But this was different, it seemed, so far. The government had not yet given up. The special constables and fire wardens and others were standing their ground, and even exhorted people to go back to their homes, to do their duty. Individuals could be singled out. ‘You, man – that’s the arm-band of a firewatcher. St. Martin’s, that’s where you should be, with your whistle and your bucket of sand, not running like rabbits.’
A few argued back, in that dawn – the absconding firewatcher, for one. ‘Come off the high horse, Ted, you’re a doorman at the Rialto, not Winston bloody Churchill. The guv’mnt ’ave took my motor-car, they’ve took my dog cart, and if it had occurred to ’em they’d have took my mother-in-law’s wheelchair too – no, no, Ma, don’t try to get up, you keep it – but they can’t yet reck-wee-zish-un my two poor feet, and if you’ve got any sense left you’ll join me.’
Even I was picked on for not carrying my gas-mask – in fact I had it but not on show, it was in my rucksack. ‘You’ll regret not having it to hand when the Black Smoke comes, missus.’
If this was going on in the West End, I imagined the same scene played out across the city and the residential suburbs: the authorities struggling to keep the city’s shape with their rules and regulations and an appeal to duty, and no traffic moving on the streets save for military and other official vehicles. And yet a trickle of dark, struggling dots must already have been filtering through the streets and alleys, laden, on foot, yet making their clumsy way, a trickle that was the people of London swarming and converging and massing, I guessed, in the great trunk roads leading south and east – opposite to the direction from which the Martians, this time, would surely come.
And, even in the Strand, even at this very early hour, in amongst the gathering crowd of evacuating residents I saw already folk who had evidently come much further, and were travelling into London. Some walked only with difficulty; they had scorched clothes, blackened faces. These were families, with old folk and little ones, all on foot – and all much less heavily burdened than the Londoners who were only now beginning their journeys, and I imagined a litter of abandoned suitcases and trunks and valuables lining the roads out of Middlesex, just as in Surrey thirteen years before. There was a first aid post in the hotel, and VADs came fluttering out to offer assistance to the worse-off of these poor wretches; waiters and bell-boys came out too with cups of water. These first refugees, it would turn out, were survivors from residences on the fringe of the Martian landfall, driven out by the fires, or the collapse of their properties, or just sheer terror – those much further in had not survived at all. I guessed as much but could not confirm it at the time. I longed to talk to these refugees, to learn a story or two from individuals, but the special constables, ever vigilant over morale, kept us apart.
Restless, impatient, I gave up on the hotel and struck out myself along the Strand, heading for Trafalgar Square.
Charing Cross station was closed entirely now, barricaded with barbed wire; the rail lines, like the roads, had now been requisitioned for official use. It was still early but a few stores were open; I saw fist-fights in a grocery. And queues formed outside a bank branch with its door barred and firmly closed, behind an official notice proclaiming that all banking would be suspended for the ‘duration’; as the Bank of England had already suspended specie payments, the other banks had no choice but to close. That was the first inkling I had that the new Martian attack already had global implications; with the closure of London’s investment markets, through which in those days flowed much of the world’s money, there would be an instant financial crisis.
In the Square itself I stood on the balcony of the Portrait Gallery and looked out, with Nelson, at this great confluence of the city’s highways: the roads becoming steadily more packed with pedestrians, only a handful of vehicles, police and military, pushing through the crowds and the roadblocks. Even here, as the morning light gathered, I sensed a steady drift eastwards, an instinctive flight away from the glowing enigma to the west. The walls and lampposts were posted with fresh proclamations from the government, and a few fragments of news. The Chief Commissioner of Police urged us to keep public order. Parliament, the Privy Council and the Cabinet councils were all in session, we were told, and communications with the military commanders in the field were being kept up. In more than one message Marvin himself, handsomely portrayed, encouraged us to stand fast and do our duty. I saw one version of Marvin given a crayoned suitcase labelled ‘Berlin bound!’
About eight in the morning the newsboys appeared with their first specials of the day, and were mobbed; small fortunes in pennies were handed over in minutes. I did not join the scrums around the boys, but waited a few minutes until I could get my hands on a discarded but mostly intact copy of the Mail.
Hastily printed, heavy on headlines but short on images, the rag contained what seemed like authentic news to me – and I silently praised the publishers for defying the government’s ban on the truth when it mattered most. Major movements of troops and materiel were being reported from Aldershot, headquarters of the Army and home of three divisions, and north of the Thames out of Colchester, and special trains were carrying stocks of weapons and shells out of the Woolwich Arsenal. The Royal Family was no longer in London; even before the weekend they had boarded a warship that would take the King to the safety of Delhi. Evidently rumours of the Martians’ projected landfall, to the north-west, had leaked out in the final hours, and I read about fighting, the evening before, for places on the last publicly available trains heading to the south: the Great Westerns to Cornwall and Devon, the Brighton Line to Sussex, the south-east lines to Kent. Meanwhile food stores across the city were already depleted of stock because of panic buying, and the government was halting the inflow of fresh supplies from the countryside, diverting it to special warehouses with locations unspecified, to be doled out as the basis of a rationing system.
And, in screaming headlines, there were scraps of news from the front itself.
A few words, a handful of facts – alarmist, you might think, but, as I would learn later, the essence of the case was there, in a dozen words.
I read the paper twice, then gave it to a man begging to see it in turn. Restless, aimless, I walked, letting instinct guide me.
I went down to the river and along the Embankment – or at least, along the narrow strip of walkway still permitted to the public. I looked on the ugly bunker that had replaced the Palace of Westminster, and I thought that if war was coming perhaps its architectural strategy had been a sound one after all. I crossed Westminster Bridge, and there, on the river, for the first time I glimpsed large-scale military movements in the city itself. I saw military vessels pushing up-river. Some appeared to be barges laden with troops, but I thought I recognised the low profile of torpedo rams, like the Thunder Child which thirteen years before had done so much to preserve my own life. Such a boat, I realised, would be able to pass under the bridges and reach further into the upper stretches than most capital ships. I also saw what appeared to be heavy naval guns, dismounted and being lugged upstream on smaller boats and barges. I resolved to make my way to the Pool of London, further downstream, to witness the gathering of warships that must be clustered there – surely an inspiring sight. That, though, was a destination I was not to reach.