Reaching for the Moon

Edward Hopkins is a middle-aged bachelor, retired from teaching arithmetic to breed poultry in the English countryside. He gardens, he is vainglorious about his prize-winning chickens, and he is a regular attendee at meetings of the British Lunar Society. He is also an arrogant snob, utterly self-absorbed and lacking in self-awareness. He tells us he has a ‘gift for friendship’ and a ‘restful, pleasant personality’. Among his neighbours he has ‘selected’ two gentlemen, with whom he has spent happy evenings ‘discussing my poultry until long past midnight . . . It was a great regret to me when both of them decided to go and live farther away.’ Oh, I thought, this is going to be good.

I first encountered R. C. Sherriff, as many do, via his classic First World War play set in the trenches, Journey’s End. It sent me on a lengthy wander through the literature of that war: Remarque, Sassoon, Owen, Graves; films like Wooden Crosses and A Very Long Engagement, and books like Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. What a wonderful surprise it was to discover that Sherriff was also a versatile novelist and an accomplished screenwriter. The Hopkins Manuscript is cast as a memoir accidentally discovered centuries after a global disaster, its pages twisted into a thermos flask. It is Hopkins’s attempt to leave behind a record of the ‘Cataclysm’ and its aftermath. An editorial foreword describes it as ‘almost valueless to the scientist and historian’. To the scientist, perhaps it is. But Sherriff’s exploration, through the eyes of one commonplace observer, of how such a society might face, anticipate, respond to and recover (or not) from such a catastrophe is astute and uncannily prescient. Published in 1939, this speculative novel clearly draws deeply on England’s experience of the Great War, and the troubles then brewing in Germany. But as it progresses, Sherriff’s fertile mind suggests possibilities with startling application to our own day. One autumn evening, at a special private meeting of the Lunar Society, it is solemnly announced that astronomers have determined that the Moon has veered off its course. It is approaching the Earth at ever-increasing speed, with a collision calculated to occur at about 8 p.m. on 3 May, with devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. And no one at the meeting is permitted to tell anyone about it. Sherriff deftly renders Hopkins’s own responses to the impending cataclysm: first, overwhelming relief that this frees him from a troubling financial crisis of his own making; then self-satisfaction at being one of the few to know what’s going to happen and contempt for those who don’t understand, with intermittent plunges into terror and despair. When the public is finally informed of the approaching disaster, Hopkins begins to see himself as a hero, touting his ‘superior’ knowledge which, for reasons he can’t fathom, isn’t especially appreciated. However, the village begins to prepare an underground shelter, gathering together supplies and food, and making plans, and as Hopkins begins to do his bit he starts to appreciate his previously ignored or disparaged neighbours: a calmly reassuring vicar; his own unappreciated housekeeper; and the efficient and competent Sapper Evans, brought in to direct construction of the hillside shelter. They watch the approaching Moon, ‘bloated’ and ‘venomous’, swelling in a discoloured sky. ‘Country gentlemen’ maintain that it is all a scare, and nothing will happen, ‘but if it did, it would happen in China where that sort of thing always happened’. (Covid, anyone?) Others, fed by careful, obfuscating articles in the newspapers, suggest that the Moon may just ‘graze’ the Earth and bounce off harmlessly. People like this scenario, which would provide some excitement – trees down perhaps, or dustbin lids blown about. A third contingent prepares for the complete destruction of the planet. Hopkins avoids them, though he admires their courage in facing up to a possibility that no one else can bear to contemplate. The Moon hits the Earth. ‘The dingy brown sky became wild and luminous . . . The heavens seemed to pant and bleed like the shattered lung of a dying giant.’ Most of the village – most of the country – dies. Those huddled in the shelter drown as an earthquake cracks it open and water pours in (foreshadowing the bombing of Balham Underground Station, barely a year later, in the Blitz). But survivors emerge, blinking and disoriented. The tsunami has dumped a giant ocean liner in Hopkins’s meadow, and he gets tetchy when no one comes to remove it. Miracle of miracles, his favourite hen has survived deep in a thicket. The electricity is back on in a few weeks. The Moon has pancaked into the Atlantic, neatly abutting the west coast of England and the east coast of North America. Excursion trains ferry visitors to the edge of the grey, rocky plain rising to the west, complete with a tea shop and souvenirs. There are visions of an ‘Epoch of Recovery’, of a better, more co-operative world led by a Permanent International Council (League of Nations? European Union?) based in The Hague. Then, after months of exploration, a team of scientists quietly releases a report that the apparently barren remnant of the Moon harbours massive amounts of . . . oil. Coal. Minerals. Platinum. Gold. Resources which the previous generation has heedlessly consumed and squandered. Now the real nightmare begins. The Council devises a plan to share the riches, which dissolves into acrimony and hostilities. A charismatic and poisonous demagogue, proclaiming that Britain is doomed, that she is abandoning her dominions and ‘suffocating’ her Empire, precipitates a war. ‘Seething’ hordes from the east, under the aspirational leadership of Selim the Liberator from Tehran, sweep into Europe to destroy everything that remains of their ‘white oppressors’. The book’s foreword, issuing from Addis Ababa and the Royal Society of Abyssinia, suggests the global outcome. The Hopkins Manuscript draws a stark, many-faceted picture of a society at risk. Hopkins never loses his longing for a bucolic ‘green and pleasant land’, still regretting the loss of farmworkers who touch their caps to their betters, while asserting that he is now comfortable speaking to shopkeepers ‘almost as if they are my equals’. Sherriff’s ultimate triumph in this marvellous novel is that it’s not always clear where his sympathies lie. Is he a good old-fashioned colonialist? Maybe. But he also sees the foolishness, the blindness, the danger. Hopkins is not redeemed or transformed. He’s still an egoist, clinging to his old prejudices, but he also displays more kindness, more respect for others, and a certain dogged courage. Tolstoy once wrote to a friend that ‘a story makes an impression only when it’s impossible to sort out with whom the author sympathizes’. Sherriff has pulled it off in this remarkably engaging work of imaginative wit, sorrow, history and prophecy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Julie Stielstra 2024