The 40s: The Story of a Decade (14 page)

The nonchalance about bombs is general throughout England. A lady who drives a lorry to blitzed areas told me that she is never in the least frightened, no matter what happens, while she is driving, nor does she flinch no matter what gruesome charges she has to carry. It is only when she is lying in bed at night that she is frightened, and then more at the sirens than at the explosions, because, she imagines, the former are anticipation, the latter
faits accomplis.
If you are alive to hear the explosion, you are all right. On the opening night of John Gielgud’s revival of
The Circle
, there was an alert during the last act. The bedraggled and bedizened Lady Kitty was sitting down front on a sofa, admonishing the
young Elizabeth to profit by her example and not run away with a married man. The sirens began. In front of the footlights a square transparency lit up to reveal the word “
ALERT
” in huge black letters—quite unnecessarily, it seemed to me, as the sirens were distinctly audible. Lady Kitty had been describing the shabbier social aspects of life in Monte Carlo. I half expected Yvonne Arnaud, playing Lady Kitty, to say, “My dear Elizabeth, go to the nearest shelter at once.” But Lady Kitty didn’t. She went on fervently imploring Elizabeth to avoid scandal. No one in the audience stirred, except to strain forward a bit to hear Yvonne Arnaud better.

William Wyler, the director of the motion picture
Mrs. Miniver
, once told me that he wants to do a scene in a film of people having lunch or dinner during an alert, with the conversation proceeding completely undeflected by the bombing. (He says that he’ll shoot the scene without telling the actors anything about it and add the sound effects afterward.) In the two months I was in England, I encountered this sort of thing five times. To get a change from the inedible food at Claridge’s, I used to go out for the inedible food at several little restaurants I knew. One day I was lunching in one of these with Chaim Weizmann and a number of his friends. Everybody was enchanted with the quietly ironic utterances of this extraordinary man. An alert began, screaming in crescendo over the very roof of the restaurant. Weizmann lifted his voice slightly—the only time I have ever known him to lift it. The conversation went on to its end without a reference to the alert. Not long before, a bomb had fallen on a restaurant in this neighborhood during the lunch hour, killing hundreds of people, but no one said a word about the incident. I never discussed an air raid with anyone in London except taxi drivers and chauffeurs. No one else will talk about them. Three or four lines in the papers will tell you that several bombs fell the day before in Southern England, but that is all. Beyond the casual remark that was made the day I arrived, the V-2s were never spoken of. Presumably it has been different since Churchill’s speech about them.

This nonchalance has affected Americans, too. There is the story the Lunts tell. Alfred Lunt was standing in the wings one night ready to make his entrance in the second act of
There Shall Be No Night.
The sirens sounded, and a bomb exploded, quite close. Lynn Fontanne, who was onstage, turned to address the young man playing her son and found him not there. He had obeyed a conditioned reflex and run off the stage to the doubtful shelter of his dressing room. Disregarding this, Lunt
made his entrance. His first line was to Miss Fontanne: “Darling, are you all right?” The audience applauded when she said she was all right. “Do you know,” Lunt told me, “what Lynn’s first remark to me was when we left the stage after the curtain was down? She turned on me accusingly and said, ‘That’s the first time, Alfred—that’s the first time in the years we’ve been doing this play—that’s the very first time you ever read it properly!’ ” I remarked that I had always suspected that the only really effective director for Lunt was Himmler. This consoled Miss Fontanne.

· · ·

The country’s absorption in the war is complete, but the peculiar anomalies of English life and English character, political and otherwise, persist. The taxi driver who took me to see Harold Laski knew about him. “Oh, yes, Professor Laski,” he said possessively. “I am Labour and I think we’ll get in at the next election. Clever man, Professor Laski. Churchill likes him.” Laski was amused by this when I told him, as well as by another remark I quoted to him, made by an American when the New York
Times
carried a story that the Laski home had been blitzed during the night. Laski, the
Times
related, had been knocked out of bed, had fallen down several flights of stairs, and waked up. “He must be a light sleeper,” said the American.

Then, on a four-hour trip to Cardiff, on a train on which there was no food, no heat, no seats, I stood in a corridor talking to a young instructor in the Home Defense. He was full of gruesome details of the work performed in London by his Home Defense volunteers, one of them a man well over seventy. “Unsparing,” he said. “They work sometimes for days with no sleep at all.” The most unbearable part of his work, he said, was finding the bodies of children. Only the week before, he had pulled out of the wreckage of a bombed building the body of a little girl about the same age as his own, who was, he thanked God, evacuated to Gloucester and whom he was now on his way to visit. “It isn’t all unrelieved gloom, though,” he said. “Sometimes funny things happen.” I encouraged him to tell me a funny thing. “Well,” he said, “one day we were clearing out a badly blitzed house. We found a decapitated man. We looked and looked for his head but couldn’t find it. Finally we gave up. As we were carrying the torso through what used to be the garden into the van, we heard a chicken clucking. Hello, I thought, what’s that chicken clucking about? There’s certainly nothing left for him in the garden. We went back and followed the clucking till we found the chicken. It wasn’t in the garden
at all but in part of the rubble and it was clucking at the missing head.” I was happy to find that there was a lighter side to this man’s work.

At the station in Cardiff I was met by Jack Jones, the novelist and playwright and the biographer of Lloyd George. Cardiff, I had been told in London, was hell even in peacetime. Jones took me to a sing in a local tabernacle. A banker in the town had organized a series of Sunday-night sings for service men. The place was packed, the mood warm and informal, and the singing, in Welsh and English, magnificent. The phenomenon of a great crowd spending the evening just singing struck me as extraordinary; in America it wouldn’t occur to people to sing en masse without being paid for it. Jones walked me back to my hotel afterward. It was obvious, once we were on the street, that only a few of the American service men in the vicinity had gone to the tabernacle. The rest appeared to be walking the streets with girls, many of them almost children. The atmosphere was high-pitched, like an American college town on a football night. In the few blocks between the tabernacle and the hotel I must have seen twenty pickups. “The girls like the American approach,” said Jones. “Your boys dispense with preliminaries. Result: high illegitimacy.” It was obvious that the blackout was a help. Long after I went to bed, I could hear the boys and girls tramping the streets, laughing and singing. I heard a boy teaching a Welsh girl “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” She seemed apt. I was eavesdropping on the active permutation of cultures; I could almost feel the graph of illegitimacy soaring. The process sounded gay.

During a trip to the Valleys, as the mining areas in Wales are called, Jones and I stopped at Merthyr Tydfil, his birthplace and the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Jones showed me the hut in which he was born. It was one of a whole block of identical huts. He pointed out, at the corner, the privy which served the entire block. Fifty yards from these dwellings is a bronze plaque commemorating the fact that from here the world’s first steam locomotive made a run of twenty-seven miles. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Jones told me, Merthyr Tydfil was one of the busiest industrial cities in the world; the products of the surrounding valleys went to every part of the globe. All one can say is that the Industrial Revolution hasn’t done well by its birthplace—the eroded hills, the rows of boarded-up buildings, the squalid artifacts left by succeeding generations make one wonder who got the benefits of all this. A few London mansions occupied by absentee mine owners could scarcely compensate for the scars, topographical and human, on the landscape.
These hovels are the shelters of the Industrial Revolution and they are not much better than those of the current one; they’re aboveground, and that’s about all you can say for them. We went through village after village with shops boarded up, their districts all mined out. The inhabitants go by bus to work in war plants some distance away. What they will do after the war Jones didn’t know. It was through one of these villages that the Duke of Windsor made a tour when he was King. As the vistas of misery opened up before him, he muttered, “Something has to be done about this.” For this mutter the people are grateful to this day. The Duke is popular in the district. “ ’E was done in by the ’igher-ups,” a taxi driver in Cardiff said to me. There is a decided impression, even in other parts of England, that it was not so much Mrs. Simpson as a program of social improvement, forming slowly in the Duke’s conscience, that cost him his crown.

· · ·

Having been in London’s shelters, I can see readily why most people—at least those who have some alternative—will take their chance on being hit rather than go into them. There are three main types: surface shelters, which look like enlarged Nissen huts; shallow shelters, which vary in size and depth and are only fairly safe; and the deep shelters, of which there are five in London. Each of the last can accommodate eight thousand people. Then, of course, there are the subways, which are still favored by many. On the concrete platforms of the stations are built tiers of steel shelves somewhat like the ones used in American railway stations for checking baggage. On them you see men, women, and small children asleep with their clothes on. As a concession to light sleepers, the trains do not run after eleven-thirty at night, but no alarm clock is needed in the early morning. One morning, while I was waiting in a station for a train, I saw a little boy rather younger than my own, who is seven, lying asleep, his arm curved up over his eyes as if to shield them from the light. The train roared in. Just as I was caught in the crowd that sucked me aboard, quite in the New York fashion, I looked back at this child. The noise of the milling crowd must have penetrated the planes of sleep; he turned abruptly, huddling himself and his blanket against the glazed brick wall behind his bunk.

When I asked why people used the subways when they could use the regular shelters, which at least didn’t have trains rushing through them, I was told that the subways appeal to many simply because of their safety;
several of the regular shelters—that is, the surface and shallow ones—have been hit and their occupants killed. What I found most trying in all the shelters, though for the habitués it is probably a solace, was the constant blaring, through loudspeakers, of ancient records of American popular tunes: “Whispering,” “Avalon,” “Blue Skies.” These nostalgic idyls, dinned out in incessant fortissimo, impart an atmosphere of phantasmagoria to scenes that might otherwise be merely abysmally depressing. This public music is a wartime phenomenon; the railway stations, too, have acquired the habit of playing American, or mainly American, jazz records to speed the departing trains. The raucous evocation of the melodies of the seven fat years makes the prevailing dreariness macabre; the orchestrations of “This Side of Paradise” somehow fail in their efforts to diminish the electrified gloom of the urban foxholes.

There are children who have never known any homes but shelters. A pretty young woman sat in one of them beside her baby, which was in a pram. I asked her whether she couldn’t be evacuated. She said she had been but hadn’t liked the place where they had sent her. “It was the noise,” she said. “The place was near a bomber command and I couldn’t stand the racket of the bombers making off for France.” An apple-cheeked old lady smiled cheerfully at the young woman and me. Someone asked her whether she had had dinner. “Yes,” she said, “I went home and cooked it in my own kitchen.” “But weren’t you bombed out?” “Oh, yes,” she said. “The rest of the house is gone, but Jerry didn’t get the kitchen.” Obviously she was proud of having put one over on Jerry.

The deep shelters are amazing. They are cities hundreds of feet underground. A companion and I timed the descent to one in the lift; it took several minutes. It is planned, after the war, to use them for stations in a projected express subway system. The interminable, brightly lit corridors curving beside the endless shelves of bunks have the antiseptic horror of the German film
Metropolis.
These shelters are really safe. The one we visited has a long bar-canteen which serves cocoa, milk and sandwiches at nominal prices. There is a fully equipped hospital with nurses and doctors in attendance. We walked miles on concrete platforms while the loudspeakers blared “Dardanella” and “Tea for Two.” We went to a lower level and visited the power room, which might serve as a sizzling, violet-lit shrine to the God Dynamo. The girl in charge manipulated switches; the immense electric bulb in the heart of an intestinal coil of lighted glass tubing changed its complexion from violet to magenta to lemon. We went to the telephone control. The operator there told us that
she could instantly get in communication with the four other deep shelters.

We went up again and walked around the corridors. A good-looking, very neatly dressed man of forty was sitting on a bunk beside a boy who must have been his son, about twelve and also nicely dressed. The boy’s hair was brushed smooth and he looked as if he had got himself up to visit a rich aunt. I talked to the man. He said he had lost every possession he had in the world except the clothes he and his son were wearing. They had been living in this shelter for eight months. In the morning he went to his work and the boy went to school. The problem in the shelter was to get up early enough, before six-thirty, because after that hour lift service, except for the aged and crippled, stopped and there were seven hundred stairs.