Barnett, on one of his regular calls, told Jeff that America was drawing nearer to the brink of war. Lines of exhaustion showed clearly on his face, which was creased like the dry bed of a river. ‘The way I look at it is this. The day the United States declare war on Nazi Germany, the Central and South American republics will follow suit. Well, excluding British Guiana and British Honduras, that gives you by my reckoning fifteen independent countries that are going to come in on our side. Now, Mr Haggard, all of them are going to want representation at the BBC. That in its turn means fifteen new sections, and although the standards of living in those places varies, I believe, and their governments are none too stable, they’ll all of them want carpets, chairs, desks, typewriters adapted to the Spanish alphabet and steel filing cabinets. If you can tell me where to get any more steel filing cabinets measuring up to our specifications, Mr Haggard, I’m prepared to go to bed with Hitler’s grandmother.’
‘I hadn’t thought of the position exactly in that way,’ Jeff replied.
‘I daresay you hadn’t, very few have. Decisions are made, as you know, with very little thought as to how they’re to be carried out.’
‘You have my sympathy.’
‘But what do you suggest I should do?’
‘Pray for a negotiated peace,’ said Jeff.
‘Now, Mr Haggard, you don’t mean that, we all know you don’t mean half of what you say.’
‘I don’t at all mean that it would be desirable. I’m simply saying that it’s the only solution for the problem of the steel filing cabinets. If you don’t like the idea, you’ll have to find a new approach to the whole question.’
On the night of September the 7th the BBC received the signal for ‘Invasion Imminent’ from the C in C Home Forces, who now had priority over the Ministry of Information. This signal was followed by another: ‘No bells to ring till advise.’ By an understandable confusion, however, there were church bells which did start ringing in scattered parishes all over the country. Not one was recorded.
‘We missed the lot,’ Sam protested, at white heat. ‘A false alarm, well, what if it was? When the real thing comes there may not be time to ring them.’ He set out in search of Dr Vogel.
Hard to track down, the doctor was sometimes to be found in the Monitoring Section, where he had a relation of sorts, said to be his nephew, although he appeared rather the older of the two. The atmosphere of this section was deeply studious. High up in the building, refugee scholars in headphones, quietly clad, disguising their losses, transcribed page after page of Nazi broadcasts in a scholar’s shorthand. When they broke for coffee, Beethoven’s last quartets were played. Even Sam, fuming energetically into the room, was checked for a moment. Then he recollected himself and shouted: ‘Heinz Vogel! Is there anyone here called Heinz Vogel? I’m looking for Josef.’
A bent figure lifted its head. ‘Unfortunately my uncle has died.’
Dr Vogel, killed by a piece of flying drainpipe, had been one of the BBC’s first casualties. And after all he had not been trying to record. Standing among the debris, he had been courteously persuading an ARP warden, on behalf of a complete stranger, that it was legal under the emergency regulations for a householder to return twice to his ruined dwelling, once for his mattress, and once for his personal effects. ‘The citizen has this right very clearly laid down,’ he explained patiently. ‘That is English law.’
Laid to rest in Golders Green, Dr Vogel had wished to be buried in his native Frankfurt. Jeff, not easily surprised, was a little taken aback when he was required to sign papers undertaking to see to this, as soon as hostilities ceased. The nephew, painfully accurate and humble, pointed out that there would be no financial obligation, indeed nothing for DPP to do at all. It was only that he himself was not a British citizen, and needed the signature and authorization of someone of a certain standing.
‘What about RPD?’ Jeff asked. ‘He worked a good deal with your uncle, whereas I only knew him very slightly.’
‘Unfortunately he was too busy.’
‘Did he tell you to try me?’
‘Yes, Mr Haggard, he suggested that I should make this application to you.’
Jeff, writing more carefully than usual, signed at the foot of the numerous pages, which trembled in the nephew’s hand.
‘Would you like a drink, Vogel?’ he said. ‘We all valued your uncle’s work. I’m very sorry.’
Heinz Vogel thanked him profusely, but did not drink.
For some time Jeff’s meditations had been following a certain course, which he felt less and less inclined to check. A few weeks at most would show whether the invasion was ever likely to take place. If it didn’t, and the war expanded in quite other directions, might it not be possible to leave the problems of Sam, as well as schedules of the Home and Forces Network, to other hands? Among the documents he might hand on to a successor would be a chart of the rescue operations, great or small, necessary for getting Sam through a given period of time. And ‘necessary’ was not an exaggeration. Sam’s methods might be improved, but his knowledge could not be replaced. It would have to be explained, for example, that this helpless and endearing expert in self-indulgence, seemingly unhinged at times, was the man who had established the apparent decrease in the proportion of higher and lower frequencies with respect to the middle range as loudspeaker level is decreased. While the war lasted, if the BBC wished to record itself, it needed Sam.
Someone must support him, then – perhaps a new Director of Programme Planning, so that the transition would be less noticeable. Meanwhile, Jeff considered whether it was too late to save himself. Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention. Mac had warned Jeff of this, and indeed he had said more: ‘You’re weakening these people.’
But the possibility of his doing something else had, as it happened, been manifested to Jeff like an emanation from various quarters, sometimes clear, sometimes muted, in the form of soundings-out, hints and suppositions, always guarded, because he was a linguist, and to know foreign languages can never be quite creditable, but tending steadily towards a certain point. This point was his knowledge of Turkish and Russian. There might be employment for him outside this country and outside the BBC, comparable in importance with the post he now held. It was being assumed that his Turkish was as fluent as his French.
‘Well?’ said Jeff.
That was the way things were done, or were put forward to be about to be done, in those days. Jeff had very little to leave behind – that too was well understood – not much to gain, either, and no embarrassments beyond a possible encounter with his former wives. He could go anywhere. He admitted that he might make better use of his detachment. A natural tendency to extravagance had prompted him to waste it, and to watch the waste with amusement. I can’t change, he thought, but I can begin to withdraw.
Under a star-powdered sky the Recorded Programmes Department set up an open microphone on the roof of BH, which caught every sound of the raids until the last enemy aircraft departed into silence. On the roof, too, the parts of the rifle were named to Teddy and Willie by Reception from the main desk of BH, who told them frequently, as he looked down at the pale pink smoke of London’s fires, that it reminded him of a quiet sector of the line in the last show. Most of the staff juniors attended, and sometimes Reception would sit and play poker with them for margarine coupons, while the Regent’s Park guns rocked them like ship’s boys aloft.
It felt odd to go down from the roof, during that cloudless autumn, into the interior of BH, where the circulation had become even more complex now that on receipt of the second, or purple, warning all personnel had to leave their rooms and proceed by the quickest route to the basement. It was only the fact that very few of them actually did this that kept the administration going. The Monitoring Section, for example, never raised their heads from their grave task.
Establishment had expected that as soon as Vi Simmons had gone, they would get an application for
a further supply of RPAs, but none came. There was extra work, which Annie was quite prepared to do. But time, as though in revenge for the minute watch that was kept on it, from the early news till Lighten Our Darkness, behaved oddly, so that she felt much older than she really was, and as though she had been with the BBC much longer than she really had. And yet Willie and Teddy, veterans of nearly eight months, spoke of epochs which she had never known. Once, when the engineers were testing the line from Manchester, a succulent voice cut in, singing an approximation of Look For the Silver Lining.
‘That’s Della!’
In the middle of the second refrain the singer was abruptly switched off. ‘Well, at least she’s been recorded,’ said Willie.
In spite of herself Annie could not help asking: ‘Did she get on well with RPD?’
Willie thought not. They were too much alike, he told her.
With only three of them left, the concept of the Seraglio seemed lost. Sam no longer sent for Annie to come and sit with him, but wandered about the building, when the need arose, until he found her. Then, of course, she was rarely alone. It was impossible to maintain the old shifts, and they got through the work as best they could.
‘There’s something wrong with these,’ she said to Teddy, as they sorted out the discs of Children Calling Home. These were recorded by line from families evacuated to Canada and the United States. The children’s bewilderment, they remembered, had often made Vi feel like crying.
Teddy wearily put one of them onto the turntable. A deep bass voice, hoarsened with smoking, began: ‘Hullo, Mum and Dad and Juicy Nelly.…’
‘They’re mixed up with Forces Messages again,’ said Annie.
They looked dolefully at each other. It was wrong to admit, no matter what the subject, that you were losing heart. And then, when RPD bounded in, as he did at that moment, giving the effect of a trajectory fuelled by indignation and landing exactly where he had intended, their lives expanded and glowed and they knew they were too important to the Corporation ever to feel tired.
‘What are you complaining about now, Mr Brooks?’ asked Annie, speaking a good deal more bluntly than Vi had done, but with a radiant smile. Diverted, apparently, from his original intention, Sam looked at her and complained that her hair was ragged.
Teddy, watching him, thought: ‘Perhaps I ought to break it to him that Annie fancies him.’ Jeez, though, it would have to be done tactfully.
Sam twisted one of the outlying curls round his finger. ‘Who’s been hacking at this?’ he asked.
‘Willie Sharpe,’ said Annie.
‘He’s made a mess of it.’
‘He’ll get better with practice.’
‘You ought to have asked me about it. I’m very good at cutting hair.’
‘Where did you learn, Mr Brooks?’ Teddy asked in amazement. ‘In the trenches?’
‘No, my mother taught me when I was about ten. That meant I could trim my father’s beard for him. I imagine the idea was to save money. We weren’t well off.’
The two juniors looked at each other, silenced by these impossibilities.
Then Annie felt something stronger than herself take her by the throat and said: ‘Do you cut Mrs Brooks’ hair?’
‘You mean my wife?’
‘Yes.’
He was not in the least perturbed. ‘I don’t think the question ever arose. She was quite self-sufficient.’ The enormous moment passed without leaving a trace.
He sprang to his feet and began to pace the stuffy mixer room. ‘Teddy, I ask you as man to man, do we appreciate Annie enough? Quite apart from her resemblance to that picture of a small French boy, or girl, in white which none of us seems able to identify, she is tranquil, she is steady, she isn’t carried out of herself, as I am, not only by the ludicrous administrative errors of the Corporation, but by the sheer injustice of life’s coincidences. I don’t suppose either of you realize that Vogel, Dr Josef Vogel, was a casualty in last Saturday’s raids?’
‘Yes, we did know that, Mr Brooks,’ said Teddy. ‘He went when there was all that damage round the Highgate Cat and Bells. We had a whip round the Department, you know, for some flowers.’
Sam ignored this. ‘You understand, Annie, I think, even if no-one else does, that in his professional capacity Vogel was indispensable to me, I’d put it as strongly as that, in the whole business of catching the sound of history as it passes. I must have discussed with him a hundred times what we’d do if German troops landed. In what archives, I put it to you, will you find a recording of the first wave of an invading tank division moving up a sand and shingle beach? I’d told him I was bringing him with me on the unit and we’d place ourselves on the foreshore, or, better still, perhaps, a mile or so up the London road. I can read you the application I’ve made to Coastal Defence. Of course, they’re trying to make needless restrictions of all kinds.…’
‘RPD struck me as a bit heartless,’ said Teddy, when they were left with Children Calling Home.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Annie. ‘Dr Vogel would have felt just the same.’
Teddy sighed. ‘You won’t listen to a word against him, will you?’
‘I can’t help myself, Teddy. I know the style he carries on, but I can’t help it.’
‘He gets round you. He gets round everyone.’
Annie could not explain to him why she felt no resentment. Her feeling for Mr Brooks was so much the most important part of her life that it seemed like something which did not belong to her, but which she had to carry about with her, at work or in her room, there was no difference. She had a kind of affection, too, for the love itself, which was so strong, but maintained itself on so little. There had been a time, not at all long ago, when she hadn’t had this responsibility, but it was hard for her to remember how she had felt then.
Eddie Waterlow, meeting her in the corridor, looked at her sharply.
‘Fly with me!’ he exclaimed.
‘What from, Mr Waterlow?’ Annie asked, not pretending to misunderstand him.
10
On September the 15th the RAF announced that they were no longer making School Certificate a requirement for flying duties and advertised for volunteers. Willie Sharpe read this on the ticker-tape after he had done his last job for that day, delivering the recordings for London After Dark. It was a very bright moonlight night outside, a bad night, as it turned out, in more ways than one.
He had a ticket to sleep in the concert-hall, and a meal allowance in the canteen. On the wiped counter, stale with its twenty-four hour service, nothing was left but herrings in mustard sauce; they were the week’s Patriotic Fish Dish. At separate tables, two messengers and a Czech professor of philosophy were picking quietly over their heap of bones.
Willie remembered Tad (who had recently sent Teddy a photograph of himself with a moustache, and a Polish fiancée), and then the outing to Prunier’s. Soon I shan’t be here, he thought. I can pass for eighteen easily. With a bit more experience of life’s testing moments, I shall look eighteen and a half. He imagined himself in training, in the Mess, listening to London After Dark, and wondering whether anybody would be interested then if he said he’d once worked in the Corporation.
The Czech professor approached his table, and asked whether it would be possible to borrow a torch. Evidently he too was going to venture into the concert-hall.
‘I’m sorry, I never carry one. As a matter of fact I’m training myself to do without a light, to make myself more useful in case of night combat.’
Willie, however, was too tired for once to expatiate on this. As the professor, resigned to refusal, moved away to ask elsewhere, he handed in his voucher and left.
The first heroic or primitive period of the concert-hall had only lasted a very short while. The grades quickly reasserted themselves, although the structure was complicated, as always, by the demands of time. Just inside the entrance, the old dressing rooms had been turned into separate cubicles for executives and senior news readers, but junior
news readers (after one o’clock in the morning) and administrative assistants (on programmes of special importance) could claim to use any that were vacant.
Tonight they all seemed to be standing empty.
Willie had quite often managed to take half an hour’s unentitled sleep in one of the cubicles. He hoped that it was right to regard this as training in initiative. The mattresses were really the same as all the others, but there were single beds, and even small tables. In front of each hung a curtain of a material half-way between felt and sacking, which had once been used to deaden sound in the drama studios.
He paused and listened acutely to the great ground swell of snoring. Pitched higher, pitched lower, came the familiar snatches of coloratura, swearing, and pleading, but everybody seemed safely stowed. Almost reassured, he felt his way behind the rank-smelling curtain into the thick darkness, trusting that he was in the cubicle next to the door, the best, of course, if you had to leave later in a hurry. He was frightened when he heard someone moaning in the corner.
‘Who is it?’ he whispered.
‘Strike a match. There’s some by the bed.’
He thought he recognized the voice. The match lit up part of a mottled, damp and livid face. He had always thought Lise rather pretty, she looked frightful now.
‘What are you doing in there?’
There was blood on the floor, on the standard green lino which the BBC also used to deaden sound.
‘Lise, have you met with an accident?’
The girl suddenly heaved over, crouching under the regulation blanket on all fours, and swaying like an animal fit to drop.
‘Shall I get you a cup of tea?’ Willie asked in terror. He knew very well what was happening. Make me wrong, he prayed.
‘Is this cubicle occupied?’ murmured a voice, a man’s voice, a foot away behind the curtain. Only an Old Servant could maintain such correctness, only a trained baritone could produce such a resonant mezza voce.
Human Voices Page 12