"The Hopkins Manuscript"

R.C. Sherriff's small-minded gentleman poultry breeder makes an ultimately likable hero in this end-of-empire tale.

• Edgar Hopkins, its author, was a man of such unquenchable self-esteem and limited vision that his narrative becomes almost valueless to the scientist and historian, and is scarcely mentioned in the Royal Society’s massive and masterly ‘Investigations into the Dead Civilisations of Western Europe’.
• There was a time when I could see a million lights from this window, with the Bayswater Road and Oxford Street piercing the heart of London like a blazing, jewelled sword. There was a time when the roar of the traffic would come up to this window like a lulling sea beneath a dying storm, but now I seem to be suspended in this broken wooden chair between unheavenly darkness and unearthly silence.
• She cooks them over a fire which she keeps blazing with Dutch masterpieces upon the stone floor of the entrance hall. She dislikes Dutch masterpieces and enjoys the fire as much as the pigeons.
• There was no difference in the actual appearance of the sun, nor in the shape of the little clouds that surrounded it as it sank gently behind the trees. But, as it passed, it left a great sombre tarnish in the sky – a feverish glow of poisoned blood that had no beauty in it – that oppressed and disturbed me.
• * Every day that passed meant greater assurance that the scheme was succeeding, and during that summer I achieved a serenity of spirit and happiness that I had never known before. I felt the joy of a gambler whose gamble had succeeded – the joy of being a man of courage – the satisfaction of feeling that my friends believed me to be a very wealthy man … <> And now, like a bolt from the blue twilit sky of that autumn evening, had come this fateful letter.
• On the 7th October, my hen Broodie won the Egg-Laying Contest for two-year-olds at Little Bramble Poultry Fair, but the triumph was a hollow mockery. I received the diploma from the Hon Mrs McNaughton and accepted the Challenge Egg Cup with a smile that needed all my courage to produce. I expect those country bumpkins in the audience attributed my pale face and haggard eyes to the drawn-out anxiety inevitable to a poultry owner during an egg-laying contest. How little they suspected the truth!
• But I knew that I must face it like a man. I determined that I, who had the most to suffer and the most to lose, should appear the calmest of them all. I strolled to the window and nonchalantly lit a cigarette, but nobody seemed to notice this gesture of defiance.
• * It can readily be understood how this torment of mind and sudden, unexpected relief had blurred for the moment the significance of what the President had been talking about. I could scarcely be expected to care what happened to the moon so long as my fortune was saved and my enterprise vindicated... It was just the kind of thing that would happen, I bitterly reflected. How was I to have known that by the time the telescope was delivered by the makers there would be no moon to look at?
• It eased rather than snapped, for the action of one of our number in rising and making an exhibition of himself did us all a power of good. It had been another man and not ourselves who had shown himself the coward. The terror of that little black-haired man had made the rest of us brave. <> There came the rustling of a hundred bodies relaxing in their chairs.
• ‘But we can assume that the shock would displace the earth but not its atmosphere. Crudely stated, the earth would be jolted out of the skin of air that loosely surrounds it – but that skin would return and settle evenly around the earth again. We should suffer tornado and flood upon two sides of the earth as it slides out of its atmosphere, and a temporary disappearance of air upon the other sides.
• A fat man with a grating voice began a rambling speech to the effect that the Government must not be allowed to take political advantage of the dugouts by leaving all persons of socialist leanings outside. He went on to suggest that no person who believed in otter hunting should be allowed in the dugouts, but the President pulled him up sharply
• But now and then a little shaft of terror shot through the glow of my exultation – as a man drunk with champagne might feel for a second a drink-dulled abscess in his cheek. For a fleeting second I realised that my friend’s false teeth would look very much the same as the pupils of my eyes when they all revolved together as the dust of a destroyed world. There was something macabre about this babble – a dance of death.
• it seemed this evening as if none of us desired to break the queer spell of herd-like courage. None of us desired to be the first to go down those steep, narrow steps into a world made strange and lonely to us through the secret that we must not share with it... I liked this unconscious friendliness far more than the unhealthy heartiness of the coffee-and-cakes period. There was something genuine about it: a tiny signpost towards the nobility that springs from a common peril.
• the Embankment: that lovely, moonlit panorama of London with the sullen river oiling its silent way to the sea.
• * I was ashamed – then proud. Ashamed that I should think of leaving those others to bear the awful burden: proud that I was numbered amongst the select and trusted few. I pictured the Prime Minister of England, planning the great subterranean strongholds to salvage a drop or two of British blood to build the Empire again. The Prime Minister! – and me! We knew – while untold millions were ignorant!
• By a simple device of a small, inexpensive boiler it is possible to keep a steady flow of warm water through these metal perches. This not only warms the feet of the fowl and prevents loss of vitality, but my experiments have proved that the fowl sleeps longer and more soundly
• I had no patience with this silly stuff. If God could create us then God could control our brains and minds: if we had failed it was because He had been unable to make better creatures of us, and that was His fault – not ours. God must have as much reason and as much sense as the visible beings that He had created, and it was most unlikely that He would advertise His own shortcomings by destroying us. <> It did not occur to me that this all-important world of ours was one of a thousand million worlds eddying in the great hive of the universe.
• Anyhow, the principal fact remained that I was a bachelor aged forty-seven, of set habits and comfortable circumstances... It needed more than a mere threat: it needed a complete, head-on collision with the moon to alter what I considered to be my rightful mode of life.
• By carefully training and clipping each summer I had altered these figures into hens sitting upon nests. I had achieved this by allowing the lower portions of the rabbit to bush out a bit (to form the ‘nests’) and by training a small piece of foliage in each tree to resemble a hen’s tail.... Haggard agreed enthusiastically, but in doing it we had the misfortune to cut the stem that supplied the foliage for the head. We had no alternative but to trim the tail into a head, with the disappointing result of what appeared to be a small fat man with his trouser legs turned up, paddling in the sea. <> Those who know the slowness of a yew tree’s growth will realise what this meant.
• * proud of my supreme knowledge over ignorant millions, but steadily my pride was turning to impotent annoyance. What, after all, is the pleasure of holding within oneself a colossal, awe-inspiring secret when nobody around one even knows that you are keeping it? No more good than a brave smile to hide a toothache when nobody knows you’ve got a toothache!
• * library: Deliberately I had furnished it with dark, heavy curtains and solid, enduring furniture to give it an atmosphere of solitude and repose. Suddenly it took upon itself a suffocating oppression. I realised that I had made of this room a dark, soft-footed servant rather than a friend in need.
• For some years past I had deplored the decay of country ‘types’. When I was a boy a farmer was a farmer and none could mistake his hearty, weather-beaten face and breeches and gaiters. Today there were crowds of ‘half-farmers’ who aped the gentleman – who wore anything from corduroys to canary-coloured jerseys – who scraped impatiently about in the fields and lived on petrol pumps.
• When I began to explain the effect of water-heated tubular metal perches upon a hen’s laying capacity, he got up and went out without saying goodnight.
• mellowed afternoons pursued the sunset and bathed in its glow until the shadows of the beech trees were stretched like fine elastic to the full breadth of the meadow, only to be snapped with the nip of twilight.
• * They stood there in a group as I walked away, and when I glanced back I saw them still as I had left them – a silent little grey cloud of friendship in the gathering twilight of the meadow. <> I felt quite touched by this spontaneous little gesture of affection, and although, on the following morning I realised that in my emotion I had forgotten to give them their evening meal, I honestly believe that they, too, had forgotten their meal, and had been moved to a devotion that few suspect in the domestic fowl.
• My belief that the whole ‘moon business’ was nothing but an absurd scare upon the part of a few super-clever ‘experts’ was growing firmer every day. I called to mind the numberless ‘experts’ who had predicted hard winters that had turned out warm... I despised the experts: I snapped my fingers at them.
• It consisted of Dr Hax as Chairman, Major Willoughby (our unpleasant bridge player of last year), Pawson, a retired policeman, and the Vicar. It was too ludicrous for words. They had as technical adviser some fellow who had been a railway engineer in India, and they began the dugout in the grounds of Burgin Park one Sunday afternoon. <> I ignored the whole thing. It was so utterly ludicrous. The one man in the village who knew everything was excluded from the Committee! I simply had to laugh.
• * I stood nearby for some while, but naturally they were all too busy and self-important to notice my smile of amused tolerance. <> My knowledge of the true facts had lifted me above the petty trivialities of the village: more and more I ignored these silly people as if they had already ceased to exist and took the moon – that suffering, struggling moon – as my sole companion.
• The railways were certain to be shaken to pieces and their shares would become useless, but Wigglesworth & Smirkin would suddenly find themselves called upon to supply new cups and saucers, plates and dishes to everybody in England. A collision with the moon would cause an enormous breakage of china: my shares would soar sky-high and I should make a fortune.
• the maids moved quietly in the shadows by the wall, serving hors d’œuvres that lay in neat glass dishes upon a silver-crested tray – serving a cool hock in amber glasses: a finely cooked chicken with mushrooms … it tortures me to write these words, yet somehow it squeezes those sweet memories to a flicker of life … life that I hunger for … life that is gone for ever …
• my extraordinary calmness of mind is proved by the fact that on the 2nd January, according to my diary, I actually bought six little Bantam hens and proceeded to bring them into condition for showing! <> But it was a very short-lived armistice with the truth.
• Dr Hax and the Vicar would become nonentities and I the hero! I would pay these old fools back in their own coin and show them what it felt like to be snubbed and neglected. The reader may feel that I was ungenerous at that moment, but he will readily sympathise and support me when he thinks back upon the treatment I had received from the ‘big men’ of the village.
• ‘He says,’ bawled the girl, ‘the world’s going to end!’
  The old lady’s eyes lit up in a gleam of memory.
  ‘That’s more like old Vicar Hutchings,’ she cackled. ‘Vicar Hutchings used to say that every Sunday.’
• * That fiery old man had so often consigned the people of Beadle to eternal flame, wrath to come, etc, that the gentle Mr Edwards with his plunging moon was naturally a bit of an anticlimax. <> I think the average feeling amongst the congregation that morning was that Mr Edwards, growing jealous of the undiminishing fame of his vigorous predecessor, had tried to pull it off himself with the moon as a novelty in the place of Vicar Hutchings’ hellfire, but that he did not possess the personality to get away with it.
• The humiliation of this nearly suffocated me: I strove to reply, but words failed me. I was being told to ‘keep my head’! – I! – I who had known the truth for twelve weeks – who had held this dreadful secret in such iron control that none had suspected it – was told by a fat-headed farmer to ‘keep my head’!
• I had expected to be given a leading part in the construction of the dugout upon the hillside, and here I was, ignored and insulted, driven back to the solitude that I had endured for twelve weary weeks. To make matters worse I had omitted, in my hurry to reach church, to remove the tin cup of glue that I had placed upon the fire to mend my bookcase. It had boiled up and overflowed and had stunk the house out. I opened all the windows and doors, and wandered in my garden while the smell blew away – I wandered like an exiled Napoleon upon St Helena, looking down with infinite contempt upon the people who had repudiated me.
• I was profoundly affected by the newspapers. This was no mere ‘eyewash’. There was reason and deep thought behind their optimism. I was angry with Professor Hartley for having disturbed us so unnecessarily at the meetings of our Society, but I reflected that all ‘experts’ were tarred with the same brush – they could never resist exploiting their superior wisdom to alarm their listeners.
• You go inside. Tell Mabel to give you a glass on the house. There’s plenty of nitwits in there who believe them papers like you do!’
• * I could quickly see that the majority had accepted without reserve the reassurances of the newspapers. The average farmer so completely exhausts his store of pessimism over the future of farming that he has no alternative but to be optimistic about everything else.
• Nobody in his right mind would bother to buy a new hat which, even if not totally destroyed by the moon itself, would obviously be blown away in a hurricane that accompanied the moon’s passing. But the official attitude was right in all the circumstances. Far better make superfluous hats than be idle under such conditions.
• dugout: There was a grand spirit amongst us, too. We had always been a friendly, peaceful village, but I had never before felt such a fine bond of comradeship. We were all so happy at having something novel and valuable to do. The men all called each other by their nicknames and I was almost tempted to tell John Briggs, the carpenter, that my Christian name was Edgar. I decided upon reflection not to do so, for if nothing fatal happened on the 3rd of May he might fail to appreciate his duty to call me ‘sir’ again.
• I have scarcely mentioned Broodie in my story until now: I could not resist holding her name back and dwelling upon her fame at this point as a surprise to my readers who might by now believe that they were fully acquainted with every branch of my success as a poultry breeder.
• Except for its brilliancy it seemed little different from usual, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the night sky I perceived the darkened portion of the moon looming huge and venomous against the thin bright crescent. I think, in its concealed darkness, it was more terrible than ever it seemed when later it emerged in its full brilliancy – it was like the foul black head of an octopus rearing its way through a dark, weed-slimed ocean.
• the ‘prepare ye for the end’ crowd. They mustered, I should say, about one in ten of the population of Beadle and were drawn from all classes irrespective of calling and creed... I have since realised that these were the genuinely brave people of the world. The majority of the rest of us preferred other opinions because we could not face the thing that was most likely to happen.
• Scientific calculations had ceased to interest me: the sharp edges of my hopes and fears had worn smooth by their frequent and painful friction against reality, and I no longer suffered acute feelings of any kind.
• * My library seemed very cheerless and empty when I returned to it. I could almost have wished to have left that little sherry glass upon the fireside table, just as Pat had laid it down. Those little balls of silver paper which Robin had pulled from the chocolate biscuits shone in the fender more brightly than my fire.
• * Nobody in living memory had worked all night in Beadle, and it created a great impression of importance and urgency. He explained that he wanted everything finished well before the 3rd of May so that we could have a full dress rehearsal before the night.
• they were ‘stream-lining’ the whole country against tornado, and although the work done was barely one-millionth part of all that would be needed, it provided the vital, sanity-protecting medicine of hard physical work.
• their prosperity had always been handicapped by the difficulty experienced by their customers in opening the shop door. In 1897 old Mr Cheesewright had fitted a cumbersome rubber contrivance to the bottom of the door to prevent draughts, and for fifty years the business of his two hardworking daughters had languished in consequence. When you pushed the door the rubber contrivance was caught by the mat, and only the most powerful inhabitants of Beadle were able to shop with the Misses Cheesewright. The rest were forced to take the bus into Mulcaster, but one morning, after years of unfailing hope, the Misses Cheesewright enjoyed a glorious week of boom business. <> Sapper Evans announced that the cavities between the timber framework of the dugout and the chalk outer walls were to be packed with every kind of shock-resisting material that could be obtained... The Dugout Committee, who were now in possession of Government funds for all emergency, thereupon purchased the whole of the Misses Cheesewright’s stock of soft goods.
• * Eton and one-quarter of his land was infinitely more desirable than the whole of his land to the sacrifice of a great tradition. <> It occurred to me, as I walked that neglected, weed-grown drive, that the great schools of England took very little fresh-grown money for their nourishment: they lived upon the mellowed land of the manor houses – the cattle of the squires – the table silver of the country clergyman and many a cherished oil painting of a small boy’s ancestor.
• for the rest my whole mind was captured by those three faces beneath the shaded candles at the table: they formed one fleeting, fragrant page from a book that had never been within my reach before – a book that was wrenched from my hand and destroyed even as its fineness was exalting me.
• * We talked a little of our gardens – of the Christmas Pantomimes that Colonel Parker had seen with Pat and Robin in the holidays: we talked of the Norfolk Broads, where the Parkers went sailing in the summer: the future kept flickering to glorious life and dying in the little pits of silence that followed our gay words of make-believe.
• I had not until this moment discussed the days ahead of us with a plain, straightforward man in the privacy of his room. The gossip of the villagers was tedious and superficial – the sublime resignation of the Vicar, the arrogant outlook of Dr Hax and the ghoulish vulgarity of the publican were not the expressions of the normal Englishman … but I was alone with Colonel Parker;
• there’s bound to be peace and quiet again sooner or later … some sort of peace and quiet – because noise and disaster and blazing light and all that has got to burn itself out … and peace and quiet wins back in the end.’... ‘Don’t you think,’ he went on, ‘that the quietest thing in all the world is the world itself as it goes rolling through space?
• It was the first night of the ‘disturbances’ that the newspapers so lightly brushed aside each morning – the first night of the strange whisperings that were now to remain with us until the end. No one sought to explain them: I doubt if even the scientists understood. The nights began to turn uneasily in their sleep – as if they no longer trusted themselves with the guardianship of the world and were impatient to hand us back to the safety of the day.
• I was getting very tired of Uncle Henry. Up to a point his views were interesting, but he had neither the imagination nor the humour to brighten what he said with inspiration or excitement.
• I could not help feeling that Uncle Henry had mashed up those suicides and riots with his second helping of sponge pudding and swallowed them with a gloating relish.
• I returned from my walk with a greater admiration for these Londoners than I had had before. They had so much less to hold them together than we had in Beadle... But in those vast, sprawling suburbs of London there was no such bond of community life: just miles of houses, filled with people who frequently did not even know which Borough they lived in, what Council they came within or which church served them.
• * Uncle/aunt: in the face of the approaching cataclysm, I saw less than ever to admire in their incurable complacency. I do not believe that it was an expression of philosophy or courage: I believe it was the symbol of a smugness so ingrained by time and habit that nothing, however tremendous, could bring them again into sympathy with the common people of the world.
• the onlookers were mostly of the unwholesome ‘men about town’ type: the type that is known as ‘sophisticated’: those poor, hunted, complex-ridden people who have never found the gateway that leads to the crystal sunlight of simplicity.
• How desperately I hoped that this grand comradeship would hold until the final, uttermost moment of these last ten days! I was thankful now that I had suffered those wretched hours in London. They had given me an increased love for the village of my home.
• He stood as I had once seen a small Welsh boy standing, singing for pennies upon the slopes of Snowdon, in a curious attitude of alertness, with heels together and shoulders squared, with eyes half-closed as if straining to draw the melody from the far-off mountains of his home. Although the song was in Welsh and none of us could understand, every word came as clear as crystal to us,
• Moon: It seemed so incredibly near to us: for a moment it appeared to balance itself lightly upon the tip of a cedar branch before ghostly scene-shifters behind the hill hoisted it clear into the pearl-grey sky.
• another proof of Sapper Evans’ genius, for the invention of the dresses had given the villagers of Beadle almost as much diversion as the dugout itself... the First Prize for Ladies’ Fancy Dress to Lady Burgin and referred in his speech to ‘the lovely, graceful costume of Early Victorian days’. It was discovered afterwards that Lady Burgin had not realised that the dance was to be Fancy Dress, and had come in her ordinary evening clothes.
• * The breathless glory of that rising moon robbed all terror from it and left me humbled and speechless: a blazing, golden mountain range that seemed to press the dark earth from it: clear rays of amber that caught the hills beyond The Manor House and crept down to drink the jet-black darkness of the valley – that flowed over the church and onwards to the cricket ground, emblazoning that shabby marquee and the threadbare bowling screens into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.
• But now nothing remains, for the 3rd of May has dawned. <> I awoke at eight when Mrs Buller brought my tea. I drank the tea and slept again till nine. I drew back my curtains upon a dark, leaden morning, more like November than the first week of May. It seemed as if even the normal functions of weather had ended, and the country lay embalmed beneath a dusty glass case.
• She was one of those simple, tidy souls to whom a decent burial was the only essential luxury of life. She had frequently told me that her father was taken to his grave in a hearse with two men standing upon the ledge at the back of it and I knew that she hungered after a similar dignity. It had gradually dawned upon the poor old lady that, if the world ended, there would be no one to bury her, and the dugout had become to her the next best thing. She had not been keen about it at first, but when she heard that the Vicar would be there her mind was content. His presence would consecrate the dugout and the honour of being buried with the Vicar made up for the disappointment of being denied a grave to herself.
• With its going my own lights flickered. They struggled to life again: for a little while they seemed to pulsate in horrid mesmerism with the brown glow of the sky – then went out completely... The dingy brown sky became wild and luminous: through its dirty brownness came a blood-red streak: swelling and pulsating until the whole sky was filled by it. The heavens seemed to pant and bleed like the shattered lung of a dying giant... there came a great rending as if the whole hillcrest were being torn open from horizon to horizon – I saw the giant elms brace themselves – quiver and fall like corn before a scythe.
• That accounted for the sudden silence, for without air there can be no sound. But the thought was gone within a second, for almost at once I was struggling in that room like a drowning man. As the air had left the outside world the pressure of the atmosphere in this room had burst the window and was whistling away into the night.
• I began rehearsing a few sharp, sarcastic remarks for when she condescended to return. <> ‘It’s perfectly all right, Mrs Buller! I spent a most restful night and am quite content to make my breakfast upon air! – Please don’t hurry yourself!’
• It was hard to believe that he was dead, for there was no sign of injury, and the rough tweed suit gave an eerie sense of life. I felt that I was saying farewell to an old, tried friend, and yet I had only twice been to his house: once to dine with him and once to dig his grave.
• * Romance is not easy to find in the placid conditions of civilised life: we strive to capture it by artificial means – through books, from the stage of the theatre and from the screen. But on that night, in that old book-lined room of mine, it came to us without conscious striving. Without our bidding, despite all that we had faced that day, its thrall enwrapped us. The fire gave us its golden glow: the candles sent our shadows creeping to and fro across the wall, and the curtains, drawn warmly against the stillness of the night, were symbols of defeated terror.
• I was still glad that Pat and Robin had come to share my home, but I began to develop an extreme reluctance to face them in my present condition. The encrusted habits of long and self-indulgent bachelorhood were reasserting themselves. I liked being silent in the morning, particularly at breakfast, but the presence of this charming girl and exuberant boy was going to call for a higher standard of morning behaviour than I was accustomed to. If I were to hold their affection and respect I must be buoyant and amusing at all times, but it was going to need all my resolution to be buoyant at seven in the morning with a stiff neck... I would gladly have exchanged the youth and charm of Pat and Robin for the middle-aged stolidity of Mrs Buller, who needed no living up to,
• * I watched it ooze away down the road and had the fright of my life when, as I opened the door, the little bell clanged overhead. It was the eeriest sound I had ever heard, and I stood there for quite a time, half-expecting to see the mud-encrusted corpse of Mr Thatcher walk from his little back room to serve me.
• He had caught it amongst the willows by the river and he declared that hedgehogs were delicious when baked in gypsy fashion, complete with skin and bristles, over a brushwood fire.
• Pat was reluctant to let the old man live like this, but he so obviously preferred it that I persuaded her from ill-spent kindness.
• ‘That is not my business. I presume it takes to bits?’ The young man stared reflectively at the huge, rusting hulk in my meadow: its great screws glittered in the setting sun. <> ‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, ‘but you can’t expect them to take much interest. There’s no Atlantic to cross any longer.’
• In bed that night I tossed to and fro, murmuring again and again: ‘If only I had a cockerel – a good, thoroughbred cockerel, worthy of my Broodie!’
• With the advent of full summer came the ‘Epoch of Recovery’, a wonderful period which lasted for well-nigh two years, until the autumn of 1948.
• There was a fine spirit of comradeship in the town; a spirit that compared most favourably with the local pomposities and smugness of pre-cataclysm days. Its two hundred survivors were mostly in youth and early middle age, for unlike a war that destroys the best and strongest, the cataclysm had weaned away the weak and the infirm,
• Then Sapper Evans had shown a last heroic resource. The third entrance to the dugout remained secure. To have opened it in an endeavour at escape through that awful flood would have been suicide, but the upper section of the stairway would form an airlock against the rising water. <> Into this airlock the Sapper had forced the women and children – forty of them, huddled upon the fifteen steps with one man – Mrs Chaplin’s husband – who understood the mechanism of the door.
• ‘The Muller-Henderson report will announce that the moon is by no means destitute. On the contrary it is immensely, incredibly rich. Rich in oil: rich in gold: rich in radium-bearing rock and rich in coal. The moon contains minerals sufficient to give wealth to this world undreamed of … iron – platinum – it has all been found … analysed and tested …’
• ‘Normal people are rarely in positions of power,’ replied the Major. ‘Mr Hopkins is a normal man. He is perfectly happy, rearing his poultry in Beadle Valley.’ <> ‘One does not speak of “rearing” poultry,’ I began, for I resented the impudent patronage of the man’s tone, ‘one “breeds” poultry.’
• The moon is not a cake with currants evenly distributed in each slice. The scientists report that the oil is all in the northern area of the moon – the area allotted in the British Plan to Sweden. Germany and France will not agree to that: they want the oil themselves. Italy demands the coalfields. Every nation in Europe demands a bigger slice than what the British Plan suggested for them. In fact I am afraid there is not nearly enough moon to go round.’
  ‘But this is ridiculous! – childish!’ I cried. ‘You surely don’t suggest that the nations are going to quarrel about a gift! Surely they can agree!’
  ‘They all agree upon one thing: they emphatically, fiercely agree that Britain must not have its corridor.’
  ‘A ten-mile corridor!’ exclaimed Dr Cranley. ‘Surely that isn’t asking much!’
  ‘It may only be ten miles wide,’ returned the Major, ‘but it happens to cut off other nations from direct communication with their own slices of the moon.
• I have always preferred to leave politics to those who had no poultry farm or other keen interest to claim their attention, and I am fairly convinced that if it had not been for the politicians I would not now be struggling against increasing weakness to write the last tragic chapters of my story in the lonely twilight of a dying world.
• The first Parliaments to be elected after the cataclysm consisted with few exceptions of hard-working, level-headed, modest men. It seemed as if the survivors of the disaster turned instinctively to this quiet type of man to lead them from the brink of famine and disruption. There was no thought of election campaigns – no time for pedantic speeches and gimcrack theories.
• But the strange thing is this. The news of the fantastic, ownerless wealth within the moon was the signal for a horrid swarm of political upstarts to appear in every nation of Europe. Some were fanatics devoid of all powers of reason and common sense, but most of them were worthless adventurers, greedy for wealth and power, their only claim to attention a loud voice and endless cascades of words.
• I feared my fellow creatures far more than I ever feared the moon. The crisis of the cataclysm had been calculated to a definite day: a definite hour. We knew that by the 4th of May it would all be over one way or another: that we should die or live. But who could measure the suspense – the awful possibilities of war with every nation at the throat of its neighbour?
• * I realised the truth. There was no difference, in the vocabulary of the Leaders, between ‘fairness’ and ‘humiliation’. To them it was one and the same thing. The weaker their positions, the more moon they needed to justify themselves in the eyes of their followers, and as all of them were weak, it would have needed at least seven moons to satisfy the aspirations of them all. The vital issue to every Leader was not so much the amount he got, but how much more than the others he was able to snatch.
• I loathed the man more than ever before: I hated his bombast: his truculence: his colossal conceit, but I knew that all of it was necessary – that the man himself was necessary. The only way to stamp out this pest of ‘Leaders’ in Europe was to produce one ourselves, worse than any of them, and stronger … <> After his speech was over we went to bed. I don’t think that anybody, after listening to that speech, could have done anything else but go to bed. I think Jagger must have gone to bed himself.
• I do not know when the conviction first came to me that I must leave my home. It may have been upon that bitter January morning when I ploughed through the snow to find my dear old Broodie dead beneath her perch. The passing of Broodie seemed to break my last link with Beadle, for day by day I grew more certain that my sanity depended upon escape from this overwhelming solitude.
• Loneliness had driven me to leave, yet in this ruined city I seemed lonelier than ever. <> But at least I had the advantage of new surroundings here. Even the labour of living might offer a new and diverting occupation.
• * Selim, as far as I know, is a Persian, the son of a small local official who lived in Teheran. Apparently he was known in a small way for some years before the cataclysm. He was a revolutionary – possibly an anarchist. He preached against the exploitation and oppression of the Eastern peoples by the white nations of the West. <> ‘But it was the moon that made him.
• They came in their thousands to his camp – from the mountains of Afghanistan and the jungles of Africa – from China and Abyssinia – from India and the deserts of Arabia. <> ‘He trained them in discipline and in the use of arms, but he need not have gone to so much trouble. By the time his Holy Pilgrimage was ready to start our silly little leaders in Europe were busily at work destroying one another.