Fugue for a Darkening Island Page 2

  In just under a minute I had them on my side. Sally lay on the muddy bank, staring at me wordlessly. I wanted her to criticize me for what I had done, but she said nothing. Isobel lay on her side, doubled over. She retched up water for several minutes, then swore at me. I ignored her.

  Although the river was cold from the hills, the air was warm. We took stock of our possession. Nothing had been lost in the crossing, but everything we carried had become soaked. It had been part of the original plan that Isobel should hold our main haversack up out of the water, while Sally supported her. Now, all our clothes and food were wet, and our matches for lighting a fire were unusable. We decided it would be best if we removed all our clothes, and hung them in the bushes and trees in the hope that they would be wearably dry by morning.

  We lay together on the ground, shivering miserably, and cuddling each other for warmth. Within half an hour Isobel was asleep, but Sally lay in my arms with her eyes open.

  We each knew the other was awake and stayed so for most of the night.

  I was to spend the night with a woman named Louise. She had taken a room for the purpose in an hotel in Goodge Street, and as I had told Isobel that I was taking part in an all-night demonstration at the college I was able to get away from home for a whole night.

  Louise and I dined at a small Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street, then, not wishing to spend the entire evening in her hotel room, we went to a cinema in Tottenham Court Road. I do not recall the title of the film. All I can remember is that it was foreign, that its dialogue was sub-titled in English and that it concerned a violently-resolved love-affair between a coloured man and a white woman. The film contained several scenes of complete sexual frankness, and although it had not been banned, few cinemas were willing to show films which depicted the various forms of the sex act in detail because of several instances of police action. However, at the time we saw the film it had been showing unmolested for more than a year.

  Louise and I had bought seats at the rear of the cinema, and when the police came in by way of the entrances along each side, we were able to see the precision with which it was done, indicating that the raid had been planned carefully. One policeman stood at each door and the others moved in a loose cordon around the audience.

  For a minute or two there seemed to be no further action, and we continued to watch the film until the house-lights went up. The film still showed and went on doing so for several more minutes. Finally it stopped abruptly.

  We sat in the auditorium for twenty minutes without knowing what was happening. One of the policemen forming part of the cordon was near me and I asked him what was going on. He made no answer.

  We were ordered to leave the auditorium row by row and to divulge our names and addresses. By a stroke of good fortune I did not have with me any form of self-identification, and was thus unable to prove who I was. Under the circumstances I gave the police a false name and address, and although my pockets were searched in an attempt to find authentication for my story, I was allowed to go free after Louise vouched for my identity.

  We returned to her hotel immediately and went to bed. After the events of the evening I was rendered impotent, and in spite of Louise's best efforts we were unable to have intercourse.

  John Tregarth's government had been in power for three months.

  As adversaries we detested the Afrim troops. We continually heard rumours of their cowardice in battle; and of their arrogance in victory, however small or relative it may be.

  One day we encountered a member of the Royal Nationalist Air Force who had been captured by an Afrim patrol. This man, who had been a pilot until crippled by the Africans' torture, told us of brutalities and atrocities in their military interrogation centres that made our own experiences as civilians appear to be trivial and perfunctory. The pilot had lost one leg below the knee, and had suffered lacerated tendons in the other, and he counted himself as among the more fortunate. He asked us for assistance.

  We were reluctant to become involved and Lateef called a meeting to decide what to do. In the end we voted to transport the crippled man to within a mile of the R.N.A.F. station, and to allow him to find his own way from there.

  Shortly after this incident, we were rounded up by a large Afrim patrol and taken to one of their civilian interrogation centres.

  We said nothing to them about the pilot, nor about their military methods in general. On this occasion we made no attempt to resist arrest. For my own part it was because I felt it might be connected in some way with the recent abduction of the women, but on the part of the group as a whole our lack of resistance was an outcome of the overall lethargy being experienced at the time.

  We were taken to a large building on the outskirts of one of the Afrim-held towns, and in a large marquee in the grounds told to strip and pass through a delousing section. This was a part of the tent which had been partitioned off and filled with a dense steam. Coming out a few minutes later, we were told to dress again. Our clothes lay untouched where we had left them.

  We were then divided into groups of one, two or three men. I was one of those on my own. We were taken to rooms inside the main building and interrogated briefly. My own interrogator was a tall West African, who, in spite of the central-heating system, wore a brown greatcoat. I had noticed on entering the room that the two uniformed guards in the corridor had been holding Russian rifles.

  The interrogation was sketchy. Identification-papers, certificate of state and origin and Afrim-stamped photograph shown and checked.

  "Your destination, Whitman?"

  "Dorchester," I said, giving him the answer we had agreed upon in the event of arrest.

  "You have relatives there?"

  "Yes." I gave him the name and address of fictitious parents.

  "You have a family?"

  "Yes."

  "But they are not with you."

  "No."

  "Who is the leader of your group?"

  "We are self-directed."

  There was a long silence while he rescrutinized my papers. After this I was returned to the marquee where I waited with the others as the remainder of the interrogation-sessions were completed. Then two Afrims dressed as civilians went through our possessions. The search was superficial in the extreme, turning up only a fork for eating that one of the men had left near the top of his haversack. The two knives I had secreted in the lining of my own bag went undetected.

  After this search there was another long perod of waiting, until a lorry bearing a large red cross on a white background was driven up alongside the marquee. The agreed Red Cross hand-out to refugees had been established for some time as being five pounds of protein, but since the Afrims had been handling their own side of the arrangement, provisions had decreased steadily.

  I received two small cans of processed meat and a packet of forty cigarettes.

  Later, we were driven away from the town in three lorries and dumped in the countryside seventeen miles from where we had been arrested. It took us the whole of the next day and part of the day after to find the cache of supplies we had made at the first warning that we were about to be arrested.

  At no time during our involuntary visit to Afrim-occupied territory had we seen or heard any sign or hint of the women. That night, I lay awake despairing of seeing Sally and Isobel again.

  It had been announced on the early news that the unidentified ship which had been sailing up the English Channel for the last two days had entered the Thames Estuary.

  During the morning I followed the regular bulletins. The ship had neither answered nor made any radio signals since first being sighted. It was not flying any flag. A pilot cutter had gone out to it from Tilbury, but the men had not been able to board it. From the name on her bows, the ship had been identified as a medium-sized cargo tramp, registered in Liberia and according to Lloyd's was at present chartered to a shipping firm in Lagos.

  It happened that from twelve-thirty I was free to leave the college, and not having
any appointments or lectures in the afternoon I decided to go down to the river. I caught a bus to Cannon Street and walked out on to London Bridge. Several hundred other people, mainly workers from near-by offices, had had the same notion, and the east side of the bridge was crowded.

  As time passed several people moved away, evidently in order to return to their offices, and as a result I was able to move forward to the parapet of the bridge.

  At just after two-thirty we were able to make out the ship, coming upriver towards the Tower Bridge. We saw that there were several craft in attendance around it, and that many of them were launches of the river police.

  A wave of speculation passed through the crowd.

  The ship approached the bridge, which kept its road down. A man standing near to me had a small pair of field-glasses, and he told us that the pedestrians on the bridge were being moved off, and the road was being closed to traffic. A few seconds later the bridge opened just in time for the ship to pass through.

  I was aware of sirens near by. Turning, I saw that four or five police-cars had driven on to London Bridge. The men remained inside, but left the blue lights flashing on the roofs. The ship came on towards us.

  We observed that several men on the small launches around the ship were speaking to those on board through loud-hailers. We could not make out what was said, but the sound came to us across the water in tinny resonances. It became unnaturally quiet on the bridge, as the police sealed off each end to traffic. A mounted policeman rode up and down telling us to leave the bridge.

  Only a few of us obeyed.

  The ship was now less than fifty yards from us, and it was possible to see that its decks were crowded with people, many of whom were lying down. Two of the police-launches had reached London Bridge, and were turned towards the ship. From one of them, a policeman with a loud-hailer shouted to the captain of the ship to stop his engines and to submit to a boarding party.

  There was no acknowledgement from the ship, which sailed on slowly towards the bridge, though many of the people on the decks of the ship were shouting back at the police, unable to make themselves understood.

  The bows of the ship passed underneath an arch of the bridge about fifteen yards where I stood. I looked down at it. The decks were crowded to the rails with people. I had no more time to observe their condition, because the superstructure amidships crashed into the parapet of the bridge. It was a slow, grinding collision, making an ugly scraping noise of metal on stone. I saw that the paintwork of the ship and its superstructure was filthy and rusty, with many panes of broken glass in the ports.

  I looked down at the river and saw that the police-launches and two river-authority tugs had gone in against the hull of the old ship, and were trying to push her stern towards the concrete bank of the New Fresh Wharf. I saw from the black smoke still issuing from her funnel and from the white-cream froth at the stern, that the ship's engines were still running. As the tugs made headway in pushing her towards the bank the metal superstructure scraped and crashed repeatedly against the bridge.

  I saw movement on the ship, on the decks and inside. The people on board were moving towards the stern. Many of them fell as they ran. As the stern rammed into the concrete quay the first men jumped ashore.

  The ship was wedged firmly between the bank and the bridge, her bows still under the arch, her superstructure against the parapet and her stern overhanging the quay. A tug moved round to the bridge, to make sure that until the engines were stopped the ship wouldn't turn somehow and move back into the river. Four police-launches were now against her port side, and ropes and rope-ladders were thrown with grappling-irons on to the decks. The fleeing passengers made no efforts to remove them. When the first ladder was secured the police and customs officials began to climb it.

  On the bridge, our interest was directed to the people leaving the ship: the Africans were coming ashore.

  We watched them with a mixture of horror and fascination. There were men, women and children. Most if not all were in an advanced state of starvation. Skeletal arms and legs, distended stomachs, skull-like heads holding staring eyes; flat, paper-like breasts on the women, accusing faces on them all. Most were naked or nearly so. Many of the children could not walk.

  Those whom no one would carry were left on the ship.

  A metal door in the side of the ship was opened from within and a gangplank pushed across the strip of water to the quay. From below-decks more Africans came out on to the shore. Some fell to the concrete as they stepped on the land, others moved towards the wharf-building and disappeared either into it or around its sides. None of them looked up at us on the bridge, or back at their fellows who were in the process of leaving the ship.

  We waited and watched. There seemed to be no end to the number of people on board.

  In time, the upper decks were cleared, though people still poured ashore from below. I tried to count the number of people lying, dead or unconscious, on the deck. When I had reached one hundred, I stopped counting.

  The men who had gone aboard finally managed to stop the engines, and the ship was made fast to the quay. Many ambulances had arrived at the wharf, and those people suffering most were put inside and driven away.

  But hundreds more just wandered from the wharf, away from the river, and up into the streets of the City, whose occupants knew nothing as yet of the events on the river.

  I learned later that the police and the river authorities had found more than seven hundred corpses on the ship, most of them children. The welfare authorities accounted for another four and a half thousand survivors, who were taken to hospitals or emergency centres. There was no way of counting the remainder, though I heard once an estimate of three thousand people who had wandered away from the ship and tried to survive alone.

  Shortly after the ship had been secured, we were moved off the bridge by the police, who told us that its structure was considered to be unsafe. The following day, however, it was open again to traffic.

  The event I had witnessed became known in time as the first of the Afrim landings.

  We were signalled down by a prowling police-car and questioned at some length as to our destination, and the circumstances surrounding our departure.

  Isobel tried to explain about the invasion of the next street and the imminent danger in which our home had been.

  While we waited for permission to continue, Sally tried to soothe Isobel, who was taken by a flood of tears. I did not want to be affected by it. While being in full sympathy with her feelings, and realizing that it is no small upset to be dispossessed in such a manner, I had experienced Isobel's lack of fortitude for the last few months. It had been understandably awkward while I was working at the cloth factory, but in comparison with some of my other former colleagues at the college, our situation was relatively settled.

  I had made every attempt to be sympathetic and patient with her, but had succeeded only in reviving old differences.

  In a few moments the policeman returned to our car and informed us that we could proceed, on condition we headed for the U.N. camp at Horsenden Hill in Middlesex. Our original destination had been Isobel's parents, who now lived in Bristol.

  The policeman told us that civilians were not advised to make long-distance journeys across country after dark. We had spent a large part of the afternoon cruising about the London suburbs in an attempx to find a garage that would sell us enough petrol to fill not only the tank of the car, but also the three five-gallon cans I carried in the boot, and consequently it was now beginning to get dark. All three of us were hungry.

  I drove along the Western Avenue towards Alperton, after having made a wide detour through Kensington, Fulham and Hammers mith to avoid the barricaded Afrim enclaves at Notting Hill and North Kensington. The main road itself was clear of obstructions, though we saw that every side-road and one or two of the subsidiary main-roads that crossed it at intervals were barricaded and manned by armed civilians. At Hanger Lane we turned off the Western
Avenue and up through Alperton, along the route we had been directed.

  At several points we saw parked police vehicles, several dozen uniformed police and many U.N. militiamen.

  At the gates of the camp we were again detained and interrogated, but this was only to be expected. In particular, we were questioned closely about the reasons we had left our home, and what precautions had been made to protect it while we were away.

  I told them that the street in which we lived had been barricaded, that we had closed and locked every door in the house, for which we had keys, and that troops and police were in the neighbourhood. While I spoke, one of the questioners wrote in a small notebook. We were obliged to give our full address and the names of the men at the barricades. We waited in the car while the information was relayed by telephone. In the end, we were told to park the car in a space just inside the gates and to take our belongings on foot to the main reception centre.

  The buildings were farther from the gates than we had anticipated, and when we found them we were somewhat surprised to find that they consisted mainly of light prefabricated huts. On the front of one of them was a painted board, written in several different languages, and which was illuminated by a floodlight. It directed us to separate; men to go towards a hut known as D

  Central, and women and children to enter this one.

  I said to Isobel: "We'll see each other later, I suppose."

  She leaned over and kissed me lightly. I kissed Sally. They went into the hut, leaving me on my own with the suitcase.

  I followed the directions and found D Central. Inside, I was told to surrender the suitcase for search, and to take off my clothes. These I did, and my clothes and suitcase were taken away together. I was then instructed to pass through a shower of hot water and to scrub myself clean. Understanding that this was to minimize health risks I complied, even though I had bathed only the night before.

  When I came out, I was given a towel and some rough clothing. I asked if I could have my own clothes back. This was refused, but I was told that I could have my night-clothes later.