Guy Renton (42 page)

The tension in the Press grew keener; but trade showed no slackening in Soho Square. For Guy there were the daily telephone talks with Renée; the same dovetailing of their diaries, their lunches or their dinners two or three times a week. The Wine and Food Society was no less active. As often as not when he looked across a restaurant, he would see one of its neophytes, studying the wine list in juxtaposition to a little ivory card on which were inscribed the relative merits of each vintage year. From the outside it all looked the same. Yet a few hundred miles away his brother was training to be a front-line soldier with more than water, more than miles dividing him from these familiar streets.

During the first weeks Franklin's letters were eagerly awaited, read, and the news in them passed round. Most days someone asked someone what his news was.

The news after the first days was slight. He was in Barcelona, at the depot, training with a polyglot collection of whom only a few had had any previous military training. Franklin on the strength of a Certificate A earned in the O.T.C. at Fernhurst had been made a sergeant. It was a boring life, he said.

Guy understood that well. Kitchener's recruits had expected to take the King's shilling one week and ambush Uhlans in the next. They had not been prepared for the dreary weeks on the barrack square, the points of aiming, the endless exercises; even when they had got to France there had been the Bull Ring. Franklin might well not find himself in action for six months. He sent him out a food parcel from Fortnum's: forwarded any book that might amuse him; but gradually, as the weeks went by he ceased to think of him as somebody in danger but as someone who was on a trip abroad.

Christmas came and January: Teruel was captured; and recovered. Then Hitler marched into Austria, and Spain left the headlines. It was not till the sensation had subsided that the
Rentons realized that no one had heard anything from Franklin for a full month. Guy was deputed to make inquiries.

Among the many pro-Loyalists organizations was one that supplied medical services for the International Brigade. Its offices were in Soho, only a few yards from Duke and Renton. There was a brisk air of animation about the place when Guy called on them. It was a small congested room, its walls placarded with propaganda posters; its bookshelves sagging under pamphlets and the orange-yellow paperbacks of the Left Book Club.

At a central desk, in an armchair, sat a well dressed woman in the thirties whose features were socially familiar. At a small table with a typewriter at each end were two youngish girls, hatless, with an air of Bloomsbury. The attention of all three was concentrated upon a tall good-looking baldish but longhaired young man who was sitting across the desk, one leg swinging loose. He was just back from Spain. He had landed at Barcelona with an ambulance and driven it to Madrid himself. He was full of his experiences; he had actually been to University City, and seen some units of the International Brigade. The spirit of the men was wonderful. “It justifies everything we are doing here. It gave me hope and faith.”

At that point Guy interrupted. He had been in the room three minutes without attracting notice.

“Perhaps, then, you could give me some information about my brother, Franklin Renton, a sergeant. When he last wrote he was at the base. We've not heard from him for a month. Do the lists of casualties reach you?”

The man and the three women swung round to face him. They were most obliging. They did not see the casualty lists themselves but they could make inquiries: would Mr. Renton be kind enough to leave them his address? They would do anything they could do to help. They were so proud of the young Englishmen who had answered the call. Did he realize that in the last engagement over a hundred Englishmen had fallen? Mr. Surridge, as he must have overheard, was just back from the very firing line. If only more people in England could have the opportunity, they'd realize then what was at stake. Did he know that an anthology of ‘Soldier Poets' was shortly to be published?

Guy remembered all the sermons he had listened to in 1917 about the cup of sacrifice. At how many shareholders' meetings had not the chairman reported the dimensions of ‘The Roll of Honour' as though it were a credit entry on the balance sheet. He remembered all the politicians and publicists who had been sent on a Cook's tour round the trenches to return with moving accounts of how a shell had pitched ‘only two traverses away'. People like this Mr. Surridge got a great kick out of wars: the spice of danger; a sense of self-importance, and the knowledge that within a week they would be enjoying the comfort and immunity of their Pall Mall club. One war was very like another.

Guy left his address and a subscription to the fund and expressed appropriate appreciation of their kindness. On his return to the office he found a letter with a Spanish postmark, in Franklin's handwriting. ‘I'm sorry to have left you all so long without a letter; but that leave in Tangiers did materialize. You ought to go there. It's fantastic. Both sides dancing in the same night clubs; nearly fraternization but not quite.'

That was in early April, the same week that an Australian cricket side arrived in England. A few weeks later along with thirty thousand others Guy watched Hammond bat through a long day, after an early morning of disasters, and was to see for the first time in his experience the whole pavilion rise to its feet to applaud a batsman as he left the field.

The news in the papers grew more ominous. But the public was now inoculated. There had been so many scares during the last eight years: the gold standard crisis; the Hoare-Laval Pact; the militarization of the Rhine; the Abdication; the Anschluss; so many panics; and hadn't everyone heard on the best possible authority that three-quarters of the German tanks that had gone into Austria were built of cardboard?

August came and the final Test Match at the Oval and Hutton batting for three days; the sun shone steadily, and though the
Evening Standard
carried a cartoon by Low of a young man at the seaside in a blazer and open shirt lying on the sand, with the caption ‘To Hell with Czechoslovakia', while down the cliff at his back was rolling a boulder marked ‘Czechoslovakia', its sister the
Daily Express
assured its three million readers that ‘There will
be no war this year or next year either'; and then suddenly before anyone could realize it was happening, a genuine crisis was upon the country and Chamberlain was flying out to Germany to confer with Hitler.

During the week-end when the crisis was at its height, Guy went down into the country to stay with Rex and Lucy. He took down Margery. The Great West Road was thronged. It was rumoured that on the first air raid there would be in London alone thirty thousand casualties. The evacuation seemed to have begun.

It was a warm week-end. Rarely had the English countryside appeared more tranquil. It was impossible to believe that in a week these quiet towns, Hungerford, Marlborough, Devizes might be laid low by bombs.

Rex, however, was reassuring. “No need to worry. None at all. There are enough sensible people in control here and in France, in Germany too for that matter, to ensure that nothing so insane could happen. I can't of course give my sources of information, but I can assure you that Hitler is only a front; the men who really run the country, the Junkers, the landowners, the industrialists, the General Staff, are using him to keep the rabble quiet, to stamp out Communism; the moment he has ceased to serve their purpose, the moment they find he's dangerous, they'll get rid of him.”

He spoke with an air of authority that was not unimpressive.

That night shortly before dinner a call came from the Vicarage. The Vicar was in charge of air defence. He had received an assignment of unassembled gas masks, he was most anxious to have them delivered on the following day. He was collecting volunteers to help in the village hall after dinner. Would the Colonel and his guests be so very kind. . . .

In the village hall, twenty or so parishioners, some in dinner-jackets, some in corduroys, were gathered round a long trestle table on which was laid out a heap of rubber masks adorned with goggles, a pile of perforated metal cylinders and a jumble of thick rubber bands. First of all you fitted the mask over the cylinder; that was simple. Then you had to clamp the mask into place with a rubber band. That was not so easy. The band was tight
you had to stretch it first. Then you had to roll it over the nozzle of the mouthpiece as though it were the rubber handle of a tennis racket. To fit the clamp in the correct position you had to slip your finger under the rubber band, and run it over the metal rib. It was difficult. It was also painful. The ioints of Guy's right hand middle fingers began to ache.

Rex was delighted with the whole performance. It all made capital sense, in his opinion, like the digging of those slit trenches in the Park: “An attempt and a highly successful one to get the country rattled. Look at that rumour about the thirty thousand casualties in the first air raid, and all the beds got ready in the hospitals. Nonsense of course, all of it: but most effective. The Left Wing are trying to work up a war hysteria because they know that if there is a war, the whole social fabric may collapse; then they'll come into power: as they did in Russia. That's what we have to avoid. We've got to get the public worried, then they'll accept a settlement without feeling loss of face.”

Guy did not contradict him. Perhaps Rex was right; he didn't know. The one thing of which he was sure was his own ignorance. He kept hearing men talk with high authority as though they had access to secret information. For all he knew they might have. But he had noticed on the few occasions when he himself had accurate, inside information, that those same men talked with the same air of authority although they were completely misinformed and their conclusions were based upon false premises.

“We've got to realize,” Rex was saying, “that the issue in. the world to-day is not between one nation and another, but between opposite philosophies. It isn't Germany against France, but the revolutionaries, the incendiarists in France, Germany, Italy and here against the constitutionalists, in Italy, in France, in Germany and here. We have more in common with certain Germans than we have with many of our compatriots. You've heard talk about a federated Europe. This is a first step to it. The men at the top know what they are doing.”

“Are you suggesting that our constitutionalists have been using Mosley as a front?” Guy asked.

“No, we don't need that kind of front. We haven't reached the same danger-levels that Italy had and Germany was about to.
But the men who matter here are watching out: when the need comes, they'll have their front: and the right kind of front. Each country needs a special type. Mussolini for Italy, Hitler for Germany.”

It sounded convincing enough the way Rex put it. But it wasn't, Guy was very certain, as simple as all that. He had been listening to this line from Rex so long: ‘When the time comes'; and at the back of it all there was the same persistent belief that when the time came, it would be his type of man that would be in control.

The headlines next day were gloomier still. Even the
Daily Express
was hedging on its bet. Lucy's two boys leapt on it. “There's going to be war. Even the
Express
thinks so.” Their voices were raised excitedly. They were sixteen and fourteen years old: about to start their second and third years at Fernhurst. To them war was the supreme adventure. For all the pacifist propaganda of the 'twenties, the adolescent mind still welcomed war. Was that why the Germans were so inflammatory—political adolescents who had only been a nation a few years?

How long would the war last, the boys were wondering; long enough for them? It had been four and a half last time. It might be longer this.

“I'm going into the R.A.F.,” the elder one was saying. The young one was going to be an engineer. “I'm going to lay mines. I'll sit on a hill and watch a whole town explode.”

“There's one thing you forget,” Guy warned them. “If there is a war, you'll play much less football. You'll have two corps parades a week instead of one: and endless squad drill.”

“Shall we, oh.” Their faces dropped. They hadn't thought of that. They pictured war in terms of the high spotlights; swooping aeroplanes and exploding hillsides. They had not bargained for the boredom of preparation: the weeks in barracks, the endless T.E.W.T.s. They disliked corps parades, drilling, musketry and marching as much as nearly everyone except Germans did; the Germans with their passion for being dragooned and wearing uniforms.

Guy switched the subject. “What chance do you think you have of getting into the Colts this term?” he asked. They were
going back to Fernhurst on the following Wednesday. They were in the School House. As an old International he was almost as much of a hero to them as their father was. “Your photograph's among the house groups in the reading-room. You haven't altered as much as Daddy has.”

“I'm a good deal younger, and he's got a moustache.”

“When Granpa was there, they wore whiskers.”

“And they didn't wear shorts either to play football. They had breeches fastening below the knees.”

“Were only house caps allowed to put their hands in their pockets in your day: or could the sixth-form table?”

“We now have a special thing called house privileges. They hadn't those, had they, in your day?”

‘In your day'. The same kind of question, the same kind of conversation that he had carried on with his own father.

Margery had to be at work on Monday: they left on the Sunday evening, directly after supper. The six o'clock news had been even gloomier than the morning papers. “It almost looks as though it will come,” Guy said.

Margery laughed, a short bitter little laugh.

“It would solve quite a few problems if it did. I don't suppose I'd be the only one to welcome it.”