Penelope Gilliatt - One By One

[dem bones]

Penelope Gilliatt - One By One (Panther, 1967)

Sid Sutton

Blurb:
A CITY TORN APART BY MADNESS, FEAR, SAVAGERY AND DISILLUSION ...

300 years after the Black Death, London is once again an isolated, panic-stricken city of the dying and the dead .... in the grip of a fearsome plague that has killed 10,000 people by the third week of August.

The boffins are baffled. The PM returns from his grouse moors ...

Theatres and cinemas close; the football pools continue by ballot .. .

Afraid of infection, men stop making love to their wives. Out-of-work prostitutes turn to collecting corpses ...

BUT MOST EXTRAORDINARY OF ALL IS WHAT HAPPENS TO JOE AND POLLY, AN ORDINARY HAPPILY MARRIED COUPLE, DURING THAT APOCALYPTIC SUMMER OF CLEAR BLUE SKIES AND ROTTING FLESH

-"Almost uncannily readable" - Sunday Telegraph

Early days yet, but two chapters down and this is already showing signs of living up to that rather glorious blurb. Joe Talbot, veterinary surgeon has been volunteering his services at the local hospital and finds himself drawn into the hush-hush team researching the worst plague to hit London since the Black Death. The first recorded victim, a sixty year old Jewish woman, seemingly contracted the disease at her Grandmother's funeral in Golders Green and the symptoms are appalling. "She ran a temperature for three days and began to stumble like a spastic if she tried to walk. The thing that confused and upset the family was that, though she was obviously in pain, she behaved as though she had had too much to drink, squinting suspiciously .... and blurting out accusations in the insulated way that is peculiar to alcoholics ... On her last day of life .... terrible incantations and Oedipal obscenities rang through the flat." The media and the unpopular Government do their best to play down the threat but with fatalities escalating and the capital fast grinding to a halt, people tend to suspect that something fishy is going on. Joe, who knows more than most, is in anguish; the boffins no closer to finding a vaccine and there's his poor wife, Polly, heavily pregnant with their first child ...

[dem bones]

"Bodies. Corpses. The flesh of London, my sentimental darling. You and me. But not together, which is what you'd like. They'll have us one by one."

The emergency ward runs beneath a street in the East End of London, "improvised out of an underground causeway that had once been a V. D. clinic." The crisis is such that Joe, a vet by profession, is now among the most indispensable key workers, working impossibly lengthy shifts in casualty. The strain is driving him out of his mind. Joe shields his wife from the worst of it, but one day, unable to take another hour cooped up indoors, Polly drives through the city to meet him from work. Rubbish strewn everywhere. Corpses dumped in the street. A cop beating away a seemingly inebriated man with far more force than necessary.

An infant riding a bicycle drops dead in the street before her.

On returning home, the Talbots surprise a burglar as he makes off with their TV. As they give chase, the trio are set upon by a swarm of angry bees. The robber, a jovial Indian named Mukkerji, rescues the couple who, in the spirit of the hour, invite him in for a drink while Joe dresses his wounds. Two days later, Mukkerji dies of the virus.

Joe is required to live in at the hospital. He suggests that Polly go stay with his ailing mother in Sussex, and return once she's had their child. At least she'll be safe there ...

Polly obediently packs a bag and drives off, taking Alf, the family cat with her. Things are going to plan until she hits East Grinstead.

"A middle-aged man with a red face rode up towards her on a horse and shouted something she couldn't understand. Behind him there were rows of people shaking their fists and grimacing, making the sort of faces that a crowd of women make at a prostitute on her way to a court case. A few of the men carried guns, and some of them were waving placards saying 'God will change His mind if men change their hearts' and 'Sussex wants no murderers.' Commuters in weekend clothes were out for blood. Their wives, dressed for Tory conferences, carried garden rakes and evil-looking pikes. Across the road they had put up a barrier rather like the ones there used to be around the coast of England during the war, made of white concrete cylinders and iron bars that were wired together to point upwards like a line of rifle butts .....

"Get back to London."

The Queen dutifully falls pregnant, but when news of the impending royal birth fails to provoke street parties, the media must dredge up a superior feel-good story to boost morale. Then some fool editor learns of a vet working as an orderly at the East London field hospital .....

[TBC; very much a novel for the hour]

[dem bones]

"People aren't dying nobly, they're dying like drunk pigs."

Polly, minus car and all but her purse and the clothes she stands in, escapes the mob, eventually arrives in Eastbourne and the home of her despicable mother-in-law. Alf, alas, is not so .... fortunate.

Joe's refusal to co-operate with the press is as a red rag to a bull. Who does this Talbot think he is? He'd be nothing without them! Both "quality" press and the red top prepare a hatchet-job. Somebody leaks the story of a public indecency charge arising from his homosexual relationship with a pal at Public School (his mother has despised him as something much less than a man ever since. Polly convincingly argues the opposite. One By One is, ultimately, a cry for tolerance). Joe is duly pilloried in the press and told by the hospital that his are services are no longer required.

We knew from the off that the story of Joe and Polly would not end well, it was only a question of what form the tragedy would take.

A very sad 150 pager.

[helrunar]

Prophetic indeed.

H.