“You mean it’s TOO cheerful?”
“Well, you always were an optimist, weren’t you?” Then he smiled, but it
was a rather grim, troubled smile. “You know, George, I don’t want to
discourage you, but things do look pretty bad. We’ve lost our army and all
its equipment, and we’ve about one plane for every ten the Germans have, and
the Channel’s only a ditch nowadays…”
George’s eyes widened with a sort of bewilderment. “Aye, I’ve thought of
all that myself. I’ve even wondered—sometimes—if they’ve got a
chance.”
“You mean to invade us?”
“Aye.”
“They might have. Recognizing the fact shouldn’t alter our resolve to
fight to the last man. On the contrary, it’s the basis of it.”
George swallowed hard, then said, after a pause of gloomy thoughtfulness:
“So it boils down to this—we might even LOSE the bloody war?”
“I think we’d be fools to assume that it’s impossible. But of course I
don’t say we shall. I’m only speaking the thoughts that came into my mind
while I was listening to you—perhaps because you HAVE been wrong before
when you’ve made such gallant prophecies.”
George suddenly stuffed the notes of his speech into his pocket. “Then by
God I’ll be wrong again!” he almost shouted. “After all, as you say, I’ve got
no reputation to lose. Aye, and I’ll not do it by halves either! I’ll tell
folks that Hitler’s on the verge of his first great defeat, and that whatever
else the Germans succeed in, they’ll never lick England!”
So George did this, and it was among his most quotable prophetic
utterances. It was certainly the only one he had ever conquered a qualm
about, and one of the very few that proved completely correct.
But as the summer months passed and the air assaults that
had been
expected a year before began now upon London and the large provincial cities,
it became clear that this was not like the First World War, when every
rostrum and pulpit had resounded to the call of a somewhat romantic
patriotism. George could remember the Mayor of that day orating in Browdley
market-square about the injustices of poor little Belgium, and thereafter
luring recruits from the audience as a revivalist preacher extracts
penitents. Thank goodness we don’t have THAT to do, thought George more than
once as he began his work on those fateful autumn days; and besides, it
wasn’t poor little Belgium any more, but poor little England—yet was
there any Englishman who wouldn’t somehow resent that phrase? Why, even poor
little Browdley didn’t seem to suit. Indeed, as George went about his
war-time business in the town, visiting factories and homes and
organizations, it seemed to him it had never been less ‘poor’, in any sense
of the word. And it wasn’t so little either. One day, in company with other
local mayors, he was taken up in an R.A.F. plane (his first flight), and when
he stared down from three thousand feet upon the roofs of the town, he
couldn’t help exclaiming: “Why, it looks like a city!” To which an Air Force
officer replied: “Let’s hope it doesn’t, or it’ll be put on the blitz list.”
For Browdley had so far escaped, though bombs had fallen in the neighbourhood
at several places.
And there were other curious things about the war—for instance, that
even with all the new food-rationing restrictions, many Browdley families
were being better fed than in peace-time, because they now had full
employment and money to spend. And the children in the schools, so the
Medical Officer reported, were actually healthier than ever before in the
history of the town.
It was nervous tension that weighed most heavily during that first
terrible year of the real war—the loss of sleep through air-raid
warnings even if the raiders did not come or merely passed over; the extra
hours of work without holidays, the ten-hour shifts plus overtime of men and
women desperately striving to repair the losses at Dunkirk; the irritations
of tired folk waiting in long lines for buses to and from their factories;
the continual wear and tear on older persons and those of weaker fibre. But
on others the tensions, hardships, occasional dangers, and ever-present
awareness of possible danger, seemed to have a toughening effect; many men
who had worked all day found they were no worse off attending Home Guard
drills in the evenings or patrolling the streets as air-raid wardens than
they would have been in the pubs and cinemas of their peace-time choice. And
in this George discovered (to his surprise, for he had never taken deliberate
exercise and had rarely given his physical condition a thought) that he
belonged to the tougher breed. He was fortunate. There was even pleasure to
him, after a hard day of mainly sedentary work, in transferring mind and body
to physical tasks of air-raid defence, in the long walks up and down familiar
pavements, in chats with passers-by, in hours afforded for private thinking,
in the chance of comradeship with men he would otherwise have missed getting
to know. Not that he ever romanticized about it; he was ready to admit that
any fun he derived from what, in a sane world, would be a waste of time, was
due to the fact that so far there had been no actual raids; if there were, he
did not expect to enjoy them any more than the next man. But for all that,
there WERE good moments, supreme moments, and if there were bad ones ahead,
he would take them too, as and when they came, sharing them with his
fellow-citizens as straightforwardly as he shared with them so many cups of
hot, strong, sugary tea.
A few things gave him emotions in which pleasure, if it could be called
that, came from an ironic appreciation of events. For instance, that the old
Channing Mill in Mill Street had at last found a use; its unwanted machinery
was junked for scrap metal, while its large ground-floor, levelled off,
served as a headquarters and mess-room for the air-raid wardens.
And also that Richard Felsby’s land, which the old man had decided too
late to give the town for a municipal park, had been compulsorily
requisitioned for the drills and manoeuvrings of the Home Guard.
But no use could be found for Stoneclough. It remained a derelict in even
greater solitude now that there were no holidays to tempt Browdley folks on
hikes and picnics.
George was an exceedingly busy man. Not only was his
printing business
getting all the work it could handle, but his position as Mayor counted for
more and more as the national and local governments of the country became
closely integrated. For the first time in his life he had the feeling that he
really represented the town, not merely his own party on the Town Council;
and if this showed how limited his conception of mayoralty had been until
then, he was disposed to concede the point. Anyhow, it was a satisfactory
feeling, especially as his tasks were far too numerous to permit him to
luxuriate in it. He was not a luxuriator, anyhow. And when he came home after
a fourteen-hour spell of work, it was rarely with time left over to indulge a
mood.
He did not even read in his study most nights, but made himself a cup of
tea and went immediately to bed and to sleep.
The ordeal of the great cities continued. Night after night the wail of
sirens and thudding of gunfire wakened Browdley, and sometimes a wide glow on
one of the horizons gave a clue as to which of the greater near-by cities was
being attacked. One night there came an emergency call for help from
Mulcaster, and George accompanied several lorry-loads of Browdley men in a
top-speed drive to the stricken area. Till then all his fire-fighting and
similar work had been a rehearsal; but that night, from soon after midnight
till long past dawn, he knew what the real thing was, and of course, like all
real things, it was different. Crawling into smoking ruins while bombs were
still falling in the neighbourhood, giving first-aid to the injured before a
doctor could arrive, he directed his squad of co-workers under conditions
which, despite all the training they had had, were in a dreadful and profound
sense novel.
A youngish doctor asked him when the raid was over: “Been in this sort of
thing before?”
George shook his head.
“I’d have thought you had, from the way you handled those stretchers.”
“Oh, I’ve done THAT before.”
“The last war?”
“Aye.”
“How would you compare it—this sort of thing—and that?”
George answered irritably: “I wouldn’t. And nor would you if you
could.”
The men returned to Browdley with scorched and blackened faces, minor
injuries, and a grim weariness of soul which, after sleep, changed to
bitterness, determination, cheerfulness, even ribaldry—so strange is
the alchemy of experience on men of differing make- up.
On George, after that first irritable outburst (which he later regretted
as being needlessly melodramatic and quite out of character), the principal
effect was a decision to do something which, at any previous time, would have
been an acknowledgment of defeat, but which now, the way he could look at it,
seemed more like victory over himself. He gave up the Guardian. He did not
even try to sell it; he abandoned it. For years it had never more than just
paid its way, and sometimes not even that; but the real issue, in George’s
mind, was not financial at all. He suddenly realized that the paper had been
costing too much in human effort, including his own, that could better be
devoted elsewhere.
“It’s one thing with another,” he explained to Wendover. “Will Spivey’s
getting old—it’s all he can do to manage the job printing— I’ll
have to keep THAT going, of course—it’s my living. And then there’ve
been newsprint difficulties, and you can’t get paper-boys any more, and I’ve
just lost another man to the Army… And besides all that, I haven’t the time
myself nowadays. If we should get a big raid on Browdley one of these nights,
we’d all have our hands full. I know what I’m talking about, after what I saw
in Mulcaster. Because I’d be responsible for things here, in a sort of way.
There’s a lot more work in being Mayor than there used to be.”
“And I haven’t heard any complaints about how you’re doing it,
George.”
“I’ll do it better, though, when the paper’s off my hands.”
“You’re sure you won’t regret not being an editor any more?”
“EDITOR?” George grinned. “What did I edit? Births, marriages, funerals,
meetings, whist drives, church bazaars. The Advertiser’ll do that just as
well—and one paper’s enough in a town of this size. Most folks always
did prefer the Advertiser, anyway.”
“But you used to write your own stuff in the Guardian sometimes.”
“Aye, and there you come to another reason why I’m giving it up. D’you
remember when I came to talk to you about that speech I made just after
Dunkirk?”
“You mean the one in which you prophesied that Hitler would never lick us?
Yes, I remember. And I’m beginning to think you were right.”
“For once. But as you said, I’d been pretty wrong before. I’m glad you
said that because it made me think about it, and I never realized how wrong I
actually had been till the other day I got out the back-files of the Guardian
and re-read some of my old editorials. By God, they were wrong. After
Locarno, for instance, I wrote about France and Germany finally burying the
hatchet, and after Munich I said that even though the settlement wasn’t
perfect, at any rate it might keep the peace of Europe for a generation…
and only a few months ago I was blabbing that the Germans couldn’t break
through in the West because of the Maginot Line… Mind you, I was always
perfectly sincere at the time, but that only makes it worse. Seems to me,
Harry, I’m just not cut out to deal with world affairs.”
“You’ve been as right as a good many of the politicians.”
“Aye, and that’s no compliment. Maybe it was a good thing I never got to
Westminster—I’d have been just another fool with a bigger platform to
spout from… And another thing occurred to me—I was thinking about it
last night on warden’s duty—and it’s this—that the nearer I stay
to Browdley the more use I am and the fewer mistakes I make. Look round the
place—I have done SOME good things—not many, not enough—but
they’re here, such as they are, and I don’t have to try to forget ‘em same as
I do the stuff I used to put in the paper… Look at the Mill Street Housing
Scheme, and the new Council School, and the Municipal Hospital, and the
electric power station the Government took over. Aye, and the sewage farm, if
you like—that’s mine too—remember what a fight I had over it?
Those things are REAL, Harry—they exist— they’re something
attempted, something done. They’re what I’ve been right about, whereas
Czechoslovakia’s something I’ve been wrong about. So give me Browdley.”
“You’ve got Browdley, George.”
“Aye, and it’s got me. Till the war’s over, anyhow.”
“And afterwards, perhaps.”
“Don’t be too sure. There’s young chaps coming along as’ll make me a back
number some day, but they’re in uniform now, most of ‘em… ‘Vote for Boswell
and Your Children’s Future’—that was my old election slogan. I hope
nobody else remembers it. I’d rather be remembered for the lavatories I put
in the market square. Because they’re good lavatories, as lavatories go.
Whereas the children’s future that I talked so much about…”
Wendover smiled. “I get your point, George. But don’t over- simplify it.
And don’t throw all your books on world affairs in the fire.”
“Oh no, I won’t do that. In fact when I’ve got the time I’ll study more of
‘em. I want to find out why we’ve all been let in for what we have. And I
want to find out why folks ten times better educated than me have made the
same mistakes.”
“Maybe because education hasn’t much to do with it, George.” Wendover
added: “And another thing—don’t be too humble about yourself.”
George thought a moment, then came out with one of those devastatingly
sincere things that endeared him to his opponents even oftener than to his
friends. “Oh, don’t you worry—I’m not as humble as I sound. That’s what
Livia once said…”