As an institution that could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle of Delphi. As office managers, they were no more than adequate, but now, as autumn approached, with the exiles crowded awkwardly into their new sections, they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of a few that made their mark. And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the news readers, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen’s one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since.
7
Sam Brooks asked Mrs Milne whether she’d noticed that there was a new Recorded Programmes Assistant.
‘Perhaps one ought to keep a check on these things,’ he said.
‘She was interviewed by myself and a representative of Establishment,’ replied Mrs Milne. ‘DPP was also present.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Her name is Annie Asra – I suppose Anne, I have put her on the register as Anne.’
‘I don’t quite see why I wasn’t consulted. But I must have a word with her as soon as I can.’
Annie settled in easily with the Simmonses. She gave no feeling of upset, rather of solidity and peace. Vi loved her mother, but was too much like her not to get irritated after fifteen minutes. She lent a hand whenever she was at home, but in her own way. To Annie, who had been reared by her widowed father, and brought to her present excellent state of health entirely on fish and chips and tins, there was a charm in helping Mrs Simmons around the garden and kitchen. It was unpatriotic now not to sort the rubbish into pigfood, henfood, tinfoil (out of which, it seemed, battleships could be partly made), paper, cardboard and rags. At the same time Mr Simmons worked late at the shop, sorting the coupons from the customers’ ration books. The nation defended itself by counting large numbers of small things into separate containers. But beyond this there were the old repetitive tasks of the seasons, the parts which, in the end, seem greater than the whole. Annie sat on the back doorstep and shelled peas with Mrs Simmons. She had never done it before.
‘You’ve only just come, and yet you’re the only one in this house that does it with a sense of what’s fair,’ said Mrs Simmons. ‘The others just take all the ones with the large peas in and then go away and leave me with the awkward ones.’
The pods were almost autumnal, and striped with paler colour. The hard late peas fell with a light percussion into the colander, then, as the pile covered the bottom, the sound changed to a rustle.
‘I still think that’s an unusual name, Asra,’ Mrs Simmons went on. ‘Vi’s mentioned to me not to ask you about it, but if I always did whatever she tells me I’d never know anything. Is it Jewish, or Spanish, or what?’
‘I don’t think it’s either,’ Annie replied, ‘but I don’t mind your asking.’
‘Well, I suppose you get all sorts of names in a big manufacturing place. Perhaps it’s taken out of the Bible.’
‘My last head teacher told me it was the name of a tribe,’ said Annie. ‘I thought that was going a bit far.’
‘Well, you’ll change it one day. If you’re a girl, you’ve always got that to look forward to.’
Vi had told her not to say that kind of thing, either. They sat there together calmly, their minds full of the July garden. After the peas, they’d have to do something about the runners.
‘Look, there’s seven peas in this one,’ said Annie.
They both felt unreasonably happy. It wasn’t much longer than any of the other pods, and yet none of them had had more than five.
Vi had come home, looking tired out.
‘They’ll be too hard to eat even when they’re cooked,’ she said, but not unkindly, looking at the whitish green heap.
‘Well, these are the last we’ll do this year.’
Annie got up, shook the bits of leaf and tendril off her lap into the pig bucket, and took the colander into the kitchen.
‘She’ll want to find something a bit more entertaining than sitting here helping me,’ said Mrs Simmons, who always felt strangely impelled to talk about anyone who had just gone away. ‘You could take her to the Palais one evening when you’re both off work together. The management’s bought more than a thousand pairs of shoes, you know, so that the service-men can change out of their boots.’
‘Well, I’ll think about it when Chris gets back. But Annie’s all right, Mum, she’s only been at BH a week and there’s plenty of boys would like to take her out. Teddy would, to start with.’
‘Isn’t that the one who talked to me so interestingly about the world to come?’
Mrs Simmons didn’t know why it was that when Vi was at home and she particularly wanted to demonstrate her intelligence and power of memory, they both had to desert her at once. Of course, she’d confused Teddy with Willie Sharpe, who’d looked so young when he came to tea that she’d felt he ought to be out playing round the cabbage beds. But there was no need, really, for her daughter to correct her. All she needed was a little time to think.
On her second Monday, when Annie was passing RPD’s office on her way to Filing, the door opened and he looked out and shouted: ‘Come in here!’
She knew him already, of course, by sight, but had no-one much to compare him with as an employer except the head buyer at Anstruthers, and that was not much help. The buyer had always been peaked with worry, whereas even at a distance from RPD she felt herself on the edge of a crazy enthusiasm, like a ring of magic fire; he looked to be as wrapped up in what he was doing as Vi’s little brothers. As she went in and shut the door he retreated backwards and snatched up a new recording.
‘Spirit of the Earth, come to my call,’ he read from the handwritten label.
‘Do you want me, Mr Brooks?’ enquired Annie.
‘They made this in Bristol yesterday and sent it up to me on the van. It’s got nothing to do with any of our programmes here, it’s music, baritone and orchestra, but they wanted me to hear it at once.’
‘I don’t know the song, I’m afraid.’
He looked at her impatiently. ‘It doesn’t matter what you know! I only want someone with two ears.’ The waste of even a moment was unbearable.
‘Sit down, sit down, for God’s sake.’
He checked the pickup of his turntable and put on the record. Annie sat with her hands in her lap and listened, as he did, without shifting or stirring while the record played through twice.
‘Well? Well?’ shouted Sam.
‘I liked the song, as far as that goes.’
‘The song! What do I care if you liked it or not? I called you in here because you were the first person I caught sight of in the corridor and I wanted you to share my experience. Nothing is an experience unless it’s shared. When I’ve got something in my hands that’s as near perfection as we can hope for in wartime conditions my first reaction is, someone else must have the chance to listen to this. I oughtn’t to have played it at all before it was dubbed. I know that. If my RPEs were here they’d want to grind me into powder. Above all I shouldn’t have played it back to you twice as I did just now. But I wanted you to know once and for all what’s meant by the term “quality” and the term “balance”, and on top of that, there was the singer.’
‘I’m very glad to learn about quality and balance,’ said Annie quietly, ‘but the singer was flat.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘His first phrase he started out with was CE flat B flat D. He was in tune till the D, then he was a twelfth of a tone flat and didn’t get back till his last bar but one.’
‘Do you claim to be particularly musical?’ Sam asked with dangerous calm.
‘No, they asked me that at my interview, and I told them not.’
Sam began to pace about.
‘Perhaps I
should explain that while the performance and the recording are of course two different and independent things, my whole training and working life suggest that I might fairly be considered as a judge of both. What’s more, at this interview of yours, about which I was given no prior information, by the way, they may have made it clear to you – if not, indeed, you may realise it for yourself when you’ve been here rather longer – that I’m in charge of a department of which you too have become a part … feel that, please feel that and think about it … and in order to be sure that the strain doesn’t become unendurable I have to look for a good deal of co-operation and human understanding and delicacy from my staff, all things that come naturally, I’m glad to say, to girls of your age.’
He took off his spectacles, and Annie met his defenceless gaze.
‘It was flat, Mr Brooks.’
RPD asked Mrs Milne whether she’d noticed that the new RPA girl seemed rather different from anyone they’d ever had in the Department before.
‘She does exactly the same hours as the others, Mr Brooks, and so far I’ve heard nothing to suggest that she’s overworked, or that she doesn’t get enough to eat, or that she needs any special consideration. She’s fixed herself up with Violet Simmons’ family, she’s got a room in their house in Hammersmith. And if you’re going to ask me whether she looks like some picture or portrait you’ve seen somewhere, I might as well tell you, in order to save time, that in my opinion she’s a very usual-looking girl from the Midlands.’
Sam glanced up at his secretary in mild surprise.
‘As it happens, her face does remind me of a portrait, but I can’t quite place it. It might be Shelley. Did he have curly hair?’
‘Everyone had curly hair in those days,’ said Mrs Milne. ‘It was the Spirit of the Age.’
‘Where’s the Picture Reference Library these days?’
‘It was evacuated in the first week of the war, Mr Brooks.’
She waited for further instructions, but Sam said: ‘I don’t want that girl on my Indispensable Personnel List.’
The list by this time had worked itself down to the middle of the Defence Instructions file. Mrs Milne concealed her amazement by taking it out and moving it somewhere nearer the top.
‘She’s rather too sure of her opinions,’ Sam went on. ‘It would be unkind to call her obstinate, so let’s say that I don’t think she knows how to adapt. To see a girl of that age who can’t adapt is ridiculous, or perhaps it’s sad, I don’t know which.’
He shook himself, as though he was emerging from cold water. But his dissatisfaction remained, not less so when he had a chance of a word with Dr Vogel. The doctor had been on a tour of the regional centres, where, in spite of his goodwill, he had caused as much distress as any other perfectionist.
‘It’s a trivial matter, I suppose, Josef, but I found it inexplicable. What it came to, really, was that she chose to set up her sense of hearing against mine. I hardly knew what to say to her. After all, perfect pitch is something you’re born with, like a sense of humour. You’re with me, Josef?’
Dr Vogel nodded.
‘Certainly, Sam. You yourself were born with neither. But you are a fine man, a good man.’
This was the first time in his life – since Dr Vogel was accepted as infallible – that Sam Brooks had ever been obliged to change his opinion of himself. The experience did not make him less self-centred, but the centre of gravity shifted. He now declared that he had no ear at all for music, and couldn’t be expected to have, he was an engineer and an administrator, nothing more than that. But generosity and selfishness are not incompatible, and his need to give and share would not quite settle down with the knowledge that he had been unjust to Annie. After all, where could his juniors, those beginners in life, look for a moral example, if not to him? It was strange that Sam, who forgot unacceptable incidents with such rapidity and skill, could not quite get over this one. Mrs Milne, for example, thought it strange.
Annie, on the other hand, remembered how RPD had looked without his glasses, and wished that she hadn’t been obliged to say that the singer had been flat from the E onwards, though, really, there’d been no help for it. It didn’t upset her that she seemed to be in disgrace; it was just that without his glasses it seemed cruel, and even wrong, to take him aback.
‘You did right to say what you thought, though,’ Vi told her. ‘It’s no use making yourself a doormat, like Lise Bernard.’
The two of them had been on late shift. They were lying on their metal bunks, one up, one down, in the concert-hall. It was not much use trying to get to sleep. Total blackout was Security’s rule, and since the tickets didn’t bear numbers, and couldn’t have been read if they had, newcomers clambered and felt about in search of an empty corner, swarming across the others like late returners to a graveyard before cockcrow. Time, indeed, was the great concern. The sleepers were obscurely tormented by the need to be somewhere in five, ten, or twenty minutes. Awakened, quite often, by feet walking over them, they struck matches whose tiny flames wavered in every corner of the concert-hall, and had a look at their watches, just to be sure. Yet some slept on, and the walls, designed to give the best possible acoustics for classical music, worked just as well for snoring. Accommodation, who had provided so much, had never thought of this. No barracks or dormitory in the country produced snoring of such broad tone, and above that distinctly rose the variations of the overwrought, the junior announcers rehearsing their cues, correcting themselves and starting again, continuity men suddenly shouting: ‘… and now, in a lighter mood …’, and every now and then a fit of mysterious weeping.
‘I often wonder if Lise ever came in here or not,’ said Vi. Annie craned over from the top bunk. In the next tier a middle-aged secretary began to sing in her sleep. Perhaps, like Della, she had always wanted to do so. The concert-hall encouraged such dreams.
‘Why are you always on about her?’ Annie whispered. ‘This Lise, I mean. From all you’ve told me, if she finds things hard again she’ll get hold of you quick enough.’
Vi acknowledged this, but it was troublesome about the missing CH ticket. They were asking for it back, and, if she had to tell lies, she didn’t particularly want them to be for Lise’s sake.
It worried her also that RPD seemed to have taken against Annie. Who was to eat the double cheese sandwiches now, and to listen to his woes? Annie was a real help both at home and at work, but in this one respect her coming had made no difference, worse than none. The whole Seraglio’s task still lay on Vi’s shoulders.
Vi, however, resembled her mother, and made her mother’s mistakes, in calculating only from what she had known so far. Indeed, there is always a kind of comfort in doing this. But overnight, or so it seemed, the continuity was broken and the Department changed.
The juniors, Willie and Teddy as well as the girls, had been used to a patriarchal tyranny, where they might be summoned at any time by the thunder of their Director, but were conscious of his direct protection, always within touch of his hand. Suddenly, RPD ceased to take any notice of them. He recalled that he had, like everyone else of his grade except DPP, assistant administrators and executives of various kinds, who had got used to functioning almost entirely on their own. Now they were flattered by consultations, and by two meetings within one week. The engineers had always been close to his heart, but now members of staff who had never been asked for an opinion before, and scarcely knew that they had one, were called upon to give it. They sent in suggestions for reorganizing the work, which Mrs Milne filed. Meanwhile the crazy nursery-tale atmosphere, the bear turned prince who could be led only by a maiden or a child, had disappeared, perhaps for ever.
The effect on the RPAs, reduced to their own tiny world, was curious. They were overawed. For the first time they looked at their Director from a distance and realized, almost with disbelief, how much he really had to do. Toiling up and down the first three floors of BH, humble servants of the discs, they were conscious of how far the work st
retched beyond them. There were the mobile units in Egypt, there were the tireless wax cylinders which recorded the world’s broadcasts, a hundred and fifty thousand words to be monitored every day. All of these depended on Sam Brooks, who not so long ago had been glad to go to sleep on Vi’s shoulder.
‘You’ll never really get to know RPD now,’ Willie told Annie. They were in a little room like a cupboard behind the ticker-tapes, which seemed not to be used for anything; he had brought a chair in there, and was cutting her hair. Willie believed that it was his duty to learn to do these things – the Red Cross Certificate had been only the first on his list – against the day when Broadcasting House was in a state of siege. At the moment he was not much of a hairdresser. A haze of snipped curls lay on the floor, and Annie’s hair looked somewhat ragged.
‘It doesn’t matter, it’ll find its own level,’ she told him reassuringly.
She minded the withdrawal of RPD less than the others. After all, she’d only spoken to him the once.
Annie was absorbed, too, in those first weeks, with the discovery made by so many of those whom the chances of war swept into Broadcasting House; there was music everywhere, just for the asking. You could borrow records from the Library and find somewhere to play them, or walk into a studio and find someone else playing them. At any moment of the twenty-four hours you could listen. Round every corner Schubert sang, or Debussy murmured on the horizon, or Liszt descended in a shower of sparkling drops. Annie had heard scarcely any of this before. Sometimes she hardly wanted to go back to Hammersmith; she felt as though she was drowning.
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