RPD had hit a snag in his design for lightweight recording equipment with an adequate – that was all he asked, heaven knew, that it should simply be adequate – windshield. At the moment he paid attention to nothing else, and nobody except the engineers had access.
‘You’ll have to await your summons,’ said Teddy, sitting back, world weary, surveying Annie. ‘That’s what you have to expect in a Seraglio.’
Annie was annoyed at herself at first for not knowing what the word meant. She’d thought it was a kind of opera.
The first job she was called upon to undertake by herself was to check the whole series of de Gaulle’s speeches, mark them up, and take them to the studio for the run-through of Eddie Waterlow’s dramatic feature France Fights On. The programme had been scheduled some time ago and had changed its name several times during the German advance. Director (Home) thought that as the cast had been booked and a certain amount of money spent already, the whole thing had better be recorded before something happened to make further alterations necessary. Annie was afraid when she first got through the door with her armful of discs, because no-one was there but Mr Waterlow, dancing quietly round the restricted space in the control studio. They’d told her that there were Old Servants in Broadcasting House, but not that there were mad Old Servants. It was the Hesitation Waltz he was doing. He paused and looked at her searchingly.
‘You’ve come early.’
‘I wanted to make sure that everything was all right, Mr Waterlow.’
He asked her name, then remarked: ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before. You are my Recorded Programmes Assistant for this afternoon?’
‘Yes, Mr Waterlow.’
‘When did you join the Corporation?’
‘Last Monday, Mr Waterlow.’
‘You appear bewildered.’
‘Well, Mr Waterlow, it’s my first time on duty.’
He peered at her. ‘I don’t know if you’re addressing me in this respectful way as a jest.’
‘They told me upstairs that was your name.’
‘It is. I have no intention of asking you what else they said. I may be too sensitive. I fancied that after only a few days you had joined the conspiracy against me.’
He’d stopped dancing, except for a few steps forward and back.
‘I’m not surprised in the least that the most inexperienced Recorded Programmes Assistant in the building has been assigned to me. If my abilities were ever highly valued by the Corporation, they are certainly not so now. Nevertheless I’ve been put in charge of a not unimportant programme, a tribute to the country without which Europe could hardly be termed civilised. And yet, in asking me to do this, they may have asked too much. Somewhere along the way I’ve lost the one quality necessary to preserve the glitter and the illusion, not only of the theatre – even in wartime I put that first – but of life. I mean confidence. All mine is gone. And from your expression at the moment, I fear you have none either.’
‘I’ve got plenty of confidence, Mr Waterlow,’ said Annie. ‘It’s just that you talk so daft.’
She put her records neatly in the producer’s rack. You couldn’t help liking him. Exhausted by his tirade, he watched her dreamily.
‘I think you must come from Birmingham.… What made you come to Broadcasting House?’
‘I wanted to do my bit.’
‘Ah, you can stand there and say that! I couldn’t say it without the deepest embarrassment. The deepest! I envy you.’
A Junior Programme Engineer stuck his head round the door, saw Annie, and whistled.
‘Got the running order, sweetheart?’
‘Yes, it’s announcement, narrator one minute twelve, cross-fade Marseillaise thirty seconds, fade out.…’
‘Yep, that’s what I came to tell you, Eddie,’ said the JPE casually, ‘European wanted me to remind you. You can’t fade the Marseillaise, not for the duration, to avoid offence to our Allies.’
Mr Waterlow sank down in picturesque despair. ‘My timing.…’
‘Yep, the whole two minutes of it. All or nothing. You’ll have to substitute.’
‘Heartless, heartless children.…’
‘Don’t give way, Mr Waterlow,’ Annie cried, ‘It’ll not take me a minute to go up to the Gram Library and get you a commercial. They showed me where it was on my tour of the building.’
‘A spark.…’
‘But what would you like me to get?’
‘Anything …’ His voice strengthened a little. ‘Anything but the song-cycles of Hugo Wolf. The Gramophone Library seem to have an unending supply of them, just as the canteen never runs out of digestive biscuits … my dear, fetch me something that is not by Hugo Wolf … let it at least be French.’
When Annie returned with a commercial of Ma Normandie, which she’d been told could be faded out anywhere, the situation in the studio had changed. The JPE had left, but someone else had come, a little old man, not looking at all well, but with a fierce air of not letting himself go, and of having dressed for the occasion. He had on a yellow checked waistcoat and a blue suit, the trousers pressed like blades.
‘Who are you? Who? Who?’ cried Eddie Waterlow.
‘The agent told me what time to come along.’
‘Why? At whose prompting? Did they tell you that, regardless of what rehearsals may have been called and what confirmations may have been sent by Bookings, anyone and everyone is welcome at Eddie Waterlow’s productions?’
‘I’ve got my letter from Bookings,’ said the old man. ‘I’ll take a chair if I may.’
He sat down with difficulty. ‘I’m a bit stiff, you might say I’ve one leg and a swinger. I don’t do much dancing nowadays.’
Annie wondered if she oughtn’t to fetch him something. He looked bad; in fact, they both did.
‘I’ve got my cast list here,’ said Eddie, trying to maintain authority.
‘What is your name?’
‘Fred Shotto.’
‘I have that on my list, certainly, but there must be a mistake of some kind. Spotlight gives him as twenty-nine years old, Shakespeare and classic comedy, specialises in French accent.’
‘That’ll be my son,’ said the old man. ‘He’s with the forces now. He’s Fred Shotto, junior. You can bill me as the old block he’s a chip of.’
Encouraged by Eddie’s silence, he went on: ‘The booking was in my name, all right. You can’t contest that, it’s legal. I’m all right myself once I’ve got my confidence.’
He took out a roll of sheet music.
‘I’ve brought my material.’
Eddie had chosen to sink his face into his left hand, while his right arm hung down helplessly towards the ground. Annie, feeling that someone must, took the music, from which other pieces of paper covered with writing fluttered to the ground.
‘That’s my material. The other’s my opening number.’
‘Annie! What has he brought me?’
Annie smoothed it out.
‘It’s the I’ve Got The You Don’t Know The Half Of It, Dearie Blues, Mr Waterlow.’
The JPE thrust forcefully in again, this time winking broadly.
‘How’s it coming, curly? We’re going to record in ten minutes.’
Annie went to the door.
‘Mr Waterlow seems to be in difficulties. Do you think he’s all right?’
‘Live in hopes.’
But France Fights On was cancelled, shelved to make room for the mounting defence instructions. Perhaps, indeed, it had never been planned for; only DPP was likely to be able to give an answer to that.
Eddie Waterlow had considerable difficulty in getting rid of Fred Shotto. The old man, who had started out as a clog-dancer at the age of four, had learned persistence in a harder school, as he pointed out, than Hitler’s war, and beyond that he had some idea that by getting work he was keeping the place warm for his son. Long after the cast had been dismissed he clung to his chair, and Eddie was obliged in the end to make a recording of the I’ve Got The You Don’t Know The Half Of It, Dearie Blues, cracked and trembling, which might have become a collector’s piece if it had not been consigned at once to scrap. Dislodged at last, and given a farewell drink, Fred Shotto became affectionate in the theatre’s old way, telling everyone in sight that Mr Waterlow had made him a happy man, and advising them to lean on Jesus till the clouds rolled by. It turned out that he’d done some hard years, too, as a revivalist.
After his programme was lost, Eddie drifted round the building, assisting a little here and there, a pensioner of the arts such as Broadcasting House, even in wartime, could not bring itself to discourage. He was told that France Fights On ‘might have involved falsification’; the BBC remained loyal to the truth, even when they stretched it a little to spare the feelings of their employees.
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.