“I heard you were a composer, sir,” I said.
“As was George here. Great things were expected of Butterworth.”
I racked my brains, but I didn’t think I’d ever heard of anyone called George Butterworth. But, then again, I’d never heard of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and I’d heard from the men at Cranbrook that he really was something, that people used to go to concerts of his music before the war.
“Actually,” Ralph went on, “there were three of us back then—George, me, and dear old Gustav.”
“Isn’t that a German name, sir?”
“Gussie was as English as you or I,” George said sternly.
“You did hear what they did to him, didn’t you?” asked Ralph. “Locked away by the Patriotic League for having latent Germanic sympathies. They say he hung himself, but I’ve never been sure about that.”
“It was just a name, for heaven’s sake. He’d stopped calling himself Von Holst. Wasn’t that enough for them?”
“Nothing was ever good enough,” Ralph said.
A brooding silence fell across the room, interrupted only by the occasional muffled explosion from somewhere outside. Ralph turned to me again and said, “George and I were both members of the Folk Music Society. Now, I don’t imagine that means very much to you now. But back then—this is thirty years ago, remember—George and I took to traveling around the country recording songs. We were quite the double act. We had an Edison Bell disc phonograph, one of the very few in the country at the time. A brute of a machine, but at least it provided a talking point, a way of breaking the ice.” He nodded at the equipment on the shelves. “Of course, it meant that we had some basic familiarity with recording apparatus—microphones, cables, that kind of thing.” He paused, and for the first time I saw something close to pain in his otherwise boyish face. “In twenty-three I was shellshocked while on ambulance duties in the Salient. I was no good for battlefield work after that, so I was transferred here, to Dungeness. I was one of the operators, listening to the sounds picked up by these dishes, straining to hear the first faint rumble of an incoming airplane. In the end, I was no good for it, and I had to go back to ambulance work; but I got to know some of the names in charge, and when I heard that dear old Butterworth had been shot …”
“I was wounded by a sniper,” George said. “Not the first time, either—took one in the Somme in sixteen. That second was my ticket out of the war, though. But do you know the funny thing? I didn’t want it. What was I going to do—go back to music, with all this still going on?” He shook his head, as if the very idea was as ludicrous as staging a regatta in the English Channel.
“I know how you felt,” said Ralph. “I had so many things unfinished when this all began and so many more things I wanted to do. Lark Ascending—that needed more work. That opera I keep talking about—I feel as if Falstaff’s been standing at my shoulder for twenty years, urging me to get Sir John down on paper. And another symphony …I’ve had the skeleton of the Pastoral in my head ever since I was in the Somme, all those years ago.”
“The bugle player,” George said, nodding—he must have heard the story several times.
“They still won’t understand it—they’ll think it’s all lambkins frolicking in meadows.”
“Give them time. They’ll work it out eventually.”
“If I ever write it, old man. That’s the clincher. Find myself a spare half hour here, a spare hour there, but if I’m not scribbling letters to Adeline, I’m filling out requisitions for bandages or spare tires, or organizing raucous singsongs around the mess piano. I have tried, but nothing good ever comes of it. Most of the time I can hardly hear the music in my head, let alone think about getting it down on paper.”
“How is Adeline now?” George asked.
“As well as can be expected, old man.”
After a silence George said: “At least we’re doing something useful. That’s what I keep telling myself. Music was a pleasant dream, but now we’ve grown up, and there are other things we have to do—proper, serious things, like listening for enemy airplanes or driving ambulances.” Something seemed to snap in him then, as if he had been waiting a very long time to unburden himself. “The damage is done, Ralph. Even if you gave me a year off to go and sit in some quiet country cottage and scribble, scribble, scribble, it wouldn’t achieve a blessed bit of good. There’s too much noise in my head, noise that won’t just go away because I’m not in France or not in earshot of the coastal guns. Why, there are times when I think the only place I can concentrate is here, in this cold little hut, listening to the noises across the sea.”
At that moment the red bulb, which had been dark when we came in, starting flashing on and off. There was a harsh buzzing sound from one of the black boxes on the shelf. Ralph looked at it worriedly.
“That’s torn it,” George said. “Gas detectors have gone off.”
“One of those bombs was carrying gas?” I asked.
“Mustard, phosgene or radium fragments—there’s no way of telling from here.” George looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Been in a gas attack, Wally?”
“Once, sir. But it’s not really gas in the radium shells. It’s little particles, but they get carried on the wind just as if they were a gas. They say there are parts of Woolwich no one will be able to live in for years, because that stuff can still get inside you.”
“Well, we’re better off than they were in Woolwich,” George said, with a kind of steely determination that told me he was going to take charge. “Now, the bad news is the seals on this hut aren’t going to help us much if the gas drifts our way. They’re old and perished, and we couldn’t spend long in here anyway before the air got stale.”
“What about the ambulance, sir?” I asked.
Ralph shook his head slowly. “No better, I’m afraid.”
“But the seals …”
“Aren’t what they used to be. If we ran into a thick cloud, we wouldn’t have much of a chance.”
“That’s not what they told us in Dorking, sir.”
“No, I don’t doubt that. But they can’t very well have ambulance drivers going around scared out of their wits, can they?”
“I don’t suppose so,” I said, without much conviction.
“Never you mind about the ambulance anyway,” George said. “There’s an underground shelter on the other side of the compound, just before the first mirror—you’d have driven past it on your way in. That’s safe, and it has its own air supply.”
“Will they still let us in?” Ralph asked.
“If we don’t dillydally. I see you’ve both got your masks—that’ll save us a jog back to the ambulance.” Still not quite steady on his feet, he went to one of the shelves and pulled down a regulation gas mask box. “Now, you two go ahead of me. You’ll find the shelter easily enough, and I won’t be far behind you.”
“You can come with us,” Ralph said.
“I can’t move very quickly—must have sprained my ankle when I fell off the ladder. Didn’t notice until now, what with the head wound and everything.”
“We’ll carry you,” I said. “We can even take you in one of the stretchers—that’ll be faster than all three of us hobbling along like a crab.” I opened my box and dragged out the gas mask. For some reason I didn’t feel as grateful to be carrying it as I usually did. I was wondering if what they had told us in Dorking also applied to the gas masks.
“Open the box, George,” Ralph said quietly.
“You two go ahead,” George said, as if we hadn’t heard him the last time.
“There’s no mask in that box, is there?”