Collis Robert - Straight on (RLE Responding to Fascism)

DRAWINGS
(After page 68)

PHOTOGRAPHS

(At the end)

MAPS

PAGE

THERE they were lined up against the kerb, our ambulances, fifteen-hundredweights and three-tonners. As I crossed the square I noticed for the first time that the vehicles carried no red crosses but rather what looked like the American star.

Why havent we got red crosses? I said to MacClancy.

Cos of some International Red Cross rule, he said.

Curious, I said. I should have thought that if anybody could have the protection, if it is a protection, of a red cross on their car, we should.

Against the rules, he said.

All right, I said, but why an American star on the bonnet?

To stop the Yanks potting you from the air, he said; dangerous otherwise.

The sun shone, but it was bitter and I shivered. We stood about for an hour, just waiting, while people came up with more papers. Finally a stir was evident. The H.Q. staff began to say good-bye. I shook hands, turned, mounted into the drivers seat and seized the controls. As I did so the scene changed. Suddenly I saw the houses, some battered, all unpainted, the one cloud in the sky between two chimneys, with the blue sky to the right, the chairmans tired stoop; the secretary, quick, organizing, yet frustrated.

Come on, some one yelled, get into line.

I pushed in the clutch, we jerked forward, wheeled after the truck in front. We were off, the journey had started.

The City of London, once centre of the worlds money, looked very naked that spring morning. Gone were the narrow streets around St. Pauls where I used to get lost every time I went to see my publisher, just a wall against the sky and a flat open space and St. Pauls standing above symbolizing the English God. Funny nobody thinks of St. Pauls as a place to pray in by oneself. General thanksgivings, inaugurations, Queen Victorias jubilee, yes. People go and look at it, talk about the dome, the structure, the lack of tombs, but not about Jesus.

The city passed us as we drove, rather than we the city, and we found ourselves moving suddenly through a mean world. Everything was ugly, except the sky. The houses were small, brick, and dirty. There was no fineness, no architecture, nothing but straight mean ugliness; mile followed mile. We stopped constantly. I looked at the names above the little shops that stuck out from the houses, Rubenstein, Levy, Morris. I looked at the people, they seemed unfamiliar.

Of course, the Jewish quarter. How I dislike these people, I said to MacClancy who sat beside me.

Yes he said. Why?

I dont know.It didnt seem necessary to think why. These beastly people in their beastly streets, of course one hated them, everybody did.We jerked on again. We came to a gaping hole where two houses had been, like a tooth-mark of some prehistoric monster of overwhelming dimensions; then another and another, and then a whole line of houses leaning drunkenly about, without glass in their windows, doors ajar and roofs sagging.