by Muriel Spark
Our five-acre compound at Milton Bryan was surrounded by a high mesh-wire and barbed fence with check-point guards on duty day and night. The headquarters was a two-storey red-brick building which looked like a small factory or a barracks. Other buildings, some of them prefabricated, were scattered over the grounds. There was a large red-brick canteen. Deer grazed on the parkland.
My job was that of ‘Duty Secretary’ to the unit, an opaque definition which somehow fitted in with the untransparent nature of the work.
My hours were generally from four in the afternoon till midnight unless there was a special demand. I was billeted in Woburn in a pleasant old requisitioned rectory together with about five other girls who were part of the unit in various capacities.
I learned to use the ‘scrambler’ which was a green-painted telephone on which a continual jangling noise made interception difficult. One learned to listen ‘through’ the jangle. Many of the features we broadcast, in between spells of the really fine dance music, had to do with precise locations that had just been bombed. This was the information I took from the spokesman of the returning crews of the Allied bombers, night after night. I would wait for the right code-name when I answered the phone, then I would say, or the Air Force spokesman would say, ‘Shall we go over?’ We then went on to the scrambler. (Years later, when I was in India, the ever-present radio music sounded to me just like that scrambler.) The scrambler was located in a different office from where I had my desk. Having taken down the details of the bombing, the number of planes that had gone out and those (not always all) that had returned, I typed out this straight information and gave it to Sefton Delmer. He had an expert staff with an uncanny access to precise streets, houses and cities. It was easy to locate the probable bomb-damage sites in the German cities and make a verifiable story, long before the news was given out on the German radio. And into the bargain might be slipped in a completely false comment about how regrettable it was that the Luftwaffe (the German air force) had now to face penalties for failing to down the Allied planes.
One day in New York in the early ’sixties I met a man in my agent’s office whom I felt I had met before. I couldn’t place him and he certainly couldn’t place me. By careful checking back into the past, it emerged that this man, René de Chochor, had been one of the SHAEF information officers who had phoned me on the scrambler, for so many nights, at M.B. I had remembered the voice although I had never seen the face, never actually ‘met’ him, in fact.
I had a desk in Delmer’s small room next to a marvellous busy newsroom where, by enormous luck, we had a teleprinter directly connected to Goebbels’ news transmitter in Germany. This treasure had been inadvertently left behind intact by the London correspondent of the German news network, on his hasty departure at the outbreak of war. The invaluable machine was known as the Hell-schreiber. It enabled us, as Delmer said, ‘to put over the poison in our news bulletins without it sounding like enemy propaganda’. Some of the operators of the Hell-schreiber were German Jewish escapees; the work must have given them immense satisfaction.
Besides the scrambler-conveyed information from SHAEF and other armed forces organizations, another nightly call used to reach me from the newsroom of the Foreign Office proper, in Whitehall. This was general news not yet released for the next day’s newspapers; we were usually ahead of time. These scrambler conversations would often lapse into the personal, and I was soon on very friendly terms with my colleague, Colin Methven. It proved to be a long and charming friendship.
Colin, like myself, was temporarily separated from his child by the war; his daughter Deirdre had been sent for safety to Canada. Colin and I used to meet in London during my four days’ leave every fortnight. In spite of austerity, there was a certain aura about dining at the Savoy, the Ritz, the Café Royal, Prunier’s and other famous restaurants that Colin knew so well. He didn’t seem to know the humbler type, and certainly he did his best to make my London leaves a lot of fun. I think he was fairly well off, but the main thing was that he was intensely interesting and had a good sense of humour. We went often to dine before the theatre at the Bath Club, which was one of the London clubs where ladies were allowed, and where Colin’s friends would join us. (The Bath Club, having been greatly damaged by a fire, was then housed in the Conservative Club.) I used to love to go to St James’s Park with Colin on a Sunday morning, or to the zoo. He was a keen naturalist. He identified every species of duck in the pond. He knew a great deal about rare beasts. Like me, he had been in Central Africa. I now owe to Colin’s letters, dating from that time and over the years to come, a great deal of casual information to invigorate my memory.
Of course, we were not permitted to speak of the work we were doing. I never asked Colin about his, nor did he think of enquiring of me about mine. He knew I worked in ‘the country’, that was all. My letters were sent to me at an address in New Oxford Street and forwarded swiftly to M.B.
My friendship with Colin was not a love affair, and perhaps it was all the better for that. He was a good deal older than me and had been married and divorced twice. He was good-looking, always with a lot of effortless charm, but I think his health had been ruined by a serious wound in the First World War. He had a most dangerous-looking bullet scar in his neck.
I didn’t at that time want any romantic attachment, and so Colin, with his delightful conversation, his generous entertainments, his true affection and very sound advice, was always just right for me as he was. I know he enjoyed my company.
I had always been aware of ‘gaining experience’ for some future literary work. No experience, I felt, was to be overlooked, even that of my darkest hours in Africa. But about the time I met Colin Methven, I felt the need to ‘give experience’. I was quite vague in this, although the desire itself was definite. I wanted to offer more of my own personality than hitherto, and give something of the same effect of ‘experience’ that I received. I wanted to give pleasure through my writings. I longed to write poems and essays or perhaps a play that would be an ‘experience’ to the reader. I wasn’t ready to do so, nor did I have much time in those hard-working days, but I often wrote poems in the mornings while I was working at M.B.
On other mornings, in Bedfordshire, I would go for a walk with a prisoner of war. We were allowed to take those brave POWs, who were risking so much to smash Hitler, for a walk or bicycle ride within a five-mile radius of the compound. What they were risking were denunciations in Germany, or assassination by clandestine POW organizations in England. Of course, if we lost the war … but that was unthinkable.
The prisoners lived in a house in Woburn Sands with a security officer. They came to work every day on the compound bus, which always stopped at Woburn for me and any other secretary or worker who was on duty; the bus brought us home after midnight. I decided not to attach myself to any one POW as some of the girls had done, but to take them for walks in turns. This proved to be a most interesting way of spending the late morning and early afternoon hours in that lovely spring of 1944. The villagers would look at us with great consternation. Obvious foreigners that our prisoners were, they were regarded as possible spies who had arrived by parachute. But the people had been warned not to approach us with questions. The Germans were not allowed to go into a pub, nor, I think, any other shop. Once I was stopped in the village street with my prisoner by a policeman new on the beat. ‘Where do you work?’ he said. ‘The Foreign Office,’ I replied, and indicating my companion (he was Hans, the former farm-hand) I added, ‘and this is a distinguished foreign gentleman.’ However, after I had shown the policeman my pass and given him a number which he rang from the nearby post office, he went away quite satisfied. ‘Only doing my duty, miss.’ I feel sure that if he had known that Hans was a German POW he would almost have fainted. I was glad that Hans himself had not been questioned. He had very little English. We got along mainly with the help of a dictionary. Sometimes Hans, with his survival-savvy, would manage to put together a German picnic of bread, la
rd and sausages. I would supply bits and pieces to eat. But this man was subject to deep depressions. The roadsides were thickly wooded. Hans said, once, ‘Hitler’s parachuters will descend here. The woods will be thick with them. They will come.’ I knew he only wanted reassurance. I told him that parachutists would hardly choose a wooded area for a landing place, and if they tried to land in the fields we would simply pick them off, one by one.
These were sad words. Our housekeeper at the Old Rectory in Woburn had a son in a parachute regiment. He came to visit her briefly on leave one weekend. I saw him setting off again down the road on foot, past those very woods where lately I had walked with Hans and allayed his fears. The young English soldier jumped to his death at Arnhem shortly afterwards.
Another of my favourite prisoners of war was Kurt, an Austrian count. He wore a shabby red and gold-braid officer’s dress coat and a monocle. His English was perfect. Kurt was known as a moving and eloquent broadcaster when we wanted to get a message to the German army on a serious national level. Kurt and I would go round the lovely lanes and pathways of Bedfordshire on foot or sometimes with borrowed bikes. I had drawn a five-mile radius with a compass on a map, but as the signposts of England had all been removed in case of an invasion, we had to judge our itinerary by instinct. Some of my happiest memories go back to those country excursions in the fine spring and summer. The roads were nearly empty of traffic, for petrol-rationing prohibited private transport. In spite of the war, it was good to be in green England after so many years in the parched heat of Africa.
We would talk of ‘after the war’. Kurt knew it was only a question of time before Germany was defeated. He understood it was necessary, but he felt genuinely for his people. Although the Allies had taken every precaution to protect the anonymity of the POWs who were working for them, there was always a fear among them of reprisals at home. Kurt would say that if the Nazis had taken his wife he would ‘of course’ shoot himself.
Some of our prisoners remained in England as British subjects. I got this news in 1948 from one of them, Otto, a young, merry Communist who loathed the Nazis, when I came across him in a newly opened restaurant called The Villa d’Este in the Bayswater Road. He was a waiter. He recognized me first. I looked up and said, ‘Otto!’ He laughed. His real name was, of course, not Otto.
In the Old Rectory I made friends with other girls who were variously employed at the compound. But as our working hours seldom coincided I saw only one of my billet-mates regularly and daily. This was the oddest relationship I had ever known. Her name was Marcelle Quennell. She was the wife (I believe then separated or divorced) of the writer Peter Quennell, a prominent biographer and literary critic whose name to me, at that time, was God or thereabouts.
Marcelle was very tall and thin, with a small, very white face. She looked as if she had suffered. I believe she was Belgian in origin. Her expression was shrewd and cynical. She accentuated her height by wearing those four-inch cork-soled shoes which were then very fashionable in Paris. They completely spoilt her walk, and took away the natural swing that she had at home in the mornings when she skimmed up and down the stairs.
Marcelle was a good linguist. Her job in the Unit was that of switch-censor. For security a censor sat by a switch during transmissions, following the script which the speaker was broadcasting, and could cut him off if he strayed from the text.
There was always something unexplained and detached about Marcelle. She was over thirty. In the morning it was she who made our coffee in the kitchen, ‘Morning’ to us was late, due to our hours of work, and so the dreary normal breakfast of rationed tea, toast and margarine would be cleared away before we got down to the large kitchen (in our dressing-gowns, to the housekeeper’s horror). I always enjoyed Marcelle’s coffee. She stirred it slowly over the gas. Coffee, spurned in those days by the general British population, was off the ration.
Marcelle had moods of grandeur which rather alarmed me. She thought nothing of saying out loud in the hearing of the housekeeper who was supervising the cleaning women in the adjacent scullery, ‘After the war she’ll have to go back to her semi-detached, roll up her sleeves and work.’ And it annoyed Marcelle intensely that the housekeeper referred to the cleaners as ‘my women’. I took those people’s pretensions as fun, but Marcelle didn’t. In turn, the good lady would inveigh against Marcelle in her absence. ‘Bossy foreigner. And dragged through the divorce courts.’ I remember remarking that I, too, was divorced; there had been no dragging. But the housekeeper seemed not to hear what I said. She had it in for Marcelle only.
Marcelle’s grand manner sometimes vented itself on me. ‘I don’t know how you can exist in England without a private income,’ she declared. ‘I have three hundred a year and they take off half for unearned income tax.’ Another time she pointed out that I was occupying a room to myself instead of sharing, although I was only twenty-six. ‘Private rooms are for people over thirty.’ I had never met anyone like her. I knew she was unbalanced. I told her once on an impulse that I was sorry for her, and I meant it sincerely. It was in no way a patronizing remark. Marcelle’s face crumpled a bit. ‘No need to be sorry for me,’ she muttered. A little while later, with a nice expression on her face, she brought me a bar of French soap. (Soap was tightly rationed and good soap unobtainable.) I remember her standing in the doorway of my room on that occasion. ‘Goodness,’ I said spontaneously. ‘You look like Mary Queen of Scots.’
‘You’re not the first person to say that. What makes you think so?’
‘Just an impression,’ I said. She did indeed have something in her looks of the Scottish Queen’s portraits.
I thought, privately, that she was rather a security risk. But of course that wasn’t my department.
One of the prisoners, a very tall, good-looking, rather reckless type, had become Marcelle’s temporary boyfriend. They were obviously having a romantic affair, to say the least.
One day that prisoner was missing. He had been sent back to the POW camp for a variety of reasons, mainly, I suppose, general indiscipline. Of course he was under strict surveillance. It was in his own interests not to talk to his fellow prisoners about where he had been, and why. He was, besides, still bound by the Official Secrets Act, and knew it. But it happened that the Red Cross or some such international organization had arranged through the BBC and the German state radio a reciprocal prisoners’ ‘Hallo, Folks’ programme – the voice of ‘our Billie’, POW in Germany, telling his family in Oldham that he was safe and well in exchange for ‘our Fritz’, POW in England, telling his family in Cologne the same thing.
Our erstwhile collaborator, Marcelle’s friend, now volunteered for one of these broadcasts. Our security surveillance slipped up and his voice, which had hitherto broadcast on our Radio Calais, now went over the air in the prison-camp context. It was recognizable as a voice, and traceable. Whether that fool’s voice was, in fact, ever recognized, or his identity traced to his family (with almost certain reprisals), I never heard. But there was a tremendous fuss, with Marcelle stalking around sulkily for a while, at the same time looking for someone new.
I used this incident with fictional variations in my novel The Hothouse by the East River. There was something surrealistic, mysterious, about the affair, which I think the novel tones in with.
Marcelle took her own life some time after the war. I felt very sad indeed when I read about it in a newspaper paragraph. Strange, proud Marcelle! I feel she must have suffered, mentally, beyond endurance, even before the period when I knew her. She was one of those people whom there is little one can do to help. She was already, when I met her, on the other side of some invisible barrier which only a stray word of sympathy or a tablet of rare French scented soap could, for a moment, pass over. Was her despair due to drugs? Drink? Men? Or merely the brittle condition of being Marcelle that pushed her to that last extremity? I have never forgotten, I cannot forget her.
Mostly, on my trips to London every two weeks I put up at the Helen
a Club. Sometimes I went to stay at Shiplake, near Henley-on-Thames, where my friend from Rhodesia, May Heygate, was now living with her father-in-law. She had returned to England shortly before me and was now preparing to marry her husband’s brother, who was fighting in France. The Church of England would not allow this union, so she eventually had a civil marriage. When I went to stay, we often made trips to London together, especially on Monday mornings, since I had to catch a train back to the country in the evening. There I made friends, through May, with a popular singer, Jack Cooper. He was on the BBC, a performer (in fact he was a ‘crooner’) with a regular feature every weekday at five in the afternoon with ‘Fred Hartley’s Quartet’. I saw quite a lot of him when, after that, I went to London and wasn’t seeing Colin Methven. My London days were more or less enjoyable in spite of the V1s, robot planes that fell with a warning from June onwards, and the subsequent V2s that started to land without warning in September. It was amusing to hear Jack Cooper crooning pre-arranged songs especially for me when I was back at work at the compound. He had quite a good voice, church-trained.
Nineteen years later exactly, I had a letter from Jack Cooper. He had been reading my books with pleasure and wanted to know if I was the same ‘strange, sweet, little red-headed creature with a burning ambition to become a writer whom he had known during the war?’ He added, very truly, ‘With the hectic life of those days we drifted apart.’ We met again and enjoyed talking about what were already, for us, old times.
At the Helena Club my friends there would come to my room after dinner to talk and make coffee. Sometimes we had sherry, a precious present from Colin. My best friend in the club, Pamela Flood, a very beautiful girl, used to like me to read her my latest poems. She was a good judge and critic of poetry.