Charles Snow - Last Things

Yet that wasn’t a consolation, as I walked with Martin in the chilly afternoon.

‘I’m not certain’, Martin was saying, after a period in which we had each been brooding, ‘that what I did (he meant, his resignation) was right. If you think of what has happened, it wasn’t.’

‘You couldn’t have predicted that.’

‘There is not much excuse for being wrong.’

It was true, we had all been wrong. We had foreseen that if men made nuclear bombs they would use them. There would be the slaughter of many millions. We shouldn’t escape a thermonuclear war. It was because he couldn’t accept his share of that responsibility that Martin abdicated. As it turned out, what we expected was the opposite of the truth. We shouldn’t have believed it, but an equilibrium had set in. It might be an unstable peace, but it had been peace for over twenty years. By this time, we were afraid of other fates, but not of major war.

So the most quixotic action of Martin’s life looked, in retrospect, like a bad guess.

I said: ‘Perhaps it helps the rest of us if one or two people show they don’t approve of mass annihilation.’

‘I wonder.’

He had been right about Hiroshima, I said. We got hardened to killing with astonishing speed: it was one of the horrifying features of the human animal.

‘I dare say’, Martin remarked, ‘that you and I have become hardened too, don’t you think?’

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘You know, this business that Charles is kicking about, there was a time when I couldn’t have taken it, could you?’

‘Most people can take anything. Not many kick.’

‘Perhaps that will be a comfort to him some day,’ Martin said.

‘It’s the only one he’s likely to get.’

What was to be done? ‘You could do more harm than good,’ said Martin, thinking of his own attempts to guide Pat, who put up no resistance and then found some new manoeuvre. With Charles it would be a mistake to try anything remotely subtle: he wasn’t labile as Pat was, but he was hard to take in. The only way was to be direct. We arranged that I should write him a letter, saying that this gossip had reached me, and telling him he ought to be aware of the Official Secrets Act. Then Martin, back in Cambridge, would ask him round. They were on good terms, it would be easier, and conceivably more effective for Martin to talk to him than for me.

The pavilion bell was clanging, and Martin showed a disposition to return to the game. I delayed him, having something else to ask.

‘Your information,’ I said. ‘How did you get it? You haven’t told me–’

He hesitated.

‘Everything is in confidence, you needn’t worry,’ I told him, playing a family joke, that he was so secretive that he didn’t like telling one the time.

He returned the gibe.

‘Within these four walls,’ he said, waving a hand towards the bare expanse, mimicking a colleague of ours long since retired.

‘Well then,’ he went on, ‘it was through Nina.’

I exclaimed, and recalled some talk about attachments.

‘From the young man Bestwick, I suppose?’

‘I think not.’

Martin’s reply, unusually brusque, sounded as though he didn’t favour Bestwick.

I said: ‘I have a lot of use for him, you oughtn’t to write him off–’

‘I’m not writing him off. I rather wish that it did come from him. But it was from someone else.’

‘Why did she tell you?’

‘I fancy she was trying to protect him.’

‘Not Charles, of course?’ She was fond of her cousin, but they had never been close.

‘Oh no.’

It seemed that Martin was not certain whom she was protecting. That afternoon, I couldn’t identify the name.

But I could identify the way secrets leaked. Just as they got hold of news about Porton, so they had let out their own news. There was a certain perverse symmetry about it. Particularly as Nina was the channel, one of the most trustworthy of girls.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this mustn’t go any further.’

‘Nina told me that.’ Martin smiled. ‘Just to make certain, I told her the same.’

I didn’t like what I had to say next.

‘You’d better impress on her that she mustn’t tell her brother.’ That was the nearest I could go to impressing on Martin that he mustn’t tell his son. It was bitter to have to say anything, but after the disclosures of last year I dared not take a risk.

Martin said, without expression: ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. You needn’t worry, he won’t be told.’

THE results of our communication with Charles were not dramatic. To me he wrote a civil and affectionate answer, saying that since he had now studied the Official Secrets Act, there was some danger that he would get mixed up and include it in his papers in the Mays: while Martin reported over the telephone that Charles had in conversation been completely sensible, but neither admitted nor denied that the rumour was correct. ‘If he is considering anything,’ Martin said, ‘then he’s got it worked out every step of the way.’ Which had been true of Martin himself, in his days of action.

With that I could do nothing but leave it. There were some disturbances at London colleges throughout May, but they did not amount to much more than shouting in the streets and in the quadrangle at King’s. I paid them very little attention, since I still knew nothing of any link between student risings and this warning about Charles. In the same spirit, when the major rising actually started, in the first week in June – at the end of the Cambridge, but not the London, term – I watched the film shots on television with a detached interest, not much more involved than if these events had been taking place in Stockholm or Warsaw.

Which, in everything but language, they might have been. The students, and especially the students milling in the streets, looked as international as airports. Hair, dress, expressions, slogans, pop music – as well as the same hatreds and the same hopes – had broken across frontiers like nothing else in the century. Watching these spectacles, I thought the only local difference was that the police weren’t using shields. This was the most international activity I had ever seen.

Pictures of the principal, students at each shoulder, being interviewed on the pavement. Yes, he had been requested not to enter his office. Requested? No reply. Communiqué that night from the Students’ Headquarters, Principal’s Office .

Messages of support from Essex, Oxford, Sussex, Cambridge. That conveyed nothing to me. If I had known, I might have reflected that the sight of young men and girls fighting in a porter’s lodge, swearing like George Passant in a rage, some of them being frogmarched by policemen, seemed some distance away from quiet conferences in the boudoir-study at Chester Row, a dozen heads round the table, talking in the low unassertive voices that were common form, refreshed by some maidenly coffee or Coca Cola. It was as long a distance as from any staff headquarters to the front line.

For Margaret, who had taken part in ‘demos’ in her youth, and for me, who had seen the street mobs in Germany, the sight of violence wasn’t pretty. Maybe it wasn’t to some of the planners. That I didn’t know and, since I was uninterested, didn’t think about. But I did have a passing thought that there were organising minds behind it.

Anyone who had spent half an hour inside a political movement would have realised that. There was a fair amount of chaos. Some allies, including Muslim liberators and a free-drugs party, must have been an embarrassment. There was some violence which didn’t appear premeditated. But too many contingents arrived at what seemed the right time. Too many squads (the serious invaders, as opposed to the irregulars, seemed to work in platoons of round about a dozen) knew what to do. College porters, secretaries, staff, were picked up, led out, put gently enough into cars, all too quickly and smoothly to be true. True, that is, in terms of the student manifestoes, or what we heard on the news or on discussion programmes from Olly himself.