“It’s one solution. Fortunately for you, there are arguments against it.”
All the colours in the room brightened. It was a strangely exhilarating phenomenon. Silk had experienced it only a few times in his life. He relaxed and enjoyed listening to Pulvertaft. He had dodged the head-on collision. Survival was pure happiness. “Talk to your wife,” Pulvertaft said, urgently. “You know what to say.” He walked with Silk to the door, shook hands, watched him go. “At least, I bloody well hope you do,” he said softly. He went around the room, opening the blinds.
BREAK A LEG
The prospect of public speaking frightened Zoë. Not the reality, but the prospect. When she first went into politics she had revelled in talking to crowds; but now she knew how dangerous it was. As the time approached for her to walk onto a stage, her heart pounded, even though she knew she was good at this because she’d done it a thousand times before. So the hour before the event was something of an ordeal, whether it was in a village hall or the Albert Hall. You could make an idiot of yourself in front of two dozen people as easily as five thousand or five million.
Tonight it looked like two thousand had come to a rally at the Central Hall in Bristol. They were standing at the back and all down the side aisles. Not to see Zoë – Bristol was a long way from Lincoln South – but to hear Bertrand Russell. Some came because he was a great humanist philosopher, most because he was so old that he had known Robert Browning and Lord Tennyson and had met Gladstone and Lenin, and because he had gone to prison as a pacifist in the First World War. They came because he’d been hired, fired, and hired again by American universities; and because he held the Order of Merit and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and inherited a peerage but discarded the title; and because he denounced both Kennedy and Kruschev as nuclear villains; and not least because he’d divorced three wives and married four. Plus other reasons. Russell was a hell of an act to follow, and Zoë was glad to be the opening speaker. Her job was to warm up the audience. After that Canon Collins, chairman of CND, would introduce the big man. By then Zoë would be in the wings, listening, with a large and well-earned gin-and-tonic.
The house lights dimmed. The PA system announced her name. She took three deep breaths and walked from the wings. Smile, for God’s sake, she told herself. Applause surprised her. Her reputation had reached Bristol. Now to kick-start the evening.
“Welcome,” she said. “I should warn you, the last time I came to the West of England to speak, the local paper wrote that I made a Rolls-Royce of a speech: old-fashioned, inaudible, and it went on for ever and ever.”
Several people laughed. That’s what she wanted. This was a CND rally but there was still room for enjoyment. “Now, I have another confession to make. I don’t know much about Bristol. Or about Bath, your near neighbour, which I’m told is different. In Bath they walk down the street as if they own it.” A couple of shouts from the balcony, blurred by distance. “Whereas in Bristol they walk down the street as if they don’t give a damn who owns it.” Not the greatest joke in the world, but it scored, it made her one of them. Laughter surged like surf. Then applause. She was off and running.
“Another thing I knew little of until yesterday was Tory illness. Tory influenza, Tory bronchitis, maybe even Tory boils on the backside, because there exists such a thing as a Conservative Medical Association. You’re a diehard Tory, you don’t want to take your Tory kidney stones to a doctor who votes Labour, you never know what he might find. I hear you say: So what? Who cares? Well, the Conservative Medical Association – the CMA – has a Conservative Medical answer to the bomb. A CMA report, just out, calls for an end to defeatist attitudes, an end to disarmament because, they say, it’s possible to reduce casualties and curb disease from a nuclear explosion, by simple and inexpensive remedies. How simple? Well, if you have a basement or a central room in your house, you turn it into a survival shelter. How cheap? The CMA reckons about £100 per house. And if you don’t think your sad and miserable life is worth a hundred quid, stay way from the CMA. Join the Liberal Medical Association, maybe they can save you from nuclear annihilation for only fifty pounds. Maybe the Fabian Society Medical Association will do it for twenty-five. No. Wait. I’ve just thought of something…”
Zoë took a moment to stare into space.
“Central room. What is that? A room in the centre of a house, yes? With no external walls. So…how many people here have a central room?” A few hands went up. “And how many have a basement?” Perhaps two hundred hands. “Thank you… That means… Well, it means the rest of us are dead, aren’t we? Should we feel badly about that? Certainly not. Because all our friends here, cosy and snug in their basements and their central rooms – they’re dead too! The CMA report is junk. Junk. It focuses on radiation hazard. You and I know better. You and I know that, by the time radiation kills you, you’re long since dead from heat and blast. Ask any nurse! The Royal College of Nursing has calculated what would happen to us here in Bristol when a one-megaton bomb explodes half a mile away, at Bristol Bridge. Heat and blast immediately kill a quarter of a million people and injure countless others. Did I say countless? Apologies. Nobody’s left to do the counting. And even if someone could count the injured, nearly all nurses and doctors are dead too. Hospitals? Blasted flat. Police? Fire services? No help there. As far as eight miles from ground zero, Bristol is finished, blown flat, burned to a crisp. Government talk of planning for mass casualties is lies. No help would come. How could it? No transport, in or out. Anyone who survives in a shelter and emerges after two or three weeks is exposed to infection, dehydration, starvation and hypothermia, with the very real risk of leukaemia, other cancers, and blindness to follow. And all that from a single, solitary, one-megaton bomb. Why drop only one? Why not ten? Twenty? Fifty?”
Zoë let that thought sink in. She took out a booklet and opened it. “We British are said to be very level-headed. Calm in a crisis. Phlegmatic: isn’t that the word? By God, we shall need to be. This is the official Home Office booklet on surviving nuclear attack. It ends with these words: ‘The All-Clear signal means that there is no longer an immediate danger and…’” She spread her arms wide. Now she gave each word the same punishing emphasis: “‘and you may resume normal activities.’ How I would like to meet the civil servant who wrote that! What a comfort he is in time of trouble!”
Fifteen minutes later, Zoë wound up, damning the suicidal stupidity of nuclear powers, in contrast to the shining sanity of ordinary men and women, and she won thunderous applause. As she left the stage, Canon Collins came on. He paused to shake her hand. “Excellent. Truly excellent,” he said. “Bertrand Russell’s train has broken down somewhere in the Midlands. You’ll have to go on again and fill in for him. Truly, truly excellent.”
Delegate. When the burden is too great, delegate. Share the load.