‘Luncheon. A so-called veal and ham pie, things which look like potatoes and beans, crab-apple pudding, cheese which is full of mites.
‘Tea. Tea (a nerve tonic indispensable to the decadent English, but which we Germans despise).
‘Dinner. A thin soup, fish, which is well known in these parts to cause leprosy. The leg of some sheep which had had to be killed, turnips and beetroot such as one feeds to cattle.
‘There was no tin of biscuits by their beds in case they woke up hungry in the night.
‘When you hear that things like this can happen in your great, vaunted, rich Empire perhaps you will demand that your statesmen, who can allow two honest and unoffending farmers to be so treated, should stop worrying over the scum of Polish cities in luxurious concentration camps, and should be a little bit more concerned about the beam in their own eye, for a change.
‘Ask Mr Churchill, where is the Ark Royal?
‘Here is the Lieder König again.’
‘Well,’ said Sir Ivor, ‘I hope you have all been as much shocked as I have by the brutal ill-treatment of Herr Bad and Herr Wangel. And now I am going to sing an old favourite, “Under the Deodar”.’
He did so, and wound up his programme with ‘Fearful the Death of the Diver Must Be, walking alone, walking alone, walking alone in the Dehehehe-he-he-pths of the Sea’, a song of which both he and his admirers were extremely fond, as, at the word ‘depths’, his voice plumbed hitherto uncharted ones, and any seals or hippos who might happen to be around would roar in an agony of appreciation. ‘Good night, dears,’ said the old König, ‘keep your hairs on. By the way, where is the Ark Royal?’
‘This ends,’ said Winthrop, resuming his place at the microphone, ‘our programme of Song-Propaganda in English, arranged and sung by the Lieder König.
‘Here are the Reichsender Bremen, stations Hamburg and D x B, operating on the thirty-one metre band. I have a special announcement for my English listeners. There will be a Pets’ Programme tomorrow from station D x B at 9.30 Greenwich mean time.’
‘Now we must scram,’ said Heatherley, ‘we can always wait in the Maternity Ward if the drain inspection is not finished.’
They all, including the old gentleman, began to struggle into anti-gas clothing. Sophia waited no longer. She flew upstairs to her bedroom and locked herself in, dumbfounded by what she had seen.
Her mind was in a whirl. If Heatherley, who pretended to be an American counter-spy, was really a German spy, perhaps the ‘King of Song’ was pretending to be a German spy, but was really an English counter-spy? Was he in the pay of the gang, or merely hoaxing them; was he perhaps longing, but unable, to get a message through to the outside world or was he only too anxious that his shameful secret should be kept? Was he neither spy nor counter-spy, but just a poor old gentleman who got a taste of the thumbscrew twice a day? She wondered, irrelevantly, whether he had seen in the newspapers the pæans of praise followed by the dirges of disillusionment which had so prominent a place in them. Suddenly she remembered that advertisement in The Times: ‘Poor old gentleman suffering from malignant disease would like to correspond with pretty young lady.’ Perhaps he did want to correspond with the pretty young lady, perhaps in fact, it was he who had written on her egg ‘Agony (column, box) 22’, and who had sent in the advertisement. But if he could do all this, surely he could equally well write to her, to Rudolph, or even to poor Fred directly.
Sophia felt that life had become very complicated all of a sudden. She wished she were more versed in the intricacies of spying, and she very much wished that she could remember more about what had happened in the limited number of spy stories which she had read at various times (generally, of course, on journeys, and how often does one remember anything read on journeys?) At what stage, for instance, does the beautiful heroine abandon her lone trail and call in the heavy hand, large boots and vacant faces of The Yard? She rather thought not until the whole plot had been brilliantly unmasked, except for a few unimportant details, by the glamorous amateur spy herself. This was a point of view which appealed to Sophia, who had to consider Rudolph and Olga as well as King and Country. She went to sleep, having decided on a policy of watchful waiting.
The next day, when Sophia arrived at her First Aid Post, she found an atmosphere of subdued but horrified excitement. She immediately concluded that something untoward had happened at the Theatre; the nurses were always retailing awful atrocities they had witnessed there, and by Theatre they did not at all mean, as anybody else would have, the play; the ‘He’ of these entertainments was not Tom Walls, but the Surgeon, the ‘She’ not Hermione Baddeley but the Patient; in short, ‘the Theatre’ was not the Gaiety but St Anne’s Hospital Operating Theatre. The dramas enacted there alternated, as at the Grand Guignol in Paris, between gruesome tragedy and roaring farce. Sophia supposed that a dead man must have come to life; the reverse, which too often happened, could never have caused such a stir.
Nurses were standing about in little groups, whispering, their eyes as round as marbles. Even Sister Wordsworth and Mr Stone, whom Sophia found in the office, were looking quite concerned.
‘Don’t tell Lady Sophia, she wouldn’t like it,’ said kind Sister Wordsworth, remembering about the knees.
‘What?’ said Sophia. ‘But of course you must tell me. I am so curious, I have the most curious nature in the world. If you don’t tell, I shan’t get a wink of sleep, or give you one minute’s peace until you have. So please, dear Sister Wordsworth.’
Of course they were dying to tell her really. It seemed that, during the drain inspection
