by Lissa Evans
There was Mary, Queen of Scots blown into the ranks of the Plantagenets, there was George IV pinned under a roof beam, and poor, plain, unlauded Queen Anne half-stripped and decapitated. And in a line across the centre of the room, each lying on the legs of the next like a coxless six, lay Henry’s wives. Here and there, through the layer of filth and plaster that covered them, a tiny spot of colour showed – the green lining of Anne Boleyn’s sleeve, a hint of crimson at Catherine Howard’s breast. A tiny pattering noise began, like weak applause, and, unthinkingly, Edith raised her torch towards the roof. A fine rain slanted across the beam.
There was a shout, and the crunch of running footsteps. ‘Off. Turn that bloody torch off.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I should bloody well hope you are. Anyone hurt in here?’
‘I don’t think so. We were all in the basement.’
‘I’ll go and check, then.’
She stood in darkness as the warden walked away and she listened to the rain falling, to the dust turning to mud and the plaster to glue.
NEWSREEL
November 1940
There were two viewing rooms at the Ministry of Information: the superior, with padded seats and a ventilation fan, for official screenings, and the intra-departmental, with sticky wooden benches and a pervasive smell of sweat. Catrin, in the latter, remained standing and breathed through her mouth while watching the scrap of film, stopwatch and script in hand.
INTERIOR OFFICE
Two women sit either side of an interview table.
Woman 1
Are you good with your hands?
3 seconds
Woman 2
Yes
Woman 1
Have you ever used an electric sewing machine either at home or in a factory or workshop?
6 seconds
Woman 2
No.
Woman 1
Do you think you could learn? 2 seconds
Woman 2
Yes.
Woman 1
Good. Because our soldiers need parachutes, and we need women who can make them.
5 seconds
Woman 2:
(Smiles.)
The scene was a two-shot, filmed over the shoulder of Woman 1, so that whereas Woman 2’s face was fully visible, only part of the back of Woman 1’s head was in view. This was known in the films division, Catrin had discovered, as a ‘salvage shot’, since Woman 1, her lips invisible, could be redubbed to say anything that would fit in the gaps between Woman 2’s replies, thus saving on the cost of shooting new footage.
Back at her desk, Catrin underlined the words ‘Food Flash’ at the top of a piece of scrap paper, re-read the Ministry of Food guidelines she’d been sent, took out the stopwatch again and set to work on a draft.
INTERIOR OFFICE
Two women sit either side of an interview table.
Woman 1
Do your family often eat carrots?
Woman 2
Yes.
Woman 1
Did you know that the Vitamin A in carrots can improve night vision by 50 per cent?
Woman 2
No.
Woman 1
Will you eat even more of them now?
Woman 2
Yes.
Woman 1
Splendid. Because if they’re good enough for our night fighters then they’re good enough for our children.
Woman 2
(Smiles.)
STOCK SHOT OF BUNCH OF CARROTS.
V/O
Raw or cooked, they’re healthy, nutritious and economical.
She missed Ivy and Lynn. The So-Bee-Fee campaign was still extant – she had spotted the latest instalment in Woman’s View – but someone else was writing the captions now, and the characters’ dialogue, which she’d tried so carefully to differentiate, had become interchangeable. Bert had also become interchangeable, carelessly appearing as Lynn’s husband one month, Ivy’s the next, while the illustrations were once again spiralling away from reality: in the last one she’d seen, Ivy had been frying sausages while wearing an evening stole.
Catrin read the Ministry of Food memorandum again. Also swedes, it said at the bottom.
FOOD FLASH #2
INTERIOR OFFICE
Two women sit either side of an interview table.
Woman 2
Would your family like to try something new?
Woman 2
Yes.
Woman 1
Can you think of a vegetable that’s not only gaily coloured and British-grown but which won’t break the bank?
The office door opened and one of the script-editors stuck his head in.
‘Call for you in scenarios,’ he said, disappearing again.
There was a telephone on her own desk, but it wasn’t connected to anything. The words ‘her own desk’ were similarly redundant since she shared it with one of the office messengers, a man in his sixties who had generously come out of retirement in order to contribute to the war effort. Personnel had decided to utilize his forty years in industry by giving him the job of occasionally taking pieces of paper from one floor to another, and he spent most of his time sleeping with his head next to Catrin’s typewriter. He opened an eye as she stood up. ‘Any jobs?’ he asked, plaintively.
‘Sorry, Clive. Bad night?’
‘Incendiaries,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind incendiaries, you can do something about them. Feel useful.’ He closed his eyes again, and Catrin took her notepad and left the office. There had been incendiaries in her own street, too, a clatter at midnight like a shower of tin cans, and she’d pulled on a coat and grabbed the bucket of sand, and hurried up the steps from the basement to find that one of the silver cylinders had lodged in the guttering above the porch and was burning fiercely. The boy from the first-floor flat had leaned out of the window with a mop handle and flipped the canister on to the pavement, and Catrin had doused the flame with the sand, and in the sudden darkness she had seen a dozen other hurrying silhouettes, a dozen other small, bright fires.
There had been, in addition, the usual disturbances of what she was coming to regard as an average night: the near-continuous drone of the raiders, the distant crumps that would suddenly move nearer, as if a Titan were striding across London, and the thunderous, reassuring noise of the guns firing from the park half a mile away, each rolling discharge followed by the crack of the shell-burst, the plink of shrapnel on pavement and road. The all-clear had sounded at a quarter to four and Catrin had slept after that, but Ellis had snored through the lot, curled like a comma on their mattress under the stairs. He was spending three nights a week now on duty at the ARP post beside Baker Street, and another two sharing a fire-watching rota on the roof of the Paddington studio, and on the evenings that he spent at home he ate hugely, and fell asleep at the table.
Catrin had made him a cup of tea before she left for work, and had kissed him between the eyebrows, the only area of skin visible above the quilt. Outside the flat, she’d paused, yawning, to watch an auxiliary fireman collecting the spent incendiaries in a sack, and the fireman had yawned too, and almost everyone on the bus had been dozing. Sleep, in London, was no longer a nightly staple but a sporadic snack, to be snatched at and savoured during any spare moment.
In the scenario office, the boys were swarming around a desk at one end; at the other, a telephone receiver lay on top of a pile of scripts.
‘Is this for me?’ called Catrin. One of the heads looked around and nodded impatiently. She lifted the phone and heard nothing but a low roaring sound, like a distant sea. ‘Catrin Cole,’ she said. ‘Hello?’ There was no answer. After a moment or two she replaced the receiver on the cradle.
‘Who was it from?’ she asked, wandering over to the group. Greville, a boy of twenty with spectacles and an unpleasantly vigorous moustache, looked round at her and shook his head.
‘Haven’t the foggiest. Gone dead, has it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The
re was a landmine on Tottenham Court Road last night, hole the size of a bus outside Heal’s. Probably nixed half the cables in the area.’ He was already turning back to the object of general interest (not to mention hilarity): a small sheet of paper with a block of typing on it.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked Catrin, hovering behind them. ‘May I see?’ For a few seconds the wall of shoulders seemed deliberately to exclude her, and then there was a grudging shift, and a narrow gap opened up.
‘It’s just a memo,’ said one of the sets of shoulders, tetchily.
12 November 1940
I wish to pass on the results of several recent meetings with representatives of American distribution companies. These representatives are somewhat disturbed by what they invariably describe as the ‘lack of oomph’ in the films with overseas potential produced under the aegis, or with the guidance, of this department. This is, in part, a reflection of the difficulties the American public have with the British tradition of understatement, and the laconic way in which much bravery is habitually reported and portrayed. There is also the perennial American problem with the British accent, usually defined as ‘plummy and muffled’, but underlying everything is the key question of how entertaining these films are – and by ‘films’ I refer to both documentary shorts and theatrical productions. The need to maintain and accentuate pro-British feeling in the USA cannot be overstated, and it is imperative to remind ourselves – every day, if necessary – that for a film to be good propaganda it must also be good entertainment.
While the following list of suggestions by a prominent American distributor may not be seen as possible, practical, or even desirable, I would ask you to read and absorb it without derision, as a useful reflection of the minds of our American cousins, whose continued goodwill towards us is vital. Remember that the Nazis have never underestimated the propaganda power of the moving image; it would be stupidity itself for us to do so.
S Bernstein
Special Advisor, film division.
Mr Goldfarb’s suggestions:
i) Plenty of oomph factory girls at work and play.
ii) Plenty of oomph army/navy/flyer girls at work and play.
iii) A reel with commentary by the Queen, dealing with a non-military subject: women and children, brides in wartime etc.
iv) Bangs, crashes, walls falling over, men shouting, ambulances careening (skidding) round corners are all good, but can you make the bangs really loud. American viewers want to be knocked off their feet.
v) Something with George Bernard Shaw in it. Just a reel, though, I don’t think our audience could take anything longer.
By the time that Catrin had finished reading the memo, she was standing entirely on her own, the others having reassembled at the far end of the office, where the tea-trolley had made an appearance. She would have liked to ask someone why it was that cinematic bangs and crashes were, indeed, never as loud as the real thing. She would have liked to speculate on what the desired ‘something with George Bernard Shaw in it’ might be. (A best beard contest? A display of Irish dancing?) She would have liked to discuss the air of strained urgency that the memo seemed to exude, and the intense seriousness of what was, at least nominally, a note about entertainment. Instead, she was left doing her usual impression of The Last Kipper in the Shop.
It had been like this since she had first started at the Ministry. Once it had been established that she was not the extra stenographer that scenarios had been hoping for (and some of the boys had asked her several times, as if she might have banged her head on the way in and be suffering from temporary amnesia), then the welcoming smiles, the appreciatively raised eyebrows, the race to take her coat and to find her a chair had all stopped. It was universally viewed as unfair, as insulting, she gathered, that a woman had been brought in especially to write women’s dialogue. ‘If there’s a dog in the script then we don’t employ a Jack Russell to come up with “woof woof”, do we?’, as one of her colleagues had put it, and she’d been allocated an office two hundred yards from everyone else, and largely ignored, her assignments arriving by messenger and being dispatched the same way. At story meetings from which she couldn’t be excluded she was invariably the note-taker (‘I’m sure Catrin will type that up for us’), while at lunchtimes her colleagues disappeared to the pub, failing to invite her on every occasion. Sometimes, at the end of a day on which Clive, her desk companion, had been particularly busy or determinedly unconscious, Catrin’s throat would ache with the pressure of unuttered speech.
At the tea-trolley, Greville was discussing North Africa with the authority of someone who had both the ear of Winston Churchill and access to the complete military plans of both sides. There were no biscuits left. Unacknowledged, Catrin slid away, and was halfway down the corridor when someone shouted her name. Another phone call. She trudged back and picked up the receiver.
‘Buckley,’ said the voice, dry as chaff. ‘I’m heading in on one of my special advisory visits. Unpaid of course. Where are you having lunch?’
*
Gravy soup v
Irish Stew
Curried vegetables and rice v
Mock-chocolate pudding v
Marmalade tart
‘What’s the ‘V’ stand for?’ asked Buckley.
‘Victory,’ said Catrin, picking up a tray. ‘We’re supposed to have at least one item off the victory menu every day. They’re made from ingredients that don’t have to be imported.’
‘Yes, I’d heard talk of the Kentish mock-chocolate harvest.’ He looked around the Ministry canteen and shook his head. ‘Put that back,’ he said, indicating the tray. ‘We’re going elsewhere.’
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to go to a restaurant.’
‘Elsewhere’s not a restaurant.’
Elsewhere was a pub, very dark and somewhere near Charlotte Street. Catrin, ravenous, sipped a gin and orange and felt instantly drunk.
‘I’m working for Baker’s at the moment,’ said Buckley.
Catrin nodded.
‘You don’t know what that is, do you?’
‘No,’ she said, blushing.
‘They make variety films, and comedies – did you see The Beaux and the Belles?’
‘No.’
‘Mr Harper’s Hat?’
‘No.’
‘Just Around the Corner?’
‘No.’
‘I bet you watch French films, don’t you?’
‘I don’t,’ she found herself saying, defensively, as if accused of an impropriety. ‘Well yes, sometimes. Did you see La Grande Illusion?’
‘No.’
There was a pause, while Buckley drank the whole of his pint and a brandy chaser. ‘They’ve got quite a bit of clout, Baker’s,’ he said, carrying on as if he’d only taken a breath since his last sentence. ‘You might not know who they are, but they make a lot of money, pay a lot of taxes to the Treasury. Entertainment for the masses. Know any?’
‘Any what?’
‘Any of the masses.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘Do you—’ Infuriatingly, she could feel herself beginning to blush again. ‘Do you think I’m a . . . a nob or something?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
‘No. I’m Welsh.’
‘Plenty of Welsh nobs.’
‘Not in Ebbw Vale. My father’s a joiner.’
‘And what about your husband?’
‘He’s an artist.’
‘Plenty of swanky artists.’
‘He’s not swanky, he’s part of the Paddington Group. It’s a collective.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s a group of artists who share the same aims and principles. They don’t work for the commercial sector.’
‘How do they eat, then?’
‘They undertake commissions for organizations with sympathetic beliefs.’
‘Can’t be too many of those.’
�
��And they hold exhibitions.’
‘Oh, they’re allowed to sell their paintings?’
‘Of course they are.’
‘But not to capitalists, presumably. So this set of painters, The Battersea Bunch—’
‘The Paddington Group.’
‘Are they all starving for art or do some of them come from money?’
‘I think one or two of them have a private income.’
‘Does your husband?’
‘No, he doesn’t. He was an apprentice engineer before he went to art college.’
‘So does he have any income?’
‘He used to—’
‘Beside yours, I mean.’
‘. . . he used to teach,’ she continued, determinedly. ‘And he’s curated exhibitions, and written catalogues. And he works all the time. He hardly ever stops.’
‘And does he paint proper pictures or is he a member of the upside-down brigade?’
‘He’s . . .’ But she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t offer the phrase, ‘the perceived domination of man by the artefactual landscape’, to that coarse, sarcastic face, it would be like handing a trembling faun to a man with a club. ‘If you saw his pictures, you’d know they were good,’ she said, simply.
He nodded and picked up his beer glass. ‘Another drink?’
‘No, thank you. Can I ask what this is all about? Only, I should really get back to work.’
‘This is work.’
She waited while he bought another pint and another chaser. ‘Baker’s,’ he said, sitting down again, ‘was founded by Edwin Baker who was actually a butcher, in Hornchurch, who wanted to make films. And he did, just after the Great War, he bought a camera and hired some actors and made one about Vikings in a wood by his house. And then he made another one, about cavemen, and then he stopped making films himself and just ran the company. He’s still running it. Him and his brother.’ Buckley took a long swallow and eyed the ceiling for a moment or two. ‘I write for them sometimes. Usually with a man called Parfitt. Usually comedies. I do structure, Parfitt does jokes. The Ladder Gang was the last one, about firemen. Graham Moffatt was in it, made a packet. You won’t have seen it, of course.’
