State of Emergency Read online

  “I can’t somehow see Clare being very willing to accept help,” I said. “Or Alan either for that matter.”

  “Don’t be uncharitable, darling,” he protested mildly.

  “I’m not!” I said. “It’s just that they’ve always been so terribly set on being ‘top people’.”

  “Well, they’re not ‘top people’ now. They’re back at the bottom of the pile with a wallop. We ought to help them if we can.”

  “I don’t see how,” I said obstinately.

  “I was thinking.” He spoke slowly. “If the worst came to the worst, they could come and stay with us for a while, until they got back on their feet.”

  I stared at him. “Oh, Mike. . . .” He met my eyes. I swallowed and said, “All right. If the worst comes to the worst. ...”

  In bed I lay for a long time flat on my back, one arm behind my head, unable to relax. At length Mike sensed my tension, rolled over and grunted enquiringly.

  “I was thinking.” I said. “Things have been bad for months now —years, really, I suppose. But we’ve kept on telling ourselves that it was just a bad patch; that everything would be all right again soon. Do you think it will, Mike?”

  There was a pause before he answered drowsily, “It depends on what you mean by all right, I suppose. I mean, some people would feel that things haven’t really been all right since 1914.”

  “I’m not going that far back,” I said irritably. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Well, when were things all right, in your view? Last year, ten years ago – when we were kids …?”

  “I just want to get back to a time when we didn’t have to stagger from one crisis to another, that’s all.”

  He put his arm round me. “Don’t worry, love. Things may never be quite like they were, but we’ll manage.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know, Mike. I’ve never worried about politics much. I’ve never really been interested. But somehow, today—that man being killed and Alan losing his job—it’s made me wonder if things are ever going to be really all right again.”

  I had never been the brooding type and by morning I had largely slept off my depression; but I was not allowed to forget the incidents of the previous day so easily. Radio and television made a great deal of the tragedy. The man who had died had been a KBG supporter and Jocelyn Wentworth appeared on one of the news programmes to call him ‘the first martyr in a long, long struggle against the forces of the far left’. Two days later a barn belonging to a farmer who had taken part in the demonstration burnt down. While the police investigated three similar fires broke out in the same area. In the last the farmhouse itself was fired and the family narrowly escaped with their lives.

  I decided to talk it all over with my old school friend, Jane, who lived in a cottage on the rural fringe of what we pleased to call ‘the village’, though it had long ago been absorbed into the outer edges of the commuter belt. Jane was a teacher, divorced, with three children and her image, together with Clare’s, stood over my consciousness like two opposing demons. Jane lived in intense and perpetual turmoil, her cottage a shambles of books, muddy boots, damp laundry, children and animals. She worked all day, rushed home in the evening to feed the children on baked beans and bread and marmalade and was off again to attend an evening class, sit on a committee or organize a meeting. Her children had long ago ceased to expect from her one tenth of the attention that she bestowed on battered wives or immigrant families but, if that thought ever occurred to her, she probably felt that this was quite as it should be. She heartily despised women whose interest centred on their homes and dismissed with contempt my aspirations towards domestic order and beauty. In the conflict between Clare’s high-powered but sterile elegance and Jane’s creative disorder I was inclined to regard my life’s achievements — a contented husband and two healthy children —as insignificant.

  I knew now that I should have taken my teachers’ advice years ago and gone to University, but I had come from a family where a degree formed no part of the kind of future projected for me. Feminism, in my father's mind, was either a bad joke or a lesbian conspiracy. A safe job in a bank had seemed the sensible way of filling the time between leaving school and getting married. It must have taken me all of ten years to recognize my mistake.

  Not that I had really been discontented. It was just a faint, nagging sense of loss beneath the smooth routine of existence. Now a different kind of anxiety had begun to plague me; but Jane was the wrong person to go to for reassurance.

  “You’re trouble, Nell,” she told me earnestly, “is that you’ve been going round with your head full of toys for the children and new recipes for Mike's dinner and primary school parents' evenings for years. Now you’ve got to come down out of your cosy cloud-cuckoo-land and face facts. Unless we do something about it we shall have a fascist government in this country within a couple of years.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do. Now, if you’re really worried enough to do something there’s a meeting you can come to next Wednesday.”

  I made an excuse, a reasonable enough one, but I could see she did not believe me. I had no intention of getting involved in politics. I had always been able to see too many sides to any question to commit myself to an ideology. Around me, however, opinions were polarizing rapidly. Acrimonious disputes broke out in the food queues and Mike told me that it was the same on the 8.17 to Waterloo.

  “It’s almost reached the stage,” he said, “when Telegraph readers and Guardian readers stand and glare at each other from opposite ends of the platform!”

  Clare, we learned, had gone off on a nation-wide speaking tour with Jocelyn Wentworth. Alan was coping on his own.

  It must have been around then that the dustmen went on strike. We took to burning as much rubbish as we could, but still the plastic bags of bottles and tins and food scraps accumulated outside the back door, until we had to start dumping them at the bottom of the garden. News bulletins showed city streets piled with rubbish, with rats scurrying amongst them. Jocelyn Wentworth, among others, urged the use of troops. Several of his meetings broke up in violent disorder. Then KBG units moved in in several areas and began clearing the rubbish. There were confrontations with strike pickets and police reinforcements were rushed in. Eventually, strike leaders agreed to allow troops to clear the worst areas and Jocelyn Wentworth claimed a victory for the KBG.

  The Government, which was being firm to the point of lunacy with the dustmen, decided to give in to the farmers, and food prices made another upward spiral. Milk and cheese, which we had come to regard as staples now that meat was so short, began to seem like luxuries. We were not going hungry, but money that a year ago might have been set aside for a holiday or to replace the car, now went on housekeeping and even so I had to plan every meal with great care.

  The Autumn passed. Clare came back from her tour and we invited her and Alan to dinner, but it was not a success. Clare could talk of nothing but Jocelyn and the KBG and Alan was bitter and sardonic. He had had to sell his car, which he had always regarded like part of himself. She, however, still had hers. A few weeks later he phoned to say that they had put the house on the market. I began to regard the future with growing dismay.

  Three weeks before Christmas the electricity power workers went on strike.

  TWO - DISINTEGRATION

  Oddly enough, it was rather a good Christmas. Mike managed to get hold of a chicken, though he would not tell me how or what he paid for it. The turkey, which I had hoarded in the freezer for months, had to be eaten at the beginning of the strike, before it became unusable along with the rest of the stock which had been our cushion against increasing shortages. With the power only coming on for three hours out of each twenty-four we were lucky to be able to cook our Christmas dinner only a couple of hours later than usual. Afterwards we huddled around the gas fire and, deprived of the soporific comfort of the television, sang carols and told stories. With the batteries on their smart phones dead and their
games consoles out of commission the boys were completely at a loss, and over the holiday Mike and I found ourselves playing with them more than we had done for years. It was that, together with the sense of being a close unit standing together against the faceless powers outside, that made it a good Christmas. I only wished that my parents, who lived in Wales, could be with us, but in the circumstances of that winter long journeys were to be avoided unless absolutely essential.

  At the beginning of the new year Alan phoned and asked Mike to meet him. Later that evening Mike returned, grim-faced and uneasy.

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  “They’ve sold the house.”

  “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. They didn’t get anything like the proper value for it. Alan didn’t tell me the exact figures but it’s pretty clear they must have dropped thousands on what they originally paid. He says it'll just about clear the mortgage. The man who bought it is some kind of property dealer.”

  “What are they going to do now?”

  “That’s just the point.” He came and sat by me on the settee. “Alan says they’ve been looking for somewhere else for weeks and there’s nowhere. They haven’t got the capital left to put down a deposit on another house, even if they could find something at the right price, and you can’t find rented accommodation at any price. He says he’s been told that there are hundreds of quite respectable families squatting in empty houses because they’re in the same position as him and Clare.”

  I looked at him. “I suppose you want them to come here?”

  He returned my look with a kind of humble appeal. “I did tell Alan weeks ago that they could come, if they needed to.”

  I sighed deeply. The prospect of living with Alan’s defensive cynicism and Clare’s fanaticism appalled me.

  “I suppose they’ll have to come then,” I said.

  He drew me to him. “I know it’s not going to be much fun for you, love. But we can’t let them down, can we? And I expect it will only be for a few weeks.”

  That was an expectation reiterated with almost embarrassing frequency by Alan and Clare when they moved in a week later. In fact, Clare was so dogmatic in her assertion that I began to wonder whether she had any definite prospect in mind; perhaps through some intervention from Jocelyn Wentworth. But when I tried to discuss the idea with her she was evasive. She often came in late or spent whole evenings in the room we had given them typing, while Alan sat with us, silent and depressed. I had the impression that she was immersing herself in her work to the exclusion of all else, even Alan — perhaps especially Alan. He went off religiously every morning with Mike and spent the day combing the offices and pubs of the city in search of useful contacts. I knew that his season ticket had run out and suspected that Mike was paying his fares but I said nothing. It was a relief to have the house to myself during the day at least.

  One evening early in the new term the boys came home wearing KBG badges. They had been handed out by someone who had come to talk to them at school. It took me some time to persuade them to take them off.

  As soon as I could find an opportunity I telephoned Jane and asked if I could go over to see her that evening. I had to talk to someone and I knew it would be worse than useless to discuss it in front of Clare and Alan. Besides, I was glad to be out of the house for an evening, even though it meant a longish walk through the unlit streets. Petrol was far too precious now to be used for that sort of thing.

  Jane was sitting at the table in her cluttered kitchen, marking books by the light of a single candle amid a litter of unwashed cups, somebody’s stamp collection and a half-dismantled radio. A line of damp washing hung above her head and the sink was stacked with dirty dishes. She looked up, pushing her straight dark hair back off her heavy pale face. She never wore make-up and only washed her hair when she remembered it.

  “Hello,” she said. “Make yourself at home. I must finish these, then I’ll get some coffee.”

  I removed the cat and a pair of dirty wellingtons from the chair opposite her and sat down.

  “I’m sorry to come and bother you. I know you’re always so busy.”

  “Don’t be daft. I’m never so busy that I can’t find time to see my friends.” She was continuing to mark books as she spoke.

  I said. “I’ve got to talk to you about something – something important.”

  “Oh?”

  I glared at the top of her head. Just for once I needed her undivided attention. I could hear her children arguing noisily over a game in the other room. How often had they felt a similar but much greater irritation, I wondered. Then I felt a pang of guilt. What right had I, with nothing to do but care for my home and children, to demand anything of Jane—least of all something as precious to her as time?

  I said, “Shall I make the coffee?”

  She looked up. “I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “Well, I can talk and make coffee at the same time, can’t I?”

  “O.K.” she said, returning to the books. “Carry on. You know where everything is.”

  I busied myself with the coffee, surreptitiously washing a few of the dirty dishes while I waited for the kettle to boil.

  After a moment she growled, “Stop it, Nell! You’re trying to shame me with your damn middle-class cleanliness again, aren’t you? Go and be house-proud in your own house.”

  “Don’t be silly, Jane!” I exclaimed. “I’m only trying to help.”

  “Well, don’t.” She pushed the books away from her and looked at me. “Come on, what is it you want to talk about?”

  I took the coffee over to the table and told her about the KBG badges. Her expression changed instantly.

  “Good God! I didn’t realise you meant something like this when you said you wanted to discuss something important. The damn cheek of the man. Bringing politics into the school! The head teacher ought to know better than to allow it. Right. We’ll soon settle his hash. What you have to do is to write to the Area Education Officer and complain that your children are being politically indoctrinated—and get as many other mums as you can to write as well.”

  “Oh I don’t know, Jane,” I protested. “I think ‘politically indoctrinated’ is a bit strong. I don’t want to get the poor man sacked. The boys have always got on very well there.”

  Jane leaned forward. “Nell, you have got to stop being a political baby! Don’t you realize that this country is on the verge of a civil war? ‘Poor man’! The KBG is the single most dangerous influence in the country today. They are deliberately fomenting unrest and when things get bad enough they will put in their own Fascist government.”

  “Oh Jane, how could they?”

  “You don’t believe me? You don’t realize how the very laws and institutions they claim to be defending could be used to put them in power. Well, you just sit back and watch it happen.”

  “Look,” I said unhappily, “you know I’m no good at this sort of thing. All I want is to stop the children being involved.”

  “O.K.” She leaned forward. “Let’s stick to the children. Has it occurred to you that any government could take your children away from you any time it wanted?”

  “Oh don’t be ridiculous!”

  “It’s not ridiculous. It’s fact. Listen. The local authority can take into care any child it suspects of being at risk. Right? And only last year we had a report by a Committee of Inquiry stating that the authority should act immediately upon the ‘slightest suspicion’ that a child is in danger.”

  “But we needed something like that. There were so many cases of children not being taken away and then being beaten or starved to death. The child has to come first.”

  “Yes, I know,” she exclaimed. “But don’t you see how a totalitarian government, of whatever complexion, could use that? Suppose one of your boys fell out of a tree or put his arm through a window. How easily someone could suspect that you had been knocking him about. Or take a family wher
e the father is unemployed. Who can keep five or six kids adequately fed and clothed on what passes for social security these days? You mark my words. We shall see children in those circumstances being taken into care before this winter’s over.”

  “But that’s not the same thing,” I protested. “That’s a case of real need.”

  “But it’s the idea I’m getting at. The KBG are trying to get hold of the kids. You’ve seen that. Now it’s talks in schools and badges and a lot of jingoistic claptrap. In six months time it could be by taking thousands of them into 'care', removing them from the influence of their families so they can be brain washed into supporting their ideas.”

  I sat gazing at her for a moment. The idea was so horrifying that my mind refused to give it credence. In the end I said, “Well, I think you’re taking it a bit far.”

  She shrugged and drew the pile of books towards her. “Suit yourself. But if you care about what happens to your children—specially about what happens to their minds — you write that letter.”

  I wrote the next day. I also made a point of meeting the boys from school and chatting to some of the other mothers. One or two were annoyed about the talk, a few others strongly in favour of it. No-one was sufficiently disturbed to want to take any action.

  When the children came out Simon had a rip in his anorak.

  “Oh Simon,” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?”

  He shrugged and did not look at me. “Some of us were fighting the KBG boys and one of them grabbed my coat and ripped it.”

  “What do you mean, the KBG boys?”

  He gave me a look which suggested that the answer was self-evident. “The boys who are wearing the badges. Some of us took them off and the others didn’t. Then some of them started shouting things at us —so we fought them.”