No Planet B - Part Six
or, The History of the World Backwards
July 2006
PART 2
ROB: In a small tavern in Dorset, Thomas Hardy has just told the Maltster, a venerable ancient fellow who smokes a clay pipe, that he wants to go from writing poetry to being a novelist.
MALTSTER: Well, if you want to be a novelist, Master Thomas, I tell ‘ee a story now. This story came from my mother, her name was Teresa. Now, this was during the Blitz on London, which was a mutual pact agreed with Germany to stimuate property development. Britain wanted to get rid of Coventry but they couldn’t just flatten it themselves without there being an without an uprising of outraged citizens, so they needed a foreign power to obliterate it for them, before local councillors could implement their plan of replacing it with a timbered town of eaves and lattice windows and the like. Now the Germans had hopes to transform Dresden, that expensive relic of the bygone hi-tech era, into a more homely, cobbledy sort of a place and so they asked the RAF to flatten that one.
Now Teresa’s husband John is coming home on leave he’s got leave to see her. Riding the train to London he gets into a quarrel with a feller about Spain and about fascism. Now, this, Master Thomas, was I don’t rightly know what. I think it was an ethnical hatred in the same way that people from Weymouth tend to look a bit askance at Tiverton folk. And John goes and sits in anoyther carriage. And he gets talking to a feller about Teresa. John tells him about her climate change work smashing up Spitfires and digging vegetables.
What else she been up to while your away, eh? asks the chap.
Well, says John, missing the low tone and answering the question in good faith, she’s been assisting at those Women’s Auxilary dances to make the American GI’s less lonely.
Oh-ho, says the man, she’s trying to get herself a Yank. She sounds like quite the Piccadilly Commando.
‘Yes,’ says Thomas Hardy to the Maltster, ‘the vile of soul project their own vileness onto all they see, and when confronted by purity, their eyes have a strange, aggressive challenging light in them, like they have been insulted, short-changed.’
True enough, Master Thomas, but you wanna take the language down a bit when you write the novel.
So John goes and stands in the corridor for the rest of the train-journey. Now, when John gets home to his street in London there ‘bain’t be no street. Just rubble, ruptured gas mains still flaring and the stench of charred, blackened stuff still wet from the firehose. Nor no time has he to find out if Teresa’s still living, afore he has to report back for duty, turn tail and begin the whole long journey again.
Not til the end of the war, does he take delivery of a clutch of letters from Teresa, and learn that she has joined the International Brigade and he’s to meet her in Spain. How strange it is, she writes, that after all these years we’ll soon have our first holiday romance. I hope this doesn’t mean that we never see each other again afterwards!
John crosses the Pyrenees into Spain for to find Teresa at the address on the letter. But, you see, in all the years them letters been yellowing in a forgotten army mailbag, Teresa’s column of the International Brigade has been sent here and there; and so once more the two slow lovers lose touch when the world starts going too fast.
What happens next, Master Thomas? Well, that is for another time. Now I think I’ve earnt a tumbler of canary off a’ ‘ee. Set ‘em up, Master Thomas, set ‘em up.
ROB: And with that the two men settle back with their drinks and their clay pipes to listen to the troubador in the corner sing.
TROUBADOR
As I walked into Salisbury
On a bright and sunny day,
The meadow full of buttercups,
It was the month of May,
I saw a dove, a stoat, a lark,
I saw a speckled hen,
But then I had a panic attack
And never went there again!