After the Rain Read online

  At seven, the rain began.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Face of the Earth

  The rain began, and did not stop. A counterpane of cloud covered the U.S.A., Canada and the South American countries. It crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and fell on Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. All over the world, the sun was blotted out, and the rain fell steadily.

  Meteorologists, finding that their weather charts had now become absurdly simple, were left with nothing to predict. Such a thing, it was announced, had not happened before; there were no precedents for this sort of weather, and they could make no forecasts. The announcement provoked angry letters from low-Church fundamentalists who asked whether the Weather Bureaux had never heard of Noah. Other correspondents blamed the hydrogen bomb. But even the fundamentalists did not regard the rain as anything but a warning—after all, the Lord had promised that there would never be another Flood—and nobody expected it to go on for much longer.

  The rain fell. Wheat, which is usually ready for harvesting in England in late August, rotted in the fields. Fresh vegetables became scarce in the shops, and rose alarmingly in price. As food prices rose, there was a burst of strikes. Dockers, miners and railwaymen, appalled at the increased cost of living, struck for higher wages, and the cost of living rose accordingly. Thomas Renton, an ex-postman living on a pension in Putney, committed suicide at about this time, and left a note for the coroner, laying out neatly in blue and red ink the details of his weekly budget. The tabloid and humanitarian newspapers made a big issue out of Mr. Renton’s suicide letter, and the head of a well-known firm of publishers immediately began a campaign for the relief of the Elderly and Indigent.

  A sudden rush of water, caught and stored in the Exmoor peat, swept away the little Devonshire town of Lynmouth, and the Lord Mayor of London sponsored a fund for the survivors. But, as similar catastrophes grew more frequent, the Lord Mayor’s Fund became something of a joke. Although swelled by Government grants, the money and woolly clothing collected always seemed to be several catastrophes behind.

  Now Noahs began to proliferate in Britain. There was a Plymouth Noah, a Bradford Noah, and a mad old man who lived just outside Luton. These were the first, and they had most publicity, but many others followed them, crying Woe at the sins of the world, and all of them making, with different degrees of skill, arks into which they proposed to cram themselves, their families and as many animals as they could come by. The Luton Noah was prosecuted for stealing sheep; the Plymouth Noah put out to sea, and was lost without trace; the Bradford Noah worked to the dimensions and materials laid down in the Bible, and never finished his ark for want of cypress. Many of the later Noahs found that the animals ate the grain they had gathered for planting on Ararat; wooden arks warped or, river-launched, were smashed to pieces against the parapet of some bridge. In spite of these misfortunes, the longer it rained, the more Noahs there were, though it became increasingly difficult to build an ark with one’s home half under water, and no food in the larder to stock it.

  I have written so far of how things were in Britain. Though I must have read in the newspapers of the early disasters in Holland and Connecticut, they are no more to me now than faded brown pictures in the Illustrated London News. It is our own misfortunes I remember. December was the turning month, for December brought freezing weather to Britain. The rain turned to snow, the flooded fields to ice. Planes were earth-bound; trains ran slowly and infrequently; buses, cars and vans clanked about in chains. Attendences at factories and offices fell away, and the people stayed at home (and for the most part in bed) fireless and hungry. The London County Council organized a service of vans that brought one hot meal a day to old people, but, even so, many of them died. So did the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

  The snow piled up in the streets of the towns. In the Highlands of Scotland, in North Wales and on the moors of England, communities were cut off from their neighbours, and, again, many people died and many cattle and sheep. Newspapers could no longer be nationally distributed, and were put out in skimpy local editions. As the country roads clogged up, food and other essentials were transported by helicopter, but the strain was too great for the service to be more than scratchily maintained, nor could the helicopters carry coal and firing. In London, snow-ploughs cleared the main highways, but the snow was piled up all the deeper in side streets, and there were clashes between tenant and tenant as basement-dwellers tried to move upstairs. Snow-shoes were sold out of the shops, and people learned to tramp about on tennis racquets and flat pieces of plywood.

  In late February the thaw came. All over the country, swollen rivers burst their banks, bridges were carried away, farmhouses were inundated, and many more of those cattle and people who had survived the winter were drowned. The streets of London were under water. The crematoria of Golders Green and Woking worked overtime; they had been given the highest fuel priority, for the dead could not be buried. Now, with no crops planted or able to be planted, with communications cut and wide areas of the country under water, the Government proclaimed a State of Emergency.

  *

  After my return from Texas, I had left the staff of the News Chronicle to join an advertising agency in Mayfair. I was a copywriter. As the rain continued, and the snow followed it, our copy became more and more “flood-conscious”—“Get flood-conscious copywise,” one of the directors told me, and an account executive nearby said, “Surely, surely!” I was concerned to sell, not the rain-coats, gum-boots and all the various forms of water-proofing that people were already buying without encouragement, but the luxury articles that nobody in his senses would want during an emergency. It was all a little like a New Statesman and Nation competition, “STOCKING S RAFT?” I wrote, “Remember OYSTERS! Succulent and easily digested, Buxtable OYSTERS carry a lot of nourishment in a little space. They give you those RESERVES OF ENERGY you are going to NEED. OYSTERS in your provision box are worth their weight in PEARLS. Ask your grocer for BUXTABLE’S BOTTLED OYSTERS now before it’s too late.”

  I wrote copy about barometers (“FIRST WITH THE GOOD NEWS”), diamond necklaces (“SO LIGHT, SO HANDY, SO EASY TO CARRY”), and for Ford cars with the new rustless finish. I advertised sun-glasses (“SNOW GLARE ATTACKS THE EYES”), and suggested a campaign for a sun-tan cosmetic with the catch-line, “If you LOOK FIT, you ARE FIT.” One selling scheme of mine proposed that parasols turned upside down could be filled with food and towed behind boats in flooded areas, but it was rejected as far-fetched.

  As the winter wore on, and the national papers were restricted to a local circulation, we expected to lose accounts, but advertisers continued to buy space just the same. In times of adversity, “Business as Usual” is more than a boast; it is a refusal to believe that adversity exists. I continued to write copy of one sort and another until the thaw, by which time, newspapers, magazines, advertising agencies, commercial television, cinemas and indeed most businesses of any kind had closed down altogether for want of staff and the materials of production.

  Hunger and disease were everywhere, but most, it seemed, in London. There were stories of cannibalism in the East End, and looting in Hampstead, Highgate and Notting Hill, where the streets were not yet under water. Over much of the rest of London, the streets had become canals, and not many of the gangs of looters had floating transport, for all sorts of boats and rubber dinghies had been commandeered by the Disposal Service. This was a kind of extension of the police, swollen by a recruitment of Special Constables and Civil Defence Volunteers, devoted to the protection of the public, both from violence and plague. They maintained a round-the-clock service—silent armed men in those absurd dinghies, jostled by the bodies which bobbed in the water, and which they collected and towed away to improvised crematoria.

  Since my return I had been renting a room from Bob Humphries, an old school-fellow who was a member of the Disposal Service, and, now that I had little to do with my time, he often allowed me to accomp
any him on duty. It kept me from boredom, and by then I no longer cared whether I were indoors or out; being wet had become a condition of life, for there was almost no heating, and one’s bedding and clothes were permanently damp. The natives of Tierra del Fuego, I had been told at school, endured this sort of existence; if they managed to get used to it, I supposed we should. I remember making this remark to Bob one morning as we paddled in convoy along the King’s Road. The rain fell steadily, and, since the Disposal Service was already beginning to be a little behind in getting rid of the bodies, there was a pervading stench of decay. Suddenly Bob said, “It can’t go on, you know.”

  “I wish I believed that.”

  “There’s no sense to it.” He stopped paddling, and stared at me earnestly. “I wish I had a cigarette,” he said. Supplies of cigarettes and tobacco had given out long ago, and most of us had grown used to being without, but Bob, I think, since he had a request to make, had wanted to be able to offer me a cigarette. “I want you to do something for me, John,” he said, “if you will.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to take Wendy out of this. We’ve got people in Somerset.”

  Wendy was Bob’s wife. “Take her out how?” I said.

  “You can use this dinghy. I’ll still have the little one.”

  “But this is silly, isn’t it?” I said. “Why don’t you take her yourself?”

  “I can’t, old man. I’m on duty.”

  Bob had always been known to his friends for what is called straight thinking; his distinctions were never blurred. He had, he reckoned, a duty to his wife to get her away from London, and his duty as a Special Constable to stay. The two would be incompatible if it were not for my help.

  “We’d be stealing the dinghy though,” I said.

  “Can’t be helped,” said Bob. “Did you know the water’s rising?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “I don’t just mean the rain. The level’s suddenly begun to rise much faster now, but we’re supposed to keep it quiet. Yesterday it was nine inches. You can’t tell me that was just rainfall.”

  “Nine inches!”

  “There’s something funny going on.”

  I said, “There was a clergyman in the eighteenth century, who explained Noah’s Flood in terms of a kind of Saturnian ring round the earth, which consisted of water, and suddenly descended. I suppose it couldn’t happen twice.”

  “Sounds a bit far-fetched.”

  “Look, it is far-fetched,” I said. “It could be that somebody’s lit a fire under the polar ice caps. It could be that something funny has happened to the pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic. It could be that a whole new Continent has appeared, and we’re getting the displaced water. Which do you prefer, Bob? You can have any of those.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why it began isn’t important. When is it going to stop?”

  “Don’t know that either,” said Bob. “But I want Wendy out of this. It’s not healthy in London.” We moved on along the King’s Road. “Whatever happens, she’ll be better off at Chew.”

  *

  Bob’s parents lived on Chew Hill above the village of Chew Magna, which had at that time the smallest gasworks in England. Chew is not far from the Mendips, and part of the Government’s Emergency Programme, we knew, was that temporary colonies should be set up on such areas of high ground, and there, when some sort of hutted accommodation should be ready together with stocks of chemical foods, medicines and vitamin pills, the population should be concentrated. D-Day for the evacuation had been set for April 2nd, but it would be a process spread over some weeks. Chew Magna itself lies in a valley, but the hill rises steeply from it; Bob reckoned that his people would still be there, and within reach of the Mendip Camp when it began to function.

  We tried that evening to work out a route to Chew, but we had no contour maps, and the green and brown patches of the Ordnance Survey provided only the vaguest indications. “You’ll have to avoid the rivers,” said Bob. “They’ll be flowing against you.” Even as things were, we should be unlikely to cover more than thirty miles a day.

  Food would take up very little room in the dinghy. Londoners had been living on tablets—yeast tablets, dextrose tablets, vitamin tablets and large pills of various colours, labelled “Nourishment A, B, C and D” and packaged by Government laboratories. “Your Meal in a Matchbox! Science reveals that Synthetic Foods are MORE TASTY and MORE NOURISHING than food in its animal state, “I had written in the early days of the shortages, and the matchbox meals were supplemented with a kind of slop, which was mostly fish and water, and was brought round daily to as many houses as could be easily reached by the L.C.C. launches. Bob could steal enough of these tablets to last us for some time, and the slop we could make for ourselves if we caught any fish and were prepared to stomach it raw. For the rest, we would take blankets and waterproof covers, and find shelter for the nights where we could.

  *

  Rain gives insignificance to any situation. Wendy and Bob Humphries, two people of devotion and strength, parted damply from one another in the early morning. Wendy wept, but her tears went unnoticed in the rain. An improvised ladder led from the first floor of the house to the dinghy below, and half-way down she was taken by a fit of coughing, and we were afraid she would fall in the water. I followed with the bundle of blankets wrapped in water-proofing, and Bob handed down the other stores we were to take. As we pushed away from the side of the house, he leaned from the window to watch us go. “Good-bye, old girl. Keep your chin up,” he said. “Take care of her, John.”

  I said, “I will,” and pushed down hard into the water with my paddle. As we moved farther away down the street, we could see him standing there at the window, stiff and solitary. “Good-bye,” I cried. Wendy had not spoken from the time we left the house, and as she lifted her hand to wave, she began to cough again.

  Bob’s greatest anxiety had been that he could give us no very effective weapons. Not as many people owned guns as the writers of detective stories liked to think; Bob himself, as a member of the Disposal Service, was armed, but he had only his Sten gun, and could not give that to us. What if we should be attacked? We should have to approach towns and villages along the way to get our bearings from time to time. The rubber dinghy would be a temptation to people marooned by the flood; might they not swim from their shelters and try to take it? We had a couple of kitchen knives and a bicycle chain, but Wendy, I was sure, would not be able to use either. I paddled harder for thinking of it.

  I do not like to remember that time. The getting lost—we were lost before we left the streets of London—the days of paddling, the fishing line that trailed behind the dinghy and never caught any fish, the damp nights in deserted houses, and that one night we spent out in the open, paddling on through the slanting rain, while Wendy wept and wept as her paddle cut into the water. He had been a boy that night (it is still confused in my memory); he had been a boy no more than seventeen, and when we said, ‘Get in then, get in, “he had refused because it was the others had sent him, and there was no room for the others, and he had tried to pull the dinghy back with him as he swam, and I had hit him again and again with the paddle, and then, when he would not let go, with the knife across the knuckles, and he had not even cried out, but only let go, and we did not know whether he got back to the others or not. Only we did not stop anywhere that night, but paddled on while Wendy wept and coughed, and coughed and wept. Her cough grew worse through that night and all the next day, and I knew that we should have to stop and rest for a while.

  Some way outside Faringdon we discovered another house. A sturdy isolated building, it might have been a vicarage, but we could see no church nearby. The ground floor was, of course, submerged, but two other floors rose above it, and these were furnished. In one of the cupboards there were sheets of old newspaper. They were damp—the damp was almost like a mist through the floorboards—but we managed to light them; Bob had given us his last box o
f matches before we left, and we had wrapped it like a precious thing in layers of cloth and oilskin. We broke up chairs and made a fire, both coughing now and red-eyed from the smoke that filled the room.

  “I expect it’s a nest in the chimney,” said Wendy. Then we realized that, during the whole of our journey so far, we had seen no birds.

  After a while we grew used to the smoke—or perhaps there was less of it—and managed to dry some of the bedding we found in the house. I went out to the staircase to see whether it would be easy to break up the bannisters and treads, and so supplement our stock of wood, and I saw, floating on the surface of the water half-way up the stairs, one of the heat-resistant plastic cans in which food was preserved. It had been opened, and was empty.

  “I think there’s some food here if we can find the kitchen,” I said.

  “But it’s under water.”

  “I’d have to dive.”

  Outside, grey daylight persisted; it would not be dark for several hours. But the water was dark. We looked through the hole we had made in the floorboards, and watched damp plaster fall away from the ceiling of what we had settled to be the kitchen. Floating on the surface of the water only about a foot below us was a reassuring litter of kitchen stuff—a carton of cereal, egg-shells and stray pieces of vegetable matter. “Where will the larder be?” I said.

  “If you could find a cupboard.”

  I let myself down into the water, and swam about. It was very cold. Soon my knee hit against the top of a cupboard. I expelled the air from my lungs, and sank, groping in the dark water for the handle of the cupboard door. As I found it, and pulled, the cupboard itself leaned towards me. I felt the weight of it bearing me down, and I realized that I should die down there, ridiculously trapped beneath a kitchen cupboard on the floor, dead, drowndead, while Wendy coughed in the bedroom. I pushed violently at the cupboard, which moved a little to one side and continued to fall, and the kick of my legs carried me to the surface again.