by Henry Green
‘Yes,’ he said back sideways over a shoulder, ‘it’s not so bad. Haven’t you ever tried?’
My wife laughed. ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’
‘That I worked? Not me. Well we won’t attempt to get near him again.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I thought he was rather sweet.’ But we didn’t, and it so happened he was dead of natural causes in a month. Mr Hanks, guiltless, left guilt all round him.
All the long drive through, we had learned the boats would be full of others as panicked as ourselves. However, our hotel porter said no, there was all the room in the world, we could cross any night we liked. So now we were torn two ways. We had our only child, a son, in London, and it did seem right to get back to him. On the other hand we had paid for the car in advance, and had a few days in hand. So, to discuss this, and as the sun had come out, we took a walk over a golf course, empty and brilliantly green except for that long crocodile of priests in black cassocks also apparently promenading. We decided at last to stay overnight although the place looked more horribly like the England we were going back to defend than any other we had visited in Eire, except for the brisk wind swirling black draperies and so many pale hands held to black bowler hats with vast black wings.
Even the food at supper was distasteful and English. Brown soup, mutton, mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts – we could not understand why until we realised it was a railway hotel. And we were disconcerted when the same crocodile of priests came filing in to dine. They sat four by four to small round tables, and, once grace was said, there arose a roar of conversation, which somehow, in some unexplained way, yet seemed discreet. On being asked, the waitress said they were in retreat and were taking all meals here.
We had been late down. It was not long before the nine o’clock news came on. But this dynamo of conversation round about was such that we heard little from London over the loudspeaker like a huge green ashtray in plastic, covered by netting, hung on one wall. No one besides ourselves paid the slightest attention. But my wife thought she picked up something about an important announcement immediately following the news. When something came, as promised, we could hear still less. ‘All the same,’ I warned myself against rising indignation, ‘you can’t just shush priests.’ Until, after about another ten minutes my wife said she wished we could be allowed to listen. At that, surprised by myself, I turned about and hissed ‘Hush’ twice, very loud. They one and all immediately stopped talking just in time for us to hear the unknown voice across the now night-dark sea say, into complete silence, ‘Goodnight, then, everyone, goodnight.’ We thought we recognised Mr Chamberlain.
We decided to get on the boat next evening.
Thus we sailed home, bereft.
London at the end of 1938 was, for intelligent people, an angry divided town, families divided against each other, old friends after a few sharp words not speaking to old friends. When Mr Chamberlain got nowhere with Hitler in Munich, saw him again at Berchtesgaden and came back with a brolly and the famous bit of paper and the slogan ‘peace in our time’, the House of Commons rose to cheer him to a man while many like myself were well satisfied, hoping at least that he had bought time, as Mr Baldwin did earlier when he was able to postpone the General Strike for a few months in 1926. Against us in a few days we had those who held that the German tanks were made of cardboard, they actually knew a man who had driven his car slap through one by mistake on an autobahn. More seriously there were those, harking back to the Civil War in Spain, who saw stark betrayal in what had been done to Czechoslovakia. Whatever the opinion held, however, there could be little doubt in any mind that our way of life was about to be radically altered, and for the worse.
What between hope one week, despair the next, it was as if Hitler was at an end of the seesaw, with oneself at the other dominated by the eyes of this maniacal genius with a hypnotic stare out of every published photograph; one would be up one moment, down the next, and completely at the mercy of these ups and downs, with nothing to be done except join one of the Services.
Most small- to medium-sized firms fell during 1939 into a coma of suspended animation. Rearmament had got under way by 1937 in the sense generally speaking that the largest factories were looking up. An account will be given later of how material began to reach the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS for short). But firms such as ours, who were principally brewers’ engineers with little repetition work for what machines we had, were left and indeed remained very much out in the wilderness for most of the war. And our customers, unable to tell what demand there was likely to be in six months’ time for their product, or indeed should it come to what the Civil Servants called ‘hostilities’, to tell whether they would be able to get the raw materials they needed, simply, peaceably gave up ordering. My problem therefore, at the top, was to help my father keep our small but expensive organisation going. For, once we let the top men be dispersed, we felt we should never get them back under our roof again.
I was rising thirty-five in 1939 and, while the talk then was that no man older than twenty-seven would ever be permitted in the firing line, it did seem expedient, as it must have done to 100,000 others, to duck out into one of these non-combatant services to avoid conscription, which must mean being drafted overseas. In London, for most of the war, one was kept while on duty close to the regular Fire Station of one’s choice. So that when the Board of Directors agreed to my joining the AFS I was able to call in at the office every third day all through the war, for we worked two days on with one off, and if not at a fire was always available, if only in my case, to sign cheques. The company also agreed to ‘make up’ my wage as a fireman, to what had been my salary with the firm, which, when in another phrase ‘hostilities developed’, indeed made all the difference; in fact I suffered financially not at all.
To join the AFS in 1938 all you needed was a doctor’s certificate to say you were not likely to fall down dead running upstairs so that they had to pay your widow a pension, and, as far as one can remember at this distance of time, a couple of references as well to say you were a responsible person. Forged notes to this latter effect were so unchecked as to be a ha-ha which deterred no one. Why go so far as forgery? Because unlike anyone else, even the British police force, firemen in England are by law allowed to enter any house when in uniform. The Englishman’s house is not his castle once a passer-by claims, however mistakenly, he has seen smoke coming from the eaves. And what attracted a certain level of society to the Service was a prophetic vision that, when bombed, householders in fleeing would abandon trinkets, and, if raids were heavy, might even be relied upon to leave valuables behind, easy pickings, windfalls in open drawers. And indeed, when raids began, there was a sense in which it could be felt that these things left in abandoned houses, had become common property even if the owners were still alive, kicking heels in public shelters.
Having armed myself with the needed few bits of paper, I was enrolled and called by appointment one evening after work to get trained. With the others in the class this instruction, for not more than sixty minutes every seven days, over a period of eight weeks was meant to turn us into full Auxiliary Firemen. They handed out overalls, peaked uniformed caps, three-inch webbing belts to each one, and an axe in a holder which fitted on the belt, but the axe had bitten into it by acid a serial number. My number was so early that I was inordinately proud of it. During the blitz, when conscripts were drafted, all these numbers were changed. From somewhere about the seven thousand mark mine was moved to the twenty thousand, and, however absurd, I cannot stop resenting that to this day.
At the other extreme there were many who volunteered convinced that the AFS must be a suicide squad. They did not want to die but chose what they thought was the most dangerous job of all. Many of these resigned in the ‘phoney war’ twelve months lull period, which ended in August 1940 with the first heavy raids.
All manner of men, therefore, came in for training in 1938 and for a variety of reasons. The Londo
n Fire Brigade (LFB for short) received them all at the Regular Fire Stations. These were always Gothic in design. Built of red brick with white stone pinnacles towards the roof, there was invariably a tower rising high above all, a relic of medieval times through which fire watches were maintained. Curiously enough when flying bombs, VIS, started, this watch was set up every night once more.
At street level there was a yard with another tower four storeys high and open on all sides, a series of bare platforms one above the other joined by an iron ladder. This was used by both LFB and AFS for training. Next door was the fire station, at ground-floor level, three huge great sliding doors of red, in one of which was a small wicket gate next a large brass handle marked ‘Fire Bell’.
There were those recruits who, not knowing how to get in, pulled this and so ‘put the bells down’, i.e. set every alarm in the place ringing and thus obliged the Station to ‘turn out’ in under thirty seconds flat. To miss a pump, or an appliance as it is called, was a minor crime. There were four-inch brass poles to help the men get down quickly from perhaps three or four floors. Their gear was left on the appliances and they dressed as they drove through the streets, ringing warning bells which never cleared the way like heroes are supposed to do.
They played tricks with these poles. One powerful LFB regular used to take a full tea cup on its saucer in his left hand, wrap the left arm round highly polished brass, and climb this thing up through the ceiling with his right hand, a prodigious feat of strength, not spilling a drop.
The regulars were indeed fantastic men. With just over 3,000 in the Force and thirty thousand Londoners about to join the AFS, they were all shortly destined as officers to oversee the AFS. Some were gunlayers in the Royal Navy Reserve, who somehow or other were retained until the blitz was over when they went back and died at sea, others were men who had made the navy or marine corps too hot to hold them. All thought exclusively of the pension they were to get when aged about forty-five. With this they would retire to one of the large stores and there be firemen once again until they died in bed, or, if old enough, pensioned off on what by then would be a double pension. Loot and pension was all they thought of, loss of pension was the preoccupation in all their minds until bombing started when some, who had been resurrected from sedentary staff duties, felt and said loudly that bombs and fire fighting were two different things, that LFB pensions were no adequate reward for dodging bombs. They had a point. The risk had been increased, the pension stayed the same.
On this ground floor in any LFB station, so clean you could eat off it, for fire fighting is a waiting game – the men spend most of their waiting hours as housemaids – stand the three appliances as they are called, the Dual Purpose (DP), the Pump and the ‘Ladders’. Any equipment we had in the AFS with our LFB officers, was based on these. A DP had an ‘escape’, that is a ladder on large wheels, hitched over the whole wagon, on a built-in tank of water with a pump to discharge this, as well as take water from hydrants, and in addition a vacuum pump to raise water from a pond, which they called ‘static water’. The pump appliance was similar except that it had no ‘escape’, or the built-in tank of water. The ‘ladders’, made in Germany, had a pump and three tubular ladders telescopically folded but joined together, and which, by hydraulic action, could be raised, with a fireman at the top, to a height of 120 feet. All three were painted red, had a great deal of brass to polish, and carried masses of equipment in lockers.
And who sent these appliances out to ring their bells past shoppers? The ‘watchroom attendant’. He took all calls by telephone in a large glass box. It was he who put the station bells down. And it was in response to these that the fireman doing out the Super’s flat up on the fourth had to hurry down the poles to be last on whatever he was ‘riding’ before with a roar and a crash of gears they were out and off.
Living at the top the Superintendent was a saintly figure of incalculable guile who twelve months later was to break windows for me with half bricks as I stood with a nozzle before such flames during the first great City Fire around St Paul’s. When he was called out he came slow down the poles, gently, to be driven off, a slight man in a little car with his special little tinkling fire bell. Although flames and smoke were his business, ‘softly, softly’ he made one think, ‘catchee monkey’, so discreet was he, so important, so quiet, so self-contained.
On the first floor was the Regulars’ mess room. Here they sat most of the day, whatever their cleaning duties, drinking tea, and as we were told by our instructors, when they did speak it was to curse the volunteers.
The instructors were a trifle shy at having volunteered as such. Canny men, they were careful to decry the usefulness of those they were teaching while leaving themselves in a position to take full advantage if and when the AFS was used. They were too clever; the war broke most of these. The WAFS (women’s branch), dressed in uniformed trousers, tigresses disguised as humans, were too much for them.
And these hard young females, when war did break out, were nearly to destroy our teacher in knots and lines, Fireman Brent. Many another such they slew remorselessly. But this man was saved, in the nick of time, by his courage in the blitz. Handsome, speechless, incomparably brave, he once described to me his exit in peacetime from a fire when cut off by flames, at a warehouse by the river Thames. ‘And then Henry,’ he said, with truthful calm, ‘I slid down me hose away from it all into the old Thamise.’ He could have at that, and from the fifth floor.
He got the George Medal afterwards for incredible gallantry; in front of witnesses of course, but he deserved them. It was impossible to get a medal without at least one high officer watching.
A line is a length of rope in these circles, and knots are taught in great variety, they date back to the days of sail. Because Brent was never ready with his tongue he was given ‘Knots and lines’ to teach. For a whole hour I have known him silently demonstrate the elegant knot with which, if well drilled, one should shorten any line that has slack in it. Over and over again he got it wrong, undid the knot without a word, only to start once more, expressionless, mute, enormously dignified. Imperturbable, beautiful as Apollo. When war came he was of course put in charge of an AFS station. He had seven WAFS sleeping in. They were too much for him. Their jealousy of each other grew to such extremes that it was even said he might be losing his pension. Then the bombs began to fall.
Brent, as they say, then came into his own.
There will be more of him hereafter.
In the meantime, peacetime, there were moments when Brent showed his innate authority. Deputising for another instructor to take hook ladder drill on that hollow open tower in the fire station yard, he got himself in a dangerous position. A hook ladder is made of the lightest construction, bound with wire and is some fourteen feet tall with a two-feet-six toothed curving hook on the end, which is meant to get into windows and grip on the sill. There was a fire in Knightsbridge in the 1930s. It was at night, of two apartment buildings next to each other, one was well alight on the ground floor. Three or four screaming girls were above, making night hideous. A fireman took the hook ladder off his DP, ‘scaled’, as they say, the unscathed building, put the ladder across a wall between the two, crossed over, went down and fetched those girls up, then led them across his bridge to love, life and laughter. Next day he had to be told what he had done. He’d been dead drunk.
These ladders have hardly ever been used since. They are absurdly unsafe. You are supposed to lift the thing and smash in the first-floor window with the wrought-iron hook, climb it, open the window, straddle this like riding a horse, raise the ladder hand over hand to the window on the floor above, repeat this treatment, and so on until you get where you want.
Unfortunately a hook ladder is of such light construction that, for the man climbing, it is a matter of keeping in the centre of balance, otherwise, if he is three parts up, the foot of it will shoot sideways and he will be a powerless fly at an angle of forty-five degrees, not away from the building
, but to the horizontal window sill above him that his hook is stuck into. And the gallant fellow will be in sore danger of falling, ladder and all, to the hard, hard pavement or onto spiked iron palings which abound in London and elsewhere.
Waiting our turn in the yard, backs to a wall, out of the cone of light with which the drill tower searchlight almost hid those four storeys in vanilla cream, and above, visible to us outside the glare, an infinite warm blue sky with stars, warm with a last flush of summer and the glow given by street lighting, each lamp falling far short of that sky but overlaying it with blue, steeping in sapphire heavens above between the stars; waiting our turn we saw Brent advance to demonstrate his hook ladder drill, long since forgotten. But, when he muffed it, was stuck at forty-five degrees half across the tower, he did what he would have done for any learner, he let out a great bellow – ‘Still!’
This command means stay put, don’t move. And, as we stayed not frozen, but warmly inanimate, an LFB colleague casually came out of the Station, hiked the ladder straight and Brent came down. Without a word to climb the thing again.
They were remarkable men, the LFB. They came out of their mess room once on a ‘smell of smoke’. I had never seen them together before. Not so much huge as squat and broad with spade-like faces, they ran wordless up and down stairs dashing off sideways to sniff like steam engines at empty fireplaces. False alarm.
But they are still allowed ‘wet canteens’, that is a basement room in which they can buy and drink beer, not spirits. When they get in too much difficulty with their figures of takings, it is traditional they should set fire to this room and then put the flames out themselves, after all records have been consumed. It may be one of these conventional blazes was expected to drag them from their tea mugs that afternoon, or perhaps anything to make them forget the hated AFS. One thing is sure. They would never have first inspected a place where money was counted till it was well alight. For they would go in anywhere, fire and flame had become second nature, true they far preferred a blaze in the grate but backed up by each other and their equipment they would face anything, any time, grumbling yes but the sooner the better. Always excepted that memory-dulling ‘incident’ the witless discarded fag end that ‘must have smouldered there for hours’ to destroy books conveniently left in no fireproof drawer but on carefully empty shelves, books not of words in black and white but pounds, shillings and pence, the columns added.