Fortitude

WHERE STANDS A WINGED SENTRY--Margaref Kennedy--Yale ($2).

When people in the future want to know what Britain was really like between the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries and the great bombings of London, this slightly refurbished journal of Margaret Kennedy (The Constant Nymph) is one of the books they will read.

Mrs. Kennedy was never in London during the blitz. She hovered over her two small daughters, small son and foster daughter at a quiet west coast resort. But the war she describes is the real war of nerves that went on in the minds of all Britons on the home front in "the day when heaven was falling, the hour when earth's foundations fled," and England lay almost defenseless, waiting for Nazi invasion. Mrs. Kennedy felt many things with a visceral vividness that many men must also have felt but would not tell about. She describes them with frank female intensity.

Her story begins at six o'clock of an evening in May 1940, when BBC announced, among other odds & ends of news, "that the situation of our army in Flanders was one of 'ever-increasing gravity.' Those three words banished forever the comfortable delusion that we were 'certain to win.' ... I felt as if I were going down very fast in a lift."

Next day King Leopold surrendered--"probably just like all the rest of us, a poor, wretched, terrified, bewildered human being, trying to act for the best." Mrs. Kennedy's husband, David, came down from London, "fagged and wretched." On the train there had been a man in a state of nervous collapse. "He had a perfectly green face and kept saying: 'This means we're done. We're finished. We've been licked. It's the end. We can't go on.' " At last a fat man in the corner said: "If you must go on saying that, go and say it in the toilet."

Mrs. Kennedy listed "the things we ought to do: 1) Money. Have quite a large sum ... to be sewed into my stays. 2) See that each member of the household has a pair of good strong shoes. 3) Have a rucksack . . . for everyone, even Charles (the smallest). 4) Think out an iron ration of compressed food. 5) Remember gas masks, ration books and identification cards."

Remote Porthmerryn on the west coast was divided into Downalong (the fishing proletariat), Upalong (the swells) and the visiting Artists. People there seemed "rather fat and red," and Novelist Kennedy felt like a ghost. The Kennedys' maid from Downalong asked what Londoners thought about the war. " 'They're rather gloomy,' I told her. 'Gloomy? Why? They don't think that Hitler is going to win, do they? We don't think so Downalong, not for a single minute.' " Mrs. Aitken, "the doyenne of Upalong," said: "The news lately has been rather queer, hasn't it? I was quite worried until Ronnie (her grandson) got out of Dunkirk." But every morning Mrs. Kennedy rushed down to the radio to find out if "it" had happened in the night. "Everybody seems to assume that the invasion will begin at dawn some day."

Episodes. Yet she would not send her children to the U.S. or Canada. "We must be careful to act quite rightly. ... It is obvious that the great mass of our children can't go. ... There must be absolute equality and fairness of opportunity about this thing, otherwise we shall have class bitterness." At that moment "the news from France gets worse in every bulletin. It seems to be complete capitulation. . . . We all have the most acute pains in our stomachs. It feels as if most of our organs had been removed."

In the way that flocks of absurdly twittering birds sometimes heighten the hush and piled-up darkness before a storm, the great tenseness was heightened by a number of silly episodes:

>Lecturing on civilian defense, Colonel Farraday "showed us how to work a stirrup pump and advised us all to get one, adding that there are none to be had anywhere just now. He also explained how to put up an Anderson steel shelter and said that none were being issued in this part of the country."

> The children made a game of Goebbels' informing Hitler afeout the sinking of the French ships at Oran. Child Hitler: "Bring me my carpet that I may bite it." Child Goebbels: "Which flavor, mein Fuehrer?" Child Hitler: "Lemon, Joe. And I'll have a nibble at the raspberry rug."

> "Expensive evacuees" began to clutter the hotels and were promptly dubbed "Gluebottoms, because they ... do nothing but sit." >-The child evacuees ("Vackies") from the London slums "all wrote home to their parents to say that this place had been bombed to bits and that most of the children here have been killed." Result: a rush of their panic-stricken parents to take them away.

In the first air raid, Mrs. Kennedy took shelter in an underground bakery with "an arthritic old lady" who had passed much of her life in an earthquake belt. She comforted Mrs. Kennedy by observing that "in an air raid you are in the hands of man, and there is some limit to what he can do. But in an earthquake you are in the hands of God and there is no knowing." Soon war was so commonplace that when Mrs. Kennedy took her daughter Ellen for an overnight visit to another resort, their host's children chanted: "We've got a magnetic mine. Have you got a magnetic mine? Bet you haven't got a magnetic mine at your old Porthmerryn." And when they were raided, Daughter Ellen "enjoyed it tremendously." promised "I shan't boast about it to Lucy and Claire. It's so hard on them to have missed it."

Sept. 15. There is a vivid passage on the attempted invasion. "I'm sure that something happened on September 15 . . . . I woke up to hear our next door neighbour backing his car stealthily out of the garage . . . . I leant out the window. The night was calm and moonlit; the moon sparkled on the flat sea. And there was a subdued hum everywhere, far and near, as if hundreds of cars were on the roads and lanes. I was so restless . . . . I got up and dressed and went out, up the road a little way into the fields. I could hear, faintly, how car after car changed gear as it went up the steep hill out of the town towards the road that runs west. There was a most extraordinary feeling in the air as if the whole country, from end to end, was alert and waiting. The very houses and trees and hedges seemed to be crouching down against the earth and listening. The night was full of rustling and whispering as if hundreds of people were talking and moving about very quietly. There were no planes. Nothing in the sky but the stable moon . . . . I kept thinking people had spoken close to me, at my elbow. But I saw nobody except a line of men slipping past a gap in a stone wall at the top of a field . . . . Very early in the morning I heard the cars come back."

To those whom it does not stun or kill, disaster brings a spasm of new growth. Mrs. Kennedy is keenly conscious of this process, which gives meaning to the word immortality in a line (from her brother's epitaph) that keeps running through her mind: The reward of fortitude is immortality. Her book shows a whole nation earning that reward.

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