The First Week

Abstract

U Toward the end of August, I939, my wife and I spent a few quiet days in a bungalow on the banks of the English river Looe, surrounded by the calm green tops of Cornwall hills. The owner's son lived in the garage near the gate entrance, and when he was not fishing or uprooting nettles in the garden he lolled on the bank telling us about air raid precautions for the coming emergency. An A.R.P. warden, he knew all about detecting poisonous gasses and passing hypothetical victims through decontamination chambers. With a pipe in one side of his mouth and his Devonshire accent in the other, he spun amusing anecdotes to puncture the grim significance of it all. One day, he told us, the gas squad, urgently called out to assist the Plymouth fire squad in the practice burning of slum quarters, had themselves been so overcome by mere woodsmoke that it was necessary to call out the first aid squad to carry them off on emergency stretchers to emergency hospital beds. Heroic in that encounter, the first aid squad later flunked ignominiously; volunteers had been detailed to various places in the city of Plymouth with instructions to telephone for help. One casualty, assigned to be badly wounded, having given up all hope after an interminable wait, left a note on his spot, reading, Have bled to death and gone home to bed. The British government had by this time already begun turning out a series of war leaflets. Number i, issued from the Lord Privy