pyramids in Central America. It was the wartime home of the Ministry of Information – MINIFORM in telex jargon – in one of whose many subsections, the BBC, he now worked. His official title was ‘Talks Assistant in the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service’, but as far as he could make out, the job consisted of writing and broadcasting endless hours of wartime propaganda to a non-existent audience in East Asia. The Ministry of Information had nearly twelve thousand employees pumping out the news, newsreels, posters, music, radio and books needed to keep the Empire fighting in the face of the grey-uniformed fascist enemy. They were all under the direction of Churchill’s Irish sidekick Brendan Bracken, whom the staff called ‘B.B.’ for short. Orwell, though, had never seen B.B. and sometimes doubted whether the fellow actually existed.

  In the tiny flat the only place for him to write was an alcove in the living room. It looked as though originally intended for a bookshelf, but he had managed to squeeze a small writing desk into the empty space, which, because of its orientation, had the effect of cutting him off from the rest of the room, out of view of Eileen or any guests. It was the closest thing a person of his limited means could get to privacy, given the housing shortage, and good prose, he thought, could only be written in solitude.

  He had an hour to himself before Home Guard duty, and he turned to the half-filled notebook on the desk. He had discovered it a year ago under a pile of old framed prints in the back of a frowsy little junkshop off the Clerkenwell Road – such necessities as stationery having long since disappeared from the high street. There hadn’t been any decent paper on sale since the Luftwaffe had destroyed the printing district around St Paul’s; he had found himself scratching his thoughts unhappily on the backs of envelopes or on coarse, fibrous notepaper that he assumed to be made of recycled rags. He wiped his hands on his already grubby trousers, then carefully opened the notebook’s marbled cover to the bookmarked page, running his fingers over the creamy paper. Clearly, the book had originally had some special sentimental purpose, although he couldn’t tell what. He had been using it to write a wartime diary he hoped would interest Gollancz, or maybe even Fred Warburg, another publisher, who by chance was a private in his Home Guard unit.

  Despite his plans to pump out a novel a year, he hadn’t now written one for nearly two, the war having instead turned him into a kind of pamphleteer. Pamphlets, he thought, with a sinking feeling. Who would remember pamphlets?
It was easy to find excuses for this sort of literary slacking, of course. There was the lack of paper, for a start. Even the Times had become little more than a couple of folded sheets, much of which, to his anger, was wasted by advertisements for fraudulent medicines and savings bonds. Then there was the lack of sleep due to the Blitz, the lack of time caused by the endless queues and delays, and of course the squalidness of life itself, with its irritating clamminess and itches and constant tragic news – and all these combined to stop anyone working for more than a few minutes at a time. And now he had had to join the war effort to try to earn a living. Starting a novel in such circumstances would be pointless, even though he had an inkling of what it was he wanted to say. It was the worst thing of all for a writer: knowing what he wanted to say, but not how.

  It was this that, back in 1940, had made the diary seem a good idea. At first the concept of it excited him. Maybe the diary – the only place where one could be totally free of wartime censorship – was the answer he was looking for. If Britain were conquered, the diary – if indeed it survived the inevitable hunting down and destruction – might be discovered and read by some free spirit like himself twenty, thirty or even forty years from now, someone hoping to understand how the world had once been. A sort of secret message to the future. A warning.

  He opened it. The simple act of touching the paper stirred in him a feeling that was at once abstract and physically immediate. It was the memory of what life itself was once like – its texture soft, silky almost, as if designed to delight people, not set them on edge like the scream of a dive-bomber. Two years into the war, utility had begun to pervade every aspect of existence, from the rough soap that left your skin red and raw to the synthetic food which tasted vaguely like fishmeal; even books had lost their beauty.

  He turned to the start of the diary and began to read.

  June 1st, 1940. The B.E.F are falling back on Dunkirk. Borkenau says England is now definitely in the first stage of revolution. According to Connolly, off the coast of France Nazi aeroplanes have machinegunned a ship with refugees on board, mostly children, etc …