While England Sleeps Read Online Free PDF

Monday he was dead, Tuesday he had lost a leg, Wednesday he had led his troops to victory, Thursday he had deserted. What finally evaporated these rumors was his physical return to London, bruised and half starved but with all his limbs intact. He was to give a talk about his experiences in the war in a basement in Chelsea.
    Political speeches, like sermons, can be a call to arms if one is there to hear them. In novels they have the effect of glue poured directly onto the page. Therefore I am going to ask you to take it on faith that Desmond Leacock’s speech that evening stirred the heart of my generation and that we left it convinced that only by shoring up Spain against the Fascist threat might we prevent Hitler from taking power in Germany.
    In short, knowing nothing about battle, knowing only that I could not afford to keep paying rent on my rooms for much longer, that the prospect of returning to Richmond was unbearable and that Nigel, my closest friend, had turned against me, I decided to go to war.
    My first step was to attend an Aid to Spain meeting in another basement, this time in Earl’s Court.
    My life changed irrevocably that night, though not in any of the ways I expected.

Chapter Two
    I come from an unusually mixed-up family. My father was a doctor, scion of several generations of doctors who ran the local surgery in a village called Elmsford, near Rye. Very E. F. Benson, his childhood, filled with sandwich cake and antiques, summer people and oddball year-round residents who were forever showing up at the surgery with imaginary liver ailments. He studied medicine in London, where Mother was born. Her mother came from Belgrave Square but defied the wishes of her family by marrying a Pole named Tadeusz Bortciewicz. My great-grandparents summarily disowned her. Grandfather died only a few years later, and Grandmother—now penniless—had to go begging to her relations in order to survive, with the result that Mother and Constance grew up dependent on officious aunts before whom they were expected to perform acts of obeisance. She and Father married for love, which was rare in those days. Of course Father would have preferred to move back to Elmsford and take over the family surgery, but Mother would have gone mad in Elmsford. So they settled in Richmond, which was London, really, but had a villagey air. They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.
    Various orators, at their funerals, praised my parents’ tolerance and gentility. But though they cared about the fate of the world, they were by no means radicals. Indeed, if there is Communism in my blood, it is probably attributable to Grandfather Bortciewicz, who was a talented oboist. I doubt I got it from Elmsford, where the word “Communist” had to be whispered. I certainly didn’t get it from Belgrave Square.
     
    Those years between the wars were full of meetings that took place in basements. The rooms blur in my memory; all of them had mildewed walls and a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, which gave them a dim, ecclesiastical glow. Chairs had been set up, but no one was sitting in them. Instead schools of young men and women flocked and gathered. Most of them had tiny standard-order Oxbridge glasses perched on their noses, and some of them were friends of mine: Anne Cheney, Emma Leland and her fiancé, Tim Sprigg, whom I knew to be a fruit. Then there were the genuine workers, their faces grimy from factories. Among their number I often recognized the driver of a bus I used to take regularly with my mother from Richmond into the West End. Once I smiled and raised a hand in what I hoped would be a comradely and affectionate gesture, but he turned away, embarrassed; even in this Communist haven, an irrevocable gulf of class separated us.
    That night in Earl’s Court, a heavyset young man with bright blond hair took to the podium and called the meeting to order. He looked familiar to me, though at first I couldn’t