Jeff owned a large rusty bike, inherited from one of his elder brothers; Dicky had a white mongrel dog called Snowy. Snowy enjoyed the common as much as the boys did. All this was in the early 1970’s, when they were in short trousers and the world was at peace.
Sometimes Jeff and Dicky played soldiers, using bits of stick for rifles. Sometimes they tried to capture lizards with their cupped hands; these were little brown lizards that generally escaped, leaving their wriggling bloody tails in the boys’ palms. Sometimes they wrestled.
One day, they wrestled so absorbedly that they rolled down a bank and into a luxuriant bed of nettles. They were both badly stung. However much it hurt, Jeff would not cry before his friend. Dicky blubbered all the way home. Even a ride on Jeff’s bike could not silence him completely.
The boys grew up. The steel-cowled factories swallowed young Jeff Pitt, as they had swallowed his brothers. Dicky obtained a job in an estate office. They found they had nothing in common and ceased to seek each other’s company.
The war came. Pitt was conscripted into the air force. After some hazardous adventures in the Middle East, he deserted, together with several of his fellows. This was like a token to other units in the area, where dissatisfaction with the cause and course of the war was already rife. Mutiny broke out. Some of the mutineers seized a plane on Tehran airport and flew it back to Britain. Pitt was on the plane.
In Britain, revolution was gathering momentum. In a few months, the government would collapse and a hastily established people’s government sue for peace with the enemy powers. Pitt found his way home and joined the local rebels. One moonlit night, a pro-government group attacked their headquarters, which was in a big Victorian house in the suburbs. Pitt found himself positioned behind a concrete bench, his heart hammering dreadfully, firing at the enemy.
One of his mates in the house brought a searchlight into play. Its beam picked up Dicky, wearing the government flash and coming towards Pitt’s position at a run. Pitt shot him.
He regretted the shot even before — as if by magic — a wound burst over Dicky’s shirt and he spun round and pitched on to the gravel. Pitt crawled forward to him, but the shot had been a true one; his friend was almost dead.
Since that time, he could never nerve himself to kill anything much bigger than a beaver.
Cramped in the tent, they ate well and slept well that night, and sailed throughout the next day. They saw no living person. Man had gone, and the great interlocking world of living species had already knitted over the space he once occupied. Moving without any clear sense of direction, they had to spend another two nights on islands in the lake; but since the weather continued mild and the food plentiful, they raised very little complaint, beyond the unspoken complaint that beneath their rags and wrinkles they regarded themselves still as modern man, and modern man was entitled to something better than wandering through a pleistocene wilderness.
The wilderness was punctuated now and again by memorials of former years, some of them looking all the grimmer and blacker for lingering on out of context. The dinghy bore them to a small railway station, which a board still announced as Yarnton Junction. Its two platforms stood above the flood, while the signal-box, perched on its brick tower, served as a look-out across the meads.
In the broken and ruined waiting-room, they found a reindeer and calf. In the look-out lived a hideously deformed old hermit, who kept them covered with a home-made bomb, held menacingly above his head, while he spoke to them. He told them that the lake was formed by a conflux of overflowing streams, among them the Oxford Canal and the Evenlode. Only too keen to get rid of them, the old fellow gave them their general direction, and once more the party moved forward, aided by a light and steady wind. It was after some two hours that Charley got up excitedly and pointed ahead, crying, “There they are!”
The others rose and stared towards the reassuring spread of Oxford’s spires through the trees. The spires stood as many of them had stood for centuries, beckoning towards the traditions of learning and piety, now broken at their feet, that had given them birth. The sun rolled from behind rain cloud and lit them. There was no one in the boat who did not feel his heart beat faster at the sight.
“We could stay here, Algy — at least for the rest of the winter,” Martha said.
He looked at her face, and was touched to find tears in her eyes. “I’m afraid it’s mainly an illusion,” he said. “Oxford too will have changed. We may find only deserted ruins.” She shook her head without speaking.
“I wonder if old Croucher has still got a warrant out for our arrest,” Pitt said. “I wouldn’t want to get shot as soon as we stepped ashore.”
“Croucher died of the cholera, and I don’t doubt that Cowley then proceeded to turn itself first into a battleground and then a cemetery, leaving only the old city,” Greybeard said. “Let’s hope we get a friendly welcome from whoever’s left. A roof over our heads tonight would be a change for the better, wouldn’t it?”
The scenery became less imposing as they drifted south towards the city. Rows of poor houses stood in the flood, their desolation only emphasized by the sunlight. Their roofs had caved in; they resembled the carcasses of enormous crustacea cast up on a primaeval beach. Dwarfed by them, an ancient creature swathed in furs watered a couple of reindeer. Further on, the stir they made on the water threw wavering reflections into the roofs of empty timber yards. The heavy silence was broken a little later by the crunch of a vehicle. Two old women, as broad as they were long, bundled together to drag a cart behind them, its wheels grinding up the sunlight as they pulled it along a quayside. The quayside ended by a low bridge.
“This I recognize,” Greybeard said, speaking in a hushed voice. “We can tie up here. This is Folly Bridge.”
As they climbed ashore, the two old women came up and offered the hire of their cart. As always when it met strangers, Greybeard’s party had difficulty in understanding their accent. Pitt told the crones they had nothing worth carrying, and the crones told them they would find shelter for the night at Christ Church, “up the road”. Leaving Charley behind with Isaac, to guard the boat, Martha, Greybeard, and Pitt set out along the broken track that led over the bridge.
The fortress-like walls of the ancient college of Christ Church loomed over one of the southern approaches of the city. From the top of the walls, a knot of bearded men watched the newcomers walk up the road. They approached warily, half-expecting a challenge, but none came. When they reached the great wooden gates of the college, they paused. Untended, the college walls were crumbling. Several windows had fallen out or were boarded up, and the shattered stone lying at the foot of the walls spoke of the action of heat and frost and the elements. Greybeard shrugged his shoulders and marched under the tall archway.
In contrast to the ruination through which they had passed, here was habitation, the bustle of people, the colour of market stalls, the smell of animals and foods. The spirits of the three newcomers rose within them. They found themselves in a great quad, which had housed many past generations of undergraduates; wooden stalls had been set up, several of them forming small enclosed buildings from which a variety of goods were being sold. Another part of the quad was railed off, and here reindeer stood, surveying the scene from under their antlers with their customary look of morose humour.