(Grins.) Can I help you, Mr Neish?
(NEISH strikes him. Uproar. We return to the train. NEISH addresses his fellow passengers.)
NEISH I lost my job. Of course I did. But by begging favours, perhaps I’ll find a position in some country school, the kind of school I went to. Where Mr Durisdeer taught me.
He died last week in his classroom. It took the last of my savings to bury him. He died of the work he had done all his life.
Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow will be better.
We will deserve it.
(Transition. Music. MRS EASTON is the next story teller so it is her experience of the disaster that we see…and to her story that we return. Train ambience.)
MRS EASTON’S STORY
MRS EASTON (Sits looking at her manuscript. To her fellow passengers.) I wish I could read to you from my manuscript. But the illumination from the paraffin lamps is as questionable as the insulation! I do know the beginning by heart. I begin the story of my life with this ‘Perhaps my husband was not a bad man, but taking him at his own estimation, I found myself so far below him, that I had no choice but to hate him, just a little.’ I do think that’s rather good!
The passengers, performing from her manuscript – of which they have all found pages in the silt, now as her husbands’ congregants, sing a hymn. Church sound picture.
REVEREND EASTON We complain, don’t we? We complain about everything. On and on and on. But let us reflect, dear friends, that as adherents of the Church of Scotland, we are blessed! Our missionaries bring our Presbyterian light to the darkness of the world! As the most dynamic servants of the British Empire, we Scots are the Chosen People of Today every bit as much as were the Children of Israel in the days of Gideon!
MRS EASTON (To the passengers.) That’s what he was like. That’s the kind of thing he said in the pulpit every Sunday. And was my husband not the expert in the workings of divine providence, having married my father’s money when he married me!
(Light fades on the REVEREND EASTON.)
When my husband had his living in the city, when I still believed I loved him, or at least that I ought to try, our parish included what was called the Holy Land, a place whose name derived from the strange presence in Whitehall Close of the most haunting and primitive carving on a wall…showing Adam and Eve…in paradise.
Paradise. Good God.
(THE REVEREND, in her memory, approaches her. He is accompanied by a young and intense medical inspector, DR COOPER.)
REVEREND EASTON It is my duty, my dear, to accompany Dr Cooper on his demonstrative excursion to the dwellings of the poor. But it is none of yours.
MRS EASTON (Narrating in the present.) I insisted on coming along. Perhaps I was curious to see how the poor lived. But I had already heard so much from that intense young man…and Dr Cooper…God forgive me… that young man was so compelling! And I was young, then, too!
(In her memory, the tour begins. She joins them as COOPER speaks.)
COOPER If there were one thing that would do more than any other to transform life in this city…it is water!
(Street sounds. They stand in a dark entrance way.)
MRS EASTON (In the moment, in the past.) Water! Such a simple thing and in such plentiful supply in these latitudes. One would have thought.
(Laughs.)
COOPER (Humourless.) A water supply tae meet the needs ae hygiene in the lower town would revolutionise hundreds of lives in this street alone, Mrs Easton. With water, their chances of decency, of virtue, of rising above animality, exist. Without it, they do not.
REVEREND EASTON The cost to the city, Dr Cooper, would be prohibitive.
COOPER What is the cost of not trying, Reverend? What is the cost to these folk of existing as they do? What is the cost to our souls of blinking at their misery?
(He gestures that they enter the darkness…they do…shadows overwhelm them…COOPER lights a lamp.)
MRS EASTON It was like walking into the mouth of hell as we stepped into the close…one’s eyes stung…watering at the devil’s breath. I had to steel myself, recover my balance…lean against a wall dripping with the condensing perspiration of all the souls within.
(In live action, MRS EASTON reacts to the smell.)
Oh!
(Then narrating.)
The smell…I’m sorry…but it’s what I most remember. It got into my nostrils and has never left them. I can smell it even now. Nothing smells as bad as poverty.
(COOPER continues ‘live’ as they climb stone stairs. Sound FX.)
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