Green for Danger

Green for Danger

Christianna Brand

With an Introduction by Marian Babson

A
MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media ebook

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

1

2

3

4

5

6

CHAPTER III

1

2

3

4

CHAPTER IV

1

2

3

4

5

CHAPTER V

1

2

3

4

CHAPTER VI

1

2

3

4

5

6

CHAPTER VII

1

2

3

CHAPTER VIII

1

2

CHAPTER IX

1

2

3

CHAPTER X

1

2

3

4

5

CHAPTER XI

1

2

3

4

5

CHAPTER XII

1

2

3

CHAPTER XIII

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

It will be apparent (I hope) that I could not have attempted the background of this story unless I had had some acquaintance with the inside workings of a military hospital; and it must surely be equally obvious that, under the circumstances, I would do all in my power to avoid portraying any one particular hospital. All such institutions, however, must have operating theatres and wards and corridors, and be staffed by Royal Army Medical Corps officers, by Sisters and by Voluntary Aid Detachments, just as all characters must have a nose and two eyes and a mouth, with a very limited choice of colouring for their hair and complexion. I do implore my readers, therefore,
not
to be more clever than their author, and see portraits where, quite honestly, none are intended.

C.B.

I
NTRODUCTION

G
reen for Danger
—and there's danger all around. Hitler has launched the blitzkrieg designed to bring England to its knees—and under his heel. Death falls from the skies at all hours of the day and night, while, from Germany, Lord Haw-Haw and his ilk fill the radio airwaves with propaganda of doom and despair. One by one, the countries of Europe have fallen before the Nazi onslaught, and England stands alone, grimly enduring, fighting back with every weapon she can muster.

In an America now involved in the conflict but safely beyond the reach of even the longest-range bombers, never bombed and never likely to be, we listened to the voices of our own radio pundits. We heard Edward R. Murrow reporting from England: “London can take it.” We listened to Gabriel Heatter dismally proclaiming: “Aaah, there's ba-a-ad news tonight!”

Churchill could offer nothing but “… blood, toil, tears and sweat,” could promise only that “… we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

On one hand, the blitz; on the other, the ever-present threat of imminent invasion. How were people really coping with wartime life on that “sceptered isle … [that] fortress built by Nature … against infection and the hand of war?”

Publishing schedules moved slowly, providing less immediacy than radio and cabled newspaper reports, but gradually books providing a picture of ordinary life under the blitz began to reach the waiting public. Foremost among them was
Green for Danger
, with its depiction of daily life in a military hospital in a heavily bombed area; forced to accept civilian casualties as well as military personnel, stretched to its limits (“there were twenty-three admissions last night”), and with no relief in sight.

This was life under fire, as experienced by millions of ordinary citizens, day after day, week after week, month after month. Amazingly, it quickly became accepted as the norm: “We didn't think about it; it was just the way we lived.”

At the time, Christianna Brand wrote in her “Author's Note” for the second edition: “Criticism has been made of the cool reaction of my characters towards the air-raids. I write only of what I know; and I know that during the whole of the blitz upon London which I spent in a heavily bombed area, largely among V.A.D.s, I, too, saw not a shadow of panic or failure or endurance-at-an-end.…”

Today, she says: “I think people should know how it all was. I think the young should. But I remember my own indifference to memories of the First World War and I understand that they don't—don't understand that one said, ‘Meet me at the theatre, and if that's not there I'll go on to the restaurant, if that's still standing …' and it was all just a part of life.”

This, then, was the life-style of the 1940s, a dangerous world in every way, into which we step through the pages of
Green for Danger.

With hindsight and today's knowledge, we are prepared for the casual gallantry and stiff upper lip: “Sorry to break up this happy party, but as you may have noticed, there's an air-raid on!” But what could prepare us for the hospital humorist who “sat up in bed and every time a bomb fell tapped himself on the back of the head and made his false teeth shoot out?”

World War II is emerging as a fiction genre of its own these days, but the authentic voice of the time cannot be duplicated and that is what we have in
Green for Danger.

Christianna Brand, after many early struggles with poverty, was a happy bride of a year when war broke out and her husband, a qualifted surgeon, immediately went into the army with the rank of major. She accompanied him on his posting until he was sent overseas.

She says: “He was posted to a military hospital in Woolwich and I took rooms in a little house as close to the hospital walls as possible—of course he had to live in. Woolwich is on the Thames, and harbours the biggest arsenal in the country; when the blitz came, every bomber unloaded a few on us for luck as they went in over London, and anything they had left over, on the way out—they followed the Thames, as the light on the water was impossible to disguise. For five months, we were bombed almost every night. They would drop flares to light up the ground below and then bomb what they saw; what they saw was all too often the hospital; and they had a horrid habit of chaining two bombs together which did make a biggish bang: you saw the flares coming, floating down and then this pretty unearthly scream of the bombs falling and whacko!…

“I got permission to share the V.A.D.'s air-raid shelter—the V.A.D.s, if you don't know, were the young women who came in from every walk of life, got a little bit of training and worked as nurses.… The shelter was tube-shaped, underground, and we slept on straw palliases on wooden bunks. At least the others slept, worn out with their days' hard work, but I was always a damned insomniac anyway, and heard the approach of every bomb. You got so used to it—your stomach used to turn over, but I don't think we ever gave our minds to what might happen, would happen, if we got a direct hit.…

“You might remember that all this time we were living on, I think, two ounces of meat a week, two eggs, a small ration
*
of bread, an ounce or two of butter and of tea and sugar. Anything else you could get, you could have—if you stood in a queue for it. I once walked down Fleet Street holding a lemon which someone had sent from North Africa, and the buses would draw up and the driver call out, ‘What did you do to get that, mate?'”

Meanwhile, her first novel,
Death in High Heels
, was going the dreary rounds of publishers, accumulating fifteen rejections before it was accepted and published and “landed up without a comma changed, as quite a little best seller.”
Heads You Lose
followed and was bought for serialization by
The Saturday Evening Post.

She was informed by authorities that the most valuable war work she could do was to continue with her writing, which was bringing desperately needed foreign currency into the country. (Wars are not cheap.) So, hunched over her typewriter, her tin helmet at the ready, she began what was to be one of the most memorable books of that era,
Green for Danger.

“We all led what had become to us perfectly ordinary lives. I wrote
Green for Danger
under these circumstances, battering away all day at my typewriter (earning good dollars … much needed in this country) and as soon as light was needed, drawing all the blackout curtains together; one gleam of light and the air raid wardens were at your door. When the air raid syrens [sic] began to howl, as they did every night as dark fell, put on my tin hat—forbidden day and night to go out without it—and collected my lucky chestnut.… Then up about a quarter of a mile to the hospital gates. Our ack-ack guns were shooting up at the bombers and down came a hail of what we used to, incorrectly, call shrapnel—great misshapen lumps of metal, red hot; one hit me once and tore the whole front of a thick woolly jersey away.… But that night, I'd be in my upstairs room, banging away at my typewriter again; and I do mean, thinking nothing of it—life going on. Syrens. Tin hat on. Up through the flak to the shelter again, rather upset because a sherry glass of mine had been broken.…