It's a Battlefield Read online

  ‘The Minister argued in this way. You, more than any other single man, have your fingers on London: the poorer parts in particular.’

  The narrow yellow face showed no pleasure; the Assistant Commissioner loved accuracy. ‘The poorer parts only. I don’t – er understand this place.’

  ‘Oh,’ the secretary said with airy amusement, ‘I can answer for this place. If you can answer for – shall we say the docks, for Paddington, Notting Hill, and King’s Cross, the suburbs, Balham and Streatham, the –’

  ‘Streatham,’ the Assistant Commissioner murmured, interrupting the secretary’s shabby pageant.

  ‘If during the next week you can send in a private report on what you think the effect of a reprieve or an execution would be –’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ the Assistant Commissioner said with an unusual lack of hesitation.

  ‘A personal favour, dear chap,’ the private secretary pleaded, ‘because he’s so tired, so worried –’

  ‘He’s got the report of the case, the judge’s notes.’

  ‘But if you could see him now, fighting every inch of the way, local opinion, tied houses.’

  ‘If he finds it hard to decide, he might see the man for himself.’

  ‘Would that be possible? Not for the Minister, of course, he’s far too busy with the licensing, but perhaps for me.’ The secretary smiled and tapped his cigarette. ‘He depends, you know, a good deal on my advice.’ Modestly he held the Minister’s dependence up under the wide concealed light as a whimsical curiosity, a quaintly ugly antique.

  ‘I’ll take you to the prison now if it would – er interest, help you.’

  ‘Does that mean that you consent, that you’ll let us know,’ he dabbed again at his automatic lighter, ‘what people think about it?’

  Again the Assistant Commissioner corrected him: ‘The poorer parts,’ and again with a studied gesture towards the leaf-green sofas and the two women whom he had left and who now smiled at him from a far corner, the secretary answered for the Berkeley. ‘Oh, I can speak for the rest.’

  The Assistant Commissioner, digging blunt nails into the sofa and heaving himself upright, said sharply: ‘Have you ever been inside a prison?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You will be – interested.’ He watched the bland face with distaste: he distrusted any man who showed so little sign of employment. Light employment, ‘half-time work’, had no meaning for the Assistant Commissioner, throwing his whole shrewd slow mind into every detail of his duty, into a crocheted béret, a second-hand trunk, a park chair, a cloakroom ticket; nor did the men with whom he spent his days disguise the fact that they worked – worked seriously, with a sense of responsibility, to keep life in them – detectives, bus-drivers, pawnbrokers, thieves.

  ‘Most interesting, I’m sure.’

  He preferred the morbid watchers at the prison gates, waiting for the striking of the clock, the posting of the typed notice (‘carried out in the presence of .the Governor, the prison doctor . . .’). Shivering in winter with the early cold, in summer touched by the pale heatless sun, they were made aware of what it was that kept them safe behind their shop counters, in their walk from fishmonger to grocer: they knew something of the stones, the rope, and the lime (‘The executioner was Pierpoint’).

  ‘I have never seen a murderer,’ the private secretary said. ‘As far as I know of course.’

  Yes, the Assistant Commissioner thought, I prefer those others. He said: ‘We can take a bus from the Ritz.’ He did not see why the country should pay for a taxi in order to satisfy the private secretary’s interest, or to help the Home Secretary to a decision which he should be able to reach without difficulty, all the papers being before him, including the judge’s notes.

  ‘I have a car just round the corner.’

  Something worried the Assistant Commissioner. He stood hesitating on the threshold of Piccadilly. Something had been said which he did not understand, it belonged to an alien world, but it was his duty to understand, something about. . . . The lights were all lit, the shop girls crowded the pavement on the way to the Underground. ‘What were they saying?’ he asked, ‘about a pram on – er a taxi?’

  The secretary laughed. ‘A pram – on a taxi – how can I tell?’ He laughed so loudly that two shop girls turned small vivid faces towards him; a clerk in dark clothes, carrying an attaché case, halted suddenly and stared at them, watching the two men turn the corner, rolling the phrase over on his tongue: ‘A pram on a taxi,’ convinced that he would never forget the meaningless joke which had set the men laughing.

  The secretary sat with his bowler hat upon his knees, his right arm through a rest, talking of this and that. The blinds clicked down in the windows of the Knightsbridge modistes, and the end of Sloane Street was lost in blue haze; in the King’s Road furniture was being carried indoors for the night. ‘But perhaps you don’t read novels.’ Over Battersea Bridge the gulls came sweeping down to the level of the glass, and the lights from the Embankment crossed the grey flow, touched two barges piled with paper, rested on the mud, and the stranded boats and the walls of the mill. ‘It all depends, of course, on her husband.’ The fish-and-chip shops were opening, and all down the Battersea Bridge Road and past Clapham Junction, through a wilderness of trams and second-hand clothes shops and public lavatories and evening institutes, the Assistant Commissioner wondered, as he often wondered, at the beauty of the young tinted faces. Their owners handed over pennies for packets of fried chips, they stood in queues for the cheapest seats at the cinemas, and through the dust and dark and degradation they giggled and chattered like birds. They were poor, they were overworked, they had no future, but they knew the right tilt of a béret, the correct shade of lipstick. ‘I should so much prefer Oslo.’ They are admirable, he thought, and as the car left the crowds and the tramlines, he was saddened for a moment like a man leaving his home. Candahar Road, Khyber Terrace, Kabul Street, the Victorian villas wavered in the mist like a shaking of shakos in old imperial wars.

  The car climbed a hill and crossed the railway line by an hotel. Turning, the beams of the head-lamps caught a few bare trees, and a sandpit where children played in the dark. The car followed a long straight road beside the cutting, and a train overtook them, tearing south, dropping sparks on the roof. The secretary nodded towards a dark mass across the line. ‘Is that the prison?’

  ‘A school for girls.’

  The car turned again; a policeman opened the door of a blue box beside a public-house, and a red tongue of light flickered up a glass globe on the roof. They drove between an allotment and a nursery garden towards a gate twenty feet high and, behind a wall, the roofs of square buildings and a tall hexagonal tower. ‘We are here,’ the Assistant Commissioner said, and they both sat quiet for a moment in the car, while a train went by unseen past the allotments, and the nursery gardens. ‘Odd to hear that in your cell,’ the secretary said with a touch of gloom.

  ‘They can tell the time by it,’ the Assistant Commissioner said.

  The gates slid softly open pushed by a warder along a metal run, then closed behind them. They were surrounded by stone and hard lamplight. Somewhere a great many men were singing. ‘Block C’s at a concert,’ the chief warder explained, and passing the door of the hall, they heard the tinkle of a piano which had not been tuned for a long time. Up in the glass chamber at the top of the hexagonal tower warders walked to and fro.

  ‘The Governor’s at the concert,’ the chief warder said.

  ‘Don’t disturb him. This gentleman wants to take a look at Drover.’

  The chief warder turned his old benevolent eyes towards the secretary. ‘Has the gentleman been here before?’

  ‘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. 10A,’ 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 10A’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, wit
h 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

  CONDER 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.