Chapter V: Part 5

Double-X is not modern and not too immaculate, but it has the saving grace of having become a social center. People like to be at Double-X because they have so much fun. It’s full of young people, handsome young people, walking and talking and laughing. And it’s cosmopolitan. There must be somebody there from every nation on earth.

Everything happens at Double-X, from births to deaths. Evening classes for adults are held. There is a library. There are romances. Multitudinous soldiers on leave go there to find girls. Double-X is a big, jolly city, all under one roof. Its inconveniences are overshadowed by its personality. It is a gigantic human omelet, fried in war.

* * * * *

Now to a private Anderson shelter.

This is a half-above-ground cellar, usually built in a backyard. As I have said before, there are thousands upon thousands of them in Britain--in the suburbs, the small towns and the country they hold more people than all other kinds of shelters put together.

Any person making less than $20 a week is supplied free with the material for an Anderson. Others must buy their own.

An Anderson shelter is formed of walls of sheet iron, heavily banked on the outside with dirt. A direct hit will demolish an Anderson, but it is good insurance against a nearby blast and flying debris. The other day I saw one standing quite unharmed not 15 feet from a bomb crater that was 20 feet across.

But four people are miserably cramped in an Anderson shelter. Often the owners have trouble with water seeping up through the floor. And it is a problem to heat them without suffocating.

At first the Andersons were considered wonderful, but now the government is threshing over a new policy of shoring up and fortifying one room in your house as a healthier and safer shelter.

* * * * *

The average Londoner who sleeps underground every night has done a lot of shopping around before settling down in a particular shelter for the duration. It is something like looking for a new apartment to rent. The choice is based on what looks safest, and on whether you like the crowd or not.

As horrible as shelter life seems to me, one marshal told me he felt sure that after the war many people would want to keep on living underground. Londoners are gregarious. They like to be in a crowd.

I’ll have to admit that the people I’ve seen in many shelters seemed to be making a picnic of it. Also, people have a feeling that the more of them there are together, the safer they are.

I was in a good-sized room that was only half-filled, and the people were grumbly and unhappy. The marshal said that if you’d pack fifty people in there they’d be as happy as June bugs.

Some people, of course, do prefer the quiet and privacy of the smaller public shelters, where just a few people can sit around, sew, play cards and talk.

I went into one basement that held only two dozen people, and they had a piano. They were all singing when I walked in. And they happened to be singing “Marching Through Georgia.”

In Soho I visited two or three shelters in the basements of small office buildings. They were cozy and pleasant, and you had at least a feeling of privacy. In the small shelters you can fix up a bunk in a corner with some permanency, and get a few little homey things around you.

People often go long distances to sleep in their favorite shelters. They say people travel by bus and subway four or five miles to sleep in the big, jolly Double-X shelter; yet other people who live within two blocks of Double-X will travel four or five miles nightly by tube to sleep underground at Marble Arch.

Although people in all the public shelters have to take their bedding home every morning, “guests” in some shelters are so permanent that they are allowed to install their own iron beds and chairs. You see whole rows of deep old leather chairs right out of the sitting rooms at home, with old people sitting up asleep in them. And there are hundreds of canvas deck chairs that people sleep in all night.

Whenever, late in the afternoon, you see somebody with a cheap brown suitcase going down the street, he is on his way to a shelter for the night. I wish I had been in the cheap-brown-suitcase business this past year. You even see people going to shelters in taxis, but with their cheap brown suitcases.

At Double-X you see hundreds of baby buggies parked around the walls. They didn’t bring babies; they brought bedding. Officials think they may be forced to forbid baby buggies, for people bring so much stuff in them. It takes up too much room. Some people come practically ready to set up housekeeping.

I was amazed at the number of soldiers in the shelters. That seemed dreadful to me. A soldier comes home on a few days’ leave for some life, liberty and a little fling at happiness. And then, because his home has gone or his folks have moved, he has to spend his leave lying on a dungeon floor.

However, not all the soldiers go to shelters because they have to. Lots of them go there to pick up girls. And officials at Double-X hint that some of the girls are not of the whitest virtue. The wardens worry about this; but virtue or not, I will say that there are girls at Double-X in the poor East End who are the loveliest I have seen in all London.

Incidentally, the girls over here are wearing coats with those Alaska-type parkas, of the same material, that pull over the head. And they look snappy.

Many people, after trying the new shelter bunks installed by the government, go back to the floor. The bunks are less than two feet wide, and too short for comfort. On the floor, people have room to stretch and roll around.

Most of the bunks are three-deckers. Those in the tube stations are made of steel. All the rest are of wood, pegged together at the joints so they can easily be knocked down and moved. They are unfinished, and look very home-made. Some have slat bottoms, others canvas bottoms.

The other night I was in a shelter that had not had the bunks installed yet, and the marshal said the people had taken a vote and only two out of the three hundred wanted bunks. But they have to take them anyway, for the Ministry of Health says so.

A few people, in the better shelters, bring pajamas and put them on before going to bed. But they are very few. Most people sleep with all their clothes on, even their hats. I have been surprised at how few slacks I’ve seen on women. I should think they would be ideal for shelter sleeping.

Before leaving home I was told by a British friend to bring a ski suit. He said it was just the thing for jumping into quickly, and for shelter wear. But I’ve been practically living in shelters for a week, and I haven’t seen a ski suit yet. Anyway, I would feel sort of silly stretched out here on a deep sofa in room 672 of the Savoy Hotel in a ski suit.

_3. STARS AND STRIPES_

_London,
February, 1941_

A lot of mighty fine sacrificing is being done in the bomb shelters of London.

I don’t care where you go, whether to one of the vast corral-like shelters or to a small neat one in the West End, there is somebody there who is giving his time and his strength and his heart for his fellow humans.

Take one big basement shelter in the East End which holds around three thousand people. There in that vast hotel of sorts is a tiny, dwarfed man named Mickey Davis. He comes only to my waist. You have to lean over when you talk to him.

He has not been out of that shelter since last September except for an occasional walk. He works day and night. And he doesn’t get a cent for it. People idolize him.

“There’s something queer about living underground,” he told me. “You stay down here so long you don’t even want to go outside. Then when you do go out and get accustomed to the fresh air again you don’t want to come back down.”

There are thousands and thousands of “Davises” serving these harassed people of London.

I have a friend who works as an accountant all day and then serves most of the night as a shelter marshal, without pay. I’ve seen girls who clerk all day in a ten-cent store and then go to an East End shelter to serve thousands of people over the canteen counter till ten o’clock at night. And they are up at five in the morning to serve early tea and coffee. They do that every night, and they get no pay for it. In the West End I saw women of comfortable means who go every night to sit on stools and make sandwiches by the thousands to be sold to the shelterers at cost.

Britain’s civil army has its big blitz heroes who are the greatest this war has produced. But it also has its little heroes by the tens of thousands. I think it’s lots harder to be a little hero, because you have to keep so everlastingly at it.

Back in September, shelter management was in a state of chaos. They were just learning then. So great were the crowds that women would fold up their bedding and go out the front door of a shelter at eight o’clock in the morning, and then turn right around and stand there all day in line, waiting to get back through the same door at four that afternoon.

But now the population of each shelter is pretty well settled down into permanent residence. Also, each section or bay of a shelter is somewhat self-governing. A deputy marshal, chosen by the people, knows everybody in his particular bay, and where they sleep, so they no longer have to wait in line. The marshal reserves space for them.

All these deputy marshals are volunteers, serving without pay. Chief marshals get about $13 a week, and how they work for it!

It was amazing and touching the way the Christmas spirit was kept up during the holidays. People banded together and got up Christmas trees, and chipped in to buy gifts all around. I visited more than thirty shelters during the holidays, and there was not a one that was not elaborately decorated.

In all the shelters used by Greeks, the people have fixed up composite pictures of King George of England and King George of Greece alongside each other. Every shelter has a flag and at least one big picture of the King and the usual “God Save Our Home” mottoes. And that brings me back to a little incident up at the vast and conglomerate Double-X shelter, which has a heavily Jewish population.

The shelter marshal there asked me if I knew where he could get an American flag.

“It’s funny your coming here tonight,” he said, “for I just had that request this morning. Most of the people here have relatives in the States. They want an American flag. They say England and America are the only two countries left in the world.”

Well, I’m not much on flags, but I figured it was up to me. So I went down to Selfridge’s, bought the last American flag they had and took it out to Double-X.

The next day the shelter marshal called up, practically agog with gratitude, and said the people had made a great fuss over it. He said the women had started already making copies of it to hang all over the place. He said he had put twenty-four Greeks from a torpedoed merchant ship in that bay the night before, and they cheered when they saw the flag.

So I guess Ernest has done his good deed for 1941. The flag cost $2.50 too. I’m all torn now over whether I should be a hero and pay for it myself, or be a heel and put it on my expense account. I guess maybe I’ll wait until I can be a more expensive heel.

* * * * *

I want to tell you about two remarkable shelters in London. Both of them come under the head of private group shelters. They are not open to the public.

The first one I saw, I was taken into privately and half surreptitiously, for few people even know that it exists. It must be one of the safest shelters in all London. It is in the basement of an apartment building, in a business section, and there is a bank on the ground floor. The shelter is the basement vault of the bank.

They’ve spent more than $10,000 fixing it up. Not a cent of this went for fancy trimmings, for the shelter isn’t fancy at all. Every penny went for the physical strengthening of this vault.

There are five stories of strong building above the vault, and the ceiling of the vault itself is five feet of concrete. The vault consists of two rooms. In the smaller one, concrete has been added to make the ceiling eight feet thick. The walls are more than three feet thick. The doors are of heavy steel. On two sides of the vault are hallways, and beyond these another thick wall. Surrounding all four walls is old Mother Earth.

An elaborate arrangement of huge cogwheels manipulates a heavy steel trapdoor in the ceiling. This is an emergency escape door. Above this door, which leads to the ground floor, is the heaviest table I ever saw. Its legs are oaken posts a foot thick, and it has a heavy steel top to keep debris from choking down on top of the door.

The steel doors of the vault close on rubber strips, which make it gas-proof. If the lights are knocked out there is an auxiliary lighting plant, run from batteries. The ordinary escape doors out in the hall have been shored up with lengths of railroad iron to support debris.

* * * * *

At the door of the Savoy Hotel’s shelter a man in a tuxedo sits at a desk. He checks in those residents of the hotel who wish to sleep in the shelter.

Inside, the shelter is softly lighted and quiet as a grave. It is air-conditioned. Great heavy satin draperies hang at the doorways, and other draperies divide the shelter into bays holding about twenty beds each. There is a wide aisle down the center, and the curtains make it all resemble a gigantic Pullman car made up for the night.

The beds are soft and deep. They have mattresses of the same type as are found in the regular hotel rooms. The linen is fresh.

There is a separate lounge in one corner where you can sit in deep chairs at tables and drink coffee. Just one floor up is a small bar.

The whole shelter is shored up with an intricate framework of heavy steel piping to brace the ceiling against the weight of bomb debris. At the entrance are three separate doors, one after the other, and each has a gas-proof curtain that can be lowered.

The shelter has its own maids and porters. It also has a full Red Cross unit, manned by seven part-time nurses. During the early September raids they treated many bomb casualties brought in off the streets.

The Savoy shelter can sleep more than two hundred people. Many of the hotel’s guests sleep there every night, whether there’s a raid or not.

Single men and single women are assigned separate bays, and there are bays for married couples. And carrying shelter etiquette to the nth degree, they even have a separate compartment for chronic snorers. They just herd ’em all together and let ’em snore it out. In fact, when the blitz first started, and before they hit on the idea of segregating the noisy ones, the hotel had one man on its night staff whose sole duty was to go around and shake up snorers!

_4. LOOKING AHEAD_

_London,
February, 1941_

As a whole, life in London’s public air-raid shelters reminds me of nothing so much as our own makeshift depression camps at home.

They sprang up suddenly out of a desperate need and amid considerable chaos. Like our camps, they are gradually getting better. As in our Okie camps, the people have set up a form of self-government. They elect their own leaders, and they have committees and representatives who sit on higher councils for making shelter rules and demanding better conditions--and God knows there is plenty of room for better conditions in some of the shelters.

The body heat of thousands of packed people makes some shelters stifling. In others, deep beneath stone arches and with concrete floors, the chill dampness is deadly. At one church in Stepney, people were actually sleeping until recently in stone coffins that once held corpses.

It wasn’t until my second week of visiting shelters, when I was taken purposely to certain places, that I saw what a modernized shelter can begin to look like.

Let us take the Borough of Stepney as an example of what they are trying to do. This borough of a quarter of a million people has 300 shelters. They are not at regular intervals, but they are never many blocks apart. Most of them are not marked. At night you have to know ahead of time which door to go in. It is possible to walk along a dark sidewalk at night right past a door behind which there are lights and three thousand people and not realize that there is a soul within miles.

All these basements are leased by the borough. When the blitz started they weren’t ready, and ever since they’ve been working on these basements right in the midst of all the people, trying to make them more habitable. But now Stepney has a program. More basements are constantly being rented and converted into shelters. When the program is finished, if it ever is finished, they hope to have 500 shelters.

Both for safety from bombs and for reasons of health, they want to disperse--to get the shelters thinned out. Under the new program they pick a strong basement, then work on it for weeks until it is fully ready before letting anybody in. At first it is shored up with a maze of brick walls, which also divide the basement into rooms housing twenty or thirty people each. Then wooden bunks are installed in rows. The ceilings are sealed with concrete so water can’t seep through. The floors are concreted, if they were not already. A first-aid room is installed, with medical supplies. Banks of modern private toilets are built. Some shelters will even have shower baths, for the disinclination of poor people to bathe is worrying the doctors. Canteens are installed so the shelterers can get something warm at a reasonable price. Last, and best of all, a system of forced ventilation is put in. It is really air-conditioning--it can blow in either hot or cold air, and suck out dead air.

That is what Stepney is aiming at. And other boroughs are doing the same. When all this program is finished, London’s shelters will be quite habitable underground dormitories. But right now too many of them are little better than underground Hoovervilles.

The churches have really done a great work in this shelter emergency. Many thousands of people are spending their nights in the lower depths of strongly built churches. In fact, of all the public shelters I have seen I like best the one in the basement of the Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, in Trafalgar Square.

This old church is known to all American tourists who have been in London. Until a year and a half ago its extensive crypts were filled with the bones of the ancient dead. But the rector had these taken out and buried elsewhere about eighteen months ago, preparatory to using these rooms for social activities. They got the job finished just in time for the war. The newly emptied crypts made perfect air-raid shelters. And that is what they are today.

The crypts are filled with double-decked bunks. Central heating has just been installed. Also banks of private toilets. Everything is clean. There is a separate crypt for mothers with small babies. There is an all-night restaurant for people in uniform. There is a canteen for civilians.

You don’t have to listen to a mission sermon, either. There are billiard and pingpong tables in the big central hall. It is more like a clubhouse than a church.

St. Martin’s can sleep 500 people. Although it is in the rich West End, anybody can come. And anybody does--well-dressed men of the world, old Jewish mothers, soldiers, girls, and a great run of just average people like you and me.

You warm to St. Martin’s as you do to a new acquaintance whom you like immensely. There is character here.

When you see a church with a bomb hole in its side and 500 fairly safe and happy people in its basement, and girls smoking cigarettes inside the sacred walls without anybody yelling at them, then I say that church has found a real religion.

Before I started over here I had a horror of being caught in some big wartime epidemic this winter. Well, it hasn’t happened. So far, England’s wartime health apparently is excellent. How or why, I don’t know; for it seems to me that with a fourth of London’s population crammed into holes beneath the earth’s surface an epidemic would be a setup.

It’s true that the city has been full of colds this winter. Many people who use the air-raid shelters suffer from something called “shelter throat.” There is always much coughing--heavy coughing. I’ve had my cold, along with the rest. It kept me in bed for nearly a week, and I didn’t feel so good. But I wasn’t half as sick that week as I was the day I got my doctor’s bill--$38.

Scarlet fever and diphtheria have actually shown a decline this winter. Pneumonia is up just a little. There has been no outbreak of real influenza. Typhoid has caused no worries. The only disease that has really gone up is cerebrospinal meningitis, known as spotted fever. This has jumped from 1500 cases in 1939 to 12,500 cases in 1940.

Right now London is in the midst of its most critical two winter months, and the doctors are keeping their fingers crossed, knocking on wood and throwing salt in seven directions. If they can go another month they’ll be over the winter hump, and if they do get through without an epidemic I think they should salaam three times to Allah--and then start on preparations for next winter.

Those shelters have got to be improved faster than they are being improved now, regardless of cost. An epidemic in London might give Hitler the opening he’s waiting for. These people simply can’t go on living through winters this way without grave trouble. It seems to me that before another winter every big shelter must have a system of forced ventilation, sanitary toilets, adequate heating and warmer floors. They must be made dry. They must have better medical departments.

They did the best they could this winter. The biggest shelters have nurses. There are some doctors on duty. But most of the smaller ones have nothing of this sort. I visited one where the people themselves had chipped in to buy a medical kit; and the shelter marshal, who knew nothing at all about medicine, was acting as doctor and nurse. In another, the medical box was padlocked, and whoever had the key hadn’t been around for days.

I remember reading a report by British doctors early last fall, saying that the lice and flea population of London was increasing alarmingly. I’ve asked about this at several of the poorest shelters, and so far as I can tell this increase has been halted. The smell of disinfectants is strong in all the big shelters, for they are cleaned and sprayed every morning. But, to my mind, they still aren’t clean enough.

The first-aid rooms in the larger shelters are really miniature hospitals, staffed by Red Cross nurses and doctors who volunteer their services nightly. At the Double-X shelter I looked over their records for the last two months. About a fourth of the cases they had treated were of people suffering from boils. This seemed odd, so I asked about it, and one of the nurses said it was the result of the poor people’s diet. Blood, toil, tears, sweat--and boils.

Shelter life in London, even at its best, is no bargain. I had thought I might find it exciting, or even romantic in spots, but I didn’t. It seems to me there is something degrading to the human spirit in lying all night, crowded among other people, on a basement floor, within arm’s reach of open toilets, in bad air and under constant supervision even on nights when no raid is in progress. I fear eventually it will do the same thing to weaken characters that being in prison does.

There are millions of people in London who prefer to take their chances in their homes, or somewhere else above ground. And I believe I am one of them.

_VII. EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH_

_1. FEAR, WITH LAUGHTER_

_York,
February, 1941_

Yesterday I received notice that if I didn’t get a move on I was to be expelled in disgrace from the Guild of Perpetual Travelers. So after six weeks of gathering moss in London, I packed my old sugar sack, shouldered my tin hat and gas mask, and hopped a northbound train to see how the war was getting on in the hinterland.

I took a 4 P.M. train out of London on the 160-mile ride to York. I got to the station half an hour early, and a good thing too, for within a minute after the train backed into the station there was hardly a seat left.

Easily two-thirds of the people on trains these days are in uniform. There are very few women. Soldiers on leave travel with full kit, including rifle. And a soldier with his full kit resembles a packhorse starting on a ten-day camping trip. They carry all this stuff because they must be ready at any moment. If the invasion comes while they’re at home, they simply report to the nearest army post and start shooting.

* * * * *

You might think that with a war on, half the hotels in England would have to close. But it’s just the opposite. The hotels have waiting lists, and if you don’t make reservations ahead you are liable to find yourself homeless.

That nearly happened to me in York when I arrived at eight o’clock in the evening. If it hadn’t been for a beautiful switchboard girl who called every hotel and boarding house in town I would have had to sit in the lobby all night. I fed her chocolates while she phoned, so we both profited.

Finally she found a place, a funny little semi-hotel that turned out to be grand. The owner was also the bellboy, and he built me a coal fire in the grate, put a hot-water bottle in the bed, and then stood and talked for half an hour.

There are many good-sized cities in England that haven’t been blitzed yet. York has had only a few raids, and only a small number of people have been killed by bombs in this city of 85,000.

As we stood in my room talking, I said to the owner: “What shall I do about ventilation tonight? I can’t open the blackout curtain with this fire going in the grate.”

He answered, “Oh, this terrible old building is full of drafts. You’ll get plenty of air without opening a window.” And he was right.

Until nearly midnight I sat before my fireplace reading the newspapers. I felt very strange, way up here in York. The city, covered with snow and very quiet, seemed terribly old, and nice in a Dickens way. Although it was February, you somehow expected to see Santa Claus coming down the chimney.

The papers had grave editorials warning about the coming invasion attempt. I read and thought, and read and thought, here alone in my ancient room in old York, and a funny thing happened. I had been in London so long I had acquired the London outlook, the London casualness, the London assurance that no matter what happens we can stand it. The Londoner’s psychology is like that of the aviator--somebody will get killed tonight, but it’ll always be somebody else, never me. But now, away from my eight million friends in London, this psychological cloak of safety fell away. Here in these strange surroundings, among people not yet hardened to bombs, here where the warning siren is an event, the whole horrible meaning of invasion shone clear before me like a picture. The frightful slaughter that even an unsuccessful invasion would bring grew stark and real to me for the first time. And I tell you I became absolutely petrified with fear for myself. I would have given everything I had to be back in America.

I probably wouldn’t have slept a wink if it hadn’t been for the bathroom. I discovered it after midnight, when everybody else had gone to bed.

The bathroom was about twenty feet square, and it had twin bathtubs! Yes, two big old-fashioned bathtubs sitting side by side with nothing between, just like twin beds.

Twin bathtubs had never occurred to me before. But having actually seen them, my astonishment grew into approval. I said to myself, “Why not? Think what you could do with twin bathtubs. You could give a party. You could invite the Lord Mayor in for tea and a tub. You could have a national slogan, ‘Two tubs in every bathroom.’”

The potentialities of twin bathtubs assumed gigantic proportions in my disturbed mind, and I finally fell asleep on the idea, all my fears forgotten.

* * * * *

Some friends drove me over to Harrogate, which is one of England’s flossiest spas. It is some twenty-five miles from York.

Harrogate has curative waters, outlandishly huge hotels with prices so high they are famous, and in war or peace a stream of wealth and titles that stuns you.

Into this display of ease a German raider came, in daytime, and the people all stood in the street watching, thinking it was a British plane. They changed their minds when a bomb came down.

I asked if Harrogate had underground public shelters like London’s and a slightly cynical English newspaper friend of mine said: “Yes, but nobody ever goes into them. Harrogate is so flossy that everybody is afraid of being seen in a public shelter in the presence of someone who isn’t his equal.”

* * * * *

English place names fascinate me. There is a street in York called Whipma Whopma Gate Street.

* * * * *

I went down to the tiny lounge of my hotel and sat in front of the fire with six other guests for late tea.

This little hotel is the only place I’ve been in--outside of an officers’ mess--where they’ve had sugar in a bowl on the table, instead of just a cube for your coffee. The owner said he had found that by just leaving it out like that, putting people on their honor, guests used only half the sugar they did in peacetime.

There were two traveling salesmen at the hotel--one who sold shoes, and one who sold bread. One of them was from Sheffield, which was badly blitzed just before Christmas, and he had his wife and two boys with him. Due to the blitz, the youngsters had a six-week vacation from school, so they weren’t feeling so hard toward the fortunes of war.

These two boys were much more interested in asking about streamlined trains in America than in telling about Sheffield’s blitz. They have never been on a train. But they have studied mechanical magazines, and they told me all about the famous Royal Scot and Silver Jubilee streamliners.

When we did talk about bombing, I found that they knew as much about the characteristics of the various bombs as any air warden I’ve talked with. Yet the recent Sheffield blitz didn’t seem paramount in their minds at all.

* * * * *

Traveling salesmen have a tough time now. They can get plenty of orders but they can’t get the goods to fill them, because most of the factories are engaged in war work. Also, their gasoline is rationed. They’re allowed from five gallons a month upward, depending on how useful the government considers them. And they try not to do much night driving, for it is not so pleasant in the blackout. Yet, despite all this and despite the snowy roads and despite the fact that England is thickly populated and the speed limits are low, these traveling salesmen will do 200 miles in a day when they can get gas.

These two were on the road the next morning by daybreak.

* * * * *

Some friends and I, in a York pub, got into a conversation with a native Yorkshireman, and I couldn’t understand a word he said. I wouldn’t have let on, except that the friends with me were all British soldiers and they couldn’t understand him either. So finally we got into one of those long ridiculous discussions, the way you do in pubs, with us trying to analyze his talk and him trying to analyze ours. We all had a wonderful time--probably much better than if we had understood each other.

Not all Yorkshiremen talk the way this one did; not even a majority. Only on farms and in two or three other instances have I had trouble understanding Yorkshiremen. After I got home that night, and was still thinking about that fellow, the awful thought occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t speaking a local dialect at all, but simply couldn’t talk plain.

_2. YORKSHIRE FARM_

_Boroughbridge, Yorkshire,
February, 1941_

The farmers of Yorkshire are getting a big play in the newspapers right now. For England realizes that she has got to turn this island into a big farm, what with Hitler trying to starve her to death by blockade. So I have been looking around some of the farms up here in Yorkshire.

The English farmer has had a terrible time since the last war. His standard of living has been abominably low. They say it is an amazing thing that anybody stayed on the farm at all.

The government did help a little, though not as much as ours has done. But now the government is doing things about the farms. It supplies loans, controls some prices, and in certain places does practically everything for the farmer except sitting on the fence and chewing a straw. But even so, the farm situation seems to me to be still fairly chaotic.

The main point is to get as much new land planted as possible. In many places they are plowing up cricket fields and golf courses. Every city and village has its “allotment plots,” where townspeople with other jobs use their spare time working small patches in the city park, raising vegetables.

Despite England’s dense population, plenty of land is available. For example, the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1938 had roughly 750,000 acres in grass, and only 250,000 acres of tilled land. But in 1940 and 1941 more than 100,000 acres of this grassland has been plowed up and planted. Over here they call it “plowing out.” The old days of the great landholding squire with scores of tenants have pretty well passed since the last war. A majority of farm land is now owned in plots of about forty acres.

There is a hue and cry against the government right now for including farm hands in the next call-up for the army. The critics contend that the farms need all the experienced men they have, and that the army doesn’t need men at all. A “women’s land army” has been formed for work on the farms. It has 9000 members now, and another thousand are being recruited.

* * * * *

I dropped in to see one Yorkshire farm family. They are not exactly typical, for they live on government land and are much better off than most English farmers.

The head of the house is Robert Wray, who is getting along in years. He wears leather boots, and a shirt with a collar button but no collar. He has rheumatism and stays in the house on snowy days such as this one was. His son Richard does the work, and will until he is called up for the army. Mr. Wray’s daughter, who was down on her knees scrubbing the floor when I was there, had just been married and was still very blushy about it.

The Wrays have sixty acres, and practically a model house and barn, built by the government. They pay an annual rental of $4 an acre, and their yearly income is about $800.

They live three miles from town, and they don’t have a car or electric lights or a telephone. They live mostly in the kitchen in winter, but their kitchen is nicer than most farm kitchens. Instead of a regular cookstove, they have an open coal grate with ovens built into the wall beside the grate.

They have a bathroom, with nothing in it but a bathtub. When I looked in, there was three inches of water in the tub, and it was partly frozen over. The toilet is an old-fashioned one in a fuel shed a few steps back of the house. Every room in the house, including the bedrooms, has a small coal grate, but these are seldom lighted.

The house is brick. Practically all English farmhouses are brick or stone, for timber is scarce. The barn is concrete, and the very last word. The Wrays keep about thirty head of cattle, a dozen pigs, a few chickens and no sheep. They farm with horses. All the stock is kept in separate stalls, spread deep with straw.

The war seems remote from the Wray farm, yet they are in it along with all the rest of England. Their home is never likely to be bombed, but they will feel a drastically tightening economy, and harder work, and one by one the absence of kith and kin who go away to fight.

On a wall of the Wray sitting room are two framed pictures. They are photographs of the young bride’s two uncles, in World War uniforms. One of them never came back from the last war. And before this one is over there will be more pictures of fighters on the wall--husbands, brothers and cousins. For everybody is in it, one way or another.

_3. VISIT TO SCOTLAND_

_Edinburgh,
February, 1941_

Traveling through the countryside of Great Britain these days is hardly an undiluted pleasure.

The bad points of traveling include: crowded trains and delayed schedules, if you’re going by rail; snowy roads, unmarked highways and a shortage of gasoline, if you’re driving; packed hotels, few taxis, and, worst of all, hotels that are unheated despite the fact that the north of England is nearer to the Arctic Circle than Newfoundland is. On the other hand, there are good points: warm trains, good food, pleasant companions, beautiful snow-covered scenery, and the fact that people will always help if you ask them. Bad as the drawbacks sound, you do get where you’re going, and with surprising speed and comfort.

There is actually more rail traffic now than in peacetime, but of course this increase is in freight trains. Passenger service has been cut down, but not as much as I had thought. There are thirty passenger trains daily from London to Scotland. The trains are terrifically long and they are always packed.

There are no restrictions on travel in England. You don’t have to get special permission or anything of that sort. You just get on a train and go. I’ve never had to show my multitudinous special papers since the day I got them. When I register at a hotel I have to put down my nationality, my passport number, where I’ve just come from and where I’m going. The English do too, except that instead of a passport number they put down their national registration number.

The better trains carry restaurant cars at dinner time. The diners are nicer than ours at home, with deep easy chairs. They bring you soup, lamb, boiled potatoes, cabbage, canned fruit and coffee for about eighty-five cents. Eating is pleasant on an English train.

For a stranger like me, it is hard to know when you get to where you’re going. You almost never see a conductor or a porter. Only occasionally do they call out a station, and the names have been taken off most of the stations in order not to give pointers to the Germans if the invasion comes. At night, of course, the train windows are blacked out so you can’t see the station you’re coming into, anyway.

I’ve worked out a scheme of eavesdropping until I spot somebody who is going where I’m going, and then when he starts putting on his coat to get off I start putting on mine.

Some people know the railroad by heart. The other night, on the way from London to York, our train slowed down and we all thought we were coming into York.

“Wait a minute,” said a man in our compartment. “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

He sat listening as the train crept forward. Suddenly we could tell we were crossing a bridge.

“No, this is not York,” the man said. “This is Selby.”

From the time we left London, four hours earlier, he had never looked up from his book, but just from the sound of the wheels he knew exactly where we were. That’s what living in the blackout does to your senses.

* * * * *

In some railroad stations there are porters to help with your bags, and in some there are not. It is tough on a stranger getting to his destination at night--and I seem to arrive everywhere at night. You get off the train and there you are--all alone in a strange city, not knowing in which direction to go, everything black, and no taxis available. You just have to stand around helplessly until you dig up somebody with a kind heart.

It was nearly midnight when we got into Edinburgh, and it was snowing and cold. The station was a madhouse of soldiers. I never saw so many in my life, outside of a camp. A lone taxi would arrive about every five minutes, and somebody else would get it. Finally, after about a half hour, I did get one.

Friends had told me about a hotel which they said was the warmest in Edinburgh. I’m glad they didn’t direct me to the coldest one, for my room had no heat whatever. It was like a refrigerator car. So the maid came at midnight and built a fire in the grate, plugged in a little electric heater and put a hot-water bottle in my bed. The grate fire, incidentally, costs fifty cents a day extra, the electric heater thirty cents.

I asked the maid to awaken me at eight in the morning and build another fire when she arrived. So when she knocked, before daylight, I reached over to unlock the door, as it was close to my bed. But the door wasn’t as close as I thought, and I kept reaching outward in the dark and finally reached too far, lost my balance and fell right out of bed onto the floor and sprained a thumb.

As I lay there in the dark on the cold floor, tangled up in bed covers, freezing to death, my thumb hurting, there all alone in a pitch-black icebox in Scotland with not a friend within four hundred miles, I thought: Of all the damn fools I’ve ever heard of, you take the prize. For you could be in Panama or Hawaii now if you had any sense.

But I haven’t any sense, and in spite of everything, I’m glad I’m here.

* * * * *

Edinburgh is a graceful city. It is the Washington or the Ottawa of Scotland. It is a city of government. It is a planned city. And it is the sturdiest city I have ever seen. In its buildings, I mean. Everything is of massive stone, so massive and so heavy that the entire municipality seems embedded in the rock underfoot.

It seems to me that Edinburgh would stand up physically under an aerial blitz better than any other city in Britain. They haven’t had one yet, and if they ever do, it will be the rankest of outrages, for Edinburgh is not an industrial city.

Many things are different up here. There is more food than in London, and a greater variety of it. You have no trouble getting an excellent steak.

Some people say Edinburgh is the gayest city in Britain now. There are beautiful restaurants, where Scottish officers dancing in kilts make a picture.

You never see a civilian with a tin hat or a gas mask. Edinburgh children were evacuated, but eighty per cent of them have come back. The movies run at night as well as in the daytime. Nobody sleeps at night in public shelters, although shelters are available.

I have friends here who travel to London weekly and who know what has happened down there. These friends get disgusted with their home folks when they return.

“Up here we are all complaining about our stomach aches and rheumatism,” they say. “It sounds mighty trivial when you have just come from London, where they really have got something to complain about--and don’t. I think a little blitzing would do us good.”

True, Scotland has not been on the receiving end of many bombs. True also, there is a certain fundamental dislike of England, but that goes by the boards in an emergency. Their heart is in the war all right. I have got the impression that if I were an invading German, or even a fire bomb, I wouldn’t relish the job of trying to land on Scottish soil.

As far as I can see, Edinburgh’s past immunity to danger has not made it lax. The city seems to be ready and waiting. It is organized in every way. Its officials have visited blitzed cities to study what has happened and have prepared accordingly.

For example, much of Edinburgh lives in small apartment houses that they call tenements. Because of this municipal singularity, the Air Raid Precaution service is different from that in other cities. Edinburgh is organized tenement by tenement--a warden for each tenement, and he is on duty right there all the time.

* * * * *

I like the Scottish people. Somehow I had them all wrong. For one thing, I thought I wouldn’t be able to understand anything they said, but they are easy to understand. Also, I thought they were dour. On the contrary, they are fundamentally witty. It is hard for a Scotsman to go five minutes without giving something a funny twist, and it is usually a left-handed twist. All in all, I have found the Scots much more like Americans than the Englishmen are. I feel perfectly at home with them.

And incidentally, just a couple of tips in case you ever come over here: (1) Don’t refer to Scotland as if it were a part of England, as I did; for it isn’t. England is England, and Scotland is Scotland. (2) Don’t say Scotch unless you are referring to the whisky. People are Scots, and they are Scottish but not Scotch.

Incidentally, Scotch whisky is getting short. Many bars limit their customers to two drinks. The whisky is being sent to America for good American dollars to spend on arms.

* * * * *

It seems that one Scotsman was telling another about being in a movie theater when some German raiders came over. The manager stopped the film, went onto the stage and announced, “The sireens has went.”

It was now time for the other Scotsman to laugh, but he didn’t. He studied it over for a long time, then finally laughed and said, “I suppose the joke of it was that the sireens hadna’ went?”

_4. A SCOTTISH FAMILY_

_Newhaven, Scotland,
February, 1941_

As far back as he can remember, Walter Rutherford’s folks have been fishermen. But his father said he would rather see his sons dead than see them become fishermen, so they became such things as engineers and shopkeepers.

But Walter stayed close to the sea. Newhaven is a fishing village, and Walter runs the shop that outfits the fishermen. He is a ship chandler.

For twelve years he has been president of the Fishermen’s Society, a proud organization that goes back to 1648. Packed in a shoebox at his house are the beautiful silver cups and medals that go with the honor. Mrs. Rutherford has sung in the Fisherwomen’s Choir since she was a girl. This choir is famous, and often travels to London to sing.

I was a guest at the Rutherfords for an evening--at my own invitation, but nobody could have been treated more genuinely if he had been kith and kin. I went to see them in order to find out whether the war was really close to the average family in Scotland. And people assured me the Rutherfords were typical.

Well, when the war came Walter turned over his ship chandler’s shop to Mrs. Rutherford and went to work in a factory that makes marine engines for the government. He is a gauge maker--the same trade he followed at Glasgow in the last war. He had been out of it eighteen years, but he is at it again now.

Walter is a grandfather, yet he gets up at 6 A.M. and rides a bicycle to work in the dark--for during the winter it isn’t daylight here until nine o’clock in the morning. That is, he did ride a bicycle, but he is walking now. The other morning his front wheel hit a curb and he took a spill, landing in the snow “right on my bottomside,” as he says.

Walter works twelve hours a day, with only one day off every two weeks.

“Those are mighty tough hours,” I said.

“They are tough for a man who is getting along,” he said.

Mrs. Rutherford laughs about his “getting along.” For he looks about thirty-five. He has a ruddy, windy face without a single line in it. He wears a turtle-neck sweater and hops around like a jumpingjack.

“I’m always being taken for his mother,” Mrs. Rutherford laughs. “But I don’t mind.”

Mrs. Rutherford is a large woman, and she is straight up and down no matter whether she is standing or sitting. She has enough humor for a dozen Scotswomen. She keeps long hours in the chandler’s shop, which is under their apartment on the street floor.

“Sometimes I just feel like closing it up,” she says, “and other times I’m thankful I have it to keep me from thinking.”

And believe me, she has plenty to think about. Her boy, who is her pet, was a fish auctioneer, but now he is in the R.A.F. in Malta. Her son-in-law was a fisherman but is now in a naval patrol, feeling his way around among the mines. Her other daughter’s fiancé is a dispatch rider with the Fusiliers. They were just ready to get married, but it’s off now till after the war.

And the children’s best friend, just down the street, also went from fishing into the naval patrol. A few weeks ago his boat hit a mine. They could hear the explosion from the chandler’s shop. His young wife was in the shop and heard it too. They never found anything of him at all.

“It was seven weeks after our boy left for Malta before we heard from him,” Mrs. Rutherford says. “I would come up here from the shop and cry by the hour with a broken heart, but finally we got a cable from him.”

Everybody in this village has somebody in the war.

Mrs. Rutherford is so impetuous she can’t stay sad very long, and so honest she says just what she thinks. She has no inhibitions. She is a good deal like my own mother. Walter tells how one night recently she was listening to someone speaking on the radio from America, talking about liberty and how we must give all aid to Britain, and suddenly Mrs. Rutherford yelled at the radio, “Oh shut up! Stop talking so much and do something!”