We moved to West Bletchley in ’29 and started buying the house in Ellesmere Road the next year, a little before Billy was born. After I was made an Inspector I was more away from home and had more opportunities with other women. Of course I was unfaithful–I won’t say all the time, but as often as I got the chance. Curiously enough, Hilda was jealous. In a way, considering how little that kind of thing means to her, I wouldn’t have expected her to mind. And like all jealous women she’ll sometimes show a cunning you wouldn’t think her capable of. Sometimes the way she’s caught me out would have made me believe in telepathy, if it wasn’t that she’s often been equally suspicious when I didn’t happen to be guilty. I’m more or less permanently under suspicion, though, God knows, in the last few years–the last five years, anyway–I’ve been innocent enough. You have to be, when you’re as fat as I am.
Taking it by and large, I suppose Hilda and I don’t get on worse than about half the couples in Ellesmere Road. There’ve been times when I’ve thought of separation or divorce, but in our walk of life you don’t do those things. You can’t afford to. And then time goes on, and you kind of give up struggling. When you’ve lived with a woman for fifteen years, it’s difficult to imagine life without her. She’s part of the order of things. I dare say you might find things to object to in the sun and the moon, but do you really want to change them? Besides, there were the kids. Kids are a ‘link’, as they say. Or a ‘tie’. Not to say a ball and fetter.
Of late years Hilda has made two great friends called Mrs Wheeler and Miss Minns. Mrs Wheeler is a widow, and I gather she’s got very bitter ideas about the male sex. I can feel her kind of quivering with disapproval if I so much as come into the room. She’s a faded little woman and gives you a curious impression that she’s the same colour all over, a kind of greyish dust-colour, but she’s full of energy. She’s a bad influence on Hilda, because she’s got the same passion for ‘saving’ and ‘making things do’, though in a slightly different form. With her it takes the form of thinking that you can have a good time without paying for it. She’s for ever nosing out bargains and amusements that don’t cost money. With people like that it doesn’t matter a damn whether they want a thing or not, it’s merely a question of whether they can get it on the cheap. When the big shops have their remnant sales Mrs Wheeler’s always at the head of the queue, and it’s her greatest pride, after a day’s hard fighting round the counter, to come out without having bought anything. Miss Minns is quite a different sort. She’s really a sad case, poor Miss Minns. She’s a tall thin woman of about thirty-eight, with black patent-leather hair and a very good, trusting kind of face. She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an annuity or something, and I fancy she’s a left-over from the old society of West Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. It’s written all over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived. They’re a special by-product of the middle classes, these women who turn into withered hags before they even manage to escape from home. Poor old Miss Minns, for all her wrinkles, still looks exactly like a child. It’s still a tremendous adventure to her not to go to church. She’s always burbling about ‘modern progress’ and ‘the woman’s movement’, and she’s got a vague yearning to do something she calls ‘developing her mind’, only she doesn’t quite know how to start. I think in the beginning she cottoned on to Hilda and Mrs Wheeler out of pure loneliness, but now they take her with them wherever they go.
And the times they’ve had together, those three! Sometimes I’ve almost envied them. Mrs Wheeler is the leading spirit. You couldn’t name a kind of idiocy that she hasn’t dragged them into at one time or another. Anything from theosophy to cat’s-cradle, provided you can do it on the cheap. For months they went in for the food-crank business. Mrs Wheeler had picked up a second-hand copy of some book called Radiant Energy which proved that you should live on lettuces and other things that don’t cost money. Of course this appealed to Hilda, who immediately began starving herself. She’d have tried it on me and the kids as well, only I put my foot down. Then they had a go at faith-healing. Then they thought of tackling Pelmanism, but after a lot of correspondence they found that they couldn’t get the booklets free, which had been Mrs Wheeler’s idea. Then it was hay-box cookery. Then it was some filthy stuff called bee wine, which was supposed to cost nothing at all because you made it out of water. They dropped that after they’d read an article in the paper saying that bee wine gives you cancer. Then they nearly joined one of those women’s clubs which go for conducted tours round factories, but after a lot of arithmetic Mrs Wheeler decided that the free teas the factories gave you didn’t quite equal the subscription. Then Mrs Wheeler scraped acquaintance with somebody who gave away free tickets for plays produced by some stage society or other. I’ve known the three of them sit for hours listening to some highbrow play of which they didn’t even pretend to understand a word–couldn’t even tell you the name of the play afterwards–but they felt that they were getting something for nothing. Once they even took up spiritualism. Mrs Wheeler had run across some down-and-out medium who was so desperate that he’d give séances for eighteenpence, so that the three of them could have a glimpse beyond the veil for a tanner a time. I saw him once when he came to give a séance at our house. He was a seedy-looking old devil and obviously in mortal terror of D.T.S. He was so shaky that when he was taking his overcoat off in the hall he had a sort of spasm and a hank of butter-muslin dropped out of his trouser-leg. I managed to shove it back to him before the women saw. Butter-muslin is what they make the ectoplasm with, so I’m told. I suppose he was going on to another séance afterwards. You don’t get manifestations for eighteen pence. Mrs Wheeler’s biggest find of the last few years is the Left Book Club. I think it was in ’36 that the news of the Left Book Club got to West Bletchley. I joined it soon afterwards, and it’s almost the only time I can remember spending money without Hilda protesting. She can see some sense in buying a book when you’re getting it for a third of its proper price. These women’s attitude is curious, really. Miss Minns certainly had a try at reading one or two of the books, but this wouldn’t even have occurred to the other two. They’ve never had any direct connexion with the Left Book Club or any notion what it’s all about–in fact I believe at the beginning Mrs Wheeler thought it had something to do with books which had been left in railway carriages and were being sold off cheap. But they do know that it means seven and sixpenny books for half a crown, and so they’re always saying that it’s ‘such a good idea’. Now and again the local Left Book Club branch holds meetings and gets people down to speak, and Mrs Wheeler always takes the others along. She’s a great one for public meetings of any kind, always provided that it’s indoors and admission free. The three of them sit there like lumps of pudding. They don’t know what the meeting’s about and they don’t care, but they’ve got a vague feeling, especially Miss Minns, that they’re improving their minds, and it isn’t costing them anything.
Well, that’s Hilda. You see what she’s like. Take it by and large, I suppose she’s no worse than I am. Sometimes when we were first married I felt I’d like to strangle her, but later I got so that I didn’t care. And then I got fat and settled down. It must have been in 1930 that I got fat. It happened so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and got stuck inside. You know how it is. One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side the grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.
And now it’s ’38, and in every shipyard in the world they’re riveting up the battleships for another war, and a name I chanced to see on a poster had stirred up in me a whole lot of stuff which ought to have been buried God knows how many years ago.
PART III
1
When I came home that evening I was still in doubt
as to what I’d spend my seventeen quid on.
Hilda said she was going to the Left Book Club meeting. It seemed that there was a chap coming down from London to lecture, though needless to say Hilda didn’t know what the lecture was going to be about. I told her I’d go with her. In a general way I’m not much of a one for lectures, but the visions of war I’d had that morning, starting with the bomber flying over the train, had put me into a kind of thoughtful mood. After the usual argument we got the kids to bed early and cleared off in time for the lecture, which was billed for eight o’clock.
It was a misty kind of evening, and the hall was cold and not too well lighted. It’s a little wooden hall with a tin roof, the property of some Nonconformist sect or other, and you can hire it for ten bob. The usual crowd of fifteen or sixteen people had rolled up. On the front of the platform there was a yellow placard announcing; that the lecture was on ‘The Menace of Fascism’. This didn’t altogether surprise me. Mr Witchett, who acts as chairman of these meetings and who in private life is something in an architect’s office, was taking the lecturer round, introducing him to everyone as Mr So-and-so (I forget his name) ‘the well-known anti-Fascist’, very much as you might call somebody ‘the well-known pianist’. The lecturer was a little chap of about forty, in a dark suit, with a bald head which he’d tried rather unsuccessfully to cover up with wisps of hair.
Meetings of this kind never start on time. There’s always a period of hanging about on the pretence that perhaps a few more people are going to turn up. It was about twenty-five past eight when Witchett tapped on the table and did his stuff. Witchett’s a mild-looking chap, with a pink, baby’s bottom kind of face that’s always covered in smiles. I believe he’s secretary of the local Liberal Party, and he’s also on the Parish Council and acts as M.C. at the magic lantern lectures for the Mothers’ Union. He’s what you might call a born chairman. When he tells you how delighted we all are to have Mr So-and-so on the platform tonight, you can see that he believes it. I never look at him without thinking that he’s probably a virgin. The little lecturer took out a wad of notes, chiefly newspaper cuttings, and pinned them down with his glass of water. Then he gave a quick lick at his lips and began to shoot.
Do you ever go to lectures, public meetings, and what-not?
When I go to one myself, there’s always a moment during the evening when I find myself thinking the same thought. Why the hell are we doing this? Why is it that people will turn out on a winter night for this kind of thing? I looked round the hall. I was sitting in the back row. I don’t ever remember going to any kind of public meeting when I didn’t sit in the back row if I could manage it. Hilda and the others had planked themselves in front, as usual. It was rather a gloomy little hall. You know the kind of place. Pitch-pine walls, corrugated iron roof, and enough draughts to make you want to keep your overcoat on. The little knot of us were sitting in the light round the platform, with about thirty rows of empty chairs behind us. And the seats of all the chairs were dusty. On the platform behind the lecturer there was a huge square thing draped in dust-cloths which might have been an enormous coffin under a pall. Actually it was a piano.
At the beginning I wasn’t exactly listening. The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn’t particularly keen to hear what he was saying–get the same stuff in the News Chronicle every morning–but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.
‘Bestial atrocities…Hideous outbursts of sadism…Rubber truncheons…Concentration camps…Iniquitous persecution of the Jews…Back to the Dark Ages…European civilization…Act before it is too late…Indignation of all decent peoples…Alliance of the democratic nations…Firm stand…Defence of democracy…Democracy…Fascism…Democracy…Fascism…Democracy…’
You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What’s he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? And what what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course. But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He means it. Not faking at all–feels every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that’s nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy, Interesting to know a chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.
As well as I could from the back row I had a look at the audience. I suppose, if you come to think of it, we people who’ll turn out on winter nights to sit in draughty halls listening to Left Book Club lectures (and I consider that I’m entitled to the ‘we’, seeing that I’d done it myself on this occasion) have a certain significance. We’re the West Bletchley revolutionaries. Doesn’t look hopeful at first sight. It struck me as I looked round the audience that only about half a dozen of them had really grasped what the lecturer was talking about, though by this time he’d been pitching into Hitler and the Nazis for over half an hour. It’s always like that with meetings of this kind. Invariably half the people come away without a notion of what it’s all about. In his chair beside the table Witchett was watching the lecturer with a delighted smile, and his face looked a little like a pink geranium. You could hear in advance the speech he’d make as soon as the lecturer sat down–same speech as he makes at the end of the magic lantern lecture in aid of trousers for the Melanesians: ‘Express our thanks–voicing the opinion of all of us–most interesting–give us all a lot to think about–most stimulating evening!’ In the front row Miss Minns was sitting very upright, with her head cocked a little on one side, like a bird. The lecturer had taken a sheet of paper from under the tumbler and was reading out statistics about the German suicide-rate. You could see by the look of Miss Minns’s long thin neck that she wasn’t feeling happy. Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If only she could make out what it was all about! The other two were sitting there like lumps of pudding. Next to them a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One plain, two purl, drop one, and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the Nazis chop people’s heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh shot. There was one other woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the teachers at the Council School. Unlike the other she was really listening, sitting forward with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it all in.
Just behind her two old blokes from the local Labour Party were sitting. One had grey hair cropped very short, the other had a bald head and a droopy moustache. Both wearing their overcoats. You know the type. Been in the Labour Party since the year dot. Lives given up to the movement. Twenty years of being blacklisted by employers, and another ten of badgering the Council to do something about the slums. Suddenly everything’s changed, the old Labour Party stuff doesn’t matter any longer. Find themselves pitchforked into foreign politics–Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine-guns, rubber truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Front, anti-Comintern pact. Can’t make head or tail of it. Immediately in front of me the local Communist Party branch were sitting. All three of them very young. O
ne of them’s got money and is something in the Hesperides Estate Company, in fact I believe he’s old Crum’s nephew. Another’s a clerk at one of the banks. He cashes cheques for me occasionally. A nice boy, with a round, very young, eager face, blue eyes like a baby, and hair so fair that you’d think he peroxided it. He only looks about seventeen, though I suppose he’s twenty. He was wearing a cheap blue suit and a bright blue tie that went with his hair. Next to these three another Communist was sitting. But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite, because he’s what they call a Trotskyist. The others have got a down on him. He’s even younger, a very thin, very dark, nervous-looking boy. Clever face. Jew, of course. These four were taking the lecture quite differently from the others. You knew they’d be on their feet the moment question-time started. You could see them kind of twitching already. And the little Trotskyist working himself from side to side on his bum in his anxiety to get in ahead of the others.
I’d stopped listening to the actual words of the lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment. The effect of that was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It’s a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.
The Complete Novels Page 81
