"And they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.'"
-Genesis 11:3
If he really focused sometimes Tom could remember the busy London of his childhood, but that London was long dead. What with the war, the plagues, the starvation, and the camps the city had slumped from a bustling new Rome to a city of ghosts. Tom hadn't seen anyone on his morning walk, even with his eyes drifting around restlessly, checking to see if any of the Ministry of Work's men were nearby - couldn't be caught idling these days, or it would be off to the camps. There wasn't much work for journalists anymore, not for those not at the Ministry of Information that was, and once he'd finished that morning's work he had ambled out the house - service medal pinned proudly to his chest -and into the cold, smog filled air of late morning London.
He whistled an old tune - Jerusalem had they called it? - to himself and the breeze caught the notes as they echoed off the cramped walls of the ruined houses all around. London was nothing but so much rubble... when the huddling masses of Europe, and England itself, had to be fed what government could afford to rebuild the wreckage of the East End? Besides that there was no one to live there anymore anyway, and no one who would want to when the alternative was living in the brutally modern concrete "Workers' Towers" reaching up to touch heaven. The country was rising from its stupor and reaching towards the future, whilst these houses lay in the past.
At the end of a destroyed street Tom finally passed onto a slightly busier thoroughfare where people still lived, and where two of the ministry's men were watching proceedings with eager eyes as women in threadbare dresses bartered with market stall owners. Half the women were as thing as twigs, and the other half were bloated and marked by sickness - such was the state of England, Tom supposed. One younger woman smiled at him shyly, revealing yellowed and rotting teeth that would have made a less polite man wince, but Tom simply held his composure and smiled back as charmingly as he could muster, trying to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach.
One wall of the little market street bore the extravagant posters put up for the election in February, and these looked almost comical in contrast with the drab greys and browns around them. The red Labour poster was nothing special - Gaitskell's face with the words "Jerusalem is in sight" at the bottom, echoing, deliberately, Attlee's laughable concept of a "New Jerusalem". Beside it the Union Party looked to have done a better job, Randolph Churchill's youthful bloom and charming smile making Gaitskell seem a thing of the past and the words "Freedom, Security, Opportunity" at the bottom alluringly ambiguous in their meaning. It might have been believable if Smithers and the terror of his Communist Activities Select Committee hadn't been Tory inventions. The last of the posters, in orange red and gold was by far the best and the largest; the Prime Minister's defiant face superimposed over those rising new towers and a battalion of marching workers, with the words "Vote for the National Government and the Common Wealth Party" at the bottom. The names of the PM's coalition partners - the Liberals, National Labour and Bevan's Socialist League - were far smaller because they were nothing by comparison.
The result didn't matetr too much, Tom thought, there'd been four Prime Ministers in the decade since the war ended, and nothing new could be worse than Churchillian Austerity, Attlee and Dalton's incompetence or Woolton's anti-Communist frenzy. The National Government, after all, had the nation's best interests in mind - freedom had to be curtailed for security, wasn't that what Rousseau and Hobbes had said? Was it not right that the state, in its benevolence, looked after the people? Even if that meant the people being made to do what was good for them and the idlers and the wreckers sent quietly away to labour for the good of the nation. Better a firm hand on your shoulder holding you up than a light hand letting you fall.
Tom walked through the market under the watchful gaze one of the two wardens and nodded politely as he passed him, heart thundering in his chest. The man nodded back, his bloodshot eyes suspicious and his gnarled hands on a truncheon and pair of handcuffs, and then let him walk out onto another abandoned road. Tom remembered the war, remembered the terror of Normandy and the anthrax poisoned wastelands of Northern Germany, but didn't think that had been nearly as terrifying as the prospect of one of those camps out in the country or the cells that "Un-Patriotic Traitors" found themselves in if they came before the Committee, an invention the Prime Minister had happily co-opted after Woolton's Ministry fell.
His mind wandering back to the posters, Tom considered briefly if he would vote, but then remembered the naive hope with which he had voted for Attlee... but then his promises of a New Jerusalem and a Land Fit for Heroes had taken them all in - even the Home Secretary Mister Driberg had supported Labour at one time - so Tom couldn't blame himself. The dangerous arrogance of avaricious affluence, the Prime Minister had said, was a thing of the past - unsustainable prosperity was to be relegated to the past, it served no purpose in the new world, a world of full-employment and dazzling public works projects in Westminster. A new world of fear, hunger, poverty, and the slow poison of Hitler's biological weapons.
A battalion of government sponsored workers passed Tom and, noticing the war medal, a few doffed their caps. He nodded and smiled back at them then lowered his eyes to avoid the suspicious gaze of their Ministry Overseer. In the distance he could see one of the towers being erected near the palace... he suspected that, like the towering ambition of every other government since the war, it too would fall some day. Perhaps like the sons of Noah man had once again tried to reach too high, sought to outstrip god, and had been punished for it.