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.
Willie peeped out. It was as he well knew, John Haliburton, the Senior Announcer.
‘I rather thought I heard a woman’s voice in here. But if it’s empty.…’
The Halibut was carrying a kind of dark lantern, and wore the correctly creased uniform of the BBC’s Defence Volunteers. Everybody knew, although he himself never mentioned it, that he had been wounded at Le Cateau and should be allowed to rest whenever possible. Willie steeled himself.
‘I’m afraid you can’t come in, Mr Haliburton.’
Lise began to make a prolonged low sound that was not a groan but an exhalation, like a pair of bellows pressed and crushed flat to expel the last air in a whimper. Willie retreated towards her.
‘Willie … can you count? You can help me if you can count … you have to tell me how many minutes between each contraction.’
‘What’s that?’ he whispered, struggling to recall his Red Cross Handbook.
‘Where do you feel the pain?’
‘In my back.’
‘Oughtn’t it to be in the front?’
‘If you are in any difficulties,’ suggested Haliburton from outside, ‘I advise you to report to the First Aid posts, or to fetch someone competent. I believe Dr Florestan, at the European News Desk, has medical qualifications.’
In spite of his predicament, Willie did not really want Mr Haliburton to go away. Whatever it was that supported the Senior Announcer, his four years at the Western Front, his training under Sir John Reith, his performer’s vanity – all these together gave him a superb indifference to the tossing and snoring shambles around him, and an authority which made Willie plead: ‘Just a minute, Mr Haliburton.’
Lise groaned again, and this time the noise rose above the permitted level of sounds in the darkened hall. Willie thought he could hear a faint tick, as of liquid splashing onto the floor in small quantities. Meanwhile the Halibut, who had, as he remembered too late, a Deaf Side, passed sedately on.
It’s too bad he couldn’t rest his leg a bit, Willie thought confusedly.
The prospect of looking after them both – the correct Old Servant and the agonizing girl – side by side under the same too narrow blanket, flashed upon him like a nightmare. Without trying to work things out any further he felt for Lise’s damp hand and held it.
‘Strike some more matches.’
‘I’d better save them, I think.’
‘Are you still counting?’
‘I can hold my watch to my ear and count the sixty seconds.’
Lise heaved, and now once again she was like a young beast wallowing, and marked out for destruction. While Mr Haliburton had been there, the sleepers nearest to them had remained relatively tranquil, soothed by his familiar voice, reassuring even in a whisper. But now that he was gone they became restive. I must calm her, he told himself.
‘I’m not criticizing you, Lise,’ he said, bending close to her. ‘I believe every human being should follow their own bent, and I assume that’s what you’ve been doing. Probably you didn’t envisage this situation.’
She clung on, yet he felt separated from her by many miles. He wouldn’t have believed that a girl could grip like that, so that his hand felt numb, with the tarsus and the metatarsus, was that right? – crushed together. The British character was at its finest in adversity. Lise, though, was half-French, if he’d got that straight. In any case, there mustn’t be pain like this after the war was over. Everyone, people like himself, must carry a range of simple medication, then you’d be able to be of real help to anyone you happened to meet in a situation like this during the course of the day.
His palm was stuck to hers with sweat like glue.
‘Don’t leave me,’ muttered Lise. ‘Go and fetch somebody. Stay here. Don’t tell them in First Aid. Go and get somebody straight away.’
What was needed before anything else, in Willie’s view, was something to mop up the floor with. He knew every room in the building, as part of a comprehensive survey he’d made of the defence facilities. The nearest cloths and hot water would be three doors to the left, where there was a messengers’ room, and they would be off duty now. As he edged out of the concert-hall he saw Mr Haliburton, propped against the wall to ease his leg, and talking quietly to a small group.
‘Sir John always expected us to wear dinner jackets to read the late news … on the other hand, informality can, I think, be carried too far.…’
In the harsh overhead light of the messengers’ room Willie felt sick. There was a bath in there, round the inside of which Accommodation had painted a red line, to remind the staff not to use too much hot water. For some reason this red line also made him feel sick. When he looked down and saw that there was blood on his shoes and trousers it became clear to him in an instant that he couldn’t carry on any longer on his own responsibility. He had no hesitation at all about where to go for help.
‘Mr Haggard, sir.’
DPP looked up from his desk without hope, alarm, or irritation. He could see that the juvenile who had just come into the room was bloodstained here and there, and that as he was not apparently bleeding himself, the blood must have come from somewhere else.
‘I don’t think you remember me,’ said Willie, grasping the back of the visitors’ chair.
‘I do remember you,’ said Jeff.
‘You may think it very queer my coming up here to see you like this.’
‘Queer, but not very queer. You’d better sit down. I don’t think you gave me your name when we last met.’
Willie gave his name. ‘Junior Recorded Programme Assistant,’ he added.
He felt it would help him not to be sick if he attempted a measure of formality. ‘It’s Lise, sir, I mean Miss Bernard, really perhaps I mean Mrs Bernard.’
He glanced down at the knees of his grey trousers.
‘Perhaps the thought’s passing through your mind that I’ve murdered her.’
Jeff saw that he was in a bad way.
‘Never mind what I think. We can discuss that later. Who is Miss Bernard?’
‘Well, she’s having a baby, Mr Haggard. I suppose she may have had it by now, but these things take some time, you know. That is, she’s giving birth to a child, in the concert-hall.’
Jeff paused before replying, but scarcely any longer than usual.
‘In the concert-hall, you say?’
‘It’s one of those curtained off bits, just as you go in. I just happened to be passing. I had a ticket for tonight, that was all in order. No, sir, I’m not telling you the exact truth, I hoped perhaps if it was free I might go in there myself. It’s the one next to the door, so usually it’s kept for the Senior Announcer.’
‘But at the moment it’s occupied by Miss Bernard, who is in an advanced stage of labour?’
Willie nodded.
‘Is the Senior Announcer in there as well?’
Willie shook his head, but with an expression which made DPP ask him whether he was actually going to be sick. Willie thought not yet, and perhaps not at all if he kept his head still.
‘Look, William, there are three First Aid Posts on floors one, five, and seven of Broadcasting House, with nurses on permanent duty, and there is also a Home Guard dispensary. I’m only employed here in the capacity of planning the Corporation’s programmes. What made you come to me?’
‘I thought you didn’t really remember me, sir. We were on the Red Cross course together, for all staff without consideration of status. We all thought it good of you to come along, considering you must have seen a lot of casualties already in World War One. In the end we both had the same special chapter for our certificates, sir – frostbite, sunstroke, and sudden childbirth.’
DPP rang through to RPD’s office and told him that he had reason to be concerned about two of the junior members of his department. William Sharpe had been made to lie down in the fifth floor First Aid post. Lise Bernard had been sent along the road to the Middlesex Hospital. It was fortunate, since of course there were no ambulances free to fetch her, that his taxi had, once more, been available.
‘I don’t understand you, Jeff. Have you been knocking them about?’
‘Bernard was in the second stage of childbirth, Sam. You remember telling me on a number of occasions that your junior staff, past and present, were a particular responsibility to you.’
‘Of course they are. What has that got to do with it?’
‘Naturally enough they weren’t at all anxious to take her in at the Middlesex, they’ve got emergency beds two deep in the corridors. We just have to be grateful that hospitals, like the rest of us, enjoy feeling powerful. They allowed themselves to be persuaded.’
‘I still don’t see why you should have been involved in all this.’
‘Nor do I. The matron told me some people made the war an excuse for everything.’
Sam appeared to reflect for a while.
‘Do you know I’m very glad you told me about this?’ he said at last, with warmth. ‘I’m very glad indeed that it happened. These two programme assistants, a girl and a boy, who you’ve never met, who in fact you’ve never seen or heard of before come to you with their problems, problems, too, of an unfamiliar kind, and although you must have been somewhat bewildered by the part you were called on to play, you did your very best for them – I believe that, Jeff. And that shows that all this appearance of coldness and of not caring a shit for what other people suffer is just what I’ve always suspected it was, a pretence. I congratulate you, Jeff. You tried to help.’
‘That’s quite enough,’ Jeff replied. ‘The time is now 1.47. I’m occupied in sorting out the difficulties of Religious Broadcasting, who want a full-length service of praise and thanksgiving if the unexploded bomb outside St Paul’s is removed, but not if it isn’t. I rang you because this young woman, as I said, is or was a member of your Department. I think she joined you in May.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call my juniors young women, Jeff. They’re just girls.’
‘Not when they give birth on the premises.’
‘I must say I can’t see why she should have wanted to do that.’
‘You remember the name, I take it.’
‘Bernard. Yes, yes, she’s been on extended sick leave.’
‘Which has now happily drawn to a close.’
‘No … well … she’s been away for some time … I’m not sure why it was exactly … I admit I’ve rather lost track there … you see, Jeff, it’s my opinion that the memory has only a certain capacity. The model would be, let’s say, a brief-case, where the contents are varied, rather than a sandbag. Under pressure of work, and hindrances, and total misunderstanding, and emotional stress, the less essential things simply have to be thrown out.… Something does come back, though … I think she was partly French.’
He had forgotten about Willie Sharpe’s plight. Lack of curiosity about anyone not actually in the room protected him to an astonishing degree. He might, perhaps, given this protection, last, like some monstrous natural formation, for hundreds of years.
‘Sam, are you human?’
‘If I’m not, I can’t see who is. That reminds me, I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you about a new assistant who’s joined my Department, really rather an exceptional person, I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone exactly like her.’
‘Have you got her there now?’
‘She’s gone to get me a sandwich. By the way Jeff, it’s just struck me that all this business, arranging about the hospital and so on, must have been a bit of an inconvenience for you.’
‘You mustn’t give it a thought.’