The Ka of Gifford Hillary (24 page)

I saw a pretty girl take a shot of dope, and a young man beating himself with a dog-whip in front of a crucifix. A well-known barrister, whom I happened to know by sight, was refusing his wife’s plea to dissociate himself from a group of fraudulent company promoters because he was able to avoid paying income tax on the big fees they were handing him in cash; while another man was saying to his wife that next time he went up to Manchester and his boss wanted her to sleep with him she had better let him, as that might lead to promotion; whereas her continued refusal might mean the sack, and where then would they find the money to keep their boys at an expensive prep school.

The worst thing I saw was a nurse torturing a small boy. She was making him stand in a steaming bath that was too hot for him. As he moaned and whimpered, lifting first one foot then the other, and struggled to get out, she kept on pushing him back, and saying: ‘That’ll teach you to tell tales to your mother about me speaking to gentlemen in the Park. Do it again, you spoiled little brat, and I’ll push you under head and all. Then it won’t be you who comes into your snooty Lord-papa’s title.’

I would have given anything to be able to intervene, but I was incapable even of acting as a cooling draught of air which might have lowered by a fraction the temperature of the hot water in which the poor child was being forced to stand.

Another half dozen random visits revealed only people
snoozing or reading in bed; couples mildly bickering or cheerfully making plans for the day. Out of my half-hundred rather reprehensible snoopings into the lives of the better off, I had found nothing really to intrigue, and quite a lot to disgust, me. Although I could no longer talk to anyone, I felt a sudden craving for the companionship of someone that I knew and cared about. My thoughts turned to Johnny; so I set off for Westminster.

It was eleven o’clock by the time I arrived at the great block of Government offices that stretch from Whitehall to St. James’s Park, and not only house several Ministries but also accommodate such departments as those of the Lord Privy Seal and Ministers without Portfolio. During the war the offices of the War Cabinet had also been situated in it, and it was no secret that a range of rooms on the ground floor overlooking the park had been converted into a flat in which Sir Winston Churchill lived for the greater part of the conflict. It was far less vulnerable to bombing than the old Georgian residence No. 10 Downing Street; and living there had enabled him to send, with a minimum of delay, for any of his Planning Staff, as it had occupied the basement beneath the flat.

Johnny had told me that the Joint Planners no longer devilled like troglodytes in the basement, but that it had been retained more or less in its war-time state and that little parties of distinguished visitors from overseas were now frequently taken round it. Assuming that the offices of the Planners would not have been moved very far I decided to begin my search for Johnny in the vicinity of the old ones, and as I entered the spacious hall I found that one of these parties had just arrived.

It consisted of four Americans and a Canadian couple. They were being received by the elderly custodian, and as he was examining their credentials I decided that it would be interesting to join them.

Leading the way down two flights of stone stairs, the old gentleman said in a soft voice: ‘We are now about to enter the famous fortress basement from which the High Direction of the war was conducted. In addition to the four storeys of stone and steel building above it, a four-feet deep layer of concrete was inserted between it and Sir Winston’s flat and the offices of his secretaries on the ground floor. It was
guarded by a special company of armed Home Guards who examined all passes, sentries supplied by the Brigade of Guards were posted on its entrances, and it had an internal garrison of Royal Marines, which also acted as servants to the Officers of the Joint Planning Staff who worked here under General Lord Ismay.

‘As well as being bomb-proof it was gas-proof, air-conditioned, had its own electric light plant and was provisioned to withstand a siege. In it was the terminal of the Atlantic Telephone on which the Prime Minister had all his talks with President Roosevelt. Its telephone system was connected by deep-laid lines to all the principal cities and Command Headquarters of the Kingdom; so that, in the event of invasion, had every telephone exchange in London been knocked out by bombs operations could still have been conducted from here and from G.H.Q. Home Forces, which occupied a similarly-fortified basement adjacent to this one. If the Germans had decided to sacrifice an Airborne Division by dropping it on Whitehall with the object of attempting to destroy the nerve centres of the Government, this underground fortress would have closed up like a clam, with the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Organisation inside it, and they could have continued to direct the war overseas without the least apprehension, while the enemy parachutists were being mopped up by the troops under the command of G.O.C. London District.’

On entering the basement I saw that it was very like the lower regions of a battleship, and the humming of the air-conditioning plant added to the similarity. It consisted of a long, narrow corridor with a maze of shorter ones opening out of it. Along the ceiling and upper walls of them all ran innumerable white-painted pipes and wires. Every few feet a plywood door gave on to a room in most of which there were three or four desks, or, in the smaller ones, a single iron bed. On the doors of the latter were stencilled the names of the men who had occupied them: Sir Edward Bridges, Mr. Attlee, General Ismay, Mr. Brendan Bracken, Lord Beaver-brook, General Hollis, Sir John Anderson, Mr. Morrison, Sir Desmond Morton, and so on.

Our elderly guide explained that while Cabinet meetings had normally continued to be held at 10 Downing Street in
the day-time, at night the War Cabinet had met in a room down here to which he took us. The sleeping cabins had been used by the P.M.’s principal assistants permanantly, and occasionally by Ministers who preferred to remain there rather than go home on nights when there were severe air-raids.

He showed us then the rooms of the Joint Planners, in each of which teams of three—sailor, soldier and airman—had worked together; the meeting room of the Chiefs of Staff; the map room, with its long range of different-coloured telephones, in which every conceivable piece of information available concerning our forces, their dispositions, and those of the enemy could be obtained at a glance; and finally Sir Winston Churchill’s quarters. These consisted of a bedroom, a work-room and a private dining-room just large enough to seat four people. On the worst nights of the blitz his staff had persuaded him to sleep there, and in any emergency he would only have had to walk downstairs from his flat to continue fighting the war from there uninterrupted.

When we emerged from this intriguing tour I set about trying to find Johnny. As it was a Sunday few people were moving about in the long corridors and most of the first-floor rooms were deserted; moreover, as they had no maps on their walls it seemed probable that the men in them were Civil Servants. The second floor, perhaps because it is further removed from the noise and dust of the street, is the one in all Government offices where the bigwigs have their quarters. The rooms there were larger and much loftier; most of them containing big conference tables as well as handsome desks. I did not expect to find Johnny in these august surroundings, and had looked into a few of the rooms only out of curiosity, when I found myself in that of Sir Charles. He had evidently arrived only a few minutes ahead of me; and, as I gathered from his remarks to a young man for whom he had rung, had come in for an hour before lunch to sign some documents and look through the overnight Foreign Office telegrams.

I wondered if he had yet learned of my death, and thought it probable that he had as, even if it had not got into the London Saturday evening papers, it was certain to have been in those of that morning.

My own feelings apart, as I looked again at his tall, still youthful figure, thatch of white hair, and kind smile through
the thick-lensed glasses, I felt sorry for him on account of it; for it had blown sky-high the plan on which he must have pinned considerable hopes.

I thought that probably he would try to get someone else to play the role he had designed for me—if not on account of E-boats then in connection with some other now redundant type of Naval craft—but that would take time, and it might not be easy to find a ship-builder regularly receiving Government contracts who, like myself, happened also to be air-minded, so sufficiently unprejudiced to view the problems as I had, and would agree to sacrifice both his Company’s interests and, perhaps, the friendship of a number of die-hard sailors.

It was certainly bad luck for Sir Charles that my death should have occurred just at that time, and in circumstances which had not the remotest connection with our secret talk. Somehow it would not have seemed quite so bad if I had been murdered by someone who had found out our intentions—perhaps a Russian agent who had orders to do his utmost to prevent Britain going over to a New Look armaments programme, or a crazy young Naval officer holding the fanatical belief that our country could be saved only by the maintenance of the Old Look with more and bigger aircraft-carriers.

No doubt that is just the sort of way the events of which I am the central character would have developed had this been a Dennis Wheatley thriller; but, as far as Sir Charles’s plans were concerned, once I was dead, who had killed me and why could have no bearing on the situation. It was only a, perhaps silly, feeling on my part that had I been done in with the object of wrecking his plans I could at least have counted my life given, in a sense, for what I believed to be the good of my country; whereas I had lost it as a result of an absurd misunderstanding between my wife, who loved me, and her passion-crazed admirer whom she did not love. There could certainly have been few more futile reasons for having one’s life cut short, but I could only accept the fact that our existence while on earth, and its termination, does appear to be governed by just such pointless stupidities.

Leaving Sir Charles to his Sunday morning chore I moved up to the third floor and there struck lucky. The first room
I entered was a typists’ pool. Most of the machines had their covers on, but two young women were busily tapping away there. Beyond it was a range of rooms each containing three or four desks, about one in three of which were occupied by men either writing or reading papers. They were all in civilian clothes, but the maps on the walls of the rooms told me that these must be offices of the Joint Planning Staff. Johnny was not among them, but I ran him to earth a few minutes later on the opposite side of the corridor.

He was in a fair-sized room that had no desks in it but an oval table and a number of elbow chairs. On the table there were a score or more of folders which at first sight looked like those used to contain magazines in a club reading room, and this evidently was a reading room, but the material in it was of the highest secrecy.

Each folder had its contents stencilled in large letters on its cover, and glancing at them I read some of the titles: ‘MINUTES OF MEETINGS AT S.H.A.P.E., MINUTES OF THE CHIEFS OF STAFF, FOREIGN OFFICE TELEGRAMS, MINUTES OF N.A.T.O. MEETINGS, JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, MINUTES OF DEPUTY CHIEFS OF STAFF, NORTH WESTERN ARMY GROUP INTELLIGENCE, MINUTES OF S.E.A.T.O. MEETINGS, EXTRACTS FROM CABINET MEETINGS, MINUTES OF U.N.O. MEETINGS, MINUTES OF DISARMAMENT CONFERENCE, MINUTES OF DEFENCE COMMITTEE.’

In addition there were another score or so of stencilled papers without covers, and reports printed on light blue paper, some of which I saw, as they were picked up and scanned by Johnny and his companions, ran to fifty of more pages in length. These had such titles as: Project Saucepan. New Assessment of Persian Oil. Operation Teasing. Report of ex-Naval Attaché Moscow. Bases in Malaya. Exercise Showdown. Enemy Propaganda in India. The War Potential of Turkey. Relative values of Light and Heavy Armoured Vehicles. British Cargo Tonnage State. Treaty between U.S.S.R. and Afghanistan. Potential of Norway to Wage War. The Underground in Czechoslovakia. Finding from recent Thermo-Nuclear Tests in the U.S.A.’ and so on.

I felt that had I been left there for a month with nothing else to do I could not have mastered this mass of fascinating
secret information, let alone the fresh material with which it would be supplemented from day to day; but Johnny and the two chaps who were with him in the room picked up and scanned through a dozen papers apiece quite casually in the course of the next half hour.

It occurred to me that in my present strange state I might make a marvellous spy if I could get to Moscow and locate some similar foom which must exist somewhere in the Kremlin. But on second thoughts I realised that such an idea was hopelessly impracticable. In the first place, with the restrictions which seemed to be imposed upon my movements it would take me quite a time to get there and back; in the second I could not read Russian; in the third, even if I could have done so, I was incapable of turning over pages for myself, so could read only such matter as was open to my gaze; and lastly I had no means of communicating to anybody anything that I might learn.

Nevertheless, I read over Johnny’s shoulder with great interest the minutes and papers through which he was glancing, and even in that short time I was struck by one thing. Again and again Members of Parliament and the press attack the Government for not doing this and that, but there is a logical explanation for their apparent remissness which they cannot give in their own defence for reasons of national security.

In addition to the stimulating effect of these assessments of Britain’s problems which I was reading, being again in Johnny’s presence comforted me greatly. After my incredibly distressing morning it was unbelievably good to be with someone whom one had every reason to believe to be an inherently decent person. No doubt many of the people I had seen reading the Sunday papers in bed or getting their breakfasts were equally likeable, but I did not know them, whereas I did know Johnny.