VIII. MURDER IN THE MIDLANDS

1. TRAIN TALK

On a Train in England, February, 1941

You can go from Scotland back to London, some 400 miles, on an overnight sleeper. Or you can take a sleeper to the industrial Midlands, which is where I’m going.

English sleepers are much pleasanter than most of ours. Every berth is in a separate compartment. It has a washbowl, plenty of mirrors, baggage racks, shelves, and room enough for a circus giant to undress. The compartment is air-conditioned, and you can keep warm and have fresh air all night without opening a window. If two people are traveling together they get two compartments with a connecting door. When the conductor awakens you in the morning he does so with a tray of hot tea and a package of cakes.

They say that before the war it was unheard of for one Englishman to speak to another on a train. But the war has broken that down. I have now made five trips by train, and only on one of them was I in a compartment where people didn’t talk.

It is now quite good manners for men in uniform to start talking to each other. A question about some detail of traveling usually opens the conversation.

And as for me, after I’ve said a few words one of my fellow passengers is always sure to ask if I’m from Canada. I say no, America, and then we are off. They are all interested to know what the American public is feeling about the war. But I tell them I don’t know, since sentiment apparently has changed since I left the States.

You’d be surprised how much they know about us in Scotland. I was actually ashamed, for I met hardly a Scotsman who didn’t know twice as much American history as I do.

This new familiarity on the train is still a little hard for some aristocrats. The higher they go in the scale, the less talking they do.

The other evening I was in the dining compartment of a train, along with two naval officers, an army colonel and a Polish officer—all obviously gentlemen. And from the time I went in until I was having coffee more than an hour later, not a word was spoken by any of us six men sitting there beside each other.

Finally, toward the end, one of the naval officers offered the other a cigarette, and then offered one to me. We took a few puffs, and I said it was a good cigarette. The other naval officer said he liked it too. That was the sum total of that evening’s conversation.

But between York and Newcastle I was in a compartment with a middle-aged civilian, an officer of the merchant marine and a very young commissioned officer of the Fusiliers, and we talked our heads off.

The civilian said he had traveled this thirty-mile stretch of railroad every day for twenty years. He lived in one town and worked at a factory in another. The night before he had been roof-spotting at his factory.

The merchant-marine officer was serving in convoys around the British Isles. He had been in Baltimore, Florida and Los Angeles, and said he’d like to live in America five or six years, but not permanently.

The young army officer was more than six feet tall, but looked as if he should have been in high school. Yet he was a veteran of Dunkirk, and he told us about those hectic days. He said he went two days and nights without sleep or food, but didn’t miss either of them.

We were riding through a blizzard, and the train was nine hours late. These two men had been on the train eighteen hours without anything to eat, and they were about starved. The young fellow said he never got half as hungry at Dunkirk as he was now.

Both of these young men had been through stuff on land and sea where their lives for the moment were not worth a dime. Yet the thing that seemed to impress them most about the war was the way London takes the bombing. They had both been there on leave, and they said they could hardly believe the way London stands up to it.

Also we got to talking about conscientious objectors. They’re called “conchies” over here. These two young fellows in uniform were completely tolerant of the conchies. They felt that if a fellow was sincere he should be allowed to do some kind of nonmilitary work.

The young officer ran out of cigarettes and kept smoking ours and apologizing. When the civilian got to his station he said good-bye and got off, but in a moment he was back pounding at the window. We opened it, and he handed the young officer a package of cigarettes.

The English are really proud of each other. Half a dozen times when I’ve been talking to strangers they’ve got off on the general subject of how Britain pulled herself together. And half a dozen times I’ve heard this same expression:

“They said we were decadent, and soft from easy living and the desire for peace. But I guess we’re not decadent yet.”

2. FACTORIES—EVERYWHERE

Birmingham, February, 1941

This is a city of more than a million people—the second largest city in England.

Since it is a manufacturing city, the Germans have tried to give it the works. They have made scars, but they haven’t been able to obliterate Birmingham. The city is damaged in about the same proportion as London’s West End, which is bad, but not bad enough for Hitler’s purposes. Up to the moment, Birmingham is not a city that will have to be rebuilt after the war. It is a city that will just have to be patched up.

Birmingham has big factories, but it is also noted for its little ones. It is a city wherein the small individual plant still lives—where craftsmanship is a virtue. There are more than 2000 factories in Birmingham. That’s why Hitler would almost have to wipe out the city before he could put Birmingham’s production out of business.

Practically all of these factories are making something for the war. I went to visit one small plant. It was in a darkish old brick building, covering about an eighth of a block. Hitler could never find it unless he sent a man on a bicycle to ask a policeman.

Tom Waterhouse is owner and manager of this plant. It is what we at home would call a machine shop. And it is small industry at its best. There are only twenty-five employees, and their average service in this same concern is twenty-five years. As I went through the shop I asked the first four men I came to how long they had been with the company, and the answers were thirty-five, thirty-seven, forty and forty-five years.

“What do you make here?” I asked Mr. Waterhouse.

He laughed and said, “We make whatever nobody else wants to make. We make hundreds of crazy things—special parts for guns and marine engines and so on. There is no mass production here. Every piece is a special piece for a special purpose, and they’re made practically by hand.”

Mr. Waterhouse’s office is full of age, and of things stacked up. On the walls hang half a dozen stuffed fish. Mr. Waterhouse says he just lives to fish. For thirty years he has been head of the biggest fresh-water fishing society in the world. He is the czar of 40,000 English fishermen.

If you think war doesn’t affect the average person—well, Mr. Waterhouse has not had time to go fishing since the war started.

On a window ledge is a row of shrapnel and bomb fragments and nose-caps off bombs. These were all picked up right around the plant. “We used to make quite a point of collecting them,” Mr. Waterhouse says, “but now they’re so common we don’t even keep them.”

Most of the Waterhouse employees are Home Guardsmen or air-raid wardens in their home suburbs, and all of them take turns as roof spotters at the plant. Mr. Waterhouse takes his turn with them.

He has kept a diary ever since the war started. In it he notes the weather for each day, the number and severity of raids, and the big news of the day. He sees the war as concerned with only one thing—the right to live in a country where you can say what you think and do whatever you damn please.

“Hell, man!” he said. “You couldn’t even knock off to go fishing, under Hitler.”

Back home I know people have wondered how it could possibly be true that England is getting along with her factory production when Hitler has such a vast air armada and such a little distance to fly it, and when England is so small and congested and easy to hit. I’ve wondered myself.

Well, for one thing, England is not so small as you might think. It is as far from Lands End, on the southwest, to John O’Groat’s, on the north, as it is from New York to Chicago. And crosswise, at the average, England is more than 200 miles wide. You can sprinkle a lot of factories over that much territory, and Britain has sprinkled them.

If they have 2000 factories in Birmingham—which they have—then they have tens of thousands in other places. They are practically everywhere. If Germany knew where they all were, and could send planes over unopposed in the daytime to destroy them, it would take months just to pick them out and blow them up. But with daylight bombing completely whipped, and small spots impossible to find at night, and with even the terrific all-night blitzes getting only a fraction of the factories in a congested area, and with a smooth system of quick repairs to damaged factories—well, Britain has been able to go right on manufacturing through it all.

3. BLITZKISS IN COVENTRY

Coventry, February, 1941

Coventry represents to Americans, and to most Englishmen too, the all-out one-night blitz at its worst. Many other cities have been blitzed since then, but Coventry remains the No. 1 example in our minds.

The Coventry blitz occurred on the night of November 14, 1940. I have read a great deal about it, and have seen many pictures of it. Further, I have seen so much hideous damage in London that you could no longer call me an amateur at viewing wreckage. Yet when we drove into Coventry I was horrified.

We walked and drove around Coventry for three hours. And late in the afternoon I realized that I had been saying to myself half out loud, saying it over and over again like a chant: “My God, this is awful!”

The center of Coventry is in ruins. All of the hotels are gone. A big newspaper office is a jumble of wilted presses and linotype machines, with twisted steel girders sagging among them. There are not many public eating places left. You can stand on what used to be a main corner in downtown Coventry, and in three directions see nothing but waste. You can walk down what was a street but now you walk in ankle-deep mud. You would barely recognize it as a street. On each side tractors and cranes and men with blowtorches are untangling and hauling away twisted girders and mingled rubble.

Nobody has been able to put that night of Coventry’s into words.

The noise was fiendish. It seemed that the entire city was burning down. They say the final death toll was a little over 500. It seems almost impossible that the loss of life should have been no more than that. For Coventry is a city of a quarter of a million people. That means that only one out of 500 was killed. The only reason many thousands of others didn’t lie dead the next morning is that they took to the shelters.

The city had two mass burials, with more than 200 bodies in each. And such is Coventry’s opinion of the Germans that they kept the time of the funerals secret, for fear of a blitz directed at the mourners.

Other dead were buried privately by their families.

Scores of bodies were unidentified. The only way the death of some of the people was known was from the fact that their families never saw them again. I feel certain that they will still be finding bodies in Coventry long after the war is over, when the final removal of tumbled debris is undertaken.

Daylight found Coventry in a daze. I have friends in Birmingham who were here by dawn. As they drove into town they found people leaving the city by any means at hand. My friends say the look of horror in the faces of these people was something they can never forget. Everyone was stunned. You could ask a simple question and they either did not know the answer or would just stare at you. Their minds seemed dead.

What brought people out of this, and back to life again, was two things. One was the visit of the King, who came on the second morning. He came unannounced, and only a few people were around when he arrived, but the word spread quickly. And somehow the realization that the King was there among them startled the people out of their stupor and they were actually able to cheer.

The second thing was the prodding into action by city leaders. An emergency council was immediately formed. A local “Churchill,” a man who had never held office, just walked into the breach and started orders flying while others stood by helpless. Loudspeaker trucks and handbills spread the command that Coventry had to be cleaned up. And it was this getting people into action again—even though the action was merely throwing brickbats from one pile onto another—that jerked their spirits back into circulation and started the stream of life flowing once again in Coventry.

We walked through a street that was a no man’s land. Utter destruction lay on both sides. One side had been brick houses, the other side a warehouse. Now both sides were just piles of broken brick.

We turned into an alley that had been cleared. A jumble of bricks had been pushed back from the line of the alley, and a little picket fence built around them. The fence was newly painted green.

Back in the alley we found J.B. Shelton. He is living in a brick lean-to about the size of a double bed. It used to be a washhouse, and it has a fireplace at one end.

“J.B.” hunted around for a couple of boards and laid them across boxes for us to sit on. The debris we had just passed used to be J.B. Shelton’s house and office. In fact, he had owned four houses in a row. They all make one big heap now.

At the edge of the rubble a twisted iron bed sticks out beyond the line of wreckage and gets in the way of the picket fence J.B. is building around his ruins. Since the bed lies in such a way that he can’t get it out from the rubble, he is sawing off the protruding ends with a hacksaw so his new picket fence will fit evenly along the line of destruction!

J.B. Shelton is a case. He is not very young, except in enthusiasm. He wears leather leggings, and a funny kind of celluloid collar with no tie, and an old cap. He laughs and talks, and it is hard to get him stopped.

He is a draying contractor, but his life interest is archaeology. In fact, he is Coventry’s official archaeologist, although this is merely a job of love and no pay. For years he has been digging up old Roman relics around Coventry. He says the blitz bombs have unearthed wonderful things for him. He is, I believe, the only man in Coventry who is authorized to poke in the ruins anywhere he wants to without getting arrested for looting.

He had a museum of Roman things back there in his alley. It is all shattered and waterlogged now, and many of his prize pieces lie in the mud on the floor. But still he stands there amid the debris and points at an old log and launches into its Roman origins. You’d think you were in a Harvard lecture room instead of standing in an alley in Coventry where you can’t see a whole building in any direction.

Finally we got him shunted away from his archaeological talk and onto the night of the disaster.

“Where were you that night?” I asked.

“Where was I?” he said. “I was right here, right here in this alley, running up and down all night long.”

And then J.B. Shelton went into action. He made that night almost as clear as if we were living through it.

“My house was already afire, so I just tried to save the stables,” he said. His five horses were tied in their stalls in a frame building running along the alley back of the house.

“All night I was running up and down the side of these stables, like this, throwing water on the boards. I got the water out of that open tank there.

“Every once in a while a new place would catch. I’d get it out, and then the hay would be on fire. I’d get it out, and then some sacks of oats would be on fire.

“Around midnight I got the horses all out. They took it fine. I had sacks ready to put over their heads, but only had to do that on one of them. I took them out two at a time so they wouldn’t be scared. I got them all out and tied them to trees in that open space back there at the end. Then I had to come back and go after these fires again.”

Running up and down and throwing water, with incendiaries and heavy bombs and sparks and timbers falling around him, all night long—all this to save an old clapboard stable that isn’t worth fifty dollars!

“Say, it was hot there, mister!” Shelton said. “Sparks were falling just like rain. See all these holes in my old coat? That’s where sparks fell on me.

“When I’d hear a big one coming I’d go down like this.” And to illustrate he dropped flat on his stomach in the cold mud of the alley.

“The noise was terrific,” he said. “All night long the planes were diving right down on top of us. That warehouse there was all afire, and the sparks were a-flying. Say, I’ll never see anything like it again. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world. Say, it was wonderful!”

And I suppose that if you have the divine gift of looking fully upon life and serenely upon death, such a night really would be wonderful.

Drive out of Coventry today in any direction and on the outskirts of town you’ll see vast fields solidly covered with dumped truckloads of brickbats and rubble. As a Coventry friend of mine said, “There are probably more second-hand bricks here today than anywhere else in the world.”

While the downtown wreckage is being cleaned up and hauled away, most of Coventry’s ruins will have to lie where they are until peace comes. Coventry will not look like a normal city again until many years after the war.

No complete rebuilding is allowed now. But the city is already throwing up little one-story frame buildings with slanting roofs—much like chicken coops—to be used as temporary shops by the merchants who were blasted out.

Coventry is carrying on as best it can. Everybody is back at work, but few people are living normally. A good portion of the population are living in single rooms salvaged from shattered homes.

For three days after the blitz all of Coventry lived on sandwiches carried around in mobile canteens. After that, communal kitchens were set up to provide hot food. Rationing was discontinued, but has now been resumed.

There is plenty of food in the shops now, but the shops are so few that there are always long lines of people waiting to get in.

Once more the beautiful girls of Coventry (and I mean beautiful) grace the streets. And best of all, the dog races have started again. The profits go to the relief of Coventry’s bomb victims.

If you get a chance to see the short film, “This Is Britain,” which is now showing in America, I hope you’ll go. And when you do, look for a Coventry woman named Pearl Hyde. She makes a little speech in the film.

Well, I know Pearl Hyde. She is one of Coventry’s greatest heroines. She has just been decorated with the Order of the British Empire for her bravery.

Hers was not just a frenzied gallantry of the moment. It was a coolness and tirelessness that lasted ten days and nights on end, almost without sleep.

Pearl Hyde is head of the Coventry branch of the Women’s Voluntary Services. It was Pearl Hyde who fed and clothed and cheered and really saved the people of Coventry after the blitz. For more than a week she plowed around in the ashes of Coventry, wearing policeman’s pants. She never took off her clothes. She was so black they could hardly tell her from a Negro.

Her Women’s Voluntary Services headquarters was bombed out, so she and her women moved across the street. Her own home was blown up, and even today she still sleeps in the police station.

Pearl Hyde is a huge woman, tall and massive. Her black hair is cut in a boyish bob. And she has personality that sparkles with power and good nature. She is much better looking than in the film. And she is laughing all the time.

She was just ready to dash off somewhere when I went in to see her, but she tarried a few minutes to tell me how good the Americans had been with donations. She talked past her time. Suddenly she looked at her watch and jumped up in a great rush. I held out my hand by way of good-bye, but instead of shaking hands Pearl Hyde grabbed my frail shoulders in her great hands and said: “Here’s a kiss for America.” And she smacked me a big one right on the face.

As little loath as I am to be embraced by the feminine gender any time, any place, I was rendered stone dumb by this sudden attack. I stood there speechless and blushing as Heroine Hyde strode away with great long steps and all her fellow women workers stood laughing with delight.

And so, when one of these days I step into a homeward-bound plane I will carry as souvenirs of this shattered city a couple of small pieces of broken tile, a mental picture of destruction that can never be erased, and last but best—a large, ample Coventry blitzkiss.

4. NOTES ON THE CUFF

Warwick, March, 1941

This is a small and ancient city on the banks of the River Avon. It is just ten miles from Stratford-on-Avon, the immortal home of Shakespeare.

I ducked in here for a week-end in the hope of writing some ageless literature while under the spell of Shakespeare. But the hotel thought we were still living in The Bard’s time, and consequently I spent the week-end in bed with a hot-water bottle. If you mention the word heat around here they report you to the police as a suspicious character.

After breakfast I fled outdoors and walked around town for an hour just to get warmed up. Motor travelers were passing through town, and within ten minutes two cars pulled alongside me to ask directions. One driver wanted to know how to get to Stratford. The other asked the way to Kenilworth. I didn’t know, so I merely replied, “Brother, I’ve even forgotten the way to New York.” In each case the motorist drove quickly on, looking back as though he thought I was touched in the head, and possibly even subversive.

Being too cold to think, I thought I would just put down a few tag ends of the last few weeks, which have stuck in my mind.

For one thing, here is a little item about the old tradition that Scotsmen are so tight. Well, back in November the government sent out a frantic call for all citizens to turn in binoculars, as they were needed in the armed forces. You could either donate, lend or sell them to the government. And up to date the proportion of binoculars donated outright to the government is three times as great in Scotland as in England!

The three most popular entertainers who ever visited Glasgow are Harry Lauder, John McCormack and Gene Autry.

Of the things I brought with me from America, the wisest of all was a pair of galoshes. I have worn them almost constantly for the past month, and I think I would be dead without them. For some reason they don’t have galoshes in England. I’ll bet thirty people have commented on my pair and said they wished they could get some.

English hotels all start their day at noon. Consequently it is possible—and has actually happened to me—to stay only one night at a hotel and yet be forced to pay for two nights.

There is a saying all over England that the safest place to be during a raid is in a church spire, and I am beginning to believe it. I have seen dozens of wrecked churches but I don’t remember one whose steeple wasn’t still standing.

One funny thing about blitzed cities—you always see, either lying around or stuck on a pole by some jocular workman, a naked wax dummy from a store window. There was one in Coventry on top of a steel post stuck in a pile of jumbled brick right in the center of town. In another town I saw a dummy propped up on the sidewalk, and a local man said they had found the dummy’s foot two blocks away.

I haven’t heard a warning siren since leaving London, but people tell me the sirens sound exactly the same all over Britain.

A very friendly lady who has donated her car and her driving services to the government drove me down here from Birmingham. There are thousands of such women in Britain. This particular one was a Mrs. Matty, and I mention it because she has a sister named Mrs. James Cruse who lives in Denver.

In Britain you never hear the war of 1914-18 spoken of as the World War. They always say “the last war.”

The other day a newspaper proposed that we call the last one “German War 1, and this one German War 2, and just keep on numbering them in the future until we run out of numbers.”

England likes to tell jokes on the regimented minds of its civil-service employees. They say this one is true: In order to get onto an R.A.F. station you have to have a special pass, which is usually a small slip of pink paper. So the other day a girl of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force received an order from Whitehall which said, “Report to R.A.F. station such-and-such at 10 A.M. and show your pink form.”

If it weren’t for the soldiers on the streets and the one lump of sugar for your coffee, it would be hard to realize a war was on when you visit many of England’s small cities and towns which have never known the crunch of a bomb.

In the provinces, policemen still wear fore-and-aft hats instead of steel helmets.

A lady from America writes and wants to know if I am wearing a correspondent’s uniform. The answer is no. The only ones who wear uniforms are those accredited to the army. There are only a few of these.

As for me, I feel silly enough carrying a tin hat and a gas mask around the provinces, let alone appearing in a uniform.