From the Diary of Viola Bellamy -- 30 August, 1896

I had rather assumed that electing three people would reduce the number of people required to argue at once.

This, like many of my observations, was optimistic. 

Our newly chosen Civilian Council met today for the first time: Mister Kennethson, Miss Onatopp, and Mister Kelp assembled before a room containing nearly everyone else who had opinions about what they ought to do.

This was also optimistic.

Mister Kennethson began by reminding us that this was a solemn moment in the annals of our settlement, and spoke with rather admirable seriousness about the work before us. It was difficult not to feel that we had finally graduated from merely surviving together to doing so officially.

Miss Onatopp then continued by producing a set of provisional regulations intended to put our little government upon something resembling proper footing.

They were thorough. Very thorough.

We remain loyal to the Crown, the Council is to concern itself with our ordinary civil affairs, the military shall retain its own proper authority, petitions may be brought forward, proceedings shall be recorded, and we are apparently still British enough that imminent freezing does not excuse us from paperwork.

There are certain comforts in continuity.

The difficulty was not terribly complicated:
Miss Onatopp and Mister Kennethson had already done a considerable amount of work together in preparation for the meeting.
Mister Kelp had not.

He therefore objected -- with considerably more colour than I shall reproduce here -- that a council of three civilian seats ought not become a council of two merely because two of its members found one another agreeable.

Others worried rather similarly that representatives ought to continue hearing the people they represent.

Mister Kennethson and Miss Onatopp, for their part, quite reasonably wished the Council to be permitted to conduct enough actual business to justify having elected one.

The distressing part was that both ideas seemed perfectly sensible.
People ought to be heard.
People also ought eventually to stop speaking long enough for something to be decided.
I believe we have discovered government.

There followed interruptions, objections, counter-objections, questions as to precisely what the Council was empowered to decide, questions as to how much the rest of us ought to assist them in deciding it, and at least one period during which poor Mister Fenn appeared to have misplaced the meeting somewhere beneath the government.

I sympathised enormously.

Eventually matters returned to the considerably less philosophical business of keeping us alive.
The boiler requires shelter and protection.
We require coal.
We require food.
We require defences.
We ought to know more about the country beyond our little settlement.
And the abandoned mine is still being investigated in the hope that it may provide a safer source of fuel than taking it from people inclined to shoot back.

In other words, after a tremendous amount of government, our problems remained remarkably similar to those we possessed before acquiring one.

This sounds rather more discouraging than I mean it to.
Only a few weeks ago we stood beneath canvas arguing over whether anyone ought to decide anything at all.
Since then we have elected representatives, built proper lodgings, begun investigating the abandoned mine, and reached the point where our disagreements concern how best to conduct the business of an actual settlement.
That must surely count as progress.

Still, I confess the meeting frightened me.

It was considerably easier to find all this charming when we were discussing what sort of society we might someday become.
Now there are roofs to finish, coal to find, food to grow, and a boiler which continues to regard our continued interest in its survival as a personal challenge.
We cannot afford to spend forever deciding how to decide.


I found myself thinking of Papa.

When I was perhaps twelve, he once took me with him to one of his railway offices on what was supposed to be a very brief stop.

I remember this with unusual clarity because I had been promised cake afterward.
Papa had only to speak with a man, sign something, and then we were to continue home.

Instead, another man arrived.
Then another.
Then someone came in carrying a telegram.
Then a gentleman with mud halfway to his knees appeared looking as though he had personally been assaulted by the environs.
Within perhaps half an hour, Papa’s ten-minute errand had become a room full of increasingly unhappy railway men.

The winter had been dreadful.
The ground had frozen far deeper than anyone expected, and then, at exactly the wrong time, a stretch of wet weather had softened the upper earth while everything beneath remained stubbornly hard.
A section of embankment had begun to move.

Not collapse, exactly.
That would almost have been simpler.
It had merely shifted enough that the rails no longer sat where rails were generally expected to sit.

The engineer responsible refused to send a loaded train across it.
The traffic men insisted they could not simply stop the line.
Someone suggested that the trains could perhaps cross very slowly.
The engineer looked at him in a way I remember even now.

Someone else suggested diverting the traffic.
Unfortunately, the alternative route was already overburdened. Other trains had begun using it, ours could not simply reverse without obstructing those behind it, and sending the whole affair around by the longer route would add days to the journey.

Another gentleman proposed unloading everything onto carts.
There were nowhere near enough horses and carts.

Then somebody began explaining whose department ought properly to have noticed the drainage before any of this happened.
This appeared to interest Papa least of all.

The difficulty was made worse by the fact that the railway wagons waiting behind the damaged section were carrying food.
A tremendous amount of food.
I cannot remember whether it was eighty wagons or a hundred.
At twelve, the distinction seemed rather academic.
There were more cabbages involved than I had previously believed existed in England.

There were sacks of flour, crates of potatoes, apples, preserved meat, dairy goods, and all manner of things that had become rather more precious than they used to be.

The previous harvests had been poor.
Everyone knew that by then, even if grown-ups still had the habit of speaking about shortages as though they were temporary inconveniences.
The food was meant for places where there had not been enough.
And some of it would not wait politely while grown men determined which office was to blame.

I remember sitting near the window with a book open in my lap.
I did not turn the page for a very long time.

Papa listened to each in turn.
That is perhaps what I remember best.
He let the engineer explain why the embankment was unsafe.
He let the traffic superintendent explain what would happen if the line remained closed.
He let the accounts man explain what it would cost.
He let the gentleman with muddy knees explain the condition of the ground.
And he even let the man concerned with blame finish explaining whose fault everything was.

Then Papa asked:
“Can a train cross it?”
The engineer said no.
“Can men?”
Yes.
“Can carts?”
Some could.
“Can we bring an engine with empty wagons up from the other side?”
Apparently we could.
Papa nodded.
“Well then.”

That was all.
He did not repair the embankment.
He did not settle the argument over responsibility.
He did not decide how every town in England was to be fed that winter.
He asked which cargo would spoil first.

The most perishable goods were unloaded.
Every useful cart and horse that could be found was brought in.
Men carried crates over the safe ground beyond the damaged section.
Empty wagons waited on the far side.
The less delicate freight waited to be sent around by the longer route.
The engineers were left to inspect the embankment properly without somebody asking them every five minutes whether it was safe yet.

It was expensive.
It was slow.
It was muddy.
It was, from what little I understood at twelve, dreadfully inefficient.
But the food moved.

Papa even gave me a job.
I was to keep count of the carts as they passed and make a little mark beside each one.
I took this responsibility with such gravity that I was certain Britain’s entire railway system must have depended upon it.

I remember being terribly proud.
I remember the mud.
I remember the smell of wet wool and steam.
I remember men shouting across the yard.
I remember Papa eventually taking off his coat because he had grown too warm going back and forth between the office and the platform.

And I remember thinking that he was the only person there who was not frightened.
I do not think that anymore.

A hundred wagons of food were sitting behind a shifting embankment in a country already beginning to discover that food could not simply be assumed. 
Of course he was frightened.
I think perhaps he was merely the first person in the room to decide that being frightened was not among the afternoon’s useful tasks.

When the worst of it was settled, Papa came back to where I was sitting and asked whether I had changed my mind about wanting to see railway business.
I informed him that I had not, though I thought the paperwork could be improved.
He laughed.

Then I reminded him about the cake.
It was well past midnight and the tea room across from the station had long since closed by then.
There was no cake.

Papa managed to procure something which called itself a bun and bore only a passing resemblance to one.
I ate it anyway.
It was dreadful.
I remember it fondly.

For years I thought the lesson of that day was that Papa always knew what to do.

I think now that I misunderstood him.
He did not know how to solve everything.
He merely knew how to make the question smaller.

What must move today?
What can wait until tomorrow?
Who actually knows whether the embankment is safe?
Who has the authority to decide?
And which cabbages are going rotten first?

I think Papa would have laughed at us rather terribly today.
Then he would have asked what needed doing before Thursday.
That thought made me feel considerably better.

Perhaps that is what we are learning now.
We need not settle the entire future of government every time we wish to put a roof over something.
We chose representatives because we trusted them to represent us.
We should certainly speak to them, petition them, pester them, disagree with them, and make a dreadful nuisance of ourselves whenever necessary. I certainly did during Kennethson's office hours.
And I personally intend to excel at several of these in the future.
But perhaps there is also some virtue in letting the Council decide the question presently before it, and leaving Thursday to Thursday.

And, eventually, that is more or less what happened.
Beneath all the larger questions was a much smaller one that Mister Fenn finally posed the Council: are we preparing to leave this place, or are we going to make ourselves capable of surviving here while we continue looking beyond it?

On that, at least, our three representatives finally found themselves together.
For the present, we shall hunker down without entirely turning our backs upon exploration.

The abandoned mine is to receive our attention first, in the hope that we might secure a supply of coal which belongs to us rather than one we must repeatedly take at considerable risk.
After that come further improvements to the settlement itself: stronger buildings in place of our temporary structures, though the precise order of those works remains a question for another day.

It took us rather a long time to reach so modest a conclusion.
But the cabbages moved.
I think Papa would have approved.

There will be time to argue over what government ought ultimately to become.
There must also be time to build things.

I remain exceedingly hopeful.
We have apparently succeeded in founding a society well enough that we have begun suffering from the problems of having one.
That seems an awfully civilized sort of difficulty.

And civilization, I have recently discovered, has floorboards.
I am therefore still very much in favour of it.
— V.

P.S. Biscotte slept through a considerable portion of our constitutional development.
His position on representative government remains unclear, though he continues to enjoy broad bipartisan support.