Graham Greene (26 page)

The delusion about illicit wireless ran the pigeons very hard. The pronouncement of a thoughtless expert that an aerial might be hidden in a chimney, and that messages could be received through an open window even on an iron bedstead, gave a great impetus to this form of delusion. The high scientific authority of the popular play,
The Man Who Stayed at Home,
where a complete installation was concealed behind a fireplace, spread the delusion far and wide. It was idle to assure the sufferers that a Marconi transmitter needed a four-horsepower engine to generate the wave, that skilled operators were listening day and night for the pulsations of unauthorised messages, that the intermittent tickings they heard from the flat above them were probably the efforts of an amateur typist: the sufferers knew better. At this period the disease attacked even naval and military officers and special constables. If a telegraphist was sent on a motor-cycle to examine and test the telegraph poles, another cyclist was certain to be sent by some authority in pursuit. On one occasion the authorities despatched to the Eastern Counties
a car equipped with a Marconi apparatus and two skilled operators to intercept any illicit messages that might be passing over the North Sea. They left London at noon; at three they were under lock and key in Essex. After an exchange of telegrams they were set free, but at 7 p.m. they telegraphed from the police cells in another part of the country, imploring help. When again liberated they refused to move without the escort of a Territorial officer in uniform, but on the following morning the police of another county had got hold of them and telegraphed, “Three German spies arrested with car and complete wireless installation, one in uniform of British officer.”

Next in order was the German governess, also perhaps the product of
The Man Who Stayed at Home.
There were several variants of this story, but a classic version was that the governess was missing from the midday meal, and that when the family came to open her trunks they discovered under a false bottom a store of high-explosive bombs. Everyone who told this story knew the woman's employer; some had even seen the governess herself in happier days—“Such a nice quiet person, so fond of the children; but now one comes to think of it, there was a something in her face, impossible to describe, but a something.”

During the German advance through Belgium an ingenious war correspondent gave a new turn to the hysteria. He alleged that the enamelled iron advertisements for “Maggi Soup”, which were to be seen attached to every hoarding and telegraph post, were unscrewed by the German officers in order to read the information about the local resources, which was painted in German on the back. Screwdriver parties were formed in the London suburbs, and in destroying this delusion they removed also many unsightly advertisements. The hallucination about gun platforms was not despatched so easily. As soon as a correspondent had described the gun emplacements laid down by Germans in the guise of tennis courts at Mauberge there was
scarcely a paved back-garden nor a flat concrete roof in London that did not come under the suspicion of some spy-maniac.

The denunciations were not confined to Germans. Given a British householder with a concrete tennis-court and pigeons about the house, and it was certain to be discovered that he had quite suddenly increased the scale of his expenditure, that heavy cases had been delivered at the house by night, that tapping had been overheard, mysterious lights seen in the windows, and that on the night of the sinking of the
Lusitania
he had given a dinner-party to naturalised Germans. When artillery experts assured the patients that gun emplacements in the heart of London were in the wrong place, and that even on the high lands of Sydenham or of Hampstead any tram road would better serve the purpose, they wagged their heads. They were hot upon the scent, and for many weeks denunciations poured in at the rate of many hundreds a day.…

A new phase of the malady was provoked by the suggestion that advertisements in the Agony Column of newspapers were being used by spies to communicate information to Germany. It is uncertain who first called public attention to this danger, but since refugees did make use of the Agony Columns for communicating with their friends abroad, there was nothing inherently improbable in the idea. In order to allay public alarm it was necessary to check the insertion of apparently cryptic advertisements. Later in the war a gentleman who had acquired a considerable reputation as a code expert, and was himself the author of commercial codes, began to read into these advertisements messages from German submarines to their base, and
vice versa.
This he did with the aid of a Dutch–English dictionary on a principle of his own. As we had satisfied ourselves about the authors of the advertisements we treated his communications rather lightly. In most cases the movements he foretold failed to take place, but unfortunately once, by an accident,
there did happen to be an air-raid on the night foretold by him. We then inserted an advertisement of our own. It was something like this:

and upon this down came our expert hot-foot with the information that six submarines were under orders to attack the defences at Dover that very night. When we explained that we were the authors of the advertisement, all he said was that, by some extraordinary coincidence, we had hit upon the German code, and that by inserting the advertisement we had betrayed a military secret. It required a committee to dispose of this delusion.

The longest-lived of the delusions was that of the night-signalling, for whenever the scare showed signs of dying down a Zeppelin raid was sure to give it a fresh start. As far as fixed lights were concerned, it was the best-founded of all the delusions, because the Germans might well have inaugurated a system of fixed lights to guide Zeppelins to their objective, but the sufferers went a great deal farther than a belief in fixed lights. Morse-signalling from a window in Bayswater, which could be seen only from a window on the opposite side of the street, was believed in some way to be conveyed to the commanders of German submarines in the North Sea, to whom one had to suppose news from Bayswater was of paramount importance. Sometimes the watcher—generally a lady—would call in a friend, a noted Morse expert, who in one case made out the letters “P.K.” among a number of others that he could not distinguish. This phase of the malady was the most obstinate of all. It was useless to point out that a more sure and private method of
conveying information across a street would be to go personally or send a note. It was not safe to ignore any of these complaints, and all were investigated. In a few cases there were certainly intermittent flashes, but they proved to be caused by the flapping of a blind, the waving of branches across a window, persons passing across a room, and, in two instances, the quick movements of a girl's hairbrush in front of the light. The beacons were passage lights left unshrouded.…

On one occasion a very staid couple came down to denounce a waiter in one of the large hotels, and brought documentary evidence with them. It was a menu with a rough sketch plan in pencil made upon the back. They believed it to be a plan of Kensington Gardens with the Palace buildings roughly delineated by an oblong figure. They had seen the waiter in the act of drawing the plan at an unoccupied table. I sent for him and found before me a spruce little Swiss with his hair cut
en brosse,
and a general air of extreme surprise. He gave me a frank account of all his movements, and then I produced the plan. He gazed at it a moment, and then burst out laughing. “So that is where my plan went! Yes, monsieur, I made it, and then I lost it. You see, I am new to the hotel, and, in order to satisfy the head waiter, I made for myself privately a plan of the tables, and marked a cross against those I had to look after.”

SIR BASIL THOMSON

A GAGGLE OF SUSPECTS

My experience is that the gentlemen who are the best behaved and the most sleek are those who are doing the mischief. We cannot be too sure of anybody.

THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, HOME FORCES (IRONSIDE), ADDRESSING LOCAL DEFENCE VOLUNTEERS ON 5
JUNE 1940

n the growing atmosphere of suspicion and hostility generated by the [1914] war, D. H. Lawrence came to be looked upon as a dangerous person, partly because he wrote and had a beard, and partly because his wife was German. One wintry afternoon, when he and Frieda were going home, with their knapsack, two officers stopped them and asked what they were carrying. “A few groceries,” Lawrence replied. One of the officers insisted on examining the contents, and pulling out what he thought to be a camera discovered it was a pound of salt. Two Americans, a man and a woman, visited Lawrence, and a police sergeant was sent round by the military to examine their papers, and when they returned to London, the man was taken to Scotland Yard, stripped and put in a cell for the night. The country people began to spy on the Lawrences: Frieda could not hang a towel on a bush, or carry out the slops without her movements being watched. When Lawrence had the chimney tarred to keep out the damp, the countryside agreed that it was a signal to the Germans. He and Frieda were supposed to supply German submarines with food, and with petrol stored in some recess of the cliffs. Cecil Gray came down to Cornwall, the Lawrences visited him, and one evening, while Lawrence was singing German songs to himself rather to Gray's discomfort, an officer banged on the door and strode in, followed by three local spies. The spies had reported a light seen through an uncurtained window, and though it turned out to be a candle held by the housekeeper on her way to her room, Cecil Gray was fined £20.

This niggling persecution wore Lawrence's nerves very thin. One day, when he and Frieda were sitting on some rocks by the sea, Frieda, exhilarated by the air and sun, jumped up and ran
along, her white scarf streaming in the wind, while Lawrence screamed—“Stop it, stop it, you fool, you fool! Can't you see they'll think you are signalling to the enemy!”…

One day in October [1917] when he and Frieda were both out, the cottage was searched, and some papers and a book removed. The next morning an officer, a police sergeant, and two local men called, and the police sergeant read out an order from W. Western, Major-General i/c Administration, Southern Command, Salisbury, that Lawrence and his wife were to leave Cornwall for an unprohibited area, where they must report to the police on arrival.

HUGH KINGSMILL

urprised in Sweden by the war—if the word “surprise” is appropriate—we had a somewhat distressing, perhaps even perilous, trip home, first by air to London and then on the overcrowded S.S.
Washington.
I carried many papers, lecture notes, and books with me, which were the object of tedious inspection at the remote and camouflaged London airport. The inspecting officers were particularly suspicious of a sketch representing the seating arrangement at a dinner that Goethe gave in his house on the Frauenplan in Weimar in honour of the sweetheart of his youth. It was suspected of being of strategic importance, and I had to deliver a condensed lecture on the novel in order to convince the officials of the complete innocence of the paper.