Time and Time Again (27 page)

'That all? I'd call it a mild diagnosis. . . . And then what did YOU say?'

'I said I knew I had.'

Charles laughed. 'If this damned war ever gets over, let's ask Blainey to dinner. . . . God, it would be something to live a civilized life again, wouldn't it? Not that it's too bad in London-- putting on a tin hat once a week and having drinks in pubs. Our friends abroad should see me. I often wonder whether some of the German Secretaries and Attachés we used to meet are doing the same in Berlin. . . . Talk about rum fellows--it's a rum world altogether. . . .'

* * * * *

Six months later the word 'rum' was hardly one that an Englishman would have chosen--with Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France already victims, German armies just across the Channel, and the first air-raids on London beginning. Charles did his duty ON as well as beneath the roofs of Whitehall, and of the many exciting moments that came to him a few were fairly unpleasant.

Early one dark morning, as he was leaving his fire-watching post after the 'all clear' sounded, he learned of an emergency summons for extra helpers in a certain street in Notting Hill where a large bomb had fallen. With others, he responded. When he got there he found that several five-storied houses had collapsed into rubble, under which were buried numerous victims, some of whom might still be alive. Rescue squads were already at work, boring and digging and passing out baskets of brick and plaster. Charles took a place in the line, and presently volunteered when a call was made for someone thin enough to crawl beneath a beam towards an elderly man who was pinned down under a mass of debris. Charles reflected as he did so that he wasn't really so thin; it was the other fellows who just happened to be stouter. He worked for perhaps an hour, scrabbling bricks out of the mess and passing them behind him. He was getting closer to the man, but still not close enough to do anything for him. Not having had experience of this sort of thing before, he kept thinking he was slower than anyone else would have been, and this spurred him to extra exertion. From sounds outside he judged that the raiders had returned and were dropping more heavy stuff in the neighbourhood. The man who was pinned down groaned quietly from time to time; presently the groaning stopped. By the time Charles finally reached him he was dead. There was no point then in continuing to work at that particular place, so Charles withdrew from the hole and went to help somewhere else. This went on till past dawn. He worked in a vacuum of sensation, not feeling any of the expectable emotions--neither fear of the still falling bombs, nor pity for the dead and injured, nor anger or indignation at anybody or anything in particular. His most conscious thought, almost amounting to a worry, was that he wouldn't be much good for some rather important work at his office later in the day.

About eight o'clock the 'all clear' sounded again and Charles, with a local warden, left the scene of what was so genteelly called an 'incident'. The street was close to where Havelock lived, and Charles was not utterly astonished to find his father standing at the corner, fully dressed and looking quite spruce. They exchanged a greeting, but no more; Charles felt now his own exhaustion and wanted nothing so much as to get to his flat and have a bath. His companion, a sturdy rough-spoken friendly fellow, commented: 'That old bloke your dad?'

'Yes,' said Charles. 'He lives just round the corner.'

'Don't you want to take 'im 'ome, then--make sure 'e's all right?'

'Oh, he's all right. I'll see him later.'

'Bin a narsty one, though, tonight--some of the old folks need a bit of cheerin' up after it.'

'My father doesn't. He enjoys it all.'

'WHAT?'

'It excites him. All the bombs falling and the fires and everything.'

'Go on--I don't believe it!'

'It's a fact. I wanted him to go away when the raids started, but he wouldn't. He likes it here.'

'Wot's the matter with 'im then? Is he loony?'

'Yes,' said Charles.

But he did not often lose his nerve enough to speak with such nerveless detachment.

* * * * *

It was true, though, that Havelock was in London from choice. After the opening nights of the heavy September raiding Charles had seen no reason why his father should stay, since he could just as well live with Cobb on the coast or in some inland town. The affair of the letters seemed to have blown over, at least for the time, and Charles had heard no more from anyone about his own letter of resignation. Even if Havelock were still on any secret list of suspects, he could be watched as easily in one place as another. But the old man himself declined to move. It was perhaps too much or at least too simple to say that he enjoyed the raids, but they certainly fascinated him; in some obscure way they offered a challenge and a reassurance of destiny, as if every bomb were aimed at him personally, so that every raid he survived represented a personal victory.

Towards the end of the year there came a lull in air attacks, and Jane (using this as an excuse) joined Charles at the Chelsea flat, leaving Gerald in Cheshire. But when the lull ended Jane also refused to leave. Charles could not convince her that he worried about her safety even more than he took pleasure in her company. But DID he? He often asked himself the question afterwards, speculating how much had been in his power, even had he chosen to exercise it.

Besides a desire to be with Charles, she soon had other reasons for staying where trouble was. She found a job with the local authority, arranging shelter for bombed-out families; in this she became an instant success and (to Charles's dismay) quite invaluable. Sometimes when they both returned to the flat, she from the Town Hall and he from his varied duties in Whitehall, it was long past midnight. Then if there was no raid they could have a meal of sorts and a few hours' sleep before morning took them to work again. It was hard, and amidst these compulsions, to remember that they were financially well off--hard, and also, as a rule, irrelevant. Money was still the lubricant, but it was not the driving power of this new kind of life; it conferred a few small privileges, but no large immunities. To Charles these months in London during the blitz reminded him more of his schooldays than of anything else--the physical austerities, the extraordinary way one enjoyed any small pleasure that came unexpectedly, the regular almost taken-for-granted ordeals (now the raids, at school compulsory games), and over it all a sense of time passing that must, if one were lucky, bring some eventual finality--the end of term, or the end of the war. Towards Christmas, so Havelock assured Charles, Hitler missed a terrific psychological opening wedge into the Londoner's heart. He should have announced, with all possible propaganda fanfare, that raids would be totally suspended during the festive season, that London could put on its lights, enjoy social engagements, and sleep the good sleep for a whole week. The British authorities, naturally, would then have warned that Hitler was not to be trusted and would have insisted (rightly) on continuing every precaution; after which Hitler should very simply have kept his word. The curious psychological effect of this would have been to make Londoners feel almost grateful for not being killed, and irritated with their own rulers for being over-zealous. At least that was the way Havelock worked it out; but since to make Hitler popular was neither Charles's desire nor within his power, the argument remained purely academic.

Charles was an averagely good citizen, performing his duties by day and night no better or worse than tens of thousands of other Londoners--that is to say, without any special heroism, but with a good deal of conscientiousness. The time he crawled under the ruins of the house to try to free the trapped old man was the nearest he ever came to a personal exploit; there were other ticklish moments, some of them even more unpleasant, but none that put him so close to the centre of any stage. He did not want such a position, anyhow, and if chance had decreed it for him he knew his friends and colleagues would have responded with far more badinage than applause.

Charles's happiest moments at this period of his life (and they had a piercing intensity while they lasted) were the rare ones when he and Jane found themselves at home with nothing much to do in some small pocket of the immediate future that seemed to have miraculously detached itself from the rest. The flat was near the river, and on raidless nights they would stroll along the Chelsea Embankment before going to bed, watching the tugs horn their way under the Albert Bridge and wishing they had a dog. But of course this was no time for having dogs in London. Or wives either, Charles sometimes thought during raids. The safe moments with Jane were precious because of the fears that at other times beset him. He had never felt so alone with her, dependent on her, worried about her--and, perhaps because of it all, so close to her.

And there were other moments, weirdly and painfully happy, when he had checked after raids to find that all was well with Jane and he could then unclench the muscles of his stomach and join a group of tired men clustering round a mobile canteen to drink tea. It was the least palatable liquid he had ever tasted--sticky and oversweetened and pale with condensed milk; yet he found in it a flavour that again reminded him of schooldays--of horrible concoctions prepared and enjoyed in his study after a football game that he had particularly loathed.

Jane, however, was much more than an averagely good citizen. In no time at all she seemed to have acquired a position of authority at the Town Hall, distributing chits for this and that, fixing homeless families in temporary quarters, smoothing out countless difficulties and bringing order out of chaos wherever she turned. All the qualities that had made her hoydenish as a girl and excellent as a diplomat's wife made her now superb. She knew how to talk to poor people without condescension and to officials without subservience. She knew exactly when to insist and when to cajole, when to rebuke and when to flatter. And she seemed to have no physical fear. This, to Charles, who had, was the most remarkable thing of all.

Owing partly to an early fresh-air upbringing and partly also to much experience of savage injuries caused by broken glass, she developed what Charles jokingly called a 'window neurosis'. As soon as she entered a room she would rush up to closed windows and open them, thus lessening the danger of blast, but also (as Charles pointed out) destroying the effect of indoor heating on cold days. Charles, in his office overlooking the Horse Guards Parade, was one of those who found the government heat ration hopelessly inadequate unless he worked in his overcoat and trusted to draughts for ventilation. Once Jane visited him and went straight to the windows, opening them wide and exclaiming: 'Charles, you're stuffy in here.' A man named Etheridge, who happened to be with Charles at the time, gave the statement a prolonged joy-ride. 'Of course he's stuffy in here. Isn't he stuffy when he's with you too? Why, that's what we call him--STUFFY ANDERSON.'

They hadn't, until then. But afterwards those who knew him well enough and liked him sometimes did. Others picked up the nickname without the story of its origin, and thinking of him as Stuffy found stuffiness in some of his behaviour. His minute handwriting helped, and perhaps also a certain fussiness over details that did not, just then, seem to everybody worth the attention he gave them. He could not have explained, and perhaps he did not know, that he clung to the importance of these trivia as to a symbol of what could not be blown to bits or buried under rubble. The verbal correctness of despatches, for instance. He abhorred jargon, the diplomatic as much as any, and would frown on any junior who talked or wrote of 'implementing a decision' or 'activating a policy', except of course when such idioms were consciously used to disguise or fog a meaning. For certain words his dislike amounted to prejudice--'rededicate' was one; 'underprivileged' was another. To the surprise of some in his department, he had no objection to 'okay'. He was not a pedant. Now that the immediate threat of a German invasion seemed to be over, there were often arguments about the value and quality of Churchill's oratory--that speech, for example, about fighting on the beaches and in the fields and the streets and the hills. How far could it have weighed in the hairline balance that had so recently existed? It was often conceded that further fighting would have been hopeless if ever an enemy had seized the airfields, the railways and roads into London, and the Channel ports, nor was it certain that all this could have been prevented if enough German lives had been staked. Yet the romantic view, the heroic attitude, however false or illogical-- what a weapon it had been, and especially in the almost total absence of other weapons! Charles, whose service to his country was at no time romantic, nor did he ever think it was, could share nevertheless the sense of glory that sometimes touched London's tired morning faces like an extra colour on a painter's palette that came from no known mixture of other colours. It would have been hard to make a memorandum about this, but it was clearly the stuff that dreams were made of, and English dreams at that. Charles was a great admirer of Churchill and of the fighting-on-the- beaches speech. But of the other famous one, about having nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat, he would only comment: 'It always WAS good--even when Garibaldi and Lord Byron and John Donne thought so.'

* * * * *

Charles alternated with Jane, as a rule, in visiting Gerald at weekends; it rarely happened that they could go together. But Gerald meanwhile was happy enough with Aunt Birdie and had made friends of his own age in the small Cheshire town. Charles told Jane he sometimes doubted whether the boy really enjoyed his visits or was just polite enough to give him a civil welcome.

'Of course he likes to see you, Charles. But he's as shy of you as you are of him.'

'I don't mind. My time will come later. What I'm really looking forward to is when he's about seventeen or eighteen and we can start being companions. Climbing, for instance--I'd like to take him up Scafell.'

'I'll be getting on for sixty when Gerald's eighteen.'