It’s a Battlefield (3 page)

‘No,' said the secretary. ‘No. It's all very interesting.' In the hall a man's voice was droning rhythmically; the Assistant Commissioner caught the words, ‘fold up our tents like the Arabs.'

The chief warder halted. ‘Ah, that'll be Adams. He's a wonderful reciter. Real artistes we have here. Make a donkey weep some of 'em.'

‘What did he do?' the secretary asked.

‘Tried to cut somebody's throat or something silly of the sort,' the chief warder said kindly. ‘Ah, but you listen to this one. He's a treat.' A baritone began to sing. Through the cold night air the Assistant Commissioner imagined for a moment that between the verses he could hear the footsteps of the warders pacing in the tower.

They walked on, and the chief warder, pointing at one great cube of stone after another, began to explain to the secretary the geography of the prison. ‘That's Block A. The new prisoners all go there. If they behave themselves they get shifted to that one there, that's Block B. Block C, the one we passed, that's the highest grade. Of course if there's any complaint against them, they get shifted down. It's just like a school,' the warder said, raising his old kind eyes with an expression of reverence towards Block A.

‘And what happens to them in Block C?' the secretary asked.

‘They have certain privileges. Have as many library books as they want. And they have more butter with their bread.' A heavy hollow bell began to ring in the tower. ‘Every man to his cell except Block C,' the warder explained.

‘Certainly,' the secretary said, ‘your school comparison was sound. And how long before they can reach Block C?'

‘Some do it in a year,' the warder said.

A searchlight in the top of the tower moved slowly round the prison, picking out grey stone after grey stone, while the bell clanged and clanged. Then the bell stopped and the light went out, and after its brilliance the lamps at every corner, the lamps over every doorway lost for a moment their harshness. Shadows fell like earth from a tilted spade.

‘Just like children,' the warder said. ‘We look after 'em just like children. I don't suppose you had prisons like this out east, sir?'

‘No,' said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘not – er – quite like this.'

‘You should see the bakeries,' the warder said to the secretary. ‘Bake all our own bread. Beautiful sweet bread it is. The officers have just the same bread as the men.'

They walked on, their shoes tingling on the asphalt. ‘See that? That's the Roman Catholic chapel. Then there's a synagogue and a C. of E. That shed there. See that? That's where they see visitors. Like telephone boxes; wire on one side, glass in front. When they want to see they look through the glass, and when they want to talk they speak through the wire. Cunning, ain't it? After a year, of course, if they've behaved well, we allow 'em to embrace. They can come right outside on them seats.'

‘Humane, very humane,' the secretary said. The Assistant Commissioner nodded, his face yellower than ever in the lamplight. The old dispute between punishment and prevention had no meaning for him; he had nothing to do with prisons; when, as now, his mind was irritated by an unsympathetic companion, he was glad of the fact. His work was simply to preserve the existing order, and it made no odds to him whether justice condemned a man to live in a common cell in a small tropical prison, with only the space of floor he could cover with his body and the sun burning through the bars, or in a private cell in Block C with a table for library books and a sing-song once a week. He had seen men happy in the common cell, flinging a dice for extra bread, singing when the warder turned his back, and he had heard that men sometimes went mad in English prisons.

‘And that building there?' the secretary asked. ‘What's that? Billiard room? gymnasium?'

‘Execution shed,' said the warder, quickening his step, but brightening the next moment at the sight of another great barred cube of stone, ‘and here we are at Block A. Do you want to speak to Drover, sir?'

‘No, no,' the secretary said. ‘That wouldn't do. The Minister wouldn't like me to raise his hopes.'

The long empty passage lined with doors was not quite silent. It was filled with slow breathing. The sound sifted down from metal floor above metal floor gleaming with electricity. A warder's boots clanked on the steel steps as he wound his way above their heads to the top. The breathing fell on them, as they stood in the well of the building, like the dropping of soft mould.

‘They have an hour for reading before lights out.'

They were buried not only under the breaths of four hundred men, but under the turning of leaves. The faint rustle, like stray mice, could be heard along the passage in which they stood; sometimes, very faintly, it came down to them from the next layer of cells ten feet above their heads, but four floors higher even the warder's boots were inaudible, climbing through the blue glare.

They passed down the hall into a second smaller one which had been long disused. Once, the warder said, juvenile offenders had been lodged there. On the table in the centre of the hall, where the children had fed, a few everlasting flowers withered in jam jars and gathered dust. Two cells at the far end had been knocked into one to house the condemned man and his pair of watchers.

Drover was not reading; they spied on him through a little window the size of a postcard in the cell door. He was asleep upright on his chair, clenched hands hanging between his knees. He might have been sitting for his portrait in the grey loose unaccustomed clothes, seen at better advantage than half hidden by a bus's hood, but in his dreams he seemed to be in a bus still; a foot pressed the floor, the hands opened a little and twisted. Then his lids parted and his eyes appeared, like the clear blue sweets which children suck. He gave the effect of strength and stubbornness, of reliability and a gentle obtuseness. All his movements were gentle; when he picked up a book the large hands moved awkwardly, deprecatingly; they held the book for a while upside-down.

The secretary said: ‘You know, I seem to know his face. I suppose he wasn't on Route 13?'

‘No. 10
A
,' the warder said.

‘I suppose he's a type,' the secretary murmured, and there passed through his mind a whole parade of large heavy-coated quiet men seated in glass cages, twisting a wheel a fraction this way, a fraction that, wrestling with it at sharp corners, in country lanes turning up their thumbs to other drivers homeward bound through the rain from Maidenhead.

‘He's quiet,' the warder said, ‘we try to cheer him up a bit but he don't rightly seem to know where he is. A bit stupid, I think. Some of his mates came and saw him the other day. He couldn't get it into his head at first that they couldn't hear if he spoke through the glass. Wanted to see an' speak at the same time. But he had precious little to say for himself anyway. Got a bit interested when he heard that 10
A
's route was being changed. No,' said the chief warder, shaking his head, ‘he's not easy to know. Anyway, he'll have to change now he shares with two of us. If he don't get a bit matey, it'll be no better than a funeral.'

They walked back across the asphalt yard; the warders paced up and down in the tower, and the grey-clothed men were coming out of the concert room and crossing to Block C. ‘Has his wife been here?' the secretary asked.

‘She's quiet too,' the warder said. ‘They're a pair of them for quietness.'

‘Poor woman,' said the secretary heavily, and his thoughts turned to Lady Collins, whose husband's name had been called on the Stock Exchange before he went to prison for five years, and to the quiet and darkness of the house in Montague Square with the shutters up and the caretaker answering the telephone calls. But the Assistant Commissioner thought of the gossip in the fish-and-chip shops, the kind neighbours, and the pain of Monday mornings with the washing for one hung out in the back garden, and the voices calling to and fro over the wooden fences. This was not the worst pain, hope and fear in a cell, visits from the Chaplain; he had a dim memory that someone had once mapped hell in circles, and as the searchlight swooped and touched and passed, and the bell ceased clanging for Block C to go to their cells, he thought, ‘this is only the outer circle'. The great gate rolled back on its metal groove, and the car passed out. The secretary put his arm through the rest and said softly, with the chill of stone a little on his tongue: ‘You'll tell us then, won't you, what people think, what effect . . .'

The man who tears paper patterns and the male soprano were performing before the pit queues, the shutters of the shops had all gone up, the prostitutes were moving west. The feature pictures had come on the second time at the super-cinemas, and the taxi ranks were melting and re-forming. In the Café Français in Little Compton Street a man at the counter served two coffees and sold a packet of ‘Weights'. The match factory in Battersea pounded out the last ten thousand boxes, working overtime. The cars in the Oxford Street fun-fair rattled and bounced, and the evening papers went to press for the last edition – ‘The Streatham Rape and Murder. Latest Developments', ‘Mr MacDonald Flies to Lossiemouth', ‘Disarmament Conference Adjourns', ‘Special Service for Footballers', ‘Family of Insured Couple Draw £10,000. Insure Today'. At each station on the Outer Circle a train stopped every two minutes.

2

C
ONDER
opened one of the sound-proof boxes on the top floor and closed the door. Immediately all the typewriters in the room became silent, the keys dropped as softly as feathers. The chief reporter sitting on his desk with his knees pressed under his chin was interrupted in mid-sentence: ‘I was waiting at Winston's all the morning and when he came out with his head all bandaged up, he only said –' On the floor below the leader-writers sat in little studies and smoked cigarettes and chewed toffee, held up for the right word, looking in dictionaries, leading public opinion. On the floor below, the sub-editors sat at long tables and ran their blue pencils over the copy, scrawled headlines on scraps of paper, screwed the whole bunch into a metal shell, and sent it hurtling with a whine and a rattle to the composing room.

‘Central 2301.'

On the floor below the swing door turned and turned and the porter sat in his box asking: ‘Have you an appointment?'; the rolls of paper were wheeled like marble monuments towards the machines which turned and turned spitting out the
Evening Watch
pressed and folded: ‘Mr MacDonald Flies Home to Lossiemouth. Are you Insured?', packing them up in piles of a hundred, spinning them down a steel incline, through a patch of darkness, into the waiting van.

‘Press Bureau, please.'

A messenger scurried upstairs from the sub-editors' room to the leader-writers, from the leader-writers to the investigation department: ‘Where is Topolobampo?' In the reporters' room the typewriter keys fell noiselessly, the chief reporter sat on his desk, while his mouth opened and shut, Conder's breath misted the cold glass.

‘Yes, this is Conder. Have you got any dope about the Streatham murder? Can't you invent something? Oh, well. No, the Chief's not much interested in Drover. What about Paddington? I suppose you are still clinging to Ruttledge. Not? Not sufficient evidence? You mean you've detained the wrong man again, I know you. There might be a leader in that if the Chief's had a bad lunch. Don't blame me. Yes, I shall trot along. Pink, very pink these days. Is it a good story? My missus likes me to be in bed by eleven. Oh, all right. The “Green Man” at 10.45. All the children send their love.'

Conder rang off and opened the door. The typewriters rattled like cavalry, and the chief reporter said: ‘I asked her, “But what were you
doing
in his pyjamas?” ‘Conder's face and his bald head gleamed softly in the lamplight. He said with habitual melancholy: ‘Nothing doing at the Yard.'

‘Nothing about Streatham?'

‘No, and they've let Ruttledge go. He was the wrong man. They tried to give me a bromide about Drover.'

‘The Chief's not interested in your Reds.'

‘No. Can I go? I've got a party meeting this evening.'

‘Feeling red?' the chief reporter asked with anxiety.

‘Pink. Very pink,' said Conder in a low sad voice, his vitality visibly ebbing.

‘We ought to get a line about Ruttledge into the final if we can. Trot it along to the stone and show it to the subs on the way.'

Conder took the lift to the floor below. It was quicker to walk, but for a few seconds, as he jerked downwards in the ancient metal cage, he was a captain of industry leaving his director's room in Imperial Chemicals. He stepped out and became again the successful journalist, the domesticated man with a devoted wife and six children to support, a taxpayer, the backbone of the country. But his round shining face, his bald head, melancholy mouth and heavy lids never altered.

A man passed him in the corridor walking rapidly and called over his shoulder: ‘Well, Conder, how are the Reds?' Conder nodded silently without a smile, Conder who was no longer the backbone of the country, but the hidden hand. Conder the revolutionary. But flick, flick, like the leaves of a book Conder's character turned and changed, and by the chief sub-editor's chair he was again the able journalist, the husband and the father. ‘How are the kids, Conder?'

‘I'm afraid of whooping cough. The youngest. They've had the doctor this afternoon. I shall know when I get home. Shall I try and get this Ruttledge par in under Streatham?'

‘They may have to put it in the stop press. Is it worth a bill, d'you think, Conder?' and flick, flick, Conder was the man who knew the secrets of Scotland Yard, the crime reporter. But the same melancholy voice which spoke of whooping cough replied: ‘Nothing to it.' In the composing-room the clerk asked him: ‘How's the wife, Mr Conder?' while he searched the papers on his desk for the page plan, and at the stone the compositor, loosening the great slab of metal type to insert Conder's message, asked: ‘And how does the new house suit you, Mr Conder?' For while they knew nothing of the captain of industry and laughed at the revolutionary and smiled in private at the intimate of Scotland Yard, they had accepted for ten years the family man, although he too was only one among the many impersonations of Conder's sad and unsatisfied brain. But it never occurred to him as strange that they should arbitrarily choose to recognize this as reality among all his unrealities, even during the few minutes of the day when he was the genuine Conder, an unmarried man with a collection of foreign coins, who lived in a bed-sitting-room in Little Compton Street.