The Hopkins Manuscript Read online

  R. C. Sherriff

  * * *

  THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

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  THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT

  R. C. Sherriff was born in 1896 and worked as an insurance clerk after leaving school. He joined the army shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, and from 1917 served as a captain in the East Surrey regiment. He saw action at the battles of Vimy and Loos and was severely wounded at Ypres. After the war, he returned to his desk job and spent ten years as a claims adjuster. It was an interest in amateur theatricals which led him to try his hand at writing. His most famous play, Journey’s End, was based on his letters home from the trenches and was initially rejected by many theatre managements. In December 1928, it was given a single performance by the Incorporated Stage Society, with a young Laurence Olivier in the lead role. The play’s enormous subsequent success enabled Sherriff to become a full-time writer. In his mid-thirties he fulfilled a long-held dream and went to Oxford to study history, but gave up his degree when he was invited to write scripts for Hollywood. His screenplays include The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1933) and The Dam Busters (1955), while his best novels include The Fortnight in September (1931) and The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). He spent most of his life living quietly with his mother in Esher in Surrey; his autobiography, No Leading Lady, appeared in 1968. Sherriff died in 1975.

  Note

  Every character in this book is entirely fictitious and no reference whatever is intended to any living person.

  Foreword

  (From The Imperial Research Press, Addis Ababa)

  When the Royal Society of Abyssinia discovered ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ two years ago in the ruins of Notting Hill it was hoped that some valuable light would at last be thrown upon the final, tragic days of London.

  But a careful study of the manuscript has proved these hopes to have been raised in vain. Edgar Hopkins, its author, was a man of such unquenchable self-esteem and limited vision that his narrative becomes almost valueless to the scientist and historian, and is scarcely mentioned in the Royal Society’s massive and masterly ‘Investigations into the Dead Civilisations of Western Europe’.

  But despite all its shortcomings, ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ possesses one unique feature. It is the only personal day-by-day record yet discovered that gives us the intimate feelings of an Englishman during the days of the Cataclysm. Our ignorance concerning the History of England has caused much comment in recent scientific debates, but it should be remembered that for a hundred years after the collapse of the ‘Western Civilisation’ the peoples of the reborn nations of the East indulged in an orgy of senseless destruction of everything that existed in their own countries to remind them of the days when they lived in servitude to the ‘white man’. Every printed book, every vestige of art surviving from Western Europe, was systematically hunted out and destroyed. The damp climate of England completed this work of destruction in the seven hundred years that followed, and the tragedy of our revival of interest in the long past nations of Europe is that it has come too late. Our knowledge of England may rest for ever upon such inadequate fragments as ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ that have survived by a miracle of chance.

  A word may be said here concerning the romance of its discovery.

  The mainland of Western Europe, once inhabited by the French, Germans, Italians and Spanish, has long since been colonised, and every vestige of its past civilisation swept away. In the Island of Great Britain alone there remained some hope of recovering evidence to reconstruct the lost glory of the ‘white man’.

  The damp British climate has not attracted the peoples of the East, and for nearly a thousand years, since its last wretched inhabitants starved to death amidst the ruins of their once noble cities, the Island has remained a deserted, ghost-haunted waste – its towns and villages buried ever deeper beneath encroaching forest and swamp.

  The difficulties facing the pioneer expedition of the Royal Society of Abyssinia were sufficient to discourage the most ardent explorer and it is not surprising that it returned almost empty-handed.

  The English recorded their lives and achievements upon paper so flimsy that every vestige has perished in the perpetual dampness of the Island, and their inscriptions upon metal and stone are of the poorest quality.

  An extremely rusted iron tablet was found twelve miles south-west of London. Its inscription has been deciphered by Dr Shangul of Aduwa University as ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS’ and it is now lodged in the Royal Collection at Addis Ababa.

  The rectangular column of stone inscribed ‘PECKHAM 3 MILES’ can be seen in the Imperial Museum of Afghanistan.

  The only other inscription found in England raised great hopes when first discovered. It had many names engraved upon it, but it proved to be the greatest disappointment of all. The tablet, which commemorates the opening of a swimming bath in North London, records in detail the names of the Borough Council, the architect and the sanitary engineer and omits the name of the ruling monarch and Prime Minister – an example of urban vain-glory that appals the modern mind.

  ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ was discovered by a pure stroke of chance. While cutting brushwood for the fires lit by the expedition every night to protect themselves against the packs of wild dogs that roam the Island, a young scientist discovered a much-decayed wall of red brick that collapsed under pressure, revealing in a recess a small vacuum flask. The manuscript within it had survived where millions of books, exposed to the climate, had perished.

  And so ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ comes to us – a thin, lonely cry of anguish from the gathering darkness of dying England – infinitely pathetic in the pitiful little conceits and self-esteem of its author. It raises the shadows from the dead limbs of a once powerful nation as the glow of a match might dispel the darkness from the desert of Sahara, and yet it is all that we have – all that we may ever have to remind us of a people that once lived in glory.

  We know that Julius Caesar invaded Britain, for this is recorded upon imperishable stone in Italy, but what happened after the invasion of Julius Caesar remains a mystery that our men of science are never likely to solve.

  This popular edition of ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ is published exactly as it was written, but a fully annotated edition by that brilliant scholar of English, Dr Shangul of Aduwa University, who has corrected all the author’s grammatical mistakes, has been published by the Royal Society of Abyssinia.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am writing by the light of a piece of string which I have pushed through a fragment of bacon fat and arranged in an egg-cup. I shall write by night, partly because I can no longer sleep through these ghastly, moonless chasms, and partly because by day I must search for food
, and the days are short.

  It is hard to believe that this is Notting Hill, and the inky, silent void beneath me is London. There was a time when I could see a million lights from this window, with the Bayswater Road and Oxford Street piercing the heart of London like a blazing, jewelled sword. There was a time when the roar of the traffic would come up to this window like a lulling sea beneath a dying storm, but now I seem to be suspended in this broken wooden chair between unheavenly darkness and unearthly silence.

  An owl was hooting just now in Ladbroke Square, but it stopped abruptly as if suddenly ashamed, like a man who has laughed in a cathedral.

  Earlier this evening I saw a few fitful little yellow lights beneath me – flickering and disappearing as people in their ruined houses tinkered with their gimcrack home-made lamps and gave them up in despair. Only a few still try to fight these horrible black nights with their feeble home-made lanterns. The majority have turned into savages and crawl into their sleeping-holes at sunset, and lie there in a kind of stupor until dawn.

  I wonder what they think about as they lie there – for most of them are quite alone and none of us has any hope. We are all just waiting for the end.

  A man I met yesterday in Kensington Gardens as I was drawing my bucket of water told me that there were only seven hundred people alive in London now, and every one of us can own a streetful of houses if we want them.

  An old lady who used to live opposite me at No. 10 Notting Hill Crescent has gone to live in the National Gallery. She heard that it was empty, and wanted to gratify her love of art and lust for possession during the last days that remain to her.

  I went to tea with her today. She lives upon the pigeons that fall dead from the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. She cooks them over a fire which she keeps blazing with Dutch masterpieces upon the stone floor of the entrance hall. She dislikes Dutch masterpieces and enjoys the fire as much as the pigeons.

  After tea she took me around the galleries to show me her collection of Turners, Constables and Gainsboroughs. She had grown tired of one or two and tore them down for her fire that evening. She gave me a little medieval panel worth £5,000. I accepted it as politeness suggested, but threw it away upon my walk home. Nobody disputes her possession and I am glad there is one happy soul in this dying city.

  But there is no time for anecdote. I must write my story, plainly and simply, while I have the strength, and sufficient light to see by.

  The idea of writing my story has given me quite a lot of happiness. I alone, of all these hopeless people, shall die with the knowledge that I leave something behind that may one day be found and valued as highly as the Rosetta Stone or the priceless manuscripts of Egypt.

  In those happy, peaceful days before the Cataclysm I spent much time in searching for the relics of people who lived before history began. History has ended now, but one day it may begin again – one day my story may be found and I shall stand amongst the immortals. Tacitus, Ptolemy and the Venerable Bede produced work that lit the dark ages of the past. My story may be the solitary torch that lights the dark age that followed the Cataclysm, for when it is finished I shall screw it tightly in my thermos flask and conceal it behind the bricks of my fireplace.

  I am a bachelor, aged fifty-three. My name is Edgar Hopkins and I come of an old and honourable family of Worcestershire squires. The fortunes of my family have declined somewhat in recent years, and in 1912 my father sold our old family estate at Stoatcastle to the Victrix Sand and Gravel Company and retired to Chislehurst.

  I was educated at Winchester and Jesus College, Cambridge. Upon taking my degree of Bachelor of Arts I accepted the position of assistant arithmetic master to Portsea Grammar School, a post which I held, I think, with distinction for twenty-three years until the death of my father at last provided me with a small but sufficient legacy upon which to retire.

  I have always taken the keenest interest in poultry breeding. For three successive years I carried off first prize for Rhode Island Pullets at the Portsea Poultry Show, and my brochure upon ‘The Successful Breeding of the Domestic Fowl’ was very favourably reviewed in the Poultry Gazette. A carping and small-minded criticism in Our Feathered Friends did not dismay or surprise me, for jealousy is unfortunately as rampant amongst poultry breeders as it is amongst metallurgists, in whose grudging world I also, I might say, ranked as an expert.

  My retirement afforded me the opportunity of gratifying my interest in poultry breeding to a wider extent. In the summer of 1940 I purchased a small but charming estate upon the outskirts of the village of Beadle in Hampshire. It was known as Beech Knoll and consisted of a nice little house upon the summit of a small hill 580 feet above sea-level (a fact to which I owe my life). The terraced gardens, rich in old hollies and yews, sloped pleasantly down to a well-drained, sheltered meadow of five acres – a veritable paradise for poultry.

  I brought my best hens from Portsea, secured six excellent cockerels from a good breeding farm in Kent, and settled down to a life of simple but vigorous purpose.

  Nature has provided me with a happy gift for friendship, a witty but not unkind tongue and, I think, a restful, pleasant personality. I soon became well acquainted with my neighbours, from whom I selected Dr Perceval and Colonel John Harrison as my most intimate friends. I spent many happy evenings with these two gentlemen, discussing my poultry until long past midnight, and it was a great regret to me when both of them decided to go and live farther away.

  But before he left, Dr Perceval engaged my interest in a hobby which was destined to play a remarkable part in my life, and without which I should never have gained the knowledge and authority to write this story.

  Dr Perceval was a keen amateur astronomer, and had constructed a small observatory in the summerhouse of his garden. My eager imagination was quickly stimulated by my first glimpse of the moon through his magnificent telescope. I was fascinated by that brilliant, crater-pitted little world of rock-strewn silence, and I spent many hours with my eye fixed to the telescope as the old doctor patiently explained to me those far-off mountains and awe-inspiring chasms.

  Within a few months I became, through the doctor’s influence, an associate member of the British Lunar Society – a learned body devoted entirely to the study of the moon.

  The Society’s headquarters were at 76 Barbara Street, Covent Garden, and consisted of the whole top floor. There was a large lecture-room, a small office for the Secretary and a refreshment-room that quickly became famous for its sandwiches composed of chicken supplied from my estate.

  On the second Tuesday of every month we met to hear a paper read by a distinguished visitor or member of the society. A stimulating debate would follow, and the evening would close with a pleasant, informal adjournment for coffee and sandwiches in the anteroom. So easy and happy was this final half-hour of the evening that the distinguished visitor would frequently unbend and almost become one of us. Upon one occasion I engaged Professor Rolleston-Mills of Greenwich Observatory in conversation for nearly twenty minutes. I explained to him that the unusual whiteness of the chicken meat in the sandwiches and their exceptionally delicate flavour was due to a deliberate inbreeding of a selected strain of Wyandotte. We had a hearty laugh when he described me as a ‘man of many parts’!

  This monthly meeting of the British Lunar Society became the most looked-forward-to event of my peaceful life. Upon the second Tuesday of each month I would rise especially early, complete the necessary attentions to my chickens as quickly as possible, snatch a hasty lunch and catch the 2.14 train for London.

  This train reached Waterloo at 4.23 and gave me the opportunity of attending a cinema theatre before our meeting began at 6.30. We usually departed at about eight o’clock, and there was time for me to dine quietly at a pleasant little Soho restaurant before my train left for home at 9.52.

  It gave me a ‘night out’ which I enjoyed the more because I had become rather a ‘country cousin’ in the past few years, and I never failed to return home with a
sense of mental well-being.

  I am afraid old Police Constable Wilson used to look askance at me as I strutted up Burntash Lane towards my home at well past midnight, and perhaps it is an understandable vanity that made me cock my hat at a jaunty angle and swing my umbrella with a touch of abandon as I wished him goodnight.

  I not only gained stimulating mental refreshment from my monthly visit to the British Lunar Society: I also secured a new respect from the ‘locals’ by being ‘a bit of a lad’!

  My story really begins upon a summer evening, seven years ago. Can it only be seven years? It seems an eternity, but careful calculation proves it to be true. Even the words ‘summer evening’ come haltingly from the pen and look strange upon paper in a world from which summer evenings have long since sped.

  There are no evenings – no twilight in a land from which the sun plunges in one ghastly, blood-red torrent. It is burning yellow day – then suddenly black, utter night.

  I remember, upon that summer evening, that I had walked into the village after tea to see Mr Flidale, the carrier. I had been to discuss with him the transport of my three outstanding Wyandotte cockerels to the Brigtree Poultry Show, and it was arranged that he should collect them next evening after sundown. It is my firm belief that a finely trained domestic bird should never be transported except at night, when its drowsy condition prevents that undue excitement and concern which actuates so seriously against a bird in a highly-strung condition, and prevents it from looking its best next morning.

  As I reached the turn of the lane upon my homeward journey, I saw Mr Barlow, our village postman, about to enter my gate. It was a steep climb up the path to my front door, and as Mr Barlow was an elderly man I called out to him that I would take the letters myself and save him unnecessary exhaustion.

  Mr Barlow was grateful, and we stood for a few moments, chatting by the gate in the mellow light of the sunset.