So Well Remembered (25 page)

“My little Livia,” he whispered, stooping to touch her forehead with his
lips. He knew she would not wake.

The next morning she left. He travelled also as far as Mulcaster,
shepherding her and her luggage and her dog during that first stage of the
journey, and fending off all sad thoughts by the resolute pretence that it
was just a holiday. He was disappointed when a friend and fellow-councillor
entered the same compartment at Browdley Station; it was hard to concentrate
upon a discussion of local political news, but then, later on, he thought it
was probably easier than to have made conversation with Livia. She sat
cosily, almost demurely, in a corner by the window, staring with quiet
interest upon the familiar scenes. The hour-long journey, with stops at every
station, built up in George a certain resignation, so that when the train
reached the terminus he was well able to take command of the situation when
Councillor Ridyard noticed the luggage. “Why, what’s all this?” Ridyard
exclaimed, reading the labels. “GENEVA? Who’s going to Geneva?”

“My wife,” said George, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“She’s visiting friends there.”

“Well, well! You don’t say! Just for the moment I thought they’d appointed
you to the League of Nations, and I was wondering how on earth we’d manage
without you on the Housing Committee…”

At which they all three laughed.

Just before George saw her off on the London train, Ridyard’s joke put him
in mind of something to say at a time when it is always hardest to think of
anything to say to anybody. “Geneva must be pretty interesting these days,
Livia. There’s probably a place for the public at the League of Nations
meetings—you might find some of them worth looking in at… but of
course they do everything in French, don’t they?”

“Do they?” she answered. “But I know French, anyhow.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“I never knew you did. You never told me.”

“I never told you lots of things.”

“Aye, that’s about it…”

And then the train began to move, and there was no more time for anything
but the last shouted goodbyes.

Two hours later he was back in Browdley, desperately unhappy, fighting
again to believe that it was just a holiday. But after a little while to get
used to it he established a fairly permanent victory over his misgivings; for
she wrote several letters, quite normal ones, reporting what sort of a time
she was having, where she went, and whom she met. And he, in return, reported
upon his own doings in Browdley—his continuing struggle to manoeuvre
the housing scheme towards its first stage of accomplishment. When she had
been away a couple of months she wrote that she had found a job with a
tourist agency, conducting travel parties about Switzerland and Austria, and
this, though it seemed to make her near return less likely, reinforced his
belief that she was benefiting by the change. After all, it was quite natural
not to stay too long as a guest in a friend’s house, and if a temporary job
offered itself, was it not sensible to take it? What really cheered him was
the knowledge that those tourist-guide jobs WERE temporary—the season
began about May and did not last beyond October. So that when October should
come…

But before October came, Lord Winslow came, on that First of September,
1921, to lay the foundation stone of the first unit of the Mill Street
Housing Scheme.

Between 1921 and 1938 much happened in the world; America
had the biggest boom and then the biggest slump in history; England went on
the gold standard and then off again; Germany rose from defeat to power and
then from power to arrogance; flying became a commonplace and radio the fifth
estate; people changed from being bored with the last war to being scared of
the next —with one short interval of cynical, clinical absorption.

And those were the years during which, in Browdley, the Mill Street
Housing Scheme was progressing unit by unit.

One afternoon in the first week of October, 1938, the Mayor of Browdley
presided at official ceremonies to mark the scheme’s completion. It had taken
a long time, with many intervals of delay and inaction, but at last it was
finished, and clusters of cheerful little red-brick semi-detached cottages
covered the entire area of what had once been slums. George Boswell himself
was also cheerful; in his early fifties he wore both his years and his
mayoralty well; except for grey hair he had not changed much, it was
remarked, since the day so long before when the foundation stone had been
laid upon the first unit.

“Remember that day, George?” someone buttonholed him afterwards. “You had
Lord Thingumbob here, and my wife slipped on the way home and busted her
ankle—that’s how it sticks in my mind.”

This ancient mishap seemed to amuse the husband more than it did the
Mayor, whose face momentarily clouded over as he answered: “Aye, I remember
that day.”

“And so you should, after the fight you’ve had. Seventeen years, George,
and without a Council majority till lately, so that you couldn’t vote ‘em
down, you just had to wear ‘em out… Well, it’s all over now, and a big job
well done.”

“Aye, but there’s plenty more to do.”

The cloud then lifted, and the Mayor was seen to be enjoying the triumph
he deserved. True, there was no noble lord on hand this time, but there was
to have been a personage of equal if not superior importance, none other than
a Cabinet Minister—and everyone knew that his absence was not George’s
fault, but Hitler’s. George did not like Hitler—for other reasons than
that; but now that the Pact of Munich had been signed he could not help
seeing a certain symbolism in what had happened—the removal of the
threat of war by a last-minute miracle so that the final ceremonies of the
Mill Street Housing Scheme could take place as planned. And a further touch:
the very same workmen who had erected the flags and platform had been taken
right off the job of building an air- raid shelter under the Town Hall.
George mentioned this in his speech, and again in a Guardian editorial that
concluded:

“We people of Browdley—quiet folks who ask for nothing more than to
do our work in peace and live out our lives in decency—we do not
profess to understand the complicated geographic, ethnographic, and
historical problem of the Sudetenland which has come so close to plunging a
whole continent into the infinite disaster of war. We cannot be sure even now
that the settlement just reached will be administered fairly to all parties,
or whether, in certain phases of the negotiations, the threat of the sword
did not prevail over the scales of justice. What we DO know, by and large, is
that at the eleventh hour a decision has been made that every honest citizen
of every country will endorse in principle—because it is AGAINST WAR.
Let every man of Browdley whose death-sentence has thus been commuted, let
every woman of Browdley who will not now face sorrow and bereavement, let
every child of Browdley who will grow up to inherit a happier world—
let them face anew THE TASKS OF PEACE AND RECONSTRUCTION.”

After the ceremonies George walked home across the town and had tea alone
in his study—the same study, though enlarged by a bay-window built over
the garden, as well as by inclusion of a book-lined alcove that had formerly
been part of the lobby. For George’s library was now more certainly than ever
the largest private one in Browdley, the years having just about doubled its
contents.

Everything else was much the same, including Annie, and the
printing-office, and Will Spivey. When George handed in his Munich editorial,
the old fellow, a little crustier but otherwise unchanged by the years, read
it through, grunted, and said at length: “Do you want this AS WELL AS the one
about the new sewage scheme?”

“No,” answered George. “Instead of.”

“What’ll I do with the sewage one then?”

“Keep it till next week.”

But by the next morning George’s slight misgiving about Munich had
thriven, and he took the opportunity to cut out that final sentence. Instead
he wrote:

“… For the rest, we must wait and see whether Hitler’s word is to be
trusted. If his desire for ‘peace in our time’ is as sincere as our own, we
should expect to see some corresponding reduction in German armaments, and
until we have evidence of this we can only continue, however reluctantly, the
process of bringing our own armaments up to a minimum safety-level. THAT THE
GOVERNMENT WILL DO THIS WE DO NOT DOUBT.”

George’s optimism had merely swerved in another direction.

Like most Englishmen, he was shocked rather than surprised
when war came.
1938 had been the year of hypnosis, the sleep-walk into tragedy, but the
first half of 1939 brought a brand of disillusionment that made the actual
outbreak of hostilities almost an anti-climax. After that there was so much
to be done, and so little time for self-scrutiny, that George was spared the
full chagrin of awakening; like all mayors of towns, he found his office had
become practically a branch of the national government, with his own tasks
and personal responsibilities greatly increased. He shouldered them with
gusto from before dawn till often past midnight, while England slowly
dissolved into a new era—slowly, it seemed, because it had been natural
to expect change and catastrophe overnight. When no bombs fell on London, and
when all continued to be quiet along the Western Front, a curious hangover of
illusion recurred; it was a ‘phony’ war, said some; perhaps it was not even a
war at all. One morning at his editorial desk, aware of this unreality and
not knowing how else to handle it, George indulged in a little spree of
optimism. After all, he reflected, the good citizens of Browdley deserved a
pick-me-up; they had done wonders in response to all his war-emergency
appeals, had enlisted splendidly for air-raid protection and civilian
defence, and were resolutely creating a strong Home Front while across the
Channel hundreds of their sons were already facing the enemy, but so far,
thank Heaven, not being killed by him. It was astonishing, compared with the
First World War, how few casualties there were along that Western Front. And
thinking things out, George composed the following:

“We have now been at war for almost six months, and though it would be
premature to offer ourselves any congratulations, nevertheless we may
justifiably wonder whether the Germans are able to do so either. True, their
tanks and mechanized armies have scored victories over the farm-carts and
cavalry of Poland, but at the cost of overrunning that country they have
brought against them a factor which, with memories of a quarter of a century
ago, must chill the blood of even the most ardent Nazi—namely, THE FULL
FIGHTING STRENGTH OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE. For today that strength is
assembled, not in a line of half-flooded trenches hastily improvised, but
along the mightiest system of steel and concrete fortifications ever
constructed by man—THE MAGINOT LINE. No wonder that the Nazi Juggernaut
has satisfied itself with triumphs elsewhere. No wonder that (as some people
are whispering, almost as if there were a mystery about it) —‘nothing
is happening’ on the Western Front. If nothing is happening, then surely that
is the measure of our victory, and of the enemy’s defeat. For that is
precisely what the Maginot Line was built for—in order THAT NOTHING
SHOULD HAPPEN.”

George thought this rather good, for it rationalized something that had
begun to puzzle even himself slightly—that so-called ‘phony’ war. But
of course the Maginot Line was the clue. A high military officer had shown
him some photographs of it—after which the whole business became no
puzzle at all.

Perhaps as a result of this, he wrote fewer editorials
after the war
ceased to be ‘phony’. For one thing, he was overworked, and if he ever found
himself with an hour to spare he preferred to drop in at St. Patrick’s to see
Father Wendover, who had long been his best friend. As George had somehow
suspected from the first, Wendover was not only agile-minded but considerably
sympathetic to George’s work in the town. He had always held what were
considered ‘advanced’ ideas for a priest, with the result that he more often
had to defend himself for being one than for having them; and that, he
claimed, was as good for him as for his opponents.

Such controversies had flourished in peace-time, and George had often
joined in them; during the war, however, and especially after the Norwegian
fiasco and the French collapse, nothing seemed to matter but the bare facts
of life and death, disaster and survival, enemy and friend. And George found
Wendover congenial because, beneath the surface of the proud ecclesiastic,
there lay a deep humility which, in a curious way, matched his own. Thus it
was to Wendover that George took his thoughts during the difficult days of
1940, and there was one day, just after Dunkirk, when he brought over some
notes of a speech he was due to make to a local patriotic organization. He
wanted to know what Wendover thought about it.

And the latter, while he was listening, smiled slightly. Here was George
Boswell, Mayor of Browdley—this decent, hard-working, well- meaning,
quite talented fellow—a good citizen and a stout-hearted friend
—a man whose powers of leadership were considerable and might have been
greater had he not been so personally likeable, and had he not liked to be so
likeable—here was George Boswell, with the Germans poised along the
European coastline from Narvik to Bordeaux, thinking it really mattered what
he said to a few hundred people gathered together in Browdley Co-operative
Hall. But then, as an honest man, Wendover had to admit that a similar
comment might have been made on his own sermons at such a time… for were
George’s speeches of any less PRACTICAL importance? So he listened patiently
and said, at the end: “Not bad, George—not bad at all. Cheerful,
anyhow.”