The Last Man in Europe by Dennis Glover

Author:Dennis Glover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

7

Islington, February 1945. Eileen had somehow managed to find them a permanent flat to replace the one the doodlebug had wrecked. It was just as he liked it – up high, in the roof, where one could at least put out incendiaries – but as others told him, it was vacant precisely because it was in the roof, and therefore a death-trap in a raid. On the way downstairs, through a partly open door he heard his neighbour, a broken-down drudge of just thirty, whose husband had disappeared into some prisoner-of-war camp in the Far East, hard at work at the kitchen sink he last week had helped her unblock. His lungs weren’t feeling strong. Thank God I’m going down instead of up, he thought.

He reached the ground floor, opened the door and let in a swirl of chilling, late winter air that disturbed the dusty entrance parlour and set his chest off. He wrapped his scarf tighter and did up the top buttons of his greatcoat, which covered the captain’s uniform he was wearing. He had taken up Astor’s offer to become a war correspondent and was on his way to the airport and Paris. It was an indulgence, he knew. The book! He should have been getting on with the book, but how often did a writer get a chance to see the front? Anyway, to see totalitarianism close up, to find out what it was really like – that was the thing.

He threw his duffel bag over his shoulder and tramped around Canonbury Square, its Georgian terraces once smart but now the borderlands of the East End. The district hadn’t had an easy war – everywhere the pavements and walls were cracked, some held up by large wooden beams, and possibly a quarter of the windows in the street were smashed and boarded up. He walked past Kopp’s flat. Kopp had somehow found his way out of both communist and fascist gaols, ending up uncomfortably – and suspiciously, he sometimes thought – close to Eileen. A moment later he was into the prole quarter of Upper Street.

Instantly he rounded the corner the street was in upheaval, with people sprinting for cover. He heard a curious double crack, followed by a sudden rushing sound. ‘Gas pipe, bang overhead,’ said a passing workman in filthy overalls, who grabbed his arm and pulled him into a doorway. Immediately there was a wallop, unbelievably loud, which shook the pavement and the remaining windows of the shopfront, even though the rising column of smoke and debris suggested it had landed a mile or more away. ‘Gas pipe’ was the name Londoners had given to the Germans’ new and more deadly rocket bomb, officially known as the V-2.

‘Blimey, what’s the next war going to be like?’ the man said.

Orwell thanked him, noticing how, after hearing his voice, the man seemed to regard him as a sort of exotic species, not often sighted in this part of London. He walked off and turned south

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