Philip grunted. ‘Behold our rulers. The Mother of Parliaments replaced by a bunker – ugh! And over in the City, around Bank, the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, Mansion House – the seat of global finance, similarly secured. You still get the swarms of commuters coming in from the suburbs in the morning, and trickling out in the evening, day by day. But they all carry papers and passes, and Black Smoke masks or revolvers depending on which drill is on that day…’
A deep thrumming seemed to make the fabric of the bridge itself vibrate, and a diffuse shadow crossed the river. Looking up I saw a vast Zeppelin, a whale in the sky. The eagle of Imperial Germany was easily visible on its flank.
Once across the river we walked along the Strand a distance, and cut up through Covent Garden. Bunting hung everywhere, and Union flags fluttered, and there were posters of the King and of the heroes of the new military government – Marvin himself, Churchill, Lloyd George. But the streets were grubby, the paint peeling on many buildings, and there were very many beggars. Their hands, open for change, were like grimy flowers.
And I was struck by how many people I saw in uniform, not just bobbies or soldiers. Every public building seemed to have a soldier or two on guard, and even the staff at the hotels and restaurants sported epaulettes and brass buttons. It was the Berlin-ification of London, I thought. And considering that, I seemed to hear an unconscionable number of German accents.
Trafalgar Square looked much as it always had, and I was obscurely pleased to see that Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, who even the Martians had not toppled, had not yet been replaced on his column by a beaming Brian Marvin, hero of Weybridge. We walked up Charing Cross Road which, of all the locations in London I had seen so far, seemed the least changed, still a warren of bookshops and barrows laden with tattered volumes. As a girl I had always loved coming to London, not for the clothes or the cafes or the shows, but for the books, always the books. This feeling, of stumbling upon a fragment of the past, was so strong that I briefly found myself overcome. Philip, always more sensitive than he looked, gave me his arm, and we walked on in silence.
I saw a new book on sale, prominently displayed: General Marvin and Why We Must Fight An Unending War, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
We cut through Oxford Street and Portland Place. On the Marylebone Road we ignored placard-bearers urging us to visit Madame Tussaud’s, where a new diorama showed the ‘true horrors’ of the Martians’ feeding habits. Philip said the exhibit was popular.
It was with relief, for me at least, that we reached the green spaces of Regent’s Park, although the light was fading fast. But even here much was changed; the expanses of grass had been largely given over to vegetable plots, meant as demonstrations for householders urged to grow food in their own lawns. And where once children flew kites and rode their bicycles, now the only youngsters marched in crocodiles or dug at the ground, and even put on what looked like a mock battle.
Later I would learn of the transformation Marvin had inflicted on the education system. The motto of the new movement was an old quotation of Wellington’s, on seeing a cricket match at Eton: ‘There grows the stuff that won Waterloo.’ Well, now Eton and the other schools turned out nothing but officers, while the younger siblings of the scholars were enticed into joining a new movement called the Junior Sappers, organised by Baden-Powelclass="underline" boys and girls as young as five or six, digging trenches or binding mock wounds. All this was part of a general cleansing of the national moral character, as Marvin’s supporters called it. I was dismayed at what I saw, coming at with unprejudiced eyes from across the Atlantic. Was this the future of Britain – the child soldier?
We passed the Zoological Gardens – now closed up and empty of animals – and crossed the Albert Road to climb Primrose Hill. The view opened up around us as it always had, the hill itself seeming to rise out of the greenery of Regent’s Park, beyond which the great reef of the city was visible, the wounded dome of St Paul’s, the new concrete excrescences of Westminster and Whitehall, the ethereal glitter of the Crystal Palace, and the Surrey hills in the distance.
Here we stood before what had been the landing site of the seventh Martian cylinder, and the nucleus of what had become the largest single Martian construction during the War. This was fenced off as had been the pits in Surrey. But of the three inert fighting-machines Walter had glimpsed here on that hot summer’s day at the end of the War in 1907, one had been left standing, a tripod stark and disconcerting in profile.
A fairground had been set up, a roundabout with cars and horses, a steam organ, coconut shies, balloon races. Thus, around the feet of the ghastly monument, small children played. I looked up at the brazen cowl of the thing, that mechanical component so like a head.
And it was at that moment that I had what Philip described as my ‘turn’.
After I recovered – I sat on a bench for a while, with Philip hovering solicitously – we took a taxi to the police centre at the Barbican, where I was processed with cold efficiency, though it was nine at night before I was released.
I allowed Philip to escort me back to the hotel at the Elephant and Castle, where I retired immediately, taking a cold supper in my room. I slept little, trying not to think of that which had disturbed me, on the Hill.
The next day was free. I felt I needed to see something of the real London, away from Philip’s kind but suffocating embrace, away from the military cynicism of the others. I still had old friends in the city, and I hastily called a couple from the hotel and made arrangements. I left the hotel early, avoiding Philip and the others.
Lunch was at an oyster house in Lambeth. Here I met a school friend who ran a soup kitchen.
For all his grand visions, and whatever he might have done for national security, Marvin had delivered an economy that was faltering at best. I was told that though trade unions and the like had long been banned, there was plenty of agitation, in the mines, the railways – even in Woolwich Arsenal, which manufactured a large percentage of the country’s munitions supply. All of this was brutally suppressed. And at the very bottom, they were opening up the workhouses once again. My friend had plenty of clients. I was lucky to be here in March, in a place like Lambeth, said my friend, for in the summer the bugs came out.
That evening, by way of contrast, I called another old friend, the wife of a banker. We met in a tea shop – I relished the smell of coffee and tea and cigarette smoke, and the rattle of the dominoes – and Hilda loaned me a dress for the evening.
We went to the Savoy on the Strand, which I playfully told Hilda was nearly as grand as the Lusitania. We had caviar and crab and mushroom salad, and a bottle of Hock. The place was full of the usual menagerie, the bounders and the flappers and the roués and the Varsity youth, their cheeks flushed pink with the drink. We danced to the Havana Band, and we let ourselves be charmed by handsome German officers.
There wasn’t much to enjoy in Marvin’s morally uplifted Britain. They hadn’t quite had the nerve to prohibit alcohol, but prices had been sharply increased by tax levies. The government had shut down most sports (none of which I followed anyhow), save for cricket which Marvin regarded as ‘manly’, and football, but only as played by military personnel on leave. But if you had money there were still places in London to spend it well.
The Savoy was relatively uncrowded, I thought, but Hilda reminded me it was not yet the season. For now the upper classes were still mostly ensconced in their draughty country houses, but they would swarm in London during the summer – like the bugs in Lambeth, I thought to myself. The well-to-do had no problems with the new way of things, Hilda told me, unless it was to complain about the reintroduction of wild boar to the English countryside, so the Germans could hunt schwein…