Chapter VIII: Part 8

Through an arrangement with the government, Mr. Carr is allowed to keep his staff of thirty-five people at work by handling dried fruits from Greece, Smyrna and Australia. He used to handle 15,000 tons of American raisins a year, but now he handles only about half that amount, and they are not American raisins.

Mr. Carr knows all about bombs. Acting on the theme of dispersal, he packed up most of his clothes and took them to his warehouse, just in case his house should get hit. That night a bomb went clear through the warehouse, blew it apart, set it afire and burned it to the ground. Mr. Carr lost all his raisins, his records and his pants.

The next night a bomb exploded outside his office window and shattered the place, but nobody was in the office at the time. They cleared up the glass and went back to work. At his house, in Croydon, a bomb fell in the back yard next door and broke all his windows, cracked the walls and blew the doors off the garage. He had a man come the next morning to put the doors back on. That night they were blown off again.

Mr. Carr still lives in the house, with the windows boarded up. He gets home about eight at night, and works on his papers till he goes to sleep, stretched out between two chairs. He is downtown at eight in the morning.

He spends two hours a day on the raisin business. The rest of the day he is working for Britain. He is a director of the American Ambulance, secretary of the American Committee for Air-Raid Relief, and a director of the recently opened Eagle Club for Americans serving with the British forces. He is also a governor of the American Club, a director of the American Chamber of Commerce, adjutant of the American Legion post, and just now he is acting head of the Allied Relief Fund in this country.

He has desks all over town, and shoots around from here to there. He is the guy who is always called on to do things. He has a big heart and a good physique. He’s not afraid of bombs, but he says he gets bored with them.

So do I. Bored limp sometimes.

_3. A VISIT WITH LOW_

_London,
March, 1941_

It would be hard to say, I suppose, who is the greatest cartoonist in the world today. But a good many people think it is David Low, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised myself if he were.

Low draws for Lord Beaverbrook’s London _Evening Standard_. He draws, at the most, three cartoons a week. Occasionally he gets a dry spell, calls up the office and says he’s tired, and drops down to one a week. When he does this, he finds it just as hard to produce one cartoon a week as three. And yet I think this respite from the daily grind must have some bearing on Low’s greatness. As he says, nobody in the world can produce a good cartoon every day.

I went to see Low with fear and trembling, since great names affect me that way. But I needn’t have. He is pleasant and companionable, and you feel at ease with him.

His cartoons are the most powerful, often the most scalding, that I have ever seen. Low’s own philosophy is toward the socialistic, and he is pugnacious and caustic in his thinking. Yet as he sits in front of his fireplace puffing at his pipe, his voice is soft and his manner gentle. He reminds you of a very young “Foxy Grandpa.”

Low is fifty. He is neither big nor small. His hair is nearly gone on top. His eyebrows are black and extremely wide. He has a grand little smile.

For many years he put himself in his cartoons now and then, in just a few quick lines down in the corner. It was mostly eyebrows. You wouldn’t think it could be anybody. Yet when you see Low, he looks exactly as in those cartoons.

He wore a beard until a few months ago. He finally shaved it off because it made him a marked man. Everybody recognized him, and he couldn’t get any peace. He is no recluse, however. He loves to walk, and is out a good deal. He has many friends and goes out often to dinners and entertainments.

Low speaks with the confidence of one who knows he is a master in his field, yet he speaks with the quiet of a professor, and not as a braggart. And he has a nice sense of self-ridicule too, for he says:

“A cartoonist has it over newspapermen who write, because if somebody doesn’t like your cartoon you can always say, ‘Well, you just don’t understand it.’”

Low is a New Zealander. He has always been a cartoonist. He came to England twenty-two years ago, via the United States, and has never been back to New Zealand. He has a sentimental feeling about his homeland, and fears that a return to the old scenes and old friends after all these years would be disillusioning.

He says he has never felt thoroughly settled in London. He feels that an Australian or New Zealander is more at home in America than in England. His last visit to America was in October, 1936. He saw Jack Dempsey and Father Divine and President Roosevelt.

The Lows subscribe to many American magazines, including _Life_ and the _New Yorker_. Mrs. Low scans the new fashions in the ads. “We can’t buy anything,” she says, “so the next best thing is to look at the pictures.” The only thing they don’t like about American magazines these days is that so many of the cartoons are on the war, and they see enough war cartoons at home.

Low drew for _Collier’s_ a while last year, but had to work so many weeks ahead that he felt his cartoons lost their punch, so it was dropped.

He has two daughters--Prudence and Rachel--in their late teens. Both are political-minded. In fact, the whole Low family is a very important part of Low’s greatness. The family breakfast is literally a conference. The four of them thresh over the world news for cartoon ideas. As Low says, “We digest it, argue it, analyze it, sing it, act it out, and balance it on our noses.”

Out of this intellectual jamboree usually comes a cartoon idea. But not always. For like all great men, Low finds his head nothing but clay sometimes. The day of my visit was an example.

“I got up this morning a complete blank,” he told me. “Here historical events by the hundred were just crashing about us, and I couldn’t get a thing. Didn’t have anything by lunchtime either. Finally at two o’clock I got an idea.

“You can always work when you have to. I started at two, and the cartoon was finished by four. But I’m not going to look at Monday’s paper.”

Low works at home, and the paper sends a messenger out for his cartoon. He has had a tough winter. Because of air raids, the _Standard’s_ engravers wouldn’t work after dark. So he had to have his cartoon in their hands by shortly after lunch. “That meant getting up at seven, two hours before daylight, and trying to be funny,” Low says. “You ought to try that sometime.”

People say David Low is the highest-paid cartoonist in the world. He also makes money from books and radio. Yet his tastes are simple. He says, “I actually prefer a nine-penny seat in the cinema, and I really like cheap cigars better than expensive ones. Just happened to be born that way.”

But the Low house in North London is charming and comfortable. It has deep furniture, floor lamps, a cozy log fire and books on each side of the mantel. A nice girl in brown maid’s dress lets you in and serves tea. It is more like an American home than an English one.

The house is a $1.10 taxi ride from the Strand. Low himself rides the subways. I did too coming back into town, and had to change three times. At one place when I asked directions of a woman subway guard she said, “Change at Leicester Square, dearie, they’ll put you right.”

The Low house is a rambling two-story brick one, with a big green garden behind. There have been a good many bombs near by. Low’s mother and aunt, who lived a few blocks away, had their house blown up a few days after they had felt a premonition and moved out of it. Despite his eminent position, Low serves his regular turn as firebomb watcher in his block every Monday night. He has put out many incendiaries.

Low had always worked in a studio some fifteen minutes’ walk from his house. The studio had no telephone, no messages were delivered, and he received no callers. But he now works at home, because of the bombs. He has an elaborate backyard shelter, with an expensive pumping system to keep it dry. But he was never satisfied with it, so he finally shored up one room of his house with heavy steel beams and brick. The whole family sleeps in this room when the raids are bad. The house also is full of buckets of sand, buckets of water, and stirrup pumps.

Low seldom goes to the _Standard_ office. His drawing paraphernalia is spread on a long table at one end of his den. He works at an elbow-high drawing table, and draws standing up. On the average, it takes him about six hours to do his cartoon.

He is his own man. His position in British journalism is unique. Beaverbrook gives him a free hand. He does not have to follow policy. It’s not unusual for Beaverbrook to see himself cruelly lampooned by his own cartoonist in his own paper.

Low is very busy and gets busier every day. He says he can’t stand having any kind of challenge made to him without taking it up. For instance, he always hated to write, and never felt he could write. But some years ago a publisher asked him to write a book. He couldn’t bear to have the publisher think he wasn’t capable of it. So he wrote one. Now he has four going all at once.

It was the same way about public speaking. He can now make a public address without getting sick at his stomach. In fact, he broadcasts to America every two weeks, and gets a great satisfaction from it. He feels that you can convey a hundred per cent more with your voice than you can through the printed page.

Low is crazy about the movies. Good or bad, he still likes them. He is also a great fellow to try games. He has played practically every game ever invented, from golf to pinochle. But his interest in such things quickly ebbs. Many of his games he has played only once. He used to sit by the hour playing the player-piano in his living room, but now it’s never touched.

I am no autograph collector, yet I couldn’t bear to return to America without one of Low’s cartoons. So I asked the _Evening Standard_ for one of his originals.

The one they gave me would make you dance with gratitude. I don’t know why I was so honored. To begin with, it is a gruesomely powerful war cartoon. A few weeks ago the _Standard_ had it on exhibition in a front window. A bomb fell in the street outside, and blew a jagged hole right through the center of this Low masterpiece. How is that for a double-barreled war souvenir?

I took the cartoon with me out to Low’s house. He had not known about the bomb incident. When he saw the hole, it was as though I had handed him the Pulitzer Prize. You never saw anybody so delighted. He thumbtacked the cartoon onto his drawing-board, and inscribed it to me. Then he started walking around the room, thinking and chuckling. To Mrs. Low he said, “I want to put something funny on it. Come on, help me be funny.”

But before Mrs. Low could be funny he said, “I’ve got it,” and went to the drawing-board and started writing. And this is what he wrote, in the white space right next to the jagged hole:

“Dear Hitler--Thanks for the criticism. Yours, Low.”

And he beamed like a child as he rolled it up and handed it to me.

_4. READY FOR HITLER_

_Dover,
March, 1941_

All day long I rode around southeastern England, skirting the coast from the mouth of the Thames to Dover. And somehow I got an impression that Germans wouldn’t be welcome in these parts.

I never hope to see again in my lifetime so much barbed wire and so many highway obstructions and roadside blockhouses as I saw in this one day.

Right at the moment the military arm is sick of visitors, so I couldn’t get a pass to see all the heavy stuff and the hidden stuff and the trick stuff that Britain has evolved to foil the encroaching villain. But just driving around, almost like a tourist, you are constantly in such a maze of soldiers, camouflaged trucks, half-hidden guns, trenches, pillboxes, lookout towers, blocked roads and endlessly stretching barbed wire that when you finally leave it you begin to feel lonesome and unsafe.

The censorship doesn’t permit a description of camouflage, but I saw camouflaged things that would make you split with laughing if it weren’t so deadly serious.

Many farmhouses stand empty, for they will be in the line of battle if battle comes. Sheep graze in the fields while soldiers occupy the sheep sheds. A farmer’s simple thatched home may be a general’s headquarters. Every roadside wood doesn’t cover a gun, but you don’t know which one does and which one doesn’t.

The public is barred from this whole area covering the Channel coast and extending for many miles inland. Those who live in the area can move about freely, but nobody can come in from outside without a special pass.

Each town along the coast is so heavily defended in front that it seems to me impossible for the Germans to make a landing in force directly by water. So the next assumption is that they would land men and tanks and guns inland, by air, and then try to push back and capture a port to establish a bridgehead for water-borne troops. Consequently the cities are as well defended behind as in front. For miles, in a great semicircle behind each city, the fortifications are complex. Roads and fields and fence-rows are entangled and blocked. Behind them are hundreds of gun posts in natural craters.

Everywhere in the whole area are soldiers. They stand guard at nearly every side road, and at most of the side streets in the towns and villages. You can see them running, drilling and practicing out in the fields. You meet them in long lines marching down the road, in full kit. Maybe they don’t look exactly like men from Mars, but they certainly don’t resemble Englishmen.

Although the whole country is already solid with obstruction and defense, men are still working constantly on more and more of the same. If they put much more concrete down here I think the whole end of this island will sink into the sea.

Surprisingly, the towns in this area don’t seem like ghost towns at all. Only about a third of the people have been evacuated, and new soldiers coming in more than make up for this decrease in population. In Dover, Ramsgate and Deal the streets are filled with people. The pubs and picture shows operate as usual. The shops are well stocked. Nobody seems to be going around casting haunted looks over his shoulder.

It is next summer that the difference will be really apparent. For this is the Atlantic City and Coney Island section of England, where half a million Londoners come on a holiday to stroll and bathe and lounge. They won’t come next summer. For one thing, most of the big hotels are evacuated. For another, the great beaches and promenade decks up on the cliffsides are now all tangled with barbed wire and concrete blocks. And the sands where massed thousands used to lie and relax are now bare and blocked off.

All this is reason enough for the crowds not coming next summer. But the best reason is--the government won’t let anybody in. Not even the Germans.

* * * * *

Dover, as you know, is the English city that is closest to France. It is subject both to air raids and to shelling from German guns across the Channel.

I suppose most of you picture Dover as a deserted city, a half-wrecked ghost town. It isn’t at all. It is quite alive. Thousands of people are living here and going on with their business. In fact, Dover is not as badly damaged--not nearly so--as Coventry or Bristol. The waterfront is pretty well battered, and most of the buildings there have been evacuated. But the rest of the city carries right on.

The Grand Hotel, where all the American newspapermen stayed during the great air-raiding days of September, 1940, has since had one whole end bombed off. This end simply fell away from the rest of the hotel as though a giant hand had cut it off with a knife. If you look way up at the naked standing wall, which used to be an inside wall, you will see one lone white washbowl still screwed to the wall. They say a newspaperman went away hurriedly, leaving his razor lying on the bowl, shortly before the hotel was hit. Presumably the razor is still there, but there’s no way to get to it.

The Dover area gets a bunch of shells from the other side about once a week. But even the ones that land right in town do little damage.

Even a newcomer like myself, after a few minutes of practice looking, can go around town and say, “This was a bomb” or “This was a shell.” A shell seems to knock down only just what it hits, instead of wrecking everything all around the way the big bombs do. I saw buildings in Dover that had received direct hits by shells yet had lost only a few feet of brick and stone off one corner.

German planes cross the coast so frequently that cities in this area have six or eight siren warnings a day. In fact, these coastal towns have recently put in effect a dual warning system. The regular siren goes when the planes are first caught by the sound detectors. Then, if the planes come directly overhead, a local warning is sounded. This may be a steam whistle or a compressed-air squawker different from the regular siren.

There was a first warning in Ramsgate while we were there, in midafternoon, and I noticed lots of people take to the shelters.

Ramsgate, incidentally, has a public shelter system that is unique. It is a vast network of tunnels in the chalk rock, winding around underneath the city at an average of sixty feet below the surface. The total length of this network is three and a half miles, and it can be entered from twenty-three different points.

In the event of a night-long blitz the entire population of Ramsgate could crowd into these tunnels. They were started the year before the war and took more than two years to build. In places the tunnel is so big you could lay two railroad tracks side by side. In this part the city has built little “apartments.” These cubicles are merely wooden frameworks covered with black burlap. They are about six feet high and have no roof, but they do give some privacy.

These apartments are permanent homes for 1700 Ramsgate people. They live down there like prehistoric people in caves. Some of them have been bombed out of their homes; others are people who are just afraid.

I’ll tell you something to show you how wide awake this coastal defense area is. A friend from Tunbridge Wells drove me around. We drove all day, and covered 150 miles. Of course we had the necessary passes to enter the area, but we didn’t have any special route mapped out for ourselves and had sent no word ahead.

In midafternoon we drove into Ramsgate, a good seventy-five miles from London. We stopped at a busy corner and asked a traffic policeman the way to the Lord Mayor’s office. The policeman was a nice-looking, pleasant young fellow. He told us the way, then looked in the car and said:

“Is this Mr. Pyle?”

My first impulse was to dismount from the car and bow to the passing throng, on the assumption that my prowess as a literary gentleman was now recognized in the uttermost corners of the earth. But logic stayed this action. No such conclusion was permissible under the cold light of fact.

The truth is simply that the police all over the area were being notified from one city to the next who we were and what we were about.

In cases like this it is soothing to know that your past life is an open book and your bib is clean. I’m glad now I never even stole watermelons as a boy.

_5. GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT_

_London,
March, 1941_

The time has almost come for me to start home.

I came over here originally for only a month. Somehow that has stretched on into a fourth month, almost without me being aware of it. The truth is, I like it over here. But I don’t like any place as well as America, and I guess it’s time I was getting out of England anyway. I don’t yet say “rahther” nor “bloody,” but I do find myself automatically looking in the right direction for traffic. Another month and I would probably be standing for Parliament from Hants.

After three months in Great Britain I still have no fears about Britain’s “sticking it.” Of course I would like to say that everybody was made of steel, that nobody ever got scared or panicky, and that every single soul was working himself to the bone for the war. But I have run into people who were petrified by bombs. I have one friend who loses several pounds during every bad raid. I have also been in some badly blitzed places where spirits were getting pretty low and people were wondering just how much more they could take. I have found a good many stories of selfishness and of running away by people who could afford to run away.

But none of these is expressive of the national character. What you have read in the daily papers back home about Britain’s courage and calmness as a nation is absolutely true. Maybe there is something that would break them, but it hasn’t come yet.

Britain as a whole is of one mind. I have never heard any defeatist or appeasement talk. Even on the Clyde-side and in Wales I heard very little of “this is a capitalistic war” kind of talk.

It is my feeling that the people are ahead of the government in the national will to win; that much of the government still waits to cast a timid political eye at the tides of opinion and the shades of precedent before acting; and that only a few are of the stripe of Churchill and Beaverbrook, with the capacity for complimenting their people’s intelligence by moving boldly.

On the whole I have worked up a feeling, from 2000 miles of travel over Britain, that the war effort is not yet supreme. Thousands and thousands of people want to do something to help but are given no direction, no orders. The organization of the war effort seems to me far from perfect. Talent and time and desire to serve are wasted.

As far as I could gather during my travels, the mass of the British people aren’t thinking much about war aims. They haven’t any very specific ideas of their own. They hope for a better world somehow, but they are pretty vague about it. The chief thought right now is to get the war finished, and then fix it so Germany can’t do this thing again to the next generation.

* * * * *

The most important person in the British government, as far as I am concerned, is a Welsh girl named Gwyn Barker who handles the wants of American newspapermen at the Ministry of Information. She is the most thorough, punctual and altogether satisfactory government representative I’ve ever dealt with. Furthermore, she is personally delightful. In Welsh her name is spelled “Gwynedd.”

It seems to me Americans are wasting their time worrying about what the war will do to the characters of the children. They fall so quickly into a familiarity with the ways of war that it becomes wholly natural to them.

One afternoon in Bristol I called on the Rev. Mr. Murray, vicar of St. Michael’s Church. The Murrays have a very robust young son named John, nineteen months old, who paddles around the room and says a few words. A few months ago when he heard a plane, John would go to the door, point up and mumble “Airplane.” But now when he hears one he points up and says, “Airplane--boom!”

London is “cleaner” than when I came here. Bomb wreckage, except that of the previous two or three nights, is all pushed back of the sidewalks. Many places have been entirely cleared away and now stand as vacant lots. Every day the great rubble heap on the grass of Hyde Park grows bigger. It now covers acres, and it is only one of many.

The open basement of what was Lewis’ great store is now almost clear. A new sidewalk is being laid in front of the hole. Almost no streets are now closed by that strange English sign “Diversion.”

Things are growing tighter daily. There will soon be meatless days officially, and in hard fact they are here already. Only a few silk stockings are left on sale. Radio sets are limited from now on. The railroads may soon raise their fares again. The Home Guards must wear their uniforms to work. Conscription of labor is in the balance.

Gas drills are being held in various suburbs. Recent tests showed some masks “out of fit”--gas gets in through the side. Four hundred masks a day are being lost or left on subway trains. The newspapers continually berate the public about not carrying masks, yet not one person in a hundred does it.

Now that the lend-lease bill is law, the British talk more frankly to Americans. “Why shouldn’t you give us the stuff?” my barber asks. “You don’t ask a man to repay you a shilling when you’re both running for your lives.”

It is the belief of most Americans I know over here that America is headed rapidly toward war. Their feeling seems about fifty-fifty for and against the idea.

More and more Americans are rolling in--here to study this, and study that.

Books about the war are coming out by the dozen, but no masterpiece seems to have been written yet.

New stage plays are opening all the time. “Gone With the Wind” is running into its second year, and you have to get seats ahead of time. Leslie Howard is making a film. Lawrence Olivier has passed his R.A.F. medical examination.

The air war is picking up. There is a lot of sudden dying in London every night. It is hit-and-skip dying. It is death dealt by mystic lottery. A lone bomber three miles above in the dark lets one loose. That bomb will hit some small spot in a big area thirty miles across, it will pick out some doomed handful from among London’s eight million people. Until it hits, nobody knows.

Ten may die tonight out of the eight million. What marked those ten to be drawn in the lottery instead of us? What fate drew a bomb to their special hundred square feet? My room is the same size as theirs, why didn’t it come here? There is no answer. That’s why you get so you don’t pay any attention.

There is no feeling of stringency or acuteness in daily life. People seem to live even more laxly than when I first came here. They know something is bound to come--but I am certain the public is not worrying about it.

The war is not dramatic to the British people. They go from day to day and take care of whatever happens. There is no fury, no frenzy, no great hatred, no general fear, no fanaticism. Faces look the same as in peacetime. There is no urgency in the British demeanor. In three months I have not met an Englishman to whom it has ever occurred that Britain might lose the war.

* * * * *

Now it is time to go. It is not easy to leave. There is something about leaving England in wartime that you cannot bear. I have been all around to say my good-byes, and I have told them all that it was not good-bye forever, that I would be back.

Spring comes early in England, and it is a lovely thing. Already the days are soft and gentle. It is wonderful to be alive when warmth and freshness spreads over the land. All through England people are looking forward to the real, blooming fulness of spring. For many of them, it will never happen. I could not bear to think that for me there might never, never be another spring.

EPILOGUE

_Albuquerque, N. M._

The long trip home is done. The wars are far distant, and over the desert there hangs an infinity of space and time that seems put here to prohibit any contemplation of giant struggles far away.

It is so quiet out here just at dawn. I don’t know what, but something awakens us--the silence or the gentleness--something awakens us just at daybreak. And we get up, and watch the light come softly over the bare Sandias to the east, and it is a perfect hour. The little birds hop from the sage-filled mesa at daylight, and they come over into our yard and they peck in the fresh earth, and waddle around and sing and have a wonderful time.

The friendly hot sun makes its arc across the peaceful sky, and evening is here. We have a window which looks to the west, and every evening I sit there and watch. Just as the sun touches the horizon its gold radiates upward onto the hanging clouds above, and the unearthly long line of the mesa rim turns into a silhouette and the old volcano peaks stand silently black in their filament of fire, and all out and on beyond, everywhere, is the gentle rolling vastness of the desert. What you see then from our west window is something completely enthralling, something that is big, and finer than any words.

All this is here for us to relish, so lovely and beautiful and serene. But when we sit in our west window at sundown it is past midnight in London, and the guns are going and the bombers are raising hell and my friends of yesterday are tense and full of a distracting excitement--peering, listening, alert to death and the sounds of death.

Out here, so remote from turmoil, the ghostly rustle of a falling bomb can surely be only something you dreamed once in a nightmare. There can be no truth in it. And yet you know. Day and night, always in your heart, you are still in London. You have never really left. For when you have shared even a little in the mighty experience of a compassionless destruction, you have taken your partnership in something that is eternal. And amidst it or far away, it is never out of your mind.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.