19 THE TELEVISION STUDIO
The commentator, wearing his costume without the mask, sits before the table of cult objects with an expert beside him.
COMMENTATOR: And that, politically speaking, was the end of the bear cult. I have with me the renowned social anthropologist Professor Grotman. Professor, we are all aware that the beast in man lies only a little way under the surface so I will not ask you to refer to the psychological basis of the cult, I will ask how it came to disappear so utterly.
GROTMAN: In my opinion the psychological basis of the cult has been much exaggerated. It is now clear that the main cause of the movement lay in the coal shortages of the winter of 1931. It was actually warmer to dress as a bear in those days. What killed the movement politically was not disillusion with bears as a species. By 1932 it had become abundantly clear to the intelligent part of the population that a second World War, with its promise of full employment for everyone, lay just round the corner. What killed the movement, in fact, was hope for the future.
COMMENTATOR: But is the movement really dead? Remember, at its peak it had a following which numbered well over three million. Perhaps the person most qualified to answer that question is the Great Bear himself, the founder of the cult, George Busby: still remarkably fit and active for a man of 68 and living at present in a bed-sitting room on the Old Kent Road.
20 VIDEOTAPE RECORDING
George Busby, white-haired, spectacled, with the air of a vaguely dissolute grand old man, sits in a small room crowded with trophies of his former grandeur: stuffed bearskins of the three main species, framed photographs of such moments of glory as the programme has revealed. He wears a yellow pullover, check trousers, a badge with a Rupert Bear head on, and is flanked by a shelf of every sort of beardoll from Winnie the Pooh to Paddington. Answering the questions of an invisible interviewer he speaks sadly of the collapse of his cult, of his present situation (he still receives cheques from the children of furriers who made their fortunes in the 1931 fur boom) and his hopes for the future.
GEORGE: My movement was ahead of its time. So the adults decided to forget it. But the children remember. Children know without being taught, you see. So the bears will return one day soon, to save England in her hour of need. Though I may not be there to see it.
(HE TURNS AND CONTEMPLATES A FOUR FOOT HIGH PADDINGTON DOLL. THE CAMERA SLOWLY RECEDES FROM THIS FINAL IMAGE OF GEORGE AS AN OLD MAN ALONE WITH HIS DREAMS AND MEMORIES)
21 THE TELEVISION CENTRE
Freeze frame, then the camera zooms further back to show the image of George multiplied on the monitor screens of a television gallery. The control surface of a console occupies the foreground. A hairy paw appears and turns a switch. We see the whole gallery is staffed by bears: a large polar director stretching himself, a panda secretary scribbling on a clip-board, a grizzly technician with headphones. The director stands, stretches, yawns hollowly, then walks through into the studio where the commentator is in the act of fitting on his mask. Professor Grotman is zipping himself into a costume of his own.
DIRECTOR: That didn’t go too badly.
COMMENTATOR: No hitches then?
DIRECTOR: None to speak of. Coming to the staff club for a drink, Professor?
GROTMAN: Certainly, certainly. Just wait till I adjust my dress. (HE PLACES THE MASK ON HIS HEAD. TOGETHER THE THREE BEARS, CHATTING AMIABLY, STROLL OFF DOWN CORRIDORS FULL OF VARIOUS BEARS GOING ABOUT THEIR VARIOUS BUSINESSES.)
THE START OF THE AXLETREE
I write for those who know my language. If you possess that divine knowledge do not die without teaching it to someone else. Make copies of this history, give one to anybody who can read it and read it aloud to whoever will listen. Do not be discouraged if they laugh and call you a liar. Perhaps they are dull herdsmen who think milk and wool more important than history. Their own history is a tangle of superstition and confused rumours. Those who lived inside the great wheel used to call them the perimeter tribes. “Were you born outside the rim?” we would ask someone who was acting stupidly or strangely and this question was a grave insult. The perimeter tribes lived so far from the hub that they only saw the axletree for a few months before it was completed and then only on unusually clear days. Even at sunrise its shadow never quite touched them, so now they say it was the last impiety of a mad civilization, an attack upon heavenly god which provoked instant punishment and defeat. But the axletree was a necessary inevitable work, soberly designed and carefully erected by statesmen, bankers, priests and wise men whose professional names make no sense nowadays. And they completed the axletree as intended. For a moment the wheel of the civilized world was joined to the wheel of heaven. The disaster which fell a moment later was an accident nobody could have foreseen or prevented. I am the only living witness to this fact. I have been higher than anybody in the world. The hand which writes these words has stroked the ice-smooth, slightly-rippled, blue lucid ceiling which held up the moon.
I was born and educated at the hub of the last and greatest world empire. We had once been a republic of small farmers in a land between two lakes. Our only town in those days was a walled market with a temple in the middle where we stored the spare corn. Our land was fertile so we developed the military virtues, first to protect our crops from neighbours, then to protect our merchants when they traded with the grain surplus. We were also the first people to shoe horses with iron, so we soon conquered the lands round about.
Conquest is not a difficult thing — most countries have a spell of it — but an empire is only kept by careful organization and we were good at that. We taxed the defeated people with the help of their traditional rulers, who wielded more power with our support than they could without, but the empire was mainly held by our talent for large-scale building. Captains in the army were all practical architects, and private soldiers dug ditches and built walls as steadily as they attacked the enemy under a good commander. The garrisons on foreign soil were built with stores and markets where local merchants and craftsmen could ply their trade in safety, so they became centres of prosperous new cities. But our most important buildings were roads. All garrison towns and forts were connected by well-founded roads going straight across marsh and river by dyke and viaduct to the capital city. In two centuries these roads, radiating like spokes from a hub, were on the way to embracing the known world.
It was then we started calling our empire the great wheel. Surveyors noted that the roads tended to rise the further from the capital they got, which showed that our city was in the centre of a continent shaped like a dish. It became common for our politicians to start a speech by saying This bowl of empire under this dome of heaven … and end by saying We have fought uphill all the way. We shall fight on till we reach the rim. This rhetorical model of the universe became very popular, though educated people knew that the hollow continent was a large dent in the surface of a globe, a globe hanging in the centre of several hollow globes, mainly transparent, which supported the bodies of the moon, sun, planets and stars.
The republic was controlled by a few rich families who worked in the middle of an elected senate, but one day it became clear that whoever commanded the army did not need the support of anyone else. A successful general proclaimed himself emperor. He was an efficient man with good advisers. He constructed a civil service which worked so well that trade kept flowing and the empire expanding during the reign of his son, who seems to have been a criminal lunatic who did nothing but feed his worst appetites in the most expensive ways possible. It is hard to believe that records tell the truth about this man. He was despised by the puritan aristocracy who filled the civil service, but loved by common citizens. Perhaps his insane spending sprees and colossal sporting events were devised to entertain them. He also obtained remarkable tutors for his son, men of low and foreign birth but international fame. They had made a science out of history, which till then had been a branch of literature. When their pupils became third emperor he knew why his land was heading for disaster.