Sam’s Department was under attack, and with it every recording engineer, every RPA, every piece of equipment, every TD7, mixer and fader and every waxing and groove in the building. As the protector and defender of them all, he became passionate.
‘Did they give specific instances? Could they even find one?’
‘They started with Big Ben. It’s always got to be relayed direct from Westminster, the real thing, never from disc. That’s got to be firmly fixed in the listeners’ minds. Then, if Big Ben is silent, the public will know that the war has taken a distinctly unpleasant turn.’
‘Jeff, the escape of Big Ben freezes in cold weather.’
‘We shall have to leave that to the Ministry of Works.’
‘And the King’s stammer. Ah, what about that. My standby recordings for his speeches to the nation – His Majesty without stammer, in case of emergency.’
‘Above all, not those.’
‘And Churchill.…’
‘Some things have to go, that was decided at a preliminary talk long before I got there. Otherwise it’s just a general directive, and we’ve lived through a good many of those. It doesn’t affect the total amount of recording. If you want to overwork, you’ve nothing to worry about.’ Sam said that he accepted that no-one present had had the slightest understanding of his Department’s work, but it was strange, very strange, that there had been no attempt whatever, at any stage, to consider his point of view.
‘If someone could have reasoned with him, Jeff. Perhaps this idea that’s come to me about the bees.…’
‘I protested against any cuts in your mobile recording units. I managed to save your cars.’
‘Those Wolseleys!’
‘They’re all you’ve got, Sam.’
‘The hearses. I’ve been asking for replacements for two years. They’re just about fit to take a Staff Officer to a lunch party, wait till he collapses from over-indulgence, then on to the graveyard. And I’ve had to send two of those out to France.… Jeff, were you asked to break this to me?
‘In a way.’ As they left the meeting one of the Directors had drawn him aside and had asked him to avoid mentioning the new recommendations to RPD for as long as possible.
Sam was floundering in his newly acquired wealth of grievances.
‘Without even the commonplace decency … no standbys … my cars, well, I suppose you did your best there … my girls.…’
‘In my opinion you can make do with the staff you’ve got,’ Jeff said. ‘One of your RPAs was talking to me in the studio just now, and I assure you he was very helpful.’
When he had done what he could Jeff walked out of the building. It was scarcely necessary for him to show his pass. His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian’s, but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC. He stood for a moment among the long shadows on the pavement, between the piles of sandbags which had begun to rot and grow grass, now that spring had come.
DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it. In any case, he had a taxi waiting for him every night, just round the corner in Riding House Street. He hardly ever used it, but it was a testimony that if he wanted to, he could get away quickly.
RPD seemed to have forgotten how to go home. Mrs Milne suggested as much to him as she said goodnight. Her typewriter slumbered now under its leatherette cover. He gave no sign of having heard her.
Long before it was dark men in brown overalls went round BH, fixing the framed blackouts in every window, circulating in the opposite direction to the Permanents coming downstairs, while the news readers moved laterally to check with Pronunciation, pursued by editors bringing later messages on pink cards. Movement was complex, so too was time. Nobody’s hour of work coincided exactly with the life-cycle of Broadcasting House, whose climax came six times in the twenty-four hours with the Home News, until at nine o’clock, when the nation sat down to listen, the building gathered its strength and struck. The night world was crazier than the day world. When Lise Bernard paused in doubt at the door of RPD’s office, she saw her Head of Department pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC’s pale furniture, veneered with Empire woods. He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC’s frightful house ties, dark blue embroidered with thermionic valves in red. Evidently he put on whatever came to hand first. Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts.
When he recognized who she was he stopped pacing about and took off his spectacles, changing from a creature of sight to one of faith. Lise, the crowded office, the neatly angled sandwiches, the tray with its white cloth suitable for grades of Director and above, turned into patches of light and shade. To Lise, on the other hand, looking at his large hazel eyes, the eyes of a child determined not to blink for fear of missing something, he became someone who could not harm her and asked to be protected from harm. The effect, however, was quite unplanned, he produced it unconsciously. All the old lechers and yearners in the building envied the success which he seemed to turn to so little account.
‘He just weeps on their shoulders you know,’ they said. ‘And yet I believe the man’s a trained engineer.’
‘Sit down, Miss Bernard. Have all these sandwiches. You look hungry.’ When he had put his spectacles on again he couldn’t pursue this idea; Lise was decidedly overweight. ‘I like to get to know everyone who comes to work for me as soon as possible – in a way it’s part of the responsibility I feel for all of you – and the shortest way to do that, curiously enough, I’ve found, is to tell you some of the blankly incomprehensible bloody idiotic lack of understanding that our Department meets with every minute of the day.’
Lise sat there blankly, eating nothing. He picked up the telephone, sighing.
‘Canteen, I have a young assistant here, quite new to the Corporation, who can’t eat your sandwiches.’
‘That’s National Cheese, Mr Brooks. The manufacturers have agreed to amalgamate their brand names for the duration in the interest of the Allied war effort.’
‘I believe you’ve been waiting to say that all day.’
‘I don’t want anything, Mr Brooks, really I don’t,’ whimpered Lise.
‘Not good enough for you.’ He looked angrily at the window, unable to throw them out because of the blackout. Then he sat down opposite to the girl and considered her closely. ‘You know, even though I only saw you for a few minutes at the interview, I was struck by the width between your eyes. You can see something like it in those portraits by – I’m sure you know the ones I mean. It’s a sure index of a certain kind of intelligence, I would call it an emotional intelligence.’ Lise wished that there was a looking-glass in the room.
‘Some people might find what I have to say difficult to grasp, because I let my ideas follow each other just as they come. But people whose eyes are as wide apart as yours won’t have that difficulty.’ He took her hand, but held it quite absent-mindedly.
‘You may find Broadcasting House rather strange at first, but there’s nothing unusual about me. Except for this, I suppose – it just so happens that all my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand. Perhaps you know what it’s like to have a worry that doesn’t and can’t leave room in your mind for anything else and won’t give you peace, night or day, for a single moment.’
Now something went not at all according to programme. Lise began to sob. These tears were not of her usual manageable kind, and her nose turned red. Having no handkerchief with her she struggled to her feet and heaved and streamed her way out of the room.
‘Bad news?’ asked
Teddy, meeting her in the corridor. Set on her way to the Ladies, she only shook her head. RPD’s gone for one of them at last, he thought. Jeez, I don’t blame him. But Della, expert in human behaviour, thought this impossible.
‘Why?’ Teddy asked. ‘He’s capable.’
‘If it was that, she wouldn’t be crying.’
When Lise did not come back, Sam was at first mildly puzzled, and then forgot about her. But he was still oppressed with the injustice that had been done to him in the name of truth, in the name of patriotism too, if you thought of the cheese sandwiches, and the added injustice of being abandoned without a listener. In the end he had to turn to Vi, too busy and perhaps too accustomed to his ways to be quite what he wanted, but not tearful, and always reliable. By this time, however, having been sorting out administrative and technical problems since five in the morning, he was exhausted. He put his head on her shoulder, as he was always rumoured to do, took off his spectacles, and went to sleep immediately.
Twenty minutes passed. It was coming up for the nine o’clock news.
‘Aren’t you exceeding your duties?’ said one of the recording engineers, putting his head round the door. ‘You’ve got a situation on your hands there.’
‘If that’s a name for cramp,’ said Vi.
2
The second year of the war was not a time when the staff of BH gave very much thought to promotion. But, even so, it seemed odd that Jeff Haggard and Sam Brooks, who, though they could hardly be termed Old Servants, had been bitterly loyal for more than ten years, should be nothing more than DPP and RPD. True, nobody else could have done their jobs, and then again Sam always seemed too overworked to notice, and Jeff too detached to care. One might have assumed that they would be there for ever.
But if they were either to move or to leave, it would have to be together. Without understanding either their warmly unreasonable RPD, or their sardonic DPP, the BBC knew that for a fact. The link between them was consolingly felt as the usefulness of having Haggard around when Brooks had to be got out of trouble. This was enough for practical purposes, but Jeff would have liked to have been able to explain it further. By nature he was selfish. He had left his first wife because he had found his second wife more attractive, and his second wife had left him because, as she told her lawyers, she could never make him raise his voice. It was, therefore, going against his nature, a most unsafe proceeding, to put himself out to help a friend, worse still to do so for so long. Their long relationship looked like an addiction – a weakness for the weak on Jeff’s part – or a response to the appeal for protection made by the defenceless and single-minded. Of course, if this appeal were to fail entirely, the human race would have difficulty in reproducing itself.
Perhaps if Sam had ever been able to foresee the result of his actions, or if he had suspected for one moment that he was not entirely self-sufficient, the spell might have been broken, or perhaps there was a fixed point in the past when that might have been done.
‘I ought to have stopped in 1938,’ Jeff thought. ‘With Englishry.’ At the time of the Munich Agreement a memo had been sent round calling, as a matter of urgency, for the recording of our country’s heritage.
It was headed Lest we forget our Englishry. Sam had disappeared for over two weeks in one of the Wolseleys, pretty infirm even at that time, with an engineer and an elderly German refugee, Dr Vogel – Dr Vogel, cruelly bent, deaf in one ear, but known to be the greatest expert in Europe on recorded atmosphere.
There was not much hope of commonsense prevailing. Dr Vogel, in spite of his politeness and gentle ganz meinerheits, was an obsessive, who had been seen to take the arms of passers-by in his bony grip and beg to record their breathing, for he wished to record England’s wheezing before the autumn fogs began. ‘Have the goodness, sir, to cough a little into my apparatus.’ Sam thought the idea excellent.
The expedition to the English countryside arrived back with a very large number of discs. The engineer who had gone with them said nothing. He went straight away to have a drink. It was probably a misfortune that the Controllers were so interested in the project that they demanded a playback straight away. Usually there was a judicious interval before they expressed any opinion, but not this time.
‘What we have been listening to – patiently, always in the hope of something else coming up – amounts to more than six hundred bands of creaking. To be accurate, some are a mixture of squeaking and creaking.’
‘They’re all from the parish church of Hither Lickington,’ Sam explained eagerly. ‘It was recommended to us by Religious Broadcasting as the top place in the Home Counties. What you’re hearing is the hinges of the door and the door itself opening and shutting as the old women come in one by one with the stuff for the Harvest Festival. The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so. Some of them have got more to carry, so the door has to open wider. That’s when you get the squeak.’
‘Hark, the vegetable marrow comes!’ cried Dr Vogel, his head on one side, well contented.
For several weeks the Recorded Programme Department was in danger of complete reorganization, for the BBC could form and re-form its elements with ease. It was put to DPP, in consultation, that although RPD was successfully in charge of hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment, and no fault could be found with his technical standing.…
‘You feel that he’s too interested in creaking doors,’ Jeff said.
‘He’s irresponsible.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say so.’
‘There was a considerable financial investment in this project, and Brooks was well aware that copies of the recordings were to be buried certain fathoms in the earth as a memorial for future generations.’
‘You could still do that,’ Jeff replied. ‘There mayn’t be any doors that creak by then. Mine doesn’t now.’ All the doors in BH were fitted with self-closing devices of an irritating nature.
It was not Jeff’s habit to soothe, but as usual the case he made for his friend, only just over the borderline of detachment, and gradually becoming more serious, proved effective. Sam never heard of these discussions. He continued like a sleepwalker, who never knows what obstacles are removed, and by what hands, from his path.
And Sam was not the only member of the Corporation who confided in Jeff. That was surprising, in view of the imperturbable surface he presented, which gave back only a stony resonance, truthful and dry, to the complaints of others. But his advice was excellent, and he could be relied upon, as so few could, not to wait for a convenient opening to start on his own grievances. Perhaps he hadn’t any, certainly he admitted to none. His calmness was really recklessness, as of a gambler who no longer felt anything was valuable enough to stake. That in turn was not likely to make him popular. Those who valued his cold judgement when they needed it, very naturally resented it when they didn’t. To see the Director of Programme Planning miscalculate might have been a relief, but during the first nine months of the war no hint of such a thing arose – never, until the affair of General Pinard.
‘You’ll get your boy back, then,’ said Della to Lise. A strong line was best, in her opinion. Everyone knew that Lise considered herself engaged and that Frédé was some kind of electrician with the French 1st Army. The way things were going they’d have to bring the French over here, there was nowhere else for them to go.
‘But that will be quite impossible,’ said Tad, demonstrating with his map. ‘You underestimate the obstacle of the English Channel.’
‘In that case, if you want my advice, you’d do best to forget him,’ said Della. ‘After all, he never gave you a ring, did he?’
Lise had not proved any better at her work than Della, which made some sort of bond between them.
Vi’s merchant seaman wrote making apparent references to home leave, but a good deal of his letter had been blacked out by the censor. What a job having to go through other people’s personal letters, Vi thought, they must feel uncomfortable, you had
to pity them.
On June 10 1940 the French Government admitted that Paris could not be defended, and left for Bordeaux. Between the débandade and de Gaulle’s arrival on the 17th, there was a bizarre moment of hope when the Government learned that General Georges Pinard had escaped to London, flying his own light aircraft, and bringing with him nothing but a small valise and one junior officer. He went straight to the Rembrandt Hotel.
Historians have not yet decided – or rather, they have decided but not agreed – as to who sent the General on his desperate mission. Certainly no-one could have been more welcome. Whereas de Gaulle was practically unknown in Britain, Pinard was instantly recognizable, with his coarse silvery moustache, the joy of worn-out cartoonists, and his nose broken by a fall from a horse and flattened out of its French sharpness. His name was one of the few that the public knew well and it created its own picture.
The General was a peasant’s son from the flattest, wettest and most unpicturesque part of France, where the provinces of Aisne and Somme join. Born in 1869, he grew up with the Prussian occupation; the army rescued him from hoeing root vegetables, and he rose at a moderate speed through the ranks. Improbable as it seemed, he was a romantic, a Dreyfusard and a devotee of the aeroplane – indeed, his lectures on the importance of airpower delayed his promotion by several years. However, he cared nothing for Empire, nothing for impossible ambitions, only for the stubborn defence of the solid earth of his country. In the Great War, he was with one of the only two divisions not affected by the mutiny of 1917. He always slept excellently, and it was said that he had to be wakened by his orderly before every battle.
When the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre was reopened in 1919, Pinard was one of the first to be appointed, and was looked upon as a sound man, a counterweight, with his peasant blood, to the impossible de Gaulle. In 1940, in spite of his advanced age, he had managed to get himself the command of the 5th Armoured Division, which, in the middle of May, had made a last counterattack against the German advance.
Human Voices Page 3