Chapter 1 Presumed Dead #2
He was still kneeling on the kitchen floor when Ivy looked in on him on her way out of the house and enquired suspiciously, “You’re not praying, are you?” He reassured her that he wasn’t and wondered if he was.
Ivy was a talker, an endless flow of chatter, anecdotes about things that had happened at work, commentaries about people she knew who he had never met, an endless monologue, almost a stream of consciousness that Flynn, taciturn to the point of silence since the war, found it difficult to cope with.
And then the stream dried up and one day Flynn realized that Ivy barely spoke to him at all, although even by the end of their three-day honeymoon both had begun to understand what a disappointment they were to each other.
By the end of six months, indifference had set in.
They had another couple of months, he reckoned, before outright hatred began to show its ugly face.
He could have stayed fettered to Ivy, perhaps he should have done, many men did in the same disheartening circumstances.
He could have sacrificed his barely retrieved soul and made some kind of a go of it, although Ivy, being a forthright sort of woman, would probably have kicked him out before long.
He pre-empted his eviction from the Wealdstone house when one morning—with no note of farewell or explanation—he caught the Bakerloo line to work and didn’t return home on it in the evening.
It turned out that the push-and-pull of the Sunday lawnmower was not the answer to his lingering malaise.
He later regretted not taking Mrs. Betty with him.
—
“Come and work for me again,” Gerald Barry said, taking a seat on the bench next to Flynn. Flynn thought he meant journalism, but apparently not. “The Festival of Britain,” Barry said. “Know about it?”
“Of course.” The proposed Festival was being trumpeted everywhere.
“We’re aiming for it to take place in the summer of ’51.
General Lord Ismay’s agreed to be the chair.
We’re planning to build it on the south bank of the Thames.
A series of temporary exhibition structures—some innovative architecture—Science, Invention, History—the Land and the People, that sort of thing. ”
Flynn thought it sounded rather dreary, almost pious. He was reminded of the earnest Schools programmes that the BBC broadcast.
“It’ll give a chance for the younger architects and designers,” Barry said.
“Their creativity’s been stifled by the war.
They look to Scandinavia these days, you know.
Functional—clean lines. Simple and uncluttered.
That’s the future. Not the fusty hodge-podge that passes for style in Britain.
” He took a deep breath, as if inhaling that future.
“Caption-writers and scriptwriters too,” he added.
“Scripts?” Flynn thought he could probably manage scripts if offered.
“It will be a narrative, a story that the people can follow as they move around the site,” Barry said. “It’ll show Britain’s best face.”
“To the world?”
“Hmm, well, more to herself, I think. The Empire’s on the way out, Europe’s a dead dog that won’t revive for decades, if ever.
This is our story, Flynn, the story of Britain.
Our love of country, love of freedom, love of nature, pride in craftsmanship, our reputation for tolerance and fair play.
Farming, industry, science—production rather than products.
Instead of the Beefeaters at the Tower of London, Chelsea Pensioners and ruined abbeys by moonlight, we’ve new things to show—new industries, new inventions, new techniques, new discoveries. New freedoms as well.”
All this from a summer festival? It sounded exhausting. And such faith in a brave new world. The triumph of hope over adversity, and yet in the whole history of mankind no utopia had ever come to lasting fruition.
“And in case you’re thinking it all sounds rather Reithian” (yes, Flynn was), “we’re planning a ‘Pleasure Garden’ too, like the old Vauxhall one, possibly in the same place.
A fairground, bands playing, a small-gauge railway perhaps.
There’ll be room for everything in the Festival. For fun as well as knowledge.”
“Fun?”
“The country’s stuck in the doldrums; we need to see the future and to know we’re in touching distance of it. We hope the whole thing will be a beacon for change, a sort of tonic for the nation after…you know.” He paused and then said gently, “What did happen to you out there, Harry?”
Flynn shrugged. Gerald Barry was a kindly man, but it was impossible.
“I tried my utmost to find out, you know,” Barry said. “I felt responsible, naturally—it was me that sent you out East—but there is always so much chaos in the aftermath of war. Missing. Presumed dead.”
“Yes, that’s what they said.”
Presumed Dead. Flynn thought that would make an excellent title for a bleak postwar existential novel.
Although writing one was the very last thing he planned to do.
There had been a time in the long-distant past when Flynn, like many journalists before him, had harboured aspirations to become a novelist. Now he despised the very idea.
Words had failed him, in more sense than one.
Not long after Flynn had returned from the war, he found himself standing on Westminster Bridge, gazing at the river below.
It had been a high tide, the swollen river surging towards Wapping and the open sea beyond, and it had seemed as though it might be blissful to let the water simply carry him away like a sacrifice to the river gods.
It wasn’t that he wanted to be dead, he simply couldn’t be bothered with the tiresome business of being alive.
It seemed ironic, having spent the last three years struggling to do just that.
Then there had been a tap on the shoulder—a GI, a private—who said, “Come on, buddy, let me take you for a drink.” There had been no drama in the encounter, just a long night of warm, weak beer and talk of women, before the GI wandered off in the direction of Piccadilly and Flynn found a cheap room for the night.
He supposed that was the moment he decided to carry on.
He’d been given back his life and he was going to have to live it, whether he liked it or not.
Plodding to the end on the path of endurance.
—
A trio of ducks—mallards—splashed down on the water, only just managing to brake before they reached the edge of the lake.
“Ducks,” Barry said, allowing Flynn his reluctance.
“Yes,” Flynn agreed.
“No, I meant it might be quite minor details, like ducks. We’re planning an ornamental lake on the site. Someone will have to choose what breed of duck to swim on it.”
“You want me to audition ducks?”
“No, no. Doubtless the ducks will get their own sub-committee. Everything else seems to be doing, I’m afraid. I’ve no job description for you. You could move around, take up some of the slack. A relief.”
“Relief?” The word struck Flynn. It sounded more likely to his ears than “fun.”
“Peripatetic, perhaps. No one really knows what this thing is going to be yet, but I was thinking of poetry for you, to begin with anyway. We’ve already put out a call for poems—a Festival anthology sort of thing.”
“Yes, I think I saw something about that,” Flynn said, his eyes still on the ducks. He had written poetry once too, tortured, pretentious stuff that had made its way into a couple of literary magazines.
“We’re gathering a highfalutin panel of judges, John Hayward has agreed to chair.
Kenneth Clark is on board, David Cecil, and so on.
The usual suspects. There’s a thousand pounds in prize money, so we’re expecting an avalanche of entries, and we can’t expect some of the top literary bods in the country to wade through mountains of slush. But you could, Harry, no disrespect.”
“None taken.”
“It’s dog work, I know, but I suspect that it might be just the ticket for you at the moment.”
Not scriptwriting, then. “You want me to read hundreds of bad poems?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“You will? Excellent!”
Barry started to walk away, but then he turned round and came back and clasped Flynn’s hand. “It really is good to see you, Harry.”
Flynn was surprised how cheered he felt afterwards by this encounter.
Perhaps he was not, after all, doomed to spend the rest of his life in the Stygian gloom of the printing works, atoning for his survival.
Wealdstone had been a false start—he simply needed to set out on a different path.
He threw his sandwich in the water, causing a flurry of excitement amongst the ducks.