Sixty Days to Live (43 page)

‘You can have all the furniture shops and Mr. Drage’s plain vans as well. I intend to furnish my flat with some of the pieces from the South Kensington Museum. As for this hideous muck, I derive a peculiar joy from smashing it.’

Lighting a fire was not as easy as they had imagined. The wood lit all right but huge clouds of smoke bellowed out from the fireplace and it was soon apparent that the chimney was blocked, probably by ice or snow. After an equally fruitless attempt in the grate of the dining-room, which lay on the other side of the hall, they carried their remaining supplies of broken wood back to the kitchen on Gervaise’s suggesting that their only course was now to light a fire on its stone floor.

The mess of sweet-corn and salmon was eventually cooked, but only after the greatest difficulties. And, as the bonfire filled the room with smoke and melted the ice on the floor and the icicles which hung from the ceiling, they ate in considerable discomfort.

After this unsatisfactory experiment they again took the road to London. A hundred yards along it they came to a big mound in its middle which, on examination, proved to be a buried car that had overturned and still had its frozen passengers in it. Farther on they found other humps concealing more wrecked cars, vans and lorries. It was past midday when they left the house, and trudging through the snow was heavy work so it was half past one by the time they entered Potters Bar.

Since finding the first house, where they had cooked their meal, they had seen others almost constantly along the sides of the highway; some standing back from the road in their own gardens, others in rows; but most of the rows had been demolished by the flood and were now only indicated by long, snow-covered humps at the roadside. Many of the single houses, too, had collapsed and in those which remained every window had been broken.

At three o’clock they were passing through Monken Hadley, where the buildings became more numerous, and half an hour later, in the middle of Barnet, they came to a place where the road disappeared, being completely blocked. At first they wondered what the snow-covered eminence in their path might be but as they mounted it the uneven surface beneath the snow soon showed them that they were walking on heaped-up bricks. A whole block of shops and flats had collapsed and been swept by the flood right into the middle of the highway. Here and there things projected from it; the top of a lamp-post, a broken wireless mast with a tangled aerial still attached and a stout pole, from the top of which dangled a cord with some snow-whitened lumps which proved on investigation to be frozen articles of clothing still pegged on to a washing line.

The light of the short, wintry afternoon was fading so when they had passed over the great mound they set about looking for a suitable place in which to pass the night. Now that twilight was falling the snow made it difficult to pick out from a distance the houses that were still standing, as only an occasional slab of wall or tree trunk from which the snow had fallen relieved the blank whiteness of the landscape.

After a little they came to a flat-roofed building on a corner where two roads crossed. Its door stood wide open and, on going in, they found it to be a road-house. Great heaps of snow had drifted in through the open doorway and half filled the lounge,
partially covering many of the brightly painted tables and chairs which had been thrown into heaps by the flood.

Forcing open a door at one side of the lounge they found it led to an office. The hideously swollen figure of a drowned man, now frozen stiff, was set fast in three inches of ice through which they could still see the carpet. They shut the door quickly and tried another on the far side of the lounge.

It opened into a bar where most of the bottles had been swept from the shelves by the inrush of the waters, their broken fragments frozen into the glassy surface of the floor making it as dangerous to walk on as the top of a park wall. Red-topped stools were scattered about in confusion and the till on the counter stood open.

Picking their way carefully through the broken glass they looked at the labels of the unbroken bottles, selected one of Cherry Brandy which was almost full, and had a couple of rounds of extremely welcome drinks. The liqueur warmed them up and they set about exploring the small hotel with renewed vigour.

It was getting dark now but they found some candles in the kitchen and, when several of them were lit, the place looked like some weird, fairy cavern as the light glinted on the icicles, the frozen floor and the snow which had drifted in through the windows, turning them to rainbow hues. There was a fair supply of food, all of which had gone bad before it had been frozen; but in a cupboard they found some tins of soup, sardines, vegetables and fruit as well as some bottles of coffee essence. Delighted with their find, which ensured them of several future meals, they hurried upstairs.

Each room had to be broken into as the doors had first swollen and then been frozen. In one room they came upon three more corpses; one, that of a woman, having been left by the receding waters dangling grotesquely from the top of a wardrobe. The sight of the poor drowned bodies made them feel slightly sick so they quickly left them and busied themselves choosing other rooms in which to sleep.

They were tired now after their long day and very cold. All of them were longing for a quick evening meal to warm them up and the joy of crawling between the sheets of comfortable beds immediately afterwards to sink into a long deep sleep.

But suddenly they realised that they were faced with a horrid problem. As with the sofa upon which Lavina had sat down in the house where they had had their midday meal, all the beds and bedding were frozen solid. How could they possibly unfreeze and dry them again so that they could be used that night?

For a few moments they dejectedly discussed various methods of setting to work. The sheets and blankets could not be pulled off the beds as they were frozen to the mattresses and to have endeavoured to hack them off would have torn them in pieces. The only solution seemed to be to thaw out each set of bedding at one operation and as no ordinary fire would give out enough heat for such a proceeding Gervaise said that they must light a super bonfire.

Through the broken window of the back bedroom in which they were talking they could see a smaller building only about a hundred yards away across the garden and, going downstairs, they walked over to it. The place was a fair-sized cottage, evidently much older than the inn as it was half-timbered and had no electric fittings.

‘Our luck is in,’ said Gervaise. ‘This place will suit us admirably, and as the people here used oil lamps there must be a drum of paraffin about somewhere.’

In the kitchen they found one two-thirds full, so returning with it to the living-room they smashed up the lighter furniture, piled the heavier pieces on top of it, sprinkled the whole heap with the paraffin and, touching the oil off with a match, ran out of the cottage.

For some moments Gervaise was anxious as to whether his plan would work. He feared that the snow in the room and the ice that saturated the furnishings would prevent the fire getting a good hold as they thawed and sputtered down into it. But, with an angry hissing, the flames licked at the beams which spanned the ceiling and the fire was soon eating through the floor boards of the room above.

The next job was to get the beds down into the garden. When one of them had been hacked free of the frozen floor it was found that owing to the weight of the ice with which it was laden it was
much too heavy to carry downstairs, so the men of the party heaved it out of a window and others after it; then laboriously dragged them through the snow over to the cottage, from the sitting-room window of which big flames were now spurting.

It was a tiring, muscle-wrenching business and darkness had long fallen by the time they had got six beds set up on end in a row before the glowing pile of red-hot logs and bricks; but the fire also served to revitalise them with its heat after their long day in this new and terrible frozen world.

Margery, meanwhile, had thawed out some of the tinned food and boiled some snow on a small fire that Lavina had made in a brick surround on the concrete floor of a garage which adjoined the kitchen of the inn. They fed round the fire and having washed the meal down with some drinks from the bar they re-crossed the garden to see whether their beds had thawed.

The sheets and blankets had fallen away from the sodden mattresses and, now wringing with water, were lying in heaps on the wet ground. Having wrung them out as well as they could they hung them up on a wire fence which the melting snow had disclosed at the side of the cottage. While the men turned the mattresses and prevented the clothes from scorching, the girls made a tour of the hotel bedrooms and collected such items as they could find which might prove useful and brought these too down to be thawed at the roaring blaze.

It was past one in the morning before the mattresses were thoroughly dry and fit to sleep on without fear of chills or rheumatism. Carrying them back to the inn they laid them out on the billiards-tables of a big games-room next to the lounge. Still in their clothes they drew the blankets over them and fell asleep, utterly exhausted.

When they were awakened by the pale morning light it was snowing again with that same gentle persistence which had marked the previous five-day blizzard, and Gervaise said he thought it would be inadvisable to attempt to go farther until the fall had ceased. After breakfast, as it seemed that the snow might keep them there for another night, they set to work trying to make the place as habitable as possible.

The cottage across the garden was now a pile of blackened embers, smoking and hissing as the snow drifted down on to it. By turning up the crust of ash with their spades they were able
to warm themselves at the red embers which still glowed underneath and to thaw several pairs of curtains for nailing up across the broken windows of the rooms they were occupying, to keep out the snow and wind. Hemmingway had wandered off on his own and when they got back they found that he had collected three buckets from the garage. He was busy knocking holes in them with a hammer and spike, as he said:

‘If we set these up on bricks we can turn them into braziers and thaw the rooms properly. There’s plenty of coke in the boiler house although one of us will have to hack it out with a pickaxe.’

Derek volunteered for the job and in half an hour they had the braziers going in the kitchen. Water dripped from the ceiling and sweated from the walls, temporarily making the place extremely uncomfortable, but Sam found a broom with which to sweep away the slush from the floor while Gervaise nailed the curtains across the windows. By midday they had at least made the room habitable.

It was now over two days since they had left their comfortable quarters in the Ark, and ever since it had been burnt out there had been so many vital things to do, if they were to keep the life in their bodies, that they had had no opportunity to clean themselves up at all. The men’s faces had an ugly stubble and the girls’ hair was limp and bedraggled. Even Lavina could not bear to look at herself in a glass any more. One hasty glance in the bar-room mirror when they had arrived at the inn had shocked her beyond belief. Her hair was straight and wispy and her cheeks sunken so that her high cheek-bones had an unusual prominence in her thin little face. Beneath her eyes there were black shadows and the tiny, blue veins in her eyelids were swollen, giving them the appearance of having been heavily mascaraed, but she had actually been much too weary to do anything about herself.

After the midday meal, being a little restored by warmth and food, they boiled some snow on the braziers and began to clean themselves; the men using the shaving gear, etc., of the dead hotel proprietor and the girls the toilet articles which they discovered in some of the bedrooms.

That evening they discussed their future plans. Gervaise pointed out that if they remained where they were the small stock of tinned food which they had found in the road-house
would soon become exhausted. They would then have to forage for further supplies, a tin here and a tin there, in the houses in the neighbourhood. At the rate the snow was settling it looked as though they might be snowed up before long. If that occurred their forays for food would become more and more difficult as on each they would have to go farther afield. It was essential therefore that they should get to London with the least possible delay and find a new refuge, with abundant stocks of food, which they could use as a permanent headquarters.

Hemmingway agreed, and added that now they were on a main road, which had houses on both sides for most of the way, there was little chance of their losing their direction; so there was no reason why they should not move on the following day, even if it was snowing, providing that it was not blowing an absolute blizzard.

Sam put up the objection that wherever they halted next they would be faced with the same appalling conditions. That meant that they would only be able to do a short stage each morning and must devote every afternoon to the grim labour of preparing a refuge for the night. Surely it would be better, therefore, to wait for a fine day when they would have a reasonable chance of covering the ten or twelve miles to London, and work all night if need be, when they had arrived, to make themselves the beginnings of permanent quarters there.

The argument was settled for them by the weather, as next day dawned clear again. The snow clouds had discharged their cargo and the sun was brighter than they had yet seen it. Having had the best part of a day’s rest and an early night, they were able to set off a little after eight o’clock.

Although the sun was shining there were no signs of a permanent thaw. They estimated the general depth of the snow to be about six feet deep, but in places it had piled up in drifts that were as much as fifteen feet in height. The temperature was still far below zero and the previous day’s snow had frozen solid making a hard crust which, apart from occasional pitfalls, made fairly easy going.