Ways of Escape

  By the end of lunch in the full humid heat of the day I would take a siesta, my sleep disturbed by the heavy movement of the vultures on the iron roof above my head (I have seen as many as six perched up there, like old broken umbrellas). When one of them took off or landed it was as though a thief were trying to break through the iron roof. At four thirty I would have tea, then take a solitary walk along an abandoned railway track once used by European officials, halfway up the slopes below Hill Station. There was a wide view of the huge Freetown bay where sometimes the Queen Mary would be lying at anchor as though she had been hijacked from the North Atlantic, and the old Edinburgh Castle – now a naval depot ship – lay rotting on a reef of empty bottles. As the sun began to set, the laterite paths turned the colour of a rose. It was the hour and the place I liked best.

  When dusk began to fall it was time to turn home; I write ‘home’ for as one year ebbed away the house on the swamp where I lived alone really became home. I had to take my bath before night dropped suddenly at six, for that was the rat-hour. I had constructed a covered way between the house and the kitchen and this provided a bridge for the invaders. Once, a little late at six thirty, I found a rat making its toilet on the rim of the bath (the rats were always punctual) and I never bathed as late again. At night I would be woken under my mosquito-net by the rats swinging on the bedroom curtains. Perhaps all this may have helped to rob The Ministry of Fear of what I intended to be carefree humour, and yet I can swear that in those first six months I was a happy man – I was in a land I loved. Kipling wrote: ‘We’ve only one virginity to lose, And where we lost it there our hearts will be.’ In the nineteenth century the American, Henry James, took the long voyage to Europe and lost his heart once and for all to Italy. ‘No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome could be loved in youth wants to stop loving her.’ At thirty-one in Liberia I had lost my heart to West Africa.

  There was not much time, however, for writing a novel. Into what hours did I manage to wedge my writing? Between tea and the walk along the railway track? Between the six o’clock whisky and dinner? Certainly the evening whisky did not take me long. I had the civilian ration of one bottle a month, with two bottles of gin and six bottles of beer. After a painful period of deprivation, I was able, with the help of the Air Force Intelligence officer, to obtain a few extra bottles of Canadian Club which no one in the Air Force seemed to like, and with the aid of an RNVR officer, who once a month took his little anti-submarine patrol boat to Bissau in Portuguese Guinea to fetch the Consul’s mail, I would obtain demijohns of excellent Portuguese wine, red and white – tasting all the better because no duty had been paid. Gin remained a problem. One type of Canadian gin became the subject of an Admiralty order, so dangerous it proved to be. All bottles had to be dumped overboard, adding to the reef on which the Edinburgh Castle rested.

  When the book was somehow finished … but I have to pause again on the word ‘somehow’ which leaves out all those interruptions that come flooding so vividly back. One interruption was always welcome – a trip into the interior. A little narrow-gauge line ran up to Pendembu near the Liberian and the French Guinea borders – I had taken it years ago when I was about to begin the long walk described in Journey Without Maps and nothing at all had changed after seven years: one took one’s ‘boy’, one’s own supply of tinned food, one’s own chair, one’s own bed, even one’s own oil-lamp to hang on a hook in the compartment when dark fell. The little train stopped for the night at Bo, where there was a Government rest-house, and thence chugged laboriously uphill to Pendembu. At Pendembu there was a rest-house, not very well maintained by the local chief, so I preferred to take my evening meal on the railway line, my camp table set up on the track. I got into trouble about the expenses of these trips, but not in the way that might be supposed. I was in the habit of charging five shillings a day, the proper Colonial Office rate, which was supposed to represent the difference in price between buying tinned food and market food – the railway and the rest-houses were free. I received a severe telegram in code from London pointing out that the proper charge for an officer in my position was three guineas a day when he was away from his station, to cover the cost of hotels. ‘Please adjust accordingly and confirm.’ I obeyed with alacrity. I opened my office safe and transferred some forty pounds in notes to my own pocket, then telegraphed back in code that all was now in order.

  There were less agreeable interruptions: my relations with my senior officer in Lagos two thousand miles away were very strained. We had disliked each other on sight. He was a professional. I was an amateur. A note of sarcasm crept into my reports, even into my cables. I feel sorry now for the poor man, who had to deal at the last stage of his career with a writer. He was a sick man, totally unacquainted with Africa: how sick I did not realise then, and I learned later that he would keep the Freetown bag unopened on his desk for days in fear of the contents. Once he tried to discipline me by cutting off my funds, which he was supposed to send me once a month in cash by bags from Lagos, but I borrowed from the Police Commissioner, so that harassment failed. Finally we came to open war – I had a rendezvous at Kailahun on the Liberian border and he sent me a telegram forbidding me to leave Freetown because of the imminent arrival of a Portuguese liner. Portuguese ships from Angola had all to be searched for industrial diamonds and illicit correspondence, but this was no affair of mine, the job belonged to the Commissioner, who represented M15. After some inner debate I obeyed, wrote, as it proved, an accurate report to London of the unfortunate events which would ensue from my not keeping the rendezvous and resigned. My resignation was not accepted. I had to stay on another six months, but I was freed at last from the control of Lagos. Perhaps the sense of freedom helped the novel on.

  All the same I wonder how I ever finished the book. The title The Ministry of Fear I took from a poem by Wordsworth (Arnold’s selection of his poems was one of the volumes I had brought with me from England), and the novel was bought unseen by an American film company on the strength of Wordsworth’s title. Then came the problem of sending the manuscript home. In Freetown it was impossible to forget the menace of submarines – it was part of our everyday life; the reason why so many wives stayed throughout their husbands’ tours, the reason why I had no refrigerator – it had been lost on the way out. So, having finished the book, I began the weary task of typing it out with one finger after dinner, and I was lucky to finish it before the scurry of the North African landings affected even my remote coast with cables at all hours.

  I have written little here about the novel itself though it is my favourite among what I called then my ‘entertainments’ to distinguish them from more serious novels. I wish now that the espionage element had been less fantastically handled, though I think Mr Prentice of the Special Branch is real enough – I knew him under another name in my own organisation when I was his pupil. The scenes in the mental clinic are to my mind the best in the novel, and it was surprising to me that Fritz Lang, the old director of M and The Spy, omitted them altogether from his film version of the book, thus making the whole story meaningless.

  I think too the atmosphere of the blitz is well conveyed. The three flares which Rowe saw come ‘sailing slowly, beautifully, down, clusters of spangles off a Christmas tree,’ I had watched myself, flattened up against the wall of Maple’s store on the night of the great raid of April 16, 1941, some months before I left for Africa.

  In those days London had been a cluster of villages – one hardly ever wandered to distant places like Hampstead, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, though some people would go for a quiet weekend to St John’s Wood. My own village was bounded on the south by New Oxford Street, on the north by Euston Road, on the east by Gordon Square, on the west by Gower Street. The author of The Napoleon of Netting Hill would have loved those days, and so in a sense did I and my fellow wardens at our post under the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower Street. While I wrote The Ministry of Fear far away in West Africa a little of the love crept, I think, into
the book. I find it too in the fragment of a journal which I kept during the blitz. I called it The Londoners.

  LONDON 1940 – 1941

  They got into the bus at Golders Green after the pantomime: a dyed blonde woman in the late forties and her older husband, with the relics of histrionic good looks. The old wrinkled tortoise skin and the heavy-lidded eyes might have belonged to a Forbes-Robertson – somebody who had played Hamlet too often. Now he was tired, very tired, and the vulgar woman he had married nagged and bullied and insulted him all the time in the public bus, and he made no reply but ‘Yes, dear,’ ‘No, dear.’ He hadn’t noticed or understood anything in the pantomime, and this was her excuse to bait him. Slowly a whole wartime life emerged. They lived in a hotel and had nowhere to sit without having to buy drinks. So after the pantomime they were going to the ‘flicks’ for an hour, and after the flicks, dinner, and after dinner, bed in the big steel-built reinforced hotel. And the next day, just the same again.

  The man sat in an alcove of the London Library with his back to the room facing a window. With both hands he held his handkerchief tightly distended in front of him against the light, and ruffled it. This went on and on – the regular ruffling of the handkerchief. I watched him for five minutes: there was nothing eccentric in his appearance: he might have been looking at a watermark.

  From The Times Personal Column

  BLACK OUT. Carry a white Pekinese. Lovely puppies from 2 guineas. Goad, 23 Overbury Avenue, Beckenham (Bec. 1860)

  The Times remains itself.

  COMFORTABLE WORDS

  Mr Churchill ended his speech on Sunday night with the last two verses of a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough. A Latin version of the whole poem, printed on another page of this issue, shows not only the scholarly art of the translator but also the success with which Clough’s English poetry passes the severe test of being turned into Latin.

  Old Clements is an Alsatian who has been a waiter at the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane for thirty years – broken by a brief spell in the French army near Verdun from which one leg has never recovered. When his boss died he asked old C on his deathbed to keep his eye on the pub and his son – who is now in the army. The other night Clements, who lives in Kilburn, was walking home with three other waiters. Planes were over and no buses were running. A lorry pulled up beside them and Clements put his hand up for a lift. At that moment a gun on the lorry went off. ‘Oh my,’ old Clements said, ‘you never heard such noises. Boom – whizz – oomph. We jumped in the air. Even my old leg jumped that high. Boom – whizz – oomph. We came down flat on our faces and then it drove on down the road and stopped. Whizz – boom – oomph. Oh my, we were scared. We thought it was a lorry and then whizz – boom – oomph. I jumped up in the air so high. “Oh, mother,” I said when I got home, “have you any whisky in the house?” “Why, daddy,” she said, “you look bad,” and I told her – whizz – boom – oomph.’ He was laughing all the time, dressed to go out in his worn-out brown suit and his old soft hat and a walking stick under his arm. But as usual there was an alert on.

  ‘If we grumble at sickness, God won’t grant us death.’ – War and Peace.

  Charlie Wix is the heroic raconteur of No. 1 Post under the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower Street. He was once, I think, a waiter, but his chief occupation seems to have been giving evidence in divorce cases. He refers to himself in his elaborate anecdotes about high explosives and delayed action bombs and the crassness of the Chief Warden, as ‘Charlie Wix’. ‘Then Charlie Wix arrives…’ One sentence in a long description of a land-mine incident at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road: ‘“Mr Wix,” ’e says, “what ’ave you done with the bodies?”’ There had been trouble because bodies were sent off in a dust-cart instead of an ambulance.

  Of another occasion when a St Pancras post arrived first and there was a lot of confusion and too many cooks (it was in Ridgmount Gardens): ‘Mr Lewin wouldn’t open ’is mouth. ’E was disgusted with the incident.’

  Of a foreigner in Windmill Street. ‘Didn’t speak ’ardly a word of English. There was a DA [Delayed Action Bomb] outside, an’ I had to clear the house. So I went up. He was in bed. “Out,” I says to him. “Out.” ’E didn’t take any action, didn’t understand. “Bomb,” I said, “bomb.” “Blimey,” ’e said, an’ jumped out.’

  Below Mallard’s, Store Street, there is a nightly little group round an oil stove at one end of the shelter warming bricks – a middle-aged man1, a Scots girl with a sharp tongue who claims to work at Fortnum & Mason and dislikes wardens2 on principle – particularly Charlie Wix – and sometimes an unshaven man in a bowler hat. A gipsy-like effect round their fire. They are there, raid or no raid. She put up a board in poker-work at the foot of her bunk: ‘Wild Scottish bull dog at large. Wardens beware.’ Which reminds me that on the occasion of the first bad raid, Lewin and Wix were on duty outside Mallard’s when there was a crash on the pavement. ‘Shrapnel,’ Lewin said, dragging Wix into cover, but it turned out to be a Watney quart bottle someone had thrown at them.

  The extraordinary nervousness of the police who disappear from the streets during a bad raid. The noisy night in Coptic Street and the policeman who mistook a new heavy gun for a land-mine. ‘Went off just behind me. Shook me up.’ He dived into a pub and out again a few minutes later when the gun went off again, he couldn’t keep still. That was the night when the coils of wire – part of a new defence weapon – descended on Heinemann’s at 99 Great Russell Street, and in Store Street, which was closed to traffic till next morning.3

  One of the wardens called L was once in the Army. He entered it at eighteen, his height being then five foot three inches, and he put on seven inches. He went to Egypt. His father was the captain of a P & O liner, and L hadn’t seen him for two years when he heard that he would be at Aden. He had a week’s leave at Suez but couldn’t get any conveyance, so he walked the ninety miles along the Red Sea, and had one day left at the end of it. He was a little disappointed. He had remembered his father as a big man. When he reached the ship there was a man in civilian clothes and a major hanging over the rail. The man in civilian clothes looked at him and said, ‘Of course I’m sorry for the poor devils, but there ought to be a rule excluding them from the first class.’ That was his father. L’s uniform had five days’ dust and the blood from an accident at gun-stations the day before he left. The major, when he learned who it was, insisted that they should all have a drink together in the saloon. L had never had a short drink before and asked for the first thing his eye saw on the list – Benedictine. His father and the major tossed down whiskies, and L tried to toss down his Benedictine … A kindly weak ugly face with a broken nose from boxing.

  The shelter at 25 Bedford Square – with two Chinamen in one room and three old ladies in another.

  The land-mine night: the body, laid out in Tottenham Court Road, which three fire engines passed over. Another man was laid bleeding on a door in the road to escape glass. Wix put a fur coat over him from a shop window. The ambulance was too full to take him. When Wix came back some time later, he had been removed to the pavement – ‘just the sort of thing a policeman would do’ – and a thief was going through his pockets. Wix rescued his notecase, and then could find nobody who would consent to take charge of it. At last next day he took it to University College Hospital. The man was a Turk with a whole string of names. ‘Is Mr So-and-so-and-so here?’ he asked a nurse. ‘He was here,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see him? He’s in the mortuary.’

  A little man with a Home Guard button lunching with a friend at the Orange Tree in Euston Road. A copy of Wedgewood’s ponderous and banal anthology Forever Freedom by his plate. ‘Young So-and-so,’ he said, ‘seems wrapped up in that girl of his.’

  ‘Where did he find her?’ his friend asked glumly.

  ‘Don’t know. Can’t get him alone to ask him.’

  He was apparently a fire-watcher, and that night was going to watch at his office with the bosses, who always pl
ayed bridge. But they were much better players than himself. ‘“Do you play the Culbertson game?” they asked me the first time. Knocked me silly. I’d never heard of it. Always play my own game.’

  Overheard in the Duke of Grafton on April Fool’s Day. The executive of some works fulfilling Air Force contracts was talking. Apparently he was below ground that morning with two workmen when they phoned down: ‘Haven’t you heard the Alert? The fire-watcher ought to be up,’ and up on the roof the fire-watcher went and stayed there in the biting east wind from nine till ten, when somebody told him it was April Fool’s Day. ‘Now you might say we lost one man’s work for an hour – but it was worth it for the merriment it caused. Made everything go smoother.’

  Basil Dean took Ernest Bevin and myself on a lightning tour of the ENSA entertainments round Aldershot. Bevin innocently on the spree, talking excitedly – ‘I’m Mr Bevin’ – to the dimmest of ENSA leading ladies. Very likeable, very unselfconscious. He told us a story of Churchill announcing to the Cabinet the Lofoten Raid. ‘I’ve got interesting news for you, gentlemen. We’ve been making a little excursion – to the Lofoten Islands. We’ve brought back quite a lot of things, including some Quislings. Mark my words’ – turning to Duff Cooper – ‘Quislings, Mr Minister of Information. Call them Quislings – not Quislingites, or you’ll be starting a religious movement.’ Bevin sleeps at the Strand Palace.

  After dinner – with champagne – at the Anchor, Liphook, we drove back between twelve and one. It was interesting and beautiful to see, from the outside, the London guns playing.