sat beside him. “You know, about Dortinger, he’s not a good speaker, but he’s a man with insight and the ability to see things clearly. We need more leaders in the police with that kind of aptitude. Don’t you agree?”
5
London, 7 March 1940
RORY FERRALL STARED DOWN listlessly at a scarcely touched pint of bitter and wondered not for the first time why he had been so quick to accept the request to come to Britain. It was a Saturday night, he was a stranger in a strange pub, and he was depressed and angry. Despite strenuous attempts to force himself to look on the bright side of things, it was a struggle believing that he hadn’t been duped.
He looked about him. The lights in the Ship and Flag were dingy, the room was draughty, and the beer lukewarm. Groups were seated in the corners talking animatedly. In an hour, he was supposed to go out to dinner at Ewen Crossley’s house in Ealing. Until then, he was stuck. Rory didn’t know anybody else. He was starved for conversation and needed a change of location, but going to a dinner party wasn’t what he wanted to do, not tonight. He always found it much easier to keep to himself when this kind of mood enveloped him. When he thought about it, his feelings were ridiculous. Tonight he was even angry at himself for feeling ungrateful about Ewen’s invitation. The Crossleys certainly didn’t have to have him, and he was sure that they were holding the party for him.
Rory had been in England for upwards of five months now, and the work he had expected to be assigned had only been hinted at in a few disjointed conferences. Twice, briefing officers implied that the war effort was going to get into high gear any day now and before long he would find himself feverishly engaged in work more suited to his background and talents. It all sounded empty.
He took a deep drink of his beer. He had left a career and a job that he enjoyed only to find he was working by himself in a shabby office analyzing outdated military reports and worthless diplomatic intercepts. The work was boring, probably pointless, and he couldn’t discuss it with anybody. How did he let himself get into this situation? He put the beer glass down. One was enough. Drinking to cheer himself up wasn’t an option.
Something had to give. He wanted a new job. He had no real desire to go back to war, but he certainly wanted a change from what he was doing. In a way, it was humiliating. He had been happy as a policeman. In Manitoba, he had a position of influence and value; more importantly, he had self-respect. Here, he found himself anonymously dropped into a junior position where he was subordinate in rank to younger men of lesser ability, and there were no tangible results for his efforts. It rankled him.
He toyed with his beer glass and listened to a small but boisterous trio of soldiers in khaki battle dress uniforms in the background. They were young Canadian officers on their first leave, obviously enjoying themselves. Other than troops at training centres, the Canadian Army was the only large armed organization left in Britain, and the newspapers made much of the fact that some of the Empire’s finest troops were manning Britain’s defences. What the newspapers didn’t say was that the Canadian Army in March 1940 was almost completely untrained. It had been hastily recruited and shipped over to England with only the most rudimentary preparation and none of its major equipment. Like almost all the troops left on this island, they weren’t ready to fight anybody yet.
Rory looked vacantly at the blackout curtains over the windows. He wasn’t in a situation much different than these young men, except that they all seemed to be good friends and they had a sense of purpose, while he was living like some angry urban hermit.
The towns around London were rapidly filling up with troops such as these from the Dominions and the Empire. In the last few months, thousands of similar young men had been arriving across the country, most of them untrained but enthusiastic and willing to risk their lives in the service of a higher cause. In spite of their enthusiasm, so far the war effort looked like a huge bungle.
He knew he should go over and say hello to them, introduce himself as a fellow Canadian, a veteran, someone who was proud that they had volunteered to come here. It was the right thing to do: wander over, engage them in friendly conversation, and have a sociable drink with a few of the boys from back home. They were probably people he would like. Twenty-five years before, he had been in exactly the same situation. But tonight he was feeling tense and irritable. He needed a change.
He pulled on his coat and hat and stepped into the blackout and the icy March drizzle. Few people were on the streets. Those who were out seemed to loom up at him in the dark like something in a haunted house. Perhaps people who had two eyes and proper depth perception didn’t experience the blackout that way. Ruth had once told him that he looked like a hawk, because he had a habit of imperceptibly scanning back and forth to get a sense of distance. She’d laughed, but he took it as a compliment.
Rory walked briskly, struggling to put himself in a better frame of mind. A year ago who would have thought he’d be here: single, and doing his bit for the war in a relatively junior position.
He’d never agreed with much of the thinking so prevalent after the Great War. Since then, too many people who should have known better chose to view men as cogs in a machine, with little control over their lives. It was worse in the new violent ideologies in Germany and Russia; fascism and communism stripped men of their free will. In those creeds the destruction of individuality had become a philosophical foundation stone. He pulled his collar higher up around him. As long as he was alive, he couldn’t go along with that kind of thinking. It was no accident that both fascism and communism held the view that individuals were impelled by an inevitable mass destiny. History sucked people along like so much debris caught in the undercurrent of a river. It was a kind of fatalism that bred disaster on a colossal scale with massive social turmoil and unending repression and bloodshed.
He pulled his hat lower to keep the wind off his face. Perhaps that kind of tyranny and misery was inevitable for less fortunate nations. Even in stable countries, he had to admit, the range of individual choice for those trapped at the bottom of society’s pyramid was pretty much restricted. But there was still choice.
Then again, he might have looked at things differently at the end of the Great War had he been carried off a troopship in a wicker stretcher, missing limbs and permanently shell-shocked. No, he was fortunate. He was lucky enough to have survived and he lived in a decent country. Stable democracies gave people security. Although democracies weren’t perfect, they provided a greater range of choices – not an equal range, but certainly at all levels there was less repression and more opportunity. On an intellectual level, he certainly believed in what he was doing; but in his more despondent moments, like this one, he wondered if that lofty thinking was what really lay behind his volunteering to come over here.
Was there something else to it, something that he hadn’t admitted or even worked out? Despite people asking him every time he turned around, he’d avoided thinking too deeply about his motivation for coming here. He wasn’t certain why. As a police officer, he’d spent much of his professional life examining the motives of others; and here, in his own case, where he had so much to lose and so little to gain, he found himself evading the subject. If Ruth hadn’t died, would he have stepped forward so readily? He wasn’t certain what her death had to do with volunteering. In his most private moments, he suspected there was a connection with which he hadn’t come to grips. Maddeningly, he wasn’t certain what it was. It hovered at the edge of his subconscious like an elusive fragment of a dimly remembered dream.
Maybe it was a sense of obligation. Life had been good to him. He’d never wanted for much. Pre-war life in an exclusive Montreal suburb had been a sheltered existence – maids, gardeners, private schools, summers in Germany, travelling back and forth across the Atlantic in first-class berths, spring and autumn weekends at the cottage by Lac Saint-Pierre in the Laurentians. School had never been difficult, and university had come just as easily. And then came his time in the trenches,
