There were soldiers everywhere. The parks of London had been given over as temporary camps, vehicle depots, and grazing for their horses. In the streets he came across columns of troops marching in cheerful mood, being greeted by catcalls from the urchins and blown kisses from strolling girls. Once Frank saw a detachment of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, marching off to their own oceanic battlefield. And on the steps of St Paul’s, under a dome still bearing a Heat-Ray scar, while a military band played, a senior officer, he thought a colonel, harangued the crowd, picking out men in civilian clothes: ‘Will you join up? Will you?’
Frank sensed no real fear, no apprehension, not that day. Rather there was a sense of excitement, if anything. In a way, he says, it was as if everybody had been waiting for this since ’07. The country might face a struggle once more, but it had prevailed before – why not again? Certainly he saw no signs of large-scale flight, as he might have expected. Indeed, around the recruiting pitches, even outside the stations, there was a kind of carnival atmosphere – the crowds, sweethearts strolling to see the spectacle, vendors of hot food and fruit and lemonade, the newsboys barking out the headlines of the latest specials. Frank thought all this could be regarded as a triumph by Marvin and his government. However cynically motivated – for the years of militaristic harangues of the government had surely had much to do with control of the populace – and however misguided and brief this sense of exhilaration would prove to be, better to be optimistic at such a moment; better to be purposeful, rather than afraid.
And Frank would write in his diary, one of the first entries, of how he had marvelled that the post offices were open – on a Saturday! ‘It must be a national emergency,’ he noted.
Towards evening he laid out his uniform. He didn’t brag about it – even I didn’t know much about it – but Frank the doctor, though a mere Fyrd volunteer, held an honorary rank of Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He would tell me he was proud of wearing the polished badge, the Rod of Asclepius, on his dark blue beret.
He says he slept well. This was despite the din outside, the unending traffic – as day turned to night, and despite official restrictions, some informal, unplanned evacuations had begun, people just driving or riding or walking out of the city – and there was too the noise of a few wild celebrations across the city on this last night of peace.
I have no reason to doubt him, though I slept badly, in the sylvan calm of Stanmore.
12
THE MOBILISATION
Frank was woken at six in the morning by a clamour of church bells, as we all were across the country, that Sunday morning. In London there followed whistles and shouts, and the squawks of loudhailers from trawling vans.
Frank had laid out his breakfast the night before, expecting an early start. He did not turn on his own Megaphone, though he suspected he was breaking some minor ordinance by not doing so. He washed, shaved, donned his uniform and boots and greatcoat and blue beret, shoved his toilet kit into his backpack – he holstered his service revolver – and he turned off the gas and electric, pocketed his papers, and left his flat.
Outside, Gower Street was transformed.
Police and military seemed to be everywhere. New posters on walls and lampposts and placards on patrolling vans declared the imposition of emergency regulations: martial law, a curfew, rationing, various restrictions on movement. And a boy was selling papers just outside Frank’s building, yet another Daily Mail special – on a Sunday – with an image of Churchill, Marvin’s minister of war, rolling up his sleeves sternly over a bold declaration:
Frank did not trouble to buy a copy. Nor did he pay much attention to the exhortations of a government that was probably already in flight to Birmingham once again – Churchill might be an honourable exception, as he had been in the First War – along with such foreign diplomats as had not fled to the ships and overseas, and, probably, the rich and influential in general.
Though there were pedestrians everywhere, there were very few civilian vehicles on the roads. The reason became obvious when Frank reached his own car, which had a military requisition notice pasted to its windscreen, along with a reclaim docket. Frank just laughed and pocketed the reclaim slip. He would manage to keep this docket safe, in fact, throughout the Second War, but he never saw his car again, nor received a penny in compensation. However he had plenty of time, and the walk to Albany Street, his muster station, was short. It was quite a contrast to the day of the great panic in which we had both been caught up in the last War, when the Martians had advanced on the capital. There was no panic this time, no sense of feverish unpreparedness. He had the general impression that, like himself, people seemed to know where to go, what to do – there was an air of purpose, not the collapse of order.
In another echo of his previous experience he walked across to Great Ormond Street, meaning to spend a few minutes in the chapel of the Foundling Hospital there – it was after all a Sunday. In the grounds the Boys’ Band played martial tunes. Frank knew that many of the boys who passed through this place went on to the armed forces, swapping one institutional life for another, and he wondered how many old boys might be preparing to face the Martians that morning. Inside the grand two-storey chapel Frank found a service in progress; a notice claimed there would be services all day.. Rather than listening to the rector’s words, Frank spent much of the service staring at the grand portrait of Christ with a child that hung on the wall there – he can’t remember the artist, and when he returned to the Hospital after the War he found the chapel destroyed, the painting gone.
From there, with no more prevarication, Frank marched direct to Albany Street. In this broad residential street of grand terraces, now hastily boarded up, he found himself part of a growing throng – he said it was like joining a crowd for a football match, save that all were in uniform, or else were sweethearts or mothers or children clinging to someone in uniform. They were regulars mostly, but some were reserve or Fyrd, as Frank was. Some were kilted – they were men of the Argylls and the London Scottish – and there was a detachment of what he learned were Guards, even a troop of marines in their blue war-kit.
But there was organisation imposed on the throng. Military policemen had fenced off the street and, armed with clipboards and pencils, they briskly read each newcomer’s call-up notice and directed him to his station – or her, for there were many women in uniform throughout the crowd. A bleak moral victory for the suffragettes!
Thus, gradually, Frank was filtered to a crowd of medical types gathering at the junction of Albany Street and Albert Road, male officers wearing blue caps like his own, and women of the Imperial Military Nursing Service in their nurses’ uniforms and capes. They joined a column forming up inside Regent’s Park itself; they would be marched across the Park to Baker Street, for transport to ‘your position at the anticipated front’, as an MP put it. From this Frank deduced that by now the cylinders’ fall must have been predicted quite precisely.