Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

About eight o’clock the ‘all clear’ sounded again and Charles, with a local warden, left the scene of what was so genteelly called an ‘incident’. The street was close to where Havelock lived, and Charles was not utterly astonished to find his father standing at the corner, fully dressed and looking quite spruce. They exchanged a greeting, but no more; Charles felt now his own exhaustion and wanted nothing so much as to get to his flat and have a bath. His companion, a sturdy rough-spoken friendly fellow, commented: ‘That old bloke your dad?’

‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘He lives just round the corner.’

‘Don’t you want to take ‘im ‘ome, then—make sure ‘e’s all right?’

‘Oh, he’s all right. I’ll see him later.’

‘Bin a narsty one, though, tonight—some of the old folks need a bit of cheerin’ up after it.’

‘My father doesn’t. He enjoys it all.’

‘WHAT?’

‘It excites him. All the bombs falling and the fires and everything.’

‘Go on—I don’t believe it!’

‘It’s a fact. I wanted him to go away when the raids started, but he wouldn’t. He likes it here.’

‘Wot’s the matter with ‘im then? Is he loony?’

‘Yes,’ said Charles.

But he did not often lose his nerve enough to speak with such nerveless detachment.

It was true, though, that Havelock was in London from choice. After the opening nights of the heavy September raiding Charles had seen no reason why his father should stay, since he could just as well live with Cobb on the coast or in some inland town. The affair of the letters seemed to have blown over, at least for the time, and Charles had heard no more from anyone about his own letter of resignation. Even if Havelock were still on any secret list of suspects, he could be watched as easily in one place as another. But the old man himself declined to move. It was perhaps too much or at least too simple to say that he enjoyed the raids, but they certainly fascinated him; in some obscure way they offered a challenge and a reassurance of destiny, as if every bomb were aimed at him personally, so that every raid he survived represented a personal victory.

Towards the end of the year there came a lull in air attacks, and Jane (using this as an excuse) joined Charles at the Chelsea flat, leaving Gerald in Cheshire. But when the lull ended Jane also refused to leave. Charles could not convince her that he worried about her safety even more than he took pleasure in her company. But DID he? He often asked himself the question afterwards, speculating how much had been in his power, even had he chosen to exercise it.

Besides a desire to be with Charles, she soon had other reasons for staying where trouble was. She found a job with the local authority, arranging shelter for bombed-out families; in this she became an instant success and (to Charles’s dismay) quite invaluable. Sometimes when they both returned to the flat, she from the Town Hall and he from his varied duties in Whitehall, it was long past midnight. Then if there was no raid they could have a meal of sorts and a few hours’ sleep before morning took them to work again. It was hard, and amidst these compulsions, to remember that they were financially well off—hard, and also, as a rule, irrelevant. Money was still the lubricant, but it was not the driving power of this new kind of life; it conferred a few small privileges, but no large immunities. To Charles these months in London during the blitz reminded him more of his schooldays than of anything else—the physical austerities, the extraordinary way one enjoyed any small pleasure that came unexpectedly, the regular almost taken-for-granted ordeals (now the raids, at school compulsory games), and over it all a sense of time passing that must, if one were lucky, bring some eventual finality—the end of term, or the end of the war. Towards Christmas, so Havelock assured Charles, Hitler missed a terrific psychological opening wedge into the Londoner’s heart. He should have announced, with all possible propaganda fanfare, that raids would be totally suspended during the festive season, that London could put on its lights, enjoy social engagements, and sleep the good sleep for a whole week. The British authorities, naturally, would then have warned that Hitler was not to be trusted and would have insisted (rightly) on continuing every precaution; after which Hitler should very simply have kept his word. The curious psychological effect of this would have been to make Londoners feel almost grateful for not being killed, and irritated with their own rulers for being over-zealous. At least that was the way Havelock worked it out; but since to make Hitler popular was neither Charles’s desire nor within his power, the argument remained purely academic.

Charles was an averagely good citizen, performing his duties by day and night no better or worse than tens of thousands of other Londoners— that is to say, without any special heroism, but with a good deal of conscientiousness. The time he crawled under the ruins of the house to try to free the trapped old man was the nearest he ever came to a personal exploit; there were other ticklish moments, some of them even more unpleasant, but none that put him so close to the centre of any stage. He did not want such a position, anyhow, and if chance had decreed it for him he knew his friends and colleagues would have responded with far more badinage than applause.

Charles’s happiest moments at this period of his life (and they had a piercing intensity while they lasted) were the rare ones when he and Jane found themselves at home with nothing much to do in some small pocket of the immediate future that seemed to have miraculously detached itself from the rest. The flat was near the river, and on raidless nights they would stroll along the Chelsea Embankment before going to bed, watching the tugs horn their way under the Albert Bridge and wishing they had a dog. But of course this was no time for having dogs in London. Or wives either, Charles sometimes thought during raids. The safe moments with Jane were precious because of the fears that at other times beset him. He had never felt so alone with her, dependent on her, worried about her—and, perhaps because of it all, so close to her.

And there were other moments, weirdly and painfully happy, when he had checked after raids to find that all was well with Jane and he could then unclench the muscles of his stomach and join a group of tired men clustering round a mobile canteen to drink tea. It was the least palatable liquid he had ever tasted—sticky and oversweetened and pale with condensed milk; yet he found in it a flavour that again reminded him of schooldays—of horrible concoctions prepared and enjoyed in his study after a football game that he had particularly loathed.

Jane, however, was much more than an averagely good citizen. In no time at all she seemed to have acquired a position of authority at the Town Hall, distributing chits for this and that, fixing homeless families in temporary quarters, smoothing out countless difficulties and bringing order out of chaos wherever she turned. All the qualities that had made her hoydenish as a girl and excellent as a diplomat’s wife made her now superb. She knew how to talk to poor people without condescension and to officials without subservience. She knew exactly when to insist and when to cajole, when to rebuke and when to flatter. And she seemed to have no physical fear. This, to Charles, who had, was the most remarkable thing of all.

Owing partly to an early fresh-air upbringing and partly also to much experience of savage injuries caused by broken glass, she developed what Charles jokingly called a ‘window neurosis’. As soon as she entered a room she would rush up to closed windows and open them, thus lessening the danger of blast, but also (as Charles pointed out) destroying the effect of indoor heating on cold days. Charles, in his office overlooking the Horse Guards Parade, was one of those who found the government heat ration hopelessly inadequate unless he worked in his overcoat and trusted to draughts for ventilation. Once Jane visited him and went straight to the windows, opening them wide and exclaiming: ‘Charles, you’re stuffy in here.’ A man named Etheridge, who happened to be with Charles at the time, gave the statement a prolonged joy-ride. ‘Of course he’s stuffy in here. Isn’t he stuffy when he’s with you too? Why, that’s what we call him—STUFFY ANDERSON.’