The King's Speech - Mark Logue [71]
The first night of the war started like any other. The only difference Myrtle noticed was there were no programmes on the radio; they just played records. Then at 3 a.m. came another air-raid warning and they hurried down to the stuffy basement. ‘The only feeling is one of irritation,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It is strange how things work out – no panic, no fear only plain mad at being disturbed.’
The blackout was into its third night and continuing to cause chaos in a city unused to total darkness. The casualty departments of the hospitals were full – not with those hit by enemy fire, but instead with people who had been run over by cars whose headlights had been partially dimmed, broken their legs while stepping off trains onto nonexistent platforms or sprained their ankles stumbling over unseen kerbs. St George’s, where Valentine was a resident surgical officer after qualifying three years earlier, was no exception: that first day of the war he was up all night operating on people who had come to grief on the streets of London.
Now war had been declared, Logue knew he would have an important role to play at the King’s side. On the previous Monday, 25 August, he had been called by Hardinge. ‘Hold yourself in readiness to come to the Palace,’ he had told him. Logue did not need to ask why. He was ready day and night although, as he told Hardinge, much as he wanted to see and speak to the King again, he sincerely hoped that he wouldn’t be sent for – since he knew only too well what it would mean.
At midday on 3 September came the call he had been dreading. Eric Mieville, who had been assistant private secretary to the King since 1937, rang to say that the King would broadcast to the nation at 6 p.m. and asked Logue to come and see him. Laurie drove him into the city and he was at the Palace by 5.20 p.m.
As they made their way towards London, everything looked normal except for the sun shining on the blimps turning them a ‘lovely silvery blue’. After dropping off his father at the Palace, Laurie turned back home at once so he could be there in time to listen to the broadcast. Logue left his hat, umbrella and gas mask in the Privy Purse Hall and mounted the stairs.
The King received Logue in his private study, rather than the room they normally used, which was being prepared for the post-broadcast photograph. He was dressed in an admiral’s uniform, with all his ribbons, and they ran through the speech. Its message, according to his official biographer, was ‘a declaration of simple faith in simple beliefs . . . which gave encouragement, as perhaps nothing else could, to the British peoples in the face of the struggle which lay ahead, and united them in their determination to achieve victory’.83 Logue went through the text, marking pauses between words to make it easier for him to read out. He also changed a few words: ‘government’, which the King might have stumbled over, was replaced with the easier to pronounce ‘ourselves’; while, later in the speech, ‘call’ took the place of ‘summon’.
Logue was struck by the sadness in the King’s voice as he read. Logue tried his best to cheer him up, reminding him of how he and the King and Queen had sat in that same room for an hour on coronation night before the broadcast he had made then – which he had approached with equal trepidation. They laughed and reflected on how much had happened in the two and a half years since. At that moment, the door at the other end of the room opened and in came the Queen – looking, as an infatuated Logue put it, ‘Royal and lovely’. She was, he thought, as he bowed over her hand, ‘the loveliest woman I have ever seen’.
With three minutes to go, it was time to move into the broadcasting room. As they crossed the corridor, the King beckoned to Frederick Ogilvie – who had succeeded Reith