Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

We walked through the streets of the old City. From the bottom of Ducks Foot Lane, we caught sight of the dome of St Paul’s and, as if adjacent to it, the pinnacles of Dick Whittington’s church, white as sugar icing in the moonlight. The City of London, in its technical sense, as opposed to the great incomprehensible town, meant little either to him or to me. It evoked no memories, I had never worked there, all it brought back were taxi-rides on the way to Liverpool Street Station. Yet something played on us — the sight of the vast cathedral? The bomb sites? The absolute loneliness, not another person in the streets? The false-romantic memory of the past, the history which is not one’s own but lives in the imagination? Something played on us, not only on him but on me, who was more sober and less adrift.

We had passed Great Trinity Lane and had turned right: St Paul’s sprang now into open view before us, soot and whitewash.

Sammikins said: ‘I suppose Roger is right. If there is another war, it’ll be the end of us, won’t it?’

I said yes.

He turned to me: ‘How much does it matter?’

He was speaking in earnest. I couldn’t make a sarcastic reply. I answered: ‘What else matters?’

‘No. I’m asking you. How much do any of us believe in human life? When it comes to the point?’

‘If we don’t, then there’s no hope for us.’

‘Perhaps there isn’t,’ he said. ‘I tell you, aren’t we becoming hypocritical? How much do any of us care, really care, for human life?’

I was silent. And in a clear tone, neither fierce nor wild, he went on: ‘How much do you care? Except for the people round you? Come on. What is the truth?’

I could not answer straight away. At last I said: ‘I think I do. At any rate, I want to.’

He said: ‘I doubt if I do. I’ve taken life before now, and I could do it again. Of course I care for a few lives. But as for the rest, I don’t believe — when you strip away the trappings — that I give a rap. And that’s truer of more people than any of us would like to think.’

The headlines, on the morning after the dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall, had a simple but pleasing eloquence. ARMED SERVICES ALL–IMPORTANT: then, in smaller letters, ‘No Substitute for Fighting Men. Minister’s Strong Speech,’ said the Daily Telegraph (Conservative). SECURITY COMES FIRST, ‘Mr R. Quaife on World Dangers,’ said The Times (moderate Conservative). SPREAD OF ATOMIC WEAPONS, ‘How Many Countries Will Possess the Bomb?’ said the Manchester Guardian (centre). CHANCE FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, ‘Our Lead in Atomic Bomb,’ said the Daily Express (irregular Conservative). TAGGING BEHIND THE US, said the Daily Worker (Communist).

The comments were more friendly than I had expected. It looked as though the speech would soon be forgotten. When I went over the press with Roger, we were both relieved. I thought he felt, as much as I did, a sense of anti-climax.

In the same week, I noticed a tiny news item, as obscure as a fait divers , in the ‘Telegrams in Brief’ column of The Times .

‘Los Angeles. Dr Brodzinski, British physicist, in a speech here tonight, attacked “New Look” in British defence policy as defeatist and calculated to play into hands of Moscow.’

I was angry, much more angry than apprehensive. I was sufficiently on guard — or sufficiently trained to be careful — to put through a call to David Rubin in Washington. No, he said, no reports of Brodzinski’s speech had reached the New York or Washington papers. They would carry it now. He thought we could forget about Brodzinski. If he, Rubin, were Roger, he’d play it rather cool. He would be over to talk to us in the New Year.

That sounded undisquieting. No one else seemed to have noticed the news item. It did not arrive in the departmental press-cuttings. I decided not to worry Roger with it, and put it out of mind myself.

A fortnight later, in the middle of a brilliant, eggshell blue November morning, I was sitting in Osbaldiston’s office. We had been working on the new draft of the White Paper, Collingwood having contorted Douglas’ first. Douglas was good-humoured. As usual, he took no more pride in authorship than most of us took in the collective enterprise of travelling on a bus.

His personal assistant came in with an armful of files, and put them in the in-tray. Out of habit his eye, like mine, had caught sight of a green tab on one of them. ‘Thank you, Eunice,’ he said equably, looking not much older than the athletic girl. ‘A bit of trouble?’

‘The PQ is on top, Sir Douglas,’ she said.

It was part of the drill he had been used to for twenty-five years. A parliamentary question worked like a Pavlovian bell, demanding priority. Whenever he saw one, Douglas, who was the least vexable of men, became a little vexed.

He opened the file and spread it on his desk. I could see the printed question, upside down: under it, very short notes in holograph. It looked like one of these questions which were rushed, like a chain of buckets at a village fire, straight up to the Permanent Secretary.

With a frown, a single line across his forehead, he read the question. He turned over the page and in silence studied another document. In a hard, offended tone, he burst out, ‘I don’t like this.’ He skimmed the file across the desk. The question stood in the name of the Member for a south coast holiday town, a young man who was becoming notorious as an extreme reactionary. It read: ‘To ask the Minister of—’ (Roger’s department) ‘If he is satisfied with security arrangements in his department, especially among senior officials?’

That looked innocuous enough: but Douglas’ juniors, thorough as detectives, had noticed that this same member had been making a speech in his own constituency, a speech in which he had quoted from Brodzinski’s at Los Angeles. Here were the press cuttings, the local English paper, the Los Angeles Times , pasted on to the file’s second page.

With a curious sense of déjà vu , mixed up with incredulity and a feeling that all this had happened time out of mind, I began reading them. Brodzinski’s lecture at UCLA: SCIENCE AND THE COMMUNIST THREAT: Danger, danger, danger: Infiltration: Softening, Conscious, Unconscious: as bad or worse in his own country (UK) as in the US: People in high positions, scientific and non-scientific, betraying defence; best defence ideas sabotaged; security risks, security risks, security risks.

‘This isn’t very pleasant,’ said Douglas, interrupting me.

‘It’s insane.’

‘Insane people can do harm, as you have reason to know.’ He said it with tartness and yet with sympathy. He knew of my first marriage, and it was easy for us to speak intimately.

‘How much effect will this really have—’

‘You’re taking it too easily,’ he said, hard and sharp.

It must have been years since anyone made me that particular reproach. Then I realized that Douglas had taken charge. He was speaking with complete authority. Because he was so unpretentious, so fresh, lean and juvenile in appearance, one fell into the trap of thinking him light-weight. He was no more light-weight than Lufkin or Hector Rose.

It was he who was going to handle this matter, not Roger. From the moment he read the question, he showed his concern. Why it should be so acute, I could not make out. At a first glance, Brodzinski was getting at Francis Getliffe, perhaps me, perhaps Walter Luke, or even Roger himself. It would be a nuisance for me if I were involved: but, in realistic terms, I thought, not much more. Douglas was a close friend: but his present gravity would have been disproportionate, if it had just been on my account.