After the Rain (2 page)

The balloon was no more than a collapsed sheath of silk on the truck; a State Trooper guarded it, and
swapped jokes with some of the people close to him. Another truck was parked at a little distance away; it contained the cylinders of gas with which the balloon was to be filled. Mr. Uppingham ordered this second truck into position, and began to superintend the operation.

As before, the balloon did not at once leave the truck to which it was attached by cable, but only took on shape as the cylinders of gas were emptied. This was a slow business, and the crowd grew bored. They stood about and shouted to their wandering children, or they sat on cushions on the tops of automobiles and trailers, and conversed with one another over the heads of the people on the ground. Most of them were lightly dressed, and all of them were sweating in the strong sun, which, as the
putt-a-putt
of the motor sounded thinly in the air and the balloon began to rise beneath the rotating helicopter blade was suddenly obscured, so that everyone fell silent, and looked up.

It was not the balloon, of course, which had obscured the sun; that, though rising steadily, was still too close to the truck. No, a large cloud had come up from the west, and as Mr. Uppingham stepped into the basket, and as the cable was paid out and the balloon rose higher and higher into the air, other clouds came and joined the first, covering the sky like a padded quilt, and blotting out the sun. All time seemed to slow down as Mr. Uppingham rose in his basket towards the cloud quilt above him, which, as it grew thicker, seemed to come down to meet the balloon.

On the roof of one of the trailers, a trap door opened as a child was sent to fetch its mother’s wrap. Suddenly the air grew chilly, and a shiver seemed to run through the crowd. A car was seen to drive furiously up the road from Cisco, and the people on foot made room for it, since it bore some sort of official pennant. The car stopped by the truck, and a middle-aged man in a light suit and a wide hat got out, and spoke sharply to the man at the winch. “Get him down,” he said, “the deal’s off.”

“Don’t know as how I could do that,” said the man.

“The deal’s off.”

“Does
he
know?” The man at the winch pointed into the air, where Mr. Uppingham could be seen, a tiny figure looking down at the people.

“O. K. I’ll tell him.” The middle-aged man made a megaphone of his hands, and shouted upwards to Mr. Uppingham. “Can you hear me? The deal’s off. OFF. It is going to rain in any case, THE DEAL IS OFF.” High above him, Mr. Uppingham smiled, and waved a benison from the basket.

Then, I suppose, he threw the switch. There was no sudden flash, nothing spectacular. It was just that the balloon seemed to disintegrate, and the basket and the helicopter blade hung there for a moment, two specks in the middle air, and then dropped. The basket hit the roof of one of the automobiles, belonging to a Mr. Henry Denton of Dallas, and smashed completely with Mr. Uppingham and all that was in it. The blade fell harmlessly on the ground.

A bustle and hubbub arose among the crowd, as its centre of interest shifted from the air above to its own midst, and the people re-formed into a new pattern that reflected this shift in focus, pressing closely around Mr. Denton’s automobile. Then the State Troopers began to disperse them. The damaged automobile with its horrid discolouration on the roof, was taken over and driven away. One by one the tents and trailers vanished from the site, until only a Utter of pop bottles, cans and papers was left to mark it. The site was deserted, and, by six in the evening, most of the correspondents and sight-seeing folk had left Cisco itself to renew the sleepy life of a small town.

At seven, the rain began.

The rain began, and did not stop. A counterpane of cloud covered the U.S.A., Canada and the South American countries. It crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and fell on Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. All over the world, the sun was blotted out, and the rain fell steadily.

Meteorologists, finding that their weather charts had now become absurdly simple, were left with nothing to predict. Such a thing, it was announced, had not happened before; there were no precedents for this sort of weather, and they could make no forecasts. The announcement provoked angry letters from low-Church fundamentalists who asked whether the Weather Bureaux had never heard of Noah. Other correspondents blamed the hydrogen bomb. But even the fundamentalists did not regard the rain as anything but a warning—after all, the Lord had promised that there would never be another Flood—and nobody expected it to go on for much longer.

The rain fell. Wheat, which is usually ready for
harvesting
in England in late August, rotted in the fields. Fresh vegetables became scarce in the shops, and rose
alarmingly in price. As food prices rose, there was a burst of strikes. Dockers, miners and railwaymen, appalled at the increased cost of living, struck for higher wages, and the cost of living rose accordingly. Thomas Renton, an ex-postman living on a pension in Putney, committed suicide at about this time, and left a note for the coroner, laying out neatly in blue and red ink the details of his weekly budget. The tabloid and humanitarian
newspapers
made a big issue out of Mr. Renton’s suicide letter, and the head of a well-known firm of publishers
immediately
began a campaign for the relief of the Elderly and Indigent.

A sudden rush of water, caught and stored in the
Exmoor
peat, swept away the little Devonshire town of Lynmouth, and the Lord Mayor of London sponsored a fund for the survivors. But, as similar catastrophes grew more frequent, the Lord Mayor’s Fund became something of a joke. Although swelled by Government grants, the money and woolly clothing collected always seemed to be several catastrophes behind.

Now Noahs began to proliferate in Britain. There was a Plymouth Noah, a Bradford Noah, and a mad old man who lived just outside Luton. These were the first, and they had most publicity, but many others followed them, crying Woe at the sins of the world, and all of them making, with different degrees of skill, arks into which they proposed to cram themselves, their families and as many animals as they could come by. The Luton Noah was prosecuted for stealing sheep; the Plymouth Noah put out to sea, and was lost without trace; the Bradford
Noah worked to the dimensions and materials laid down in the Bible, and never finished his ark for want of cypress. Many of the later Noahs found that the animals ate the grain they had gathered for planting on Ararat; wooden arks warped or, river-launched, were smashed to pieces against the parapet of some bridge. In spite of these misfortunes, the longer it rained, the more Noahs there were, though it became increasingly difficult to build an ark with one’s home half under water, and no food in the larder to stock it.

I have written so far of how things were in Britain. Though I must have read in the newspapers of the early disasters in Holland and Connecticut, they are no more to me now than faded brown pictures in the
Illustrated London News
. It is our own misfortunes I remember. December was the turning month, for December brought freezing weather to Britain. The rain turned to snow, the flooded fields to ice. Planes were earth-bound; trains ran slowly and infrequently; buses, cars and vans clanked about in chains. Attendences at factories and offices fell away, and the people stayed at home (and for the most part in bed) fireless and hungry. The London County Council organized a service of vans that brought one hot meal a day to old people, but, even so, many of them died. So did the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

The snow piled up in the streets of the towns. In the Highlands of Scotland, in North Wales and on the moors of England, communities were cut off from their neighbours, and, again, many people died and
many cattle and sheep. Newspapers could no longer be nationally distributed, and were put out in skimpy local editions. As the country roads clogged up, food and other essentials were transported by helicopter, but the strain was too great for the service to be more than scratchily maintained, nor could the helicopters carry coal and firing. In London, snow-ploughs cleared the main highways, but the snow was piled up all the deeper in side streets, and there were clashes between tenant and tenant as basement-dwellers tried to move upstairs. Snow-shoes were sold out of the shops, and people learned to tramp about on tennis racquets and flat pieces of plywood.

In late February the thaw came. All over the country, swollen rivers burst their banks, bridges were carried away, farmhouses were inundated, and many more of those cattle and people who had survived the winter were drowned. The streets of London were under water. The crematoria of Golders Green and Woking worked overtime; they had been given the highest fuel priority, for the dead could not be buried. Now, with no crops planted or able to be planted, with communications cut and wide areas of the country under water, the Government proclaimed a State of Emergency.

*

After my return from Texas, I had left the staff of the
News Chronicle
to join an advertising agency in
Mayfair
. I was a copywriter. As the rain continued, and the snow followed it, our copy became more and more “flood-conscious”—“Get flood-conscious copywise,”
one of the directors told me, and an account executive nearby said, “Surely, surely!” I was concerned to sell, not the rain-coats, gum-boots and all the various forms of water-proofing that people were already buying without encouragement, but the luxury articles that nobody in his senses would want during an emergency. It was all a little like a
New Statesman and Nation
competition, “
STOCKING S RAFT
?” I wrote, “Remember
OYSTERS
! Succulent and easily digested, Buxtable
OYSTERS
carry a lot of nourishment in a little space. They give you those
RESERVES OF ENERGY
you are going to
NEED. OYSTERS
in your provision box are worth their weight in
PEARLS
. Ask your grocer for
BUXTABLE’S BOTTLED OYSTERS
now before it’s too late.”

I wrote copy about barometers (“
F
IRST WITH THE GOOD NEWS
”), diamond necklaces (“
SO LIGHT, SO HANDY, SO EASY TO CARRY
”), and for Ford cars with the new rustless finish. I advertised sun-glasses (“
SNOW GLARE ATTACKS THE EYES
”), and suggested a campaign for a sun-tan cosmetic with the catch-line, “If you
LOOK
FIT, you
ARE
FIT.” One selling scheme of mine proposed that parasols turned upside down could be filled with food and towed behind boats in flooded areas, but it was rejected as far-fetched.

As the winter wore on, and the national papers were restricted to a local circulation, we expected to lose accounts, but advertisers continued to buy space just the same. In times of adversity, “Business as Usual” is more than a boast; it is a refusal to believe that adversity exists. I continued to write copy of one sort and
another until the thaw, by which time, newspapers, magazines, advertising agencies, commercial television, cinemas and indeed most businesses of any kind had closed down altogether for want of staff and the materials of production.

Hunger and disease were everywhere, but most, it seemed, in London. There were stories of cannibalism in the East End, and looting in Hampstead, Highgate and Notting Hill, where the streets were not yet under water. Over much of the rest of London, the streets had become canals, and not many of the gangs of looters had floating transport, for all sorts of boats and rubber dinghies had been commandeered by the Disposal Service. This was a kind of extension of the police, swollen by a recruitment of Special Constables and Civil Defence Volunteers, devoted to the protection of the public, both from violence and plague. They maintained a round-the-clock service—silent armed men in those absurd dinghies, jostled by the bodies which bobbed in the water, and which they collected and towed away to improvised crematoria.

Since my return I had been renting a room from Bob Humphries, an old school-fellow who was a member of the Disposal Service, and, now that I had little to do with my time, he often allowed me to accompany him on duty. It kept me from boredom, and by then I no longer cared whether I were indoors or out; being wet had become a condition of life, for there was almost no heating, and one’s bedding and clothes were permanently damp. The natives of Tierra del Fuego, I had
been told at school, endured this sort of existence; if they managed to get used to it, I supposed we should. I remember making this remark to Bob one morning as we paddled in convoy along the King’s Road. The rain fell steadily, and, since the Disposal Service was already beginning to be a little behind in getting rid of the bodies, there was a pervading stench of decay. Suddenly Bob said, “It can’t go on, you know.”

“I wish I believed that.”

“There’s no sense to it.” He stopped paddling, and stared at me earnestly. “I wish I had a cigarette,” he said. Supplies of cigarettes and tobacco had given out long ago, and most of us had grown used to being without, but Bob, I think, since he had a request to make, had wanted to be able to offer me a cigarette. “I want you to do something for me, John,” he said, “if you will.”

“What?”

“I want you to take Wendy out of this. We’ve got people in Somerset.”

Wendy was Bob’s wife. “Take her out how?” I said.

“You can use this dinghy. I’ll still have the little one.”

“But this is silly, isn’t it?” I said. “Why don’t you take her yourself?”

“I can’t, old man. I’m on duty.”

Bob had always been known to his friends for what is called straight thinking; his distinctions were never blurred. He had, he reckoned, a duty to his wife to get her away from London, and his duty as a Special
Constable to stay. The two would be incompatible if it were not for my help.

“We’d be stealing the dinghy though,” I said.

“Can’t be helped,” said Bob. “Did you know the water’s rising?”

“Well, of course.”

“I don’t just mean the rain. The level’s suddenly begun to rise much faster now, but we’re supposed to keep it quiet. Yesterday it was nine inches. You can’t tell me that was just rainfall.”

“Nine inches!”

“There’s something funny going on.”

I said, “There was a clergyman in the eighteenth century, who explained Noah’s Flood in terms of a kind of Saturnian ring round the earth, which consisted of water, and suddenly descended. I suppose it couldn’t happen twice.”

“Sounds a bit far-fetched.”

“Look, it is far-fetched,” I said. “It could be that somebody’s lit a fire under the polar ice caps. It could be that something funny has happened to the pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic. It could be that a whole new Continent has appeared, and we’re getting the displaced water. Which do you prefer, Bob? You can have any of those.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why it began isn’t important. When is it going to stop?”

“Don’t know that either,” said Bob. “But I want Wendy out of this. It’s not healthy in London.” We
moved on along the King’s Road. “Whatever happens, she’ll be better off at Chew.”

*

Bob’s parents lived on Chew Hill above the village of Chew Magna, which had at that time the smallest gasworks in England. Chew is not far from the
Mendips
, and part of the Government’s Emergency
Programme
, we knew, was that temporary colonies should be set up on such areas of high ground, and there, when some sort of hutted accommodation should be ready together with stocks of chemical foods, medicines and vitamin pills, the population should be concentrated. D-Day for the evacuation had been set for April 2nd, but it would be a process spread over some weeks. Chew Magna itself lies in a valley, but the hill rises steeply from it; Bob reckoned that his people would still be there, and within reach of the Mendip Camp when it began to function.

We tried that evening to work out a route to Chew, but we had no contour maps, and the green and brown patches of the Ordnance Survey provided only the vaguest indications. “You’ll have to avoid the rivers,” said Bob. “They’ll be flowing against you.” Even as things were, we should be unlikely to cover more than thirty miles a day.

Food would take up very little room in the dinghy. Londoners had been living on tablets—yeast tablets, dextrose tablets, vitamin tablets and large pills of various colours, labelled “Nourishment A, B, C and D” and packaged by Government laboratories. “Your
Meal in a Matchbox! Science reveals that Synthetic Foods are MORE TASTY and MORE NOURISHING than food in its animal state, “I had written in the early days of the shortages, and the matchbox meals were
supplemented
with a kind of slop, which was mostly fish and water, and was brought round daily to as many houses as could be easily reached by the L.C.C. launches. Bob could steal enough of these tablets to last us for some time, and the slop we could make for ourselves if we caught any fish and were prepared to stomach it raw. For the rest, we would take blankets and waterproof covers, and find shelter for the nights where we could.

*

Rain gives insignificance to any situation. Wendy and Bob Humphries, two people of devotion and strength, parted damply from one another in the early morning. Wendy wept, but her tears went unnoticed in the rain. An improvised ladder led from the first floor of the house to the dinghy below, and half-way down she was taken by a fit of coughing, and we were afraid she would fall in the water. I followed with the bundle of blankets wrapped in water-proofing, and Bob handed down the other stores we were to take. As we pushed away from the side of the house, he leaned from the window to watch us go. “Good-bye, old girl. Keep your chin up,” he said. “Take care of her, John.”