Читать книгу The Oaken Heart - Margery Allingham - Страница 5

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A few weeks later, when we were still clearing up and packing away things that might come in useful next year, the incredible descended upon us, and we were suddenly required to take instant precautions in case of an attack on our lives by poison gas.

In Auburn we don't care for drama very much. Certain of our good ladies have a flair for it, and generations of them presiding over illnesses and accidents have brought the whole thing into disrepute; so it happened that when real drama appeared it shocked and irritated us before it stimulated us.

The first thing that happened was the change in the wireless. It gave up being dull and became frankly hysterical, bursting into news bulletins every forty-five minutes or so, a phenomenon which reminded us of the death of the King and the Abdication. The painfully nervous light entertainment between the announcements was a change from the slow music of the other occasions, but if it was meant to be comfortingly normal it was a mistake, because we were inclined to be confused by it rather than soothed.

As I have said, few of us ordinary people in Auburn tended to be students of foreign affairs at that time, although most of us have done a little studying since; but, as Sam pointed out, we could at least read, and the bare facts, which we have a gift for seizing among the verbiage, suddenly resolved themselves into a path to disaster as clear as if we had suddenly seen it appearing across the marsh.

As far as we could find out--and this was not too easy, because the newspapers were very busy conjecturing--we were not pledged to help Czechoslovakia, but France was and we were pledged to help France. No one ever questioned that the Frenchies wanted a fight. In those days it was our convinced opinion that the Frenchies were always prepared to fight on any provocation, it being in their nature as it were, and at that time the only military operations in Europe which we could imagine were those in which we painfully consolidated brilliant but dangerous French advances.

It was all very alarming, but, perilous though the situation looked, we still could not believe that it was actually war. We were still blinded by the absence of any hint whatever sent direct to us from the Government. It was that which kept us thinking that there must be a catch in it somewhere. The notion that for twenty years our politicians might have been inefficient, to put it mildly, and that our present man in an impossible position was backing his own theory without letting us in on it, never came into our heads for a moment.

One evening we in Auburn got our first definite hint. Mr. Moore came up from the schoolhouse, where his wife is Headmistress, to ask P.Y.C. to take the chair at an Air Raid Precautions meeting on the following Tuesday. It was important, he said, and they were speeding it up all over the district.

Air Raid Precautions. This was more like it. This sounded more like business. We had had air raids before. A Zeppelin had come down in a village not far away in the last war, and there was a great chunk of it in the garage still. Also we had heard about Spain and had seen horrifying newsreels from China, and we had no illusions whatever about the value of the aeroplane as an offensive weapon.

Yet at that moment the wireless was giving us to understand that the crisis was upon us. Events were obviously moving fast. If one could believe one's ears and use one's head, air raids might begin that night. What in the name of sanity was this tale of a meeting next Tuesday?

"It won't come to nothin'." "There's something behind it." "He's a-playing for something." "He's frightening on 'em."

That was the general opinion, and it was not all wishful thinking. No one wanted a war. To some of us war seemed then to mean quite literally a sentence of death on everyone and everything we most loved, but no one felt war was impossible, whatever it meant. In Auburn death comes, war comes, night comes. There is no question of stopping any of them by a refusal to co-operate. In a country like England democracy has been fought for so many times, and won by so many battles small and large, that it has long ceased to become an ideal and is an instinct.

On the Monday of the Munich crisis it was a windy, showery day, and Auburn, I remember, seemed very old. In the spring the cut squares round the trees in the orchard are carpeted with aconites, and all through the year the memory of those blazing golden cushions hangs about it. There is a legend that aconites only flourish where Roman blood has been spilt, and if this is true there must have been a battle up there at the end of the Old Doctor's garden. There is a heap of old cannonballs up there too, much later in date, and only a mile or so away are the plains where Boadicea was captured. Remembering all this and the bit of Zepp in the garage, war seemed almost as natural to Auburn as peace.

That evening P.Y.C. and I drove into the county town to put a week-end guest on the London train. As we came out of the station we were held up by a procession of self-conscious-looking youths in tweeds walking along in formation. That stopped us talking, and we drove back in silence. When we got in we found "Me," the local bobby, and the Flinthammock policeman waiting for us.

I cannot remember how "Me" got his name, but he is a great ally of ours and is popular in the village. He is a Londoner and he served all through the last war. He opened the proceedings characteristically, his red hair standing on end as usual and his sepulchral voice lowered to a confidential bellow.

"'Ere, do you know anything about poison gas?" he said. "You might like to read it up. You'll soon know why."

He lent us his book on the subject, and we all had a drink on it. Grog came down from the studio, and there was a conference about it. We knew nothing at all about gas naturally, except that it was loathsome, and I had seen a man with a horribly scarred face who had suffered from it twenty years before.

"Me" said that Lewisite was the Awful Stuff. "Smells of geraniums," he said. "One whiff, and you're a gonner."

It all seemed quite impossible, or rather it seemed as though time had gone out of gear. When I had seen "Me" only a few days before we had discussed dog licences and a certain matter of whether or not Cooee could ride a horse on a footpath. It seemed a long way from that to his tale about the place being threatened by Lewisite.

When the policemen had gone we looked at the handbook. Ten minutes made it clear that there was a lot to be learnt, and that if any sort of protection was to be achieved everybody in the country had got to swot it up thoroughly. The effects of the different stuffs were varied and sensational. Phosgene filled your lungs with water and produced gangrene of the extremities. Mustard had scarcely any odour, but blinded you and ate your flesh away. It did seem mad. One of Grog's flunkeys still leered from the wall of the breakfast-room. We had grown used to him and had forgotten to take him down. The whole business was so wildly melodramatic that all one's instinctive common sense said it could not be quite true. On one side there was that chap Hitler looking like Charlie Chaplin and behaving as far as one could gather like Captain Hook, and yet on the other there was this neat little police handbook of old "Me's" reading like useful hints for those about to be handed over to the Spanish Inquisition.

Because he thought it would amuse us, our week-end guest had brought us a frankly "scare" book which had just come out, and which contained very bald facts and figures purporting to be of use to the young soldier. One extract, I remember, ran something like this:

"Q. What do I do if an enemy infantryman thrusts a bayonet into my stomach?

A. You ask him to withdraw it gently, turning it very slightly to the left. Q. What are my chances of survival? A. Very small. Providing you have instant attention from a skilled surgeon, your chance is 3.102 in the hundred."

And so on and so on.

P.Y.C. wanted to take this book to bed with him, and the rest of us became very abusive and quite unreasonably angry, I remember. We hung round the wireless until after the midnight news, not even caring to go down the village and meet the neighbours, and finally we went to bed, the sickening suspicion growing upon us that something might have gone wrong with the Government's calculations, and yet still feeling in our hearts that the God of simple people would not permit us to be caught quite so sound asleep.

However, at three o'clock the next morning (an unheard of, not respectable, secret hour in Auburn) P.Y.C. got a telegram by phone. The message was very much to the point and explained Me's unnaturally official visit and the loan of the handbook.

It said "Collect seven hundred gas-masks for your area and fit," and was signed "A.R.P., Fishling."

P.Y.C. got up dutifully and fetched out the car. Fishling is eight miles from Auburn and, although we come in its rural area, it is not very much used by us since it is not so large or so modern as Bastion, ten miles in the other direction. Fishling was practically unknown to us, therefore, as far as the townsfolk were concerned.

The next we heard of P.Y.C. was at noon, when he phoned in great haste to tell us to send a lorry, book the hall, and get a wireless loudspeaker down there. In a larger place none of these demands would present much labour, but in Auburn, where there is only one lorry available for odd jobs, the custodian of the hall is also the postman, and the only suitable wireless loudspeaker is owned by Albert, who may be absolutely anywhere doing any conceivable type of job for anybody, it represented a sort of minor mobilisation.

At last the difficulties were overcome, and Bill, who is an ex-serviceman and lives by the pond, cut his afternoon's work and went off to Fishling with his lorry.

Late in the afternoon, when the entire village was fortunately aware that something definite and personal was afoot, P.Y.C. returned from Fishling a little dazed. He had with him a few notes on the back of an envelope and a sample gas-mask, one of the seven hundred which Bill and Charlie the postman were unloading at the hall.

Now that we are all so used to gas-masks all their visual horror has gone, but that one which P.Y.C. brought in was something new in Auburn then. The obscene elephant-foetus effect of the thing burst on us for the first time, and its obvious efficiency brought home the reality of the situation with a jolt like the kick of a mule. We all tried it on immediately. Most of us had seen the anti-war propaganda drawings of little children wearing them, and they had been unpleasant enough; but the sight of Chrissie in one, her starched apron and blue frock looking like fancy-dress under it, and her eyes, which I have known so long, looking out truculently at me (for, from the first, the mere mention of war had the unexpected effect of making her furious), turned my stomach over more sickeningly than anything else in that whole unbelievable day.

P.Y.C.'s story was simple, and his problem rather startling. In Fishling, he said, the A.R.P. Office was performing miracles. Thousands of gas-masks were being assembled by volunteer labour which included Albert's father among others, who had been working all night. Other volunteers were driving the things out to the villages and distribution centres in the town. The amount of work was tremendous and the strain terrific. One of their executives had fallen dead at his post at two in the morning. P.Y.C. had hung about getting all the information he could and had managed to get a short intensive course in gas from the A.R.P.O.'s assistant, who had given him the information between incessant telephone calls.

We all went over the notes he had made. The salient facts were these: the masks were a complete protection to the face and lungs if properly put on, everybody ought to have one in the next twenty-four hours, the area of our operations was roughly five square miles, and there was nothing yet for babies. P.Y.C. added that the thing they had impressed upon him most was that there was to be no panic.

At first the problem appeared to present great difficulties, and we all took a lesson in putting on the masks and adjusting the tapes. However, we were wrong. From the beginning the entire operation went with astonishing smoothness, and it was the first time I ever saw the unity of Auburn as a visible thing. It was almost as if the village was a big single gentle animal, rather startled and nervous but old and experienced and patient. I cannot describe this phenomenon, because it was apparent in such little things and was an impression which grew upon me very slowly. For instance, four hundred and fifty people out of six hundred of us turned up quietly to the village hall in the pouring rain at the appointed time, two hours after P.Y.C. came back, although the message was only passed round by word of mouth.

The hall, which is only a glorified army hut, has two main rooms, the smaller containing a billiard table. They put the masks on the table, and Albert's father and Charlie sorted them into the only two sizes we had--Large and Medium. Albert had got his big loudspeaker into position, and P.Y.C. and Sam, who had taken charge of the gathering, got everyone to listen to the Prime Minister's speech. Everyone was very quiet while the dry, harsh voice, which was so like a family solicitor's, put the situation to us so well and so honestly and with such courage. Even then, though, it did not sound like war. There was no trumpet, no inspiration to arms.

After it was over P.Y.C. began to explain the more personal aspect of the gathering. Certain English people become utterly unself-conscious and without any sense of the ridiculous at all when once their minds are fixed on a definite objective. He and Sam were on the stage together in the big room and were framed in an exceedingly dusty and shabby red curtain. Immediately behind them was a dilapidated forest glade with a tear in the sky and scraps of paint flecking off all over it, while a single electric light bulb with a prosaic green shade hung directly over their heads. Between them was a very shaky card table and one small creaking chair. Sam sat on the chair and put on the gas-mask, while P.Y.C. did the talking.

The line he took, I remember, was typical both of himself and of Auburn. He announced firmly, and as if he had had it personally from God, that the danger to us from poison gas in the village was not nearly so great as the one which every Londoner experienced every day from the perils of his city's traffic, but that we might as well take every precaution, as no doubt they did in their difficulty. The point about the absence of any protection whatever for babies gave him more trouble. It was obviously no good skating over the subject, because to thrust a very young child into an adult's mask would certainly be to suffocate it, so he plumped for a gas-proof room.

None of us had any clear idea of the official method of proofing a room at that time, but it required only a very elementary intelligence to see that the main idea was to stop every conceivable draught. P.Y.C. pointed this out, and Auburn, who knows all there is to know about draughts when the wind skates over the marshes from the North Sea, grasped the situation instantly.

Meanwhile the rest of us were letting people into the inner room, fifteen at a time, and fitting their masks. As we were doing it, it occurred to me that if the main purpose of the distribution was really to allay panic, as P.Y.C. had told me he thought it must be, it might possibly be a highly mistaken policy.

You cannot attempt to frighten folk off war for twenty years without your efforts taking some effect upon them, and the sudden present of a gas-mask will hardly wipe out all that in ten minutes.

It is a curious fact that nearly everybody's eyes are nice, and when you see them, startled and helpless, looking at you through a small mica window the effect is apt to be overwhelming. I obtained a lot of undeserved credit as a prophet by insisting in a burst of wishful thinking that there was not going to be any war for a bit.

All this time the rain was pouring down on the roof as if it had come from a hose, and there was the problem of how to take the things home through the lanes without getting them wet. People went hurrying away with them clasped to their bosoms like puppies under their coats. Everybody worked as fast as they could because of the shortage of time. There were a lot of us to help. Joan and Cynthia had come down from the Court, Mr. and Mrs. Carr Seabrook from beside the pond, and Chrissie, Margaret, Cooee, Olive and I helped Albert's father and Charlie, while Grog took down names and addresses.

We fitted four hundred and fifty before ten o'clock, when everyone went home.

The fact which seems so absurd now that we have experienced air attack, and yet was so painfully real then, was that we did expect air raids on a far more intense scale than any in the Spanish war, and we half expected them to begin without warning at almost any moment. No one in Auburn had been to the Spanish war, and we had therefore only written accounts to go by. One is apt to forget that written accounts only deal with the highlights, and naturally we had a somewhat distorted view.

We expected London to be razed in a week, and I know my own private fear was the idiotic notion that a terrorised city population would spread out like rings in a puddle all over the Home Counties, bringing fear and quarrels and chaos with it.

What we had no real idea about at all was the blessed limits to the powers of high explosives. What would have actually been the effect of one enormous persistent gas and high-explosive attack on London in that week in '38 I do not know. In two years we have all changed greatly, and I think for the better, but it was that threat which began the change. I do not suggest for a moment that at any time any single person whom I met ever hinted at surrender. They did not, and I do not think it was bravery, for nobody felt very brave at that time, nor was courage in fashion then (and fashion has much more say than most things); but the thought of surrender just never came up and never has since.

When we got home that night most of the helpers came with us, and presently Ronnie, our old friend the surgeon from Bastion, whom we have known since he was a student, with Mary his wife, and Jimmy, the young Irish doctor from Flinthammock, came in to see how we were going and what the verdict was. They too were our own age, responsible people all of them but no more experienced in war than we were. The dearth of folk ten to twenty years older had not seemed so apparent since we grew up.

Mary had sent my godchild and her sister away to Scotland, and Ronnie, so he said, had prepared for war by ordering two hams and thirty-six gallons of beer, not being able to think of anything more useful at the moment. It sounded very practical. Both he and Jimmy were naturally very full of the plans for emergency hospitals, and we remembered with a jolt from far back in our childhood that the wounded were coming through this village three days after the outbreak in 1914.

The Army was represented round the fire that night, too. The Captain and the Major from the Court had come in to collect their wives. They were both convinced that it was coming. In twenty-four hours, they said.

I woke the next morning to hear the talk in the street. Our house is right on the road just off the Square, and our high-pitched East Anglian voices carry a long way.

I could hear old Cliff, who has worked for Mr. Graves ever since he was ten, except for a brief period when he was Sir Edmund Ironside's batman in the last war. Bobby Graves used to be Vicar of Auburn until he retired a few years ago, and when he first came the village was still in smocks and gaiters and high silk hats on a Sunday. Cliff must have worked for him for close on forty years, and is Auburn born. He always shouts the local news to anyone he passes when he goes down for the paper, and if there is anything one wants to know about local affairs he can usually supply the information.

I lay listening to him with relief. Evidently we had not gone to war in the night, or he would have referred to it; but he was saying something which seemed almost more important at the moment. As far as I could hear, someone had not got his mask yet and was making a to-do about it. There were two hundred people who had not got their masks then, as I very well knew, and they all needed to be found.

Meanwhile, however, some of the family had to get to London; Grog to take care of his mother and P.Y.C. to attend to business, while Cooee was busy with the animals, who needed to eat even if the sky fell; so Albert's sister Olive and Mr. and Mrs. Carr S. and I went down to the hall and opened shop, as soon as we had sent word round that we were going there. Sending word round Auburn consisted of going into the shop where Albert's father was selling newspapers and cigarettes and telling everyone who happened to be talking there. There was quite a crowd that morning, and Albert's mother undertook to get the news about.

There were several disconcerting factors that morning. One of them was that the few ex-servicemen in the village seemed more apprehensive than anyone else. It was cold and sunny after the rain, but the sense of impending tragedy was suffocating. Now, when sensational and sometimes terrible things actually happen every day and no one takes any of them too seriously, the peculiar quality of the wretchedness of that morning is hard to recapture and define; but the whole thing is analogous with the way one feels when one first realises that someone one loves is going to die and the way one feels when they do.

It was Cooee, my oldest student friend, who lived with us, who raised the question of the animals, and that shook everyone in the place. Norry was appalled, I remember. We looked it up, but Me's handbook said nothing about animals.

Some English folk make too much fuss about their beasts, but there are degrees in these things, and the man who spends his whole life tending animals is a funny sort of chap if he is not fond of them. Norry's old pony Kit was over thirty at the time and not exactly valuable, but the idea of her being suffocated or burned and no drench of his brewing being able to save her shook him badly, while Cooee was very nearly demoralised altogether. It was not only the pet animals but all the stock. The cows might escape in the meadows, but what about the pigs in the backyards?

Of course, at that time we knew nothing about gas at all, and the notion of a concentration strong enough to envelop half the county did not then seem absurd. Fogs and sea-wracks are a commonplace with us, and it was only natural to assume that something like one of these, but possessing all the "injurious properties" mentioned in Me's book, was not really unlikely.

Meanwhile Albert's father suddenly remembered the Tye and Shadow Hill and Abbot's Dyke. These are outlying hamlets in the parish of Auburn, but separated from it by several miles of winding muddy lanes. The folks up there would not have heard about the masks yet, save in a general way from the wireless. Fortunately he knew of some first-rate people in each community, who came along at once and collected their own and their neighbours' masks.

All the morning the "shopkeeping" at the hall went on. Some of the more frail elderly ladies who had not felt up to joining the scrum the night before came in with embroidered shopping bags and bent their sleek little grey heads meekly for the rubber monstrosities and asked very gently for a good recipe for getting mustard gas off the skin.

It did all seem such wicked lunacy.

They were followed by a contingent from the fields, who had only just heard of the crisis. These men had fine Norman-French or purely agricultural names, like Clover or Cornell, and about as much kinship with chemical warfare as had the iron cannonballs in the aconite orchard.

Round about noon came the rumour. To this day I do not quite see how it arose, and it remains one of the few genuine mysteries I have ever known. Someone--I fancy it was Olive--came into the hall and remarked that a strange gentleman had passed through the village in a car and had stopped at the only petrol pump. While he was there he had told someone he saw standing by that everything was going to be quite all right, and that Signor Mussolini was going to intervene. It was the usual rumour, completely without any chance of verification at any given point, but it arose at least an hour and a half before the midday news, and we are a great many miles from the city.

The grace-note, I remember, was the additional information that the stranger had taken a road which was a cul-de-sac and never came down it again. It was a good story, but not unnaturally no one took much heart from it.

Not long after this Olive, who had been going round on a bicycle visiting every bedridden or infirm person (there seemed to be a pretty large percentage of these), came back to suggest we went down to Old Lady Fell, who "couldn't make her gas-mask work." The name did not convey much to me, except that I knew by the local courtesy title that she must be over seventy.

Olive led me down her garden path and mentioned as we turned the corner to the back garden, "She's ninety-four, you know."

I had never seen a hale and vigorous person of ninety-four before, and Old Lady Fell impressed me enormously. She was so old that her skull had flattened and the cartilage of her nose had shrunk, but she had a bright colour and was doing a bit of wringing in the wash-house of the cottage where she lived alone. Also she was very tall.

She said, "Another war?"

It was the first and last time I ever experienced any feelings of war-guilt, and I said hastily it was only might-be. She said she hoped I was right and went on to give me her opinion of wars and warmongers from the Crimea onwards.

"They've been a nuisance all my life, they Proosians and Rooshians," she said. "We ought to have done with they."

Olive and I agreed with her, and then went into the matter of the gas-mask. We found the trouble quite unsurmountable. Like the babies, she had not sufficient strength in her lungs to draw the air through the filter. She was not interested. It was the food question which was worrying her.

"Wars mean flat stomachs," she said.

I reassured her with honest conviction. "We learnt that lesson last time," I said. "The Government will have taken care of that."

She gave me a devastatingly shrewd glance and her boot-button eyes were as bright as a squirrel's.

"Think so?"

"Why yes," I said. "They're not barmy."

She sniffed. "Let's hope not," she said. "It 'on't be the first time if they are."

I gave up being silly after that and turned to something I did know a little about. I could see that the mask was dangerous and I was so frightened that she might put it on and suffocate if there was a scare, yet I felt I ought not to take it away. I began to explain this as tactfully as possible when I saw that she was laughing at me.

"I 'on't wear that, don't you worry," she said.

Finally we kissed and decided it wasn't going to happen anyway, but that should any warning reach her she would shut her door and her window and take a nap until the trouble was past. It seemed the only thing to do. She was quite as "wide" as I was.

Olive and I went back to the hall. We had missed the news and the Premier's decision to fly to Germany, but the story was all over the village. Even so the importance of the step did not quite register on us at once. Our country minds work slowly. But the grip on our vitals grew less and less intense and for the first time some of that secret invigoration, which we learnt so much about later, crept into the proceedings. It began to be possible to notice things with interest again and to appreciate the spontaneity of the service which came from all sides like a reflex action.

In the normal way, although we keep posted about everyone else's affairs, we do it very discreetly and modestly and have a tendency to live very much alone, but now suddenly all the ceremony had gone and people spoke to each other as if they at last realised that they really had known each other for years. More than that, it was a larger-than-life occasion and people became startlingly more like themselves. Bobby Graves at eighty-two was driving round among his ex-parishioners preaching decency and damn-the-enemy and the whole place was awake again in a night.

When P.Y.C. came home in the evening he had much the same story of London. He said it had been like going to the funeral of everybody's wife when he first arrived at Liverpool Street Station and that the streets and buses were silent as churches. Business had stopped and a pall of gloom which was almost a visible thing hung over the town. And then, just after lunch, he came out of an office building and saw someone laughing in the street. After that the good news spread before his eyes as he walked along, so that he knew something must have happened before he saw a placard.

For the more knowledgeable world I suppose that was the end of the crisis, although the second flight of Mr. Chamberlain was yet to come, but for the majority of us in Auburn, who think so much less fast and who I sometimes fancy scent so much more quickly, it was only a lull in the storm.

Before we had fully realised what was afoot we were being told the danger was over, but we were not deceived. We had had our batch of preliminary warnings and we were awake. What we had got into our heads at last was that, whatever Mr. Chamberlain might think, we had an enemy. What was more, it was an old enemy on his feet again and coming for us.

The full spate of the warnings was still to come, as it happened, for when someone presses a button in Whitehall the effects go rumbling on for days as the machinery makes a full revolution.

The following morning we were having a family row. I cannot remember what it was about at this distance, probably something infantile like P.Y.C. refusing to get up at a reasonable hour, but which must I think have been mainly weariness, for a mental, emotional and physical shake-up is very tiring. However, whatever it was, in the midst of it Mr. Doe stepped down from his butcher's shop (which is the only pretty butcher's shop I have ever seen, and looks as if it were composed, meat and all, of highly glazed china) and came in, bringing the latest bolt from the Government.

He said that the Sanitary Inspector had called upon him, dubbed him Billeting Officer, and told him eighteen thousand East Enders were due in the district. "Of course they won't all come here," he said.

We were all still standing in the studio discussing the ways and means of the project, sending round for Albert's father's advice and deciding that the somewhat ominous choice of a messenger presaged nothing more than that the scheme was being put over by the Ministry of Health, when the S.I. returned to say that one hundred and twenty children were arriving in Auburn the following day.

The effect of this news on the village as a whole was unexpected. Apart from certain qualms, because there are not very many houses in the place at all, the main reaction was excitement and a burst of remarkably practical energy.

This new mood was interesting because it lasted for such a very long time, was both spontaneous and efficient, and was rather as though everyone had slipped down into another gear. A committee came into being rather than was formed; that is to say certain people came and sat down at the dining-room table with old Doey at the head, and I for one began to enjoy it all enormously.

The local authorities had provided a vast quantity of cards, one for every household in the place, and based on the last census, then hopelessly out of date. Each card was divided into three columns. One contained a space for the number of rooms, the second for the number of people in the household, and the third for the answer to a subtraction sum, which was the number of evacuees to be received. From the warrant the Sanitary Inspector had given Doey he appeared to have dictatorial powers, and I suppose on paper the scheme looked almost easy.

Albert's father brought his morning newspaper lists from the shop and, with Olive and Clara, we went through them with the cards. Of course all sorts of things had happened since they had been prepared. People had moved, died and been born. Houses had been built, had fallen down or been split in two, and there were other snags.

"Poor Old Lady Rose," said Doey, pouncing on a card. "Four rooms, one in family, so three children. What would she do with three children? The house is no more than a barn. She's over eighty, practically bedridden, and Mrs. Rich next door goes in to look at her. Three children would kill her. Count her out. Someone else must take her lot. I wouldn't mind some little old boys."

Little old boys were in demand. The distribution of the children began to move with speed, with Doey as a sort of rubicund stork.

In the last twenty years an interest in children has too often been thought sentimental, but Auburn people are not particularly fashionable and the absence of young stock has got on many people's nerves, so that the prospect of a hundred and twenty young things bursting the school again and filling the streets was not altogether an unpleasant idea, even if they belonged to somebody else.

The actual organisation had the simplicity of the obvious and the new unity which we had so suddenly achieved carried the arrangement through with the beautiful ease of a conjuring trick.

There are five roads leading out of Auburn, and somewhere along each road there turned out to be someone who appeared to be not only the best but the proper person to help. This element of properness is always cropping up in Auburn, and, since it is based on personalities rather than on any material consideration, it is a very valuable thing.

In the ordinary way the gathering in the dining-room might well have hesitated to ask so much of anybody, but on that day it simply sent young Ralph down on a bicycle to each of them and begged him or his wife to come at once for the love of Mike. Although it was just after midday and an awkward time, everybody came as naturally and as simply as they had been approached and no one thought that part of it at all odd. Doey and Albert's father took the cards out of alphabetical order and put them into a sensible geographical sequence, and as soon as each "proper" person arrived they gave him the pack of cards for his own road--miles long, some of them--and asked him to drop in at each house, explain the situation, and see what could be done.

That was all. When everybody came back we went through the cards again and marked them on the back with honest opinions based on all the current circumstances. Finally they were re-stacked into new groups, which are worth mentioning if only because of their magnificent optimism and as showing the way everyone felt about it just then.

The main divisions were Good, Bad and Indifferent, naturally, but these were sub-divided into "Very special indeed (for grizzly or frightened kids)," "Special for little kids," "Good for nice girls," "Good for tough boys," "Good home for anybody," "Just good," "Good at a pinch," "Would, but not keen," "Could, but wouldn't without a row," "Unsuitable," "Bad," "Impossible," and "Never on your life."

By eight in the evening there were two hundred homes waiting for children, all owned by people who really wanted them. It was all very pleasant and intimate and simple. There was a lot of bed borrowing and airing and messages about taking two sisters, or two brothers, so they could sleep together. Mrs. Golding sent up from the farm to say she could manage six tough little boys, it didn't matter how rough, and that did sound like a glorious offer for someone because hers is a farm as live and vigorous as any of fifty years ago.

In the midst of all this sentiment excitement, and rather complacent (on my part) pride in our astounding efficiency, which was after all an unsuspected attribute and quite as surprising as discovering that we all had a mutual gift for part-singing or juggling, we suddenly remembered the cause of it all--the war, the gas-masks, the aerial bombardment which was "absolutely certain" to bring fifty thousand casualties a week to London the instant hostilities began. All these things bounced up again from the back of our minds where they had been thrust by the practical job in hand.

I think most of us found that we felt much better for it. The danger of a gas attack seemed far less likely and war itself more remote. However, to this day I marvel that anyone could ever question the ability of British morale to stand up to any sort of threat when it had swallowed the distribution of those gas-masks at such a moment and with no warning at all.

The children did not come that year and many people were disappointed. Little Miss Drudge, who lives down at High View, was very sad. She was cooking a meal for the two little girls we had promised her so blithely when we had to tell her it was all over and there wasn't going to be a war after all for a time.

Everyone admired Mr. Chamberlain's final effort, but his arrangement with Hitler that the two countries should never go to war with each other again sounded far too good to be true, which it was, of course.

Doey tabulated his billeting addresses, Olive and Clara made out the gas-mask lists, and the village settled down to quiet, leisurely preparation of mind. There was a lot of speculation. The discovery that the men from Ipswich who had been carting lime on to the Tye fields had spent the crisis carting empty coffins to London (private precautions taken by the undertakers, no doubt) set us back a bit, and every scrap of terror-talk from Spain was carefully discussed. But we were getting the idea; and this was important, everyone knew instinctively, for the one thing we countryfolk--and I think it may be true of the nation as a whole--are most afraid of is of being frightened, and nothing real, however ghastly, is liable to frighten one so much as the utterly unknown.

As the months went on, therefore, and we found out first of all what a vital and important part of Czecho-Slovakia had been taken by the enemy (no one had realised that at the time: geography is not our strong point) we got into the frame of mind for war, partly in resignation and partly in honest apprehension.

In some country places, according to the newspapers, the evacuation scheme was met with howls of execration, but it was not like that at first in Auburn. In the beginning Auburn rather liked the idea of having children--nice little girls and tough little old boys. In a way I think it almost mitigated some of the cold dread of the casualty lists which must lie behind the mind of everyone who has to stay at home.

This was partly sentimental, partly the idea of young stock in the place at last, and partly something else which I hesitate to mention but which ought to be put in. This is a peculiarity of temperament which I have not been able to help noticing in nearly all the ordinary unintellectual English people I have ever met, myself included.

In all nations the ordinary man likes to be thought something; that is to say he has to have an ideal, a picture of himself which he likes to present to his fellows with the idea, perhaps, of getting their admiration or interest. This is very human and natural and a truism, but whereas in some countries it is the national weakness to be thought smart, and in others worldly, or cynical, or whimsical, or even capricious, in England the very ordinary simple chap likes to be thought good.

That this is a mistaken idea if mere popularity is its aim is obvious, because virtue is not an instantly endearing quality in times of ease. Goodness, when it is assumed and not quite genuine, is an infuriating affectation and probably accounts for the exasperation which the English do arouse in so many foreign breasts. Yet most people fall short of their ideal. The smart folk are not always smart, but in their case the laughter at their expense has a kindly, forgiving quality, while the laughter provoked by the man who wants to be thought good, and muffs it, is not laughter at all.

I do not know how long the English have had this peculiar personal weakness, but as far as I can gather it is very old in us indeed, and the fact does remain that some of us achieve the ideal and are good in the classic rather than in the Christian sense; not charming, not even pleasant or entertaining, but just plain good, like a woollen vest or stout pair of shoes. In war, and other times of hardship, they come into their own with the virtues they pretend to or strive for or do actually achieve.

Taking care of a pack of other people's children seemed to demand just that peculiarity and not much else, and so that was another factor which made the child evacuee problem in Auburn something almost to look forward to amid the rest of the upheaval which was obviously coming our way.

When I remember what did happen when the war proper began I cannot help laughing at us a little and I fancy most of Auburn joins me.