Human Voices
Penelope Fitzgerald
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’, this is a funny, touching, authentic story of life at Broadcasting House during the Blitz.The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the World War II, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC – as elsewhere – some had to fail and some had to die.It does not pretend to be an accurate history of Broadcasting House in those years, but ‘one is left with the sensation’, as William Boyd said, reviewing it in the ‘London Magazine’, ‘that this is what it was really like.’
Human Voices
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
Contents
Cover (#u10354d7e-30be-5c55-8936-4b2ea6d1c96b)
Title Page (#ua5bb8267-5b03-5580-bd96-e65af1aff73c)
Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor (#uc4b3cde6-c8fd-507e-b35b-5b76ee024a85)
Introduction (#uc78d2519-ac55-5441-b97a-275b300437c1)
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Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor (#ulink_fe6941fa-1682-5846-91fe-cc062a1973c6)
When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.
Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.
She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short-listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.
After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.
Introduction (#ulink_f1250c38-7762-5a0c-b23a-130671bf0a08)
Penelope Fitzgerald, brilliant Oxford student and already a clever if unpublished writer, was employed as a BBC features producer at the end of 1940 – the year in which Human Voices is set. She may not have been at the bottom of the pile but neither was she part of an elite graduate corps that the BBC brilliantly recruited and exploited in the last decades of the century.
In 1940 Fitzgerald could hardly have expected anything senior or with real prospects. The BBC had not yet discovered the merits of young female talent. As with almost all areas of public life, it was controlled entirely by men who largely required women to make the tea, do the typing and scurry through its corridors to store, retrieve and organise the material that would ensure the BBC could provide truthful information and a bit of light relief to a nation enduring the impact of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the military collapse of its closest ally, France.
If Fitzgerald’s contribution to the BBC’s war effort was marginal she at least had a ringside seat while its mandarins, then as now laden with acronyms, established its reputation as an independent, if imperfect, force for the good by telling the truth – or at least large chunks of it. The BBC had not done nearly as well during the General Strike of 1926, when its first director general, Lord Reith, much preferred the idea of buttressing the government, over any idea of the BBC as a trusted source of information. When Human Voices was published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher era, the BBC still drew much strength and credibility, both at home and abroad, from its performance in World War Two.
Fitzgerald’s view of the wartime BBC is unsparing, but her respect for its achievement is palpable throughout. Her summary of its public service credo may have been a response to the specific events of 1940 but has never been bettered in any subsequent crisis by any historian at any point in the BBC’s history:
Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective.
Her two central male characters, Sam Brooks and Jeff Haggard, are flawed broadcasting heroes. Brooks is head of Recorded Programmes, Haggard the director of Programme Planning. Their professional interests at the BBC are not aligned. Brooks is forever frustrated by having to cede airtime and resources to the needs of live broadcasting, Haggard’s domain. But they share a profound sense of duty: detached and understated in Haggard’s case, obsessive and narcissistic in Brooks’. They also share a pronounced disregard for the pettifogging, very senior managers who get in their way and for any government or military interest bent on turning the BBC into a more conventional state broadcaster. They never talk about the BBC’s independence – the first word the BBC normally uses to defend itself against outside pressure – they simply practise it.
The relationship between these two men, each with largely unexplored marital difficulties, gives the novel much of its shape. They do not go in for verbal intimacy, nor do they have time to socialise and, unlike others in the building, they don’t drink much.
Brooks is attractive, apparently oblivious to the interests of the women who work for him (his ‘seraglio’) and constantly complains, angrily and wittily about those who do not recognise the importance of his work. Haggard is laconic, understated and frequently called in to support his needy and vulnerable friend. He does so with almost terminal reluctance.
Haggard is the more impressive and more senior. In the book’s biggest dramatic broadcast scene he is in charge of a live address given by a fictional French Pétainist, General Pinard, who arrives at Broadcasting House to address Britain. Fitzgerald places this scene only a few days before De Gaulle’s famous and indomitable BBC broadcast to his defeated countrymen. It is a wonderful set-piece brimming with incident and comedy which illustrates Haggard’s wholly admirable and almost reckless independence of thought and action. Fitzgerald uses this moment to expose a deeply embedded BBC senior managerial trait when faced with improvisation – a nervous rigidity and lack of imagination. But more importantly she celebrates the BBC’s dogged refusal to allow anybody from outside to intimidate it.
Pinard, something of an Anglophile, is ‘always cheerful, and most important of all, nearly always a loser’. His speech takes a swipe at Churchill, ‘the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister’ and adds tartly that ‘the French are a nation who have always cared about their army, while you have never cared about yours’. As he reaches his climax to an audience of fifteen million, he has a terrible coughing fit.
And at this point, at what would have been the most dramatic moment in the history of broadcasting, Fitzgerald memorably captures a central and largely forgotten aspect of the first fifty years of the BBC – the obsession with the technicalities of broadcasting: ‘“He’s overloading,” said the programme engineer, in agony.’
Human Voices is in part a reflection on the BBC’s engineering roots, the nature of sound and of broadcasting authenticity. Brooks in particular is forever trying to perfect the art and science of radio while all the time his department is under threat from the primacy of live news – delivered live. A BBC meeting of hierarchs, from which he is typically excluded, decides that ‘the direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it – if not, the public must be clearly told what they’ve been listening to – the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, Not Quite Fresh’.
But Brooks, as ever resentful and frustrated, does not relent: ‘“All my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand.”’
This gives Fitzgerald a great deal of scope to describe the anatomy of a professional passion and the largely unintended punishment it can inflict on others. Brooks goes round the country with a half-deaf German refugee, Dr Vogel, to capture the sounds of genuine British wheezing and coughing, or the hinges of church doors creaking (‘The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so’). He can’t abide the absence within the BBC of recordings of German Stuka bombers and seeks with manic intensity to invent a new windshield to improve the performance of microphones in the open air.
This search for aural perfection is a central preoccupation of the entire novel. It provides more than the framework for the almost ideological struggle for resources and prestige between live and recorded programmes. It also leads to an early but defining moment in the relationship between Brooks’ unchallengeable expertise and the latest member of his seraglio – young Annie Asra from Selly Oak, a place described with reference to its sound as having ‘scrupulously fair intonation … neither rising nor falling, giving each syllable its equal weight, as though considering its feelings before leaving it behind’.
Annie is the daughter of a piano tuner but not musically sophisticated. Brooks wants to teach her about sound quality and balance. She is more than happy to learn but memorably seeks to correct him on the matter of pitch. She meets an amazed and indignant response and it seems that she will never be forgiven.
Annie is the most interesting of all the women in the novel. Most of the other members of Brooks’ seraglio have assorted boyfriend issues – aggravated by the separation of war. Lise is rather hopeless, Vi is full of solid decency, Della is flirty – and so on. Brooks, clearly thoroughly attractive to women, needs them all to listen to and be supportive of his grievances against all-comers. Annie is willing, calm, frank, clear-sighted, strong-willed and patient. She is delighted to have left her job at a Midlands hosiery store to be at the BBC (‘to help the war effort’). She is far from plain but has no concern for glamour and can neither flatter nor deceive, not least herself. There is something downbeat and pessimistic about her. When she falls in love and it is unrequited her fate is summed up thus: ‘She was free to stay here and be unhappy, just so long as she didn’t become ridiculous; for that she didn’t think she could forgive herself.’
Few authors depict the stoic virtues as well as Fitzgerald. She has a forensic eye and ear for domestic and romantic suffering borne in a minor key. If she doesn’t exactly celebrate an acceptance of fate and incomplete happiness, she evidently has profound respect for the ability to cope – and she applies it not only to her characters and to the BBC but to wartime Britain too. This is never done in a way that simply conforms to clichés of a unique British national fortitude. Indeed, she places some distance between herself and her characters’ observations of the temperaments of various nations – but she nevertheless is in tune with those who respond phlegmatically to the physical damage and disruption of war.
When the American journalist, McVitie (Mac), who has some of the attributes of the real Ed Murrow, arrives to report on Britain’s battle to survive he is impressed, but provides a highly attractive counterpoint to British reticence. He comes freighted with oranges (a luxury), energy, fraternal goodwill and enterprise. We learn little about his inner life but he neatly encapsulates a very different and more swashbuckling journalistic realm than that depicted within the BBC. His night-time trip with Haggard to a tube station, to decide a bet as to whether he knows any ‘ordinary men’, is a brilliant cameo of the physical damage wrought by the Luftwaffe, and of a journalist’s resourcefulness and guile.
There is one other big character in the book and that is Broadcasting House (BH) itself, ‘a ship with the wrong sort of windows’ – just north of Oxford Circus – then and now the BBC’s home. Much of the novel is set in and immediately around the building. Even in normal times the BBC is prone to claustrophobia. Here the introversion is pervasive. The bombs fall on it and near it, and the pre-war BH rhythms and routines are dislocated. The concert hall becomes the scene of a well-meaning but ridiculous first aid course with Haggard subverting proceedings as best he can. And its function as an overnight dormitory sees a child born amid sleeping and snoring. It becomes hard for Brooks and Haggard to leave it even if they had wanted to:
Their life in BH had become so secluded and so strange that it was difficult to remember at times where wives or friends could come from.
Fitzgerald left the BBC at the end of the war. Both before Human Voices was published and since, many have written accounts of its wartime role. None has so penetrated its physical and moral skin. She may only have been in her mid-twenties when she was there but she palpably understood the BBC’s profound, fussy, sometimes vain but largely heroic and invaluable commitment to the truth – and expressed it in the form of a concise, witty and beautiful novel. Would that the BBC had more friends like her.
Mark Damazer
2013
1 (#ulink_e3db2f1d-7f72-5d40-86d0-920e7e683115)
Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women. This in itself was an understandable habit and quite harmless, or, to be more accurate, RPD never considered whether it was harmless or not. If he was to think about such things, his attention had to be specially drawn to them. Meanwhile it was understood by the girls that he might have an overwhelming need to confide his troubles in one of them, or perhaps all of them, but never in two of them at once, during the three wartime shifts in every twenty-four hours. This, too, might possibly suggest the arrangements of a seraglio, but it would have been quite unfair to deduce, as some of the Old Servants of the Corporation occasionally did, that the RP Junior Temporary Assistants had no other duties. On the contrary, they were in anxious charge of the five thousand recordings in use every week. Those which the Department processed went into the Sound Archives of the war, while the scrap was silent for ever.
‘I can’t see what good it would be if Mr Brooks did talk to me,’ said Lise, who had only been recruited three days earlier, ‘I don’t know anything.’
Vi replied that it was hard on those in positions of responsibility, like RPD, if they didn’t drink, and didn’t go to confession.
‘Are you a Catholic then?’
‘No, but I’ve heard people say that.’
Vi herself had only been at BH for six months, but since she was getting on for nineteen she was frequently asked to explain things to those who knew even less.
‘I daresay you’ve got it wrong,’ she added, being patient with Lise, who was pretty, but shapeless, crumpled and depressed. ‘He won’t jump on you, it’s only a matter of listening.’
‘Hasn’t he got a secretary?’
‘Yes, Mrs Milne, but she’s an Old Servant.’
Even after three days, Lise could understand this.
‘Or a wife? Isn’t he married?’
‘Of course he’s married. He lives in Streatham, he has a nice home on Streatham Common. He doesn’t get back there much, none of the higher grades do. It’s non-stop for them, it seems.’
‘Have you ever seen Mrs Brooks?’
‘No.’
‘How do you know his home is nice, then?’
Vi did not answer, and Lise turned the information she had been given so far slowly over in her mind.
‘He sounds like a selfish shit to me.’
‘I’ve told you how it is, he thinks people under twenty are more receptive. I don’t know why he thinks that. He just tries pouring out his worries to all of us in turn.’
‘Has he poured them out to Della?’
‘Well, perhaps not Della.’
‘What happens if you’re not much good at listening? Does he get rid of you?’
Vi explained that some of the girls had asked for transfers because they wanted to be Junior Programme Engineers, who helped with the actual transmissions. That hadn’t been in any way the fault of RPD. Wishing that she didn’t have to explain matters which would only become clear, if at all, through experience, she checked her watch with the wall clock. An extract from the Prime Minister was wanted for the mid-day news, 1’42” in, cue Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.
‘By the way, he’ll tell you that your face reminds him of another face he’s seen somewhere – an elusive type of beauty, rather elusive anyway, it might have been a picture somewhere or other, or a photograph, or something in history, or something, but anyway he can’t quite place it.’
Lise seemed to brighten a little.
‘Won’t he ever remember?’
‘Sometimes he appeals to Mrs Milne, but she doesn’t know either. No, his memory lets him down at that point. But he’ll probably put you on the Department’s Indispensable Emergency Personnel List. That’s the people he wants close to him in case of invasion. We’d be besieged, you see, if that happened. They’re going to barricade both ends of Langham Place. If you’re on the list you’d transfer then to the Defence Rooms in the sub-basement and you can draw a standard issue of towel, soap and bedding for the duration. Then there was a memo round about hand grenades.’
Lise opened her eyes wide and let the tears slide out, without looking any less pretty. Vi, however, was broadminded, and overlooked such things.
‘My boy’s in the Merchant Navy,’ she said, perceiving the real nature of the trouble. ‘What about yours?’
‘He’s in France, he’s with the French army. He is French.’
‘That’s not so good.’
Their thoughts moved separately to what must be kept out of them, helpless waves of flesh against metal and salt water. Vi imagined the soundless fall of a telegram through the letter-box. Her mother would say it was just the same as last time but worse because in those days people seemed more human somehow and the postman was a real friend and knew everyone on his round.
‘What’s his name, then?’
‘Frédé. I’m partly French myself, did they tell you?’
‘Well, that can’t be helped now.’ Vi searched for the right consolation. ‘Don’t worry if you get put on the IEP List. You won’t stay there long. It keeps changing.’
Mrs Milne rang down. ‘Is Miss Bernard there? Have I the name correct by the way? We’re becoming quite a League of Nations. As she is new to the Department, RPD would like to see her for a few minutes when she comes off shift.’
‘We haven’t even gone on yet.’
Mrs Milne was accustomed to relax a little with Vi.
‘We’re having a tiresome day, all these directives, why can’t they leave us to go quietly on with our business which we know like the back of our hand. Tell Miss Bernard not to worry about her evening meal, I’ve been asked to see to a double order of sandwiches.’ Lise was not listening, but recalled Vi to the point she had understood best.
‘If Mr Brooks says he thinks I’m beautiful, will he mean it?’
‘He means everything he says at the time.’
There was always time for conversations of this kind, and of every kind, at Broadcasting House. The very idea of Continuity, words and music succeeding each other without a break except for a cough or a shuffle or some mistake eagerly welcomed by the indulgent public, seemed to affect everyone down to the humblest employee, the filers of Scripts as Broadcast and the fillers-up of glasses of water, so that all in turn could be seen forming close groups, in the canteen, on the seven floors of corridors, beside the basement ticker-tapes, in the washrooms, in the studios, talking, talking to each other, and usually about each other, until the very last moment when the notice SILENCE: ON THE AIR forbade.
The gossip of the seven decks increased the resemblance of the great building to a liner, which the designers had always intended. BH stood headed on a fixed course south. With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale. Since the outbreak of war damp sandbags had lapped it round, but once inside the bronze doors, the airs of cooking from the deep hold suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary. At night, with all its blazing portholes blacked out, it towered over a flotilla of taxis, each dropping off a speaker or two.
By the spring of 1940 there had been a number of castaways. During the early weeks of evacuation Variety, Features and Drama had all been abandoned in distant parts of the country, while the majestic headquarters was left to utter wartime instructions, speeches, talks and news.
Since March the lifts below the third floor had been halted as an economy measure, so that the first three staircases became yet another meeting place. Few nowadays were ever to be found in their offices. An instinct, or perhaps a rapidly acquired characteristic, told the employees how to find each other. On the other hand, in this constant circulation much was lost. The corridors were full of talks producers without speakers, speakers without scripts, scripts which by a clerical error contained the wrong words or no words at all. The air seemed alive with urgency and worry.
Recordings, above all, were apt to be mislaid. They looked alike, all 78s, aluminium discs coated on one side with acetate whose pungent rankness was the true smell of the BBC’s war. It was rumoured that the Germans were able to record on tapes coated with ferrous oxide and that this idea might have commercial possibilities in the future, but only the engineers and RPD himself believed this.
‘It won’t catch on,’ the office supervisor told Mrs Milne. ‘You could never get attached to them.’
‘That’s true,’ Mrs Milne said. ‘I loved my record of Charles Trenet singing J’ai ta main. I died the death when it fell into the river at Henley. The public will never get to feel like that about lengths of tape.’
But the Department’s discs, though cared for and filed under frequently changing systems, were elusive. Urgently needed for news programmes, they went astray in transit to the studio. Tea-cups were put down on them, and they melted. Ferried back by mobile units through the bitter cold, they froze, and had to be gently restored to life. Hardly a day passed without one or two of them disappearing.
Vi was now looking for Churchill’s Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide with the faint-hearted help of Lise. It was possible that Lise might turn out to be hopeless. They’d given up For Transmission, and were looking in what was admittedly the wrong place, among the Processed, whose labels, written in the RPAs’ round school-leavers’ handwriting, offered First Day of War: Air-Raid Siren, False Alarm: Cheerful Voices with Chink of Tea-Cups: Polish Refugees in Scotland, National Singing, No Translation. ‘You won’t find anything in that lot,’ said Della, brassily stalking through, ‘that’s all Atmosphere.’
‘It’s wanted in the editing room. Do you think Radio News Reel went and took it?’
‘Why don’t you ask the boys?’
Three of the Junior RPAs were boys, and RPD, though fond of them, felt less need to confide in them. As the Department expanded more and more girls would be taken on. ‘What a field that’s going to give us!’ said Teddy, relaxing in the greasy haze of the canteen with Willie Sharpe. Willie only paid twopence for his coffee, because he was a juvenile.
‘I don’t grudge you that in any way,’ Teddy went on. ‘It’s a mere accident of birth. I just wonder how you reconcile it with what you’re always saying, that you expect to be in training as a Spitfire pilot by the end of 1940.’
‘My face is changing,’ Willie replied. ‘Coming up from Oxford Circus on Wednesday I passed a girl I used to know and she didn’t recognize me.’
Teddy looked at him pityingly.
‘They’re still asking for School Certificate in maths,’ he said.
‘Pretty soon they mayn’t mind about that, though. They’ll be taking pilots wherever they can get them.’
‘They’ll still want people who look a bit more than twelve.’
Willie was rarely offended, and never gave up.
‘Hitler was a manual worker, you know. He didn’t need School Cert to take command of the Nazi hordes.’
‘No, but he can’t fly, either,’ Teddy pointed out.
The boys’ ears, though delicately tuned to differences of pitch and compression, adapted easily to the frightful clash of metal trays in the canteen. Unlike the administrative staff, they had no need to shout. Teddy sat with his back to the counter, so that he could see the girls as they came in – Della, perhaps, although there was nothing doing there – and at the same time turned the pages of a Yank mag, where white skin and black lace glimmered. These mags were in short supply. Vi’s merchant seaman, who was on the Atlantic run, had passed it on.
‘You know, Willie, I need money for what I want to do. Honestly, the kind of woman I have in mind is unattainable on £378 a year.’
‘Your mind’s tarnished, Teddy.’
‘I’m not responsible for more than one eighth of it,’ Teddy protested.
‘No, but you can increase the proportion by concentrated will-power. As I see it, in any case, after the conflict is over we shan’t be at the mercy of anything artificially imposed on us, whether from within or without. Hunger will be a thing of the past because the human race won’t tolerate it, mating will follow an understandable instinct, and there’ll be no deference to rank or money. We shall need individuals of strong will then.’
Neither Teddy nor anyone else felt that Willie was ridiculous when he spoke like this, although they sometimes wondered what would become of him. Indeed, he was noble. His notebook contained, besides the exact details of his shift duties, a new plan for the organisation of humanity. Teddy also had a notebook, the back of which he kept for the estimated measurements of the Seraglio.
‘I’d put this Lise Bernard at 34, 25, 38. Are you with me?’
‘I’m not too sure,’ said Willie doubtfully. ‘By the way, she cries rather a lot.’
‘She’s mixed a lot with French people, that would make her more emotional.’
‘Not all foreigners are emotional. It depends whether they come from the north or the south. Look at Tad.’
Taddeus Zagorski, the third of the junior RPAs (male), had arrived in this country with his parents only last October. How had he managed to learn English so quickly, and how, although he wasn’t much older than the rest of them and was quite new to the Department, did he manage to dazzle them with his efficiency and grasp?
‘I can’t seem to get to like him,’ said Teddy. ‘He’s suffered, I know, but there it is. He wants to be a news reader, you know.’
‘I daresay he’ll get on,’ Willie replied, ‘in the world, that is, as it’s at present constituted. It’s possible that we’re jealous of him. We ought to guard against that.’
Tad, in fact, was emerging at the head of the counter queue, where, with a proud gesture, he stirred his coffee with the communal spoon tied to the cash register with a piece of string. He must have been doing Messages From The Forces.
‘My auntie got one of those messages,’ said Willie. ‘It was my uncle in the Navy singing When the Deep PurpleFalls, but by the time it went out he was missing, believed killed.’
‘Was she upset?’
‘She never really heard it. She works on a delivery van.’
The young Pole stood at their table, cup of coffee in hand, brooding down at them from a height.
‘You should have been off ten minutes ago,’ said Teddy.
Tad sat down between them, precisely in the middle of his chair, in his creaseless white shirt. The boys felt uneasy. He had an air of half-suppressed excitement.
‘Who is that fellow?’ he asked suddenly.
Willie looked up, Teddy craned round. A man with a pale, ruined-looking face was walking up to the bar.
Tad watched him as he asked quietly for a double whisky. The barman seemed unnerved. In fact, the canteen had only obtained a licence at the beginning of the year, on the understanding that the news readers should not take more than two glasses of beer before reporting for work, and the shadow of disapproval still hung over it. Higher grades were expected to go to the Langham for a drink, but this one hadn’t.
‘I ask you about that fellow,’ said Tad, ‘because it was he who just came into Studio LG14. I was clearing up the Messages preparatory to returning them to registry, and I asked him what he was doing in the studios, as one cannot be too careful in the present circumstances. He replied that he had an administrative post in the BBC, and, as he seemed respectable, I explained the standard routine to him. I think one should never be too busy to teach those who are anxious to learn.’
‘Well, you set out to impress him,’ said Teddy. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him the rules of writing a good news talk – “the first sentence must interest, the second must inform”. Next I pointed out the timeless clock, which is such an unusual feature of our studios, and demonstrated the “ten seconds from now”.’
The familiar words sounded dramatic, and even tragic.
‘What did he do?’
‘He nodded, and showed interest.’
‘But didn’t he say anything?’
‘Quite quietly. He said, “Tell me more.”’
Tad’s self-assurance wavered and trembled. ‘He does not look quite the same now as he did then. Who is he?’
‘That’s Jeffrey Haggard,’ Willie said. ‘He’s the Director of Programme Planning.’
Tad was silent for a moment. ‘Then he would be familiar with the ten second cue?’
‘He invented it. It’s called the Haggard cue, or the Jeff, sometimes.’ Teddy laughed, louder than the din of crockery.
‘God, Tad, you’ve made me happy to-day. Jeepers Creepers, you’ve gone and explained the ten second cue to DPP …’
Their table rocked and shook, while Tad sat motionless, steadying his cup with his hand.
‘Doubtless Mr Haggard will think me ludicrous.’
‘He thinks everything’s ludicrous,’ said Willie hastily.
Teddy laughed and laughed, not able to get over it, meaning no harm. He wouldn’t laugh like that if he was Polish, Willie thought. However, in his scheme of things to come there would no frontiers, and indeed no countries.
The Director of Programme Planning ordered a second double in his dry, quiet, disconcerting voice. Probably in the whole of his life he had never had to ask for anything twice. The barman, knowing, as most people did, that Mr Haggard had run through three wives and had lost his digestion into the bargain, wondered what he’d sound like if he got angry.
The whisky, though it had no visible effect, was exactly calculated to raise DPP from a previous despair far enough to face the rest of the evening. When he had finished it he went back to his office, where he managed with no secretary and very few staff, and rang RPD.
‘Mrs Milne, I want Sam. I can hear him shouting, presumably in the next room.’
On the telephone his voice dropped even lower, like a voice’s shadow. He waited, looking idly at the schedules that entirely covered the walls, the charts of Public Listening and Evening Meal Habits, and the graphs, supplied by the Ministry of Information, of the nation’s morale.
RPD was put through.
‘Jeff, I want you to hear my case.’
DPP had been hearing it for more than ten years. But, to do his friend justice, it was never the same twice running. The world seemed new created every day for Sam Brooks, who felt no resentment and, indeed, very little recollection of what he had suffered the day before.
‘Jeff, Establishment have hinted that I’m putting in for too many girls.’
‘How can that be?’
‘They know I like to have them around, they know I need that. I’ve drafted a reply, saying nothing, mind you, about the five thousand discs a week, or the fact that we provide a service to every other department of the Corporation. See what you think of the way I’ve put it – I begin quite simply, by asking them whether they realize that through the skill of the recording engineer, sound can be transformed from air to wax, the kind of thing which through all the preceding centuries has been possible only to the bees. It’s the transference of pattern, you see – surely that says something encouraging about the human mind. Don’t forget that Mozart composed that trio while he was playing a game of billiards.’
‘Sam, I went to a meeting to-day.’
‘What about?’
‘It was about the use of recordings in news bulletins.’
‘Why wasn’t I asked?’
But Sam was never asked to meetings.
‘We had two Directors and three Ministries – War, Information, Supply. They’d called it, quite genuinely I think, in the interests of truth.’
The word made its mark. Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness. But the BBC had clung tenaciously to its first notion, droning quietly on, at intervals from dawn to midnight, telling, as far as possible, exactly what happened. An idea so unfamiliar was bound to upset many of the other authorities, but they had got used to it little by little, and the listeners had always expected it.
‘The object of the meeting was to cut down the number of recordings in news transmissions – in the interests of truth, as they said. The direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it – if not, the public must be clearly told what they’ve been listening to – the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, Not Quite Fresh.’
Sam’s Department was under attack, and with it every recording engineer, every RPA, every piece of equipment, every TD7, mixer and fader and every waxing and groove in the building. As the protector and defender of them all, he became passionate.
‘Did they give specific instances? Could they even find one?’
‘They started with Big Ben. It’s always got to be relayed direct from Westminster, the real thing, never from disc. That’s got to be firmly fixed in the listeners’ minds. Then, if Big Ben is silent, the public will know that the war has taken a distinctly unpleasant turn.’
‘Jeff, the escape of Big Ben freezes in cold weather.’
‘We shall have to leave that to the Ministry of Works.’
‘And the King’s stammer. Ah, what about that. My standby recordings for his speeches to the nation – His Majesty without stammer, in case of emergency.’
‘Above all, not those.’
‘And Churchill.…’
‘Some things have to go, that was decided at a preliminary talk long before I got there. Otherwise it’s just a general directive, and we’ve lived through a good many of those. It doesn’t affect the total amount of recording. If you want to overwork, you’ve nothing to worry about.’ Sam said that he accepted that no-one present had had the slightest understanding of his Department’s work, but it was strange, very strange, that there had been no attempt whatever, at any stage, to consider his point of view.
‘If someone could have reasoned with him, Jeff. Perhaps this idea that’s come to me about the bees.…’
‘I protested against any cuts in your mobile recording units. I managed to save your cars.’
‘Those Wolseleys!’
‘They’re all you’ve got, Sam.’
‘The hearses. I’ve been asking for replacements for two years. They’re just about fit to take a Staff Officer to a lunch party, wait till he collapses from over-indulgence, then on to the graveyard. And I’ve had to send two of those out to France.… Jeff, were you asked to break this to me?
‘In a way.’ As they left the meeting one of the Directors had drawn him aside and had asked him to avoid mentioning the new recommendations to RPD for as long as possible.
Sam was floundering in his newly acquired wealth of grievances.
‘Without even the commonplace decency … no standbys … my cars, well, I suppose you did your best there … my girls.…’
‘In my opinion you can make do with the staff you’ve got,’ Jeff said. ‘One of your RPAs was talking to me in the studio just now, and I assure you he was very helpful.’
When he had done what he could Jeff walked out of the building. It was scarcely necessary for him to show his pass. His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian’s, but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC. He stood for a moment among the long shadows on the pavement, between the piles of sandbags which had begun to rot and grow grass, now that spring had come.
DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it. In any case, he had a taxi waiting for him every night, just round the corner in Riding House Street. He hardly ever used it, but it was a testimony that if he wanted to, he could get away quickly.
RPD seemed to have forgotten how to go home. Mrs Milne suggested as much to him as she said goodnight. Her typewriter slumbered now under its leatherette cover. He gave no sign of having heard her.
Long before it was dark men in brown overalls went round BH, fixing the framed blackouts in every window, circulating in the opposite direction to the Permanents coming downstairs, while the news readers moved laterally to check with Pronunciation, pursued by editors bringing later messages on pink cards. Movement was complex, so too was time. Nobody’s hour of work coincided exactly with the life-cycle of Broadcasting House, whose climax came six times in the twenty-four hours with the Home News, until at nine o’clock, when the nation sat down to listen, the building gathered its strength and struck. The night world was crazier than the day world. When Lise Bernard paused in doubt at the door of RPD’s office, she saw her Head of Department pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC’s pale furniture, veneered with Empire woods. He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC’s frightful house ties, dark blue embroidered with thermionic valves in red. Evidently he put on whatever came to hand first. Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts.
When he recognized who she was he stopped pacing about and took off his spectacles, changing from a creature of sight to one of faith. Lise, the crowded office, the neatly angled sandwiches, the tray with its white cloth suitable for grades of Director and above, turned into patches of light and shade. To Lise, on the other hand, looking at his large hazel eyes, the eyes of a child determined not to blink for fear of missing something, he became someone who could not harm her and asked to be protected from harm. The effect, however, was quite unplanned, he produced it unconsciously. All the old lechers and yearners in the building envied the success which he seemed to turn to so little account.
‘He just weeps on their shoulders you know,’ they said. ‘And yet I believe the man’s a trained engineer.’
‘Sit down, Miss Bernard. Have all these sandwiches. You look hungry.’ When he had put his spectacles on again he couldn’t pursue this idea; Lise was decidedly overweight. ‘I like to get to know everyone who comes to work for me as soon as possible – in a way it’s part of the responsibility I feel for all of you – and the shortest way to do that, curiously enough, I’ve found, is to tell you some of the blankly incomprehensible bloody idiotic lack of understanding that our Department meets with every minute of the day.’
Lise sat there blankly, eating nothing. He picked up the telephone, sighing.
‘Canteen, I have a young assistant here, quite new to the Corporation, who can’t eat your sandwiches.’
‘That’s National Cheese, Mr Brooks. The manufacturers have agreed to amalgamate their brand names for the duration in the interest of the Allied war effort.’
‘I believe you’ve been waiting to say that all day.’
‘I don’t want anything, Mr Brooks, really I don’t,’ whimpered Lise.
‘Not good enough for you.’ He looked angrily at the window, unable to throw them out because of the blackout. Then he sat down opposite to the girl and considered her closely. ‘You know, even though I only saw you for a few minutes at the interview, I was struck by the width between your eyes. You can see something like it in those portraits by – I’m sure you know the ones I mean. It’s a sure index of a certain kind of intelligence, I would call it an emotional intelligence.’ Lise wished that there was a looking-glass in the room.
‘Some people might find what I have to say difficult to grasp, because I let my ideas follow each other just as they come. But people whose eyes are as wide apart as yours won’t have that difficulty.’ He took her hand, but held it quite absent-mindedly.
‘You may find Broadcasting House rather strange at first, but there’s nothing unusual about me. Except for this, I suppose – it just so happens that all my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand. Perhaps you know what it’s like to have a worry that doesn’t and can’t leave room in your mind for anything else and won’t give you peace, night or day, for a single moment.’
Now something went not at all according to programme. Lise began to sob. These tears were not of her usual manageable kind, and her nose turned red. Having no handkerchief with her she struggled to her feet and heaved and streamed her way out of the room.
‘Bad news?’ asked Teddy, meeting her in the corridor. Set on her way to the Ladies, she only shook her head. RPD’s gone for one of them at last, he thought. Jeez, I don’t blame him. But Della, expert in human behaviour, thought this impossible.
‘Why?’ Teddy asked. ‘He’s capable.’
‘If it was that, she wouldn’t be crying.’
When Lise did not come back, Sam was at first mildly puzzled, and then forgot about her. But he was still oppressed with the injustice that had been done to him in the name of truth, in the name of patriotism too, if you thought of the cheese sandwiches, and the added injustice of being abandoned without a listener. In the end he had to turn to Vi, too busy and perhaps too accustomed to his ways to be quite what he wanted, but not tearful, and always reliable. By this time, however, having been sorting out administrative and technical problems since five in the morning, he was exhausted. He put his head on her shoulder, as he was always rumoured to do, took off his spectacles, and went to sleep immediately.
Twenty minutes passed. It was coming up for the nine o’clock news.
‘Aren’t you exceeding your duties?’ said one of the recording engineers, putting his head round the door. ‘You’ve got a situation on your hands there.’
‘If that’s a name for cramp,’ said Vi.
2 (#ulink_5990667a-11dd-5b7e-a957-8dadfbc412d1)
The second year of the war was not a time when the staff of BH gave very much thought to promotion. But, even so, it seemed odd that Jeff Haggard and Sam Brooks, who, though they could hardly be termed Old Servants, had been bitterly loyal for more than ten years, should be nothing more than DPP and RPD. True, nobody else could have done their jobs, and then again Sam always seemed too overworked to notice, and Jeff too detached to care. One might have assumed that they would be there for ever.
But if they were either to move or to leave, it would have to be together. Without understanding either their warmly unreasonable RPD, or their sardonic DPP, the BBC knew that for a fact. The link between them was consolingly felt as the usefulness of having Haggard around when Brooks had to be got out of trouble. This was enough for practical purposes, but Jeff would have liked to have been able to explain it further. By nature he was selfish. He had left his first wife because he had found his second wife more attractive, and his second wife had left him because, as she told her lawyers, she could never make him raise his voice. It was, therefore, going against his nature, a most unsafe proceeding, to put himself out to help a friend, worse still to do so for so long. Their long relationship looked like an addiction – a weakness for the weak on Jeff’s part – or a response to the appeal for protection made by the defenceless and single-minded. Of course, if this appeal were to fail entirely, the human race would have difficulty in reproducing itself.
Perhaps if Sam had ever been able to foresee the result of his actions, or if he had suspected for one moment that he was not entirely self-sufficient, the spell might have been broken, or perhaps there was a fixed point in the past when that might have been done.
‘I ought to have stopped in 1938,’ Jeff thought. ‘With Englishry.’ At the time of the Munich Agreement a memo had been sent round calling, as a matter of urgency, for the recording of our country’s heritage.
It was headed Lest we forget our Englishry. Sam had disappeared for over two weeks in one of the Wolseleys, pretty infirm even at that time, with an engineer and an elderly German refugee, Dr Vogel – Dr Vogel, cruelly bent, deaf in one ear, but known to be the greatest expert in Europe on recorded atmosphere.
There was not much hope of commonsense prevailing. Dr Vogel, in spite of his politeness and gentle ganz meinerheits, was an obsessive, who had been seen to take the arms of passers-by in his bony grip and beg to record their breathing, for he wished to record England’s wheezing before the autumn fogs began. ‘Have the goodness, sir, to cough a little into my apparatus.’ Sam thought the idea excellent.
The expedition to the English countryside arrived back with a very large number of discs. The engineer who had gone with them said nothing. He went straight away to have a drink. It was probably a misfortune that the Controllers were so interested in the project that they demanded a playback straight away. Usually there was a judicious interval before they expressed any opinion, but not this time.
‘What we have been listening to – patiently, always in the hope of something else coming up – amounts to more than six hundred bands of creaking. To be accurate, some are a mixture of squeaking and creaking.’
‘They’re all from the parish church of Hither Lickington,’ Sam explained eagerly. ‘It was recommended to us by Religious Broadcasting as the top place in the Home Counties. What you’re hearing is the hinges of the door and the door itself opening and shutting as the old women come in one by one with the stuff for the Harvest Festival. The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so. Some of them have got more to carry, so the door has to open wider. That’s when you get the squeak.’
‘Hark, the vegetable marrow comes!’ cried Dr Vogel, his head on one side, well contented.
For several weeks the Recorded Programme Department was in danger of complete reorganization, for the BBC could form and re-form its elements with ease. It was put to DPP, in consultation, that although RPD was successfully in charge of hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment, and no fault could be found with his technical standing.…
‘You feel that he’s too interested in creaking doors,’ Jeff said.
‘He’s irresponsible.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say so.’
‘There was a considerable financial investment in this project, and Brooks was well aware that copies of the recordings were to be buried certain fathoms in the earth as a memorial for future generations.’
‘You could still do that,’ Jeff replied. ‘There mayn’t be any doors that creak by then. Mine doesn’t now.’ All the doors in BH were fitted with self-closing devices of an irritating nature.
It was not Jeff’s habit to soothe, but as usual the case he made for his friend, only just over the borderline of detachment, and gradually becoming more serious, proved effective. Sam never heard of these discussions. He continued like a sleepwalker, who never knows what obstacles are removed, and by what hands, from his path.
And Sam was not the only member of the Corporation who confided in Jeff. That was surprising, in view of the imperturbable surface he presented, which gave back only a stony resonance, truthful and dry, to the complaints of others. But his advice was excellent, and he could be relied upon, as so few could, not to wait for a convenient opening to start on his own grievances. Perhaps he hadn’t any, certainly he admitted to none. His calmness was really recklessness, as of a gambler who no longer felt anything was valuable enough to stake. That in turn was not likely to make him popular. Those who valued his cold judgement when they needed it, very naturally resented it when they didn’t. To see the Director of Programme Planning miscalculate might have been a relief, but during the first nine months of the war no hint of such a thing arose – never, until the affair of General Pinard.
‘You’ll get your boy back, then,’ said Della to Lise. A strong line was best, in her opinion. Everyone knew that Lise considered herself engaged and that Frédé was some kind of electrician with the French 1st Army. The way things were going they’d have to bring the French over here, there was nowhere else for them to go.
‘But that will be quite impossible,’ said Tad, demonstrating with his map. ‘You underestimate the obstacle of the English Channel.’
‘In that case, if you want my advice, you’d do best to forget him,’ said Della. ‘After all, he never gave you a ring, did he?’
Lise had not proved any better at her work than Della, which made some sort of bond between them.
Vi’s merchant seaman wrote making apparent references to home leave, but a good deal of his letter had been blacked out by the censor. What a job having to go through other people’s personal letters, Vi thought, they must feel uncomfortable, you had to pity them.
On June 10 1940 the French Government admitted that Paris could not be defended, and left for Bordeaux. Between the débandade and de Gaulle’s arrival on the 17th, there was a bizarre moment of hope when the Government learned that General Georges Pinard had escaped to London, flying his own light aircraft, and bringing with him nothing but a small valise and one junior officer. He went straight to the Rembrandt Hotel.
Historians have not yet decided – or rather, they have decided but not agreed – as to who sent the General on his desperate mission. Certainly no-one could have been more welcome. Whereas de Gaulle was practically unknown in Britain, Pinard was instantly recognizable, with his coarse silvery moustache, the joy of worn-out cartoonists, and his nose broken by a fall from a horse and flattened out of its French sharpness. His name was one of the few that the public knew well and it created its own picture.
The General was a peasant’s son from the flattest, wettest and most unpicturesque part of France, where the provinces of Aisne and Somme join. Born in 1869, he grew up with the Prussian occupation; the army rescued him from hoeing root vegetables, and he rose at a moderate speed through the ranks. Improbable as it seemed, he was a romantic, a Dreyfusard and a devotee of the aeroplane – indeed, his lectures on the importance of airpower delayed his promotion by several years. However, he cared nothing for Empire, nothing for impossible ambitions, only for the stubborn defence of the solid earth of his country. In the Great War, he was with one of the only two divisions not affected by the mutiny of 1917. He always slept excellently, and it was said that he had to be wakened by his orderly before every battle.
When the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre was reopened in 1919, Pinard was one of the first to be appointed, and was looked upon as a sound man, a counterweight, with his peasant blood, to the impossible de Gaulle. In 1940, in spite of his advanced age, he had managed to get himself the command of the 5th Armoured Division, which, in the middle of May, had made a last counterattack against the German advance.
A romantic, then, though limited by earth and sky, but nothing in his military career explained his curious fondness for the English. This could be traced to his shrewd marriage with a very rich woman, addicted, as Pinard was himself, to racehorses. Between the wars he had become a familiar figure at bloodstock sales, and at Epsom and Ascot. Much photographed at every meeting, he was always cheerful, and most important of all, nearly always a loser. That was the foundation of his great popularity over here, something he had never attained in France. On his wife’s money, he became an Anglophile. He learnt to love because he was loved, for the first time in his life.
At half-past eight on the 14th of June the Director General’s office told DPP that General Pinard was going on the air as soon as it could be arranged. ‘He wants to broadcast to the English nation and it seems it’s a matter of great urgency. It’s all been agreed.’
‘Well, the evening programmes must shove over a bit,’ said Jeff. ‘I’ll see to it.’
‘It’s more than that. We want you down in the studio.’
‘What for?’
‘Don’t you speak fluent French?’
‘Well?’
‘He wants you there when Pinard comes.’
‘He speaks perfectly good English, with a strong French accent, which is exactly what you want.’
‘The point is this – the War Office is sending someone and so is the FO, and the DG and DDG don’t think it will look well if we can’t produce a French speaker from our top level in BH.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Oh, it might be a few sentences of greeting. Some hospitality may be considered appropriate. I suppose there’d better be some absinthe, isn’t that what they drink?’
‘The General prefers cognac,’ Jeff said.
‘Have you met him, then? That might be extremely useful.’
‘I met him in a dugout, behind a village called Quesnoy en Santerre, twenty-three years ago.’
‘I’ve never heard you talk about your war experiences before, Haggard.’
‘This wasn’t an experience. We were supposed to be taking over from the French, then it turned out that we were retreating. I was Mess Officer and I stayed to see if the French had left any brandy behind, they did sometimes. Pinard came back with exactly the same idea in mind. He was a captain then. I don’t flatter myself that he’ll remember this incident, by the way.’
‘I see, well, that isn’t really … did he seem to be a good speaker?’
‘He didn’t say very much on that occasion.’
‘In a sense it hardly matters whether he is or not. It’s a morale talk, he’s expected to fly on to Morocco to organize the resistance there, he’ll want to encourage himself as well as us.’
General Pinard arrived brushed and shining, to the relief of the Talks Producer, who believed, in the old way, that appearances were projected through the microphone. His silent young aide wished to accompany him into the studio, but was detained in the rather crowded continuity room. Pinard sat down behind the glass panel, his eyes resting for a moment upon everybody present.
‘He won’t wear headphones,’ the Talks Producer told Jeff. ‘It seems he doesn’t like them. He prefers to go ahead on a hand cue.’
‘I don’t think we should grudge him anything.’
The canteen’s brandy, Martell 2 Star, left over from Christmas, was brought out. The General raised his hand in a gesture of mild, but emphatic, refusal. That meant that no-one could have any – a disappointment to everybody except Talks, whose allocation for the month had already run out. The brandy would now do for the Minister of Coastal Defence, due later that evening. But these considerations faded as the General’s presence was felt. He waited in immaculate dignity. Behind him lay France’s broken armies.
A piece of paper was put in front of him. He looked at it, then moved it to one side.
In the continuity studio it was hardly possible to move. The War Office’s Major, the Foreign Office’s liaison man, sat awkwardly on high stools. The young French aide stood warily on guard. The Acting Deputy Director General suddenly came in through the soundless door to join them. DPP leant in a corner, looking up at the ceiling.
‘Don’t forget it’s your duty to put everyone at their ease,’ he said to the Talks Producer.
‘He didn’t look at my notes and suggestions. We need a run-through.’
‘You’ve no time. I did what I could for you, but we can’t alter the nine o’clock. You’re on in forty-three seconds.’
The producer pressed his switch.
‘How would you like to be introduced, General?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pinard replied. ‘I am in uniform, but I am a soldier without a post, an officer without authority, and a Frenchman without a country.’
‘The English people know your name quite well, sir.’
‘Use it if you wish. But make it clear that I am speaking to them as an individual. I have something to say from the heart.’
‘How long is this going to take?’ asked the programme engineer. No-one knew, it was open-ended. The PE’s face tightened with disapproval.
‘My dear friends,’ General Pinard said, ‘many persons who have occupied the stage of history have been forgiven not only their mistakes, but their sins, because of what they did at one moment only. I pray that for me, this will prove to be the moment.’
It was a quiet, moving, old man’s voice, with a slight metallic edge.
‘It gives me a strange feeling to speak to you this evening, and even stranger, after all that has happened in the past few weeks, to think that I should be speaking the truth, and that so many of you should be willing to hear it. Old soldiers like to tell stories, and old generals most of all. That kind of story is called a giberne.’
The producer passed a note: Should we translate at the end? ADDG wrote: I think a few untranslated French words give the right atmosphere. Jeff wrote: Don’t worry, he’s not going to tell it anyway.
‘This evening I am not here to indulge myself with a giberne. I have come to tell you what I saw yesterday, and what you must do tomorrow.
‘But perhaps you will say to yourselves, “I am listening to a Frenchman.” He is French, and I am English and I don’t trust him, any more than I would have done these past five hundred years, let them make what alliances they will. And today above all I don’t trust him, this evening I don’t trust him, because his country has been defeated. You know that every road leading to the south is impassable, every road is crowded not only with troops in retreat, but with families on the move, the old, the weak and the very young, the bedding, the cooking-pots, the scenes to which we have become so terribly accustomed since Poland fell.’
‘What’s this about cooking-pots?’ said the engineer to his JPE. ‘He may be going to break down. Watch the level.’
‘So, to repeat, you will think: I shan’t trust this man.… And we French, do we trust the English? The answer is: not at all. In the past weeks, most of all in the past twenty-four hours, I have heard you called many hard names, I don’t only mean by colleagues in the Conseil de Guerre but every soldier and every little shopkeeper on the road. They say that you led us unprepared into war with Germany and that having done so you have deserted us. And perhaps “in the misfortunes of our friends there is something not displeasing to us”. Well, in that case you must be satisfied. We are ruined, and we blame it on you.
‘Why then when I began to speak to you did I call you “friends”? That is a word that means so much that I understand no language is without it. I use it to you, and I mean it. The truth is that I am here this evening, in spite of all I have said, because I care deeply for England and the English.
‘Well, is this nonsense, or is the old man weak in the head? No more unsuitable task could be imagined than for a general, worse still, an aged general, to show his feelings. And those who hold power in France at the moment did not wish me to come. They tried to prevent me, but I came.’
Without warning, General Pinard’s voice rose to the level of the parade ground, and the engineer, caught on the hop, allowed it to blast fifteen million listeners.
‘But, believe me, I am not here to flatter you! That would not be the duty of friendship. Dear listeners, dear Englishmen and women, dear people of the green fields, the streets and the racecourses that I know so well – I have seen my nation lose hope, and I say to you now that there is no hope for you either, ne vous faîtes pas aucune illusion, you have lost your war. I tell you – do not listen to your leaders – neither those who are ready, as they always have been, to depart from these shores to Canada, nor to the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister.’
The Talks Producer stared round from face to face, his hand on the censor switch, waiting for orders. The Foreign Office confronted the War Office.
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