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Apocalypse next
Alice Thomas Ellis
What a bloody dreadful year, and it isn't over yet — we still have two and a half months and Christmas to get through. As disaster follows on the heels of disaster I ask myself, whatever next? Apocalypse? The four horsemen have certainly been getting around a lot recently. Apart from the more cosmic cataclysms, most of my friends are suffering sadness and dismay for reasons of their own. The first-born speculates that it may all be due to the
imminence of Halley's comet, a notorious trouble-bringer. Last year we went to a sort of celebration of the beastly thing in a 15th-century vault under the Ministry of Defence where we were told to pronounce it Horley's comet — surely a minor point in view of its apparently matchless malefi- cence.
On the other hand I am told there is evidence to suggest that (apart from a couple of world wars) we in this country have enjoyed more than a century of unprecedented civil peace and orderliness and things are now getting back to normal. It is not so long after all since no one dared venture off Regent Street into the stews flanking it for fear of being instantly murdered. Someone has a book of re- miniscences by the Revd T. Mozley MA, Cardinal Newman's brother-in-law, pub- lished in 1885, comparing England as it was then with England after the Napoleonic wars. Everything had gone remarkably quiet, he says, while in his younger days . . there was heard everywhere and at all times the voice of lamentation and passion, not always from the young, not always even from the very poor. In towns and villages, in streets and in houses, in nurser- ies and in schools, and even on the road, there were heard continually screams, pro- longed wailings, indignant remonstrances, and angry altercations, as if the earth were full of violence, and the hearts of fathers were set against their children, and the hearts of children against their fathers. But . . . these were not all children who brawled or lamented in the open air, and in the midday, filling the air with their grie- vances, and resolved, as they could not be happy themselves, none else should be.' Now what was all that about? I find it entirely fascinating that this phlegmatic, supposedly inhibited people, stiff-upper- lipped and keeping themselves to them- selves, were, only 150 years ago, yelling their heads off in public places. The Revd T. Mozley couldn't figure it out either but leaves it to 'almost any octogenarian to say whether it be not a true account of England as it was sixty or seventy years ago'.
Mind you, when I was at art school in Liverpool it was pretty noisy. The women known as 'Mary Ellens' were not averse to making their opinions known, and one cry, emanating from the alley behind Canning Street, still rings in my ears, `Lemme go and I'll give you your pound back.' But then it has been said, and I agree, that Liverpool is the least English of all cities in this green and pleasant land. In those days, rather depending on the weather, we would sometimes dash out to intervene and usually came to no harm.
Only ten years ago, doing the shopping in Camden Town I bumped into a stall- holder brandishing a chicken-gutting knife in hot pursuit of a man who had caused offence. I said, 'I wouldn't do that, if I were you, you might hurt him,' and he stopped and returned, muttering, to his stall. Would it were always so simple. Both the eldest son and our neighbour Gwynne have recently felt it necessary to interfere on finding a man kicking a woman lying on the ground. Luckily the men were much too drunk to do anything more than put the boot in their lady-friends, but I don't think I should have been so bold as to tick them off. Not any more.
Janet was standing outside the house the other afternoon while a well-dressed young couple chatted in what seemed like amity beside the pillar box across the road. Suddenly the boy swiped the girl twice round the head, knocking her into the gutter. Then — as seems to be the present mode — he took a running jump at her and kicked her in the ribs. Janet was so amazed she just stood there gawking, rather wait- ing for the credits to roll, the music to swell and the scene to diminish to a dot before disappearing. Perhaps it isn't the comet. Perhaps it's television.
PS. I have just remembered that some idiots have shot, or are planning to shoot, a missile through the comet's tail. This does seem to me to be most ill-advised. Why irritate it further?
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