To occupy the journey by catching up on the world I bought a selection of daily and weekly newspapers. The urgent topic in most of the dailies was 'coast preparedness' the Left demanding wholesale embattlement of the Atlantic seaboard, the Right rejecting panic-spending on a probable chimera. Beyond that, the outlook had not changed a great deal. The boffins had not yet produced a panacea (though the usual new device was to be tested), the merchant-ships still choked the harbours, the aircraft factories were working three shifts and threatening to strike, the C.P. was pushing a line of Every Plane is a Vote for War.
Mr Malenkov, interviewed by telegram, had said that although the intensified programme of aircraft construction in the West was no more than a part of a bourgeois-fascist plan by warmongers that could deceive no one, yet so great was the opposition of the Russian people to any thought of war that the production of aircraft within the Soviet Union for the Defence of Peace had been tripled. War was not inevitable.
Long analyses of this statement by the regular Kremlinologists conveyed the impression that the tripod, as well as a touch of the conversational style, of Delphi, had been transferred to Moscow.
The first thing I noticed when I let myself into the flat was a number of envelopes on the mat, a telegram, presumably my own, among them. The place immediately felt forlorn.
In the bedroom were signs of hurried packing, in the kitchen sink, some unwashed crockery. A half-written page in the typewriter in the sitting-room presented some cross-talk; as one of the speakers was called Perpetua, I recognized it for a part of the stand-by novel. I looked in the desk-diary, but the last entry was a week old, and said simply: 'Lamb chops.'
The precious notebook was there beside it. I don't usually look at that: it has a status slightly lower than personal letters, but still private. However, this was an exceptional occasion, and I wanted a clue if there was one, so I opened it. The last two entries read:
Ever since the phi etymological Mr Nash
Turned the dictionary into a polysyllabical hit of hash,
'S'no longer the lingo
The Bard used to sing-oh.
And:
Even if I should live a very, very long time
I still shouldn't be very likely to find the rhyme
That Ogden
Got bogged on.
More plaintive than constructive, I thought; certainly not instructive. I picked up the telephone.
It was nice of Freddy Wittier to sound genuinely pleased that I was about again. After the greetings and congratulations:
'Look,' I said, 'I've been so strictly incomunicado that I seem to have lost my wife. Can you elucidate?'
'Lost your what?' said Freddy, in a startled tone.
'Wife Phyllis,' I explained.
'Oh, I thought you said "life". Oh, she's all right. She went off with Bocker a couple of days ago,' he announced cheerfully.
'That,' I told him, 'is not the way to break the news. Just what do you mean by "went off with Bocker"?'
'Spain,' he said, succinctly. 'They're laying bathy-traps there, or something. Matter of fact, we're expecting a dispatch from her any moment.'
'So she's pinching my job?'
'Keeping it warm for you it's other people that'd like to pinch it. Good thing you're back.'
In the subsequent course of the conversation I learnt that Phyllis had stood her rest-cure for just one week, and then showed up again in London.
The flat was depressing, so I went round to the Club and spent the evening there.
The telephone jangling by the bedside woke me up. I switched on the light. Five a.m. 'Hullo,' I said to the telephone, in a five a.m. voice. It was Freddy. My heart gave a nasty knock inside as I recognized him at that hour.
'Mike?' he said. 'Good. Grab your hat and a recorder. There's a car on the way for you now.'
My needle was still swinging a bit.
'Car?' I repeated. 'It's not Phyl ?'
'Phyl ? Oh, Lord, no. She's okay. Her call came through about nine o'clock. Transcription gave her your love, on my instructions. Now get cracking, old man. That car'll be outside your place any minute.'
'But look here. Anyway, there's no recorder here. She must have taken it.'
'Hell. I'll try to get one to the plane in time.'
'Plane ?' I said, but the line had gone dead.
I rolled out of bed, and started to dress. A ring came at the door before I had finished. It was one of EBC's regular drivers. I asked him what the hell, but all he knew was that there was a special charter job laid on at Northolt. I grabbed my passport, and we left.
It turned out that I didn't need the passport. I discovered that when I joined a small, blear-eyed section of Fleet Street that was gathered in the waiting-hall drinking coffee. Bob Humbleby was there, too.
'Ah, the Other Spoken Word,' said somebody. 'I thought I knew my Watson.'
'What,' I inquired, 'is all this about? Here am I routed out of a warm though solitary bed, whisked through the night yes, thanks, a drop of that would liven it up.'
The Samaritan stared at me.
'Do you mean to say you've not heard?' he asked.
'Heard what?'
'Bathies. Place called Buncarragh, Donegal,' he explained, telegraphically. 'And very suitable, too, in my opinion. Ought to feel themselves really at home among the leprechauns and banshees. But I have no doubt that the natives will be after telling us that it's another injustice that the first place in England to have a visit from them should be Ireland, so they will.'
It was queer indeed to encounter that same decaying, fishy smell in a little Irish village. Escondida had in itself been exotic and slightly improbable; but that the same thing should strike among these soft greens and misty blues, that the sea-tanks should come crawling up on this cluster of little grey cottages, and burst their sprays of tentacles here, seemed utterly preposterous.
Yet, there were the ground-down stones of the slipway in the little harbour, the grooves on the beach beside the harbour wall, four cottages demolished, distraught women who had seen their men caught in the nets of the cilia, and over all the same plastering of slime, and the same smell.
There had been six sea-tanks, they said. A prompt telephone-call had brought a couple of fighters at top speed. They had wiped out three, and the rest had gone sliding back into the water but not before half the population of the village, wrapped in tight cocoons of tentacles, had preceded them.
The next night there was a raid further south, in Galway Bay
By the time I got back to London the campaign had begun. This is no place for a detailed survey of it. Many copies of the official report must still exist, and their accuracy will be more useful than my jumbled recollections.
Phyllis and Bocker were back from Spain, too, and she and I settled down to work. A somewhat different line of work, for day-to-day news of sea-tank raids was now Agency and local correspondent stuff. We seemed to be holding a kind of EBC relations job with the Forces, and also with Bocker at least, that was what we made of it. Telling the listening public what we could about what was being done for them.
And a lot was. The Republic of Ireland had suspended the past for the moment to borrow large numbers of mines, bazookas, and mortars, and then agreed to accept the loan of a number of men trained in the use of them, too. All along the west and south coasts of Ireland squads of men were laying minefields above the tidelines wherever there were no protecting cliffs. In coastal towns pickets armed with bomb-firing weapons kept all-night watch. Elsewhere, planes, jeeps, and armoured cars waited on call.