In late spring we learnt that a decree had merged us with the arch-rival, putting all radio communication under direct Government control. It was the Broadcasting House lot that were moved out by a swift airlift since their premises were vulnerable while ours were already in a prepared state, and the one or two BBC men who stayed came over to join us.
News reached us mainly by two channels: the private link with EBC, which was usually moderately honest, though discreet; and broadcasts which, no matter where they came from, were puffed with patently dishonest optimism. We became very tired and cynical about them, as, I imagine, did everyone else, but they still kept on. Every country, it seemed, was meeting and rising above the disaster with a resolution which did honour to the traditions of its people.
By midsummer, and a cold midsummer it was, the town had become very quiet. The gangs had gone; only the obstinate individuals remained. They were, without doubt, quite numerous, but in twenty thousand streets they seemed sparse, and they were not yet desperate. It was possible to go about in relative safety again, though wise to carry a gun.
The water had risen further in the time than any of the estimates had supposed. The highest tides now reached the fifty-foot level. The flood-line was north of Hammersmith and included most of Kensington. It lay along the south side of Hyde Park, then to the south of Piccadilly, across Trafalgar Square, along the Strand and Fleet Street, and then ran northeast up the west side of the Lea Valley; of the City, only the high ground about St Paul's was still untouched. In the south it had pushed across Barnes, Battersea, Southwark, most of Deptford, and the lower part of Greenwich.
One day we walked down to Trafalgar Square. The tide was in, and the water reached nearly to the top of the wall on the northern side, below the National Gallery. We leant on the balustrade, looking at the water washing around Landseer's lions, wondering what Nelson would think of the view his statue was getting now.
Close to our feet, the edge of the flood was fringed with scum and a fascinatingly varied collection of flotsam. Further away, fountains, lamp-posts, traffic-lights, and statues thrust up here and there. On the far side, and down as much as we could see of Whitehall, the surface was as smooth as a canal. A few trees still stood, and in them sparrows chattered. Starlings had not yet deserted St Martin's church, but the pigeons were all gone, and on many of their customary perches gulls stood, instead. We surveyed the scene and listened to the slip-slop of the water in the silence for some minutes. Then I asked:
'Didn't somebody or other once say: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper?"'
Phyllis looked shocked.' "Somebody or other!" she exclaimed. 'That was Mr Eliot!'
'Well, it certainly looks as if he had the idea that time,' I said.
'It's the job of poets to have the idea,' she told me.
'H'm. It might also be that it is the job of poets to have enough ideas to provide a quotation for any given set of circumstances, but never mind. On this occasion let us honour Mr Eliot,' I said.
Presently Phyllis remarked: 'I thought I was through a phase now, Mike. For such a long time it kept on seeming that something could be done to save the world we're used to if we could only and out what. But soon I think I'll be able to feeclass="underline" "Well, that's gone. How can we make the best of what's left?" all the same, I wouldn't say that coming to places like this does me any good.'
'There aren't places like this. This is was one of the uniques. That's the trouble. And it's a bit more than dead, but not yet ready for a museum. Soon, perhaps, we may be able to feel, "Lo! All our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre" soon, but not quite yet.'
'You seem to be on unusually happy terms with other people's Muses to-day. Whose was that?' Phyllis inquired.
'Well,' I admitted, 'I'm not sure whether you would class her as a muse at all more, perhaps, of a bent. Mr Kipling's.'
'Oh, poor Mr Kipling. Of course he had a Muse, and she probably played a jolly good game of hockey, too.'
'Cat,' I remarked. 'However, let us also honour Mr Kipling.'
There was a pause. It lengthened.
'Mike,' she said, suddenly, 'let's go away from here now.'
I nodded. 'It might be better. We'll have to get a little tougher yet, darling, I'm afraid.'
She took my arm, and we started to walk westward. Halfway to the corner of the Square we paused at the sound of a motor. It seemed, improbably, to come from the south side. We waited while it drew closer. Presently, out from the Admiralty Arch swept a speedboat. It turned in a sharp arc and sped away down Whitehall, leaving the ripples of its wake slopping through the windows of august Governmental offices.
'Very pretty,' I said. 'There can't be many of us who have accomplished that in one of our waking moments.'
Phyllis gazed along the widening ripples, and abruptly became practical again.
'I think we'd better see if we can't find one of those,' she said. 'It might come in useful later on.'
The rate of rise continued to increase. By the end of the summer the level was up another eight or nine feet. The weather was vile and even colder than it had been at the same time the previous year. More of us had applied for transfer, and by mid-September we were down to sixteen.
Even Freddy Whittier had announced that he was sick and tired of wasting his time like a shipwrecked sailor, and was going to see whether he could not find some useful work to do. When the helicopter whisked him and his wife away, they left us reconsidering our own position once more.
Our task of composing never-say-die material on the theme that we spoke from, and for, the heart of an empire bloody but still unbowed was supposed, we knew, to have a stabilizing value even now, but we doubted it. Too many people were whistling the same tune in the same dark. A night or two before the Whittiers left we had had a late party where someone, in the small hours, had tuned-in a New York transmitter. A man and a woman on the Empire State Building were describing the scene. The picture they evoked of the towers of Manhattan standing like frozen sentinels in the moonlight while the glittering water lapped at their lower walls was masterly, almost lyrically beautiful nevertheless, it failed in its purpose. In our minds we could see those shining towers they were not sentinels, they were tombstones. It made us feel that we were even less accomplished at disguising our own tombstones; that it was time to pull out of our refuge, and find more useful work. Our last words to Freddy were that we would very likely be following him before long.
We had still, however, not reached the point of making definite application when he called us up on the link a couple of weeks later. After the greetings he said:
'This isn't purely social, Mike. It is disinterested advice to those contemplating a leap from the frying-pan don't!'
'Oh,' I said, 'what's the trouble?'
'I'll tell you this. I'd have an application in for getting back to you right now if only I had not made my reasons for getting out so damned convincing. I mean that. Hang on there, both of you.'
'But ' I began.
'Wait a minute,' he told me.
Presently his voice came again.
'Okay. No monitor on this, I think. Listen, Mike, we're overcrowded, underfed, and in one hell of a mess. Supplies of all kinds are right down, so's morale. The atmosphere's like a lot of piano-strings. We're living virtually in a state of siege here, and if it doesn't turn into active civil war in a few weeks it'll be a miracle. The people outside are worse off than we are, but seemingly nothing will convince them that we aren't living on the fat of the land. For God's sake keep this under your hat, but stay where you are, for Phyl's sake if not for your own.'