AT THE BEGINNING OF 1939 Dilly was still working in the Broadway. His health was not much better, if at all, since his operation, and he appeared to live entirely on black coffee and chocolate. To the casual visitor the office would have appeared disorderly, even though it was tidied by a girl assistant, but the chaos was restored at the end of every day by Dilly, like Daedalus in his own labyrinth. A brilliant young Oxford mathematician, Peter Twinn, who was recruited to the Department in February, found to his dismay that Dilly was not prepared to offer any explanation at all of the working system. Worse still, it turned out that the girl assistant, who went about her routine so calmly, did not understand anything either; she had given up, she said, but thought it best not to say so. The trouble, of course, was not that Dilly would not explain, but that he thought he had. “Mightn’t it be a good idea …” and “Why do you say that?” were, surely, enough to cover everything? At four o’clock every afternoon Dilly suddenly left the office to drive himself perilously home to Courn’s Wood. The regulations of the Foreign Office had to give way to him. In contrast to Ronnie’s deep need for authority, Dilly recognized the need for rules only in ritual (poetry, cricket, emendation of texts), not in what he thought of as the rational conduct of his own existence. To Newman’s, and Ronnie’s, question, “Can a kingdom have two governments?” Dilly would have replied that it could have as many as it had individuals. He reappeared at any time he liked in the very early morning, made coffee, and resumed his work where he had left it.
His section was at present concentrated full time on the solution to Enigma, the enciphering system which had been selected by the Nazi Government in the 1930s and now distributed as standard issue to the German forces. The Enigma machine was a harmless-looking object, not much larger than an office typewriter, which was offered, not very successfully at first, on the open market by its German promoter. It was one of a number of similar machines which had been patented between the wars.
Enigma enciphered by means of three turning discs, or rotors, made of rubber, and about four inches across. Round the rim of each of these were twenty-six brass contacts, which corresponded to the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, but were usually given their numerical values. Each of them was wired, through the thickness of the rotor, to a contact on the opposite face, which in turn passed the current through the crossing and re-crossing wires in the other two rotors. At each contact, the original letter which was being transmitted changed into another one. In addition, after each encipherment the rotor turned one notch, bringing a completely new arrangement into play. After it had turned twenty-six times, the second rotor began to turn—one notch for every twenty-six notches of the first one, giving 676 possible positions. Enigma also came supplied with two spare rotors which could be substituted for any two in the machine, so that if all five were used in every possible order they could produce eleven million different arrangements of the alphabet before returning to their original positions.
To send a message the operator simply typed it on the keyboard, and it eventually emerged as a series of numbers, which were lit up by a row of small lamps at the output. At the other end, the receiver could put his machine into reverse, so as to read the message en clair.
ABOVE IS A LATE-MODEL Enigma with a QWERTY “typewriter” keyboard (described on page 247). Though the order of letters on the keyboard changed during the war, the basic look and mechanism of Enigma did not. In the photograph, the three turning discs, or rotors, are clearly visible. Not visible is the internal mechanism of the larger message-scrambling unit. On the left-hand side of the rotors is a stationary entry wheel (Eintrittwalze), which received the keyboarded message and sent an electrical current through the variously wired rotors (described on page 222); on the right-hand side is a stationary “reflecting” wheel (Umkehrwalze), which, once the current had passed through the rotors, scrambled the current and advanced the rotors. The optional plugboard allowed for further levels of encipherment. The standard-issue Enigma was housed in a wooden carrying-case, rather like a 26-pound portable typewriter. It ran on an internal battery, but could be connected to an outside power supply.
If the message had always begun at the first position of the first rotor, the decipherers might not have found their task too difficult; but it might start anywhere. Every Enigma operator had in his secret drawer a selection of red, green and blue spools and an instruction book. Every twenty-four hours he was given a new “key of the day”, expressed in colours and numbers, telling him how to set his machine to the Grundstellung, or starting position. There was a separate indicator which registered the day’s setting in three small windows, to avoid any possible discrepancies.
The Foreign Office had supplied its department with an old commercial Enigma, costing about £2,500, from which they could study the general mechanism, but no more than that. Further progress was almost impossible without enormous quantities of material in cipher, a reasonable amount in clear (not forthcoming), and an example of the current German setting instructions (also not forthcoming). With these it might be feasible to start the laborious mathematical task (they had no computers of any kind) of marking in at least a few of the connections between the maze of wires.
Enigma could never be “solved” in the ordinary sense, but the millions of alphabets could be reduced to the few possible ones for each day, and these could be solved by trial and error. However, even to begin work it would be necessary (1) to read the setting instructions, which were given, as has been said, in letters, figures and colours; (2) to wait until the setting indicated that only the first rotor would be turning; this meant that though every letter enciphered had to pass through rotors two and three, these last two rotors at least would be standing still; (3) to get hold of messages sent while only the first rotor was turning, and their complete equivalent in clear; and (4) to wait again until the same letter occurred twice in the first twenty-six letters of the cipher text. For example, if the clear text message started with the word AACHEN, the first A might register as Z, and C might also appear as Z, although the first rotor would have turned two spaces, producing a completely different alphabet.
This lucky find could be expressed as two equations by letting numbers stand for letters (A=1, B=2, C = 3, etc.,) letting h(n) be the unknown displacement of the nth letter on the first rotor (the displacement is the number of places in the alphabet which the letter gains or loses as it passes from one contact to another), and letting k be the displacement on the last two rotors (which must be the same in each case since these rotors have not moved and the output was in both cases):
1 + h(1) + k = 26
3 + h(5) + k = 26
Here, h(5) occurs instead of h(3) in the second equation because the rotor has moved on two places between the encipherment of A and C, and for convenience it has been assumed that the first rotor starts at setting A. Subtracting one equation from the other, this gives
h(1)−h(5)=2.
Information of this kind will help the cryptographer to work out, in time, all the contacts on the first rotor. But even this first step towards recovering the arrangement of even one rotor is impossible unless he knows the order of the letters on the keyboard. The order makes no difference at all to the operator, but considerable difference to the solver. A random keyboard (on which, for instance, A might be not the first but the twentieth letter) would mean adding another factor into the equation so that it would take very much longer to get a simple result like h(1) – h(5) = 2. Once, however, he knows the order of the keyboard he can make allowance for it, and proceed as before.
The Enigma keyboard which the Germans were using was, Dilly thought, certain to be random, as this would make for much greater security. But the different ways of arranging twenty-six letters come to 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000.
The Foreign Office Communications Department were not the only, or even the first people in Europe who were trying to solve Enigma. The Germans had been manufacturing their version (called the glühende Chiffriermaschine because of its glowing lamps) since 1926, and they had tried it out on manoeuvres on the Polish border. Some of the early models proved unreliable. Polish interceptor groups frequently recorded Maschine defekt and even Maschine kaput. Others, particularly Mark 2, were too heavy for rapid transport. Eventually the Germans reverted to Mark 1, combined with an automatic device which printed the signal either in clear or in code.
The liaison between the Poles and the French Deuxième Bureau in the years before the war was excellent. Here the key figure was General Gustave Bertrand, then a major with the Services de Renseignement, who was particularly well able to get on with these brilliant, suffering and heroic people. For their sake, he admitted, he readily sacrificed his health, drinking away long evenings with them, bottle for bottle, when vodka was the only remedy for despair. London was not in the confidence of the Poles, but Bertrand, who had a delicate sense of honour, was prepared to share any results they might give him with his British allies. He had, also, the advantage of a defector from the Chistelle (the cipher room at the German Defence Ministry), whose motive was very simple—money—and who was able to supply a number of valuable documents; among them were the servicing instructions and manuals for the machines, and tables showing the changes of key, which at that time operated monthly. When, in 1934, this useful agent lost his job, Bertrand knew a good deal about Enigma, but not the ventre de machine, its exact internal construction. His next idea was to obtain a list of all the workers in the German firms manufacturing Enigma, in the hope of finding a contact, but this proved impossible. The machines were assembled in special workshops under the direct supervision of the Abwehr. Furthermore, in September 1938 the Nazis modified the system by introducing interchangeable rotors.
In January 1939 Major Bertrand arranged for a group of British technicians to visit Paris, and gave them one of the last legacies of his secret agent, a message sent on Enigma, both in clear and code. It dated from before the modifications; still, it was precious. But while the Department of Communications were still considering it the Poles succeeded in reconstructing the current Enigma. With only the specifications for 1931–34, which have already been described, they managed to build a working model, a good deal larger than the original, but still only half a metre square.
In July 1938 an invitation arrived to a conference, this time not in Paris, but in Poland itself. The British deputation was to consist of Commander A. G. Denniston, Dilly’s superior since the days of Room 40, a Naval Commander from the Admiralty and Dilly himself. At Courn’s Wood the two boys, neither of whom had any idea what their father did, were amazed to see an Admiral in full uniform sitting in the draughty dining room. What could he want? Two weeks later, the deputation flew to Warsaw.
Major Bertrand had the delicate task of creating a friendly atmosphere. The English party were booked into the Hotel Bristol, and that evening he took them out to the celebrated Restaurant Crystal. Here the Naval Commander ate and drank too much, Denniston remained discreet, and Dilly, in Bertrand’s words, appeared “froid, nerveux, ascète”, scarcely touching the numerous courses, and concentrating only on the matter in hand. The next morning they went to the “house in the woods”—the secret radio and intelligence station at Mokotov-Pyry, a few kilometres from Warsaw, hidden underneath a concrete shelter and almost invisible, among its thick surrounding trees, from the air. The Poles were waiting at the bottom of a flight of damp steps. After the best Bertrand could do by way of congratulations and introductions, they gave a demonstration of their model.
Dilly had been working for the past twelve months on the problem of the sequence of letters on the Enigma keyboard. Now he was told what it was. It was ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
Dilly’s reaction was characteristic. He was furious. It was a swindle, not because he had failed to solve it, but because it was too easy. Games should be worth playing. The keyboard was, it turned out, not a significant factor at all. During lunch, which was taken at the Restaurant Bacchus, and at which the Naval Commander was actually sick from overeating, Dilly sat hunched in his loose-fitting suit, unresponsive and groaning slightly. He only just rallied sufficiently to make a polite farewell.
He was deeply grateful to Bertrand, but he was outraged. A problem which had been presented to him as too difficult had turned out to be too simple. He intended, however, never to make the same miscalculation again.
When Poland was invaded in September 1939, Bertrand succeeded in evacuating both the Poles and the reconstituted machines to the Château de Vignolles, where he had his hands full not only with a heavy and dangerous routine but with British liaison officers “authorized to know all”, who complained that they could not get a decent cup of tea. In spite of this, he sent the Foreign Office a model of the machine. In July 1939 he had met Dilly briefly in London when he came over to arrange a system for the exchange of information; this was vitally important, because Enigma made 4,789 changes of key between the occupation of Poland and the invasion of France.
In 1939 the Department of Communications was moved down to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which was given the name of Station X. Bletchley was selected simply as being more or less equidistant from Oxford and Cambridge, since the Foreign Office remained faithful to Blinker Hall’s principle of recruiting dons as cryptographers. As it happened, Bletchley was also an important railway junction, and it might have been expected that the tracks, gleaming in the moonlight, would make a good target for enemy bombers—in fact the R.A.F., before the development of radar, used them for a “steer”—but this disadvantage was outweighed by its convenience for professors. Confidence was justified. Although many of the personnel, accustomed to the lecture room, spoke openly and much too loudly, and on one occasion a quantity of secret decodes were brought in from the ordinary rubbish heap, the secret was kept, and Bletchley never suffered a severe attack from the air.
The house itself was a large Victorian Tudor-Gothic mansion, whose ample grounds sloped down to the railway. It had been much done up by Sir Herbert Leon, a prosperous merchant, and the panelled, crocketed rooms had been fitted with majestic plumbing. The perimeter was wired, and guarded by the R.A.F. regiment, whose N.C.O.s warned the men that if they didn’t look lively they would be sent “inside the Park”, suggesting that it was now a kind of lunatic asylum. There were passwords for entry and exit, but Dilly could never remember any of them, or where they were kept.
Lodgings had to be found for the cryptographers in Bletchley, which was still a little railway town, so that the wives of engine drivers, cleaners and shunters now had billeted on them an unfamiliar Elite. The small front parlours were taken over by very advanced bridge games, and experts in symbolic logic worked out on a sliding scale the exact amount everyone should pay for cocoa and biscuits. Before long chess-players were recruited to the department, and the champions, Alexander and Golombek, demonstrated the romantic and classical styles of chess. These were intellects at play. Those who solved problems in the bath, however, were at a loss, because few of the billets had bathrooms. Even before rationing there were grievous shortages of pipe tobacco and copies of The Times in Bletchley, and the corner newsagents developed a serious power complex. Then, gradually, hotels and country houses were taken over for the higher administrative grades.
Dilly himself always slept in the office, going back to Courn’s Wood once a week. His driving was worse than ever. His mind was totally elsewhere. Fortunately he drove slowly. “It’s amazing how people smile, and apologise to you, when you knock them over,” he remarked.
In time the buildings inside the Park walls extended into blocks of huts and cafeterias, and by the end of the war the personnel numbered more than seven thousand, increased by observers and liaison men and important visitors in uniform. With all this Dilly had nothing to do. At first his department consisted of ten people, though these included, besides Peter Twinn, two very brilliant and sympathetic young women, Margaret Rock and Mavis Lever (now Mrs Batey). They were accommodated in a small cottage overlooking the old stable yard.
He would, however, need more ciphering clerks—not the vast numbers which eventually made the Treasury complain that “Bletchley was using up all the girls in the country,” but still, a section of his own. Into this task Dilly entered with quite unexpected enthusiasm, and when the assistants arrived down from London with the files they were surprised to find him surrounded with pretty girls, all of them, for some reason, very tall, whom he had recruited for the work. The girls took from four to six months to train, though this was not undertaken by Dilly, who never trained anybody, but by a capable and understanding woman, Mrs Helen Morris. They worked on the equations in three eight-hour shifts, and when Dilly wanted to speak to them or to the punch-card operators who registered the encipherments as dots, he would limp across from the cottage, often in his grey dressing gown, indifferent to rain and snow, to tell them his new idea.
The cottage suited Dilly, though it had disadvantages. The walls were coated with whitewash, which rubbed off on visiting admirals who were seen to brush their uniforms furtively. The two downstairs rooms were connected by a cupboard, which Dilly frequently mistook for the door. His voice could be heard inside, resounding hollowly. To get his hot bath he had to go to a special hut adjoining the main buildings. But the isolation was precious and he could have coffee with real milk, supplied to him by a lady who lived nearby, and kept her own cow.
The invasion of France had changed the nature of the work completely. When the Germans crossed the border, Bertrand moved his organization from pillar to post, and by a heroic effort kept it functioning even when the French Higher Command was giving up. It proved impossible, however, to transfer the “factory” out of France and he entrusted some of the best of his Polish cryptographers to a passeur, who was to smuggle them into Spain across the Pyrenees. This man sold them to the Nazis. Meanwhile the Germans, on the eve of the invasion, had begun to work a completely new version of Enigma, a new setting programme, a new keyboard, a new arrangement of wires. All the solutions had to be started again. The Department of Communications temporarily “went deaf”.
Dilly’s particular corner of the work was the Spy Enigma Variation. This was not used by enemy agents in the field—the machine was too heavy to carry about easily—but by the German Embassies in neutral countries and in the occupied zones. As a problem, the Variation was crucial, because the traffic, if it could be read, told not only the enemy plans but what they knew and did not know, or mistakenly thought they knew, about ours. The Variations used by the German Army, Navy and Air Force were assigned to different departments, or “huts”, which, as the war went on, required expert administration and an automatic routine to handle the enormous volume of material. This did not interest Dilly, who was not an organization man. Possibly he would not have adapted to computer-based techniques, but then he was not a technical man either. He was, essentially, what he had been in Room 40, an idea-struck man.
He could, for example, look at a mass of cipher text and pick out unerringly the parts that might be of help towards a solution and therefore should be tried first. There is no rule for doing this; it is a matter of instinct, though instinct, Headlam always said, is the natural way of discovering what happens. The “way in” they were hoping for in 1940 was through the indicators, that is, the date and number at the beginning of each signal, which could be solved in time by trial and error, and the padding, or nonsense words, which were used to fill up a message; these were issued to the German cipher clerks in lists; one of them was Rosengarten, which surely must have taken Dilly back twenty-odd years or so to the Rosen of Schiller.
The mechanical work was done by the tall girls, and largely consisted of solving equations and of arranging and rearranging the dots which represented the transpositions of letters, until every alternative likely or possible in a message sent at that time and place had been tried. They had elementary devices to measure the displacements, invented by the Department, and known as “creeping subtractors”. To describe the groupings, and perhaps to amuse the patient clerks, Dilly invented a special language, “beetling”, “lobstering”, “if one cow can cross the road so can two” and so on. Combined with his hesitant way of speaking, this made decipherment, to the outsider, seem quite as unintelligible as the cipher itself. American observers who came for a briefing were unable to make head or tail of their notes; beetles, cows, lobsters … They asked if they might see the working papers, and, after some search, were shown the backs of some old envelopes. They wanted to know the office routine, but there wasn’t any.
Dilly had written on things with purple ink, which faded, or with a blunt pencil, and when everything seemed to be going reasonably well he had taken his staff out and treated them to the best dinner that the Seven Bells public house could provide. Perhaps all this sounded like the deliberate holding-back of information, but it was not. There was no further explanation to give.
Occasionally the terrible Knox temper would blaze up, and then Dilly’s language was cutting and intemperate. This was particularly the case if he thought that anyone at the Park was using the war to promote a business career. Otherwise his kindness was unfailing—at least to the women, for it sometimes had to be pointed out to him that he should be kind, also, to men. Hadn’t one said the right thing? You haven’t said anything; you haven’t spoken to him at all for two weeks. And Dilly would lope out again, to redress the wrong.
As the months went by the Park, like any other human society, began to find a communal life; the cryptographers danced, and skated on the lake, and there was cricket, though Dilly no longer bowled his slow spinners. The Local Defence Volunteers he did join, and his staff thought it was lucky that no live ammunition was issued, but here they were wrong. Dilly, in spite of his poor eyesight, was a very good shot.
There were old friends at Bletchley, among them the inscrutable Frank Birch, who had rejoined the Department, and had the distinction of being one of the few people ever to refuse to employ Kim Philby (he turned him down on the grounds that Bletchley would not be able to offer him enough money). Dilly also made new acquaintances, and became particularly fond of the young genius Alan Turing, who was responsible for expressing the solutions and possibilities in mathematical form. Turing’s vagaries were worthy of the high standard of Bletchley. Doubtful of the future of sterling, he had wheeled away two ingots of silver bullion in a pram and buried them as an investment, but later he could not remember the place, and they are still lying unclaimed beneath one of the post-war housing estates of Bletchley. As early as 1937 he had suggested a “universal computing machine” and had showed that there were mathematical problems which would not be computable; he was largely responsible for devising a way to read the settings of Enigma. During his idle moments, however, Turing had worked out the likelihood, on the data the Department had so far, of a complete solution. The odds were more than 50,000 to one against.
The Spy Enigma cipher texts piled higher and higher, still without any significant way in. One day a huge sack of torn and burnt papers came in, salvaged from a German vessel, and Dilly amazed the staff by the eager skill with which he pieced them together. He telephoned for colleagues from Cambridge, who hurried over to help him. In spirit he was back at the British Museum, among the papyri.
Although he had now added mushrooms and gruel to his strange daily diet, the old stomach trouble was recurring, and he never felt really well. His solicitor, E. S. P. Haynes, had said that dentists were to blame; obviously Nature intended all animals to die as soon as their teeth dropped out, whereas human beings insisted on living on, to experience intolerable illnesses. Dilly liked to refer systems back to Nature, though he himself would be hard to fit into any hypothesis of biological survival. To and fro he drove to Courn’s Wood, reciting choliambics or Lycidas, determined that whatever happened he would survive long enough to see the solution of Spy Enigma.
Not long after the outbreak of war, Wilfred, as has been explained in the last chapter, was homeless. When Edward Wynne had been offered the Bishopric of Ely he had consulted the O.G.S., as their rule required, and Wilfred had told him that, “on the whole, you’d make less mess of being a bishop than anyone else I can think of”; and after Wynne’s departure he was in the unfamiliar position of having material possessions to give away—he was able to send the new Bishop the forks, spoons and crockery which he had bought himself for the Oratory. Of course, this did not mean that Wilfred was any the less a member of the O.G.S.; indeed, in 1941 he was elected Superior, and the impression he made on the brotherhood was as clear as Eddie’s upon Punch. But in 1940 he was faced with Ronnie’s recurrent problem of where to go next.
Wilfred could live anywhere; but if the house in Lady Margaret Road had outlived its usefulness, it meant leaving his garden. A tenderness for the plants you have raised from seed and the earth you have turned over a thousand times seems one of the most allowable of earthly attachments. House and garden, however, went to the Franciscans, and subsequently to the Lucy Cavendish Foundation for mature women students.
A suggestion came from Pembroke. Meredith Dewey, the chaplain, had volunteered to serve with the Navy. Wilfred was asked to take his place for the duration of the war.
Cambridge was preparing for what was called “the emergency”. The college gates were blocked with sandbags, treasures were sent away, the Director of the Fitzwilliam, a bachelor, had fifty invalid women quartered upon him. In March 1941 Pembroke itself went up in a blaze which started in its R.A.F. Initial Training Wing, and the New Buildings stood roofless for about a hundred yards. Wilfred, arriving with his old bike and his old clothes, gave a valuable sense of continuity with the past. In a few weeks he had taken over the gardens. They were given over to the wartime cultivation of vegetables, but he managed to retain enough ground to construct a rockery.
He was to teach theology, history and logic to the undergraduates. Many of these were short-course students, soon due to join the forces, and hoping if they survived to return to Cambridge. They needed all the care that he could give them. “Examiners found that they could recognise his pupils,” Canon Dodds has written, “both by the direction of their interest and by a certain freedom of approach; possibly the less able men found him somewhat puzzling.”
It was the old story: Wilfred took getting used to. This was particularly the case for the young men whom he took down on reading vacations to Knill. The fishing had now become a syndicate of Eddie, Wilfred and Bishop Wynne, Wilfred retaining the right to debit any sums spent on beer for Mr. Moses, the water-bailiff, “in order to reconcile him to the idea of the syndicate.” Wilfred caught about a hundred and fifty trout a year, and grew a large quantity of potatoes, some of which he sent to Eddie in London as “swill for the trough”. Bishop Wynne, with all the latest equipment, caught little.
To the young men, the “rules” of the cottage seemed odd at first. The fire, for reasons of wartime economy, might not be lit till four o’clock. One former student (Canon Murray MacDonald) recalls “having the temerity to light it in the morning. A note was placed on the fireguard restating the rules: not before four.” The trout which Wilfred caught were cooked by Mrs Moses and handed out in rotation: “If it was your turn you had it, like it or not.”
He somehow communicated with everyone a deep love from a broken unloving man … Looking back now one realises how deeply he had been hurt, how much he longed for simple affection, how nervous of it he was, and how he hid behind his wit and apparent tartness. The last time I saw him, I wanted to give him a simple parting gift for all that he had done for me. I saw a reproduction of a map of the Radnor-Hereford border. I knew that he would have been too embarrassed to have received it from me, so I left it in his rooms with a note. I was amazed how delighted he was to have it, not simply for what it was but that somebody had given him a present.
In point of fact Wilfred was given many presents, though each one seemed to amaze him, but this is a very perceptive account, for it shows, what the writer could not guess at, the enduring pain at the loss of his brother. Others who came to Knill were able to break through the nervousness. Horace Dammers, the present Dean of Bristol, felt only his affection, helpfulness and ingenuity. Wilfred confided in him “that he had a recurrent nightmare of sitting in a small boat in the middle of a large lake with his brother Ronnie, while the latter attempted to convert him to Roman Catholicism.” This was perhaps as far as Wilfred cared to go on the subject; on another occasion, up on the shoulder of the hill near Offa’s Dyke, Wilfred pointed to a man in the far distance, aiming a shotgun, presumably at a rabbit. “If that was murder, we should be the only witnesses, ” he told Dammers, and he invented on the spot, with great precision, the plot of a detective story. One evening he informed the young men that he was writing a book on ethics in two volumes: Part 1, Respect to the Clergy; Part 2, Any Other Virtues. Some of them believed this at first, but not for long. “He was the sort of man,” says another correspondent, “who understood every natural joy and sorrow that we could feel at that age, but couldn’t find his own collar stud.” This, however is a misapprehension, because Wilfred never had any collar studs; he used a paper clip.
As always, he put his pastoral work first. As the short-course students passed rapidly through their University year, Wilfred, for many of them, was the only senior member of the college they really knew. For some of them, this odd figure was their abiding memory of Cambridge. Every year he asked every student in Pembroke to tea, and went on asking, at the risk of a snub, until the invitation was accepted; his lists were like the elements of a game, indeed, of an elimination tournament. And the young men did come, though the majority were not sure why.
Wilfred’s standards of tea-giving were high, having remained unchanged since Edmundthorpe. There had to be two cakes, one “fancy”, the other a plum cake, with one slice already cut to put visitors at their ease. As rationing grew stricter—the shortages were even worse in Cambridge than in Bletchley—Wilfred could be seen, tattered, persevering, often half-freezing, in the dawn queue outside Fitzbillies, the famous cake shop in King’s Parade. His guests must be honoured. Some people had their own “arrangements” with the shop, but Wilfred would never have dreamed of such a thing.
Letters from Service personnel on every front recalled his heroic patience in the queue. Tobacco was sent from Mount Carmel, butter and sugar (“to lighten the task of providing those teas”) from New Zealand, plants for the rock garden from Hong Kong. Someone had found a copy of St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles in Rawalpindi, on the way to the North-West Frontier. Living in barracks on four shillings a day, they “kept sane” by writing, and appealed for help when they felt hopelessly alone, or “contaminated by the filth of the world”. All of them would have liked to get back, if only for a day, to the tobacco-choked atmosphere of the chaplain’s rooms on Staircase M. They had not realized—one of them not until he had his arm and half his side blown away—how much they would miss Cambridge.
Dammers, now a gunner in North Africa, wrote in 1943 that he felt discouraged, but
I feel as soon as you read this that reinforcements will come pouring over the ether (or whatever the medium for such things is) and meanwhile I must try again. In all seriousness this kind of life makes it difficult for feeble people like myself to keep contact with God and sometimes I feel deeply ashamed of myself. On the other hand I feel a sort of instinct (whether right or wrong I don’t know) against forcing myself to such contact. I feel it should come naturally and get a bit miserable when it doesn’t. Presumably I share all this with hundreds of thousands of others but there it is, I feel that an effort of some sort is required but am not quite clear about what. We are now allowed to recount our battle experiences. Mine are negligible. On the whole I enjoy action. One’s faculties are extended and one has little time to think, while performing one’s technical duties, what a beastly business it is to direct masses of high-explosive against your fellow-men whose most earnest desire is to do the same to you. The only unpleasantnesses are occasional lack of sleep … and when one is shelled or bombed or machine-gunned from the air … Even so the danger is I imagine less than that involved in bicycling fast down King’s Parade twice a week.
By no means all the correspondents cared anything about religion, but Wilfred saw to it that they cared about something. “Much worse than drifting,” he thought, “is letting others drift.”
The attendance in chapel, which a priest watches as carefully as an editor watches the circulation, went steadily higher. Wilfred’s methods were a curious mixture of briskness and spirituality. There were no concessions. Students were not asked to “brighten up” the services. He believed that a sermon should never last more than ten minutes; every minute after that bored the listener and undid the work of two minutes, so that after fifteen minutes you were, so to speak, preaching in reverse and ought logically to have a deduction made from your pay. He was no more audible than he had ever been, but relied on people to make the effort to hear his rapid, often cryptic sentences.
He could make an impression, quite unconsciously as always, on those who did not know him at all. Mr Iain Mackenzie writes:
As an undergraduate of Fitzwilliam House, reading for Part 1 of the English Tripos between 1944 and 1946, I used to go at least once a week in term to Pembroke College for supervisions from Mr (later Professor) Basil Willey. Quite often, when passing the porter’s lodge at Pembroke, one had to stand aside for an elderly cleric wheeling out his bicycle. He always looked straight in front of him and seemed entirely oblivious of the presence of others; but I was conscious enough of an inner strength in him to find out who he was, and although I never met him, I know that these very small contacts helped me to grow in the Christian faith.
Probably Wilfred was only going to snap up the last cake at Fitzbillies. But as a true evidence of his character this would make no difference. There are very many ways of bearing witness. When he was told that prayer was wish-fulfilment, or a compensation device, Wilfred never contradicted; he said he did not particularly mind what it was called; it existed.
But only a very few of his friends knew that during the war years he had to pass through a “black night of the soul”, no less painful to a Christian because so many have experienced it. At one point he could not even repeat the Lord’s Prayer with any sense of its meaning. Then the ordeal passed, and he came out into clear daylight again.
Once a year, without fail, Ronnie came over from Aldenham to have dinner with Wilfred in Pembroke. The High Table were disappointed on these occasions by his silence. He was not on his own ground, and was haunted by a Cambridge memory of 1937, when a visiting professor had leaned towards him with the remark, “Well, Monsignor, I haven’t heard you say anything very witty yet.” The meeting provided a sort of competition in clerical shabbiness, as the brothers’ black suits grew nearer to absolute incoherence. Wilfred’s cassock was almost green, Ronnie’s collars so much too big for him that it was difficult to imagine when they could have been bought. “Clothing coupons” were issued to them, as to everyone else, during the war; but they gave them all away.
In going to Shropshire, Ronnie was returning to the Border country which they all loved, Housman country, the “blue remembered hills”. With Lady Acton’s eager patronage, he had begun to draw up schemes and headings (“for I cannot work without headings”) for the immense task of Bible translation. Contentment, as being too easy, almost “cheating”, always made Ronnie somewhat anxious; however, it was not to last long.
One thing he had dreaded in leaving Oxford had been the possibility of a convent chaplaincy. “There are two kinds of nun,” he told Evoe, “those who do you much too well, and those who do you terribly badly.” So far he had not had to face either for any length of time, but, at Aldenham in 1939, a convent came to him. The Sisters of the Assumption, who had a girls’ school in intensely respectable Kensington Square, decided, like many other establishments, to evacuate them to the country until the threat of air raids was past. They began to arrive, the nuns, fifty girls and their luggage, at the beginning of September.
Ronnie therefore became for the duration of the war a convent chaplain, with board and lodging, but no pay. He still travelled tirelessly as a preacher; the trains still ran, unheated and blacked out; the 10 a.m. to York, which Ronnie believed was the foundation of the whole British railway system, still left King’s Cross every morning. One of the restrictions which he had made for himself was that he could visit members of his family only if it could be fitted into his official engagements. His “plans” were sent out in all directions, on postcards, in his fine handwriting.
Aldenham changed. As in the days of the Crusades, the wartime ladies of England ruled their homes and farms much more rigorously than the men who had gone to battle. The land must produce food; Aldenham produced, principally, root crops and pigs. The “plans” were now entered in Tildsley’s Farm Diaries, and Ronnie, who could not help learning things by heart, took a morbid pleasure in knowing, for example, that the Maximum Grant for Field Drainage, Other Than Mole Drainage, was £7 10s. But he could not feel that he was of much help on the farm. His indigestion grew worse; his nose was red, his fingers blue with cold, emerging from woollen mittens. Lady Acton had necessarily to make the most economical use of space after the convent had been housed, and there was only one smallish room left for her own farm accounting and Ronnie’s work; the table had to be cleared for his meals. At no time did he have a secretary. All the typing, retyping, packing, posting (but Ronnie was good with string), all the filing, indexing and proof correcting, he did for himself.
Many people who have never read his version, or indeed any version, have come to respect Ronnie as the man who tackled the Bible single-handed. This, though it was the way that suited him best, was not what had been originally intended. The terms of the commission, imprecise though they were, required Ronnie to work with a committee, under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Lancaster; one of the members was Charlie Martindale, who wrote to his father in 1939: “I expect to emigrate to Oxford and can quietly help Ronald Knox in his translation of the Vulgate … He was sure he could not get me as assistant. Now he has got me.” Cardinal Hinsley had hoped for a joint version from these two eminent scholars. Martindale, however, found that “all [Knox] wants me to do is to make a paraphrase of the most obscure passages in St Paul and St John.” He did not object to this, but he was busy, the committee rarely met, and Ronnie departed to Aldenham.
The Cardinal was doubtful whether somewhere “within easier access to libraries” would not have been more suitable. Ronnie seemed to be taking on the almost impossible. Newman, after all, had only hoped to be the editor of a team of Bible translators. Wilfred never trusted his own Hebrew, but relied on Dr Loewe, the Cambridge Lecturer in Rabbinics. Dilly had all the resources of the British Museum and of King’s. Ronnie, in the depths of Shropshire, had to entrust all his consultations over minute shades of meaning to the uncertain wartime post. And at his elbow, so to speak, stood the lively new Protestant translations and the only too well remembered Authorized Version, learned by heart with Uncle Lindsey, as unwelcome to him now as it was to Dilly, but impossible, while he could still think and breathe, to forget. He reminded himself that the Authorized Version was never really authorized at all, certainly not by Parliament, but this did not help him.
Ronnie did not have Newman’s musical ear, nor his pastoral touch with ordinary people, but as a translator he was sympathetic, fastidious and reverent. Possibly, as Belloc once suggested, he was “insufficiently coarse”. His object was still to produce a Vulgate which could be read aloud with pleasure and which English Catholics, perhaps for the first time, might study together at home. “Our first job is to make them love it. If they don’t love it, they won’t read it.”
He was a wordmaster, but the words of the New Testament cannot be made servants. On a single phrase, consolation may stand or fall. Is the angels’ message “Peace on earth, good will toward men” or (as in the Vulgate) the much more grudging “Peace on earth to men of good will”? The question turns on whether a Greek noun is in the nominative or the genitive case. Wilfred, who was consulted, argued convincingly for “good will toward men”, but Ronnie felt obliged to stick to the Vulgate. The problem was to come up time and again. What did Jesus say to Mary Magdalen, in the mysterious early morning appearance in the garden? Was it the traditional “Do not touch me”, suggesting a spiritual body beyond our comprehension, or “Do not cling to me thus”, suggesting an earthly one? Footnotes and commentaries can modify, but no one reads them, least of all those in search of comfort.
During the next few years Ronnie was to meet many discouragements. The Hierarchy had approved his work, but persisted in feeling that he ought really to be doing something different. He was urged first of all to go on a propaganda trip to the United States (“In so far as I am justified in making a decision, my answer must be No. [The Ministry] is thinking of a much younger R.A.K., who in 1917 might have been of some use”); then to go back to Oxford to counteract what his bishop called “the confounded left-wingers and pro-Russians”. This task was taken on by his old friend Vernon Johnson, who became chaplain to both men and women students. Ronnie emerged from each of these proposals like Christian escaping from By-Path Meadow. If he had been ordered to go, he would of course have obeyed, but, with an amazing fund of quiet obstinacy, he demurred and survived.
The convent school, meanwhile, had become a source of real happiness. The nuns he always found intimidating, and he never managed to identify the Sister who darned his clothes, but the girls became, first teasingly and then deeply, attached to him. They were an easier generation than his own highly strung nephews and niece. Schoolchildren have a large tolerance of age, little habits, out-of-date slang, where they can detect sincerity. It was for the Assumption girls that Ronnie wrote his popular Creed in Slow Motion and Mass in Slow Motion. They show him at his best just where Dilly was at his worst—in the art of clear explanation.
He wrote these things easily; most of his strength had to go into the Knox Bible. It mattered to him in every possible way that the Church should approve of it. At the end of the winter of 1939 he submitted a draft version of passages from St Matthew’s Gospel for the approval of his committee. To his dismay, Martindale raised sixty-four objections to the first chapter alone.
The impetuous Martindale had wanted something quite different. Knowing Ronnie’s ear for style, he had hoped for three Gospels distinct from each other, “making the reader feel the real delicate difference between the naive Mark, the cultured Luke, the rather stiff Matthew.” At the same time it must be right for dockers, miners and soldiers. Ronnie had proposed to write in decent, timeless English, but there was no such thing as a timeless language, and what did “decent” mean? Were dockers decent?
To disagree with Martindale, and on this subject above all, was agonizing. But events took an unexpected turn. Martindale, who really wanted to devote himself to the wounded and dying, reluctantly accepted an invitation to lecture in Copenhagen. Two days later the Germans invaded; he was trapped and interned, and had to spend the next five years miserably checking his engagement book to see where he should have been on that particular day. Ronnie’s friends, and even the nuns, were disposed to look on this as a blessing, but they were wrong. Martindale, though he was as quarrelsome as St Jerome himself, had the authority that was needed. Without him, Ronnie was driven back on to his own strength of will, and perhaps he asked too much of it.
He was most at ease with the Epistles of St Paul, which, many Catholics agree, he made intelligible to them for the first time. In September 1941 he was finishing 2 Corinthians, when the Bishop of Southwark, who had at last found time to look at the draft of St Matthew, reported that he didn’t like it: “It is a complete change from what we have used so long.” This criticism, with its implication that any new translation ought to be exactly like the old ones, was almost too much for Ronnie, and he offered his resignation. The Cardinal, however, having routed the Bishop, persuaded him to go on.
Sometimes he missed his family intensely. “Brother is the man to stand by brother,” he wrote in answer to a correspondent. “If I went on the rocks, I have three brothers and two sisters to keep me out of the workhouse.” During the London air raids he worried about Eddie. In the green heart of Shropshire the bombing seemed remote, and yet it arrived every day in the news columns of The Times.
The air raids, however, had a mildly stimulating effect on Eddie. “With casual courage,” wrote his assistant editor, Humphrey Ellis, “he took to wandering about wherever the bombs fell thickest, with a bottle of whisky in his pocket, looking for people who needed it.”
He had agreed to stay on as editor of Punch until the war was over and a younger man could be found. He was now most happily remarried, to the daughter of his friend Ernest Shepard. Mary and he were living in a flat in St John’s Wood; when the first bombs fell there Eddie was opening a bottle of claret for his guests, and the blast was close enough to make the cork jump straight out of the bottle. Eddie stood among the débris, corkscrew in hand, quietly interested: “If one could rely on its happening regularly …” London itself, absorbed in air-raid precautions, he saw as
A city of painstaking pupils and earnest instructors
(And everyone’s craters the largest of all in the land),
A lemonless onionless city with female conductors
On Manchester buses half lost in the wilds of the Strand …
The suburbs, however, were transformed, with gaping open spaces, and wild flowers growing out of the rubble. Mary kept hens and grew marrows in the derelict garden behind the Air Raid Wardens’ Post. E. S. P. Haynes, who also lived in St John’s Wood, and whose house in 1941 was the only one left standing in his road, could be seen every morning, defiantly swimming naked in the emergency water-tank. Rose Macaulay, an old friend of all the Knoxes, drove briskly about, fascinated by the ruins, comparing them to Babylon and Pompeii. Foxes appeared among the rubble, and kestrels soared overhead; it was more difficult than ever to get to the office by half past nine, or even by ten.
Eddie caught exactly the Londoner’s characteristic reaction of enjoyable gloom, the conviction that those at the top were perfectly safe and doing very nicely, the perverse determination on business as usual, even if there was very little business to do. He had been to the same barber for twenty-eight years, and the barber’s shop was still open to cut his hair. Then there was his old friend and tailor, Dodson, who wrote to him in October 1940:
Dear Sir—No doubt you are wondering what has happened to your two suits, I had them well in hand last week and the coats and waistcoats are ready for fitting, but the two pairs of trousers are somewhere in a heap of rubble, the remains of my trousermaker’s workshop. The result of a Hun Souvenir which arrived last Saturday morning. The workman and his helpers escaped by a miracle with not bad injuries but are all in hospital.
Part of my trouble is that there is not enough material now available for another pair of trousers and for either of the suits. There is just a chance that the trousers may be saved. I hope also that you will be indulgent for the delay, your obedient servant, William Briston Dodson.
An Edwardian by temperament, Eddie created an Edwardian loyalty. The suits, with two pairs of trousers each, were ready by November. And, of course, Dodson and his philosophic trousermaker, who recovered in hospital, were right; imperturbable daily work meant sanity.
The proprietors of Punch, like many others on Fleet Street, had planned to evacuate if things got much worse. The Round Table was sent down to the country to be kept safe. An emergency office had been acquired in Manchester, or, failing that, the United States offered hospitality. One American well-wisher was ready to print Punch at his own expense, but, in the event, the paper stayed in Bouverie Street. Eddie arrived one morning after a fire raid to find that the offices had been smouldering all night, but were still intact. “A cord was drawn across the top of the street, with little paper notices attached showing the new addresses of the periodicals which had been bombed out. They ranged from The Economist to Little Dot’s Playbox.” He would have liked to smoke, but it was not allowed, too much gas was escaping from the broken mains. He had to go straight up to the editorial floor to sort out the week’s jokes.
The senior cartoon remained as the paper’s serious comment on the progress of the war, and Bernard Partridge was on duty, drawing as meticulously as ever, but with even fewer ideas. “It falls to the lot of the Editor to suggest the subject, and when the staff of the paper is greatly depleted and printing arrangements more difficult, there are not as a rule many other ideas.” And Punch still had to gamble with destiny. The paper had, as always, to be locked up for the printers by Saturday morning, and by Monday a new country might have declared war, or an Empire might have fallen. Mobile warfare is the nightmare of weekly editors.
Uncertainty as to what was going to happen in North Africa, and afterwards, perplexed our cartoonists every week, and at last I was forced to have a Lion ready, a Lion reproduced and plated, a Lion in mid-air, a Lion without attachments, in the act of leaping upon Europe, and ready to be run into the paper at the last moment, whenever and wheresoever it might happen to spring. It ought to have been accompanied by the Eagle and by the Canadians too, but this we could not guess or judge until the full news of the attack on Sicily was made known. As it was, after wavering about Pantelleria, I was obliged to telephone at the last moment (a Saturday morning as far as I remember)—‘Release the Lion.’
Eddie did not drop the cartoon for the simple reason that the readership liked it and wanted it. In the irrecoverably strange atmosphere of June 1940 countless letters of the simplest kind of appreciation came in response to Punch’s picture of a single aircraft, flying out to the attack into a darkened sky. Even at this point of danger, it mattered very much that Punch should appear every week.
In the article which is quoted above, Eddie says nothing about his personal commitments; it would never have occurred to him to do so. In 1942 Mary’s brother was killed in action on convoy duty, and his own son disappeared, for four years, into a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Eddie, in W. S. Gilbert’s bitter words, was “paid to be funny”; that was his business, and he never regretted it, but it was a difficult business at times.
Eddie knew that Dilly was tired, and suspected that he was ill. He suggested a holiday at the cottage at Knill, but Dilly had to refuse; he was bound to his trance-like alternations between Bletchley and Naphill.
Early in 1941, he had a new idea. It was not, apparently, the result of calculation, but came into his mind like a visitor, as ideas had come to him at Cambridge, making him stand absolutely still in the middle of passing traffic. Like everyone who does this kind of work, he had been concentrating on one problem at a time, then relaxing by changing to another one. At the moment he had returned to the question of the order of the letters on the Enigma keyboard, which, of course, had been changed completely on the new model. Now it struck him that perhaps he had been looking at things the wrong way round. Enigma was usually described as being “like a typewriter”. Suppose, on the contrary, a typewriter was like Enigma? The typewriter keyboard reads QWERTYUIOP … Out of the many millions of millions of ways of arranging the alphabet, mightn’t this be the right one?
It was. He had hit on the first significant “way in” to the Spy Variation. Once the keyboard was known, it was possible to work out the displacements so rapidly that in February the shift workers, sitting round a model many times larger than the real machine, and using material several months old, knew that they had a breakthrough. Dilly was not there when the first deciphered text began to come through in clear. It was his day off, and he was at Courn’s Wood. This first signal read: “The garden wall is broken down”—evidently a code message, and “typical romantic rubbish” from the point of view of the Department, whose attitude to all Secret Services, whether German or Allied, was one of tolerant paternalism. Nor was Dilly at all distressed at missing the occasion. What mattered was that his idea had proved useful.
How useful? It has been estimated that it cut short the search for a solution by six months; no one can estimate the value of six months in 1941. The solution, in turn, is thought to have played an important part in at least three crises:
1. The battle of Matapan (March 1941), when Admiral Cunningham had warning that the Italian fleet had ventured out of harbour and saw his chance to damage it decisively, but had to keep up the appearance of unpreparedness while he brought his destroyers to at short notice; credit for spotting the Italian cruisers had to be given to the Fleet Air Arm, so that the Enigma source would not be compromised. Dilly on this occasion wrote a poem for the Department, “When Cunningham Won at Matapan”, introducing the names of all his girls; Mavis (Lever) rhymed with “rara avis”, and Margaret (Rock) with “target”—not a good enough rhyme for a Knox brother, but all this doggerel came from the heart.
2. The search for the Bismarck (May 1941), when the battleship disappeared during the middle watch until eleven a.m. on the 25th; at this point the Admiralty received information which made them tell our pursuit forces to “act on the assumption that the enemy was making for Brest.”
3. The anxious matter of the Malta convoy (April 1942), when the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp undertook to bring a cargo of Spitfires through the Straits of Gilbraltar, and it was essential to find out, through the signals of the German agents in Spain, whether the secret of the convoy had been kept or not.
Churchill paid a visit of congratulation to Bletchley. Once again, Dilly was not on duty, and once again this left him unconcerned. He admired Churchill, but did not consider him discreet, and he felt that, if the work at Bletchley was not to be compromised, it might be better if as few details as possible were known to the Former Naval Person. He would, admittedly, have liked his staff to receive some credit for the work they had been doing for so long and so patiently, but he understood, as did they all, that credit might very well not be possible.
In 1942 Dilly was threatened with a second operation for cancer. He was admitted to hospital. Eddie, the only person who could understand him completely, arrived to find him smiling sardonically over a book called The Art of Dying. They took turns in reading each other passages, just as in the Birmingham schoolroom they had read each other Smiles’s Self-Help. Dilly did not want the operation; his considered opinion was that a human being ought not to be turned into a bit of plumbing; the place for taps was the sink. He had also been looking, in a detached way, through the burial service, and, unexpectedly, through the Epistles of St Paul, in particular 1 Corinthians 15, which is a discussion of the resurrection of the dead. Of what use was it, St Paul asks in this chapter, “to fight with the beasts at Ephesus,” if, at the end of it, he did not know he would rise from the dead and live again?
After he had got back home to Courn’s Wood, Dilly asked his niece to come and see him, to discuss the possibility of a job at Bletchley. “You don’t share the family pretence of not understanding mathematics?” he asked anxiously. It had to be a pretence, since mathematics, after all, consisted only in seeing what was there. But was it a pretence when he said that he didn’t understand music? That was a totally different matter, Dilly said. Music was simply a conspiracy to make certain loud and less loud noises, to prevent other people from thinking. Returning to the subject of the family, he added that he would not mind seeing rather more of them, as he was going to die. All expressions of sympathy were brushed away. “It will give me something to do,” he said.
He had not forgotten the Pentelopes; one of them he considered as his epitaph:
A wanderer on the path
That leads through life to death,
I was acquainted with
The tales they tell of both,
But found in them no truth.
Dilly was aware, when he said that he needed something to do, that he could not do much more in his department, but he was too ill to give up the habit of cryptography, and too loyal to stop working if there was even the slightest chance of being of use. At last he could not make the journey to Bletchley any longer, but stayed in his study at Courn’s Wood, working on a small, isolated difficulty in the Italian cipher, with the tactful help of Margaret Rock. Pain produced fantasies, and he would send over to Bletchley elaborate suggestions for solutions which his staff scarcely knew what to do with. Olive nursed him devotedly. These two people had loved each other for twenty years without being able to make each other happy. They would have given the world, now they were at the point of separation, to understand one another. But Dilly’s nerves were on edge. Even the dog James, now very elderly, could not be tolerated in the room. Still an iron discipline held.
It was not in his nature to be daunted [writes his son, Oliver] … By this time eighteen or nineteen years old, I was given compassionate leave to be at home during his last days. He had just been awarded the C.M.G. It has been explained to my mother that security considerations precluded his being given some more illustrious honour. Far too ill to travel to London, he deemed proper receipt of the honour to be a duty; he insisted on dressing and sat, shivering in front of the large log-fire, as he awaited the arrival of the Palace emissary. His clothes were now far too big for him, his eyes were sunk in a grey face, but he managed the exercise all right. ‘Nothing is impossible.’
The decoration was sent over to the Department, since he felt it was theirs as much as his. Dilly did not leave his room again. Ronnie came over from Aldenham; he slept on a made-up bed, praying, waiting, as a priest, to see his brother out of this world. Dilly, though hardly conscious, could hear him. “Is Ronnie still out there bothering God in the passage?” he asked.
The end came a few days later, on 27 February 1943. In the Times obituary Maynard Keynes described his old friend as “sceptical of most things except those that chiefly matter, that is, affection and reason.” Without ever reconciling these two, Dilly had gone, unwavering in his disbelief, into what he believed was endless darkness.
“Yesterday’s news came to draw us all closer …” Ronnie wrote to his sister. “What a happy family life we’ve had really, though so scattered in these last years. No feuds, no scandals, and the youngest turned fifty-five before the circle was broken.”
Broken it was, however, with a mortal shock to the whole structure.