The King's Speech - Mark Logue [70]
The Logues, like everyone else, were preparing for the worst. Starting on the night of 1 September, street lights were turned off and everyone had to cover up their windows at night to make it more difficult for German bombers to find their targets. Tony, their youngest, an athletic young man with wavy brown hair who was soon to celebrate his nineteenth birthday, came back from the local library bearing a sheet of black-out paper and embarked on making all the windows lightproof. Fortunately all the main rooms had shutters – Myrtle hated them and had long contemplated ripping them out but was now rather glad she hadn’t.
There wasn’t enough black-out paper to do all the windows so Tony had left one uncovered in the bathroom. It didn’t seem much of a concern but that evening, a few minutes after Myrtle went in to clean her teeth before going to bed, there was a knock on the front door. She opened it to two air-raid precaution wardens who told her in courteous tones that she should turn out the light. Sleeping in a blacked-out room was also an unfamiliar experience: Myrtle felt like a ‘chrysalis in a cocoon of semi-gloom’.
The family had a more immediate problem: Therese, their devoted cook, who had lived in London for the previous ten years, was originally from Bavaria. ‘Oh Madam, I am caught – it is too late to get away,’ she told Myrtle, tears streaming down her cheeks. That afternoon they had turned on the radio, only to hear an alarming notice of general mobilization. Therese rang the German embassy and was told there was a last train leaving at ten o’clock the next morning, and she rushed away to pack.
In the Logue household, as elsewhere in the country, the sense of apprehension was leavened by some lighter moments. ‘The charwoman turned a tense situation into one of great comedy,’ Logue recalled. ‘Her boy Ernie was taken to the country yesterday, and as she went downstairs she said “Thank God my Ernie has been excavated.’”
However unwelcome the prospect of fighting another war, only just over two decades after the end of the last one, Chamberlain’s declaration of 3 September meant the people of Britain at least now knew where they stood. ‘A marvellous relief after all our tension,’ wrote Logue. ‘The universal desire is to kill the Austrian house painter.’ The King expressed similar sentiments in his own diary, which he was to keep dutifully for the next seven and a half years. ‘As eleven o’clock struck that fateful morning I had a certain feeling of relief that those 10 anxious days of intensive negotiations with Germany over Poland, which at moments looked favourable, with Mussolini working for peace as well, were over,’ he wrote.81
Myrtle, meanwhile, was preoccupied with more practical matters: she made 10lb of damson jam and 8lb of beans to salt down. War or no war, they had to eat. Laurie and his wife Josephine – or Jo, as she was known in the family – were also there. Myrtle was worried about them: Jo was expecting their first child (Lionel and Myrtle’s first grandchild) at the end of that month. As Myrtle wrote in the diary that she was now keeping, she hoped that Jo would be ‘excavated’ too.
A few minutes after Chamberlain had finished speaking, the unfamiliar wail of air-raid sirens could be heard across London. Logue called Tony, who was in the garage mending his bicycle, and they began to close all the shutters. From their window they could see the barrage balloon going up – it was, Logue noted, a ‘wonderful sight’. A few miles away in Buckingham Palace, the King and Queen were also surprised to hear the ghastly wailing of the sirens. The two of them looked at each other and said, ‘it can’t be’. But it was, and with their hearts beating hard they went down to the shelter in the basement. There, in the Queen’s words, they ‘felt stunned & horrified, and sat waiting for bombs to fall’.82
There were no bombs that particular night, and about half an hour later the all-clear went