Do You Remember?

Northern Advocate, 21 November 1941, Page 2

Do You Remember?

Writing in the London “News Chronicle” on September 1, Mr Guy Ramsey drew attention to the great changes that had taken place during two years. He wrote: Those high and sunny skies in which the strange balloons drifted, silver at noon, opalescent as the sun sank; those long afternoons of holiday and the half-hinted sense that, perhaps, they were the last days we should know of peace—if not the last days we should know at all? The roads were crowded, for petrol was buyable at will. A hungry man with a few shillings in his pocket could sit down to eight rashers of bacon (streaky or “short-back” at demand) and half a dozen eggs, and fill up the corners with unlimited bread and butter and jam. Every stall on the seashore could provide with as many cigarettes of your * favourite brand as you wanted —or could afford —most of them at a shilling for 20. Drink And Dress You could still drink “the bottled sunshine of the Rhine” —in other words, Hock—at a reasonable price; beer was still from 5d to 9d a pint; whisky was 8d for a single. You could buy a suit without coupons and get it for anything between 50/- and 14 guineas; the same, or better, than would cost you today from between 65/- and 18 guineas. Do you remember the straggling columns of ill-drilled young "militiamen,” as we called them, in the sloppy battle-dress; and how we argued whether so slipshod a garment was not likely to undermine morale? How we thought that Leslie Hore-Beiisha was making the Army too comfortable? How the column of threes looked so thin beside the then familiar fours? West End Delights Think back to the West End with 22 theatres all open; with aftertheatre suppers; with cinemas streaking the night with neon and that inexhaustible bottle interminably filling a glass with ruby electric bulbs. Remember? Do you recall the thick newspapers: 20 pages or so that you could pick up off every bookstall? “Tomorrow's 'Daily Worker’” was on sale every evening; Captain Ramsay was in Parliament and Mosley was at liberty; the German Embassy was busy in Carlton House Terrace and watchers were scanning its chimneys for the plume of smoke that announced the burning of documents; and Italians still served soup at the Cafe Royal. Women’s Fashions There wasn’t much difference in women’s fashions, nor the style of their hair; but a vicar hit the head-

lines by denouncing shorts and trousers for them—and I wonder what he is saying of the trousered women in the arms factories today! We had had no blitz, but dynamite was in our minds. The I.R.A. was blowing up with home-made bombs station cloak-rooms; they did one at Coventry—scene of the first and the most concentrated blitz that shocked the conscience of the world. Winston Churchill was not even in the Cabinet: he was voicing from the back benches what you thought; Roosevelt —if ever we thought of Americe—could surely never successfully challenge the prejudice against a third term. Neville Chamberlain was in Downing Street, Burgin at the Ministry of Supply, Inskip “co-ordin-ating our defence.” Somewhere in the lumber-room was a dusty, brown cardboard box in which reposed our gas-mask; relic, pushed as far away as possible, of the hideous nightmare cf war-fear that ended in the hysteria of relief—and in the frightful hangover of shame—brought back from Munich. Remember ? The A.R.P.

Do you recollect the way in which we thought of A.R.P.? How we jeered at the trenches, water-logged, and then filled in, of 1938; how we sneered at the busybodies who asked us to join First-Aid classes and Demolition Squads and spend our Saturday afternoons in clearing up totally imaginary accidents? The Ai’my manoeuvres that August were planned on the assumption tha< the Straits of Dover did not exist: these narrow waters across which, within less than a year, we were tc ferry back in rowing-boats the B.E.F from france. Our military-naval-air mission led by Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunket-Ernle-Erle-Drax had sailed to Russia in a slow 20-year-old liner; half the Government opinion hoped we might “yet escape a pact” with the U.S.S.R.. and Stalin's men seemed (small wonder!) a little sticky at disclosing their plans. But the beaches —those beaches on which we are now pledged to fight—and ready to fight—were places for hockey and single-stump cricket and ba'hing and lazing the hot summer days away. No barriers of barbed wire, no bastion of tubular steel torn from the stands on which we watched the Coronation or a ragged A.R.P. parade in Hyde Park; no searchlights or gun emplacements or mines, and no defence area was forbidden to you if you wanted to go to Brighton or Dover or Margate for the day. The Zoo was a 1 full strength, and there were a million dogs and a million cats more in Britain than there were a month later. Yorkshire was making sure of the cricket championship (as usual) and the South Coast championships at tennis were only two or three weeks off at Eastbourne, soon fo be barred under the defence scheme. Bank or Stocking Your bank account or your stocking was filling gradually—or, perhaps, your dreams! —with the money which should pay your income tax in January —after the RED notice had arrived; for we had not come to “deduction at source." The tax stood at the “outrageous” figure of 5/6 in the £, a mere 6d short of the peak figure of the last war. Over those hot summer days came an occasional chill: when we envisioned the possibility of a war. Wo thought of a mass air-raid as bearing inescapable death, not for one, or two, or one or two hundred or one or two thousand—but for all in a city. We imagined whole ciffes flattened by a single raid. And. cold upon that, chill, came one yet icier; the dread of another “sellcut,” another Munich, with its curses from the Continent and its jeers from across the Atlantic.

Knowing the Worst We s'ill believed—do you remember?—that the French Army was invincible, that the Maginot Line was impregnable, that the Russians had no discipline, and that all Britain had to do to check the man with the little moustache of Berlin and Berchtesgaden was to call his bluff. Do you remember the sudden, strident scream of the siren that, in London, capped the Prime Minister’s tired tones; do you remember the wonder that struck us—especially those who had not heard the broadcast; so that we did not know whether this demon wail was the actual evidence of a declaration of war by Germany, or whether it was a rehearsal? And when, Anally, we knew the worst, how we felt, instantly upon the cold contraction of the heart, a sudden surging of the spirit, a loosening of the bonds of humiliation that had coiled about us for twelve bitter and apprehensive months. That was two years ago. Since then : we have learned some at least of the lessons of war. Those lessons have been worth the learning, and worth even more has been the permanent and ever-growing consciousness that every single sacrifice. no matter how small or great, any or all of us have made, has been towards not only the cleansing of the world from an evil thing but the creation of a better world in its place. Remember?