Easily two-thirds of the people on trains these days are in uniform.

There are very few women. Soldiers on leave travel with full kit,

including rifle. And a soldier with his full kit resembles a packhorse

starting on a ten-day camping trip. They carry all this stuff because

they must be ready at any moment. If the invasion comes while they’re

at home, they simply report to the nearest army post and start shooting.

* * * * *

You might think that with a war on, half the hotels in England would

have to close. But it’s just the opposite. The hotels have waiting

lists, and if you don’t make reservations ahead you are liable to find

yourself homeless.

That nearly happened to me in York when I arrived at eight o’clock in

the evening. If it hadn’t been for a beautiful switchboard girl who

called every hotel and boarding house in town I would have had to sit

in the lobby all night. I fed her chocolates while she phoned, so we

both profited.

Finally she found a place, a funny little semi-hotel that turned out to

be grand. The owner was also the bellboy, and he built me a coal fire

in the grate, put a hot-water bottle in the bed, and then stood and

talked for half an hour.

There are many good-sized cities in England that haven’t been blitzed

yet. York has had only a few raids, and only a small number of people

have been killed by bombs in this city of 85,000.

As we stood in my room talking, I said to the owner: “What shall I do

about ventilation tonight? I can’t open the blackout curtain with this

fire going in the grate.”

He answered, “Oh, this terrible old building is full of drafts. You’ll

get plenty of air without opening a window.” And he was right.

Until nearly midnight I sat before my fireplace reading the newspapers.

I felt very strange, way up here in York. The city, covered with

snow and very quiet, seemed terribly old, and nice in a Dickens way.

Although it was February, you somehow expected to see Santa Claus

coming down the chimney.

The papers had grave editorials warning about the coming invasion

attempt. I read and thought, and read and thought, here alone in

my ancient room in old York, and a funny thing happened. I had

been in London so long I had acquired the London outlook, the

London casualness, the London assurance that no matter what happens

we can stand it. The Londoner’s psychology is like that of the

aviator--somebody will get killed tonight, but it’ll always be somebody

else, never me. But now, away from my eight million friends in London,

this psychological cloak of safety fell away. Here in these strange

surroundings, among people not yet hardened to bombs, here where the

warning siren is an event, the whole horrible meaning of invasion shone

clear before me like a picture. The frightful slaughter that even an

unsuccessful invasion would bring grew stark and real to me for the

first time. And I tell you I became absolutely petrified with fear for

myself. I would have given everything I had to be back in America.

I probably wouldn’t have slept a wink if it hadn’t been for the

bathroom. I discovered it after midnight, when everybody else had gone

to bed.

The bathroom was about twenty feet square, and it had twin bathtubs!

Yes, two big old-fashioned bathtubs sitting side by side with nothing

between, just like twin beds.

Twin bathtubs had never occurred to me before. But having actually seen

them, my astonishment grew into approval. I said to myself, “Why not?

Think what you could do with twin bathtubs. You could give a party.

You could invite the Lord Mayor in for tea and a tub. You could have a

national slogan, ‘Two tubs in every bathroom.’”

The potentialities of twin bathtubs assumed gigantic proportions in my

disturbed mind, and I finally fell asleep on the idea, all my fears

forgotten.

* * * * *

Some friends drove me over to Harrogate, which is one of England’s

flossiest spas. It is some twenty-five miles from York.

Harrogate has curative waters, outlandishly huge hotels with prices so

high they are famous, and in war or peace a stream of wealth and titles

that stuns you.

Into this display of ease a German raider came, in daytime, and the

people all stood in the street watching, thinking it was a British

plane. They changed their minds when a bomb came down.

I asked if Harrogate had underground public shelters like London’s and

a slightly cynical English newspaper friend of mine said: “Yes, but

nobody ever goes into them. Harrogate is so flossy that everybody is

afraid of being seen in a public shelter in the presence of someone who

isn’t his equal.”

* * * * *

English place names fascinate me. There is a street in York called

Whipma Whopma Gate Street.

* * * * *

I went down to the tiny lounge of my hotel and sat in front of the fire

with six other guests for late tea.

This little hotel is the only place I’ve been in--outside of an

officers’ mess--where they’ve had sugar in a bowl on the table, instead

of just a cube for your coffee. The owner said he had found that by

just leaving it out like that, putting people on their honor, guests

used only half the sugar they did in peacetime.

There were two traveling salesmen at the hotel--one who sold shoes, and

one who sold bread. One of them was from Sheffield, which was badly

blitzed just before Christmas, and he had his wife and two boys with

him. Due to the blitz, the youngsters had a six-week vacation from

school, so they weren’t feeling so hard toward the fortunes of war.

These two boys were much more interested in asking about streamlined

trains in America than in telling about Sheffield’s blitz. They have

never been on a train. But they have studied mechanical magazines,

and they told me all about the famous Royal Scot and Silver Jubilee

streamliners.

When we did talk about bombing, I found that they knew as much about

the characteristics of the various bombs as any air warden I’ve talked

with. Yet the recent Sheffield blitz didn’t seem paramount in their

minds at all.

* * * * *

Traveling salesmen have a tough time now. They can get plenty of

orders but they can’t get the goods to fill them, because most of the

factories are engaged in war work. Also, their gasoline is rationed.

They’re allowed from five gallons a month upward, depending on how

useful the government considers them. And they try not to do much night

driving, for it is not so pleasant in the blackout. Yet, despite all

this and despite the snowy roads and despite the fact that England

is thickly populated and the speed limits are low, these traveling

salesmen will do 200 miles in a day when they can get gas.

These two were on the road the next morning by daybreak.

* * * * *

Some friends and I, in a York pub, got into a conversation with a

native Yorkshireman, and I couldn’t understand a word he said. I

wouldn’t have let on, except that the friends with me were all British

soldiers and they couldn’t understand him either. So finally we got

into one of those long ridiculous discussions, the way you do in pubs,

with us trying to analyze his talk and him trying to analyze ours.

We all had a wonderful time--probably much better than if we had

understood each other.

Not all Yorkshiremen talk the way this one did; not even a majority.

Only on farms and in two or three other instances have I had trouble

understanding Yorkshiremen. After I got home that night, and was still

thinking about that fellow, the awful thought occurred to me that maybe

he wasn’t speaking a local dialect at all, but simply couldn’t talk

plain.

_2. YORKSHIRE FARM_

_Boroughbridge, Yorkshire,

February, 1941_

The farmers of Yorkshire are getting a big play in the newspapers right

now. For England realizes that she has got to turn this island into a

big farm, what with Hitler trying to starve her to death by blockade.

So I have been looking around some of the farms up here in Yorkshire.

The English farmer has had a terrible time since the last war. His

standard of living has been abominably low. They say it is an amazing

thing that anybody stayed on the farm at all.

The government did help a little, though not as much as ours has done.

But now the government is doing things about the farms. It supplies

loans, controls some prices, and in certain places does practically

everything for the farmer except sitting on the fence and chewing a

straw. But even so, the farm situation seems to me to be still fairly

chaotic.

The main point is to get as much new land planted as possible. In many

places they are plowing up cricket fields and golf courses. Every city

and village has its “allotment plots,” where townspeople with other

jobs use their spare time working small patches in the city park,

raising vegetables.

Despite England’s dense population, plenty of land is available. For

example, the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1938 had roughly 750,000

acres in grass, and only 250,000 acres of tilled land. But in 1940

and 1941 more than 100,000 acres of this grassland has been plowed up

and planted. Over here they call it “plowing out.” The old days of the

great landholding squire with scores of tenants have pretty well passed

since the last war. A majority of farm land is now owned in plots of

about forty acres.

There is a hue and cry against the government right now for including

farm hands in the next call-up for the army. The critics contend that

the farms need all the experienced men they have, and that the army

doesn’t need men at all. A “women’s land army” has been formed for work

on the farms. It has 9000 members now, and another thousand are being

recruited.

* * * * *

I dropped in to see one Yorkshire farm family. They are not exactly

typical, for they live on government land and are much better off than

most English farmers.

The head of the house is Robert Wray, who is getting along in years. He

wears leather boots, and a shirt with a collar button but no collar. He

has rheumatism and stays in the house on snowy days such as this one

was. His son Richard does the work, and will until he is called up for

the army. Mr. Wray’s daughter, who was down on her knees scrubbing the

floor when I was there, had just been married and was still very blushy

about it.

The Wrays have sixty acres, and practically a model house and barn,

built by the government. They pay an annual rental of $4 an acre, and

their yearly income is about $800.

They live three miles from town, and they don’t have a car or electric

lights or a telephone. They live mostly in the kitchen in winter, but

their kitchen is nicer than most farm kitchens. Instead of a regular

cookstove, they have an open coal grate with ovens built into the wall

beside the grate.

They have a bathroom, with nothing in it but a bathtub. When I looked

in, there was three inches of water in the tub, and it was partly

frozen over. The toilet is an old-fashioned one in a fuel shed a

few steps back of the house. Every room in the house, including the

bedrooms, has a small coal grate, but these are seldom lighted.

The house is brick. Practically all English farmhouses are brick or

stone, for timber is scarce. The barn is concrete, and the very last

word. The Wrays keep about thirty head of cattle, a dozen pigs, a few

chickens and no sheep. They farm with horses. All the stock is kept in

separate stalls, spread deep with straw.

The war seems remote from the Wray farm, yet they are in it along with

all the rest of England. Their home is never likely to be bombed, but

they will feel a drastically tightening economy, and harder work, and

one by one the absence of kith and kin who go away to fight.

On a wall of the Wray sitting room are two framed pictures. They are

photographs of the young bride’s two uncles, in World War uniforms. One

of them never came back from the last war. And before this one is over

there will be more pictures of fighters on the wall--husbands, brothers

and cousins. For everybody is in it, one way or another.

_3. VISIT TO SCOTLAND_

_Edinburgh,

February, 1941_

Traveling through the countryside of Great Britain these days is hardly

an undiluted pleasure.

The bad points of traveling include: crowded trains and delayed

schedules, if you’re going by rail; snowy roads, unmarked highways and

a shortage of gasoline, if you’re driving; packed hotels, few taxis,

and, worst of all, hotels that are unheated despite the fact that the

north of England is nearer to the Arctic Circle than Newfoundland is.

On the other hand, there are good points: warm trains, good food,

pleasant companions, beautiful snow-covered scenery, and the fact that

people will always help if you ask them. Bad as the drawbacks sound,

you do get where you’re going, and with surprising speed and comfort.

There is actually more rail traffic now than in peacetime, but of

course this increase is in freight trains. Passenger service has been

cut down, but not as much as I had thought. There are thirty passenger

trains daily from London to Scotland. The trains are terrifically long

and they are always packed.

There are no restrictions on travel in England. You don’t have to get

special permission or anything of that sort. You just get on a train

and go. I’ve never had to show my multitudinous special papers since

the day I got them. When I register at a hotel I have to put down my

nationality, my passport number, where I’ve just come from and where

I’m going. The English do too, except that instead of a passport number

they put down their national registration number.

The better trains carry restaurant cars at dinner time. The diners are

nicer than ours at home, with deep easy chairs. They bring you soup,

lamb, boiled potatoes, cabbage, canned fruit and coffee for about

eighty-five cents. Eating is pleasant on an English train.

For a stranger like me, it is hard to know when you get to where you’re

going. You almost never see a conductor or a porter. Only occasionally

do they call out a station, and the names have been taken off most

of the stations in order not to give pointers to the Germans if the

invasion comes. At night, of course, the train windows are blacked out

so you can’t see the station you’re coming into, anyway.

I’ve worked out a scheme of eavesdropping until I spot somebody who is

going where I’m going, and then when he starts putting on his coat to

get off I start putting on mine.

Some people know the railroad by heart. The other night, on the way

from London to York, our train slowed down and we all thought we were

coming into York.

“Wait a minute,” said a man in our compartment. “I’ll tell you in a

minute.”

He sat listening as the train crept forward. Suddenly we could tell we

were crossing a bridge.

“No, this is not York,” the man said. “This is Selby.”

From the time we left London, four hours earlier, he had never looked

up from his book, but just from the sound of the wheels he knew exactly

where we were. That’s what living in the blackout does to your senses.

* * * * *

In some railroad stations there are porters to help with your bags,

and in some there are not. It is tough on a stranger getting to his

destination at night--and I seem to arrive everywhere at night. You

get off the train and there you are--all alone in a strange city,

not knowing in which direction to go, everything black, and no taxis

available. You just have to stand around helplessly until you dig up

somebody with a kind heart.

It was nearly midnight when we got into Edinburgh, and it was snowing

and cold. The station was a madhouse of soldiers. I never saw so many

in my life, outside of a camp. A lone taxi would arrive about every

five minutes, and somebody else would get it. Finally, after about a

half hour, I did get one.

Friends had told me about a hotel which they said was the warmest in

Edinburgh. I’m glad they didn’t direct me to the coldest one, for my

room had no heat whatever. It was like a refrigerator car. So the maid

came at midnight and built a fire in the grate, plugged in a little

electric heater and put a hot-water bottle in my bed. The grate fire,

incidentally, costs fifty cents a day extra, the electric heater thirty

cents.

I asked the maid to awaken me at eight in the morning and build another

fire when she arrived. So when she knocked, before daylight, I reached

over to unlock the door, as it was close to my bed. But the door wasn’t

as close as I thought, and I kept reaching outward in the dark and

finally reached too far, lost my balance and fell right out of bed onto

the floor and sprained a thumb.

As I lay there in the dark on the cold floor, tangled up in bed covers,

freezing to death, my thumb hurting, there all alone in a pitch-black

icebox in Scotland with not a friend within four hundred miles, I

thought: Of all the damn fools I’ve ever heard of, you take the prize.

For you could be in Panama or Hawaii now if you had any sense.

But I haven’t any sense, and in spite of everything, I’m glad I’m here.

* * * * *

Edinburgh is a graceful city. It is the Washington or the Ottawa of

Scotland. It is a city of government. It is a planned city. And it

is the sturdiest city I have ever seen. In its buildings, I mean.

Everything is of massive stone, so massive and so heavy that the entire

municipality seems embedded in the rock underfoot.

It seems to me that Edinburgh would stand up physically under an

aerial blitz better than any other city in Britain. They haven’t had

one yet, and if they ever do, it will be the rankest of outrages, for

Edinburgh is not an industrial city.

Many things are different up here. There is more food than in London,

and a greater variety of it. You have no trouble getting an excellent

steak.

Some people say Edinburgh is the gayest city in Britain now. There are

beautiful restaurants, where Scottish officers dancing in kilts make a

picture.

You never see a civilian with a tin hat or a gas mask. Edinburgh

children were evacuated, but eighty per cent of them have come back.

The movies run at night as well as in the daytime. Nobody sleeps at

night in public shelters, although shelters are available.

I have friends here who travel to London weekly and who know what has

happened down there. These friends get disgusted with their home folks

when they return.

“Up here we are all complaining about our stomach aches and

rheumatism,” they say. “It sounds mighty trivial when you have just

come from London, where they really have got something to complain

about--and don’t. I think a little blitzing would do us good.”

True, Scotland has not been on the receiving end of many bombs. True

also, there is a certain fundamental dislike of England, but that goes

by the boards in an emergency. Their heart is in the war all right. I

have got the impression that if I were an invading German, or even a

fire bomb, I wouldn’t relish the job of trying to land on Scottish soil.

As far as I can see, Edinburgh’s past immunity to danger has not made

it lax. The city seems to be ready and waiting. It is organized in

every way. Its officials have visited blitzed cities to study what has

happened and have prepared accordingly.

For example, much of Edinburgh lives in small apartment houses that

they call tenements. Because of this municipal singularity, the Air

Raid Precaution service is different from that in other cities.

Edinburgh is organized tenement by tenement--a warden for each

tenement, and he is on duty right there all the time.

* * * * *

I like the Scottish people. Somehow I had them all wrong. For one

thing, I thought I wouldn’t be able to understand anything they said,

but they are easy to understand. Also, I thought they were dour. On the

contrary, they are fundamentally witty. It is hard for a Scotsman to go

five minutes without giving something a funny twist, and it is usually

a left-handed twist. All in all, I have found the Scots much more like

Americans than the Englishmen are. I feel perfectly at home with them.

And incidentally, just a couple of tips in case you ever come over

here: (1) Don’t refer to Scotland as if it were a part of England, as

I did; for it isn’t. England is England, and Scotland is Scotland. (2)

Don’t say Scotch unless you are referring to the whisky. People are

Scots, and they are Scottish but not Scotch.

Incidentally, Scotch whisky is getting short. Many bars limit their

customers to two drinks. The whisky is being sent to America for good

American dollars to spend on arms.

* * * * *

It seems that one Scotsman was telling another about being in a movie

theater when some German raiders came over. The manager stopped the

film, went onto the stage and announced, “The sireens has went.”

It was now time for the other Scotsman to laugh, but he didn’t. He

studied it over for a long time, then finally laughed and said, “I

suppose the joke of it was that the sireens hadna’ went?”

_4. A SCOTTISH FAMILY_

_Newhaven, Scotland,

February, 1941_

As far back as he can remember, Walter Rutherford’s folks have been

fishermen. But his father said he would rather see his sons dead than

see them become fishermen, so they became such things as engineers and

shopkeepers.

But Walter stayed close to the sea. Newhaven is a fishing village, and

Walter runs the shop that outfits the fishermen. He is a ship chandler.

For twelve years he has been president of the Fishermen’s Society, a

proud organization that goes back to 1648. Packed in a shoebox at his

house are the beautiful silver cups and medals that go with the honor.

Mrs. Rutherford has sung in the Fisherwomen’s Choir since she was a

girl. This choir is famous, and often travels to London to sing.

I was a guest at the Rutherfords for an evening--at my own invitation,

but nobody could have been treated more genuinely if he had been kith

and kin. I went to see them in order to find out whether the war was

really close to the average family in Scotland. And people assured me

the Rutherfords were typical.

Well, when the war came Walter turned over his ship chandler’s shop to

Mrs. Rutherford and went to work in a factory that makes marine engines

for the government. He is a gauge maker--the same trade he followed at

Glasgow in the last war. He had been out of it eighteen years, but he

is at it again now.

Walter is a grandfather, yet he gets up at 6 A.M. and rides a bicycle

to work in the dark--for during the winter it isn’t daylight here until

nine o’clock in the morning. That is, he did ride a bicycle, but he is

walking now. The other morning his front wheel hit a curb and he took a

spill, landing in the snow “right on my bottomside,” as he says.

Walter works twelve hours a day, with only one day off every two weeks.

“Those are mighty tough hours,” I said.

“They are tough for a man who is getting along,” he said.

Mrs. Rutherford laughs about his “getting along.” For he looks about

thirty-five. He has a ruddy, windy face without a single line in it. He

wears a turtle-neck sweater and hops around like a jumpingjack.

“I’m always being taken for his mother,” Mrs. Rutherford laughs. “But I

don’t mind.”

Mrs. Rutherford is a large woman, and she is straight up and down no

matter whether she is standing or sitting. She has enough humor for a

dozen Scotswomen. She keeps long hours in the chandler’s shop, which is

under their apartment on the street floor.

“Sometimes I just feel like closing it up,” she says, “and other times

I’m thankful I have it to keep me from thinking.”

And believe me, she has plenty to think about. Her boy, who is her

pet, was a fish auctioneer, but now he is in the R.A.F. in Malta. Her

son-in-law was a fisherman but is now in a naval patrol, feeling his

way around among the mines. Her other daughter’s fiancé is a dispatch

rider with the Fusiliers. They were just ready to get married, but it’s

off now till after the war.

And the children’s best friend, just down the street, also went from

fishing into the naval patrol. A few weeks ago his boat hit a mine.

They could hear the explosion from the chandler’s shop. His young wife

was in the shop and heard it too. They never found anything of him at

all.

“It was seven weeks after our boy left for Malta before we heard from

him,” Mrs. Rutherford says. “I would come up here from the shop and cry

by the hour with a broken heart, but finally we got a cable from him.”

Everybody in this village has somebody in the war.

Mrs. Rutherford is so impetuous she can’t stay sad very long, and so

honest she says just what she thinks. She has no inhibitions. She is a

good deal like my own mother. Walter tells how one night recently she

was listening to someone speaking on the radio from America, talking

about liberty and how we must give all aid to Britain, and suddenly

Mrs. Rutherford yelled at the radio, “Oh shut up! Stop talking so much

and do something!”

The Rutherfords are neither poor nor very well off. The chandler’s shop

has put their three children through school and has bought them a house

and car. The car is laid up now, for Walter works all day and Mrs.

Rutherford doesn’t drive.

“But you are not going to sell that car,” says Mrs. Rutherford. “It’s

going to be right here for the boy when he gets back. It’s a bonnie wee

car.”

The Rutherfords both use “wee” and “bonnie” almost constantly. Such

native expressions sound odd alongside their modern slang phrases, such

as “fed up.”

For “herring,” Mrs. Rutherford says what sounds like “hen.” Being in a

fishing village, they have to eat an awful lot of fish. “It’s just hen,

hen, hen, morning, noon and night,” she says.

The Rutherfords never miss church, but they are far from being churchy

people.

Their home is in what we would call a cooperative apartment. They own

the first and second floors of one section of a brick building. They

have two bedrooms, a kitchen and bath. As in many Scottish houses, the

kitchen also serves as a living room. There is a parrot in a cage by a

blacked-out window.

At ten-thirty the youngest girl, who lives at home, came in from a

movie. Then Mrs. Rutherford put on the coffeepot, got out a jar of

cakes and made sandwiches. We all sat around the kitchen table and ate

and talked. I never felt more at home in my life.

_5. THE RED CLYDE_

_Glasgow,

February, 1941_

Edinburgh is on the east side of Scotland and Glasgow on the west, but

since they are at Scotland’s narrowest point they are only an hour’s

ride apart by train. The country between looks very much like Indiana,

except that the fields are smaller here.

That’s the trouble with America--it’s so big and has so many kinds of

scenery that it makes all the other countries look like something at

home, instead of looking foreign.

* * * * *

Edinburgh is cultured, scholarly, historical and quiet. Glasgow is

industrial, cosmopolitan, pulsating and full of business. They are as

different as two cities could be.

Sailors have told me that they found Glasgow the warmest city on the

Seven Seas, as far as making you welcome was concerned. Personally, I

could see no difference along that line between the two cities. I was

chilled physically and warmed spiritually by both of them.

We got off the train at Glasgow, checked our bags and took a walk. In

sight of the station was a building wrecked by a bomb--one of the very

few in Glasgow. The only casualties were two people who started to walk

downstairs in the dark after the blast; the stairs weren’t there.

Glasgow has not had a blitz. They have expected one all along, for

they have factories and great shipyards. The people can’t understand

why Hitler hasn’t tried to give it the works. Some say he is saving

the shipyards for himself--after he seizes Ireland and swings across

the Irish Sea. Others say very knowingly that he is saving them for

something else, but they are so knowing that I never know what they

mean.

We walked through a big park by the station, full of brick air-raid

shelters exactly like the surface shelters in London. I went up to see

what one was like inside, but its slatted door was solidly locked. My

Scottish friend said, “That’s just in case there is a raid and somebody

wants to get inside.”

We were already overdue at an appointment, but my friend said I would

have to see how the businessmen of Glasgow work. So we went to a

basement coffee house which was nearly a block long, with deep rugs and

walls solid with framed paintings. The whole place was packed, with men

sitting two and three at a table, their hats on, drinking coffee and

talking. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

My friend made up an imaginary conversation at a nearby table. “Now

this is a sure-fire thing if I can just get hold of a little capital,”

one fellow was theoretically saying--and my friend said the chances

were 10 to 1 he was actually saying just that. That’s how business is

done in Glasgow. It reminded me of Rio de Janeiro, where people go

to work at ten and knock off at ten-thirty for a couple of hours of

sidewalk coffee drinking.

* * * * *

Glasgow is prosperous now. It needs to be. It had a tough time through

the depression--a black, dismal, dangerously tough time.

Glasgow is on the River Clyde, and all over Britain you hear of

the “Red Clyde.” They don’t mean red with blood, they mean red

with Communism. Glasgow is supposed to be the center of Communism

in Britain. The _Daily Worker_ had a Glasgow edition until it was

suspended recently by the government.

I’m not a muckraker nor a political investigator, so my delvings into

the Clyde’s redness have not been deep. But I have got the same story

from the rich and the poor and the middle-income man alike, and that is

that the Clyde is not so red after all. Not even a small fraction of

one per cent of the workers are Communists. They are just tough guys

who are agin things as a matter of habit. They are agin their bosses,

they are agin their political leaders, and they would be agin Stalin or

agin Hitler if one of those gentlemen happened to be their boss. But

there is no question with the men of Glasgow about who is going to win

this war--that’s Great Britain.

These fellows up here in the shipyards, the dockworkers down in

Liverpool, the coal miners in Wales, the Cockneys in their London

slums, and farmers all over Britain--they are the guys who will have

to have a new deal when the war is over. They are the guys the country

must make some war aims for when the victory is won.

The men of Glasgow drink big and talk hard. You see a shipyard worker

go up to a bar in a Clydebank pub and he will say, “A glass and a

half.” You know what that means? It means a glass of beer and half a

glass of whisky, the equivalent of two big slugs. He drinks the whisky,

washes it down with the beer, and goes back to work.

We got aboard a Glasgow police launch for a private sightseeing

excursion down the River Clyde, past the great shipyards.

The day was miserable and dark, with lowering clouds, cold and windy.

Mist and smoke combined to make the same stuff they call “smog” in

Knoxville. You can’t keep a shirt clean in Glasgow either.

There are bridges across the Clyde in Glasgow, but none out toward

the sea. However, there are frequent little ferries, in which the

passengers stand up. These ferries are free, run by the city. “That,”

said the policeman at the wheel, “is for Aberdonians [people from

Aberdeen]. They come down here on a holiday and ride back and forth all

day.”

All the world makes a byword of the Scotsman’s thriftiness, but in

Scotland itself they blame it all on people from Aberdeen.

And while we’re on the point, I notice in Glasgow that your Scottish

friends insist on paying for the first ones, and they always say, “No

sir, you can’t pay for anything in Scotland.”

* * * * *

The River Clyde is not very wide, but on its two banks for several

miles downriver is probably the greatest concentration of shipbuilding

in the world.

One great shipbuilding yard after another--you can’t begin to count the

number of ships under construction. They run all the way from the mere

ribworks of ships being started, which resemble dinosaur skeletons, on

up to ships ready to be launched in a few days. And at the docks there

is ship after ship, already launched but without superstructure yet,

going through the process of being fitted for sea.

Several things impressed me about these shipyards. One was that ships

look smaller in stocks than in the water. Another was that the stocks,

instead of being at right angles to the river bank, were all built

slantwise. That is because the river is so narrow the ships would scoot

clear across the river on being launched and ram the other bank. So

they set the stocks slantwise and launch the ships to slide upriver.

Stocks from which a ship was launched yesterday will have the keel of a

new one started today.

From the river, the stocks where the _Queen Mary_ and _Queen Elizabeth_

were built don’t look big enough to take a tramp steamer.

The stocks of a shipyard, instead of being a great permanent thing

like a drydock, look scant and temporary, more like a high corral

fence, except that huge movable cranes tower over each of them. Seen

at a distance, this vast mass of cranes gives you the same feeling of

density that the oil-well derricks do around Long Beach, California.

We were on the river for two hours. As we chugged back to our little

dock I thought to myself: Yes, Britannia still rules the seas. And I

also thought: But what about after the war--when all of these giant

stocks stand empty, and instead of the miles-long rattle of riveting

hammers there is a dead silence, and the thousands of men haunt the

pubs for lack of anything else to do? What about the “Red Clyde” then?

* * * * *

After the river tour I had nothing to do for a couple of hours, so I

took the opportunity to see “The Great Dictator,” which is now showing

all over Britain. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The theater

was a big one, but it was packed. It made you feel that the war wasn’t

real.

I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the picture, and when Chaplin made his

much discussed speech at the end it somehow made me embarrassed. People

know all that over here already; that’s what they’ve been fighting

about for a year and a half; it seemed superfluous.

But the people of Glasgow cheered it heartily.

* * * * *

At Clydebank I made some new friends and spent an evening with them.

They are good, normal, intelligent, Scottish working people. Their name

is Roberts. They live in a brick-row house in a wide suburban street.

They are a family of seven--a grandfather, his three grown children, a

son-in-law and two little grandbabies.

William Roberts, the head of the house, was a needle straightener in a

sewing-machine factory, but he is retired now. I never knew before that

there was such a thing as a needle straightener.

Greta, the youngest daughter, now works in that same factory, but it

doesn’t make sewing machines any more--it makes munitions.

Willie, the son, used to work in the shipyards, but has tried to better

himself through much study, reading and thinking. He works for the

government now, making talks about war aims all over the country. The

family laughs and calls him “The Professor.” He farms a small allotment

in a park a few blocks away.

The son-in-law is a plater in the shipyards.

Like good average people anywhere, the Robertses say what they think,

and it isn’t all in praise of the government. They are right in

the midst of the details of war work, and details that are wrong

loom large to them. They see inefficiency and waste and floundering

organization, and they come right out with it. They sound just like

people at home.

Greta said to me: “Do you suppose America will come in at the last

minute again, and say she won the war?” Yet in spite of that crack we

got along famously.

Greta once worked in London for three months; her greatest desire is to

see Hawaii.

Her brother and I were a little late getting home, and we missed

supper. So Greta threw together a snack of fried eggs and sausage. The

rest of the family sat in front of the fireplace while we ate.

There was a jar of jelly on the table. I took some onto my plate and

began putting it on some bread.

“Wait,” Greta called, “that’s jelly.”

“Sure, I know it is,” I said.

“But you’re putting it on your bread!” she exclaimed.

“Of course,” I said. “What should I do with it?”

“Why we eat it for dessert,” she said. “I never heard of putting jelly

on bread with your meal.”

She laughed every time I took a bite.

No American had ever been in the Roberts’ home before, and I think I

amused them a great deal. They said I talked with a drawl just like

the cowboys in the movies. Greta said she really expected me to go

“Yippee!” every once in a while.

The Roberts family has an Anderson shelter back of the house. They have

fixed it up with electric lights and a heater, but they have never had

to use it. They appreciate the fact that they’ve been lucky, and they

don’t count on the luck lasting. They are ready for a raid when it

comes, and they expect one.

At the fireside we got to discussing Mr. Churchill. Back in America

I suppose we hear Churchill’s name mentioned a dozen times a day, but

when we started talking about him here it suddenly occurred to me that

I had heard his name mentioned very seldom in England. I don’t know

why that is, for Britain idolizes him and certainly is behind him to a

man. Yet they don’t talk much about him, and I never yet have heard him

referred to as “Winnie.”

I thought the Roberts’ feeling about Churchill was very revealing. All

their critical talk about production and speed and British methods of

warfare and so forth was just good democracy expressing itself. But

their talk about Churchill showed where their real feelings lay.

The son-in-law, sitting on a couch, shook his head and said: “I don’t

know what would happen to us if we lost Churchill.”

And the father, in a deep chair by the fire, said: “Yes, it would be

bad. He’s the man who pulled us together.”

By then it was midnight and the last bus was about due, so I said

good-bye and felt my way out into the Scottish night.

_6. DEFENSE IN DEPTH_

_Paisley, Scotland,

February, 1941_

This is the city that used to make Paisley shawls. It wasn’t until I

came here that I discovered genuine Paisley shawls haven’t been made in

sixty years. That is, real hand-woven ones.

But America still knows this city, at least indirectly; for as one

person expressed it, “Nearly all the buttons that hold up the pants of

America are sewed on with thread from Paisley.”

This is a great textile city, but it is neither shawls nor thread that

I’m going to write about. It is the Home Guard.

You have heard about Britain’s Home Guard, the civilian army which has

sprung to arms to make an invasion of Britain impossible. There are

today something like 1,700,000 men in the Home Guard, which came into

existence in May, 1940. At first their organization was flabby and

almost without direction. Today they are well equipped and well trained

and, I can assure you, very formidable men.

They are here literally to defend their homes. Every city, town and

village has its Home Guard. They drill, and practice marksmanship, and

study plans. They are ready for whatever comes.

Today the whole force is uniformed. The uniform is brown, just like

the regular army’s, but they wear white armbands with the words “Home

Guard.” This may be abandoned, however, for in case of invasion the

Germans could spot them too easily.

A large percentage of the Home Guard are World War veterans.

Practically all the members have daytime jobs.

As we sat around a Home Guard post at night, drinking late tea, I asked

the men around me what work they were in. There were three salesmen,

an architect, a billposter and his assistant, a school janitor, a

preacher, a truck driver, a schoolteacher and a lawyer.

The Paisley Home Guard has a strength of several thousand men. Every

so often each man is on duty all night. He spends most of his duty

night in cleaning guns, studying military tactics, and maybe drilling.

There are a few cots, and the ones who have to go to work early in the

morning are allowed to snatch a few winks. But for two hours every

night each man is actually out in the dark patrolling--looking for

parachutists or anything suspicious.

This patrol is maintained all over Britain by the Home Guard, every

night, all night. They patrol in strength, so that if they should spot

a German landing party one man could run back and give the alarm while

the others held off the attackers until help came.

The Home Guard is essentially a deep-line defense. The way Britain

figures it, the Navy and the Air Force are the first lines of defense

against invasion. If Germany should break through these, behind them on

the land is Britain’s now formidable regular army and an intricate maze

of defenses that would astound you. The fourth line of defense is the

Home Guard, whose duty is to prevent infiltration by the enemy back of

the front lines--the thing that has destroyed so many other countries.

They estimate that a planeload of parachutists, with everything planned

perfectly, could jump out over Britain at night, collect into a group

after landing and be ready with bicycles and machine guns to go into

action within fifteen minutes. It is the Home Guard’s job to see that

they are spotted and wiped out before the fifteen minutes are up, or,

failing in that, to hold them up until the regular army arrives on the

scene.

They say there is no spot in Britain, no matter how isolated, that

cannot be reached in force by the regular army within an hour.

Every street and every country road in all Britain is patrolled

throughout the night by the Home Guard.

I have a friend who was driving along an east-coast road one night. It

was isolated, bleak and lonesome country. He stopped for a moment on

personal business, and stood looking toward the sea. Then he drove on a

few miles, and stopped at a pub for a drink. While he was in the pub a

Home Guardsman came up and required him to identify himself. Somebody

had seen him out there in the darkness.

“And suppose,” my friend asked, “suppose I hadn’t stopped at this pub

for a drink. What would you have done?”

“You wouldn’t have got four miles,” the guardsman replied. “You’re

being watched for right now at every crossroad in every direction from

here.”

* * * * *

The Home Guard which was not even in existence less than a year ago,

today is well equipped.

Most of the Guard’s arms have come from America. In one post I saw

American rifles and machine guns. The Guard is well supplied with

hand grenades. And the countryside is a network of tank traps and

obstructions that even the local people don’t see or recognize.

Provincial England is determined that the Germans shall not pass.

Of course there is some good democratic bellyaching against the

government, and derision about mistakes. There are thousands of

hot-stove-league fighters who know how to run the war better. There

are some shirkers, and no doubt even a few fifth columnists. And yet I

suppose there never has been a nation more unanimous in its mind than

Britain is now. If she ever stumbles in this war, I feel absolutely

certain that it will not be by the immoral Quisling route.

* * * * *

Among the soldiers of Britain, and even among the bombed people of

London, I have found very few who hate the Germans with the frenzy

of World War days. But these middle-aged Home Guardsmen do. Most of

them carry over their hate from the last war, and it is intensified

by resentment at having to do the job all over again. It is further

intensified by the fact that now they’re fighting for their own homes

and families, right in their own streets and their own fields and

pastures.

In Home Guard posts you hear the terms “Boche” and “Hun” more often

than you hear “Jerry.” The Home Guardsmen say they intend to take no

prisoners. They say they intend to use their bayonets when they get

that close.

I don’t know whether it has been definitely settled which is the

stronger--steel or a man’s spirit. I only know that Britain’s Home

Guard is armed with a state of mind that is likely to make parachuting

a very unpleasant calling.

* * * * *

No doubt you’ve read that when the invasion comes the church bells will

ring all over Britain. We were talking about this the other night at a

Home Guard post, and as we talked I realized I had not heard a church

bell since I came to England. It is, in fact, against the law to ring

a church bell today in Britain. They’ve even stopped firing the famous

one o’clock gun from the castle in Edinburgh, a custom there longer

than anyone can remember.

Recently in one district of Paisley they had a surprise mobilization of

the Home Guard at 6 A.M., which was long before daylight. Nobody but

the leaders knew about it ahead of time.

They didn’t ring bells. They just passed the word along from house to

house. And with no prearrangement or warning at all, fifty men out of

the membership of fifty-three in this section were at their stations

inside of fifteen minutes.

I talked to a Home Guardsman who is sixty years old and has seven

service medals. He has fought in Egypt, India and Africa. He was in

the Boer War and the first World War. Now he is a billposter by day and

a guardsman by night. On the side he is an informer for the Ministry of

Information. And he has a son who went through Dunkirk. He just hopes

the Germans will come--that’s all he hopes.

* * * * *

I sat until 3 A.M. in front of a glowing fireplace with David McQueen,

a Presbyterian minister here in Paisley.

The Church of Scotland, you know, is Presbyterian; and it used to be a

part of the State. Presbyterian ministers here are highly educated in

the classics. When you sit with Mr. McQueen you are sitting with a man

of intellect.

Mr. McQueen is in the war. He has raised thousands of pounds for

soldiers’ entertainment. His church runs a canteen for the troops

stationed here. Wounded R.A.F. fliers come to live with him in his

manse, to recuperate. And Mr. McQueen is a private in the Home Guard.

They wanted to make him a padre for the Guard but he wouldn’t do it. He

said that if they did that then they should make the pipe organist a

bandsman, and no band is needed. So on every duty night David McQueen,

Presbyterian minister, is out in the dark fields in uniform, patrolling

up and down, looking for Germans.

When his turn falls on Saturday night, he has to go right to church

Sunday morning without a wink of sleep, and preach two sermons. He says

he has to keep the church cold in order not to fall asleep while he’s

talking.

That’s the Home Guard for you.

_VIII. MURDER IN THE MIDLANDS_

_1. TRAIN TALK_

_On a Train in England,

February, 1941_

You can go from Scotland back to London, some 400 miles, on an

overnight sleeper. Or you can take a sleeper to the industrial

Midlands, which is where I’m going.

English sleepers are much pleasanter than most of ours. Every berth

is in a separate compartment. It has a washbowl, plenty of mirrors,

baggage racks, shelves, and room enough for a circus giant to undress.

The compartment is air-conditioned, and you can keep warm and have

fresh air all night without opening a window. If two people are

traveling together they get two compartments with a connecting door.

When the conductor awakens you in the morning he does so with a tray of

hot tea and a package of cakes.

They say that before the war it was unheard of for one Englishman

to speak to another on a train. But the war has broken that down. I

have now made five trips by train, and only on one of them was I in a

compartment where people didn’t talk.

It is now quite good manners for men in uniform to start talking to

each other. A question about some detail of traveling usually opens the

conversation.

And as for me, after I’ve said a few words one of my fellow passengers

is always sure to ask if I’m from Canada. I say no, America, and then

we are off. They are all interested to know what the American public

is feeling about the war. But I tell them I don’t know, since sentiment

apparently has changed since I left the States.

You’d be surprised how much they know about us in Scotland. I was

actually ashamed, for I met hardly a Scotsman who didn’t know twice as

much American history as I do.

This new familiarity on the train is still a little hard for some

aristocrats. The higher they go in the scale, the less talking they do.

The other evening I was in the dining compartment of a train, along

with two naval officers, an army colonel and a Polish officer--all

obviously gentlemen. And from the time I went in until I was having

coffee more than an hour later, not a word was spoken by any of us six

men sitting there beside each other.

Finally, toward the end, one of the naval officers offered the other a

cigarette, and then offered one to me. We took a few puffs, and I said

it was a good cigarette. The other naval officer said he liked it too.

That was the sum total of that evening’s conversation.

But between York and Newcastle I was in a compartment with a

middle-aged civilian, an officer of the merchant marine and a very

young commissioned officer of the Fusiliers, and we talked our heads

off.

The civilian said he had traveled this thirty-mile stretch of railroad

every day for twenty years. He lived in one town and worked at a

factory in another. The night before he had been roof-spotting at his

factory.

The merchant-marine officer was serving in convoys around the British

Isles. He had been in Baltimore, Florida and Los Angeles, and said he’d

like to live in America five or six years, but not permanently.

The young army officer was more than six feet tall, but looked as if

he should have been in high school. Yet he was a veteran of Dunkirk,

and he told us about those hectic days. He said he went two days and

nights without sleep or food, but didn’t miss either of them.

We were riding through a blizzard, and the train was nine hours late.

These two men had been on the train eighteen hours without anything to

eat, and they were about starved. The young fellow said he never got

half as hungry at Dunkirk as he was now.

Both of these young men had been through stuff on land and sea where

their lives for the moment were not worth a dime. Yet the thing that

seemed to impress them most about the war was the way London takes the

bombing. They had both been there on leave, and they said they could

hardly believe the way London stands up to it.

Also we got to talking about conscientious objectors. They’re called

“conchies” over here. These two young fellows in uniform were

completely tolerant of the conchies. They felt that if a fellow was

sincere he should be allowed to do some kind of nonmilitary work.

The young officer ran out of cigarettes and kept smoking ours and

apologizing. When the civilian got to his station he said good-bye and

got off, but in a moment he was back pounding at the window. We opened

it, and he handed the young officer a package of cigarettes.

The English are really proud of each other. Half a dozen times when

I’ve been talking to strangers they’ve got off on the general subject

of how Britain pulled herself together. And half a dozen times I’ve

heard this same expression:

“They said we were decadent, and soft from easy living and the desire

for peace. But I guess we’re not decadent yet.”

_2. FACTORIES--EVERYWHERE_

_Birmingham,

February, 1941_

This is a city of more than a million people--the second largest city

in England.

Since it is a manufacturing city, the Germans have tried to give

it the works. They have made scars, but they haven’t been able to

obliterate Birmingham. The city is damaged in about the same proportion

as London’s West End, which is bad, but not bad enough for Hitler’s

purposes. Up to the moment, Birmingham is not a city that will have

to be rebuilt after the war. It is a city that will just have to be

patched up.

Birmingham has big factories, but it is also noted for its little ones.

It is a city wherein the small individual plant still lives--where

craftsmanship is a virtue. There are more than 2000 factories in

Birmingham. That’s why Hitler would almost have to wipe out the city

before he could put Birmingham’s production out of business.

Practically all of these factories are making something for the war. I

went to visit one small plant. It was in a darkish old brick building,

covering about an eighth of a block. Hitler could never find it unless

he sent a man on a bicycle to ask a policeman.

Tom Waterhouse is owner and manager of this plant. It is what we at

home would call a machine shop. And it is small industry at its best.

There are only twenty-five employees, and their average service in this

same concern is twenty-five years. As I went through the shop I asked

the first four men I came to how long they had been with the company,

and the answers were thirty-five, thirty-seven, forty and forty-five

years.

“What do you make here?” I asked Mr. Waterhouse.

He laughed and said, “We make whatever nobody else wants to make.

We make hundreds of crazy things--special parts for guns and marine

engines and so on. There is no mass production here. Every piece is a

special piece for a special purpose, and they’re made practically by

hand.”

Mr. Waterhouse’s office is full of age, and of things stacked up.

On the walls hang half a dozen stuffed fish. Mr. Waterhouse says he

just lives to fish. For thirty years he has been head of the biggest

fresh-water fishing society in the world. He is the czar of 40,000

English fishermen.

If you think war doesn’t affect the average person--well, Mr.

Waterhouse has not had time to go fishing since the war started.

On a window ledge is a row of shrapnel and bomb fragments and nose-caps

off bombs. These were all picked up right around the plant. “We used to

make quite a point of collecting them,” Mr. Waterhouse says, “but now

they’re so common we don’t even keep them.”

Most of the Waterhouse employees are Home Guardsmen or air-raid wardens

in their home suburbs, and all of them take turns as roof spotters at

the plant. Mr. Waterhouse takes his turn with them.

He has kept a diary ever since the war started. In it he notes the

weather for each day, the number and severity of raids, and the big

news of the day. He sees the war as concerned with only one thing--the

right to live in a country where you can say what you think and do

whatever you damn please.

“Hell, man!” he said. “You couldn’t even knock off to go fishing, under

Hitler.”

* * * * *

Back home I know people have wondered how it could possibly be true

that England is getting along with her factory production when Hitler

has such a vast air armada and such a little distance to fly it, and

when England is so small and congested and easy to hit. I’ve wondered

myself.

Well, for one thing, England is not so small as you might think. It

is as far from Lands End, on the southwest, to John O’Groat’s, on

the north, as it is from New York to Chicago. And crosswise, at the

average, England is more than 200 miles wide. You can sprinkle a lot of

factories over that much territory, and Britain has sprinkled them.

If they have 2000 factories in Birmingham--which they have--then

they have tens of thousands in other places. They are practically

everywhere. If Germany knew where they all were, and could send planes

over unopposed in the daytime to destroy them, it would take months

just to pick them out and blow them up. But with daylight bombing

completely whipped, and small spots impossible to find at night, and

with even the terrific all-night blitzes getting only a fraction of

the factories in a congested area, and with a smooth system of quick

repairs to damaged factories--well, Britain has been able to go right

on manufacturing through it all.

_3. BLITZKISS IN COVENTRY_

_Coventry,

February, 1941_

Coventry represents to Americans, and to most Englishmen too, the

all-out one-night blitz at its worst. Many other cities have been

blitzed since then, but Coventry remains the No. 1 example in our minds.

The Coventry blitz occurred on the night of November 14, 1940. I have

read a great deal about it, and have seen many pictures of it. Further,

I have seen so much hideous damage in London that you could no longer

call me an amateur at viewing wreckage. Yet when we drove into Coventry

I was horrified.

We walked and drove around Coventry for three hours. And late in the

afternoon I realized that I had been saying to myself half out loud,

saying it over and over again like a chant: “My God, this is awful!”

The center of Coventry is in ruins. All of the hotels are gone. A big

newspaper office is a jumble of wilted presses and linotype machines,

with twisted steel girders sagging among them. There are not many

public eating places left. You can stand on what used to be a main

corner in downtown Coventry, and in three directions see nothing

but waste. You can walk down what was a street but now you walk in

ankle-deep mud. You would barely recognize it as a street. On each side

tractors and cranes and men with blowtorches are untangling and hauling

away twisted girders and mingled rubble.

* * * * *

Nobody has been able to put that night of Coventry’s into words.

The noise was fiendish. It seemed that the entire city was burning

down. They say the final death toll was a little over 500. It seems

almost impossible that the loss of life should have been no more

than that. For Coventry is a city of a quarter of a million people.

That means that only one out of 500 was killed. The only reason many

thousands of others didn’t lie dead the next morning is that they took

to the shelters.

The city had two mass burials, with more than 200 bodies in each. And

such is Coventry’s opinion of the Germans that they kept the time of

the funerals secret, for fear of a blitz directed at the mourners.

Other dead were buried privately by their families.

Scores of bodies were unidentified. The only way the death of some of

the people was known was from the fact that their families never saw

them again. I feel certain that they will still be finding bodies in

Coventry long after the war is over, when the final removal of tumbled

debris is undertaken.

Daylight found Coventry in a daze. I have friends in Birmingham who

were here by dawn. As they drove into town they found people leaving

the city by any means at hand. My friends say the look of horror in the

faces of these people was something they can never forget. Everyone was

stunned. You could ask a simple question and they either did not know

the answer or would just stare at you. Their minds seemed dead.

What brought people out of this, and back to life again, was two

things. One was the visit of the King, who came on the second morning.

He came unannounced, and only a few people were around when he arrived,

but the word spread quickly. And somehow the realization that the King

was there among them startled the people out of their stupor and they

were actually able to cheer.

The second thing was the prodding into action by city leaders. An

emergency council was immediately formed. A local “Churchill,” a man

who had never held office, just walked into the breach and started

orders flying while others stood by helpless. Loudspeaker trucks and

handbills spread the command that Coventry had to be cleaned up. And it

was this getting people into action again--even though the action was

merely throwing brickbats from one pile onto another--that jerked their

spirits back into circulation and started the stream of life flowing

once again in Coventry.

We walked through a street that was a no man’s land. Utter destruction

lay on both sides. One side had been brick houses, the other side a

warehouse. Now both sides were just piles of broken brick.

We turned into an alley that had been cleared. A jumble of bricks had

been pushed back from the line of the alley, and a little picket fence

built around them. The fence was newly painted green.

Back in the alley we found J.B. Shelton. He is living in a brick

lean-to about the size of a double bed. It used to be a washhouse, and

it has a fireplace at one end.

“J.B.” hunted around for a couple of boards and laid them across

boxes for us to sit on. The debris we had just passed used to be J.B.

Shelton’s house and office. In fact, he had owned four houses in a row.

They all make one big heap now.

At the edge of the rubble a twisted iron bed sticks out beyond the line

of wreckage and gets in the way of the picket fence J.B. is building

around his ruins. Since the bed lies in such a way that he can’t get

it out from the rubble, he is sawing off the protruding ends with a

hacksaw so his new picket fence will fit evenly along the line of

destruction!

J.B. Shelton is a case. He is not very young, except in enthusiasm. He

wears leather leggings, and a funny kind of celluloid collar with no

tie, and an old cap. He laughs and talks, and it is hard to get him

stopped.

He is a draying contractor, but his life interest is archaeology.

In fact, he is Coventry’s official archaeologist, although this is

merely a job of love and no pay. For years he has been digging up old

Roman relics around Coventry. He says the blitz bombs have unearthed

wonderful things for him. He is, I believe, the only man in Coventry

who is authorized to poke in the ruins anywhere he wants to without

getting arrested for looting.

He had a museum of Roman things back there in his alley. It is all

shattered and waterlogged now, and many of his prize pieces lie in the

mud on the floor. But still he stands there amid the debris and points

at an old log and launches into its Roman origins. You’d think you were

in a Harvard lecture room instead of standing in an alley in Coventry

where you can’t see a whole building in any direction.

Finally we got him shunted away from his archaeological talk and onto

the night of the disaster.

“Where were you that night?” I asked.

“Where was I?” he said. “I was right here, right here in this alley,

running up and down all night long.”

And then J.B. Shelton went into action. He made that night almost as

clear as if we were living through it.

“My house was already afire, so I just tried to save the stables,” he

said. His five horses were tied in their stalls in a frame building

running along the alley back of the house.

“All night I was running up and down the side of these stables, like

this, throwing water on the boards. I got the water out of that open

tank there.

“Every once in a while a new place would catch. I’d get it out, and

then the hay would be on fire. I’d get it out, and then some sacks of

oats would be on fire.

“Around midnight I got the horses all out. They took it fine. I had

sacks ready to put over their heads, but only had to do that on one of

them. I took them out two at a time so they wouldn’t be scared. I got

them all out and tied them to trees in that open space back there at

the end. Then I had to come back and go after these fires again.”

Running up and down and throwing water, with incendiaries and heavy

bombs and sparks and timbers falling around him, all night long--all

this to save an old clapboard stable that isn’t worth fifty dollars!

“Say, it was hot there, mister!” Shelton said. “Sparks were falling

just like rain. See all these holes in my old coat? That’s where sparks

fell on me.

“When I’d hear a big one coming I’d go down like this.” And to

illustrate he dropped flat on his stomach in the cold mud of the alley.

“The noise was terrific,” he said. “All night long the planes were

diving right down on top of us. That warehouse there was all afire,

and the sparks were a-flying. Say, I’ll never see anything like it

again. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world. Say, it was

wonderful!”

And I suppose that if you have the divine gift of looking fully upon

life and serenely upon death, such a night really would be wonderful.

* * * * *

Drive out of Coventry today in any direction and on the outskirts of

town you’ll see vast fields solidly covered with dumped truckloads of

brickbats and rubble. As a Coventry friend of mine said, “There are

probably more second-hand bricks here today than anywhere else in the

world.”

While the downtown wreckage is being cleaned up and hauled away, most

of Coventry’s ruins will have to lie where they are until peace comes.

Coventry will not look like a normal city again until many years after

the war.

No complete rebuilding is allowed now. But the city is already throwing

up little one-story frame buildings with slanting roofs--much like

chicken coops--to be used as temporary shops by the merchants who were

blasted out.

Coventry is carrying on as best it can. Everybody is back at work, but

few people are living normally. A good portion of the population are

living in single rooms salvaged from shattered homes.

For three days after the blitz all of Coventry lived on sandwiches

carried around in mobile canteens. After that, communal kitchens were

set up to provide hot food. Rationing was discontinued, but has now

been resumed.

There is plenty of food in the shops now, but the shops are so few that

there are always long lines of people waiting to get in.

Once more the beautiful girls of Coventry (and I mean beautiful) grace

the streets. And best of all, the dog races have started again. The

profits go to the relief of Coventry’s bomb victims.

* * * * *

If you get a chance to see the short film, “This Is Britain,” which is

now showing in America, I hope you’ll go. And when you do, look for a

Coventry woman named Pearl Hyde. She makes a little speech in the film.

Well, I know Pearl Hyde. She is one of Coventry’s greatest heroines.

She has just been decorated with the Order of the British Empire for

her bravery.

Hers was not just a frenzied gallantry of the moment. It was a coolness

and tirelessness that lasted ten days and nights on end, almost without

sleep.

Pearl Hyde is head of the Coventry branch of the Women’s Voluntary

Services. It was Pearl Hyde who fed and clothed and cheered and really

saved the people of Coventry after the blitz. For more than a week she

plowed around in the ashes of Coventry, wearing policeman’s pants. She

never took off her clothes. She was so black they could hardly tell her

from a Negro.

Her Women’s Voluntary Services headquarters was bombed out, so she and

her women moved across the street. Her own home was blown up, and even

today she still sleeps in the police station.

Pearl Hyde is a huge woman, tall and massive. Her black hair is cut

in a boyish bob. And she has personality that sparkles with power and

good nature. She is much better looking than in the film. And she is

laughing all the time.

She was just ready to dash off somewhere when I went in to see her,

but she tarried a few minutes to tell me how good the Americans had

been with donations. She talked past her time. Suddenly she looked at

her watch and jumped up in a great rush. I held out my hand by way of

good-bye, but instead of shaking hands Pearl Hyde grabbed my frail

shoulders in her great hands and said: “Here’s a kiss for America.” And

she smacked me a big one right on the face.

As little loath as I am to be embraced by the feminine gender any time,

any place, I was rendered stone dumb by this sudden attack. I stood

there speechless and blushing as Heroine Hyde strode away with great

long steps and all her fellow women workers stood laughing with delight.

And so, when one of these days I step into a homeward-bound plane I

will carry as souvenirs of this shattered city a couple of small pieces

of broken tile, a mental picture of destruction that can never be

erased, and last but best--a large, ample Coventry blitzkiss.

_4. NOTES ON THE CUFF_

_Warwick,

March, 1941_

This is a small and ancient city on the banks of the River Avon. It is

just ten miles from Stratford-on-Avon, the immortal home of Shakespeare.

I ducked in here for a week-end in the hope of writing some ageless

literature while under the spell of Shakespeare. But the hotel thought

we were still living in The Bard’s time, and consequently I spent the

week-end in bed with a hot-water bottle. If you mention the word heat

around here they report you to the police as a suspicious character.

After breakfast I fled outdoors and walked around town for an hour

just to get warmed up. Motor travelers were passing through town, and

within ten minutes two cars pulled alongside me to ask directions. One

driver wanted to know how to get to Stratford. The other asked the way

to Kenilworth. I didn’t know, so I merely replied, “Brother, I’ve even

forgotten the way to New York.” In each case the motorist drove quickly

on, looking back as though he thought I was touched in the head, and

possibly even subversive.

* * * * *

Being too cold to think, I thought I would just put down a few tag ends

of the last few weeks, which have stuck in my mind.

For one thing, here is a little item about the old tradition that

Scotsmen are so tight. Well, back in November the government sent out

a frantic call for all citizens to turn in binoculars, as they were

needed in the armed forces. You could either donate, lend or sell them

to the government. And up to date the proportion of binoculars donated

outright to the government is three times as great in Scotland as in

England!

The three most popular entertainers who ever visited Glasgow are Harry

Lauder, John McCormack and Gene Autry.

* * * * *

Of the things I brought with me from America, the wisest of all was

a pair of galoshes. I have worn them almost constantly for the past

month, and I think I would be dead without them. For some reason they

don’t have galoshes in England. I’ll bet thirty people have commented

on my pair and said they wished they could get some.

* * * * *

English hotels all start their day at noon. Consequently it is

possible--and has actually happened to me--to stay only one night at a

hotel and yet be forced to pay for two nights.

* * * * *

There is a saying all over England that the safest place to be during

a raid is in a church spire, and I am beginning to believe it. I have

seen dozens of wrecked churches but I don’t remember one whose steeple

wasn’t still standing.

* * * * *

One funny thing about blitzed cities--you always see, either lying

around or stuck on a pole by some jocular workman, a naked wax dummy

from a store window. There was one in Coventry on top of a steel post

stuck in a pile of jumbled brick right in the center of town. In

another town I saw a dummy propped up on the sidewalk, and a local man

said they had found the dummy’s foot two blocks away.

* * * * *

I haven’t heard a warning siren since leaving London, but people tell

me the sirens sound exactly the same all over Britain.

* * * * *

A very friendly lady who has donated her car and her driving services

to the government drove me down here from Birmingham. There are

thousands of such women in Britain. This particular one was a Mrs.

Matty, and I mention it because she has a sister named Mrs. James Cruse

who lives in Denver.

* * * * *

In Britain you never hear the war of 1914-18 spoken of as the World

War. They always say “the last war.”

The other day a newspaper proposed that we call the last one “German

War 1, and this one German War 2, and just keep on numbering them in

the future until we run out of numbers.”

* * * * *

England likes to tell jokes on the regimented minds of its

civil-service employees. They say this one is true: In order to get

onto an R.A.F. station you have to have a special pass, which is

usually a small slip of pink paper. So the other day a girl of the

Women’s Auxiliary Air Force received an order from Whitehall which

said, “Report to R.A.F. station such-and-such at 10 A.M. and show your

pink form.”

* * * * *

If it weren’t for the soldiers on the streets and the one lump of sugar

for your coffee, it would be hard to realize a war was on when you

visit many of England’s small cities and towns which have never known

the crunch of a bomb.

In the provinces, policemen still wear fore-and-aft hats instead of

steel helmets.

* * * * *

A lady from America writes and wants to know if I am wearing a

correspondent’s uniform. The answer is no. The only ones who wear

uniforms are those accredited to the army. There are only a few of

these.

As for me, I feel silly enough carrying a tin hat and a gas mask around

the provinces, let alone appearing in a uniform.

_IX. YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ANYTHING_

_1. THE WAR IN WALES_

_Cardiff,

March, 1941_

The very first sight that greets you as you walk out of the railroad

station in Cardiff is the city’s big municipal stadium. It sits quite

alone, surrounded by a grassy park. It is like some of the fine

stadiums at home, with a great steel-trussed grandstand, roofed over.

It cost a lot of money, and the people of Cardiff have packed it on big

soccer and rugby days.

But Cardiff should have known better than to erect this deadly war

machine right out in the open, for you can’t fool Hitler. He knows all

about the airplanes and tanks and battleships they’ve been building out

there on the cricket field. And so he has blown their stadium all to

hell.

Outside of that, you don’t see much bomb damage around Cardiff. If you

were to set out deliberately on a “damage tour” you could pick out

quite a total of wrecked houses and burned stores; but if you are just

wandering around like a tourist the bomb wreckage doesn’t stare you in

the face around every corner.

The sizes of British cities are always amazing me. Cardiff, for

instance, is a city of a quarter of a million people. And did you ever

hear of Newport? I’m sure I never did. Well, it’s only ten miles from

Cardiff, and its population is 100,000.

Wales, as you know, forms the west central part of Britain. It is noted

for its coal mines, and somewhat for the bad condition of its miners.

And Wales is mountainous. To my surprise I have found that there are

mountains on this island rising as high as 3000 to 4000 feet, but

the mountainous sections are thinly populated. The bulk of Wales’s

population of more than two million is settled along the southern coast.

The Welsh people look and dress very much the same as Americans. They

are noted as singers, but I’ve not heard anybody singing in Cardiff.

You see an amazing number of bicycles here. Late in the evening, when

people are on their way home from work, you can hardly cross the street

for the bicycles.

I had supposed that Cardiff was a grimy, smoky city, bearing the marks

of the coal-mining industry. To my amazement, it turned out to be light

and clean, much more so than most English cities. The streets are wide,

there are vast parks and lovely buildings, and as you go around you

pick up a feeling that Cardiff has everything in hand.

Cardiff is full of defenses. More street obstructions are noticeable

here than in most of the places I’ve visited. Every city seems to have

its own special type of street barricade with which to stop the German

invaders if they come. Public shelters are different in Cardiff, too.

Everywhere else the street shelters are made of a tan-colored brick,

but in Cardiff most of them are concrete.

There is very little public sheltering in basements here. The big

street shelters are preferred. In the residential sections these

shelters are built right in the middle of the street. In case the

bombing gets hot, people have only to run out their front doors and

halfway across the street.

I ran into something in Cardiff I had not seen in any other

city--automobiles driven by coal gas. The point is that gasoline is

rationed, and coal gas isn’t.

A huge canvas bag is installed on the roof of the car, and surrounded

with a railing. It looks like about five layers of featherbed. The only

change in the motor that’s necessary is a new top to the carburetor.

It’s all right as a makeshift, but not too satisfactory. For one

thing, it costs $120 to equip the car for coal gas. Then you don’t get

as much power as with gasoline. And that big bag has a terrific wind

resistance. When the gas gets low the bag flops around in the breeze.

Also, if there is a heavy snow or rain, the weight presses down on the

bag and forces gas into the carburetor too fast, making the engine

choke and backfire.

And worst of all, you look silly as hell driving down the street with

this balloon on top of you.

* * * * *

The WVS (Women’s Voluntary Services) has done excellent work in

Cardiff, as it has everywhere else.

I somehow managed to get myself into the good graces of the WVS

commander for all Wales. She turned out to be a beautiful, cultured

girl only two years out of a university. When I asked her how one so

young had risen so high, she said it was a mystery to her too. Her name

is typically Welsh--Eirwen Owen. She can even make a speech in Welsh if

she has to. She has some 8000 women under her, and she handles it all

with the utmost calm.

The WVS was anxious for me to know how much they appreciated the gifts

sent from America. They said they didn’t know how they would have

clothed all the bombed out people and poor evacuees who have come from

other sections if it hadn’t been for the American gifts.

We went around to one of their distributing sections, where half a

dozen women in green smocks were sorting out and repacking huge boxes

of stuff from America. It has been quite an education for them. They

read on the bills of lading such unknown items--to them--as slickers,

Mackinaws, and gum boots. They had never heard of these things by these

names. They open the big wooden boxes as though they were Christmas

packages--to see what a Mackinaw is. In most cases they are immensely

pleased; but one thing did stop them--union suits. They had never

heard of union suits. Over here nobody ever saw underwear all in one

piece before. In fact, when they went to distribute them, lots of

old-fashioned Welsh people refused to take them.

And while we’re on the subject of American gifts, maybe the merchants

of San Francisco would like to know that some of those boxes of

elaborate mechanical erector sets they sent over are now in Wales. They

got here too late for Christmas, but they’re being distributed now by

the women of the WVS, who think they’re the most wonderful things they

ever saw.

* * * * *

Once in a while German bombers come over Cardiff and drop propaganda

leaflets. The last time they did it the pamphlets were a translation

of one of Hitler’s speeches. The people of Cardiff consider this such

a great joke they collect them as souvenirs to keep after the war, and

they are actually peddled around for a shilling apiece.

* * * * *

Cardiff has 600 Belgian refugees. And to their eternal discredit, they

are making asses of themselves--demanding, complaining, pestering.

They are the crankiest people in a jam that Cardiff has ever had to

deal with.

* * * * *

I have been riding around Wales with a gentle Welshman by the name

of Eames whose wife is a first cousin of Chief Justice Hughes. Which

would make it a small world after all if I only happened to know Chief

Justice Hughes.

_2. MINER_

_Ebbw Vale,

March, 1941_

This is a coal-mining town of about 30,000 people in the hills of

Monmouthshire, near the border of Wales.

The altitude is only 900 feet here, but the hills roll in long, vast

ridges, and there are no trees; the snow lies deep on the ground,

whereas down on the coast it has all melted. You have a feeling of

great height here. All day long I had to pinch myself to realize I was

not somewhere in the Rockies, above timberline.

The coal miners in and near Wales have had tough going since the last

war. They are among Britain’s neediest people. And unlike the rest of

Britain, unlike most of the warring populations, the present conflict

hasn’t done their employment much good.

The reason lies in transportation. The railroads are tied up hauling

munitions, and they haul only such coal as is necessary. There’s no

real coal shortage in England, but nobody has any more than just

enough. And there’s no use digging coal if you can’t haul it away and

sell it. Consequently the mines aren’t working in any frenzy. The loss

of French markets was a blow too.

Ebbw Vale happens to be very prosperous at the moment, due to local

manufacturing which uses coal, but it is rather the exception. Western

Wales is still in the lower brackets of depression, and a good part

of its working population has gone to great factory centers such as

Birmingham and Manchester, seeking work.

* * * * *

I came to Ebbw Vale to see how close the war has come to the average

family over here in the hills. My “average man” turned out to be Henry

Powell. He lives in a two-story brick-row house on a sloping street.

Children were sliding down the street on sleds.

Henry Powell is seventy-one, and he is well preserved. He has spent

fifty years underground and it hasn’t hurt him. He retired from

coal-digging a couple of years ago, on a small pension, but is back at

work again now, for he wanted to do a little something in the war. They

have put him to cutting down timber supports in unused mine tunnels.

Henry Powell has a big family. There are eight in his house. His sister

lives next door, and there are half a dozen in her house. They are all

mixed up--children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and in-laws.

Mr. Powell owns his home. He started buying it when it was brand-new,

and moved into it the year after I was born, which was 39 years ago.

Mrs. Powell is dead now. Two of Mr. Powell’s sons were in the World War

and one of them was gassed. Some of his grandsons are already in the

Home Guard, awaiting their call-ups for the regular army.

Just before Mr. Powell quit the deep pits two years ago there

were three generations of his family working side by side in the

pits--himself, three sons and three grandsons.

Mr. Powell feels that he has done pretty well for a miner. He has

bought his house, raised a big family, taken care of his relatives,

kept himself respectable, and has nothing to regret. His home is

comfortably and nicely furnished, and he himself is as neat and clean

as a whistle.

He has had only two holidays in his life. (Over here when they say

holiday they mean three or four weeks off in which to take a long

trip.) He has been to London a couple of times.

He doesn’t smoke, but for fifty years he has stopped for two pints of

beer on his way home from work every evening.

About the only way the Powells are directly affected by the war is

through the rationing of food. But they don’t suffer for anything.

There are some shelters in Ebbw Vale, but the Powells have never been

in them. All in all, life is not a great deal different for them from

what it was in peacetime, and they themselves, in truth, are not much

different from Americans.

_3. NO MAN’S LAND_

_Bristol,

March, 1941_

It was midafternoon when I got off the train. We had come through the

long tunnel under Bristol Channel, and the compartment had been full of

smoke. So I checked in at a hotel and went to my room to wash off the

soot.

It had been more than three weeks since I had heard a siren, a bomb

or a gun. After a lull like that, you actually get out of practice.

You drop your protective armor of expectancy. Thus it was that I was

standing there all relaxed in a quiet hotel room, washing my hands,

when all of a sudden there was the damnedest explosion I ever heard.

It shook the windows, and made the curtains puff, and to say that it

shook me would be a vast understatement of fact.

My first conclusion was that it was a sneak daytime raider, but still

it hadn’t sounded just like a bomb. So I sat down and tried to think.

I finally figured out that it must be dynamiters, blasting some unsafe

bombed walls just back of the hotel. And that’s what it was.

After my strength came back I called up some people to whom I had a

note, and arranged to meet them.

“Gee whiz,” I said when we got together, “Bristol has certainly been

knocked around. I didn’t know Bristol had had it this bad.”

“Why,” they said, “you haven’t seen anything. Come on.”

So we taxied to a certain corner where the street was blocked, and then

got out and walked. It was the worst day I have seen this winter. There

was a somber black rain that was nearly sleet, and a piercing wind that

cut through any kind of clothes.

And so, bent against the storm, we walked. Walked through streets where

on Saturday nights a hundred thousand people used to mill up and down,

but where today all was silent. For this part is now closed to the

public; you can enter only with credentials. It is a No Man’s Land.

This part of Bristol is just as bare and ruined and destroyed as any

1918 village in France that we used to see in pictures. In fact, it

looks exactly like those pictures. Only a few walls are left standing.

There is such an incongruous maze of hanging, twisted girders as I have

never seen elsewhere. Tearing it all apart and hauling it away will

surely be a greater job than building it in the first place.

Drive around Bristol, and all over the city you will find whole

blocks knocked down and burned up. And there is a general scattered

devastation that is staggering if you add it up.

My friends and I wandered like children back and forth amid this

strange land that used to be. I said almost nothing, for what was there

to say? I had never known that anything could actually be like this.

In the midst of our wanderings I saw a familiar figure coming toward

us. He was walking with a policeman down the middle of what had been a

street, and he was huddled deep in his coat against the bitter rain. I

knew the man well, yet so ghostly was the setting, and so strange this

place we inhabited, that I could not believe a human acquaintance of

mine could be there too, in the flesh, on such a weird, mystic day.

It was Gault Macgowan of the New York Sun. Neither of us knew the

other was in Bristol. I have not seen him since to talk it over, but I

believe he must have had the same strange feeling about me. For he came

up and looked at me for a long time, in a puzzled way, before he spoke.

We said a few words of surprise, and then walked on again in opposite

directions, on through a kind of world I hope America never sees.

I truly believe that if it were possible for you to come to Bristol

directly from America, arriving blindfolded so you could not accustom

yourself gradually by seeing lesser damage as you drove along, and let

me lead you to this vast blocked-off graveyard in Bristol and then

suddenly snatch off the blindfold and let the fury of the scene engulf

you all at once--I truly believe there is not one person out of ten,

man or woman, who would not stand there with tears in his eyes, and his

head bowed in anguish and despair.

In Bristol I met a man who is a “reader” in imperial history at the

University of Bristol. The great hall of the university, with its

lovely walls paneled in oak, stands just outside the professor’s

window, or rather did stand there before the fire bombs gutted it.

My history professor says the hall was the most beautiful thing he had

ever seen. To him its loss was the worst of all the blows that have

befallen Bristol. My professor is blind, but just the same he can see

these beautiful things that are now gone.

He invited me to come out to his apartment after dinner. His name is

Charles MacInnis, and there’s nothing professorish about him at all.

He said he couldn’t offer me anything to drink except whisky, beer

and wine. I told him not to worry, that we had to put up with these

hardships in wartime.

He insisted on sending a taxi for me, because it is hard to get taxis

at night in Bristol. The sirens sounded just before the taxi came. The

driver took me out in a hurry, for he was on roof-spotting duty at his

garage and he had to get right back. He wouldn’t have come at all if

the sirens had sounded before he started. He said he’d return for me

at ten-thirty if the all clear had sounded. If it hadn’t, I would just

have to wait.

Mr. MacInnis is a Canadian, from Calgary. He has always been blind.

Once he took a crack at newspaper work in Calgary. “But because I was

blind they thought I was religious,” he said, “so they put me on the

church notices. That’s all the newspaper work I ever did.”

In 1915 he finished school in Canada and came on to Oxford. When he

finished there, the University of Bristol offered him a job. He has

been here ever since. He is one of Bristol’s most active citizens. He

has written a book about Bristol, and he gave me a copy of it. He

married a Bristol girl, and they have a twelve-year-old boy who has now

been evacuated to the country with his grandparents.

The MacInnises have a nice six-room apartment with a center hallway, a

library, and a big sitting room at one end. We went into the sitting

room, and in the middle of the floor there stood a table with nine

wooden pins on it and a stick raised above, from which hung a wooden

ball on a string.

“Have you ever played table skittles?” Mr. MacInnis asked.

“I never even heard of it,” I said.

“Then you had better learn,” he said. “That’s what they play in the

pubs around here. Everybody plays it.”

So we played, and Mrs. MacInnis won both games.

“I like this game because it isn’t intellectual,” the professor said.

The all clear sounded as we were playing the second game.

“Do you have a shelter in the basement?” I asked.

“There is one,” Mr. MacInnis said, “but we’ve never been down.”

“Not even during those terrible all-night blitzes?”

“Not even then,” he said. “What’s the use? You might get buried. We

never stir from the apartment. You sort of get used to it.”

“How do your dogs take it?” I asked. They have two beautiful dogs, a

Samoyed and a cocker.

Mr. MacInnis laughed. “They don’t get frightened,” he said. “In fact,

they don’t seem to mind it at all, except for screaming bombs. One of

those screamers sounds like a cat howling, you know, and the dogs set

up an awful howl.”

The basement shelter has a gas-proof room for the dogs, in case gas

ever comes.

“I don’t want you to think I’m impertinent,” I said, “but can you

describe to me what a blind man’s conception is of the damage to

Bristol?”

“Well,” Mr. MacInnis said, “I’m sensitive to light, and when I walk

down the street I suddenly realize there is light at my side and I know

I am passing a building that isn’t there any more. I see it as piles of

brick, partly standing walls, charred timbers and twisted girders.”

And I realized that although he was using the same words of description

that I use, there was no possible way for him to tell me what he sees

in his mind, because piles of brick and charred timbers are only words

to him. He has never seen any.

Mr. MacInnis is a hard worker. He does voluntary work day and night. He

has a job that might best be described as that of a morale-keeper-up

for the blitzed and homeless of Bristol. He makes speeches, organizes

entertainments, helps people find homes, and gets better things for the

shelters. Everyone I met was full of praise for him.

He has lots of humor--a sort of sardonic humor. He thinks the funniest

war story is one that happened right at the university, and he heard it

himself. It seems that Kings College, a big medical school in London,

decided to evacuate to Bristol. All the professors arrived and held

their first meeting on the morning after Bristol had experienced one of

its worst blitzes and many scores of people lay dead.

“The meeting was very serious and businesslike,” Mr. MacInnis said.

“The professors were doubtful whether they could carry on normal

instructions here because transportation from London was not so good

and the new school was not properly equipped with corpses!”

The doorbell rang. The all clear having sounded, our taxi driver was

back on the dot. Mr. MacInnis ran ahead of me down two flights of

stairs and out the front door into the dark street to the taxi. And as

I groped my way behind him, it dawned on me that this vile blackout

which is scourging England today has no terrors at all for a man who is

blind. As the philosophers would say, there is recompense in everything.

_4. LONGSHORE PUB_

_Shirehampton,

March, 1941_

Last night I decided to do a little pub-crawling, to see if I could dig

up a piece of conversation among some longshoremen.

I have always thought of longshoremen as hard guys, quick to suspect

an outsider. So I sidled up to the bar sort of timidly. But these

longshoremen were so suspicious that before two minutes had passed I

had the life history of the fellow next to me, voluntarily. The problem

wasn’t getting him started, it was getting him stopped.

His name was “Nobby” Clark. In fact, all the Clarks in these parts

are called Nobby. This special Nobby lost a leg in the last war. His

brother was killed in France. His two sons are in the forces now. His

sister and a niece were killed by a bomb last fall. And now his own

house has been blown up, and he and his wife are living with friends.

“But Hitler won’t get me,” Nobby says. “I’m too tough and too lucky.

Here, wait a minute, a stranger can’t pay for his own here, and anyway

this is my birthday. Here’s to ol’ Hitler, bad luck to ’im!”

Well, that was a good start, so then we got to talking to Tom

Woolacombe and his brother-in-law. They are dock workers too.

The brother-in-law’s left arm was in a plaster cast. It seems he and

another fellow were sitting in front of their fireplace one night, and

everything was peaceful and quiet, and no raid was on, and all of a

sudden the whole side of the house, fireplace and all, leaped out and

fell on them.

The reason for this odd behavior on the part of the house was that

a time bomb had buried itself in the ground just outside, one night

earlier, and nobody knew about it till it went off. The boys said they

sure were surprised.

After a while Tom suggested that we walk up to his place, which was

just a couple of blocks. So we got two bottles of beer for his wife and

walked home in the moonlight. Mrs. Woolacombe was a little disconcerted

to see Tom home so early, and with a stranger too, and she obviously

wasn’t any too pleased about it. But after we talked a while everything

was all right.

The Woolacombes, to be blunt about it, have had a bellyful of this war.

As Mrs. Woolacombe puts it, “I’m proper fed up. Bombs, bombs, bombs,

all the time.”

You’re afraid to go anywhere. You get so jumpy you hate everything.

Sitting out there in that lousy Anderson shelter night after night gets

on your nerves. And what’s the use to plant vegetables in your back

yard? The bombs are just as liable to come along and blow them up.

Yes, the Woolacombes are proper fed up.

Tom has steady work unloading ships. He is 57. He says he makes just

enough to get by. They live pretty well, but there is nothing left over

on payday. They rent their two-story six-room house for $2.75 a week,

which they consider high.

Their two sons are in the army. So is their married daughter’s husband.

Another daughter, Alice, whose husband has been killed, lives with them.

Alice has a little boy three years old, and I noticed that he kept

walking around saying to himself, “War’s over. War’s over.”

“What’s he saying that for?” I asked his mother.

“Well,” she said, “several weeks ago he wanted something, I forget

what, and I told him he couldn’t have it till the war was over. Ever

since he has been saying ‘War’s over’ to himself all the time.”

It sounds like using the Coue system on the war.

There are two more Woolacombe girls. Eileen, who is sixteen, sells

tickets at a movie theater. Violet, who is twenty, works in a munitions

factory.

The Woolacombes have had an incendiary bomb through their roof. This

was during a heavy raid, and they were all in the backyard shelter.

Things got a little quiet, so Alice stuck her head out to see what was

what. And it looked as if the whole world was afire. So they all jumped

out and ran to the house, and some neighbors and wardens came running

too. They finally got the incendiary put out. All their sand was frozen

solid, so they had to use ashes out of the grate. The fire burned up

all the clothes in a corner closet. They’ve got this room closed off

now, and aren’t using it.

After a while we went back to the pub and sat around talking with a lot

of longshoremen. It is the custom here for men to eat an early supper

at home and then go to the pub and sit from seven till ten, when the

pubs close.

The men were mostly middle-aged and there was no loud talk or singing,

such as you find in so many pubs on these wartime nights.

These longshoremen carried the bitterest feeling about the war that

I’ve run onto yet. “This ain’t war,” they say. “This is just plain

murder, bombing our homes and women and children like this.” If I heard

that once, I heard it twenty times.

These men are mostly veterans of the last war and they still have an

idea that wars should be fought on the battlefield. As you can see,

they are very old-fashioned and don’t understand the New World Order.

_5. BACK TO LONDON_

_London,

March, 1941_

And so back to the big city.

The returned sojourner can see changes in London after being gone for a

month. Not much physical change, of course, for the bombings were light

during most of my absence. But there is more sugar, more chocolate,

more cigarettes. In a restaurant the waiter brought four lumps of sugar

and whispered, “Two for your first cup, two for your second.” Of course

he was angling for a bigger tip, and he angled well.

There are now plenty of chocolates in the shops, whereas chocolates

were close to being extinct right after the holidays.

There has never been a real shortage of cigarettes, but there has been

a scarcity of various brands. When I first came to England I shopped

around among the English cigarettes to see what most closely resembled

the American kind. I finally lit on one called Wix. Well, the day I

left London for the north I went to fifteen tobacco shops and succeeded

in collecting only five packs of Wix. Yet on my return when I went

Wix-hunting again the first two tobacconists sold me a carton each.

While there are more cigarettes and sugar and chocolates, there is less

meat. For several nights now they say Simpson’s has been without its

famous roast beef. My hotel has no steaks or chops. This is a temporary

shortage, possibly due to transportation trouble, but it is becoming

more habitual all over London.

There seems to be more food and a greater variety of it everywhere in

the provinces than in London. The smaller the town the more food there

is. The supply of sugar and eggs is practically normal in the smaller

places.

The Food Ministry has announced a general all-around tightening of the

British belt, and I think it’s a good thing. For an island that imports

so much and has such vulnerable sea lanes, England has been eating too

much. As a matter of fact, the Food Ministry is several months behind

the people. They have been quite willing for a long time to have their

belts tightened.

Furthermore, the picture of rich people eating grandiosely in

restaurants while the poor theoretically go hungry is rapidly becoming

a hallucination. You still pay exorbitantly at the big hotels, and you

get all the overabundance of silverware and yessirs and delay that

seems to be fashionable, but when you come to sum up what you’ve had to

eat you could have fared better in somebody’s home.

And speaking of food, you may remember that a while back I said the

only thing I missed over here was enough sugar. That must have put

ideas into people’s heads, for I have already received two one-pound

boxes of sugar from readers in America. And I hear that more is on the

way.

One box was sent by Mr. and Mrs. Dick Petticrew of East Lansing,

Michigan, whom I don’t know. On the customs declaration which

accompanied the package they had to indicate to whom it should be

delivered if I couldn’t be found. So the Petticrews wrote “Winston

Churchill.”

* * * * *

Scotland has become a new national home for the Poles who got away

after the German occupation. There are many thousands of Poles in

Scotland now, and most of them are in the army. They get along well

with the Scots.

They are fine soldiers. Nobody in this war is fighting with more

burning fire in the soul than the Poles. I have yet to hear a word

about them that wasn’t in praise. No German will ever get mercy from a

Pole on this island.

* * * * *

The other day I saw a question sent from America asking what people in

theaters did when an air-raid warning sounded. Well, I can tell you.

Having a touch of the heebie-jeebies, I decided to go to a movie. The

picture was “Dulcy,” and everybody thought it was swell. The theater

was a huge one in Leicester Square, and it was packed. In the middle of

the picture the film stopped and a sign was flashed on the screen. It

said the sirens had just sounded and that anyone who wished could leave

and go to the public shelters across the street. The picture was then

resumed.

Not a soul in that whole theater stirred.

Afterward another sign flashed, saying the all clear had sounded.

People simply don’t pay attention to daytime warnings any more. Even my

own faint heart ceased long since to do even a slight dervish when the

sirens moan.

* * * * *

I think I have enough official British credentials in my wallet to get

me out of anything, up to and including assassination. Yet in all my

recent travels I have been called upon to show them only twice.

Both cases were ridiculous. Once it was a matter of a nosey hotel clerk

in Wales. The other instance was in the peaceful Cotswold Hills of

Gloucestershire. There I had to identify myself in a big way before

being allowed to see a communal dining room for evacuees. You could

have sat Hitler down there for a meal and he wouldn’t have found out

anything.

That’s one trouble with war--the farther you are from it the sillier

the people get.

In most of Great Britain they are too busy to fussbudget with red

tape. I have been amazed at the utter freedom in England today. People

come and go, brag and criticize, talk and listen. It is remarkable and

admirable.

On gun stations, at flying fields, in pubs or on trains, I have never

run into anybody who seemed suspicious or secretive. The average

Englishman just can’t conceive of there being a fifth column in this

country, and as a general premise I think he is right.

In fact, in wartime England today I believe you can nose around with

less bogeyman interference than you can in America.

* * * * *

In spite of being accepted everywhere over here on friendly and

intimate terms, I am an American and therefore an alien, and all the

alien laws apply to me. For example, it is against the law for me to

have a guidebook now without a permit. I am a criminal if I carry the

famous Baedeker guidebook of Great Britain, even though the damned

thing is printed in Leipzig and the Germans have all the copies they

want.

It is a little shaming somehow to be considered an alien, when I speak

the same language and am on the same side of the fence. In fact, I

don’t like it, and I said so to an English newspaper friend of mine.

But his answer stopped me cold. He said:

“Well, I worked in New York on the Sun for eight years, and I was an

alien over there!”