As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman

country—but with the terrestrial sphere itself, with the earth, betting the validity of his own particular little complex of prejudiced assumption and inherited value against the safety of my planet.
    And they were all doing it, the retired marshal who once commanded infantry on the Somme, the candidates, the elected ‘representatives of the people’, the ministers, the party secretaries and presidents and prime ministers were all doing it—raving about with torches in a world of paper, so hypnotically intent on their theological absolutes that they were forgetting all about us. And not only about us, but about our fellow lodgers, about cats and lions, dogs and mules, badgers, butterflies and the glistening seals. All vital things had slipped from their minds, through the lattices of their various ideologies. What did they know of the tides, the motion of the sea, the spray-drenched rocksencrusted with tough molluscs, the long, soft beaches along which curl children and the breaking waves? None of it was in their minds when they discussed the world situation and issued their ultimata. Not the human life cycle, not day and night, spring and winter, youth and age, not even that ‘History’ they were so adept at invoking, no, not even history which, God knows, has seen the emergence (and ultimate subsidence) of causes enough for which men have willingly dismembered each other but which has always , at least, been informed by a sense of human continuity . But no human continuity, no future, no past, no long-term view could be inferred from the current pronouncements of our leaders when they reviewed their apocalyptic armaments and confronted their microphones .
    Well then—what was the point? Why did I work in the engraving works? And my real ambition? What about that? Why? There had been a past but there was clearly no future, nothing recognizable, nothing that could be related to either the past or the present, to any of the ways that human beings had learned to live on the earth. The modern world was a vast, mindless machine, the people in the buses, on the ships and in the aeroplanes were as mechanical, as devoid of human understanding, human aims or aspirations, as the great machines themselves. And so were the politicians, not human, but computers into which a given series of statistics were fed and which then formulated perilous abstractions without a single human thought intervening for the assumptions on which they spoke had nothing to do with the constants of human experience .
    Perhaps most thinking people have these moments when the brain, like a powerful machine with a slipping clutch, seems to spin to the verge of disintegration. When I glanced around during that unnerving moment, rocking my pint mug slightly on the counter, I saw Peggy raise her glass of dark Guinness and sip it. I could almost see the lazy,domestic thoughts in her head, so different from my own. Once, something happened in Japan—Peggy sipped her Guinness.
    And a little later, again calm, or in that state of taut equilibrium which is the calm of our age, I slouched away into the Bayswater Road, to meet Selma.
    Who? Selma Rushington, dark girl, while they built the bunkers, and adjusted the instruments and set the timing mechanisms and the damned traffic churned on up Regent Street. The evacuation of the coral isle proceeded smoothly, half an ocean was appropriated, shipping was warned and I met Squadron Leader Rushington, a Whitehall officer who had a dark-haired, sly, laughing daughter called Selma who struck me as being ‘ravers’. The lorries clanked up to the rear of the engraving works and we carted great bulbs of acid, in straw-packed iron cradles, into the stores. Mickey Smith….
    â€˜Mickey Smith, fellow I work with—likes maps.’
    Mickey Smith was part of that November, imperturbable, young (not more than eighteen), laughing….
    â€˜Wooden leg? Got a wooden head, I should