IT MIGHT BE BEARABLE, Eve thought, sipping her tea, if the atmosphere were less like a boarding school. The teachers enjoyed themselves, Angelina, old Miss Hill, and Dobbie the warden, but the pupils, civilians like herself, sat miserably along the wall, the victims of a vast, destructive bureaucracy that was the same in every land. It was impossible to realize what was happening. Angelina had compared raids to a film, but the screen was at least concrete; it was easier, she decided to her amazement, to accept a photographed storm as real than this concentrated bombing. It was the absurdity of it all, the dropping of balls upon the ninepin houses, that baffled understanding.
Even in the few weeks taboos had grown up; the people chattered incessantly as they came in about the events of the day as though this would prevent untoward happenings at night. Beds were arranged in the same order, less because of comfort than from fear that to alter the original sequence might mean a worse night. Thermos flasks marked a solemn pause: afterwards, whether you gossiped or not depended upon your neighbour. War was the triumph of bad organization, Eve decided; there was Joe, completely happy as he never could have been in peacetime, and here she was herself, her world broken, her future darkness and her present almost unendurable. “Now I know just what you need!” Miss Hill’s voice, which was so much heavier than her small, bustling personality, rang out above the rest of the conversation. “Juniper oil; I took five drops myself this morning.” She reached under her camp bed for a handbag.
“It’s just nerves!” Her victim, who had the air of a rather pale mouse wrapped up in a grey shawl, leaned back wearily in her canvas deck chair. “I’m sure the noise must affect us subconsciously.”
“Nonsense, dear, my grandfather used to say, what do you mean by subconscious?—we got along perfectly well without knowing it existed! But I knew you’d upset your digestion, drinking that tea at four o’clock yesterday morning.”
“I seem to get so cold.”
“Well, the juniper oil will put you right. It was a better England, when we gathered our own remedies and baked our own bread. And I wish I had lived a hundred years ago myself.”
“I expect our ancestors had their troubles too.”
“But they didn’t have the radio. Directly the wireless started blurting out a lot of unnecessary news like a town crier bellowing about a mad dog, I knew something would happen. All this gossiping out loud, you could almost call it eavesdropping, is unnatural.”
These wretched women, Eve thought; if old Hill says another word, I shall have to go back to my room. The zipper of her sleeping bag had caught in the fringe of her coat and she tried to focus her attention on disentangling the strands. She would much have preferred to stay upstairs in bed, but it upset the Tippett, and Selina was the only person in the room who was really kind to her. People talked about progress, but when you came down to happenings and not articles in the press, the same old Victorian life went on. They accepted the Warming Pan because it belonged to the kitchen, was domestic, but her own job was taboo. There was nothing people hated more than independence.
The guns came nearer. Occasionally there was a screech of brakes as an ambulance rounded the corner. “That’s just a door banging,” Angelina called, as an old lady, hearing the thump, struggled out of her bed.
“Well, what I say is, these shelter evenings encourage correspondence!” Eve’s neighbour, the only other “business girl” in the room, looked up from the rose-pink linen notepaper case carefully arranged on her knee. She was sixty, the cashier at the stationer’s up the road and came, not from the Warming Pan, but from her own attic somewhere else in the neighbourhood. Selina and Eve had christened her privately “Miss Empire,” for she had nieces in New Zealand, a brother at the Cape; Muriel, “my colleague all the time I was at Jackson’s,” was in Montreal, and there was another friend in Vancouver. Lilian herself (her name was inevitably Lilian) had never left her London birthplace except to visit a married sister in Exeter, but she had exchanged her mind, Eve always pretended, for a post-office guide.
“Did you really look today for cards?” The Christmas mail was the axle around which the year revolved. It was less the fires and the German armies that Lilian feared than the disorganization of the posts; she was forever quoting precedents from 1917.
“Yes, dear, how kind of you to be interested in my spot of worry. I wanted to find an English hunting scene to remind my nieces of England’s picturesque joys, and today, in town, I secured one. A calendar. It does look bright and jolly and typical of England’s winter days, but it is difficult somehow to reconcile it with all this,” and she looked round at the bundled-up forms on the mattresses and chairs. “I would have kept it to show you, but I thought in these times we never know what is going to happen.” She giggled as though she had uttered a rather naughty word. “After all, I do feel that they will look after the mails if it gets really bad, rather than us citizens. So, somehow, I felt safer when I had popped it into the slot.”
“Yes, that was wise, I think.” It would be silly to remind her of the smashed pillar boxes and the burnt-out vans. Perhaps she felt that the use of the term “royal” made them invincible.
“In the last war, my sister’s eldest boy, he was only two, got the Santa Claus I sent him only at Easter. I was always so vexed. He must have thought his old aunt crazy, sending him snow when he should have had a bunny.”
“You cannot do more than post at the date they advise.”
“No, dear, but somehow I always felt that I should have been more careful. After all, our festivals only come once a year. Has it ever struck you what a time we spend preparing for them, and then they are over in a flash? It’s difficult to think about Christmas with those raiders overhead; still, the British Lion is barring every door, and the more it is banged, the tighter it will hold.”
“People are being extraordinary.”
“Well, what I say is, it does not do to give way to things. I used to tell Muriel that, when she got so frightened over thunderstorms. I missed her very much at first, for if a person has lunch with you for ten years continuously the day seems upside down when she goes away; but now I am thankful she is in Montreal. We don’t always realize at the time how often things happen for the best.”
The basement vibrated with the shock of masonry falling in the near distance. It was as if they were lying at the bottom of a well with nothing overhead. All the heads stared up in unison, a grotesque sight, for what use were looks if the sky itself collapsed? There was a moment’s silence, and then the knitting needles began again, though one or two, with furtive glances at their neighbours, helped themselves to barley sugar.
“If paper could speak, what a tale your card could tell when it gets to New Zealand!” The pillar box began to bob up and down in Eve’s mind until it was an ark swimming on dark tropical seas. “I saw a film once, I remember, about a bank note. They ought to make one about your letter. I should begin with the mail”—she thought of the taxi roof that she had seen that morning on her way to work, just visible at the rim of a gigantic crater—“then there would be the docks, the ships being loaded in spite of the fires, the submarines in the Bay, at last, after the fear and the stars, sunlight on the other side of the world.” Only nothing really would explain their experience; there would be a gulf between the bombed and the unraided.
“I don’t know”—her neighbour began to sharpen a pencil—“if I do go to the pictures I like a real story; a good cry once in a while makes you fresher for your work.”
Eve could think of no suitable reply. “Oh, I’m one with you in appreciating the spring weather,” she heard above the clatter. “How glad we shall be to say goodbye to winter, though it has to come again in a year of months. I love the moment when the snowdrops bloom in our little yard, though this year everything will be on the tapis, methinks.” And Mrs. Juniper Oil’s niece (Eve did not know her name) settled back into her creaking chair, as if raids were the most normal thing in the world. “I do not think the outlook is too safe, just now, though Britain’s hope for victory is great.”
“Safe,” Colonel Ferguson murmured to himself, looking up in amazement. Was it courage or was it simply stupidity? He caught Eve’s eye, and both smiled. The barrage blew up in a gust of thunder, died almost away, and then bellowed again, until he thought of an illustration he had seen somewhere of men crouching in caves. Perhaps civilization was really unbearable, and in some rage of protest man had duplicated the conditions of the beginning of the world? It amused him to think that the distant thuddings of the mobile guns were the footsteps of mammoths.
Perhaps too much security was unendurable. Families said that they were afraid of war, yet they were unwilling to take one positive step to prevent it. Oh, they joined pacifist societies and smothered criticism, but they had never once looked the monster in the face. Colonel Ferguson shut his eyes, remembering a summer afternoon in the Wrights’ garden, on his last brief visit to England before the war. “I know you two like exchanging reminiscences,” Mrs. Wright had said, snipping off a faded delphinium head into her basket, “but if it had not been for those wretched trenches Frank wouldn’t be a cripple with his rheumatism. What idiots you were! But it isn’t going to happen again, you know, we’ll see to that,” and she had clipped off another lavender-coloured spike almost to ground level. “What about Germany?” Ferguson had inquired. “War, they think, is all that matters.”
“Tush! Scare-mongering. It’s the newspapers playing up atrocities, and I don’t believe they happen. It would be a better thing for the world if the press were abolished.” And the Parliament and laws, the Colonel had felt tempted to answer. “It is true,” he had protested, “I met a boy in the mountains. On a track I had found by accident, the real smuggler’s path. I thought the child, he couldn’t have been more than seventeen, had had an accident. At first he was terrified, then when I could not answer his German he realized I was English and showed me his hands. They had been broken by rifle butts. The Nazis had left him for dead, and an old woman had helped him to cross the frontier. It was his turn yesterday, but it may be ours tomorrow.”
“You have a kind heart and he took you in. I expect he was just a common criminal.”
“Even so,” Ferguson had wanted to reply, “you don’t smash a boy’s hands.” It would have spoiled the afternoon for Frank, so he had answered simply, “No, it was true, I made inquiries.” Now they were all learning about war the hard way, for the second time in one generation; yet sitting in this basement and looking at the diverse group in their rugs and siren suits, people still seemed unaware of what had happened. I know and I understand, he thought with great bitterness as another explosion shook the street; but it is all useless, people prefer stupidity. He felt in his pocket for his cigarette case, but caught sight of the notice Angelina had chalked up in large letters, “No Smoking During Alerts.”
“Dear me,” Selina sighed, “it is being noisy tonight! I must confess I find it trying night after night with no sleep.”
“Do try some wax plugs, Miss Tippett, I’m sure they would help you.” One of the many old ladies dived into a huge bag she held, full of goggles, ointment, and powder. There was a violent crash as she spoke, on a neighbouring roof.
“Patience, my children,” Angelina shouted from the top of the stairs, “wait until you hear the eight o’clock news tomorrow,” and she mimicked the announcer: “‘There was slight enemy activity over London in the early hours of last evening.’” They all laughed, but several stirred uneasily in their chairs.
“I think it is better not to try to settle till the guns stop,” Mrs. Juniper Oil intervened. “I go home directly the all-clear sounds, take a bath, and sleep on till eleven.”
I can’t do that with my ledgers and my stores, Selina thought, yawning. Horatio was staring at her in a very peculiar way, like a child she had once seen who had been frightened by a runaway horse. “Don’t worry, Mr. Rashleigh,” she called across to him, “five minutes more and we’ll have some soup.”
“Hush,” he whispered, pointing to the staircase, “they’re after us.”
“Of course, they are after all of us.” It was best to humour him. “But here in the shelter we are safe.”
Rashleigh shivered violently and shook his head. He could distinguish forms in the shadows, dancing and leaping. “Can’t you see the flashes?” he muttered. “They’ve got to the stockades.”
“Stockades? Whatever do you mean?”
“The Indians …” He broke from Selina’s grasp, for she had crossed over to quiet him. “There, can’t you see them?” He tried to crouch under the staircase. “Indians …” he yelled the word, but nobody heard him, for the walls lifted with a roar at that moment and split, and rushed towards each other in a cascade of noise, plaster, and crumbling bricks.