Free The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures by Mike Ashley, Eric Brown (ed) Page B

more and,
paradoxically, for being in the situation where I could give at all.
    I arrived at the
dirigible depot, which was guarded by both black-shirted militia and a division
of the local constabulary, with seconds to spare. The last of the passengers
were crossing the swaying drawbridge on to the gondola, and I just had time to
buy an early edition of the Herald.
    The purser gave me a
resentful look as I proffered my ticket and hurried across the drawbridge to
the Spirit of London. I wondered whether it was my tardiness or the
state of my overcoat that had roused his ire.
    The gondola was only
half-full and I found a window seat with ease. Ever since German planes had
downed the Pride of Benares last year, the public had shied away from
air travel.
    A klaxon sounded.
Hawsers whipped away from capstans on the platform. With a sudden lurch we were
in the air, floating silently over the bomb-sites and the few remaining
tenements standing after the recent blitz.
    Already I longed for the
solitude of my island retreat. The crass advertisements which decorated the
interior of the carriage sickened me with their creators’ assumptions that the
populace might be so easily tempted. Outside, the eye was offered no respite.
The ruin of the city gave way to the slag heaps of the country, with pathetic
stick-figures scratching for coal and whatever growing thing might be stewed in
the pot. Even the air of this benighted land sat heavily upon my chest.
    I opened my notebook and
reread the first lines of the poem I was working on: As I stood at the
blackened gate/ With warring worlds on either hand . . .
    For the next hour I
reworked the line and then, tired, tried to absorb myself in the Herald. War
coverage predominated — the usual exaggerated claims of success, with little
actual analytical reportage of the politics behind the conflict. But what did I
expect, with the newspapers of Great Britain in the strangle-hold of the
capitalists?
    I tossed aside the rag
and pulled from the inside pocket of my coat the letter which was one of the
reasons for my journey south.
    Dear Sir, Ever since
reading your piece on the war and its evil in the New
Statesman, I have considered writing you this letter. A very long while ago now
I was involved in a series of events which became famous after being published
in a book by my master, Dr Samuel Fergusson. You will know this book as Six
Weeks in a Balloon, published in 1863. It is these events about which I wish
to speak to you. Such is the nature of things at the moment — and I am sure I
need not spell out my meaning — that I feel constrained from revealing my
thoughts herein, but if you were able to make the trip to London I would most
gratefully receive you and apprise you of my story.
    Signed, Joe Smith.
    The letter was
intriguing in itself. Why might Joe Smith wish to tell me, a lowly journalist,
about his balloon adventures in Africa? I had read the book — who had not? —
and was aware of it as another piece of Imperialist propaganda, all the more
obnoxious for its xenophobia.
    I was also aware of its
influence on events at the time, and the significance it had played in
exaggerating Anglo-German enmity ever since.
    I was more than
intrigued by the line in his letter, Such is the nature of things at the
moment — and I am sure I need not spell out my meaning — that I feel
constrained from revealing my thoughts herein. What heretical inside story
might the loyal manservant have to tell me of that famous balloon journey taken
nearly seventy years ago?
    I witnessed an ugly
incident as I stepped from the London depot. Night had fallen and with it the
temperature, and I
    was one among hundreds
of citizens who, bundled up in their winter wear, departed the station and
hurried into Baker Street. Most were so intent on thoughts of home that they
failed to notice the fracas across the street, either that or they effected not
to notice.
    Six militiamen had
arrested a pamphleteer and were giving