The Postmistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

the war toward them, so urgently Will couldn’t stand it, he couldn’t stand there waiting anymore, and just as the woman on the radio slowed to say “ This is London, Good ni —,” he did, at last, snap it off.

    “OH, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE .” Frankie Bard leaned back against the chair in the broadcast studio and closed her eyes. “That came off too high, didn’t it?”
    Murrow was silent. She opened her eyes.
    “Too high and too fast.” She grimaced, agreeing with what he hadn’t said.
    “You’ll get it.” He stood up and reached for his hat. “Your type always does—”
    She looked up in time to catch the grin. “My type?”
    He leaned toward the studio door. “Mix a martini neat as she can shoot a bear—isn’t that right?”
    “That’s right.” Frankie stood. “But New York won’t like it.”
    He jerked open the studio door. “Hell with New York. You did fine.”
    But New York wouldn’t like it one bit. They’d had this same trouble with Betty Wason, in Norway. The door swung slowly closed behind him. A woman’s voice ought not to be telling America about men fighting. It was too high, too thin. It got too excited. For Christ ’s sake . Frankie bent and flicked off the microphone. Mr. Paley’s right-hand man refused even to hire women in the CBS top office as secretaries. Hospital junkets, daily life, that sort of thing—the kinds of thing you might hear in the shops—but for God’s sake women shouldn’t be reporting the war. Men were over there dying in the skies above London. She pushed the pages of her script together into a neat pile, switched off the light in the studio, and reached for the door. Women really ought to marry and settle down and have babies. Women ought not to walk bareheaded under the German bombs looking for vivid word pictures to paint for the people back home.
    So there, she chuckled, and rounded the third set of stairs, climbing her way back up from the underground studio to the street level. She pushed open the heavy back door of Broadcasting House into the blacked-out city waiting for the night’s sirens.
    When the bombs started at teatime on the seventh of September, there had been nothing to distinguish that moment as the beginning—there was no way to know what was coming, or why or for how long. War dropped down and settled. Four hundred people died in the first minute of the Blitz. Fourteen hundred were left blown up and bleeding that first night, and now seventeen nights later there was no way to know who was still alive—every night new numbers, and you don’t say, Murrow instructed Frankie, “the streets are rivers of blood. Say that the little policeman you usually say hello to every morning is not there today.”
    The new moon had risen over the smoking rooftops, and for a moment one could remember the sky without the bombers and the bright rocketing lines of antiaircraft fire over the chimney pots and the distant medieval spires of Westminster Abbey.
    She walked briskly along the shuttered house fronts noting with a reporter’s eye tiny slits of light escaping from some of them. Beyond prayer, beyond chance, for some people lay the simple reward of staying put. Come what may. The moon glinted on the chrome bumpers of the taxis. From the big public shelter along the north side of the street she heard someone singing “Body and Soul,” and the man’s voice in the gray quiet of the moonlit street made it all human. Frankie smiled. War weather.
    There was a pattern to the night attacks, the high uneven drone of the Luftwaffe planes rising like a deadly song to a crescendo around midnight. The searchlight shot straight up into the blackness where, singly or in pairs, the German planes flew like shuttlecocks up and back down the river—a relentless rhythm. The incendiaries dropped first, firebombing the darkened city, forcing it alight and ablaze, cutting open a pathway for the others to follow. Those came down screaming, or whistling, the