Chapter 24 What Gets Left Behind
What Gets Left Behind
“Shall we dance?”
“Dance?”
—
Their revels were ending. The Festival had been judged a success by nearly everyone, even by many of those who had been vociferous in their protests at the beginning. It never made a profit.
Now, five months and eight and a half million visitors after the King had declared it open, the Festival had reached its last night.
Tomorrow there would be a closing ceremony with the usual kind of rigmarole—speeches, community singing, fireworks, the Band of the Guards, the striking of the flags, Gracie Fields singing “Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye”—but on the South Bank tonight it felt like the real farewell.
Farewell to the famous military regiments that had beaten the tattoo at the end of every night.
Farewell, too, to the thousands of people who had paid two shillings to dance on the illuminated Fairway where different bands had entertained each evening—Geraldo and his orchestra were the firm favourites of the crowd.
People had been dazzled by the cheerful colours and the bright lights—things they hadn’t seen since before the war.
Those lights twinkled and sparkled everywhere, “like a magic kingdom,” Flynn overheard one visitor say.
Fountains and moats were lit up, and the ducks had serenely negotiated the artificial water-lily lights that glittered on the water in the dark.
(Aylesburys were the duck of choice, Flynn noted.) And fireworks, lots of fireworks, exploding riotously in scintillas and sequins, splashing and streaking above the Westminster skyline.
For the first time the British public had experienced open-air cafés, spaghetti, hot dogs, ice-cold drinks, soft toilet rolls, and the opportunity to drink wine with a meal. So Continental. So modern. The glimpse of a possible future.
Twelve tons of litter had been deposited every day—much of it lying where it fell, no matter how many litter bins were brought on site (one thousand, one hundred and fifty at the final count—a figure that obsessed Evans).
The amount of peel discarded in the fountains from the Nell Gwyns’ oranges occasionally choked them and had to be cleared out.
It was estimated that two hundred and fifty miles of Festival Rock was manufactured and eaten.
No one had foreseen that the bread being displayed in Power and Production would slowly grow mouldy and become an unappetizing green.
A new batch of butterflies had arrived every week, as had the wildflowers to feed them.
The plankton for the freshwater fish put in a daily appearance throughout.
The five thousand prize horses, sheep, goats, ducks and cows came and went in martial order.
Orange Blossom, the Festival Cow, spent her week being admired by all and sundry.
The visitors to the site, unused to the amount of plate glass used in the construction of the Pavilions, had the unfortunate experience of constantly walking into it, especially the sheer glass cliff that formed the front of the Lion and the Unicorn.
Kerstin “Kiki” H?kansson from Sweden won the Festival Girl Bikini Contest—also known as the Miss World 1951 competition.
Thousands upon thousands of people enjoyed the fun of the fair at Battersea.
A small boy became trapped when he put his head beneath one of the legs of Henry Moore’s massive bronze sculpture of a reclining figure that was stationed near the main entrance to the Festival.
The boy was greased with a liberal amount of soap and eventually shot out “like a rocket,” according to the Boy. The Boy rarely missed any excitement.
Most exciting of all—the Boy was also a witness to this event—one hot day in July, the French snakes had their revenge.
They swelled with the heat and burst out of their acrylic tombs.
Blood seeped out and ran down the display case.
When confronted with this ghastly scene, people screamed and some fainted and had to be treated in one of the First Aid tents.
Towards the end of the Festival, the “high-wire ace” Elleano crossed the Thames on a tightrope strung above the Bailey bridge.
The feat was cheered to the heavens by the appreciative crowd watching from below.
It made all the newspapers, although they gave surprisingly little space to the story of the woman who was run over and killed by Battersea Funfair’s whimsically named Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Branch (miniature) Railway.
And only one small column in the Evening Standard (written by the obituary-writing cake judge from Birmingham) recorded that “the twenty-year-old woman who fell from the Big Dipper roller coaster at the Festival Funfair in Battersea has been named as Cynthia Blinkhorn, the daughter of popular ‘housewives’ choice’ personality Mitzi Blinkhorn, who herself died in tragic circumstances earlier this year. ”
The morning after the closing ceremony, the workmen took all the chickens from Agriculture and wrung their weary necks before carrying them away for their wives to cook.
The Boy paid one of the workmen a shilling (donated to him by Evans) and proudly took one home to his mother.
That mother had secured him a job for when the Festival finished—on a stall in Petticoat Lane Market selling pots and pans and cheap crockery.
“He’ll do well,” Evans said. “That boy’s marked for success, one way or another. ”
“Shall we dance?”
“Dance?”
“Yes, dance. You may not believe it, but I was a very keen dancer in my younger years,” Maud Ogilvie laughed. “Although this hardly merits the term ‘dancing’—shuffling around the Fairway like this. We’re not likely to have the space to break into a quickstep.”
They made an incongruous couple. Flynn put his arm around her bony waist and thought how small and insignificant—not to mention old—she must seem to anyone looking at them.
It was a long time since he had danced with a woman.
He had a sudden vivid, unexpected memory—the last time had been with a taxi girl in the Great World in Singapore, beneath the painted dragons on the walls where fifty cents bought you ten dances.
She was Chinese, the most beautiful girl Flynn had ever seen.
It had been the same kind of teeming huddle that moved around the dance floor on the South Bank now, but that was the only similarity.
In the Great World, people were still dancing as the Japanese advanced inexorably, many on bicycles.
They were still drinking gin prahits in every long bar and hotel lounge in the city, still claiming the Japanese didn’t know how to fight even as Fortress Singapore was falling.
Flynn had seen the waiters in Raffles burying an enormous silver roast-beef trolley in the gardens of the hotel and wondered if it would ever be dug up again after the war.
He had seen, too, the choking black smoke rising from the bombing of the oil-storage depot behind the Alexandra military hospital, unaware that in the hospital three hundred doctors, nurses and patients were being bayoneted to death.
He had witnessed hundreds of heads on spikes after the Sook Ching massacre of the Chinese and wondered if his beautiful taxi girl was one of them.
He had bought tubes of opium—chandu—twenty-six cents each in one of the government’s retail shops.
He had been writing an article about opium addiction and its importance to the Straits economy, bashing it out on the little Remington that he’d inherited from the stringer who might have been called Wilson or Watson.
He was about to visit an opium den with a fellow hack, an Australian, when the Japanese interrupted. The article was never finished.
In the interests of research, he had smoked the chandu though.
In retrospect, if he had known what was going to happen to him, Flynn would have bought every tube in the shop and chased that dragon down until it rolled over on its back and begged for mercy and Flynn would have ceased upon the midnight with no pain.
Poetry was a last resort, but very occasionally it was the only thing that would do.
—
“Tell me, Maud—Badger and Lydia left the office after the whole Dangerfield debacle, but you stayed. Why?”
“Well, I still had a job. I’ve enjoyed working in the office and someone had to keep an eye on things, you know. I feel quite sad that our revels are coming to an end. Cloud-capped palaces and so on. What will you do next, Harry?”
“No idea. I fancied renting a little cottage in the country—Kent or East Sussex, a smallholding-type thing, to live off the land, but Veronica says she’ll kill us both if I do that.”
“She has a flair for the dramatic.”
“We’ve moved into a bigger flat, in Warwick Street. At least I have a bed to sleep in, rather than a sofa.”
“No sign of the mother coming home yet?”
“Not yet.”
Ivy Shears and Uncle Gerry had been arrested in Calais when trying to board a ferry to Folkestone and were currently languishing in limbo in a French jail awaiting trial.
That had been the news Vigo was bringing when they had returned from the Hitchin pageant.
Uncle Gerry, it turned out, was “importing” goods tax-free for the Messinas—an Italian/Maltese outfit that operated in the West End.
It was odd (although not impossible) to think of Ivy Shears as a gangster’s moll, although apparently she swore blind that she had known nothing about it.
If she was found guilty, it might be years before she arrived back on English shores.
Veronica seemed largely unaffected by this development in parental care. Ever the pragmatist, she said to Flynn, “Just as well I’ve still got you, then.”
He had asked Maud Ogilvie if she would be able to put in a word for Ivy with the French authorities, but she said, “Oh, goodness me, Harry, we never interfere with legal proceedings in foreign countries,” which was undoubtedly a bare-faced lie.
Flynn suspected that she thought Veronica was better off with him.
Or that he was better off with Veronica.
“And are you still with that girl—Margot?” Maud Ogilvie asked.
“No, not any more. I’ve been seeing the much-vaunted niece.”
“The what?”
“The old ladies downstairs from me in Romilly Street have a niece. She’s rescued them from a life of penury and misery by taking them under her wing and they’re going to live with her in Beaconsfield. The much-vaunted niece and I have been on three dates, and she hasn’t disappeared so far.”
“Good. And good luck with the rest of your life, Harry.”
“Thank you, Maud. With yours, too.”
“In my defence, I don’t really believe in luck.”
—
The Festival proved itself to be astonishingly ephemeral.
Everything was consigned to the scrapheap or eagerly auctioned off on site.
The Pavilions were torn down ruthlessly.
Every last brick removed from every last building.
It was a bonanza for the scrap-metal dealers George Cohen and Sons.
The dismantled aluminium roof of the futuristic Dome of Discovery was melted down, some of it transformed into, amongst other things, paperknives.
The even more futuristic Skylon became a memory, immortalized only in a souvenir ballpoint pen and the name of a restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall.
Siegfried Charoux’s massive concrete relief sculpture The Islanders, which had been much admired by Festival visitors, was smashed to pieces by the workmen as soon as the entrance gates were closed.
Only the Festival Hall itself was left for succeeding generations, although the plaster doves would one day fly again as replicas in, of all places, a Festival of Britain-themed Wetherspoons in Waterloo Station called, appropriately, The Lion and the Unicorn.
“Well, that’s that, then,” Evans said. They had come to view the demolition and to say goodbye to each other.
Evans was going back to sea, having decided to get his master’s ticket.
He had booked a place on a course in Liverpool, paid for with his Festival salary—he was nothing if not parsimonious.
He hoped eventually to captain one of the cross-Channel ferries.
“Fancy that, boyo,” he said to Flynn. “You can come and visit me on the bridge any time you like.”
Herodotus’s ever-changing river would flow on relentlessly, Flynn thought, the tide of history taking all before it.
The good and the evil. The detritus and the treasure.
The truth and the lies. If Lydia was right, there would soon be a new Queen.
A new era. The Festival would be seen as the herald of a new age—the Elizabethan age.
(“Things can only get better,” Flynn said to Evans. “Or worse,” Evans said.)
Flynn suddenly and unexpectedly felt full of vitality.
He might do something useful, he thought.
Train to be a teacher. Or a vet. Perhaps even something heroic—join the fire brigade or the ambulance service and become a man of action rather than this passivity.
His war had been one of captivity and duress.
Of endurance. He had not chosen any of it.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Or road sweeping—why not? He was a man with a child. He was part of the pageant now.
“Memory lane?” Evans asked.
Flynn laughed and said, “No, quite the opposite—the road ahead.”
Flynn kept the plaster dove. He thought it was his only souvenir from the Festival, but some months later he came across another, sequestered at the back of his wallet.
It was the photograph that the man from Seaside had taken at Maud Ogilvie’s behest. (I thought it might be rather nice if we had a photograph of us all together. A record for posterity, as it were.)
“Big smiles now,” the man from Seaside had said. “Say cheese.”
“May I offer a suggestion,” Denholm replied. “We always found in the theatre world that Red Leicester worked rather well for photographs.”
“I would have thought Cheshire would be better,” Maud Ogilvie said. “One has to stretch the lips further.”
“Stilton,” Badger offered.
A good-natured argument followed about the competing merits of different cheeses, the photograph largely forgotten.
“What about Brie?” the man from Seaside suggested, finding himself unwillingly drawn into the discussion.
“Too short, too French,” Denholm said.
(“French?” the Boy queried. “French cheese?”)
“English cheeses are far superior,” Denholm said.
“British,” the Boy amended helpfully.
“No,” Denholm said happily. “I think in this case, Terence, Caerphilly notwithstanding” (said with a little nod to Evans), “we can safely say English.”
“This is ridiculous,” Flynn said to no one in particular (although his silent, partisan vote was for Wensleydale, the cheese of his birthright).
In the end, the man from Seaside grew bored and took the photograph anyway, so that they were all still quibbling when they looked posterity in the face.