FROM ENGLAND
65
manufacturers. The point is that the 'little man' cannot imagine himself
being really involved in anything so vastly horrible as the war. It is not
that he considers himself better than it, but both smaller and saner.
The war has no glamour and very little hatred.
If
the Germans mean
anything to my fellow Firemen, they mean a disease of which several of
them have witnessed the horrible results in the form of mangled corpses
during air raids. Our problem is to prevent and counteract the spreading
of this
dise~that
is how they look at it. They take their work extremely
aeriously. A very large part of their conversation consists of the shop of
people who are determined to know their job. They realize that sooner or
later they will have to fight real fires, and they are determined to be as
well qualified as possible. During this period of training, there is no
slacking, no absenteeism, and no drinking. All this is rather a surprise
to me.
The best quality of the people I work with is their unfailing kindness.
The defects, eccentricities and shoddiness of life are too near to them for
them to laugh at anyone for making a fool of himself. They need help too
often themselves not to give it to others. When new recruits arrive, the
older recruits go out of their way to help and make things easy for them.
Excuses are made for even the most stupid and ridiculous bunglers on the
ladders. It is not considered disgraceful to be afraid. At the back of all
this,
we are drawn together by a common wish to get on with the small
things of our lives, looking after our families, cultivating our gardens,
enjoying some degree of independence. The loss of the small business, the
tuicab,
the newspaper pitch, the shop in the back street, is a common
grief which draws everyone together in a slight and tacit mourning.
The A.F.S. is in some ways a model democratic organization. The disci–
pline is based on everyone recognizing that a certain degree of efficiency
il
necessary, that certain inefficiencies cause unnecessary risk of life. The
old London Firemen who train us are indefatigable, patient, humorous,
and
never malicious. They are nothing like what I have imagined drill
eergeants to be. They are often extremely funny, usually on purpose, and
they
ahow a manly contempt for 'fancy stuff' such as hydraulics. One or
two of them are such good lecturers that I spend as much time trying to
learn
public speaking from them, as
~hat
they are saying. One day this
week
our instructor lectured twice for two hours on collective pumping,
without seeming tired and without being boring for a moment (although
tile
aubject is one in which I am not specially interested).
There is no saluting in the A.F.S., and so far no one has been kept in
ar
in any way punished. The bad sides of
it
are things such as feeding
ad
sleeping arrangements which are very scrappy. Also, although when
tlfelllen are actually allotted to their stations, they spend long hours
doing absolutely nothing (as do all the Civil Defence workers) nothing
llelllS
to have been done about Civil Defence Education. A tremendous
