The New Men (3 page)

I did not think so. Rose said: ‘That makes us a very cosy little party.’

He spoke with a flick of the tongue, but he did not mean that it was strange for him, the Permanent Secretary, to be invited along with someone many rungs lower (I had started as what the Civil Service called a principal). Rose was too confident a man to bother about trivialities like that; he was himself formal, but he only objected to informality in others when it interfered with his administrative power.

The Minister came in, carrying a coalscuttle, on his hand a grimy cloth glove. He knelt by the grate, picked out lumps of coal and built up the fire. He was naturally familiar and unobtrusive in manner, but sometimes I thought he had developed it into an act. When people called on him in Whitehall, he would take their hats and coats and stow them punctiliously away in his cupboard. Kneeling by the fire, he looked thin-shouldered, wispy, like an elderly clerk.

‘I just wanted to have a word with you two,’ he said, still bending down.

‘An old boy came in to see me a day or two ago,’ he went on, as he pulled up a chair between us, round the fire. The ‘old boy’ was an eminent physicist, not more than sixty, that is, ten years Bevill’s junior. And the visit had taken place a week before: Bevill had been thinking things out.

‘I think I ought to put you two in the swim,’ he said. ‘Though, as you may have gathered, I’m a great believer in no one knowing more than he’s got to know to do his job. And I don’t mind telling you that I’ve wondered whether either of you have got to know this time. But Eliot must, if he’s going to be much use to me, and there may be some action for you, Rose, not now, perhaps in a year or so’s time.’

‘If you think it wiser that
I
shouldn’t know till then, Minister,’ said Rose. Underneath the courtesy, he was irked by Bevill’s talent for using two words where one would do. I thought that he underrated the old man, particularly when, as now, he settled down comfortably to another Polonius-like discourse on security. The first thing, said the Minister, was to forget all about the official hierarchy, the next was to forget that you had any relatives. If you possess a secret, he said, your secretary may have to know: but not your second-in-command: and not your wife.

‘If you decide to leave me out at this stage, I shall perfectly well understand,’ said Rose, getting back to relevance.

‘No, my dear chap. It wouldn’t be practical,’ said the Minister. ‘I shouldn’t be able to pull the wool over your ears.’

The Minister sometimes got his idioms mixed up. Rose went on watching him with pale, heavy-lidded eyes, which met the old man’s frank, ingenuous, blue ones. With the same simple frank expression, Bevill said: ‘As a matter of fact, some of these scientists believe they can present us with a great big bang. Like thousands of tons of TNT.
That
would be a futurist war,
if
you like. That old boy the other day said we ought to be ready to put some money on it.’

It sounded like the gossip I had heard in Cambridge, and I said so.

‘Ought you to have heard?’ said Bevill, who thought of science in nothing but military terms. ‘These chaps will talk. Whatever you do, you can’t stop them talking. But they’re pushing on with it. I’ve collected three appreciations already. Forget all I tell you until you have to remember – that’s what I do. But the stuff to watch is what they call a uranium isotope.’

He said the words slowly as though separating the syllables for children to spell. ‘U.235,’ he added, as though domesticating a foreign name. To each of the three of us, the words and symbols might as well have been in Hittite, though Rose and I would have been regarded as highly educated men.

The Minister went on to say that, though the scientists ‘as usual’ were disagreeing among themselves, some of them believed that making a ‘superbomb’ was now only a matter of a series of techniques. They also believed that whichever side got the weapon first would win the war.

‘These people always think that it’s easier to win wars than I do,’ he added imperturbably.

‘How soon before it’s a feasible proposition?’ Rose asked him.

‘Not tomorrow,’ said Bevill. ‘Anything up to ten years.’

‘That’s a very long-term prospect,’ said Rose.

‘I’m not an optimist,’ the Minister replied. ‘It may be a very long-term war. But I agree with you, my dear chap, it doesn’t sound like business for this time. Still it won’t do any harm to watch out and keep our powder dry.’

‘Many thanks for giving me the warning, Minister,’ said Rose, deciding there was nothing more of use to be learned that afternoon. ‘Many, many thanks.’

But before Rose could get away, Bevill showed us his private dossier of the uranium project. We must not refer to it again by that name, he said: as with all other projects of high secrecy, he copied out the ‘appreciations’ in his own hand, keeping no copies: the documents were then mounted in a loose-leaf cover, on which he printed a pet name.

‘I’m going to show you my name for this new stunt,’ he said, with a smile that was frank, shy and eager. And into that smile there crept the almost salacious pleasure that many men show as they talk of secrets.

He turned over the cover, and we saw, painted in bold capitals, the words:

MR TOAD

‘That’s what we’ll call it here, if you don’t mind,’ he added.

IT still did not seem significant. That winter, one or two of us who were in the secret discussed it, but, although we looked round the room before we spoke, it did not catch hold of us as something real.

Once Francis Getliffe, whom I had known longer than the other scientists, said to me: ‘I hope it’s
never
possible.’

But even he, though he did not want any men anywhere to possess this power, spoke without heaviness, as if it were a danger of the future, a piece of science fiction, like the earth running into a comet’s path.

All the arrangements of those first months of Mr Toad were on the pettiest scale – a handful of scientists, nearly all of them working part time, scattered round three or four university laboratories; a professor wondering whether he might spend three hundred and fifty pounds for some extra help; an improvised committee, meeting once a month, sending its minutes to the Minister in longhand.

In the summer of 1940, on one of those mornings of steady, indifferent sunshine that left upon some of us, for years afterwards, an inescapable memory, I was walking down Piccadilly and noticed half a dozen men coming out of the Royal Society’s door in Burlington House. I knew most of them by sight. They were scientists, nearly all youngish men: one or two were carrying continental briefcases; they might have been coming from an examiners’ meeting. In fact, they were the committee, and the sight of them brought back the Minister’s pet name, which, with the war news dragging like an illness, did not seem much of a joke.

Soon afterwards, in the Minister’s office we received intelligence that the Germans were working on the bomb. Although we had all assumed it, the news was sharp: it added another fear. Also it roughened the tongues of those who were crusading for the project. Step by step they won for it a little more attention. By the spring of 1941 they obtained sanction for a research establishment – not a grand establishment like those working on radio and the immediate weapons of war, but one with perhaps a hundred scientists to their thousands. For a site, they picked on a place called Barford – which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon.

It became one of my duties to help them collect staff. I could hardly have had a more niggling job, for almost all scientists were by this time caught up in the war. Even for projects of high priority it was difficult enough to extract them, and so far as priority was concerned, the Barford project still had none at all. The only good scientists not yet employed were refugees, and it was clear that they would have to form the nucleus of Barford.

Accepting those facts, the Barford superintendent and his backers still made a claim, a modest claim, for at least one or two of the better young Englishmen. It was thus that I was asked to sound Walter Luke; if we could get him released from his radio work, would he be willing to move to Barford?

Then I wondered about Martin. I had heard little from him. I should have heard, if things had been going well, if like a good many scientists of his age, he had fallen on his feet. For eighteen months he had been doing a piece of technical routine. He seemed to be doing it just as competently, neither less nor more, than a hundred other young men in the naval ports. From a distance I had been watching, without being able to help.

I could not say much about Barford; in any case I knew that in this matter his temperament would work like mine; we said yes, but we did not like to be managed. Nevertheless, I could drop a hint. He could see for himself that it might give him a chance.

Later, my memory tended to cheat; it made me look as though I had the gift of foresight. That was quite untrue. In the spring of 1941, there were several other projects on Bevill’s files which seemed to me of a different order of importance from Mr Toad. As for Barford, I did not believe that anything would come of it, and my chief interest was that it might give Martin a better chance.

IT was some weeks before either Luke or Martin could get to London, but then I arranged to see them both on the same afternoon in May.

Martin was the first to arrive. It was over a year since we had met, and, as we enquired about each other, there was the sense of well-being, the wiping away of anxiety’s fret, that one only gets with those who have become part of the deep habit of one’s life.

Soon I asked: ‘How is Irene?’

‘Very well,’ said Martin, looking straight into my eyes, giving nothing away.

He walked round my office, admiring the Regency mantelpiece and the view over Whitehall. He was rejoicing that I was having something of a success – for, entirely through the Minister’s backing, I had just been promoted. In a section of the war, I now had my bit of subfusc power. I was for shrugging it off; but Martin, however, set more store by official honours than I did.

‘Are you sure you’re making the most of it?’ he said, with a proprietorial, insistent air,

He was delighted, and in his delight there was no envy. Yet suddenly he was sounding knowledgeable and worldly; it was strange, out of the haze of family memories, to see him standing there, a calculating man. If he had a success himself, I thought, he would have all the tricks ready to exploit it.

Actually, he had nothing to exploit. I listened to him saying that, as far as his job went, there was still nothing whatever to report. No change. I was full of irritation, for, when you hope for someone as I did for him, you blame them for their own misfortunes.

‘So far as there’s been any luck in the family,’ I said, ‘I’ve had it.’

‘I don’t believe in luck to that extent,’ said Martin, without complaint.

‘You’ve had none,’ I said.

Then Martin smiled, and brought out a phrase which would have been meaningless to any but us two. ‘You’ve got someone to live up to.’ It was a phrase of our mother’s, holding me up before him as an example, for I had been her favourite son. I recalled her as she lay dying, instructing me sternly not to think too little of Martin. No injunction could ever have been less called for; but later I believed that she was making amends to herself for not having loved him more.

Martin was talking of her when, an hour before I expected him, Walter Luke came in. Ever since I had known him as a younger man – he was still not thirty – he had thrown the whole of his nature into everything he felt. I had seen him triumphant with every cell of his body, as a human integer of flesh and bone: and I had seen him angry. That afternoon he was ashamed of himself, and it was not possible for a man to throw more of his force into being ashamed.

‘Hallo, Lewis. Hallo, Martin,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been ticked off. I deserved it, and I got it, and I’m beginning to wonder when I shall manage to grow up.’

He slumped on to a chair, immersed in his dejection. His backbone usually so straight in his thick energetic frame, curved disconsolately against the leather; yet he exuded vigour, and both Martin and I were smiling at him. His cheeks were not as ruddy as when I first saw him at high table, five years before. In the last two years he had carried responsibility, and even on his physique the strain had told. Now he looked his age; there were grey hairs at his temples; but his voice remained eager, rich and youthful, still bearing a rumble from the Plymouth dockyard where he was brought up.

He had just come from one of the radio committees, where he had been arguing with someone he called a ‘stuffed shirt’ (and who was highly placed). The stuffed shirt had been canvassing his favourite idea, ‘and I tell you,’ said Luke, ‘if I’d been asked to think of something bloody silly, I couldn’t have thought up anything so fantastically bloody silly as that.’ Luke had apparently proceeded to say so, using his peculiar resources of eloquence. The chairman, who was even more highly placed than the stuffed shirt, had told him this was not the right spirit: he was thinking of his own ideas, and didn’t want the other’s to work.

‘The old bleeder was perfectly right,’ said Luke with simplicity. He went on: ‘I never know whether I’ve got cross because some imbecile is talking balderdash or whether my own precious ego is getting trampled on. I wish one of you shrewd chaps would teach me.’

Walter Luke was neither pretending nor laughing at himself; he was contrite. Then, with the same freshness and resilience, he had finished with his contrition. He sat up straight in his chair, and asked what I wanted to see him about.

I said we had better have a word alone. Luke said: ‘Why have we got to turf Martin out?’

‘Lewis is right,’ said Martin, getting ready to go.

‘It depends which surprise-packet he’s going to pull out of the bag,’ said Luke, with a broad, fresh grin. He looked at me: ‘Barford?’