Human Voices. Penelope Fitzgerald

Queen Mary. At night, with all its blazing portholes blacked out, it towered over a flotilla of taxis, each dropping off a speaker or two.

      By the spring of 1940 there had been a number of castaways. During the early weeks of evacuation Variety, Features and Drama had all been abandoned in distant parts of the country, while the majestic headquarters was left to utter wartime instructions, speeches, talks and news.

      Since March the lifts below the third floor had been halted as an economy measure, so that the first three staircases became yet another meeting place. Few nowadays were ever to be found in their offices. An instinct, or perhaps a rapidly acquired characteristic, told the employees how to find each other. On the other hand, in this constant circulation much was lost. The corridors were full of talks producers without speakers, speakers without scripts, scripts which by a clerical error contained the wrong words or no words at all. The air seemed alive with urgency and worry.

      Recordings, above all, were apt to be mislaid. They looked alike, all 78s, aluminium discs coated on one side with acetate whose pungent rankness was the true smell of the BBC’s war. It was rumoured that the Germans were able to record on tapes coated with ferrous oxide and that this idea might have commercial possibilities in the future, but only the engineers and RPD himself believed this.

      ‘It won’t catch on,’ the office supervisor told Mrs Milne. ‘You could never get attached to them.’

      ‘That’s true,’ Mrs Milne said. ‘I loved my record of Charles Trenet singing J’ai ta main. I died the death when it fell into the river at Henley. The public will never get to feel like that about lengths of tape.’

      But the Department’s discs, though cared for and filed under frequently changing systems, were elusive. Urgently needed for news programmes, they went astray in transit to the studio. Tea-cups were put down on them, and they melted. Ferried back by mobile units through the bitter cold, they froze, and had to be gently restored to life. Hardly a day passed without one or two of them disappearing.

      Vi was now looking for Churchill’s Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide with the faint-hearted help of Lise. It was possible that Lise might turn out to be hopeless. They’d given up For Transmission, and were looking in what was admittedly the wrong place, among the Processed, whose labels, written in the RPAs’ round school-leavers’ handwriting, offered First Day of War: Air-Raid Siren, False Alarm: Cheerful Voices with Chink of Tea-Cups: Polish Refugees in Scotland, National Singing, No Translation. ‘You won’t find anything in that lot,’ said Della, brassily stalking through, ‘that’s all Atmosphere.’

      ‘It’s wanted in the editing room. Do you think Radio News Reel went and took it?’

      ‘Why don’t you ask the boys?’

      

      Three of the Junior RPAs were boys, and RPD, though fond of them, felt less need to confide in them. As the Department expanded more and more girls would be taken on. ‘What a field that’s going to give us!’ said Teddy, relaxing in the greasy haze of the canteen with Willie Sharpe. Willie only paid twopence for his coffee, because he was a juvenile.

      ‘I don’t grudge you that in any way,’ Teddy went on. ‘It’s a mere accident of birth. I just wonder how you reconcile it with what you’re always saying, that you expect to be in training as a Spitfire pilot by the end of 1940.’

      ‘My face is changing,’ Willie replied. ‘Coming up from Oxford Circus on Wednesday I passed a girl I used to know and she didn’t recognize me.’

      Teddy looked at him pityingly.

      ‘They’re still asking for School Certificate in maths,’ he said.

      ‘Pretty soon they mayn’t mind about that, though. They’ll be taking pilots wherever they can get them.’

      ‘They’ll still want people who look a bit more than twelve.’

      Willie was rarely offended, and never gave up.

      ‘Hitler was a manual worker, you know. He didn’t need School Cert to take command of the Nazi hordes.’

      ‘No, but he can’t fly, either,’ Teddy pointed out.

      The boys’ ears, though delicately tuned to differences of pitch and compression, adapted easily to the frightful clash of metal trays in the canteen. Unlike the administrative staff, they had no need to shout. Teddy sat with his back to the counter, so that he could see the girls as they came in – Della, perhaps, although there was nothing doing there – and at the same time turned the pages of a Yank mag, where white skin and black lace glimmered. These mags were in short supply. Vi’s merchant seaman, who was on the Atlantic run, had passed it on.

      ‘You know, Willie, I need money for what I want to do. Honestly, the kind of woman I have in mind is unattainable on £378 a year.’

      ‘Your mind’s tarnished, Teddy.’

      ‘I’m not responsible for more than one eighth of it,’ Teddy protested.

      ‘No, but you can increase the proportion by concentrated will-power. As I see it, in any case, after the conflict is over we shan’t be at the mercy of anything artificially imposed on us, whether from within or without. Hunger will be a thing of the past because the human race won’t tolerate it, mating will follow an understandable instinct, and there’ll be no deference to rank or money. We shall need individuals of strong will then.’

      Neither Teddy nor anyone else felt that Willie was ridiculous when he spoke like this, although they sometimes wondered what would become of him. Indeed, he was noble. His notebook contained, besides the exact details of his shift duties, a new plan for the organisation of humanity. Teddy also had a notebook, the back of which he kept for the estimated measurements of the Seraglio.

      ‘I’d put this Lise Bernard at 34, 25, 38. Are you with me?’

      ‘I’m not too sure,’ said Willie doubtfully. ‘By the way, she cries rather a lot.’

      ‘She’s mixed a lot with French people, that would make her more emotional.’

      ‘Not all foreigners are emotional. It depends whether they come from the north or the south. Look at Tad.’

      Taddeus Zagorski, the third of the junior RPAs (male), had arrived in this country with his parents only last October. How had he managed to learn English so quickly, and how, although he wasn’t much older than the rest of them and was quite new to the Department, did he manage to dazzle them with his efficiency and grasp?

      ‘I can’t seem to get to like him,’ said Teddy. ‘He’s suffered, I know, but there it is. He wants to be a news reader, you know.’

      ‘I daresay he’ll get on,’ Willie replied, ‘in the world, that is, as it’s at present constituted. It’s possible that we’re jealous of him. We ought to guard against that.’

      Tad, in fact, was emerging at the head of the counter queue, where, with a proud gesture, he stirred his coffee with the communal spoon tied to the cash register with a piece of string. He must have been doing Messages From The Forces.

      ‘My auntie got one of those messages,’ said Willie. ‘It was my uncle in the Navy singing When the Deep Purple Falls, but by the time it went out he was missing, believed killed.’

      ‘Was she upset?’

      ‘She never really heard it. She works on a delivery van.’

      The young Pole stood at their table, cup of coffee in hand, brooding down at them from a height.

      ‘You should have been off ten minutes ago,’ said Teddy.

      Tad sat down between them, precisely in the middle of his chair, in his creaseless white shirt. The boys felt uneasy. He had an air of half-suppressed excitement.

      ‘Who is that fellow?’ he asked suddenly.

      Willie looked up, Teddy craned round. A man with a pale, ruined-looking face was walking up