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!”

The Rutherfords are neither poor nor very well off. The chandler’s shop has put their three children through school and has bought them a house and car. The car is laid up now, for Walter works all day and Mrs. Rutherford doesn’t drive.

“But you are not going to sell that car,” says Mrs. Rutherford. “It’s going to be right here for the boy when he gets back. It’s a bonnie wee car.”

The Rutherfords both use “wee” and “bonnie” almost constantly. Such native expressions sound odd alongside their modern slang phrases, such as “fed up.”

For “herring,” Mrs. Rutherford says what sounds like “hen.” Being in a fishing village, they have to eat an awful lot of fish. “It’s just hen, hen, hen, morning, noon and night,” she says.

The Rutherfords never miss church, but they are far from being churchy people.

Their home is in what we would call a cooperative apartment. They own the first and second floors of one section of a brick building. They have two bedrooms, a kitchen and bath. As in many Scottish houses, the kitchen also serves as a living room. There is a parrot in a cage by a blacked-out window.

At ten-thirty the youngest girl, who lives at home, came in from a movie. Then Mrs. Rutherford put on the coffeepot, got out a jar of cakes and made sandwiches. We all sat around the kitchen table and ate and talked. I never felt more at home in my life.

5. THE RED CLYDE

Glasgow, February, 1941

Edinburgh is on the east side of Scotland and Glasgow on the west, but since they are at Scotland’s narrowest point they are only an hour’s ride apart by train. The country between looks very much like Indiana, except that the fields are smaller here.

That’s the trouble with America—it’s so big and has so many kinds of scenery that it makes all the other countries look like something at home, instead of looking foreign.

Edinburgh is cultured, scholarly, historical and quiet. Glasgow is industrial, cosmopolitan, pulsating and full of business. They are as different as two cities could be.

Sailors have told me that they found Glasgow the warmest city on the Seven Seas, as far as making you welcome was concerned. Personally, I could see no difference along that line between the two cities. I was chilled physically and warmed spiritually by both of them.

We got off the train at Glasgow, checked our bags and took a walk. In sight of the station was a building wrecked by a bomb—one of the very few in Glasgow. The only casualties were two people who started to walk downstairs in the dark after the blast; the stairs weren’t there.

Glasgow has not had a blitz. They have expected one all along, for they have factories and great shipyards. The people can’t understand why Hitler hasn’t tried to give it the works. Some say he is saving the shipyards for himself—after he seizes Ireland and swings across the Irish Sea. Others say very knowingly that he is saving them for something else, but they are so knowing that I never know what they mean.

We walked through a big park by the station, full of brick air-raid shelters exactly like the surface shelters in London. I went up to see what one was like inside, but its slatted door was solidly locked. My Scottish friend said, “That’s just in case there is a raid and somebody wants to get inside.”

We were already overdue at an appointment, but my friend said I would have to see how the businessmen of Glasgow work. So we went to a basement coffee house which was nearly a block long, with deep rugs and walls solid with framed paintings. The whole place was packed, with men sitting two and three at a table, their hats on, drinking coffee and talking. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

My friend made up an imaginary conversation at a nearby table. “Now this is a sure-fire thing if I can just get hold of a little capital,” one fellow was theoretically saying—and my friend said the chances were 10 to 1 he was actually saying just that. That’s how business is done in Glasgow. It reminded me of Rio de Janeiro, where people go to work at ten and knock off at ten-thirty for a couple of hours of sidewalk coffee drinking.

Glasgow is prosperous now. It needs to be. It had a tough time through the depression—a black, dismal, dangerously tough time.

Glasgow is on the River Clyde, and all over Britain you hear of the “Red Clyde.” They don’t mean red with blood, they mean red with Communism. Glasgow is supposed to be the center of Communism in Britain. The Daily Worker had a Glasgow edition until it was suspended recently by the government.

I’m not a muckraker nor a political investigator, so my delvings into the Clyde’s redness have not been deep. But I have got the same story from the rich and the poor and the middle-income man alike, and that is that the Clyde is not so red after all. Not even a small fraction of one per cent of the workers are Communists. They are just tough guys who are agin things as a matter of habit. They are agin their bosses, they are agin their political leaders, and they would be agin Stalin or agin Hitler if one of those gentlemen happened to be their boss. But there is no question with the men of Glasgow about who is going to win this war—that’s Great Britain.

These fellows up here in the shipyards, the dockworkers down in Liverpool, the coal miners in Wales, the Cockneys in their London slums, and farmers all over Britain—they are the guys who will have to have a new deal when the war is over. They are the guys the country must make some war aims for when the victory is won.

The men of Glasgow drink big and talk hard. You see a shipyard worker go up to a bar in a Clydebank pub and he will say, “A glass and a half.” You know what that means? It means a glass of beer and half a glass of whisky, the equivalent of two big slugs. He drinks the whisky, washes it down with the beer, and goes back to work.

We got aboard a Glasgow police launch for a private sightseeing excursion down the River Clyde, past the great shipyards.

The day was miserable and dark, with lowering clouds, cold and windy. Mist and smoke combined to make the same stuff they call “smog” in Knoxville. You can’t keep a shirt clean in Glasgow either.

There are bridges across the Clyde in Glasgow, but none out toward the sea. However, there are frequent little ferries, in which the passengers stand up. These ferries are free, run by the city. “That,” said the policeman at the wheel, “is for Aberdonians [people from Aberdeen]. They come down here on a holiday and ride back and forth all day.”

All the world makes a byword of the Scotsman’s thriftiness, but in Scotland itself they blame it all on people from Aberdeen.

And while we’re on the point, I notice in Glasgow that your Scottish friends insist on paying for the first ones, and they always say, “No sir, you can’t pay for anything in Scotland.”

The River Clyde is not very wide, but on its two banks for several miles downriver is probably the greatest concentration of shipbuilding in the world.

One great shipbuilding yard after another—you can’t begin to count the number of ships under construction. They run all the way from the mere ribworks of ships being started, which resemble dinosaur skeletons, on up to ships ready to be launched in a few days. And at the docks there is ship after ship, already launched but without superstructure yet, going through the process of being fitted for sea.

Several things impressed me about these shipyards. One was that ships look smaller in stocks than in the water. Another was that the stocks, instead of being at right angles to the river bank, were all built slantwise. That is because the river is so narrow the ships would scoot clear across the river on being launched and ram the other bank. So they set the stocks slantwise and launch the ships to slide upriver.

Stocks from which a ship was launched yesterday will have the keel of a new one started today.

From the river, the stocks where the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were built don’t look big enough to take a tramp steamer.

The stocks of a shipyard, instead of being a great permanent thing like a drydock, look scant and temporary, more like a high corral fence, except that huge movable cranes tower over each of them. Seen at a distance, this vast mass of cranes gives you the same feeling of density that the oil-well derricks do around Long Beach, California.

We were on the river for two hours. As we chugged back to our little dock I thought to myself: Yes, Britannia still rules the seas. And I also thought: But what about after the war—when all of these giant stocks stand empty, and instead of the miles-long rattle of riveting hammers there is a dead silence, and the thousands of men haunt the pubs for lack of anything else to do? What about the “Red Clyde” then?

After the river tour I had nothing to do for a couple of hours, so I took the opportunity to see “The Great Dictator,” which is now showing all over Britain. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The theater was a big one, but it was packed. It made you feel that the war wasn’t real.

I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the picture, and when Chaplin made his much discussed speech at the end it somehow made me embarrassed. People know all that over here already; that’s what they’ve been fighting about for a year and a half; it seemed superfluous.

But the people of Glasgow cheered it heartily.

At Clydebank I made some new friends and spent an evening with them. They are good, normal, intelligent, Scottish working people. Their name is Roberts. They live in a brick-row house in a wide suburban street. They are a family of seven—a grandfather, his three grown children, a son-in-law and two little grandbabies.

William Roberts, the head of the house, was a needle straightener in a sewing-machine factory, but he is retired now. I never knew before that there was such a thing as a needle straightener.

Greta, the youngest daughter, now works in that same factory, but it doesn’t make sewing machines any more—it makes munitions.

Willie, the son, used to work in the shipyards, but has tried to better himself through much study, reading and thinking. He works for the government now, making talks about war aims all over the country. The family laughs and calls him “The Professor.” He farms a small allotment in a park a few blocks away.

The son-in-law is a plater in the shipyards.

Like good average people anywhere, the Robertses say what they think, and it isn’t all in praise of the government. They are right in the midst of the details of war work, and details that are wrong loom large to them. They see inefficiency and waste and floundering organization, and they come right out with it. They sound just like people at home.

Greta said to me: “Do you suppose America will come in at the last minute again, and say she won the war?” Yet in spite of that crack we got along famously.

Greta once worked in London for three months; her greatest desire is to see Hawaii.

Her brother and I were a little late getting home, and we missed supper. So Greta threw together a snack of fried eggs and sausage. The rest of the family sat in front of the fireplace while we ate.

There was a jar of jelly on the table. I took some onto my plate and began putting it on some bread.

“Wait,” Greta called, “that’s jelly.”

“Sure, I know it is,” I said.

“But you’re putting it on your bread!” she exclaimed.

“Of course,” I said. “What should I do with it?”

“Why we eat it for dessert,” she said. “I never heard of putting jelly on bread with your meal.”

She laughed every time I took a bite.

No American had ever been in the Roberts’ home before, and I think I amused them a great deal. They said I talked with a drawl just like the cowboys in the movies. Greta said she really expected me to go “Yippee!” every once in a while.

The Roberts family has an Anderson shelter back of the house. They have fixed it up with electric lights and a heater, but they have never had to use it. They appreciate the fact that they’ve been lucky, and they don’t count on the luck lasting. They are ready for a raid when it comes, and they expect one.

At the fireside we got to discussing Mr. Churchill. Back in America I suppose we hear Churchill’s name mentioned a dozen times a day, but when we started talking about him here it suddenly occurred to me that I had heard his name mentioned very seldom in England. I don’t know why that is, for Britain idolizes him and certainly is behind him to a man. Yet they don’t talk much about him, and I never yet have heard him referred to as “Winnie.”

I thought the Roberts’ feeling about Churchill was very revealing. All their critical talk about production and speed and British methods of warfare and so forth was just good democracy expressing itself. But their talk about Churchill showed where their real feelings lay.

The son-in-law, sitting on a couch, shook his head and said: “I don’t know what would happen to us if we lost Churchill.”

And the father, in a deep chair by the fire, said: “Yes, it would be bad. He’s the man who pulled us together.”

By then it was midnight and the last bus was about due, so I said good-bye and felt my way out into the Scottish night.

6. DEFENSE IN DEPTH

Paisley, Scotland, February, 1941

This is the city that used to make Paisley shawls. It wasn’t until I came here that I discovered genuine Paisley shawls haven’t been made in sixty years. That is, real hand-woven ones.

But America still knows this city, at least indirectly; for as one person expressed it, “Nearly all the buttons that hold up the pants of America are sewed on with thread from Paisley.”

This is a great textile city, but it is neither shawls nor thread that I’m going to write about. It is the Home Guard.

You have heard about Britain’s Home Guard, the civilian army which has sprung to arms to make an invasion of Britain impossible. There are today something like 1,700,000 men in the Home Guard, which came into existence in May, 1940. At first their organization was flabby and almost without direction. Today they are well equipped and well trained and, I can assure you, very formidable men.

They are here literally to defend their homes. Every city, town and village has its Home Guard. They drill, and practice marksmanship, and study plans. They are ready for whatever comes.

Today the whole force is uniformed. The uniform is brown, just like the regular army’s, but they wear white armbands with the words “Home Guard.” This may be abandoned, however, for in case of invasion the Germans could spot them too easily.

A large percentage of the Home Guard are World War veterans. Practically all the members have daytime jobs.

As we sat around a Home Guard post at night, drinking late tea, I asked the men around me what work they were in. There were three salesmen, an architect, a billposter and his assistant, a school janitor, a preacher, a truck driver, a schoolteacher and a lawyer.

The Paisley Home Guard has a strength of several thousand men. Every so often each man is on duty all night. He spends most of his duty night in cleaning guns, studying military tactics, and maybe drilling. There are a few cots, and the ones who have to go to work early in the morning are allowed to snatch a few winks. But for two hours every night each man is actually out in the dark patrolling—looking for parachutists or anything suspicious.

This patrol is maintained all over Britain by the Home Guard, every night, all night. They patrol in strength, so that if they should spot a German landing party one man could run back and give the alarm while the others held off the attackers until help came.

The Home Guard is essentially a deep-line defense. The way Britain figures it, the Navy and the Air Force are the first lines of defense against invasion. If Germany should break through these, behind them on the land is Britain’s now formidable regular army and an intricate maze of defenses that would astound you. The fourth line of defense is the Home Guard, whose duty is to prevent infiltration by the enemy back of the front lines—the thing that has destroyed so many other countries.

They estimate that a planeload of parachutists, with everything planned perfectly, could jump out over Britain at night, collect into a group after landing and be ready with bicycles and machine guns to go into action within fifteen minutes. It is the Home Guard’s job to see that they are spotted and wiped out before the fifteen minutes are up, or, failing in that, to hold them up until the regular army arrives on the scene.

They say there is no spot in Britain, no matter how isolated, that cannot be reached in force by the regular army within an hour.

Every street and every country road in all Britain is patrolled throughout the night by the Home Guard.

I have a friend who was driving along an east-coast road one night. It was isolated, bleak and lonesome country. He stopped for a moment on personal business, and stood looking toward the sea. Then he drove on a few miles, and stopped at a pub for a drink. While he was in the pub a Home Guardsman came up and required him to identify himself. Somebody had seen him out there in the darkness.

“And suppose,” my friend asked, “suppose I hadn’t stopped at this pub for a drink. What would you have done?”

“You wouldn’t have got four miles,” the guardsman replied. “You’re being watched for right now at every crossroad in every direction from here.”

The Home Guard which was not even in existence less than a year ago, today is well equipped.

Most of the Guard’s arms have come from America. In one post I saw American rifles and machine guns. The Guard is well supplied with hand grenades. And the countryside is a network of tank traps and obstructions that even the local people don’t see or recognize.

Provincial England is determined that the Germans shall not pass. Of course there is some good democratic bellyaching against the government, and derision about mistakes. There are thousands of hot-stove-league fighters who know how to run the war better. There are some shirkers, and no doubt even a few fifth columnists. And yet I suppose there never has been a nation more unanimous in its mind than Britain is now. If she ever stumbles in this war, I feel absolutely certain that it will not be by the immoral Quisling route.

Among the soldiers of Britain, and even among the bombed people of London, I have found very few who hate the Germans with the frenzy of World War days. But these middle-aged Home Guardsmen do. Most of them carry over their hate from the last war, and it is intensified by resentment at having to do the job all over again. It is further intensified by the fact that now they’re fighting for their own homes and families, right in their own streets and their own fields and pastures.

In Home Guard posts you hear the terms “Boche” and “Hun” more often than you hear “Jerry.” The Home Guardsmen say they intend to take no prisoners. They say they intend to use their bayonets when they get that close.

I don’t know whether it has been definitely settled which is the stronger—steel or a man’s spirit. I only know that Britain’s Home Guard is armed with a state of mind that is likely to make parachuting a very unpleasant calling.

No doubt you’ve read that when the invasion comes the church bells will ring all over Britain. We were talking about this the other night at a Home Guard post, and as we talked I realized I had not heard a church bell since I came to England. It is, in fact, against the law to ring a church bell today in Britain. They’ve even stopped firing the famous one o’clock gun from the castle in Edinburgh, a custom there longer than anyone can remember.

Recently in one district of Paisley they had a surprise mobilization of the Home Guard at 6 A.M., which was long before daylight. Nobody but the leaders knew about it ahead of time.

They didn’t ring bells. They just passed the word along from house to house. And with no prearrangement or warning at all, fifty men out of the membership of fifty-three in this section were at their stations inside of fifteen minutes.

I talked to a Home Guardsman who is sixty years old and has seven service medals. He has fought in Egypt, India and Africa. He was in the Boer War and the first World War. Now he is a billposter by day and a guardsman by night. On the side he is an informer for the Ministry of Information. And he has a son who went through Dunkirk. He just hopes the Germans will come—that’s all he hopes.

I sat until 3 A.M. in front of a glowing fireplace with David McQueen, a Presbyterian minister here in Paisley.

The Church of Scotland, you know, is Presbyterian; and it used to be a part of the State. Presbyterian ministers here are highly educated in the classics. When you sit with Mr. McQueen you are sitting with a man of intellect.

Mr. McQueen is in the war. He has raised thousands of pounds for soldiers’ entertainment. His church runs a canteen for the troops stationed here. Wounded R.A.F. fliers come to live with him in his manse, to recuperate. And Mr. McQueen is a private in the Home Guard.

They wanted to make him a padre for the Guard but he wouldn’t do it. He said that if they did that then they should make the pipe organist a bandsman, and no band is needed. So on every duty night David McQueen, Presbyterian minister, is out in the dark fields in uniform, patrolling up and down, looking for Germans.

When his turn falls on Saturday night, he has to go right to church Sunday morning without a wink of sleep, and preach two sermons. He says he has to keep the church cold in order not to fall asleep while he’s talking.

That’s the Home Guard for you.