The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (9 page)

I arrived in Glasgow from the west coast on the 8th of February, 1930, and made my way to the British Dirigible Company depot on Sauchiehall Street, intending to catch the noon flight for London.

It was a short walk from the bus station, but I witnessed much poverty and degradation on the way. Entire families made their homes on the pavement, and my progress was impeded by the incessant importuning of child-beggars. I gave them what little change I had in the pocket of my threadbare overcoat, and in doing so experienced a curious, double-edged guilt. I felt guilty for being unable to give 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 him a beating for his troubles. At one point the man fell to the ground, and a militiaman stamped upon his face, again and again. I made to cross the road, if not to intervene physically, then to register my vocal protest, when I felt a hand grip my upper arm like a tourniquet.

“Caution, Comrade. There’s nothing you can do but get yourself arrested, and we need men with conscience for the coming fight.” And before I could catch a glance at my interlocutor, he thrust a pamphlet into my hand and became one with the flowing commuters.

The militiamen were carrying their victim, dripping blood now, to a waiting black Mariah. I stood, buffeted by the crowd, and glanced at the pamphlet.
Revolution!
It proclaimed:
Workers must Unite . . .

The pamphlet was the crude propaganda of the British Communist Party, and I dropped the paper and hurried south through the darkened London streets.

As I walked, I despaired at the plight of my country, gripped as it was between rapacious capitalists on one hand and on the other the heedless lackeys of Stalinist Russia.

I had given no thought to Smith’s Kensington address when I received his letter. Now, as I turned into the wide, affluent street and paused outside the three-storey Georgian town house, I wondered for the first time how Fergusson’s manservant had found himself elevated to such palatial accommodation. He would be well past retirement age now, and so presumably was not still ‘in service’. My curiosity was piqued.

The bell was answered by a middle-aged housekeeper who, when I introduced myself, said that Mr Smith was expecting me.

I was escorted up a flight of wide stairs to a mahogany door on the first floor. I must have looked out of place, in my stained overcoat and farm boots, amid such bourgeois decadence.

The housekeeper opened the door, announced me, and invited me to enter.

After the February chill of London, the heat of a blazing log fire hit me in a wave. The second thing that struck me was what filled the room. Maps and navigational charts covered all four walls, between bookshelves stocked with bound journals and atlases. Occasional tables and bureaux held globes and scale models of balloons and dirigibles.

Last of all I noticed my host, who rose from an armchair beside the fire and advanced with a smile and an outstretched hand.

Joe Smith, the trustworthy servant of Dr Samuel Fergusson, who more than once risked his life for that of his master — and how I had scoffed at that upon reading the book in my youth! — was a short, square, thickset man of ninety-five, but with the vigour of someone thirty years his junior.

“Glad you could make it, sir!” he beamed. “Can I get you a drink?”

“A whisky — and please, call me George,” I said, a request he later ignored.

He poured me a whisky. Joe Smith’s speech, I noted, was true to his working class roots. I had feared from the tone of his letter that I might find someone affecting the mannerisms of the class he had spent so much of his life serving.

Glass in hand, I admired the room, or rather the models of balloons, dirigibles, and all manner of airships that filled it.

Joe stood beside me, hardly reaching my shoulder. “Quite a collection,” I murmured.

He smiled. “Dr Fergusson’s,” he said, “like everything else in the house. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of anything when he passed on.”

I recalled the extended news coverage of Dr Samuel Fergusson’s death, of heart failure at the age of eighty, some twenty years ago. I had not mourned his passing.

“I still find it hard to think that he won’t walk through the door at dinner-time and demand his first whisky of the evening.”

“Dr Fergusson left the house to you?” I asked.

“The house and everything in it, as well as almost half his fortune.”

“And you couldn’t bring yourself to move out?”

He smiled, and murmured something about this being his home.

I was overcome by the urge to tell the feisty retainer that his loyalty was no more than a Pavlovian response to his extended slavery. I managed to hold my tongue.

Joe Smith talked me through the collection of flying machines, each replica lovingly reproduced in the tiniest detail.

The journalist in me, recalling my summons here, took over. “Have you any doubt at all that the technological progress in the seventies and eighties, the development of airships from balloons to navigable dirigibles, was largely down to the popularity of Fergusson’s book?”

“No doubt about it at all!” Joe Smith said. “You should have seen all the hullabaloo after the book was published! Of course, you’re too young to have been around then. My word, the commotion! The house was besieged by pressmen and well-wishers and all! What a sight! And the lectures! Dr Fergusson was booked up two years solid with appointments at this institute and that, all the way from Brighton to Aberdeen.”

We took our seats before the roaring fire, and Joe Smith went on, “And scientists and inventors — they beat a path to Dr Fergusson’s door. Later he even sank some of his own money into a company manufacturing the early steerable balloons.”

I shook my head. “All from the publication of a single book,” I said, hoping to direct Joe back to the reason for his summons.

My words seemed to have the desired effect. He reached out to a bookshelf beside his armchair and withdrew a calf-bound volume of
Six Weeks in a Balloon.

I said, “Do you agree that what Fergusson wrote also contributed to the deterioration in relations between Germany and Britain at the time . . . ?” And in consequence, though I did not add this, to the present chaotic state of world affairs?

Joe had been leafing through the volume, a reminiscent smile playing on his lips, and he looked up at me almost sadly.

“That is true, sir. Little did I realize at the time that the adventure of crossing Africa might have such far-reaching consequences.” He paused. “Of course, if the telling of our momentous journey had concentrated
only
on our crossing, then the world might not now be at war.”

I took the book from him and leafed through the pages, stopping at Chapter Seventeen:
The Germans Attack
—
Kennedy Injured
—
Treachery!
—
A Close Shave
—
We Escape the Hun!

A colour plate showed the
Victoria,
and its intrepid crew of Dr Samuel Fergusson, his friend Dick Kennedy, and loyal manservant Joe, under attack from German guns.

I wondered if chapter seventeen, and a later account of German bellicosity in chapter twenty-five, might have been the most incendiary words ever written on the subject of Anglo-German relations.

“You should have been around to witness the scenes, sir! The cabinet was recalled, if I remember rightly. The German ambassador to London was summoned to Downing Street.”

“But the Germans denied all responsibility,” I said. “They even claimed that they didn’t have troops in that part of Africa.”

Joe looked at me, his gaze steady. At last he nodded. “And they were right, sir.”

I lay my whisky aside. “What?”

Joe cleared his throat. “That, sir, is what I wanted to see you about. I have had it on my conscience for a long time now.” He laughed to himself, but without humour. “Can you imagine what it has been like, to live with the knowledge of the terrible lie for almost seventy years?”

“The terrible lie . . .” I repeated.

“We crossed Africa, sir, from Zanzibar to Senegal, and in all that time we came upon but one serious attack, and that by the Arabs in the southern Sahara.”

“But chapter seventeen, all the detail . . .”

“All lies, sir. The Germans did not have an expeditionary force on the banks of the Nile, still less did they attack us.”

“And chapter twenty-five? Where Fergusson reported watching a platoon of German infantry attack a Berber encampment, and then turn their attack upon the
Victoria . . .”

“Again, sir, a fabrication, inserted into the book with the express intention of inflaming nationalistic passions and creating enmity against the German state.”

“It certainly worked,” I murmured. As a direct result of the passion provoked by German hostility reported in
Six Weeks in a Balloon,
and subsequent press reports of German atrocities in the continent, British positions in Western Africa were strengthened. This precipitated the strained relations between the two nations for the rest of the 1800s, which in turn brought about the eventual war, which began in 1908 and had been going on ever since.

Joe Smith rose and crossed the room to a small Sheraton bureau, from which he withdrew a sheath of documents. He carried them back to the fire and laid his cargo upon the table.

“The original manuscript of
Six Weeks in a Balloon,
sir, the first typescript, and the second script which included the inserted fictional chapters. I discovered these among my master’s papers shortly after his death.”

I picked up the hand-written manuscript and turned a couple of pages. I looked up at Joe. “But they’re in French.”

Joe nodded. “Dr Fergusson was acquainted with a French writer at the time, one Jules Verne, who he employed to write up a rough account of our adventures.”

I shook my head. “I’m not aware of the name.”

“Verne wrote three or four science-based adventure stories for boys, before his death from typhoid in 1870.”