by Muriel Spark
In late February 1944, I was told that there was a passage for me on a troop-ship. This merely meant that some space normally intended for troops returning to England had not been fully occupied. Just like the troops, the thirty or so women who had decided to risk such a voyage were packed into a section with four-tiered bunks. We were told not to undress for bed but to sleep in our dark trousers. Dark trousers, said the typewritten instructions, were advisable should the boat be torpedoed, because sharks tended to overlook dark clothes. (I am sure this was a mess-room jollification.) At all hours we had to hug our lifebelts. We were allowed to wash in salt water. In fact, we were treated no worse and no better than the Army.
The boat, which was bound for Liverpool, did not go there direct. Always forestalling the German U-boats, it zigzagged. We went from Cape Town to Liverpool by way of the Azores. The voyage took three weeks. Before leaving Cape Town I had bought some poetry books. It was ages since I had read new poetry. In pamphlet form I had found T.S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages which I read on that dangerous journey.
It was indeed a dangerous journey. But it is curious how a sense of danger diminishes in proportion to the number of people who participate in the risk. On this, as on other occasions during the war, being ‘in it together’ took the edge off fear. I had no regrets about leaving Africa, and was only too happy to arrive in Liverpool, grim and unheated as it was, on a blacked-out night in March.
CHAPTER FIVE
All women who were under forty-five and who were free of family ties (such as young children or ailing relatives) were under obligation to register for work in wartime England. All types of work were considered to be war service.
In the spring of 1944 after I had been reunited with my family in Edinburgh on my return from Africa, I went to London to find a job which, in any case, I needed. Believe it or not, I chose London rather than peaceful Edinburgh because I wanted to ‘experience’ the war. This, my incredible ambition, was amply fulfilled on my first night in the blacked-out city. The train got in after dark and I put up at the Euston Station hotel. It was not long before the sirens wailed. I had so far only heard them on the newsreels. The fire-wardens were shouting from the streets to anyone who was not observing the black-out from the darkened windows. This was a period of intense incendiary bombing. It went on all night. Many people in the hotel congregated in the basement regions, but I decided to take my chance in my room. Most people agreed that you took a chance wherever you were.
But soon I was established at 82 Lancaster Gate, the Helena Club, which had been founded long since by a daughter of Queen Victoria, the worthy Princess Helena, for ‘Ladies from Good Families of Modest Means who are Obliged to Pursue an Occupation in London’. This was the original ‘May of Teck Club’ in my novel The Girls of Slender Means.
The Helena Club was absolutely charming. It was my home in London from time to time over many years. We were mainly secretaries. There was a presiding angel, bearing the formidable title of ‘Warden’, who was anything but formidable: Mrs G.S. Taylor was both warm and efficient. How happy she was to recognize our Helena Club in my novel! She wrote to me most affectionately.
The rooms reserved for the youngest girls – those in their teens – held as many as four beds. These were large rooms. The price, including two meals a day, was very modest. I had a room to myself at the top of the house overlooking leafy Kensington Gardens. For this I paid one pound twelve shillings and sixpence per week. If one wanted lunch in the Club, or to give dinner to a guest, that was an extra two shillings and sixpence for each meal.
In 1944 until well after the war food rationing was growing ever tighter. We had ration books which we surrendered to the Club, and they did quite well with difficult food supplies. Sausages, powdered eggs, spam, dried milk, were somehow concocted into a plateful of food followed by apple pudding or cake. Imported food (oranges, lemons, bananas) was not available. But we thought nothing about food, that I remember. Everybody’s lot was equal, and lives were being lost everywhere.
At the Helena Club two houses had been made into one. The Club was very spacious with an air of quiet but expensive elegance quite at odds with the humble price we paid. On the ground floor was a large drawing-room leading on to a wide terrace where we could entertain our friends, We had an equally large music room where we could study or play the piano. There were maids to clean the rooms and make our beds. And we were all young and full of fun, despite the war.
On nights when the sirens wailed we would haul our mattresses down to the cellar to sleep there. Sometimes we didn’t bother. I was once too lazy to move when I heard the air-raid warning, but I moved quickly enough when a bomb fell nearby breaking my window. Glass flew all over the room but I didn’t get a scratch.
I revisited Lancaster Gate some years ago, and for the second time in my life I found that a building I had known was in course of total reconstruction, probably to make a hotel. The Helena Club was gone (as had been the case when I visited my grandparents’ former house in Watford).
I had stayed so often in that club in Lancaster Gate, it seemed incredible that it was no more.
One incident in particular stood out in my memory as I stood there in the street: A night of thick London smog, in the blackout. I had arrived at Euston Station from Edinburgh where I had been visiting my family. No taxis were available. I simply didn’t know what to do, alone in that blanket fog, totally unable to judge what direction to take. I saw a policeman with a black-out electric torch which had a thick black handle and a dim light that shone inward and downward. I asked him if there would be a bus. – No, they were all taken off the road by the fog, he said. My suitcase was fairly heavy but I lifted it up, ready to walk in any direction the policeman might suggest. He asked me where I lived. ‘Bayswater direction,’ I said. ‘Lancaster Gate.’ – ‘Let’s go,’ he said, taking my suitcase. And with the aid of his torch and good sound street-direction, he walked me all the way home. He was very cheerful, and would hardly accept my thank-you. I thought of this as I stood outside that former site of the Helena Club, so many years after.
I lost no time in finding a job. I had extraordinary luck. Soon after arriving in London I registered at the Kensington Public Library and took out some books. One of these was Elders and Betters by Ivy Compton-Burnett, for whom I had already formed a great admiration.
The morning after, I went to the local Employment Bureau in Ladbroke Grove to see about a job. I was prepared to take anything. I filled in a form and joined a queue in the secretarial section, armed for a long wait with my copy of Ivy Compton-Burnett.
My turn came. I went into a small office and was asked to sit at a desk, on the other side of which sat a sensible-looking middle-aged woman with a file of cards in front of her. These represented the jobs available. I handed over the completed form. The recruiting administrator, as she was called, meanwhile leaned over and turned my book, which I had laid on the desk, so that she could read the spine. ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett,’ she said with great enthusiasm. We were soon embarked on a long session of literary talk. I recall that I said Ivy Compton-Burnett resembled the Greek dramatists in her stark themes, and that basically her art was surrealistic. My new friend thought Miss Compton-Burnett one of the most intelligent women writing in English. And so we went on.
When it came to the question of my job, she slid aside her card-index box and took another card out of a drawer, remarking that she imagined I was looking for an interesting job. I said, indeed I was. She asked, would I like to do secret work for the Foreign Office? Long irregular hours. In the country.
She rang up there and then and made an appointment for my interview. I was to go to the very top floor of Bush House in Aldwych. Tell no one. She wished me luck with a lovely smile. I believe I had cheered up her day; she had certainly enlivened mine.
The small office at the top of Bush House was a kind of eyrie overlooking London. The man who interviewed me looked far too big for the room. He was immensely large and f
at with a black beard. He was Sefton Delmer, a top newsman of the ’thirties and former European correspondent of the Daily Express. His blonde personal assistant, Betty Colbourne, put me at my ease by telling me the sort of work I would have to do, without giving much away about the nature of the job. I would have to be vetted, she said. It would take a few weeks. This meant that the security people would have to look into my past life. I pointed out that this might take a longer time since I had just arrived from Africa.
‘Did you come in a convoy?’ asked Delmer.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, smiling a little.
It was an elementary test: we had all been warned ‘not to know’ about the movements of ships and troops, past and present. Great signs were plastered over the walls of public buildings: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.
Three weeks passed during which I wandered all over London on foot, savouring the joys of being there, and out of Africa. I had never known London well. Our family visits before the war had been brief. Bombed-out London was the first real London I was to know. I was short of money and badly in need of a job. It troubled me quite a lot that if I didn’t get the Foreign Office job I would be in difficulties. There was some doubt, I knew, about my meagre qualifications on paper, but I believe my friend at the Employment Bureau had given me a strong recommendation for natural intelligence. I had been told that I would be unable to tell anyone what sort of work I was doing, but that I could simply declare that I worked in the Foreign Office. In World War II there was always temporary staff in the government departments, but still an aura of privilege clung to the Foreign Office idea. For instance, soon I was able to tell the girl with whom I shared a table in the Helena Club that I had got a job at last; she enquired where, I answered, ‘In the Foreign Office,’ whereupon she said, ‘You must have tons of influence.’ I replied that I had no influence at all, just luck. I doubt if she believed me.
The job was wonderfully interesting. I played a very small part, but as a fly on the wall I took in a whole world of method and intrigue in the dark field of Black Propaganda or Psychological Warfare, and the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy. The entire operation has been described by the late Sefton Delmer himself in his book Black Boomerang (published in 1962 by Seeker & Warburg); it is an account of his wartime adventures of the mind and well worth reading.
The Foreign Office secret intelligence service was M.I.6., of which our department was Political Intelligence. I worked in Delmer’s Compound at Milton Bryan, near Woburn, which we called M.B. Although he was in complete charge, Delmer’s supporters and co-workers included Richard Crossman, Ian Fleming and Bruce Lockhart, all of whom put in appearances from time to time. On the spot, practically day and night, were numerous professors and dons. M.B. was in fact a concentrated brain-tank.
Delmer, then aged forty, had been born and brought up in Berlin where his father was Professor of English at the University. As correspondent for the Daily Express during the ’thirties he had met the Nazi leaders frequently. He knew the German mind and spoke German like a native. He was in the best position to run the sort of organization that he founded.
There were two radio stations. First, the Soldiers’ Radio Calais (Soldatensender Calais) and secondly, in the last phases of the war when I had joined the unit, the powerful Radio Atlantic (Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik).
Black propaganda was distinct from the BBC’s white variety. Black took up the position that we were loyal Germans devoted to the Führer. From that point of view the news was presented in such a way that the Germans got the impression that they were listening to a German station. This was a camouflage for subtle and deadly anti-Nazi propaganda.
Detailed truth with believable lies: this was outside the scope of the BBC who boasted clearly of our strength, and disparaged the enemy. The methods of Delmer’s M.B. unit horrified a few cabinet ministers. Delmer didn’t care. His brilliance and ingenuity stimulated admiration, predominantly.
The music we played to the troops was exceptionally good and very popular.
Writing in 1962, Delmer described how, to begin with (in 1941), he had formed a policy to make the Nazi party functionaries
the number one target of our attack because, in my opinion, the formative and dedicated officials of Hitler’s organisation were doing an amazingly effective job as the driving force behind the war effort of the German people. I was immensely impressed by the way Goebbels and his underlings, high and low, were succeeding in cheering and goading the Germans to ever greater effort, and ever greater sacrifices. If we could blacken these men in the eyes of the German public as a venal and slothful privilegenzia which demanded everything from the common man, but made no sacrifices itself, why then we would have struck a mortal blow at a vital nerve of Germany’s war morale. Not only that. We would be giving the ordinary German a splendid excuse for any falling short in his own devotion to duty: ‘why should I put up with this,’ he would be able to say to himself, ‘when those party swine can get out of it all.’
Quite a lot of the stories concerned quite ordinary people, but not invented, living at real addresses. This made a convincing effect on the listeners. The names and addresses had been culled by Delmer from the small advertisement columns of the German magazines and newspapers and from the announcements of births, deaths and marriages.
If I required an engine driver living in the district of Cassel, or a greengrocer’s shop in Berlin’s Hansa district, my files could provide them …
Another source of intelligence came from the prisoner of war camps. The walls of their quarters were bugged as were the trees under which they strolled. This yielded the average soldier’s state of mind and the latest slang expressions.
Keeping the German army anxious about affairs at home and the German population who listened to this ‘German’ station worried about the course of the war in the hands of their corrupt leaders, was still daily routine when I joined the unit in 1944. It was always Delmer’s joy to find a story he had himself invented being retailed as fact by a POW.
I myself, scanning an English newspaper, found a Delmer-invented story reported as news. This was after D-Day when we were attempting to convince the German troops in Europe to surrender, by always undermining their morale. Slipped between the lines in our propaganda was information that there were no reinforcements coming to them; all had been sent to the Eastern Front; inferior and unreliable foreign troops were fighting there on the Western Front in France with the German troops. The German troops had been particularly conditioned by their own home-distributed propaganda to despise Italian fighters, especially since the Italians had made a separate peace with the Allies the previous year. To fight on the same side as Italians would be decidedly depressing to the German troops.
What I read with great enjoyment in the British newspaper was a straight news item reporting that we, the Allies, now had to employ Italian interpreters to interrogate our POWs because there were so many friendly, pro-Fascist Italians employed on the Western Front as auxiliaries to the Wehrmacht (the German army). Of course the story was false. I had seen and heard it invented by Sefton Delmer at his desk in the little newsroom where I occupied the other desk. He had tried it out on me as there was nobody more important around.
In fact, the reason why Delmer called his book Black Boomerang was precisely because the techniques of psychological warfare were inclined to turn back on the propagandist. We were constantly in danger of deceiving our own side, and sometimes, at least for a while, we did. But more important, in Delmer’s view, was the effect of the black propaganda mythology on the post-war German rationale.
Black propaganda had encouraged the legend of the generals’ resistance to the Nazi party. Resistance there certainly was, on 20 July 1944, the day of the bomb plot against Hitler. For two months before the plot our unit had the advantage over the Gestapo of knowing about it, through gossip about Count Stauffenberg, emerging from the German officers who were POWs in their bugged country hou
se camp in England.
At that stage of the war from our ‘super-patriotic German’ platform it was easy to fool the troops, if not the high-ranking officers. But the generals were incited to read between the lines, and to believe that the Allies would gladly make peace with them and consolidate their leadership, once Hitler and the Nazi party hierarchy were overcome. The Allies, in fact, had no such intentions.
Delmer wrote that in September of that year:
I learned that our broadcasts had indeed been heard by the conspirators, and interpreted in precisely the sense I had hoped. I am sorry the generals ended their lives on Hitler’s meat hooks. But I cannot say I have any compunction about having raised false hopes in them. For these men and their caste were the original patrons and sponsors of Hitler’s movement. They were the profiteers of his Reich. And they only rose against him when it was clear that he and his war of conquest was doomed.
The radio announcers were Germans, prisoners of war who had agreed to work for us in a role in which, as truly patriotic Germans, they could oppose Hitler and the Nazis. Some were aristocrats, some Communists, some artists and scholars; one POW whom I knew there was a farm-hand who was thoroughly indignant with the SS. They were still POWs in status. We protected them by anonymity. They were known in the compound as ‘Otto’, ‘Kurt’ and other names, not theirs. They were to receive British citizenship at the end of the war.