Then suddenly I felt weak. I saw how we were going through the motions of life: feeding the animals, making tea. Mildred must have felt the same, because she said from the kitchen, “The gas is all right.”
I said, “And the water?” though I had heard her fill the kettle and knew that the water was still running.
“The water’s all right, too,” she said.
It won’t be for long, I thought; and got up and put the plug into the bath and filled it. That would give us fifty gallons or so—enough for a few days anyway. I was trying to bridge the gap between a technological past of half an hour ago and the future, trying to think what would work and what wouldn’t, and making decisions that seemed very wise at the time—conditioned reflexes to disaster brought out of the past from African droughts, from memories of the last war, from stories and letters I had had about London in the blitz. The next minute I was being violently sick. Lucky I’m in here, I thought. If one had to be sick it was a good thing to be in the place where it was easiest to be sick. It all comes back to me very clearly as I relive that day. Again I hear my wife’s voice saying, “Are you all right?” And my answer: “Yes, I’m all right.”
And now I became aware of the smoke and the smell. Smoke was coming in through the shattered window of the bedroom. Fires must have broken out everywhere, I thought. Probably the destruction of the explosion, though it must have caused the fires, had banked them, as it were, with falling buildings, and only now were they breaking out with real severity. I heard a great crash as something fell on the flat roof and, looking out, saw it was a big wooden beam; more things fell, half bricks, tiles, dust, something that looked as if it had once been a man. I must get that away—overboard—before Mildred saw it.
I did later, when things had stopped falling, and wondered as I handled the broken body if it was radioactive. I wondered how things had stayed in the air so long. Or was it not long; had it all happened so fast, in minutes— and what did it matter, anyway? I thought of what we had done, of filling the bath and the kettle, and decided that the debris falling on the roof was the result of a later explosion. There would no doubt be many of them. The kettle began to whistle.
I said, “Let’s make the tea. We’ll feel better when we’ve had tea.”
Mildred said, “Yes,” and we went into the kitchen together with the dog between us, right on our heels so that when we stopped, she bumped into us. The very act of making tea was calming.
Things still kept falling, and the air was filled with papers that rose sailing like kites on the currents between the high buildings. It was very dark and there was no light when I tried to turn on the table lamp. Neither of us said anything. The wind continued to rise, assuming almost whirlwind proportions. I began to be aware of the noise of sirens. Fire engines and ambulances and police cars were evidently out on the streets. We both said, “Listen to the fire engines.” Then there was a shot and Mildred said, “Is that a shot?” and I said, “Yes.” There were to be plenty more later. Then we heard a scream. The paralysis of fear was now changing to hysteria. Terrified people were rushing out to escape from themselves, to find out. We’d have to go out ourselves sometime—but not yet.
We had a second cup of tea. I was surprised how very calm I seemed; my hand hardly trembled. That amused me, not because it showed my lack of fear but because it showed my ability to control most of it. Probably the only people who were not frightened at that moment were lunatics, to whom this must all have seemed very logical and predestined. Perhaps that is why I was not more frightened, having been classified, because I had expected something of this kind to happen, as a lunatic. I was, in a way, psychologically prepared for the end of the world, but there was little satisfaction in being able to say, “I told you so,” and, at the moment, no one to whom I could say it except my wife, who always believed everything I said and thought me an altogether remarkable man, thus tempering her criticism with her charm.
I went into the bedroom to try the telephone. The room was very smoky but not so bad as it might have been, for the wind had changed again. I did not know whom I was going to call. It was just that I wanted to see if the telephone worked. I had always hated the telephone—the network of copper threads that tied all civilized mankind together in a web of misunderstanding. If there had been no telephones and no airplanes and no electricity, there would have been no atomic bomb. I held the receiver to my ear. It was dead. No phone. That, after all, was not surprising after the failure of the electric light. But as the discovery of the telephone had been hailed as a great advance of our civilization, its end—for there was no doubt in my mind that it had ended—was a definite sign that our civilization was disintegrating.
I went to look in the kitchen to see what we had to eat. There was quite a lot of stuff: cans of baked beans, boned chicken, soups, glass jars of tongue.
There were other factors that were to the good. Once the first shock had worn off, I began to consider the possibilities of life as well as I was able—began to look and see if there was anything to reconstruct with. As I say, there was a fair amount of canned food in the kitchen and there were, in addition, about ten large parcels of food that we had wrapped and were going to send to friends in England and France. It was remarkable how distant England and France seemed and how little our dearest friends now mattered. I was grateful to them for my own good impulse that had made me buy the food, and delighted with the habit of procrastination which had prevented my sending it to them.
Another good thing, though I did not realize it fully at the time, was that I had a thousand rounds of .22 ammunition for the Mauser, because we had been intending to go on a holiday and I had meant to do some target shooting. I must have thought of this, though subconsciously, because my next move was to go and see the manager of the hotel, a great deer hunter who lived in the adjoining penthouse, and ask him if he would let me have one ol his heavier rifles and some ammunition. I was already aware that there would be a necessity for weapons, that civilization in terms of protection had broken down and that it must be every man for himself.
I obtained a rifle and fifty rounds of 303 ammunition without much difficulty—the manager had more guns than he could use—in exchange for a case of whisky that I had just bought. We talked around the subject of the bomb and our predicament, more or less ignoring it, which was fantastic, since the air was filled with smoke. Like me, he must have had the feeling that this was the end of everything. Actually, of course, there was nothing to say. And to talk would probably only have torn the last shreds of self-control from our naked fear. We got no further than saying it was terrible, that neither of us had been out, that we had better be careful, and that it would probably be all right.
My wife fixed some food. We had meat in the icebox, which by this time had stopped working; we had potatoes and soup. Surprisingly, the gas was still on; our supply had evidently been unaffected. And we had water; it was still running, probably from the reserve tank on the roof above us, and we did not have to use the reserve in the bath. We gave the kinkajou the dead fish from the tank and a banana, the last, and a bit of bread, and Annie had our leavings. The day passed somehow. I forget how. Night came —a night like those of the blackouts of the war but without air-raid wardens or police. The streets were dark and lighted only by the light reflected down from the low ceiling of cloud and smoke which was illuminated by those parts of the city that were still burning. It was a night filled with strange happenings—screams, cries, shouts, shots, the noise of doors being forced; a night of black horror edged by the glare of the buildings that still burned to the south of us. The McGraw-Hill Building still stood out like a great black pinnacle against the glow of the sky. There was still the sound of sirens as fire engines and police tried to keep some semblance of order, but it was all sporadic. There was no sleep for us, but we lay down with the dog between us and tried to rest. I had the deer rifle loaded beside me, and I had a Gurkha kukri in its sheath under my pillow; I had sharpened it till it was like a razor. I have it still, having carried it since that day. I say we did not sleep, but we must have dozed off, for at dawn we were wakened by a sound truck.