EVACUATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL
By FRANCIS GOWER
MORE than four months have passed since the staff of this company moved into the two country houses, three miles apart and twenty-five miles from its old home in the City, and we are still trying to adapt ourselves to the strange new ways of working, sleeping and finding amusement. But we have evolved a modus vivendi. Let us look at each house in turn.
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The first is a large Georgian mansion, standing in a hun- dred acres of park. Eighty clerical workers here dispose themselves five in a bedroom, sit by day at their desks in the library, the dining-hall and the drawing-room (all incon- gruously hung with ancestral portraits and filled with busts in alabaster, marble and bronze) and try to think up some- thing original to do, or somewhere to go, during the long dark evenings. Most are young, but—except the typists— married and parted by evacuation from their wives. (They go home at week-ends.) This small, isolated community sees none but the most vicarious aspects of the war. There is a social life, of course; but such factors as prejudice, repression and an enforced narrowness of both space and outlook combine in rendering it hard to tell where work ends and play begins. Social and fficial existences are inextricably bound up. Bureaucracy exhales from the desks, the files, the typewriters even, when, at our weekly dances, they are stuffed to one side or when hey confront a giggling crowd hurriedly fulfilling them- elves at progressive ping-pong ; and in an office all men, as veryone knows, are unequal. But this persists despite real democratic effort: the best f us have to share a bedroom and stand in a queue for food hich we convey to unappointed places at a common dining- able. Liberty is lost not so much by rule (though many es there are and have to be) as by gentle and insidious plication. Nothing pays, in this place, like tact. But even this can be overdone ; and the directors would, I think, welcome a little initiative and a display of character by individuals who are far too servile and ingratiating. This is proved by the obvious conflict between vanity and modesty in these great men, producing in them attitudes at once patronising and hail-fellow-well-met, which are probably as distasteful to them as they are paradoxical to others.
Clearly—though I doubt if they are fully aware of this— these directors have a tremendous power, like the Nazis and the owners of certain factories in this country, to mould their staff's ideas. Quite unconsciously, this power is wielded from time to time when we witness colour films of the company's industrial plant and of life in the British overseas possession where it happens to be. The films have been shot purely for amusement on a eine camera by one of the staff who is now home on leave. One need not, of course, attend these shows. In fact, there is little else to do; every- one else goes ; and it is not easy, or tactful, to avoid being victimised by the mild form of mass hysteria which makes one applaud the appearance on the screen of a director or one of his family. And though these may be admirable people in a number of ways, they are even less worthy of such adulation than is, for instance, the National Socialist State.
Of creative leisure in the Georgian house there is not the faintest sign. Work is often continued unofficially from five o'clock until dinner-time and even afterwards, not because there is any to do, but out of boredom, or habit, or a desire to impress. Outside entertainments are restricted through darkness and distance to people with cars and petrol, and through lack of the will for anything else, to the pub and the cinema. Inside the house, few people read ; nobody plays cards or round games ; all, save none, play table-tennis with a frenzy and perpetuation that are frightening. For the rest, four months in this place have seen the small change of sexual gossip inexorably swell to monstrous proportions until it now changes hands in the clearing-house of the soul. Truly, here, are the resources of the human spirit on a war footing.
What contrast is the other, and smaller, house! Here we have half a dozen engineers and some twenty draughtsmen, again young and nearly all married. This house, which none of the real giants of the company ever enters, is in charge U a senior engineer, a man of tact, imagination and charm ; and in less than a week he, and others, had foreseen the long, dreary winter evenings. But we saw, also, unlimited opportunity for development ; for we had all lived in London or its suburbs for all our lives—cooped up alone, with few friends, a good deal of urban despair, and no civic sense at all. We had been cogs in a machine that was going no one knew whither. This was our chance. We had our own community here ; we were a world, a universe apart.
We held meetings and formed committees: for discus- sions, the library, sports, A.R.P. work. Everyone had some- thing of his own choice to do. Even the office-boy found himself appointed assistant secretary of the shovella'penny section, and very important, a man of purpose and respon- sibility, at that. Nor is anyone slow to fulfil, in the most enthusiastic way, the functons of his office. In September the tennis organiser aroused, in people who had never played before, a passion for tennis. We have a team of footballers, keen as a north-east wind. Nearly everyone reads a good deal. When, on an evening a week, we debate some intel- ligent subject all but two or three of us attend, and the majority not only speak but are obliged by an over-zealous chairman to leave their seats and march several paces to a rostrum in order to do so. Periodically a member of the staff is prevailed upon to read a paper or, preferably, deliver a lecture. We follow, but are quickly able to forget about, the course of the war and its implications. With such diverse outlets few of us, in the nature of things, can suffer from inhibitions; there are hardly any squabbles and everyone is, I believe, about as happy as it is given to one to be in these days.
Obviously, the problem of evacuation and the individual is a large and many-sided one. I have touched, very briefly, on a particular case. It is equally clear that from the dual effect produced by this case—an effect which seems to be caused by little except the relative absence, in the smaller house, of prejudice and privilege—it is hard to draw a con- clusion. The industrial efficiency of the staff has, I think, been unimpaired in both cases ; happiness, in both a narrower and a wider field, has probably increased. But to me the most important thing of all is that human beings have been raised by an experiment, good or evil, out of the endless and hopeless monotony of dull lives to a point where their destinies, if they will only know and grasp it, lie once more in their own hands. The narrow and viewless road has come at last to a fork ; the choice is theirs ; they can branch off, or continue.
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