On the 20th June, Jack Barnett of Transport, Supply and Equipment asked if DPP could spare him a few minutes.
‘Mr Haggard, do you still want that taxi to wait for you every night in Riding House Street?’
‘Why, is the driver objecting?’ asked Jeff. ‘I should have thought he might have come and talked to me himself. He often does.’
‘Not as far as I know. Of course, you’re paying for his time yourself so he doesn’t come onto my account. But I was thinking that perhaps you’re not aware that since the news got so bad you’re entitled as a Departmental Director to the use of an armoured car every evening on standby until further notice. Of course we’re leaving it to your public spirit to share the car whenever possible.’
‘Jack, you want my taxi for somebody else. Who is it?’
‘Well, we’ve been notified that a very distinguished American newscaster is going to turn up here. He’s just made his own way out of France, and NBS have asked us to give him transport facilities. We don’t know how long he’ll be over here, but he’s said to be one of Britain’s firmest friends, and believe me, Mr Haggard, we need them now.’
‘He can have my armoured car.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t made my point clear, Mr Haggard. He wants a cab with a Cockney driver who’s a bit of a character. That’s what journalists like, and that’s what he is, newscaster’s just their word for it. And you seem to be the only member of staff that can get a cab to wait regularly.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Something McVitie.’
DPP looked somewhat moved, you could almost call it pleased, but all he said was: ‘If it’s Mac, it will do him good to walk.’
The door seemed to explode inwards. It was fortunate that the desk was always kept clear, because the man who came in immediately piled it high with tin hats, webbing belts, mess-tins, three cameras, a Press arm-band, a bedroll, French wines, French cheeses, a holster, a .45 automatic and a pair of officer’s field-glasses.
‘Take all this junk out of here,’ said Jeff.
Mac flung down a large sack of oranges and threw his arms round Jeff, as when brave and reluctantly friendly paleface meet. Barnett was taken aback. He’d never seen anybody, man, woman or child, attempt to embrace DPP and he could hardly credit it now.
‘These are times of stress, times of decision,’ growled Mac in a deeply rich New Jersey accent. ‘I find you sitting here.’
‘That’s all I’m required to do until the Germans cross the Channel,’ Jeff replied. ‘I expect to get further instructions then.’
‘Let’s go on a real beat-up,’ said Mac. ‘You too, kid,’ he added, turning to Barnett.
Barnett excused himself. His duties in regard to the important American correspondent were at an end. DPP and he were evidently as thick as thieves and could decide for themselves about the taxi. Meanwhile it was time to address himself to his next problem. The newly-installed French section didn’t like the grade 3 mid-green carpets which he’d supplied with such difficulty. It was a moral issue, it seemed, they wanted to bivouac in the simplest possible conditions and to purify themselves through suffering, London being their new front line until victory was in sight. Now he was left with three carpets on his hands.
Up till 1939 Mac had been stationed in London rather more often than in other parts of the world, and on routine visits to BH he had got to know Jeff as well perhaps as anybody did. He loved Jeff because he saw him as a human being not over-impressed by the world, less so in fact than anyone he knew except his own grandmother who’d always refused to leave Stony Ridge, Vermont. Hence when Jeff had had to go to New York on the BBC’s business or his own, he had always stayed with the McVitie family, out on Long Island.
Now Mac’s unexpected arrival and generous progress through Broadcasting House was like a gust of warm wild air, exposing its thin places. At his approach Barnett had become a kid, while the office, ready for a forward planning meeting, had turned into a dump for left luggage. Even the well-tried national defence of expecting the worst, in which Jeff shared because it suited him temperamentally, had to give way and let through the impatient pioneer. Everything seemed possible, except to leave things as they were.
The two of them crossed the road together in the sunlight for a drink at the Langham. The vast hotel, rented by the BBC, gave the impression of being too proud to submit to its new occupants. The cathedral-like apse, the colossal Corinthian pillars branching into gilded foliage, the antique iron fire escapes, the pendants of Lalique glass glimmering from the high ceilings, all suggested many cycles of art and civilization, now put to baser uses and menaced by war. Upstairs, most of the bedrooms had been converted with hardboard partitions into offices; turning left through the mighty glass doors you came to a bar which the BBC had furnished with timid cocktail stools.
Mac drove his way through the clearings between the tables.
‘My cut-through to New York’s at seven. We’ve got half an hour. Do they have anything to drink here?’
‘Give them time,’ said Jeff. ‘When you come into the war they’ll lay in some root beer for you.’
‘What do you want me to fight your war for?’ Mac asked. He took a bottle of bourbon out of his coat pocket and offered the barman a drink in exchange for the loan of two clean glasses. ‘What’s the idea, why are you so anxious to survive?’
‘Habit,’ said Jeff.
‘You ought to think about it very carefully. You’d get to be sixty or seventy, and then what are you going to do with yourself?’
‘I shall care about less things.’
‘As it happens my father’s sixty-three to-day,’ Mac went on. That makes me feel pretty young. Who was that character anyway, that one who was talking with you and couldn’t come out? I’d hoped to ply him with liquor, I’d imagined he’d be the better for being plied.’
‘He was consulting me about a taxi, but I rather think he was going on to the question of carpets.’
For the first time Mac’s creased affectionate face was completely serious.
‘You take on the hell of a lot too much of this advice and assistance. You’re weakening these people. In times like these we’ve got to forgo luxuries and that includes the obligation to help others. Probably you ought to be doing something totally else.’
Over the different accents and languages at almost every table of the Langham Mac’s lazily purring voice could be distinctly heard.
‘Anyway, I’m told you’ve been in trouble.’
Jeff was not disconcerted, he didn’t mind when heads turned round to look at him from a wide circle of tables, but he was surprised.
‘When did you hear that?’
Mac, pouring out more bourbon, said that he’d been to see all his contacts as soon as he landed. He’d come over just before dawn in a Breton fishing boat.
‘Breton fishermen at dawn are the equivalent of Cockney taxi-drivers,’ said Jeff. ‘You’ll choke yourself on local colour.’
‘Let’s get this right, I was told you’d been in trouble,’ Mac persisted. ‘Nobody said you were now. But a troublemaking capacity is God’s gift, Jeff. You’ll have to render an account some day of what the hell you did with it and the quality of the trouble you made. Don’t tell me you’re giving up just when you’re getting your hand in.’
Jeff looked at him meditatively. ‘Do you mean to say you went round all your contacts with that load of cheeses?’
‘No, I dropped off quite a few of them as I went by. They were gifts.’
‘What about all that stuff in my office?’
‘Gifts, gifts. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with you, Jeff. You don’t recognize a giver.’
Mac’s call to New York came through on time and an hour later he flew home, either to get a clean shirt or to find a shirt that would fit him, there were two versions. He said he’d be back in September. That would be about the right time, according to his sources. Before leaving he had scattered oranges, which were un
obtainable in England, and it wasn’t clear where he could have got them in France, throughout the offices of BH. The strange fruit glowed from the bottom of in-trays and out-trays; a dozen of them were rolling about the deserted music library. The Recorded Programmes Assistants received three between the four of them who were left – Tad had gone to train as a fitter with the Free Polish Air Force. Willie and Vi waited until two minutes to fourteen hours, when Teddy and the yawning Della turned up on shift, while they were due to go off. The division of the oranges was a serious matter, since the shortages had produced in the whole population a delicate and bizarre sense of justice. The only sharp knives were in Packing and Despatch – the canteen had none – and Willie undertook to get hold of one.
They laid the three oranges on a copy of the Radio Times. It is difficult to know what to do with scarce items in wartime and David was no doubt right, when his servants risked their lives to bring him water, to pour it out on the ground as an offering to the Lord. For the RPAs, it came to three-quarters of an orange each. They were, of course, much too old to be greedy. Vi made a sensible calculation that it wouldn’t be worth taking hers home to share it with so many. Willie picked up the packers’ knife.
‘Ten seconds from now.’
‘Poor old Tad, I miss him,’ said Teddy. ‘I’d like to send him his slice.’ None of them mentioned Lise.
‘How are you going to work it out?’ asked Della. ‘One of them’s smaller than the others.’
‘That’s a point.’
‘… Aah, the Three Oranges … I am the Magician Tehelio …’ sang a thin, disturbing tenor from the corridor. A lean and silvery figure sidled past.
‘It’s Mr Waterlow,’ said Vi. ‘He was down here before, when I first came, in January.’ Surely he couldn’t want a piece?
‘I believe there’s plenty of oranges in the other departments, Mr Waterlow,’ snapped Della. But of course, he scarcely belonged to a department. He’d drifted back to London to do Heaven knows what.
‘Ah, my dear, I have never brought myself to touch one …’ he drifted on, and they could hear him start singing again, further down the passage.
Willie drew the sharp edge of the blade across the brilliant, delicately pitted skin of the first orange, and let it slide through the pith. Like a firework it sprayed up and burst into fragrance. The best moment. They sat licking and lingering, wondering if it was worth planting the pips, the heating would be on in BH next winter, but they wouldn’t thrive, plants always knew the difference.
Della finished some time after the others. She was reading a General Circulation memo headed Christmas Arrangements 1940. The BBC, like most British organizations, thought about these in June. It began Although it is not possible to forecast what shape this year’s Christmas Programmes will take, or to give any assurance as to whether His Majesty will broadcast to the nation as he did in 1939, all Departments are asked to send in their suggestions as soon as possible. The Corporation also feels that it is not too early to warn staff, particularly in the Drama and Variety Departments, that all presents offered to them by the outside public, particularly money, jewellery, and alcoholic drinks, should be refused or returned as soon as possible, without comment.
‘I’m going to apply for a transfer,’ said Della.
They stared at her, with the limp empty quarters of peel in their hands.
‘If Eddie Waterlow can come down from Drama, I don’t see why I shouldn’t go up there. It’s a free country.’
‘Jewellery!’ Teddy exclaimed.
‘You know I’ve always wanted to do something with my singing. I can’t get anyone to audition me here. I believe I’d meet with understanding in Drama.’
‘Everyone understands you down here,’ said Vi.
‘I’ve had my voice described as dark brown velvet,’ Della said.
Teddy jumped up, putting the peel in his pocket, and told her that they’d be late if they didn’t look out.
Mrs Milne’s confidential crony, the Secretary of Assistant Director (Establishment), spoke to her without reserve. AD(E) simply didn’t think that RPD knew how to select his staff. That last RPA, the half-French girl who snivelled, had left without even handing in her BBC pass and had left no forwarding address. And now he’d lost another one, although of course Zagorski, T., couldn’t be blamed for joining his country’s armed forces.
‘What do you suggest, then? We’re very short-handed.’
‘It might be a much better plan to try for a sensible middle-aged woman, I mean someone a few years older than ourselves. Of course the job and the pay are on a junior scale, but that mightn’t matter if she was just augmenting her husband’s income. It’s been demonstrated time and again that older women are less prone to tears and hysteria. I could show you our reliability charts. There’s no reason at all why they shouldn’t handle the discs efficiently, and if it came, as I believe it does, to holding RPD’s hand when he feels under the weather, then one would imagine that they’d have had considerably more practice.’
‘That, I think, is rather a delicate area where RPD has been very much misunderstood,’ replied Mrs Milne. ‘RPD likes to chat quietly about day-to-day problems of the Department and it’s very unfortunate that my hours of work make it impossible for me to listen to him as often as in his heart of hearts he would like.’
The two women were simply aiding and abetting each other to disband the Seraglio. Mrs Milne had allowed herself to take another step forward into illusion, and her friend, also an Old Servant, had not dissuaded her. AD(E) had insisted that this time a small panel should interview the applicants for the job of RPA, to avoid any repetition of mistakes. Both secretaries would attend it, and Mrs Milne thought that if they could guarantee to get through the business quickly, DPP might be prevailed upon to come too. She knew that he was devoted to RPD’s interests, in spite of his sour manner; well, if not sour, you could hardly call it encouraging. However, she personally believed that DPP’s main function – although he did his own job exceedingly well, no-one denied that – was to encourage RPD and to help him over those moments of depression which come to even the best of us.
The question of Lise’s replacement also weighed heavily on RPD himself. For Establishment to count her as one of the girls he’d used up was a characteristic injustice. He had put her on his Emergency List, and told Mrs Milne that she was a somewhat unusual person, and surely needed special consideration, but only in a half-hearted manner, and before he had got to know her at all, she had simply disappeared.
‘You might, perhaps, consider someone who would stay a little longer,’ said Jeff. AD(E) had privately told him in advance that he’d have to assist in conducting the interview this time and see that a sensible appointment was made or there’d be nothing doing.
‘They claim that in the present situation all the girls are needed for Coastal Defence,’ said Sam, ‘but that’s ludicrous. I see girls walking about everywhere.’
‘Do you mean you’ve actually been out?’
Sam ignored this. He was hurt and puzzled. ‘Jeff, they want to surround me with old women. You know, there’s a good deal of sagging on the late night shift, just when hopefulness is needed, and firmness, and roundness, and readiness to be pleased, and so on.’
‘Have you mentioned this to Mrs Milne?’
‘What’s she got to do with it? I couldn’t carry on if I didn’t know that she was going to leave every day at half past five. And you know I’ve always had the best possible relationships with the junior members of my Department. I consider myself as morally responsible for them all and I can honestly say that I know their troubles as well as I do my own.’
Jeff felt that that was saying a good deal. He waited silently.
‘Then there’s another thing, I’m not sure I’ve made myself absolutely clear about my wife. Leaving London was her idea, not mine. I don’t want you to think she’s in any way out of the picture, just because she’s never here. She sent me a photograph of the tractor, quite
a good one. She seems to be occupied with the War Agricultural Committee which gets rather in the way of things, and then they all have coffee in each other’s houses for some reason, and she’s in the Red Cross with some friends of hers, splendid women, she tells me. The truth is that other things being equal she really prefers women to men.’
‘So do you, Sam,’ said Jeff.
He arranged for a recruitment interview at the end of the following fortnight.
4
It was reassuring to see the interviews and provisional Christmas arrangements going ahead and looking as they always had done while Broadcasting House reached its final state of War Emergency. The defence rooms were shut off by iron doors, armed guards patrolled the sub-basement, and the lists of Indispensable Personnel, except for Sam’s, were complete. After repeated consultations Sam still hesitated as to who might be asked to accompany him, perhaps for weeks on end, behind the barricades. Meanwhile all departments were asked to find volunteers for the Red Cross Certificate Course.
Accommodation put the now unused concert-hall at the disposal of the Red Cross classes. The canvas-seated chairs, drawn up too close together for comfort just beneath the platform, conjured up the rapt ghosts of the BBC’s old invited audiences. The lighting, designed for the orchestras now stranded in Bristol, was not too well suited to the lecturer, a harassed doctor from the nearby Middlesex Hospital who had probably expected younger listeners. Some of them, it was true, didn’t look much more than children, but among them were departmental heads and even an Assistant Controller with folded arms, unused to sitting on a chair without a conference table in front of him. All ranks had been mingled to learn elementary first-aid. The BBC had always been liable to these sudden appealing manifestations of the democratic spirit, derived from both its moral and its veteran-theatrical sides, reminding both highest and lowest that they shared the same calling and, at the moment, the same danger.
‘In cases of emergency,’ muttered the lecturer, ‘an umbrella, walking-cane or broomstick is sure to be handy, and will furnish an excellent splint.’ Unashamedly reading out of a hand-book, he went on: ‘When a fracture has taken place the object is to bring the ends of the broken bone as nearly as possible to the position they were in previous to the accident. In order to do this, the part nearest to the body must be steadied by someone, while that furthest removed is gently stretched out, the sound limb being uncovered and observed as a guide.… For God’s sake, ladies and gentlemen, don’t dream of doing any of these things. Leave the patient exactly as he is, and if you have to move him take him straight round to Casualties. However, my object, as I understand it, is to see that by the end of six weeks you can be passed competent in bandaging, simple and compound fractures, first and second degree burns, lesions, cramp, poisoning, intoxication, snakebite … no need to take all these down, they’re simply some of the chapter headings.…’
Human Voices Page 6