Chapter VII: Part 7

The sizes of British cities are always amazing me. Cardiff, for instance, is a city of a quarter of a million people. And did you ever hear of Newport? I’m sure I never did. Well, it’s only ten miles from Cardiff, and its population is 100,000.

Wales, as you know, forms the west central part of Britain. It is noted for its coal mines, and somewhat for the bad condition of its miners. And Wales is mountainous. To my surprise I have found that there are mountains on this island rising as high as 3000 to 4000 feet, but the mountainous sections are thinly populated. The bulk of Wales’s population of more than two million is settled along the southern coast.

The Welsh people look and dress very much the same as Americans. They are noted as singers, but I’ve not heard anybody singing in Cardiff.

You see an amazing number of bicycles here. Late in the evening, when people are on their way home from work, you can hardly cross the street for the bicycles.

I had supposed that Cardiff was a grimy, smoky city, bearing the marks of the coal-mining industry. To my amazement, it turned out to be light and clean, much more so than most English cities. The streets are wide, there are vast parks and lovely buildings, and as you go around you pick up a feeling that Cardiff has everything in hand.

Cardiff is full of defenses. More street obstructions are noticeable here than in most of the places I’ve visited. Every city seems to have its own special type of street barricade with which to stop the German invaders if they come. Public shelters are different in Cardiff, too. Everywhere else the street shelters are made of a tan-colored brick, but in Cardiff most of them are concrete.

There is very little public sheltering in basements here. The big street shelters are preferred. In the residential sections these shelters are built right in the middle of the street. In case the bombing gets hot, people have only to run out their front doors and halfway across the street.

I ran into something in Cardiff I had not seen in any other city--automobiles driven by coal gas. The point is that gasoline is rationed, and coal gas isn’t.

A huge canvas bag is installed on the roof of the car, and surrounded with a railing. It looks like about five layers of featherbed. The only change in the motor that’s necessary is a new top to the carburetor.

It’s all right as a makeshift, but not too satisfactory. For one thing, it costs $120 to equip the car for coal gas. Then you don’t get as much power as with gasoline. And that big bag has a terrific wind resistance. When the gas gets low the bag flops around in the breeze. Also, if there is a heavy snow or rain, the weight presses down on the bag and forces gas into the carburetor too fast, making the engine choke and backfire.

And worst of all, you look silly as hell driving down the street with this balloon on top of you.

* * * * *

The WVS (Women’s Voluntary Services) has done excellent work in Cardiff, as it has everywhere else.

I somehow managed to get myself into the good graces of the WVS commander for all Wales. She turned out to be a beautiful, cultured girl only two years out of a university. When I asked her how one so young had risen so high, she said it was a mystery to her too. Her name is typically Welsh--Eirwen Owen. She can even make a speech in Welsh if she has to. She has some 8000 women under her, and she handles it all with the utmost calm.

The WVS was anxious for me to know how much they appreciated the gifts sent from America. They said they didn’t know how they would have clothed all the bombed out people and poor evacuees who have come from other sections if it hadn’t been for the American gifts.

We went around to one of their distributing sections, where half a dozen women in green smocks were sorting out and repacking huge boxes of stuff from America. It has been quite an education for them. They read on the bills of lading such unknown items--to them--as slickers, Mackinaws, and gum boots. They had never heard of these things by these names. They open the big wooden boxes as though they were Christmas packages--to see what a Mackinaw is. In most cases they are immensely pleased; but one thing did stop them--union suits. They had never heard of union suits. Over here nobody ever saw underwear all in one piece before. In fact, when they went to distribute them, lots of old-fashioned Welsh people refused to take them.

And while we’re on the subject of American gifts, maybe the merchants of San Francisco would like to know that some of those boxes of elaborate mechanical erector sets they sent over are now in Wales. They got here too late for Christmas, but they’re being distributed now by the women of the WVS, who think they’re the most wonderful things they ever saw.

* * * * *

Once in a while German bombers come over Cardiff and drop propaganda leaflets. The last time they did it the pamphlets were a translation of one of Hitler’s speeches. The people of Cardiff consider this such a great joke they collect them as souvenirs to keep after the war, and they are actually peddled around for a shilling apiece.

* * * * *

Cardiff has 600 Belgian refugees. And to their eternal discredit, they are making asses of themselves--demanding, complaining, pestering. They are the crankiest people in a jam that Cardiff has ever had to deal with.

* * * * *

I have been riding around Wales with a gentle Welshman by the name of Eames whose wife is a first cousin of Chief Justice Hughes. Which would make it a small world after all if I only happened to know Chief Justice Hughes.

_2. MINER_

_Ebbw Vale,
March, 1941_

This is a coal-mining town of about 30,000 people in the hills of Monmouthshire, near the border of Wales.

The altitude is only 900 feet here, but the hills roll in long, vast ridges, and there are no trees; the snow lies deep on the ground, whereas down on the coast it has all melted. You have a feeling of great height here. All day long I had to pinch myself to realize I was not somewhere in the Rockies, above timberline.

The coal miners in and near Wales have had tough going since the last war. They are among Britain’s neediest people. And unlike the rest of Britain, unlike most of the warring populations, the present conflict hasn’t done their employment much good.

The reason lies in transportation. The railroads are tied up hauling munitions, and they haul only such coal as is necessary. There’s no real coal shortage in England, but nobody has any more than just enough. And there’s no use digging coal if you can’t haul it away and sell it. Consequently the mines aren’t working in any frenzy. The loss of French markets was a blow too.

Ebbw Vale happens to be very prosperous at the moment, due to local manufacturing which uses coal, but it is rather the exception. Western Wales is still in the lower brackets of depression, and a good part of its working population has gone to great factory centers such as Birmingham and Manchester, seeking work.

* * * * *

I came to Ebbw Vale to see how close the war has come to the average family over here in the hills. My “average man” turned out to be Henry Powell. He lives in a two-story brick-row house on a sloping street. Children were sliding down the street on sleds.

Henry Powell is seventy-one, and he is well preserved. He has spent fifty years underground and it hasn’t hurt him. He retired from coal-digging a couple of years ago, on a small pension, but is back at work again now, for he wanted to do a little something in the war. They have put him to cutting down timber supports in unused mine tunnels.

Henry Powell has a big family. There are eight in his house. His sister lives next door, and there are half a dozen in her house. They are all mixed up--children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and in-laws.

Mr. Powell owns his home. He started buying it when it was brand-new, and moved into it the year after I was born, which was 39 years ago.

Mrs. Powell is dead now. Two of Mr. Powell’s sons were in the World War and one of them was gassed. Some of his grandsons are already in the Home Guard, awaiting their call-ups for the regular army.

Just before Mr. Powell quit the deep pits two years ago there were three generations of his family working side by side in the pits--himself, three sons and three grandsons.

Mr. Powell feels that he has done pretty well for a miner. He has bought his house, raised a big family, taken care of his relatives, kept himself respectable, and has nothing to regret. His home is comfortably and nicely furnished, and he himself is as neat and clean as a whistle.

He has had only two holidays in his life. (Over here when they say holiday they mean three or four weeks off in which to take a long trip.) He has been to London a couple of times.

He doesn’t smoke, but for fifty years he has stopped for two pints of beer on his way home from work every evening.

About the only way the Powells are directly affected by the war is through the rationing of food. But they don’t suffer for anything. There are some shelters in Ebbw Vale, but the Powells have never been in them. All in all, life is not a great deal different for them from what it was in peacetime, and they themselves, in truth, are not much different from Americans.

_3. NO MAN’S LAND_

_Bristol,
March, 1941_

It was midafternoon when I got off the train. We had come through the long tunnel under Bristol Channel, and the compartment had been full of smoke. So I checked in at a hotel and went to my room to wash off the soot.

It had been more than three weeks since I had heard a siren, a bomb or a gun. After a lull like that, you actually get out of practice. You drop your protective armor of expectancy. Thus it was that I was standing there all relaxed in a quiet hotel room, washing my hands, when all of a sudden there was the damnedest explosion I ever heard. It shook the windows, and made the curtains puff, and to say that it shook me would be a vast understatement of fact.

My first conclusion was that it was a sneak daytime raider, but still it hadn’t sounded just like a bomb. So I sat down and tried to think. I finally figured out that it must be dynamiters, blasting some unsafe bombed walls just back of the hotel. And that’s what it was.

After my strength came back I called up some people to whom I had a note, and arranged to meet them.

“Gee whiz,” I said when we got together, “Bristol has certainly been knocked around. I didn’t know Bristol had had it this bad.”

“Why,” they said, “you haven’t seen anything. Come on.”

So we taxied to a certain corner where the street was blocked, and then got out and walked. It was the worst day I have seen this winter. There was a somber black rain that was nearly sleet, and a piercing wind that cut through any kind of clothes.

And so, bent against the storm, we walked. Walked through streets where on Saturday nights a hundred thousand people used to mill up and down, but where today all was silent. For this part is now closed to the public; you can enter only with credentials. It is a No Man’s Land.

This part of Bristol is just as bare and ruined and destroyed as any 1918 village in France that we used to see in pictures. In fact, it looks exactly like those pictures. Only a few walls are left standing. There is such an incongruous maze of hanging, twisted girders as I have never seen elsewhere. Tearing it all apart and hauling it away will surely be a greater job than building it in the first place.

Drive around Bristol, and all over the city you will find whole blocks knocked down and burned up. And there is a general scattered devastation that is staggering if you add it up.

My friends and I wandered like children back and forth amid this strange land that used to be. I said almost nothing, for what was there to say? I had never known that anything could actually be like this.

In the midst of our wanderings I saw a familiar figure coming toward us. He was walking with a policeman down the middle of what had been a street, and he was huddled deep in his coat against the bitter rain. I knew the man well, yet so ghostly was the setting, and so strange this place we inhabited, that I could not believe a human acquaintance of mine could be there too, in the flesh, on such a weird, mystic day.

It was Gault Macgowan of the New York Sun. Neither of us knew the other was in Bristol. I have not seen him since to talk it over, but I believe he must have had the same strange feeling about me. For he came up and looked at me for a long time, in a puzzled way, before he spoke. We said a few words of surprise, and then walked on again in opposite directions, on through a kind of world I hope America never sees.

I truly believe that if it were possible for you to come to Bristol directly from America, arriving blindfolded so you could not accustom yourself gradually by seeing lesser damage as you drove along, and let me lead you to this vast blocked-off graveyard in Bristol and then suddenly snatch off the blindfold and let the fury of the scene engulf you all at once--I truly believe there is not one person out of ten, man or woman, who would not stand there with tears in his eyes, and his head bowed in anguish and despair.

In Bristol I met a man who is a “reader” in imperial history at the University of Bristol. The great hall of the university, with its lovely walls paneled in oak, stands just outside the professor’s window, or rather did stand there before the fire bombs gutted it.

My history professor says the hall was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. To him its loss was the worst of all the blows that have befallen Bristol. My professor is blind, but just the same he can see these beautiful things that are now gone.

He invited me to come out to his apartment after dinner. His name is Charles MacInnis, and there’s nothing professorish about him at all. He said he couldn’t offer me anything to drink except whisky, beer and wine. I told him not to worry, that we had to put up with these hardships in wartime.

He insisted on sending a taxi for me, because it is hard to get taxis at night in Bristol. The sirens sounded just before the taxi came. The driver took me out in a hurry, for he was on roof-spotting duty at his garage and he had to get right back. He wouldn’t have come at all if the sirens had sounded before he started. He said he’d return for me at ten-thirty if the all clear had sounded. If it hadn’t, I would just have to wait.

Mr. MacInnis is a Canadian, from Calgary. He has always been blind.

Once he took a crack at newspaper work in Calgary. “But because I was blind they thought I was religious,” he said, “so they put me on the church notices. That’s all the newspaper work I ever did.”

In 1915 he finished school in Canada and came on to Oxford. When he finished there, the University of Bristol offered him a job. He has been here ever since. He is one of Bristol’s most active citizens. He has written a book about Bristol, and he gave me a copy of it. He married a Bristol girl, and they have a twelve-year-old boy who has now been evacuated to the country with his grandparents.

The MacInnises have a nice six-room apartment with a center hallway, a library, and a big sitting room at one end. We went into the sitting room, and in the middle of the floor there stood a table with nine wooden pins on it and a stick raised above, from which hung a wooden ball on a string.

“Have you ever played table skittles?” Mr. MacInnis asked.

“I never even heard of it,” I said.

“Then you had better learn,” he said. “That’s what they play in the pubs around here. Everybody plays it.”

So we played, and Mrs. MacInnis won both games.

“I like this game because it isn’t intellectual,” the professor said.

The all clear sounded as we were playing the second game.

“Do you have a shelter in the basement?” I asked.

“There is one,” Mr. MacInnis said, “but we’ve never been down.”

“Not even during those terrible all-night blitzes?”

“Not even then,” he said. “What’s the use? You might get buried. We never stir from the apartment. You sort of get used to it.”

“How do your dogs take it?” I asked. They have two beautiful dogs, a Samoyed and a cocker.

Mr. MacInnis laughed. “They don’t get frightened,” he said. “In fact, they don’t seem to mind it at all, except for screaming bombs. One of those screamers sounds like a cat howling, you know, and the dogs set up an awful howl.”

The basement shelter has a gas-proof room for the dogs, in case gas ever comes.

“I don’t want you to think I’m impertinent,” I said, “but can you describe to me what a blind man’s conception is of the damage to Bristol?”

“Well,” Mr. MacInnis said, “I’m sensitive to light, and when I walk down the street I suddenly realize there is light at my side and I know I am passing a building that isn’t there any more. I see it as piles of brick, partly standing walls, charred timbers and twisted girders.”

And I realized that although he was using the same words of description that I use, there was no possible way for him to tell me what he sees in his mind, because piles of brick and charred timbers are only words to him. He has never seen any.

Mr. MacInnis is a hard worker. He does voluntary work day and night. He has a job that might best be described as that of a morale-keeper-up for the blitzed and homeless of Bristol. He makes speeches, organizes entertainments, helps people find homes, and gets better things for the shelters. Everyone I met was full of praise for him.

He has lots of humor--a sort of sardonic humor. He thinks the funniest war story is one that happened right at the university, and he heard it himself. It seems that Kings College, a big medical school in London, decided to evacuate to Bristol. All the professors arrived and held their first meeting on the morning after Bristol had experienced one of its worst blitzes and many scores of people lay dead.

“The meeting was very serious and businesslike,” Mr. MacInnis said. “The professors were doubtful whether they could carry on normal instructions here because transportation from London was not so good and the new school was not properly equipped with corpses!”

The doorbell rang. The all clear having sounded, our taxi driver was back on the dot. Mr. MacInnis ran ahead of me down two flights of stairs and out the front door into the dark street to the taxi. And as I groped my way behind him, it dawned on me that this vile blackout which is scourging England today has no terrors at all for a man who is blind. As the philosophers would say, there is recompense in everything.

_4. LONGSHORE PUB_

_Shirehampton,
March, 1941_

Last night I decided to do a little pub-crawling, to see if I could dig up a piece of conversation among some longshoremen.

I have always thought of longshoremen as hard guys, quick to suspect an outsider. So I sidled up to the bar sort of timidly. But these longshoremen were so suspicious that before two minutes had passed I had the life history of the fellow next to me, voluntarily. The problem wasn’t getting him started, it was getting him stopped.

His name was “Nobby” Clark. In fact, all the Clarks in these parts are called Nobby. This special Nobby lost a leg in the last war. His brother was killed in France. His two sons are in the forces now. His sister and a niece were killed by a bomb last fall. And now his own house has been blown up, and he and his wife are living with friends.

“But Hitler won’t get me,” Nobby says. “I’m too tough and too lucky. Here, wait a minute, a stranger can’t pay for his own here, and anyway this is my birthday. Here’s to ol’ Hitler, bad luck to ’im!”

Well, that was a good start, so then we got to talking to Tom Woolacombe and his brother-in-law. They are dock workers too.

The brother-in-law’s left arm was in a plaster cast. It seems he and another fellow were sitting in front of their fireplace one night, and everything was peaceful and quiet, and no raid was on, and all of a sudden the whole side of the house, fireplace and all, leaped out and fell on them.

The reason for this odd behavior on the part of the house was that a time bomb had buried itself in the ground just outside, one night earlier, and nobody knew about it till it went off. The boys said they sure were surprised.

After a while Tom suggested that we walk up to his place, which was just a couple of blocks. So we got two bottles of beer for his wife and walked home in the moonlight. Mrs. Woolacombe was a little disconcerted to see Tom home so early, and with a stranger too, and she obviously wasn’t any too pleased about it. But after we talked a while everything was all right.

The Woolacombes, to be blunt about it, have had a bellyful of this war. As Mrs. Woolacombe puts it, “I’m proper fed up. Bombs, bombs, bombs, all the time.”

You’re afraid to go anywhere. You get so jumpy you hate everything. Sitting out there in that lousy Anderson shelter night after night gets on your nerves. And what’s the use to plant vegetables in your back yard? The bombs are just as liable to come along and blow them up.

Yes, the Woolacombes are proper fed up.

Tom has steady work unloading ships. He is 57. He says he makes just enough to get by. They live pretty well, but there is nothing left over on payday. They rent their two-story six-room house for $2.75 a week, which they consider high.

Their two sons are in the army. So is their married daughter’s husband. Another daughter, Alice, whose husband has been killed, lives with them.

Alice has a little boy three years old, and I noticed that he kept walking around saying to himself, “War’s over. War’s over.”

“What’s he saying that for?” I asked his mother.

“Well,” she said, “several weeks ago he wanted something, I forget what, and I told him he couldn’t have it till the war was over. Ever since he has been saying ‘War’s over’ to himself all the time.”

It sounds like using the Coue system on the war.

There are two more Woolacombe girls. Eileen, who is sixteen, sells tickets at a movie theater. Violet, who is twenty, works in a munitions factory.

The Woolacombes have had an incendiary bomb through their roof. This was during a heavy raid, and they were all in the backyard shelter. Things got a little quiet, so Alice stuck her head out to see what was what. And it looked as if the whole world was afire. So they all jumped out and ran to the house, and some neighbors and wardens came running too. They finally got the incendiary put out. All their sand was frozen solid, so they had to use ashes out of the grate. The fire burned up all the clothes in a corner closet. They’ve got this room closed off now, and aren’t using it.

After a while we went back to the pub and sat around talking with a lot of longshoremen. It is the custom here for men to eat an early supper at home and then go to the pub and sit from seven till ten, when the pubs close.

The men were mostly middle-aged and there was no loud talk or singing, such as you find in so many pubs on these wartime nights.

These longshoremen carried the bitterest feeling about the war that I’ve run onto yet. “This ain’t war,” they say. “This is just plain murder, bombing our homes and women and children like this.” If I heard that once, I heard it twenty times.

These men are mostly veterans of the last war and they still have an idea that wars should be fought on the battlefield. As you can see, they are very old-fashioned and don’t understand the New World Order.

_5. BACK TO LONDON_

_London,
March, 1941_

And so back to the big city.

The returned sojourner can see changes in London after being gone for a month. Not much physical change, of course, for the bombings were light during most of my absence. But there is more sugar, more chocolate, more cigarettes. In a restaurant the waiter brought four lumps of sugar and whispered, “Two for your first cup, two for your second.” Of course he was angling for a bigger tip, and he angled well.

There are now plenty of chocolates in the shops, whereas chocolates were close to being extinct right after the holidays.

There has never been a real shortage of cigarettes, but there has been a scarcity of various brands. When I first came to England I shopped around among the English cigarettes to see what most closely resembled the American kind. I finally lit on one called Wix. Well, the day I left London for the north I went to fifteen tobacco shops and succeeded in collecting only five packs of Wix. Yet on my return when I went Wix-hunting again the first two tobacconists sold me a carton each.

While there are more cigarettes and sugar and chocolates, there is less meat. For several nights now they say Simpson’s has been without its famous roast beef. My hotel has no steaks or chops. This is a temporary shortage, possibly due to transportation trouble, but it is becoming more habitual all over London.

There seems to be more food and a greater variety of it everywhere in the provinces than in London. The smaller the town the more food there is. The supply of sugar and eggs is practically normal in the smaller places.

The Food Ministry has announced a general all-around tightening of the British belt, and I think it’s a good thing. For an island that imports so much and has such vulnerable sea lanes, England has been eating too much. As a matter of fact, the Food Ministry is several months behind the people. They have been quite willing for a long time to have their belts tightened.

Furthermore, the picture of rich people eating grandiosely in restaurants while the poor theoretically go hungry is rapidly becoming a hallucination. You still pay exorbitantly at the big hotels, and you get all the overabundance of silverware and yessirs and delay that seems to be fashionable, but when you come to sum up what you’ve had to eat you could have fared better in somebody’s home.

And speaking of food, you may remember that a while back I said the only thing I missed over here was enough sugar. That must have put ideas into people’s heads, for I have already received two one-pound boxes of sugar from readers in America. And I hear that more is on the way.

One box was sent by Mr. and Mrs. Dick Petticrew of East Lansing, Michigan, whom I don’t know. On the customs declaration which accompanied the package they had to indicate to whom it should be delivered if I couldn’t be found. So the Petticrews wrote “Winston Churchill.”

* * * * *

Scotland has become a new national home for the Poles who got away after the German occupation. There are many thousands of Poles in Scotland now, and most of them are in the army. They get along well with the Scots.

They are fine soldiers. Nobody in this war is fighting with more burning fire in the soul than the Poles. I have yet to hear a word about them that wasn’t in praise. No German will ever get mercy from a Pole on this island.

* * * * *

The other day I saw a question sent from America asking what people in theaters did when an air-raid warning sounded. Well, I can tell you.

Having a touch of the heebie-jeebies, I decided to go to a movie. The picture was “Dulcy,” and everybody thought it was swell. The theater was a huge one in Leicester Square, and it was packed. In the middle of the picture the film stopped and a sign was flashed on the screen. It said the sirens had just sounded and that anyone who wished could leave and go to the public shelters across the street. The picture was then resumed.

Not a soul in that whole theater stirred.

Afterward another sign flashed, saying the all clear had sounded.

People simply don’t pay attention to daytime warnings any more. Even my own faint heart ceased long since to do even a slight dervish when the sirens moan.

* * * * *

I think I have enough official British credentials in my wallet to get me out of anything, up to and including assassination. Yet in all my recent travels I have been called upon to show them only twice.

Both cases were ridiculous. Once it was a matter of a nosey hotel clerk in Wales. The other instance was in the peaceful Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire. There I had to identify myself in a big way before being allowed to see a communal dining room for evacuees. You could have sat Hitler down there for a meal and he wouldn’t have found out anything.

That’s one trouble with war--the farther you are from it the sillier the people get.

In most of Great Britain they are too busy to fussbudget with red tape. I have been amazed at the utter freedom in England today. People come and go, brag and criticize, talk and listen. It is remarkable and admirable.

On gun stations, at flying fields, in pubs or on trains, I have never run into anybody who seemed suspicious or secretive. The average Englishman just can’t conceive of there being a fifth column in this country, and as a general premise I think he is right.

In fact, in wartime England today I believe you can nose around with less bogeyman interference than you can in America.

* * * * *

In spite of being accepted everywhere over here on friendly and intimate terms, I am an American and therefore an alien, and all the alien laws apply to me. For example, it is against the law for me to have a guidebook now without a permit. I am a criminal if I carry the famous Baedeker guidebook of Great Britain, even though the damned thing is printed in Leipzig and the Germans have all the copies they want.

It is a little shaming somehow to be considered an alien, when I speak the same language and am on the same side of the fence. In fact, I don’t like it, and I said so to an English newspaper friend of mine. But his answer stopped me cold. He said:

“Well, I worked in New York on the Sun for eight years, and I was an alien over there!”

I hadn’t thought of that.

* * * * *

Road signs have been taken down all over England, in case of invasion. The names of towns on public and private signs have been painted over with black paint. The result is that the average Englishman trying to drive even a little way from home gets lost and has to stop and inquire the way about every two miles.

It is against the law to leave a car that could be driven away by the Germans. You have to immobilize your car when you leave it, even though you might be walking only fifty feet away to ask a policeman for directions. In daytime, just locking the doors and taking the key counts as immobilization, but at night you have to take out some vital part, such as the distributor.

Most cars over here are small ones, from 8 to 15 horsepower. No new cars at all are being manufactured for sale. The price of second-hand cars is shooting up, because the army is taking all it can get.

If you wreck your car badly it is almost impossible to get repairs, due to the control of materials and the shortage of civilian mechanics. Many garages and gas stations are closed. A great many garage men have gone into the tank corps. These tank corps men wear the regular brown uniform, the same as the rest of the army, but they have a blue cloth cap, like a beret, which drops over one ear, making them look very cocky and tough.

* * * * *

During the past month I have traveled about 1500 miles by train and 500 by car, and except for small things the travel service was excellent. I have been on twelve different trains, and except for the week-end we got caught in a Yorkshire blizzard I’ve never been more than half an hour late in reaching my destination.

In the latter part of my travels, after getting the hang of things, I rode third-class all the time. It’s about one-third cheaper, and the only difference is that the seats are just a shade nicer in first class and you sit with officers instead of soldiers. Frequently there are first- and third-class compartments in the same car.

The railroads get a lot of criticism, but I think they are doing wonderfully. They have not been taken over by the government.

Occasionally a section of track will be blown to extinction. The railroads have a time limit on themselves of ten hours, I believe it is, no matter how big the crater or how twisted the wreckage, in which to have trains moving again across the bombed spot.

And the way these trains blast along through the night, with no lights, gives you the shivers. One road has just raised its wartime speed limit from sixty miles an hour to seventy-five.

There is one thing about the British railroads that I haven’t figured out yet. You’ll get on a train that is the dinkiest local you ever saw, stopping at every crossroads, taking hours to go a few miles. Then all of a sudden, halfway to where you’re going, the thing mysteriously becomes a highball express and makes the last half of the trip going like the wind, roaring through cities without even stopping.

I suppose it’s just a change of pace to fool Hitler.

_X. BOMBS DO THE DAMNEDEST THINGS_

_1. “SHUT UP, THEY’LL HEAR YOU!”_

_London,
March, 1941_

I suppose every person in England who has had a bomb within a block of him has his own freak bomb story to tell. Bombs seem to do the damnedest things. Every raid brings a flock of incidents as miraculous as the old one about the tornado blowing a straw through a tree.

Most of the unusual bomb stories have to do with escapes. Air Raid Precautions men say there are more freakish escapes than freakish deaths. For example, one bomb on a recent night came right through the roof of a building and smack into a pub full of men sitting there drinking beer. It blew the place all to pieces, killed some people in a house across the street--and hurt no one in the pub.

In another case, a bomb glanced off a roof and landed in the open. It apparently had a delayed fuse. Two policemen went up to inspect it, and it went off. No trace ever was found of one policeman, but the other one--well, the blast blew his tin hat onto the roof of a five-story building, and blew all the buttons off his coat, but he wasn’t hurt.

In Stepney a policeman was doing roof-spotting duty on top of a seven-story building. A bomb hit the building and blew the policeman off the roof. He fell seven stories, and landed on concrete. He went to work as usual the next day.

* * * * *

In my room I have a circular lead nosepiece from a German bomb. It is about half as big as a saucer, and must weigh two pounds. It came screaming into the apartment of a friend of mine one night, and this friend gave it to me. It arrived in his place through a window, flying horizontally and spinning furiously. It hit a wall, and it was spinning so fast it circled three walls of the room, just like a hippodrome motorcycle racer who rides against the vertical wall of a bowl. But the astounding thing is that in its mad rush this heavy disk raced right across the glass doors of a built-in china closet in one corner and never even cracked the glass.

One surprising thing about bomb explosions is that the suction toward the explosion is almost as great as the blast away from it. That’s because the explosion creates a vacuum, and then as air rushes back into the vacuum it does so with just about the same hideous force with which it rushed away. Because of that you’ll see wreckage from the same bomb hurled in opposite directions. Say a bomb lands in a street. On one side it may blow a house inward, but on the other side the whole front of a house may be sucked out. I know one case where the suction of a bomb pulled a rug off the floor right from underneath two tables and a piano, and left them standing just as they were.

And then there is the story--my man says he saw it--of a skilletful of frying fish being blown off a stove in one house and landing upright on a stove in a house four doors away. My man does go so far as to admit that the skillet lost its contents on the way.

I believe all those stories. It would be hard to tell me a bomb story I wouldn’t believe. But here’s one even I must take with a grain of salt:

A gentle lady of culture and means was sitting in front of a fireplace on the ground floor of her home one evening. Her housemaid, having finished her work, was sitting in her little attic bedroom on the fourth floor. A bomb came through the roof, plunged through four successive stories, and exploded in the basement. When it was all over the gentle lady was sitting in her maid’s attic rocking-chair and the maid was sitting downstairs in front of the fireplace.

Both were unhurt, of course. And both quite unruffled, you may be sure.

Maybe lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but bombs do. I could show you a narrow brick-row house in London that has been hit five times, yet not another house in the block has been touched. Also, I know cases where a bomb has fallen through the darkness for four miles and landed in the center of a crater blown by a previous bomb.

There is an odd belief in London that corner buildings attract bombs. It doesn’t seem reasonable, yet I have seen scores of corner places blown down, with everything else all around them untouched. At Coventry I saw one street corner where four separate bombs had taken out the four corner houses.

On the other hand, just two blocks from my hotel there is a small crater in the middle of a street intersection, where a traffic cop would normally be standing, and none of the corner buildings has been touched.

Those who hold with the corner theory think air currents, caused by the funneling of air through the streets, force a bomb to deviate just a little at the last second. I can’t see it.

A Fleet Street friend of mine went out one night and got himself tight. He managed to drive his car home through the blackout, but the entrance of his garage was narrow and, being three and a half sheets in the wind, he decided just to leave the car out in the street. During the night his garage was demolished.

I have been told of a woman in a suburb who thought she heard a knock at the door. As she opened it a small bomb came sailing through, kerplunk onto the living-room floor. The lady gave a yell and dashed out the door. About three seconds later she saw her house fly into a million pieces.

One of my best friends here is an American who has a horror of crossing a street during the blackout. He has lived here several years and knows hundreds of people. Two close friends of his were killed by autos in the blackout, yet he has never known anyone, even casually, who was killed by a bomb.

Friends are always telling me about shrapnel falling around them. I have been out in the streets a lot at night but I’ve heard only one piece of shrapnel fall.

I do know, however, that if you’re out when the guns are firing pretty heavily you find yourself edging over toward the inside of the sidewalk, against the building walls. No matter how hard you pull yourself out toward the curb, you discover you’re still walking along close to the buildings.

I have a friend who was driving into town one night when a piece of shrapnel hit the street, just missing the car. But it bounced so hard it came back up through his fender from underneath and left a big hole.

Another funny thing about raids--when you hear planes overhead you have a feeling that you must be very quiet or the German pilots will hear you. If I’m in my room I unconsciously stop typing for fear of making a noise and attracting the bomber’s attention. Often, while planes are overhead, you can hear people down in the street in the dark yelling for taxis at the top of their lungs. I always feel like opening a window and yelling, “Shut up, you fools, they’ll hear you!”

* * * * *

Some people seem to attract exciting incidents as though they were magnets. George Lait hadn’t been here a week till he had been blown off the seat of a car, had put out incendiaries that came through his roof, and had seen shrapnel smack the sidewalk within three feet of him.

But me--the nearest I have been to drama was one night when we had seven incendiaries on the roof of our hotel and a bomb around the corner, and that happened to be the night I was visiting an antiaircraft gun station miles away! It’s probably just as well. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a hero anyhow.

_2. GERMANS, ARISE AND FLEE_

_London,
March, 1941_

Tex Bradford walked into my room at seven-thirty in the evening and said he had only a few minutes. He took off his coat and threw it on the bed, and asked if he could wash up. He left at two-thirty the next morning and hadn’t washed up yet.

Tex is one of the many Americans over here serving with the Canadian Army. He’s a good old boy from down in Texas. He looks like Texas, too, and it’s a shame he can’t wear a ten-gallon hat with his uniform.

He doesn’t smoke or drink, but how he can cuss! He says alcohol doesn’t mix with nitroglycerin, and using nitroglycerin is his normal business. For by vocation and hobby Tex is an oil-well fire fighter. He says there are only three men in America doing his kind of fire-fighting. And he says he’s the best-looking one of the three.

Tex loves fires more than anything on earth. He almost goes crazy thinking of all the wonderful fires here in London, and him way down in southern England drilling recruits. But Britain is beginning to wake up to Tex. He has a technical education and a lifetime of experience that are wasted on the drill ground. So now he is frequently called to London to make speeches and confer with fire fighters.

When he’s in the city he pays his own hotel expenses. He makes about thirty appointments a day. When he leaves a message for anybody he signs it with a rubber stamp that he carries in his pocket. He already knows every important name in the city. He goes around in the rough battle dress of a Canadian sergeant, but admirals and generals don’t faze him. In fact, I’m sure he must faze them.

You ought to hear Tex talk. He says more words in one hour than any human being I’ve ever met. He talks all over the place. He hadn’t been in my room five minutes before he was running back and forth like a madman, pulling a theoretical fire hose up to a theoretical blaze. When a friend of mine walked in Tex was down on his knees loading my wastebasket with theoretical nitroglycerin to put out a big crater fire in Texas.

He carries with him constantly an immense black briefcase that weighs fifty pounds. He calls it Bradford University. It is a traveling encyclopedia. No matter what subject or name you mention, Tex will dig in there and find some reference to it. He is inseparable from this briefcase. He works with it the way a ventriloquist works with his dummy. Before you know it the floor is covered with his papers and letters. He reassembles them and puts them back in the briefcase, then litters the floor with them again a dozen times during the evening.

Tex closed his big oil-field fire-fighting business in Corpus Christi last summer, stored all his equipment, sent his family to California, went to Canada and joined up. He did it because he was in Germany after the last war and he says Germans are not the people he wants to run the world. Also, he has an itchy foot.

Mrs. Bradford knew the minute war was declared that Tex would get in it sooner or later. So she was resigned to it.

They have three sons--one working in Death Valley, one in college and one in high school.

Tex was born in Australia, of Texas parents. I asked him if that made him American or Australian, and he said: “If your cat went next door to an oyster shop and gave birth to a litter, would they be oysters or kittens?” At any rate Tex is a Texan.

He fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico. He has been on the Panama police force. He was a friend of Jack London in California. He battled Hoover’s soldiers the time they burned the Bonus Army out of Washington, even though he wasn’t in the bonus march and didn’t believe in it. He has never collected his own World War bonus.

He is a fanatical admirer of President Roosevelt, and donated three months of his time in 1936 to help reelect him. He has been an engineer superintendent at a CCC camp in Shiloh Park, Tennessee. He has followed oil fields on every continent on the globe. He has gone to military school and six or eight universities and taken dozens of correspondence courses, and he wishes he could live 300 years so he could do all the things he wants to.

Tex is rough-fibered and tough-minded, yet he is informed on every subject under the sun. He uses unusual words and uses them easily and correctly. His mind seethes and foams. He can’t tell a single thing without telling twenty other things along with it. He gets continents and decades away from the subject, but he always remembers to get back to it. He just has so much to tell he tries to tell everything at once.

Tex is busier than two dozen bird dogs. He is just fighting this war to a standstill. He wrote more than 700 letters to senators and congressmen urging them to hurry with help for Britain. He carries a hundred indexed file cards of the names of people he must see in London.

He is a friend of Major George Fielding Eliot, of Pat Hurley, of Congressman Dick Kleberg, of Frederick Delano, of Dale Carnegie. He admires Lowell Thomas. He loves to make public speeches.

Tex weighs 190, and has a chest like an ox. He lets you hit him with all your might right in the stomach, and it is like hitting a stone wall. He marches fourteen miles a day carrying a seventy-pound pack and comes home ahead of the column, doing a jig. Officers tell me Tex is one of the greatest inspirations the Canadian Army has. He is tough and he is smart. And he is burning for a fight.

Yet Tex is as bald as an owl, he is slightly deaf, he wears glasses to read with, and he is a grandfather.

Germans, arise and flee from this transplanted scourge of the plains!

Maybe you would like to hear something about the other Americans in England.

Well, there are approximately 4000 of them. If you would tell that to any individual American who lives here he would be amazed, because the most gregarious one probably doesn’t know more than a hundred. Outside of newspapermen, I haven’t met a dozen Americans altogether. But 4000 is the Embassy’s figure.

They fall into three groups: Those in business or holding jobs. Those of dual nationality who married Englishmen. Those who came here to retire.

Some 1600 of those 4000 want to go home, and have notified the Embassy to that effect. But there is no way for them to get there unless they fly to Lisbon, and you have to have pull to get a seat on the plane to Lisbon. Unless the United States sends another ship to Ireland, these people are here for the duration. Most Americans think it is ridiculous that our government refuses to let them travel home on British ships, because of the danger, yet forces them to stay here amid constant danger.

Of these 4000 Americans, not more than 200 take an active part in American doings. The rest just go their own ways. They are scattered all over England. The retired people mostly live in the country, out of harm’s way. So far as I can learn, only one American has been killed by a bomb in England, and only a few have been hurt. The number of those who have been scared green is not available at the moment.

Americans over here have been very active in donating money to British relief. Furthermore, some sixty American businessmen have formed a mobile division to help fight the invasion if it comes. They furnish their own cars, which have been camouflaged and equipped with machine guns, rifles and “Molotov cocktails.” They drill, and wear British uniforms, but they will see action only if the invasion comes as far as London. I understand they would like to enlarge the unit but can’t find any more interested Americans.

There are many Americans (not counted in those 4000) serving here with Canadian troops, but they are hard to count because most of them claim to be Canadians. Many of them are like the fellow who was asked the other day where he came from and said “Vancouver, Saskatchewan”--which was like saying Seattle, Nebraska.

The busiest American over here, I think, is a fellow named Gilbert Carr. Back home in 1920 he would have been a typical Babbitt. He belongs to every lodge and society you’ve ever heard of. He has lived in England twelve years, and represents the Sunmaid Raisin Company.