RETURN TO LONDON
By E. H. M. RELTON
ONE expected, on returning to England after eighteen months spent in Canada and the United States, to find things altered. We had kept, of course, in vicarious touch. But correspondents were scared, a little, of the censor ; experience of newspapers had taught us to read between the lines ; and if, perhaps, our most eliable informants were those who followed us out, even they ontradicted each other. Some facts we knew. Soap had been rationed since we left ; fuel-targets had appeared ; the basic petrol allowance had been stopped. ClOthes-rationing, which we saw troduced, had had time to take effect. The bread had turned an o ff-white, if not definitely brown. Fooid, on the whole, we gathered, vas in some respects scarcer ; but in others, we believed that an ngenious trick, known as dehydration, had caused an improve-
ent. Our absence had seen the dwindling of air-raids and rubber, he conscription of women, and the invasion of our island by the A.merican army. With such older institutions, such' as the blackout nd the earlier food-rationing, we had lost touch. What were our mpressions on returning?
My own, at least, were unexpected. I had imagined, I think, a istinctly shabby lot of people (men in patched suits, women in bare cgs or cotton stockings) with the backs of their hands perhaps a ittle grained, people whom a shortage of soap and hot water might, or all I knew, have compelled to offend in a way which even their
st friends would shrink from openly criticising (if, indeed, being n a similar state, they were able so to do)., I was looking for he usual stoic gloom, for cynicism, for apathetic, for fatalistic, esignation. I was even prepared to see my countrymen enjoying hemselves in a queer, perverse way—a sort of mass-masochism, like he Germans.
I saw none of these things. Londoners, far from being shabby, ad a clean, prosperous air. (Whence came, I wondered, all the autiful clothes?) The streets and houses were. neat. Nearly vu years' immunity from air-raids had wrought a form of super- rganisation of which the incredible punctuality of trains was but ne example. Food was sparse but, to ensure health, adequate ; in he case of those who, like myself, abhor carrots and potatoes, it
• ppealed less to the palate than to the appetite. Everybody seemed cry brisk and purposeful and tough. This toughness, indeed, was extremely remarkable. It compared • th the flabbiness that I remembered in pre-war London, with the ecadent and pallid faces that have slowly vanished with sports cars nd road-houses and char-a-banc outings and women of leisure. It as different, too, from the intermediate stage, from the demeanour f the blitz or period of training. Then, apprentice war-mongers, ere fledgling savages, we were bruised and bewildered, resentful
t resolute. Then, in the fields of our agony, was sown the seed f hate which now is ripening for the harvest.
London has an air of tenseness. Something is about to happen. omething big, but you don't know what. Men and women are nt, seriously determined, steeling themselves for action and sacrifice. Restrictions, discomforts, official supervision that smacks in some degree of Fascism—these we suffer but do not enjoy. Nor do we discuss them. But they are felt ; they are very definite ; they form the powder-charge to the shell of personal fury against the German people which is shortly going to explode with devastating effect, somewhere. There is no sign, I thought, of apathy or resig- nation. Instead, there is a healthy impatience, a straining at the leash. This is a nation in its fourth year of total war. It has done - with play-acting, and it will brook no shirkers. It is still kind, but now also it is stern. Its democracy is being stretched to its limits, but it is still democracy.
. If London has not, in these days, the same infectious air of gaiety, of fast and furious well-being, as New York, it is very crowded, and there is still, I found, plenty to do, if you can afford it. Money buys the privilege more of privacy than of luxury. You can take your lady friend out to dinner and, a dance, and pay five pounds or one, but the food and wines you have are the same either way. Many attempts of rich people to spend money arc both futile and wasteful. Members of dance-bands are old, slack and appallingly inefficient. Waiters are decrepit. Women military police look funny. It was odd, I thought, to see the grimy, drily humorous cockney bus-conductor replaced by a conductress from Roedean.
Britain, once more, has acquired character. Into the soul of a people which, 'for well over a year, alone defied the fury of the Axis world there has entered again the iron of pride, the cold steel of arrogance. Self-assured, self-controlled, we have put on our old armour of reticence. The people walk with dignity ; the humblest private, the poorest waitress or shop-girl, - is a Churchill in miniature. Is all this, I wondered, to impress the Americans?
Above all, I detected a new spirit, a fresh and rather complex awareness of Britain's destiny, which was totally absent when I left. It is a strange, struggling, contradictory, inarticulate spirit ; half- formed ; a revolution, a first groping towards the new era. It is the spirit which can acclaim the Prime Minister's (and therefore its own) declared resolve, in face of a good deal of criticism from America, to hang on to the Empire. It can, while still being able to stomach the neutrality of Eire, be stern enough to allow the leader of the Indian Congress Party to starve himself, if necessary to death. In the middle of this grimmest of- all wars, a war of survival, of total victory or total defeat, it can take time off and, over a beer, as it were, in a pub, praise and rationally discuss such a kindly revolution in social economy as the Beveridge Report. These contradictions lead nowhere ; the paradox cannot be explained. The only clear issue is that our attitude is changing. A democratic New Order is emerging ; a wider and better emancipation, it seems, might be won, in combination with an enlarged sense of national and international duty, a sterner personal discipline. Britain is aware of her responsibility.. It may be that at present she is unsure of her rightful place in the world after this war ; but on the issue of deciding what sort of a world it will be she will yield, unless I am mistaken, to nobody.
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