‘I put that in the box for you,’ said Dick Dobbs.
‘It’s a pretty card.’
The teachers asked her why, at Christmas time, she couldn’t say something more friendly.
‘He’s a dirty devil,’ Annie replied calmly. She accepted that people couldn’t be otherwise than they were, good, bad, and middling, but one ought to be allowed to take them or leave them.
She kept seeing Dick, because although he didn’t come on to grammar school with her friends, he sang in the same church choir as she did, at St Martin’s. When she was twelve and a half he caught her behind the vicarage bicycle sheds, took a firm grip of her and pressed her back hard against the wall.
‘I expect you think it’s wrong to do this,’ he said, unbuttoning her coat.
‘I don’t think it’s wrong,’ Annie replied. ‘I daresay I’d do it if I liked it.’
He was disconcerted, hesitated and lost hold. Annie walked away, but not in a hurry, she stopped to do up the six buttons of her coat. There were one or two boys she liked at school, but not Dick. She’d not do any better for Dick by pretending. Luckily his voice was breaking.
Annie did well at her lessons, and would have liked to please the music teacher, who wanted her to start piano, but for reasons that were not clear to her, and therefore caused her annoyance, she didn’t care to learn. Her father could have found the money, but he never made her do anything she didn’t want to.
When she was nearly sixteen, Mr Asra fell ill. He asked Annie to make the round of the customers and tell them that unfortunately he wouldn’t be coming. When she rang the bell-pulls which she hadn’t been able to reach as a little girl, and saw through the front windows the familiar pianos, and the silver-framed photos on them that had to be moved away when the tuner called, she knew for certain that her father was going to die. The doctor couldn’t make out what was wrong, but that was no surprise to their neighbours in the terrace, who were well aware that doctors don’t know everything. Mr Asra didn’t have to be sent away to hospital to die. Annie managed pretty well, sleeping on two chairs in the passage outside his room. He was with them one night and gone in the morning, when she got up to fetch him the medicine which the district nurse had left.
Her aunt, who lived next door, asked her to move in for the time being, and no-one could fault the arrangements. But they were not surprised, either, when in spite of the emergency Annie went off to try her luck in London. That was on the 8th of July, the day they announced the tea-rationing, two ounces per person per week.
Annie left her luggage and umbrella at Paddington and took the Underground, hoping, as the result of this, that she’d never have to travel in it again. The windows of the trains, following regulations, were painted black, with a tiny square of glass left to peer through and to make out the name of the station. This presumably meant that the tube came above ground some time, but it didn’t do so before she got out at Oxford Circus.
The passers-by were quick to tell her that she couldn’t miss Broadcasting House, because it looked like a ship with the wrong sort of windows. She walked right and left between the sandbags that masked the entrance and realized, from the way the sentry looked at her, that she’d done right to put on her white blouse and navy-blue skirt.
The entrance hall of BH worried her not at all. It reminded her of the Midland Hotel, where once or twice, when a friend had been taken ill, her father had been called in to tune the concert grand. In its size and height she recognized the need to impress. People had to feel they’d arrived somewhere. She remembered, too, that they hadn’t much wanted a child running around the hotel, so they’d told her to go and look at some comics in a little room upstairs, much like the room where she went for her interview now.
There were two middle-aged women who identified themselves as Mrs Milne and Mrs Staples, from Establishment. They were in charge, and yet she felt they needed approval from the man sitting rather apart from them, at the corner of the table, who wasn’t much like anyone Annie had ever met. He was both pale and dark, and had the sort of face that they used to say would make a fortune on the halls; perhaps, indeed, he had. At the moment he was half lying back and looking at the ceiling, which made Annie wonder why he had come to interview her at all. It must be an advantage, she thought, to be like that, and not to bother.
‘You don’t need to be musical,’ Mrs Milne explained, ‘or to have any kind of technical knowledge – just complete accuracy in following instructions, punctuality and reliability. We’ve got the references from your Vicar and your head teacher … and then you’ve had a Saturday job as well, haven’t you?’
‘At Anstruthers,’ said Annie. ‘I was in the loose count sweets to start with, then they moved me to hosiery. We’d instructions to let the old folks help themselves to a few sweets if they wanted to,’ she added.
‘Their letter was satisfactory too,’ murmured Mrs Staples.
‘The job is largely chasing the recordings and seeing that they’re available at the right time, and for the right programmes.’
‘A straightforward service job,’ said Mrs Staples.
Mrs Milne changed colour a little.
‘Service, yes, but of a particularly important nature. The Department is quite indispensable to the Corporation as a whole. The name of your Director, by the way, if you were selected for this position, would be Mr Seymour Brooks. But you would be working on shift – you’ll have to take that into account, by the way, when you’re finding somewhere to live – and you’re not likely to have much direct contact with Mr Brooks.’
Annie didn’t miss the change from you would to you will, and she observed with compassion that Mrs Milne looked downright tired. Probably she’d been interviewing for hours and there’d been very few hopefuls.
Meanwhile the man stretched his legs and shifted in his chair as though he was thinking of going, causing an equal but contrary movement in the two women. Then he said, in a voice almost too quiet to catch: ‘My name is Jeffrey Haggard. I have nothing to do, really, with your appointment, I’m the Director of Programme Planning … You’re from Birmingham, Miss Asra?’
They’d all said that, seeming to think it was rather surprising for her to come. However far away did they think it was?
‘I’ve been through it often enough, but I’ve never stopped there. Tell me, just as a point of geographical interest, would you call Birmingham north or south?’
He smiled, and for the first time since she’d passed the soldier at the door, Annie smiled back.
‘It’s neither.’
‘I imagine that perhaps there’s only one way to settle it. Are there pork butchers, separate from the ordinary butchers?’
‘Of course there are, Mr Haggard.’
‘Then it must be north.’
Annie was wrong in thinking that there hadn’t been many hopefuls among the applicants. There had been none at all. She had been right, however, in detecting, as she did, that her interviewers were not quite of one mind. Mrs Milne was thinking of RPD, Mrs Staples was thinking of AD(E), and Jeff wanted to get away.
‘I think we might as well appoint her at once,’ Mrs Milne said, straightening her back, when she was left alone with her friend. ‘Of course, she’ll have to go through the college, but I hardly anticipate.…’
By this she meant that the BBC would have to ascertain that Annie had never been a member of the Communist Party. But, in view of the understaffing in Recorded Programmes, they thought it safe to issue her with a temporary pass, and tell her to report for work on Monday.
The next problem, of course, was where the girl was to live. It was no use leaving things to chance, she might slip back to Birmingham. Mrs Milne had hostels in mind, but Vi, with Lise still on her conscience, went with Annie to Paddington to pick up the luggage and then brought her back to Hammersmith on that very first evening. Mrs Simmons, who was generous enough to learn nothing from experience, welcomed a new lodger. She was bottling plums, and not ever remembering a year lik
e it for plums. Hitler had given out that Britain would capitulate by August, she added, or rather he’d said it some time ago, but she’d only just read it off an old Mirror that she’d used to spread under the jars.
‘Did you share a room before?’ Vi asked, taking Annie upstairs.
‘Not really, because I hadn’t brothers and sisters.’
‘Do children worry you, then?’
Annie shook her head.
‘My little brothers don’t need much,’ Vi went on. ‘Just fall down when they machine-gun you, half-way will do if we’re at table.’
‘I can manage that.’
‘Well, I’ll show you where to put your things. You’ll have to make do with just a bit of the cupboard, because we’ve got all our winter things in there, and these two and a half drawers over here. How will that do?’
And after all, Annie had not brought much.
‘What my mother meant, starting off about Hitler, and the jars, and everything, was that if there’s any trouble you’d be better off in a house like this, where there’s a lot of us.’ She sat down on her own bed. ‘Do you want to use the phone? Will they be worrying about you at home?’
‘Writing will do,’ said Annie stiffly. ‘I don’t think my aunt will be at her house. I think she’s going to let it.’
Vi perceived that they had come to the end of that subject.
6
RPD had hit a snag in his design for lightweight recording equipment with an adequate – that was all he asked, heaven knew, that it should simply be adequate – windshield. At the moment he paid attention to nothing else, and nobody except the engineers had access.
‘You’ll have to await your summons,’ said Teddy, sitting back, world weary, surveying Annie. ‘That’s what you have to expect in a Seraglio.’
Annie was annoyed at herself at first for not knowing what the word meant. She’d thought it was a kind of opera.
The first job she was called upon to undertake by herself was to check the whole series of de Gaulle’s speeches, mark them up, and take them to the studio for the run-through of Eddie Waterlow’s dramatic feature France Fights On. The programme had been scheduled some time ago and had changed its name several times during the German advance. Director (Home) thought that as the cast had been booked and a certain amount of money spent already, the whole thing had better be recorded before something happened to make further alterations necessary. Annie was afraid when she first got through the door with her armful of discs, because no-one was there but Mr Waterlow, dancing quietly round the restricted space in the control studio. They’d told her that there were Old Servants in Broadcasting House, but not that there were mad Old Servants. It was the Hesitation Waltz he was doing. He paused and looked at her searchingly.
‘You’ve come early.’
‘I wanted to make sure that everything was all right, Mr Waterlow.’
He asked her name, then remarked: ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before. You are my Recorded Programmes Assistant for this afternoon?’
‘Yes, Mr Waterlow.’
‘When did you join the Corporation?’
‘Last Monday, Mr Waterlow.’
‘You appear bewildered.’
‘Well, Mr Waterlow, it’s my first time on duty.’
He peered at her. ‘I don’t know if you’re addressing me in this respectful way as a jest.’
‘They told me upstairs that was your name.’
‘It is. I have no intention of asking you what else they said. I may be too sensitive. I fancied that after only a few days you had joined the conspiracy against me.’
He’d stopped dancing, except for a few steps forward and back.
‘I’m not surprised in the least that the most inexperienced Recorded Programmes Assistant in the building has been assigned to me. If my abilities were ever highly valued by the Corporation, they are certainly not so now. Nevertheless I’ve been put in charge of a not unimportant programme, a tribute to the country without which Europe could hardly be termed civilised. And yet, in asking me to do this, they may have asked too much. Somewhere along the way I’ve lost the one quality necessary to preserve the glitter and the illusion, not only of the theatre – even in wartime I put that first – but of life. I mean confidence. All mine is gone. And from your expression at the moment, I fear you have none either.’
‘I’ve got plenty of confidence, Mr Waterlow,’ said Annie. ‘It’s just that you talk so daft.’
She put her records neatly in the producer’s rack. You couldn’t help liking him. Exhausted by his tirade, he watched her dreamily.
‘I think you must come from Birmingham.… What made you come to Broadcasting House?’
‘I wanted to do my bit.’
‘Ah, you can stand there and say that! I couldn’t say it without the deepest embarrassment. The deepest! I envy you.’
A Junior Programme Engineer stuck his head round the door, saw Annie, and whistled.
‘Got the running order, sweetheart?’
‘Yes, it’s announcement, narrator one minute twelve, cross-fade Marseillaise thirty seconds, fade out.…’
‘Yep, that’s what I came to tell you, Eddie,’ said the JPE casually, ‘European wanted me to remind you. You can’t fade the Marseillaise, not for the duration, to avoid offence to our Allies.’
Mr Waterlow sank down in picturesque despair. ‘My timing.…’
‘Yep, the whole two minutes of it. All or nothing. You’ll have to substitute.’
‘Heartless, heartless children.…’
‘Don’t give way, Mr Waterlow,’ Annie cried, ‘It’ll not take me a minute to go up to the Gram Library and get you a commercial. They showed me where it was on my tour of the building.’
‘A spark.…’
‘But what would you like me to get?’
‘Anything …’ His voice strengthened a little. ‘Anything but the song-cycles of Hugo Wolf. The Gramophone Library seem to have an unending supply of them, just as the canteen never runs out of digestive biscuits … my dear, fetch me something that is not by Hugo Wolf … let it at least be French.’
When Annie returned with a commercial of Ma Normandie, which she’d been told could be faded out anywhere, the situation in the studio had changed. The JPE had left, but someone else had come, a little old man, not looking at all well, but with a fierce air of not letting himself go, and of having dressed for the occasion. He had on a yellow checked waistcoat and a blue suit, the trousers pressed like blades.
‘Who are you? Who? Who?’ cried Eddie Waterlow.
‘The agent told me what time to come along.’
‘Why? At whose prompting? Did they tell you that, regardless of what rehearsals may have been called and what confirmations may have been sent by Bookings, anyone and everyone is welcome at Eddie Waterlow’s productions?’
‘I’ve got my letter from Bookings,’ said the old man. ‘I’ll take a chair if I may.’
He sat down with difficulty. ‘I’m a bit stiff, you might say I’ve one leg and a swinger. I don’t do much dancing nowadays.’
Annie wondered if she oughtn’t to fetch him something. He looked bad; in fact, they both did.
‘I’ve got my cast list here,’ said Eddie, trying to maintain authority.
‘What is your name?’
‘Fred Shotto.’
‘I have that on my list, certainly, but there must be a mistake of some kind. Spotlight gives him as twenty-nine years old, Shakespeare and classic comedy, specialises in French accent.’
‘That’ll be my son,’ said the old man. ‘He’s with the forces now. He’s Fred Shotto, junior. You can bill me as the old block he’s a chip of.’
Encouraged by Eddie’s silence, he went on: ‘The booking was in my name, all right. You can’t contest that, it’s legal. I’m all right myself once I’ve got my confidence.’
He took out a roll of sheet music.
‘I’ve brought my material.’
Eddie had chosen to sink his fac
e into his left hand, while his right arm hung down helplessly towards the ground. Annie, feeling that someone must, took the music, from which other pieces of paper covered with writing fluttered to the ground.
‘That’s my material. The other’s my opening number.’
‘Annie! What has he brought me?’
Annie smoothed it out.
‘It’s the I’ve Got The You Don’t Know The Half Of It, Dearie Blues, Mr Waterlow.’
The JPE thrust forcefully in again, this time winking broadly.
‘How’s it coming, curly? We’re going to record in ten minutes.’
Annie went to the door.
‘Mr Waterlow seems to be in difficulties. Do you think he’s all right?’
‘Live in hopes.’
But France Fights On was cancelled, shelved to make room for the mounting defence instructions. Perhaps, indeed, it had never been planned for; only DPP was likely to be able to give an answer to that.
Eddie Waterlow had considerable difficulty in getting rid of Fred Shotto. The old man, who had started out as a clog-dancer at the age of four, had learned persistence in a harder school, as he pointed out, than Hitler’s war, and beyond that he had some idea that by getting work he was keeping the place warm for his son. Long after the cast had been dismissed he clung to his chair, and Eddie was obliged in the end to make a recording of the I’ve Got The You Don’t Know The Half Of It, Dearie Blues, cracked and trembling, which might have become a collector’s piece if it had not been consigned at once to scrap. Dislodged at last, and given a farewell drink, Fred Shotto became affectionate in the theatre’s old way, telling everyone in sight that Mr Waterlow had made him a happy man, and advising them to lean on Jesus till the clouds rolled by. It turned out that he’d done some hard years, too, as a revivalist.
After his programme was lost, Eddie drifted round the building, assisting a little here and there, a pensioner of the arts such as Broadcasting House, even in wartime, could not bring itself to discourage. He was told that France Fights On ‘might have involved falsification’; the BBC remained loyal to the truth, even when they stretched it a little to spare the feelings of their employees.
Human Voices Page 8
