For, yes, despite the fall from grace, we went down to dinner, of soup and rather stringy beef, served in the oldfashioned formal way, in a dining room lined with paintings of weak-chinned generations of owners. And there was wine from the cellar and port served in fine glasses, and at the end the cigars came out, a very expensive treat shipped from Cuba. Much of the conversation was light, touching on the scandalous behaviour of various film stars, perhaps for my benefit as the only civilian present and one of only three women. Gray put in anecdotes about the eccentric behaviour of Churchill in his bunker at Dollis Hill, where – so it was said – the Governor of London would host meetings of his inner cabinet in his pyjamas and dressing gown, with a goblet of brandy at his side and a budgerigar perched on top of his balding head.
Most Army officers were, after all, drawn from the privileged classes, and all this seemed normal to them. To me it was a strange evening, a poignant reminder of an England that was all but lost. And an England, I thought as I watched poor Ted Lane try to decide which bit of cutlery he was supposed to use next, from which most of the English had always been excluded.
I slept restlessly that night in a room that felt stuffy, on a mattress that felt too deep, a bed piled too high with blankets. Perhaps I was simply disturbed, as I had been since my injections in Portsmouth, by the thought of the lethal pathogens I carried in my body – as if my body itself had become a battleground. Or perhaps I had simply become too used to my relatively austere but comfortable life in Paris.
I was woken very early by sounds outside: voices barking commands or raised in laughter, a hiss of water, even a smell of what might have been cooking bacon. I pulled on a dressing gown and went to my open window.
As I have said, the grounds of the house had been given over as a rest and recuperation area for men brought back from the front. I saw them now, queuing in the low sunlight of an early May morning, at tables for an open-air breakfast of sardine and potatoes and bread and a mug of tea; they were fed from a ‘company cooker’, as they called it, like a big kitchen range on wheels. Or they gathered around communal shower centres to wash – I caught cheeky glimpses of pale flesh – and there were wagons laden with disinfectant and delousing powder through which those just back from the front had to be processed.
Some, that morning, had already been called to training. I saw one group busily burrowing into what had once been a croquet lawn, I think, disappearing into a tunnel like human moles. Others, in full kit, faced a row of targets dangling from a line, like big leathery sacks. At a snapped command from the NCO they charged en masse at the targets, yelling; they did not fire their rifles but stabbed at the sacks with their bayonets, like men taking on bears. With their big eyes and beak-like mouths and dangling tentacles, the sacks were scarecrow Martians. I learned later that, although it seemed unlikely any soldier would get to face a Martian outside its protective machines, the very physicality of bayonetting was thought to be good for a soldier’s morale. Do it often enough, make yourself muscle-weary with it, and you grow into a kind of blood lust, an unhesitating willingness to kill – and that was a good mental state for a fighting man to reach for.
As I watched there was a sudden clatter of rattles, a cry of ‘Smoke, Black Smoke!’ Everyone in hearing range dropped their gear, and fixed hooded masks over their heads, and pulled down sleeves and trouser cuffs to leave no flesh exposed. But it was only a drill.
Before the day was much older we were driven from the house and back into town to the rail station, and loaded up on a train filled with anxious troopers, novices and veterans alike, returning to their duties. We three, Lane, Gray and I, shared a compartment with a dozen of them, who crowded the seats and sat on the floor – one fellow even stretched out on the flimsylooking luggage rack overhead – and they filled the little cabin with their cigarette smoke.
We slowed as we passed another train, coming down from London, and I peered curiously. The train was splashed with paint, black and brown and green – camouflage colours. I saw troops in there, grimy and exhausted, many sleeping. Cars marked with red crosses were like mobile hospitals, and there were cars crammed with civilians too, men, women, and children, many of them as grimy as the troops, blinking in the light – and in the case of the children, staring in wonder at the green countryside, which perhaps they had never seen before.
Ted Lane, by the window, amused himself by pulling faces at the little Londoners and trying to make them smile.
I touched his arm. ‘Is it always like this?’
‘Oh, yes, Miss,’ he murmured. ‘Seven million or so trapped on the day the Martians came, I believe, and you don’t shift them in a hurry.’
Gray said, on my other side, ‘The Londoners do what they can for themselves – backyard allotments and the like. But there are whole populations left behind, some in hiding in tube tunnels and the like – and every so often they have to be shifted as the flood waters rise.’
At that time I knew nothing of London’s floods – I would see enough later.
Ted Lane was still pulling faces and waving. ‘Seven million,’ he muttered. ‘And every one of them a life to be saved.’
I felt obscurely proud of him.
Later we had a pause in our journey. The train simply stopped in open country, somewhere near Alton I think. The locomotive was shut down, and workers in khaki – they may have been military swarmed along the carriages dragging tarpaulins loosely over the roofs, and our view from the window was obscured.
Lane touched my shoulder. ‘Martian about – or so some spotter will have called in, and the message sent on to the signalmen.’
‘Probably a flying-machine,’ Gray said. ‘They come out for the odd raid, as if testing our defences. And they cut the rail links if they see them. So you conceal the tracks by splashing them with camouflage-colour paint, though that has to be renewed as it gets rubbed off by passing stock. And the trains too, the roofs of the carriages painted, a bit of tarpaulin to blur the outlines. Wouldn’t fool a human spotter, but might a Martian. And we have to be still. A moving train—’
‘Why are we whispering? The Martians might see us, but they can’t hearus.’
He grinned. ‘Natural reaction, ain’t it? Anyhow you started it.’
Of course he was right.
We were held for hours before at last we moved. In the interval we had none of us spotted a flying-machine.
11
MY RETURN TO LONDON
The train journey ended south of London, at Clapham Junction. Here our train-load of troops was exchanged with another lot, evidently fresh from the front and ready for their bit of leave, the men mostly in khaki uniforms and greatcoats, and women in the uniforms of nurses or VADs. The relieved troops were all grimy and damp-looking, their clothes and kit shapeless and well-worn, even mouldy in some cases. The dominant impression was of exhaustion. Nevertheless these hollow-eyed troops had greetings ready for their replacements. ‘Hello! Nice haircut, mate, but the Heat-Ray will give you a trim for nothing. Got a fag to spare?’
‘Look at that one, Fred. Ruddy like a raspberry and as full of juice. Them Martians will have a fine time sucking you dry, you mark my words, suck and suck and slurp!…’
I suppose it has been the way of soldiers to goad each other this way, back to the days when Caesar came with his legions, perhaps to this very spot. But I saw that while this badinage was continuing, the nurses and MOs stood with men and a few women in a worse condition: walking wounded, festooned with bandages, on crutches – there was a line of men who seemed to have lost their sight, all standing with one hand on the shoulder of the fellow in front. All looked exhausted, bewildered, shocked, and those who could see were blinking in the light. It was not a promising welcome committee. And still I was far from the Martian centre, the cause of all this.