As soon as he decently could the doctor passed on to practical work, asking them to envisage the scene after a general attack from the air, but to assume, for the sake of convenience, that all the casualties were broken bones. DPP, sitting at the extreme edge of a row to make room for his long legs, was summoned to the front to take the part of an incident. Unruffled and resigned, labelled Multiple Injuries and Compound Fractures, he was laid out prone on one of a long line of stores trolleys. While the other incidents settled themselves he passed the time by smoking a cigar, which is difficult when both arms are immobilized.
‘Perhaps you’d like me to copy out my notes for you as I go along, Mr Haggard,’ said Willie Sharpe, bent over him and prodding him with a pencil, ‘you’ll probably miss a number of important points while you’re lying here.’ He scribbled rapidly. ‘I’ve got you down as both femurs, both collarbones and right patella.’
Jeff emitted a faint cloud of smoke. The lecturer glanced at him in understandable annoyance. The cause of realism wasn’t served by a multiple fracture smoking a cigar.
‘Please will the incidents remember not to make signs or convey information of any kind to the class.’
Willie, however, had understood that DPP wanted the ash tipped off his cigar. He did so, then, not wishing to waste an opportunity, he drew up a chair, sat down near the trolley, and leant forward eagerly, half confiding, half appealing.
‘We mustn’t grudge the time we’re spending on this Red Cross course, Mr Haggard. In fact, personally speaking, I’m very glad of the training because it contributes in a small way to one of my general aims for all humanity. I mean the maintenance of health both in mind and body. Education will be a very different thing in the world of tomorrow. It will start at birth, or even earlier. It won’t be a petty matter of School Certificate, the tedious calculations of facts and figures which hold many a keen and hopeful spirit back to-day. It will begin as we’re beginning now, Mr Haggard, you and I and all these others here this evening, with a knowledge of our own bodies and how they can be kept fighting trim – fighting, I mean, needless to say, for the things of the spirit. Yes, we shall learn to read our bodies and minds like a book and know how best to control them. Oh boy, will the teachers be in for a shock. Don’t think, either, that I’m saying that physical desires must be entirely subdued. On the contrary, Mr Haggard, they have their part to play if every individual is to develop his potentialities to the full. And the point I want to make is how very little pounds, shillings, and pence have to do with all this. Yes, sir, out in the fresh air and sunlight, with your chosen mate by your side, you’ll have little need for money.’
Carried away, glowing and translated into a generous future, Willie tucked away his notebook and pencil and passed on to the next trolley. As soon as he decently could the doctor hurried away, leaving two of his hospital nurses to carry on. At half-time, incidents and students were asked to change places. Jeff was released, and Willie became a shock case.
The following week a message was posted on all notice boards for the attention of volunteers for Red Cross training. The classes had been amalgamated with other local courses, and they were asked to attend in future at Marylebone Town Hall. Accommodation, it turned out, needed the concert-hall for a dormitory. In the event of an attack, the notice explained, personnel would be unable to get home, shift workers found it difficult already, and it hadn’t escaped Accommodation’s notice that a number of the staff never seemed to leave the building at all. In this connection, it should be emphasized that the new bathrooms on the fifth floor were for the use of grades of Assistant Controller and above. But in future the Corporation would provide beds for those who had earned them, strictly allocated on a ticket basis.
Quantities of metal bunks were dragged into Broadcasting House. Piled outside the concert-hall, they made an obstruction on the grand scale. Even the news readers, whose names and voices were known to the whole nation, were held up on their way to the studios. Even John Haliburton, assigned to read in case of enemy landing, with a voice of such hoarse distinction that if the Germans took over BH and attempted to impersonate him the listeners could never be deceived for a moment – even the beloved Halibut fell over a consignment of iron frames and himself became an incident. But the work went on with the exalted remorselessness characteristic of anyone who starts moving furniture. The bunks were fitted on top of each other in unstable tiers, and the platform, including the half-sacred spot where the grand piano had once stood, was converted into cubicles. Eddie Waterlow, insanely fond of music, was seen walking away from the sight with his head in his hands, a pantomime of grief. The fitters didn’t mind, feeling that he acknowledged the importance of their work. If Broadcasting House had been built like a ship, it now had quarters for a crew of hundreds.
At length a cord was stretched across the great hall, dividing it in half, and grey hospital blankets were draped over it in place of a curtain. Barnett and his staff thought this part of the job by no means up to standard.
‘It’ll provide privacy for the ladies, which is the main point. But I don’t like to see a job left like that.’
And might not the makeshift nature of the blankets lead to moral confusion? There were a lot of very young people among the temporary staff. Barnett was asked whether he thought there’d be goings on?
‘Surely not while England’s in danger.’ he replied.
Everyone went to look at the arrangements. ‘So near and yet so far,’ Teddy said. At the end of the week the RPAs’ tickets arrived with their time sheets. They were relieved, all of them, to think they wouldn’t have to queue any more for the all-night buses.
When Vi got home that afternoon a little brother, lying flat on his back on the lawn where the cabbage beds had become torpedoes, and he was drowned and floating, told her that someone had rung her up. When she went into the hall the telephone rang again.
‘Vi, it’s Lise.’
‘Where are you? Are you coming back to work?’
‘Vi, I want you to help me. I haven’t anywhere to live.’
‘Why don’t you go home? Southampton’s a defence zone, but of course it’ll be all right for you if your parents live there.’
‘I can’t get on with them. I don’t feel as though I’m their child at all. I don’t want to hear what they say about Frédé. When my father starts up about Frédé I feel like doing him an injury.’
‘Well, Lise, we’re full up here at the moment, I’m sorry. I don’t know whether …’
‘Listen, it isn’t for long, only for a night or so. I haven’t any money, but I’m going to get a job, then I shall have money. Listen, Vi, is it true they’ve got places to sleep now in Broadcasting House?’
‘Have you been back there, then?’
‘No, I read it in the Daily Mirror.’
‘Well, we get the Mirror, but I missed that.’
‘It was headed THIS IS THE NINE O’CLOCK SNOOZE.’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘Vi, please get me a ticket, I’ve still got my pass, they’ll recognize me at Reception and they’ll never know I’ve left. It’s only for a very short time.’
Vi considered. There was an extra ticket, it had been sent by mistake for Della, and should have been given back immediately to Mrs Milne. Of course, if Lise was found out it would be awkward, but on the whole it wasn’t likely. They would think she’d been away in one of the regions, or on a training course, which heaven knows she’d needed badly enough.
‘I can get you a ticket, Lise, but where shall I send it to?’
‘Leave it at Reception in an envelope with my name on it. I’ll pick it up. You needn’t have anything more to do with it, you needn’t see me or talk to me.’
Although she found the pathos of this last remark irritating, Vi was dissatisfied with herself. What she had been saying fell short of the truth. The house, by her family’s standards, wasn’t full up; the other bed in her room was free. But looking back over the last six weeks or so
she thought of Lise in a state of doleful shapelessness, only half listening while her job was explained to her, then collapsing into tears it seemed, when RPD was doing no more than beginning to talk to her – and after all nobody in BH worked harder than he did – then the unpleasantness about Frédé and Lise’s dampening presence in the house, Dismal Lizzie the little ones had called her and had to be threatened into silence, and finally even her mother having one or two things to say when she disappeared without explanation. Vi had been able to tell from one look at her mother’s back, as she started the washing-up, that she was hurt. Surely that was justification enough for not having Lise back.
And then, she was expecting Chris on leave, pretty well certainly this time. ‘I hope he keeps strong for you,’ said Teddy gloomily, a spectator of experience, always on the wrong side of the windowpane. Sometimes he went down to the BH typing pool to see if any of the girls would like to come out, say to the pictures, or for a cup of tea at Lyons. Their heads, dark and fair, rose expectantly as he came in, then, although he was quite nice-looking, sank down again over their work. Nor was Teddy very popular with the Old Servant who supervised the pool.
The Department was getting a new girl as a replacement, but what use was that? He’d read an article by a psychologist in some magazine or other which explained rather well how owing to Nature’s Law of Compensation girls in wartime, if they weren’t fixed up already, were practically bound to fall in love with older men. That was a scientific analysis, and you couldn’t fly in the face of science.
All the same, he allowed himself a mild interest in the newcomer. During his tea-break he went and hung about the second floor. The corridor, like all the others, curved mysteriously away, following the lines of the outer walls, and leading to sudden shipboard meetings, and even collisions, as the doors opened. Most of Administration was there, and you could usually find out what was going on. While the tape machines in the basement ticked in the world’s news from outside and radio gathered it from the air, the second floor generated the warm internal rumours of BH. There, through one of the filing clerks, a very plain girl, unfortunately, Teddy learned that they were considering an RPA application from Birmingham.
5
Annie Asra was the kind of girl to whom people give a job, even when they didn’t originally intend to. Her name sounded foreign, but wasn’t. She came from Birmingham.
Annie was a little square curly-headed creature, not a complainer. Certainly, at seventeen, she would never have complained about her childhood. She had spent the part of it which was most important to her on the move, trotting round beside her father, who was a piano tuner. In the city of a thousand trades, he had seen his own decline, but he still had quite enough work to live on. He was a widower, and it was felt in the other houses in their terrace that he wouldn’t be able to manage, but he did.
It was a curious existence for a child. Winter was the height of the piano-tuning season, and she became inured at an early age to extreme temperatures. The pianos that were considered good enough to tune were in little-used front parlours and freezing parish rooms, sometimes in the church itself where on weekdays a tiny Vesuvius struggled with the frost’s grip, its stovepipe soaring high into the aisle vaulting. She didn’t have to go, the neighbours would have minded her, but that didn’t suit Annie. She knew all their regulars, who her father would have to speak to and where he had to hang up his coat. The pianos stood expectantly, some with the yellowed teeth of old age, helpless, once their front top was unscrewed, awaiting the healer’s art. There were two Bechsteins on their round, one belonging to a doctor, the other to a builder’s merchant, but Mr Asra didn’t prefer them to the others. To each according to their needs.
It often seemed a very long time before the actual tuning began. The ailing pianos had to be put in good order first, cracks wedged up, the groaning pedals eased with vaseline. Annie was allowed to strike every key in turn to see if any of them stuck. If so, a delicate shaving of wood had to be pared away. Sometimes the felts needed loosening, or even taken right off, to be damped and ironed in the kitchen or the church vestry. They smelled like wet sheep under the iron, and lying all together on the board they looked like green or red sheep. Then they had to be glued back onto the hammers, and Mr Asra never did anything either quickly or slowly.
When at last he took out his hammer and mutes, ready to tune, his daughter became quite still, like a small dog pointing. While he was laying the bearings in the two middle octaves she waited quietly, though not patiently, watching for him to get the three C’s right, tightening the strings a little more than necessary and settling them back by striking the keys, standing, bending, tapping, moving his hammer gently to and fro round the wooden pins, working through the G’s, the D’s and the A’s until he came to middle E. When middle E was set Annie left the spot where he had put her, the warmest place, close to the stove, and stood at his elbow, willing him to play the first trial chord. It was a recurrent excitement of her life, like opening a boiled egg, the charm being not its unexpectedness but its reliability. And Mr Asra struck the chord of C.
‘But the E’s sharp, Dad,’ she said.
That too was in order, she always said it. To please her, he lowered the E a little, and sounded the perfect chord, looking round at her, an unimpressive man in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, able to share with her the satisfaction of the chord of C major. But he couldn’t leave it like that, she knew. The E must be sharpened again, all the thirds must be a little bit sharp, all the fifths must be a little bit flat, or the piano would never come right. At this point he quite often gave her a boiled sweet from a paper bag in the pocket of his waistcoat.
When he reached the treble Mr Asra worked entirely by ear. The treble for Annie was entering a region of silver or tin, the wind through the keyhole, walking with due care over the ice, sharpening gradually until the uttermost tones at the top of the keyboard. With the bass she felt more at ease. There was danger, in that if a string broke it couldn’t be replaced and had to be spliced there and then, but the tuning itself was easier, the strings ran easily and willingly over the bridges, and their warm growl took her downwards into a region of dark fur-covered animals crowned with gold who offered their kindly protection to the sleepy traveller. Annie, in fact, when she was very young, often fell asleep during the bass, even though she loved it best. The torrent of chromatic scales which signified the final testing, and which the householders thought of as the tuner (who’d probably once hoped to be a concert performer) letting himself go at last, didn’t interest either of them nearly so much.
While her father was putting away his things into the familiar leather bag, worn threadbare round the edges, they were often brought a cup of tea, with two lumps of sugar put ready in the saucer. The owner, coming hesitantly out of some other room, looked at their piano, with everything screwed back and in order, as if it was a demanding relative newly come out of hospital. ‘The Queen of the Home,’ Mr Asra called it, when a remark of this kind seemed necessary. Sometimes there was a vibration of distress, which Annie deeply felt. ‘If you’re going to give singing lessons, madam, you really ought to have it tuned to concert pitch. I could do that if you want, but it may mean replacing a few strings,’ and the pale-coloured woman could be seen to shrink, anxiety adding to her embarrassment over handing him the right money.
Annie became self-contained, a serious tranquil believer in life and in the time ahead when she would know what was most important to her. She went to school with her brown curling hair in decent pigtails. Her aunt, her dead mother’s eldest sister, came in from next door every day to do it for her. At the end of her first morning at Church School, when the teacher told them to go out for their second play, she half got up and then sat down again quickly, feeling her head dragged painfully back by a cruel weight. Dick Dobbs, the boy sitting behind her, had tied her pigtails to the back of her chair, perhaps with her aunt’s new ribbon, perhaps with string. She sat there perfectly still until the teach
er, who had gone out to patrol the yard, came back and found her sitting stiff and serious as a little idol. ‘Why didn’t you tell me as soon as class was done?’ she asked, relieved that there were no tears.
‘I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.’
At the end of the Christmas term there was a letter-box in the corner of the classroom. It was made from a dustbin covered with red crepe paper; the handles sticking out each side spoiled the illusion to some extent, but the teacher put a cardboard robin on each. In the box the children posted cards to one another, bought at Woolworths, carefully inscribed the night before, and brought to school in their cases that morning in an atmosphere of jealous secrecy. Some got few or no cards. The teacher could do nothing about this, the box was opened at mid-morning and she was unable to get at it in time to redress the balance. Annie, however, had plenty. When she was eight years old she received a large snow scene covered with glitter, beautiful, and from the expensive box. The rest of the class gathered round to admire until she slowly put it away in her case.
Human Voices Page 7