In 1940, as World War II heats up, the BBC is doing its best to fulfill its singular mission: saving Britain from despondency and panic without resorting to lies. "Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth." Surrounded by sandbags that are literally going to seed, this London landmark has come to resemble an ocean liner both inside and out. "With the best engineers in the world," Penelope Fitzgerald observes, "and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale." Though there are no icebergs in Human Voices, Fitzgerald's perfectly pitched 1980 novel, danger does loom on several decks.

For a start, the Department of Recorded Programmes (DRP) is in for a shakeup. Sam Brooks, its director (RPD), has long ruffled the Controllers' feathers owing to his need for several nubile assistants--no wonder his unit is sometimes labeled the Seraglio. This time, however, his penchant for young women isn't the issue. Instead, it's the fact that RPD takes his calling too seriously. For instance, in response to a directive that England's heritage not be lost, he and a crack team once spent two weeks recording a creaky church door in Heather Lickington. At this point, only Jeff Haggard, the Director of Programme Planning (DPP), can save Sam; but having done that for the past 10 years, DPP is suffering from severe BBC battle fatigue.

As Penelope Fitzgerald follows this pair--and several other employees--her novel melds tragedy, surrealism, and satire into one endlessly surprising whole. As ever, she captures the momentous in the smallest moment--the joys of an orange in wartime, the pleasures of piano tuning, and the painful twists of love. When the newest member of the Seraglio makes the mistake (or is it?) of falling for RPD, she does so

absolutely, and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way. After the war the species no longer found it biologically useful, and indeed it was not useful to Annie. Love without hope grows in its own atmosphere, and should encourage the imagination, but Annie's grew narrower.

As is evident in this acute passage, and in virtually every other in Human Voices, Fitzgerald can pivot from sorrow to humor by way of pessimism and desire and then back again. If you so much as blink you'll miss one of the book's key turns or unexpected pleasures. No matter. Penelope Fitzgerald's human comedy always rewards rereading. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people. New Criterion

When British listeners tuned in to the BBC's Nine O'Clock News in the middle of 1940, they had no idea what human dramas and follies were unfolding behind the scenes. Targeted by enemy bombers, the BBC had turned its concert hall into a dormitory for both sexes, and personal chaos rivaled the political. Amidst the bombs and broadcasts two program directors fight for power while their younger female assistants fall prey to affairs, abandonment, and unrequited love. Reading this intimate glimpse behind the scenes of the BBC in its heyday, one is left with the sensation, William Boyd wrote in London Magazine, that this is what it was really like.

Human Voices is funny and touching and authentic, but it is more. It is affirmative in the best and most important sense. Sunday Times

Perfectly describes the moment when the British stiff upper lip begins to tremble in the face of overwhelming historical and emotional events. Publishers Weekly

PENELOPE FITZGERALD (1916 2000) was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction for The Blue Flower, the Booker Prize for Offshore, and three of her novels The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring were short-listed for the Booker Prize."

Admirers of The Blue Flower and The Bookshop (both 1997) will be happy for this wonderful touch of the Fitzgerald hand, published in 1980 in England but here only now. The place is London, the time 1940, the main concern that the Germans may invade at any moment. Under such circumstances, theres no choice for those working at the BBC (and no thought of one) other than to carry on the weekly, daily, and hourly work of the big bureaucracy in its vital role of keeping the British people informed, prepared, and calmed. Broadcast House, where these efforts take place, has the look of a seven-story ocean liner, and those inside are much like its passengers and crew, especially when air bombardments begin and overnight encampments are set upin, for example, the broadcasting concert hall. Emerging gradually as the storys chief figure is Jeffrey Haggard, DPP (Director of Programme Planning), a suave, worldly, weary, divorced, Graham Greenelike character unsure of his own future who keeps everything going, works far too hardand is turned to incessantly by others for help, care, and advice. Dominant among the latter is Sam Brooks, RPD (Recorded Programme Director), who works even harder than Haggard, wants decent mobile recording equipment to record the invasion if it comes aboutand whose department is nicknamed the Seraglio for his habit of hiring numerous young women as assistants. Among such are the half-French Lise, who disappears near storys beginning (to reappear later under changed, charged, and revealing circumstances), and the positively captivating creation, Annie Asra, a young thing down from Birmingham whos the very quintessence of pluck and stabilityand who changes all. Ingeniously delivered tragicomedy from one of the very finest of writers. The feel of history, England under the blitz, civilization at the brink of doomall with perfect stories, too, of private hearts. A hundred-plus pages from Fitzgerald can hold more than five times that from many another. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Chapter One

Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was
sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he
could work better
when surrounded by young women. This in itself was an understandable
habit and quite harmless, or, to be more accurate, RPD never
considered whether it was
harmless or not. If he was to think about such things, his attention
had to be specially drawn to them. Meanwhile it was understood by the
girls that he might have an
overwhelming need to confide his troubles in one of them, or perhaps
all of them, but never in two of them at once, during the three
wartime shifts in every
twenty-four hours. This, too, might possibly suggest the arrangements
of a seraglio, but it would have been quite unfair to deduce, as some
of the Old Servants of the
Corporation occasionally did, that the RP Junior Temporary Assistants
had no other duties. On the contrary, they were in anxious charge of
the five thousand
recordings in use every week. Those which the Department processed
went into the Sound Archives of the war, while the scrap was silent
for ever.


`I can't see what good it would be if Mr Brooks did talk to me,' said
Lise, who had only been recruited three days earlier, `I don't know
anything.'

Vi replied that it was hard on those in positions of
responsibility, like RPD, if they didn't drink, and didn't go to
confession.

`Are you a Catholic then?'

`No, but I've heard people say that.'

Vi herself had only been at BH for six months, but since she was
getting on for nineteen she was frequently asked to explain things to
those who knew even less.

`I daresay you've got it wrong,' she added, being patient with
Lise, who was pretty, but shapeless, crumpled and depressed. `He won't
jump on you, it's only a
matter of listening.'

`Hasn't he got a secretary?'

`Yes, Mrs Milne, but she's an Old Servant.'

Even after three days, Lise could understand this.

`Or a wife? Isn't he married?'

`Of course he's married. He lives in Streatham, he has a nice home
on Streatham Common. He doesn't get back there much, none of the
higher grades do. It's
non-stop for them, it seems.'

`Have you ever seen Mrs Brooks?'

`No.'

`How do you know his home is nice, then?'

Vi did not answer, and Lise turned the information she had been
given so far slowly over in her mind.

`He sounds like a selfish shit to me.'

`I've told you how it is, he thinks people under twenty are more
receptive. I don't know why he thinks that. He just tries pouring out
his worries to all of us in turn.'

`Has he poured them out to Della?'

`Well, perhaps not Della.'

`What happens if you're not much good at listening? Does he get
rid of you?'

Vi explained that some of the girls had asked for transfers
because they wanted to be Junior Programme Engineers, who helped with
the actual transmissions. That
hadn't been in any way the fault of RPD. Wishing that she didn't have
to explain matters which would only become clear, if at all, through
experience, she checked
her watch with the wall clock. An extract from the Prime Minister was
wanted for the mid-day news, 1'42" in, cue Humanity, rather than
legality, must be our
guide.

`By the way, he'll tell you that your face reminds him of another
face he's seen somewhere — an elusive type of beauty, rather elusive
anyway, it might have been
a picture somewhere or other, or a photograph, or something in
history, or something, but anyway he can't quite place it.'

Lise seemed to brighten a little.

`Won't he ever remember?'

`Sometimes he appeals to Mrs Milne, but she doesn't know either.
No, his memory lets him down at that point. But he'll probably put you
on the Department's
Indispensable Emergency Personnel List. That's the people he wants
close to him in case of invasion. We'd be besieged, you see, if that
happened. They're going to
barricade both ends of Langham Place. If you're on the list you'd
transfer then to the Defence Rooms in the sub-basement and you can
draw a standard issue of
towel, soap and bedding for the duration. Then there was a memo round
about hand grenades.'

Lise opened her eyes wide and let the tears slide out, without
looking any less pretty. Vi, however, was broadminded, and overlooked
such things.

`My boy's in the Merchant Navy,' she said, perceiving the real
nature of the trouble. `What about yours?'

`He's in France, he's with the French army. He is French.'

`That's not so good.'

Their thoughts moved separately to what must be kept out of them,
helpless waves of flesh against metal and salt water. Vi imagined the
soundless fall of a
telegram through the letter-box. Her mother would say it was just the
same as last time but worse because in those days people seemed more
human somehow and
the postman was a real friend and knew everyone on his round.

`What's his name, then?'

`Frédé. I'm partly French myself, did they tell you?'

`Well, that can't be helped now.' Vi searched for the right
consolation. `Don't worry if you get put on the IEP list. You won't
stay there long. It keeps changing.'

Mrs Milne rang down. `Is Miss Bernard there? Have I the name
correct by the way? We're becoming quite a League of Nations. As she
is new to the
Department, RPD would like to see her for a few minutes when she comes
off shift.'

`We haven't even gone on yet.'

Mrs Milne was accustomed to relax a little with Vi.

`We're having a tiresome day, all these directives, why can't they
leave us to go quietly on with our business which we know like the
back of our hand. Tell Miss
Bernard not to worry about her evening meal, I've been asked to see to
a double order of sandwiches.' Lise was not listening, but recalled Vi
to the point she had
understood best.

`If Mr Brooks says he thinks I'm beautiful, will he mean it?'

`He means everything he says at the time.'


There was always time for conversations of this kind, and of every
kind, at Broadcasting House. The very idea of Continuity, words and
music succeeding each
other without a break except for a cough or a shuffle or some mistake
eagerly welcomed by the indulgent public, seemed to affect everyone
down to the humblest
employee, the filers of Scripts as Broadcast and the fillers-up of
glasses of water, so that all in turn could be seen forming close
groups, in the canteen, on the seven
floors of corridors, beside the basement ticker-tapes, in the
washrooms, in the studios, talking, talking to each other, and usually
about each other, until the very last
moment when the notice SILENCE: ON THE AIR forbade.

The gossip of the seven decks increased the resemblance of the
great building to a liner, which the designers had always intended. BH
stood headed on a fixed
course south. With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying
between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready
to scorn any disaster
of less than Titanic scale. Since the outbreak of war damp sandbags
had lapped it round, but once inside the bronze doors, the airs of
cooking from the deep hold
suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary. At
night, with all its blazing portholes blacked out, it towered over a
flotilla of taxis, each dropping
off a speaker or two.

By the spring of 1940 there had been a number of castaways. During
the early weeks of evacuation Variety, Features and Drama had all been
abandoned in
distant parts of the country, while the majestic headquarters was left
to utter wartime instructions, speeches, talks and news.

Since March the lifts below the third floor had been halted as an
economy measure, so that the first three staircases became yet another
meeting place. Few
nowadays were ever to be found in their offices. An instinct, or
perhaps a rapidly acquired characteristic, told the employees how to
find each other. On the other
hand, in this constant circulation much was lost. The corridors were
full of talks producers without speakers, speakers without scripts,
scripts which by a clerical
error contained the wrong words or no words at all. The air seemed
alive with urgency and worry.

Recordings, above all, were apt to be mislaid. They looked alike,
all 78s, aluminium discs coated on one side with acetate whose pungent
rankness was the true
smell of the BBC's war. It was rumoured that the Germans were able to
record on tapes coated with ferrous oxide and that this idea might
have commercial
possibilities in the future, but only the engineers and RPD himself
believed this.

`It won't catch on,' the office supervisor told Mrs Milne. `You
could never get attached to them.'

`That's true,' Mrs Milne said. `I loved my record of Charles
Trenet singing J'ai ta main. I died the death when it fell into the
river at Henley. The public will never
get to feel like that about lengths of tape.'

But the Department's discs, though cared for and filed under
frequently changing systems, were elusive. Urgently needed for news
programmes, they went astray
in transit to the studio. Tea-cups were put down on them, and they
melted. Ferried back by mobile units through the bitter cold, they
froze, and had to be gently
restored to life. Hardly a day passed without one or two of them
disappearing.

Vi was now looking for Churchill's Humanity, rather than legality,
must be our guide with the faint-hearted help of Lise. It was possible
that Lise might turn
out to be hopeless. They'd given up For Transmission, and were looking
in what was admittedly the wrong place, among the Processed, whose
labels, written in the
RPAs' round school-leavers' handwriting, offered First Day of War:
Air-Raid Siren, False Alarm: Cheerful Voices with Chink of Tea-Cups:
Polish Refugees in
Scotland, National Singing, No Translation. `You won't find anything
in that lot,' said Della, brassily stalking through, `that's all
Atmosphere.'

`It's wanted in the editing room. Do you think Radio News Reel
went and took it?'

`Why don't you ask the boys?'


Three of the Junior RPAs were boys, and RPD, though fond of them, felt
less need to confide in them. As the Department expanded more and more
girls would be
taken on. `What a field that's going to give us!' said Teddy, relaxing
in the greasy haze of the canteen with Willie Sharpe. Willie only paid
twopence for his coffee,
because he was a juvenile.

`I don't grudge you that in any way,' Teddy went on. `It's a mere
accident of birth. I just wonder how you reconcile it with what you're
always saying, that you
expect to be in training as a Spitfire pilot by the end of 1940.'

`My face is changing,' Willie replied. `Coming up from Oxford
Circus on Wednesday I passed a girl I used to know and she didn't
recognize me.'

Teddy looked at him pityingly.

`They're still asking for School Certificate in maths,' he said.

`Pretty soon they mayn't mind about that, though. They'll be
taking pilots wherever they can get them.'

`They'll still want people who look a bit more than twelve.'

Willie was rarely offended, and never gave up.

`Hitler was a manual worker, you know. He didn't need School Cert
to take command of the Nazi hordes.'

`No, but he can't fly, either,' Teddy pointed out.

The boys' ears, though delicately tuned to differences of pitch
and compression, adapted easily to the frightful clash of metal trays
in the canteen. Unlike the
administrative staff, they had no need to shout. Teddy sat with his
back to the counter, so that he could see the girls as they came in —
Della, perhaps, although there
was nothing doing there — and at the same time turned the pages of a
yank mag, where white skin and black lace glimmered. These mags were
in short supply. Vi's
merchant seaman, who was on the Atlantic run, had passed it on.

`You know, Willie, I need money for what I want to do. Honestly,
the kind of woman I have in mind is unattainable on £378 a year.'

`Your mind's tarnished, Teddy.'

`I'm not responsible for more than one eighth of it,' Teddy
protested.

`No, but you can increase the proportion by concentrated
will-power. As I see it, in any case, after the conflict is over we
shan't be at the mercy of anything
artificially imposed on us, whether from within or without. Hunger
will be a thing of the past because the human race won't tolerate it,
mating will follow an
understandable instinct, and there'll be no deference to rank or
money. We shall need individuals of strong will then.'

Neither Teddy nor anyone else felt that Willie was ridiculous when
he spoke like this, although they sometimes wondered what would become
of him. Indeed, he
was noble. His notebook contained, besides the exact details of his
shift duties, a new plan for the organisation of humanity. Teddy also
had a notebook, the back of
which he kept for the estimated measurements of the Seraglio.

`I'd put this Lise Bernard at 34, 25, 38. Are you with me?'

`I'm not too sure,' said Willie doubtfully. `By the way, she cries
rather a lot.'

`She's mixed a lot with French people, that would make her more
emotional.'

`Not all foreigners are emotional. It depends whether they come
from the north or the south. Look at Tad.'

Taddeus Zagorski, the third of the junior RPAs (male), had arrived
in this country with his parents only last October. How had he managed
to learn English so
quickly, and how, although he wasn't much older than the rest of them
and was quite new to the Department, did he manage to dazzle them with
his efficiency and
grasp?

`I can't seem to get to like him,' said Teddy. `He's suffered, I
know, but there it is. He wants to be a news reader, you know.'

`I daresay he'll get on,' Willie replied, `in the world, that is,
as it's at present constituted. It's possible that we're jealous of
him. We ought to guard against that.'

Tad, in fact, was emerging at the head of the counter queue,
where, with a proud gesture, he stirred his coffee with the communal
spoon tied to the cash register
with a piece of string. He must have been doing Messages From The
Forces.

`My auntie got one of those messages,' said Willie. `It was my
uncle in the Navy singing When the Deep Purple Falls, but by the time
it went out he was missing,
believed killed.'

`Was she upset?'

`She never really heard it. She works on a delivery van.'

The young Pole stood at their table, cup of coffee in hand,
brooding down at them from a height.

`You should have been off ten minutes ago,' said Teddy.

Tad sat down between them, precisely in the middle of his chair,
in his creaseless white shirt. The boys felt uneasy. He had an air of
half-suppressed excitement.

`Who is that fellow?' he asked suddenly.

Willie looked up, Teddy craned round. A man with a pale,
ruined-looking face was walking up to the bar.

Tad watched him as he asked quietly for a double whisky. The
barman seemed unnerved. In fact, the canteen had only obtained a
licence at the beginning of the
year, on the understanding that the news readers should not take more
than two glasses of beer before reporting for work, and the shadow of
disapproval still hung
over it. Higher grades were expected to go to the Langham for a drink,
but this one hadn't.

`I ask you about that fellow,' said Tad, `because it was he who
just came into Studio LG14. I was clearing up the Messages preparatory
to returning them to
registry, and I asked him what he was doing in the studios, as one
cannot be too careful in the present circumstances. He replied that he
had an administrative post in
the BBC, and, as he seemed respectable, I explained the standard
routine to him. I think one should never be too busy to teach those
who are anxious to learn.'

`Well, you set out to impress him,' said Teddy. `What did you tell
him?'

`I told him the rules of writing a good news talk — "the first
sentence must interest, the second must inform." Next I pointed out
the timeless clock, which is such
an unusual feature of our studios, and demonstrated the "ten seconds
from now".'

The familiar words sounded dramatic, and even tragic.

`What did he do?'

`He nodded, and showed interest.'

`But didn't he say anything?'

`Quite quietly. He said "tell me more."'

Tad's self-assurance wavered and trembled. `He does not look quite
the same now as he did then. Who is he?'

`That's Jeffrey Haggard,' Willie said. `He's the Director of
Programme Planning.'

Tad was silent for a moment. `Then he would be familiar with the
ten second cue?'

`He invented it. It's called the Haggard cue, or the Jeff,
sometimes.' Teddy laughed, louder than the din of crockery.

`God, Tad, you've made me happy today. Jeepers Creepers, you've
gone and explained the ten second cue to DPP ...'

Their table rocked and shook, while Tad sat motionless, steadying
his cup with his hand.

'Doubtless Mr Haggard will think me ludicrous.'

'He thinks everything's ludicrous,' said Willie hastily.

Teddy laughed and laughed, not able to get over it, meaning no
harm. He wouldn't laugh like that if he was Polish, Willie thought.
However, in his scheme of things
to come there would no frontiers, and indeed no countries.


The Director of Programme Planning ordered a second double in his dry,
quiet, disconcerting voice. Probably in the whole of his life he had
never had to ask for
anything twice. The barman, knowing, as most people did, that Mr
Haggard had run through three wives and had lost his digestion into
the bargain, wondered what
he'd sound like if he got angry.

The whisky, though it had no visible effect, was exactly
calculated to raise DPP from a previous despair far enough to face the
rest of the evening. When he had
finished it he went back to his office, where he managed with no
secretary and very few staff, and rang RPD.

`Mrs Milne, I want Sam. I can hear him shouting, presumably in the
next room.'

On the telephone his voice dropped even lower, like a voice's
shadow. He waited, looking idly at the schedules that entirely covered
the walls, the charts of Public
Listening and Evening Meal Habits, and the graphs, supplied by the
Ministry of Information, of the nation's morale.

RPD was put through.

`Jeff, I want you to hear my case.'

DDP had been hearing it for more than ten years. But, to do his
friend justice, it was never the same twice running. The world seemed
new created every day for
Sam Brooks, who felt no resentment and, indeed, very little
recollection of what he had suffered the day before.

`Jeff, Establishment have hinted that I'm putting in for too many
girls.'

`How can that be?'

`They know I like to have them around, they know I need that. I've
drafted a reply, saying nothing, mind you, about the five thousand
discs a week, or the fact
that we provide a service to every other department of the
Corporation. See what you think of the way I've put it — I begin quite
simply, by asking them whether
they realize that through the skill of the recording engineer sound
can be transformed from air to wax, the kind of thing which through
all the preceding centuries has
been possible only to the bees. It's the transference of pattern, you
see — surely that says something encouraging about the human mind.
Don't forget that Mozart
composed that trio while he was playing a game of billiards.'

`Sam, I went to a meeting to-day.'

`What about?'

`It was about the use of recordings in news bulletins.'

`Why wasn't I asked?'

But Sam was never asked to meetings.

`We had two Directors and three Ministries — War, Information,
Supply. They'd called it, quite genuinely I think, in the interests of
truth.'

The word made its mark. Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated
to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling
the truth. Without prompting,
the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation,
and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no
guarantee of this. Truth
ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness. But the BBC had
clung tenaciously to its first notion, droning quietly on, at
intervals from dawn to midnight, telling,
as far as possible, exactly what happened. An idea so unfamiliar was
bound to upset many of the other authorities, but they had got used to
it little by little, and the
listeners had always expected it.

`The object of the meeting was to cut down the number of
recordings in news transmissions — in the interests of truth, as they
said. The direct human voice must
be used whenever we can manage it — if not, the public must be clearly
told what they've been listening to — the programme must be announced
as recorded, that
is, Not Quite Fresh.'

Sam's Department was under attack, and with it every recording
engineer, every RPA, every piece of equipment, every TD7, mixer and
fader and every waxing
and groove in the building. As the protector and defender of them all,
he became passionate.

`Did they give specific instances? Could they even find one?'

`They started with Big Ben. It's always got to be relayed direct
from Westminster, the real thing, never from disc. That's got to be
firmly fixed in the listeners'
minds. Then, if Big Ben is silent, the public will know that the war
has taken a distinctly unpleasant turn.'

`Jeff, the escape of Big Ben freezes in cold weather.'

`We shall have to leave that to the Ministry of Works.'

`And the King's stammer. Ah, what about that. My standby
recordings for his speeches to the nation — His Majesty without
stammer, in case of emergency.'

`Above all, not those.'

`And Churchill....'

`Some things have to go, that was decided at a preliminary talk
long before I got there. Otherwise it's just a general directive, and
we've lived through a good
many of those. It doesn't affect the total amount of recording. If you
want to overwork, you've nothing to worry about.' Sam said that he
accepted that no-one
present had had the slightest understanding of his Department's work,
but it was strange, very strange, that there had been no attempt
whatever, at any stage, to
consider his point of view.

`If someone could have reasoned with him, Jeff. Perhaps this idea
that's come to me about the bees....'

`I protested against any cuts in your mobile recording units. I
managed to save your cars.'

`Those Wolseleys!'

`They're all you've got, Sam.'

`The hearses. I've been asking for replacements for two years.
They're just about fit to take a Staff Officer to a lunch party, wait
till he collapses from
over-indulgence, then on to the graveyard. And I've had to send two of
those out to France.... Jeff, were you asked to break this to me?'

`In a way.' As they left the meeting one of the Directors had
drawn him aside and had asked him to avoid mentioning the new
recommendations to RPD for as
long as possible.

Sam was floundering in his newly acquired wealth of grievances.

`Without even the commonplace decency ... no standbys ... my cars,
well, I suppose you did your best there ... my girls.... `

`In my opinion you can make do with the staff you've got,' Jeff
said. `One of your RPAs was talking to me in the studio just now, and
I assure you he was very
helpful.'


When he had done what he could Jeff walked out of the building. It was
scarcely necessary for him to show his pass. His face, with its dark
eyebrows, like a
comedian's, but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known
in the BBC. He stood for a moment among the long shadows on the
pavement, between the
piles of sandbags which had begun to rot and grow grass, now that
spring had come.

DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of
which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could
use at the Langham,
and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was
quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came.
He never went to his
house, because his third wife was still in it. In any case, he had a
taxi waiting for him every night, just round the corner in Riding
House Street. He hardly ever used it,
but it was a testimony that if he wanted to, he could get away
quickly.

RPD seemed to have forgotten how to go home. Mrs Milne suggested
as much to him as she said goodnight. Her typewriter slumbered now
under its leatherette
cover. He gave no sign of having heard her.


Long before it was dark men in brown overalls went round BH, fixing
the framed blackouts in every window, circulating in the opposite
direction to the Permanents
coming downstairs, while the news readers moved laterally to check
with Pronunciation, pursued by editors bringing later messages on pink
cards. Movement was
complex, so too was time. Nobody's hour of work coincided exactly with
the life-cycle of Broadcasting House, whose climax came six times in
the twenty-four
hours with the Home News, until at nine o'clock, when the nation sat
down to listen, the building gathered its strength and struck. The
night world was crazier than
the day world. When Lise Bernard paused in doubt at the door of RPD's
office, she saw her Head of Department pacing to and fro like a bear
astray, in a grove of
the BBC's pale furniture, veneered with Empire woods. He wore a tweed
jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC's frightful house ties, dark
blue embroidered with
thermionic valves in red. Evidently he put on whatever came to hand
first. Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a
cupboard full of clean
shirts.

When he recognized who she was he stopped pacing about and took
off his spectacles, changing from a creature of sight to one of faith.
Lise, the crowded office,
the neatly angled sandwiches, the tray with its white cloth suitable
for grades of Director and above, turned into patches of light and
shade. To Lise, on the other
hand, looking at his large hazel eyes, the eyes of a child determined
not to blink for fear of missing something, he became someone who
could not harm her and
asked to be protected from harm. The effect, however, was quite
unplanned, he produced it unconsciously. All the old lechers and
yearners in the building envied the
success which he seemed to turn to so little account.

`He just weeps on their shoulders you know,' they said. `And yet I
believe the man's a trained engineer.'

`Sit down, Miss Bernard. Have all these sandwiches. You look
hungry.' When he had put his spectacles on again he couldn't pursue
this idea; Lise was decidedly
overweight. `I like to get to know everyone who comes to work for me
as soon as possible — in a way it's part of the responsibility I feel
for all of you — and the
shortest way to do that, curiously enough, I've found, is to tell you
some of the blankly incomprehensible bloody idiotic lack of
understanding that our Department
meets with every minute of the day.'

Lise sat there blankly, eating nothing. He picked up the
telephone, sighing.

`Canteen, I have a young assistant here, quite new to the
Corporation, who can't eat your sandwiches.'

`That's National Cheese, Mr Brooks. The manufacturers have agreed
to amalgamate their brand names for the duration in the interest of
the Allied war effort.'

`I believe you've been waiting to say that all day.'

`I don't want anything, Mr Brooks, really I don't,' whimpered
Lise.

`Not good enough for you.' He looked angrily at the window, unable
to throw them out because of the blackout. Then he sat down opposite
to the girl and
considered her closely. `You know, even though I only saw you for a
few minutes at the interview, I was struck by the width between your
eyes. You can see
something like it in those portraits by — I'm sure you know the ones I
mean. It's a sure index of a certain kind of intelligence, I would
call it an emotional intelligence.'
Lise wished that there was a looking-glass in the room.

`Some people might find what I have to say difficult to grasp,
because I let my ideas follow each other just as they come. But people
whose eyes are as wide
apart as yours won't have that difficulty.' He took her hand, but held
it quite absent-mindedly.

`You may find Broadcasting House rather strange at first, but
there's nothing unusual about me. Except for this, I suppose — it just
so happens that all my energies
are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one
thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn't
make for an easy life, you
understand. Perhaps you know what it's like to have a worry that
doesn't and can't leave room in your mind for anything else and won't
give you peace, night or day,
for a single moment.'

Now something went not at all according to programme. Lise began
to sob. These tears were not of her usual manageable kind, and her
nose turned red. Having
no handkerchief with her she struggled to her feet and heaved and
streamed her way out of the room.

Copyright © 1980 Penelope Fitzgerald. All rights reserved. Reprinted
with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Now that Fitzgerald has widened her audience hereABlue Flower was published to rave reviews and the 1997 NBCC fiction awardAHoughton Mifflin is releasing her early novels in paperback. This gracefully controlled and neatly inlaid chronicle of Britain during WWII, published in England in 1980, reflects the author's wartime experiences with the BBC. The beleaguered broadcasters she portrays have chosen truth over consolation; nevertheless they must try to keep their listeners and themselves from despair as the threat of a German invasion mounts and parachute bombs pit the streets. Yet Sam Brooks, RPD (Recorded Programmes Director), lives in a fantasy world of wax discs and nubile women. When he is not trying desperately to capture the sounds of England (spending hundreds of hours and pounds recording the creak of a country church door), Brooks is crying on the shoulder of one or another of his RPAs (Recorded Programmes Assistants), whose "firmness, and roundness, and readiness to be pleased" give him strength. His seraglio comprises Vi Simmons, cheery, practical, with a man at sea who means to marry her; part-French, pregnant, Lise Bernard, abandoned by her beau; Della, tarty, velvet-voiced, bound for defection to the drama department; and the latecomer, Annie Asra, whose uncompromising candor and fragile susceptibility to emotion reverberates as the real voice of Fitzgerald's book. Annie's fate is to fall in love with Brooks, whom she sees clearly as "a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls" and who is, above all, self-centered, obsessed with his work and oblivious to what goes on around him. Fitzgerald conveys the peculiar intimacy and secrecy of wartime: people disappear from this strange little world very easily and almost without comment, yet, besieged as they are by the fear that England will soon go the way of occupied France, they cling to each other fiercely. Hopelessness is in the air, but, as the BBC employees stay up all night on the late shift, so are strains of Debussy, blunt confessions, murmured condolences and the wails of a baby born in the makeshift bunk room. Fitzgerald's clipped, unsentimental and yet sympathetic irony perfectly describes the moment when the British stiff upper lip begins to tremble in the face of overwhelming historical and emotional events.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Fitzgerald follows The Blue Flower (LJ 3/1/97; 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award winner) with another entertaining short novel. This time her setting is 1940 at BBC headquarters in London, where the beleaguered Department of Recorded Programmes attempts to get news and music on the air amid German bombing attacks and internal chaos. War has transformed the BBC's famed London concert hall into a dorm, Red Cross training interrupts programming schedules, mix-ups are rife, and tempers are short. Particularly stressed are the teenage Junior Temporary Assistants, responsible for more than 5000 recordings weekly and struggling with personal problems inflamed by the war. Their should-be mentors, two self-absorbed departmental directors, are preoccupied with their own eccentricities and can scarcely deal with office glitches, much less the tragicomic complications arising when Annie, an intern of 16, falls in love with one of them. Fitzgerald, drawing on her own youthful employment at the BBC, brings time, place, and characters to life in a book remarkable for its dexterous and appealing prose. Recommended.AStarr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.