Green for Danger Read online

  Green for Danger

  Christianna Brand

  With an Introduction by Marian Babson

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  CHAPTER III

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER V

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER VI

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  CHAPTER VII

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER VIII

  1

  2

  CHAPTER IX

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER X

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER XI

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER XII

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER XIII

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It will be apparent (I hope) that I could not have attempted the background of this story unless I had had some acquaintance with the inside workings of a military hospital; and it must surely be equally obvious that, under the circumstances, I would do all in my power to avoid portraying any one particular hospital. All such institutions, however, must have operating theatres and wards and corridors, and be staffed by Royal Army Medical Corps officers, by Sisters and by Voluntary Aid Detachments, just as all characters must have a nose and two eyes and a mouth, with a very limited choice of colouring for their hair and complexion. I do implore my readers, therefore, not to be more clever than their author, and see portraits where, quite honestly, none are intended.

  C.B.

  INTRODUCTION

  Green for Danger—and there’s danger all around. Hitler has launched the blitzkrieg designed to bring England to its knees—and under his heel. Death falls from the skies at all hours of the day and night, while, from Germany, Lord Haw-Haw and his ilk fill the radio airwaves with propaganda of doom and despair. One by one, the countries of Europe have fallen before the Nazi onslaught, and England stands alone, grimly enduring, fighting back with every weapon she can muster.

  In an America now involved in the conflict but safely beyond the reach of even the longest-range bombers, never bombed and never likely to be, we listened to the voices of our own radio pundits. We heard Edward R. Murrow reporting from England: “London can take it.” We listened to Gabriel Heatter dismally proclaiming: “Aaah, there’s ba-a-ad news tonight!”

  Churchill could offer nothing but “… blood, toil, tears and sweat,” could promise only that “… we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

  On one hand, the blitz; on the other, the ever-present threat of imminent invasion. How were people really coping with wartime life on that “sceptered isle … [that] fortress built by Nature … against infection and the hand of war?”

  Publishing schedules moved slowly, providing less immediacy than radio and cabled newspaper reports, but gradually books providing a picture of ordinary life under the blitz began to reach the waiting public. Foremost among them was Green for Danger, with its depiction of daily life in a military hospital in a heavily bombed area; forced to accept civilian casualties as well as military personnel, stretched to its limits (“there were twenty-three admissions last night”), and with no relief in sight.

  This was life under fire, as experienced by millions of ordinary citizens, day after day, week after week, month after month. Amazingly, it quickly became accepted as the norm: “We didn’t think about it; it was just the way we lived.”

  At the time, Christianna Brand wrote in her “Author’s Note” for the second edition: “Criticism has been made of the cool reaction of my characters towards the air-raids. I write only of what I know; and I know that during the whole of the blitz upon London which I spent in a heavily bombed area, largely among V.A.D.s, I, too, saw not a shadow of panic or failure or endurance-at-an-end.…”

  Today, she says: “I think people should know how it all was. I think the young should. But I remember my own indifference to memories of the First World War and I understand that they don’t—don’t understand that one said, ‘Meet me at the theatre, and if that’s not there I’ll go on to the restaurant, if that’s still standing …’ and it was all just a part of life.”

  This, then, was the life-style of the 1940s, a dangerous world in every way, into which we step through the pages of Green for Danger.

  With hindsight and today’s knowledge, we are prepared for the casual gallantry and stiff upper lip: “Sorry to break up this happy party, but as you may have noticed, there’s an air-raid on!” But what could prepare us for the hospital humorist who “sat up in bed and every time a bomb fell tapped himself on the back of the head and made his false teeth shoot out?”

  World War II is emerging as a fiction genre of its own these days, but the authentic voice of the time cannot be duplicated and that is what we have in Green for Danger.

  Christianna Brand, after many early struggles with poverty, was a happy bride of a year when war broke out and her husband, a qualifted surgeon, immediately went into the army with the rank of major. She accompanied him on his posting until he was sent overseas.

  She says: “He was posted to a military hospital in Woolwich and I took rooms in a little house as close to the hospital walls as possible—of course he had to live in. Woolwich is on the Thames, and harbours the biggest arsenal in the country; when the blitz came, every bomber unloaded a few on us for luck as they went in over London, and anything they had left over, on the way out—they followed the Thames, as the light on the water was impossible to disguise. For five months, we were bombed almost every night. They would drop flares to light up the ground below and then bomb what they saw; what they saw was all too often the hospital; and they had a horrid habit of chaining two bombs together which did make a biggish bang: you saw the flares coming, floating down and then this pretty unearthly scream of the bombs falling and whacko!…

  “I got permission to share the V.A.D.’s air-raid shelter—the V.A.D.s, if you don’t know, were the young women who came in from every walk of life, got a little bit of training and worked as nurses.… The shelter was tube-shaped, underground, and we slept on straw palliases on wooden bunks. At least the others slept, worn out with their days’ hard work, but I was always a damned insomniac anyway, and heard the approach of every bomb. You got so used to it—your stomach used to turn over, but I don’t think we ever gave our minds to what might happen, would happen, if we got a direct hit.…

  “You might remember that all this time we were living on, I think, two ounces of meat a week, two eggs, a small ration* of bread, an ounce or two of butter and of tea and sugar. Anything else you could get, you could have—if you stood in a queue for it. I once walked down Fleet Street holding a lemon which someone had sent from North Africa, and the buses would draw up and the driver call out, ‘What did you do to get that, mate?’”

  Meanwhile, her first novel, Death in High Heels, was going the dreary rounds of publishers, accumulating fifteen rejections before it was accepted and published and “landed up withou
t a comma changed, as quite a little best seller.” Heads You Lose followed and was bought for serialization by The Saturday Evening Post.

  She was informed by authorities that the most valuable war work she could do was to continue with her writing, which was bringing desperately needed foreign currency into the country. (Wars are not cheap.) So, hunched over her typewriter, her tin helmet at the ready, she began what was to be one of the most memorable books of that era, Green for Danger.

  “We all led what had become to us perfectly ordinary lives. I wrote Green for Danger under these circumstances, battering away all day at my typewriter (earning good dollars … much needed in this country) and as soon as light was needed, drawing all the blackout curtains together; one gleam of light and the air raid wardens were at your door. When the air raid syrens [sic] began to howl, as they did every night as dark fell, put on my tin hat—forbidden day and night to go out without it—and collected my lucky chestnut.… Then up about a quarter of a mile to the hospital gates. Our ack-ack guns were shooting up at the bombers and down came a hail of what we used to, incorrectly, call shrapnel—great misshapen lumps of metal, red hot; one hit me once and tore the whole front of a thick woolly jersey away.… But that night, I’d be in my upstairs room, banging away at my typewriter again; and I do mean, thinking nothing of it—life going on. Syrens. Tin hat on. Up through the flak to the shelter again, rather upset because a sherry glass of mine had been broken.…

  “Of course all the nonsense went on for three or four years afterwards, the doodle-bugs and the huge, silent, terrible rockets and the lot; but Green for Danger had been launched by then.”

  And what a launch! Green for Danger was to become a major success, both for her and for the British film industry when Alastair Sim brought Inspector Cockrill to vivid life. Not quite the Inspector Cockrill the author had visualized, but “done so beautifully … a marvellous film …” that she was able to forgive the discrepancies. And, of course, the real Inspector Cockrill was still hers—and went on to fresh triumphs, appearing in many subsequent books and short stories.

  But it is the Inspector Cockrill—“Cockie”—of Green for Danger that we remember best as he begins his thoroughgoing investigation, perhaps from slightly less than worthy motives. (“The sirens broke belatedly into their unearthly howl; a flare dropped slowly over the downs, out towards Torrington, splitting the early winter darkness with its gradually brightening gleam—and where there are flares, there are very soon going to be bombs. Inspector Cockrill was interested in bombshells and he did not like bombs; and there was a fifteen-mile drive home in the general direction of those flares. ‘I’ll stay,’ he said briefly.”)

  For the war itself is the motivating force of this entire mystery. Were it not for the war, most of these characters would never have met. They would have continued living their peacetime lives, many miles apart—both geographically and socially—never to have met at all.

  But the war came, people were conscripted, volunteered, went into active military and medical duty—and met other people and situations they would never have encountered in their normal peacetime lives. Still, life went on, disrupted though it might have been. Still, people found time for laughter, love … and murder.

  Despite the mass murder raining down from the skies, the forces of law and order swung into action when an individual was murdered on the operating table; horrifyingly, by one of the people dedicated to saving and preserving life. How? The operation was a routine one, the patient in good health apart from the fractured femur due to be mended—but the patient died.

  Until this, Business as Usual had been the order of the day, but the blitz was one thing, and deliberate murder in their midst was something else. That did what the bombs had not been able to do—disturbed them, upset them, frightened them. As Cockie pointed out, “‘You can take the blitz in your stride; but a couple of unexplained deaths, and you all get the jitters.’”

  Not unreasonably, the reply was: “‘“Unexplained” is the operative word.… I’m much more petrified of the blitz on the nights that it doesn’t come; once it’s there, it’s there, but I don’t like the uneasy waiting for it to begin; and I don’t like waiting to be murdered—or to have my friends murdered.’”

  For the second murder had rapidly followed the first: a nurse who had claimed to know the identity of the killer had been stabbed—with a scalpel. There had also been an unsuccessful attempt to kill another nurse by gassing her as she slept. Nerves were fraying, rumors abounded, and the main suspects found themselves not quite ostracized, but definitely set apart from the rest of the staff. (“‘I suppose it’s all right to let her give the injections? After all she is one of “them” …’” … “‘My dear, the inmates of our shelter have petitioned that when there are air-raids, I shall sleep somewhere else; they think I’m going to rise up in the night and set fire to their palliasses with oil from the paraffin lamps!’” … “‘The Mess was sitting around uneasily, jiggling their teaspoons in their saucers and jumping whenever we spoke to them, so we made ourselves scarce.’”)

  Opening in truly classic style, Chapter One introduces us to two victims and a clutch of suspects—all such pleasant and charming people that it seems impossible to imagine any of them in such roles. And yet … buried deep in the life of each of them is a private tragedy, a secret each would rather not have revealed.

  Some secrets, of course, were open. Everyone knew that a girl had recently died under the anæsthetic administered by Lieutenant Barnes during one of his last operations as a civilian. He had been attacked by the girl’s mother and had even been sent an anonymous letter about it. Sympathy had been on his side—until the fractured femur died under the anæsthetic he was administering.

  Kindly Major Moon made no secret of the fact that he had lost a young son in a hit-and-run road accident and now found sad irony in the fact that the war had brought him an unexpected comfort. (“‘Well, well—I can find it in my heart now to be grateful, I suppose; now that the war’s come, I mean. He’d have been of age, you know; I’d have had to send him off, to see him go off to France or the East or somewhere.… I’d have had to wait and hunger for news of him; he might have been posted missing, perhaps, or killed, and without any news of what had really happened. It’s that telegram business.… I don’t think I could have borne that.… Who would have thought in all these years that I could ever have found it in my heart to say that I was glad that my boy had been killed?”’)

  Everywhere they turned, the war and its effects were inescapable. If it hadn’t been for the war, all those tablets of morphia wouldn’t have been in such wide circulation. But, during the blitz, it seemed a simple and necessary precaution to medical people, who had no difficulty in acquiring such pills. (“‘Most of us keep a small dose handy in case of being buried in an air-raid.… If you were trapped and in pain, it would be comforting to have some, and might save another person risking their lives to give you a shot of something.’”)

  With consummate skill, the author weaves her web of pain and deceit, deadly deeds and twisted motives, catching the reader at every turn. Once you’ve read it, go back and reread it and see how cleverly all your assumptions have been used against you, how smoothly and inevitably you have been fooled.

  Today Christianna Brand lives with her surgeon husband in a beautiful Regency house in the Maida Vale section of London and is a proud grandmother. She has served on the Committee of the Crime Writers’ Association and was chairman from 1972 to 1973. Ever mindful of her early struggles, she is endlessly helpful to new authors. Friends who find themselves in hospital (or in jail) are the recipients of a constant flow of cards, verses, and little notes, thoughtfully spaced to keep boredom at bay and ensure that said friend is not lying alone and neglected when the mail is given out. At the monthly meetings of the Crime Writers’ Association, just follow the sounds of hilarity and you will find Christianna Brand holding court, the center of a lively and appreciative group of colleagues.


  I told her once that I didn’t write fan letters—this is the exception that proves the rule.

  —Marian Babson

  * Actually, bread was not rationed until after the war.

  CHAPTER I

  Joseph Higgins, postman, pushed his battered red bicycle up the long ascent that leads to Heron’s Park, three miles out of Heronsford, in Kent. It had been a children’s sanatorium before the war, and now was being hurriedly scrambled into shape as a military hospital. Its buildings stood out big and grey and bleak among the naked winter trees and he cursed them heartily as he toiled up the hill, his bicycle tacking groggily from side to side on the country road. All this for a mere seven letters! Six miles out of his way for a handful of letters that would probably not even be looked at till the morning! He spread them out, fanwise, in one hand, his elbow resting heavily on the handle-bar, and examined them resentfully. The first was addressed to the Commanding Officer. One of the new medicos, guessed Higgins shrewdly, holding it up to the light. A nice linen envelope and a Harley Street postmark; and doctors’ handwriting was always illegible.…

  Gervase Eden had also cursed as he sat in his consulting-room, confirming to the C.O. at Heron’s Park that he would report for duty, ‘forthwith’. The last of his lovely ladies had just tripped off down the steps in a flutter of cheques and eyelashes and invitations to dinner, and already feeling miraculously better for her heavenly little injection (of unadulterated H2O). He could not flatter himself that the pay of a surgeon in His Majesty’s Forces was going to keep him in anything like the luxury to which he was rapidly becoming accustomed; but there it was—one had put one’s name down during the Munich crisis, and already it was becoming a tiny bit uncomfortable to be out of uniform.… At least he would be free of the lovely ladies for a spell. For the thousandth time he looked at himself in the mirror, looked at his ugly face and greying hair, at his thin, angular body and restless hands—and wondered what on earth women saw in him, and wished they wouldn’t. He rang the bell for his pretty little secretary and asked her to post the letter. She immediately burst into tears at the thought of his going, and after all it was only common charity to spend a few minutes in comforting the poor little soul.