"The Children
of Men"
By P.D. James
Read by Julian Glover
Book 1 Omega
January to March, 2021
Chapter I
Friday, 1 January 2021
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last
human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of
Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days. If the
first reports are to be believed, Joseph Ricardo died as he had lived. The
distinction, if one can call it that, of being the last human whose birth
was officially recorded, unrelated as it was to any personal virtue or talent,
had always been difficult for him to handle. And now he is dead. The news
was given to us here in Britain on the nine o'clock programme of the State
Radio Service and I heard it fortuitously. I had settled down to begin this
diary of the last half of my life when I noticed the time and thought I
might as well catch the headlines to the nine o'clock bulletin. Ricardo's
death was the last item mentioned, and then only briefly, a couple of sentences
delivered without emphasis in the newscaster's carefully non-committal voice.
But it seemed to me, hearing it, that it was a small additional justification
for beginning the diary today: the first day of a new year and my fiftieth
birthday. As a child I had always liked that distinction, despite the inconvenience
of having it follow Christmas too quickly so that one present -- it never
seemed notably superior to the one I would in any case have received --
had to do for both celebrations.
As I begin writing, the three events, the New Year, my fiftieth birthday,
Ricardo's death, hardly justify sullying the first pages of this new loose-leaf
notebook. But I shall continue, one small additional defence against personal
accidie. If there is nothing to record, I shall record the nothingness and
then if, and when, I reach old age -- as most of us can expect to, we have
become experts at prolonging life -- I shall open one of my tins of hoarded
matches and light my small personal bonfire of vanities. I have no intention
of leaving the diary as a record of one man's last years. Even in my most
egotistical moods I am not as self-deceiving as that. What possible interest
can there be in the journal of Theodore Faron, Doctor of Philosophy, Fellow
of Merton College in the University of Oxford, historian of the Victorian
age, divorced, childless, solitary, whose only claim to notice is that he
is cousin to Xan Lyppiatt, the dictator and Warden of England. No additional
personal record is, in any case, necessary. All over the world nation states
are preparing to store their testimony for the posterity which we can still
occasionally convince ourselves may follow us, those creatures from another
planet who may land on this green wilderness and ask what kind of sentient
life once inhabited it. We are storing our books and manuscripts, the great
paintings, the musical scores and instruments, the artefacts. The world's
greatest libraries will in forty years time at most be darkened and sealed.
The buildings, those that are still standing, will speak for themselves.
The soft stone of Oxford is unlikely to survive more than a couple of centuries.
Already the University is arguing about whether it is worth refacing the
crumbling Sheldonian. But I like to think of those mythical creatures landing
in St. Peter's Square and entering the great Basilica, silent and echoing
under the centuries of dust. Will they realize that this was once the greatest
of man's temples to one of his many gods? Will they be curious about his
nature, this deity who was worshipped with such pomp and splendour, intrigued
by the mystery of his symbol, at once so simple, the two crossed sticks,
ubiquitous in nature, yet