The Hand of Spring

The Cockney's street barrows were bright with yellow jonquils. In Soho Square the hedges turned from sooty brown to impetuous green. The stark winter skeletons of the trees in Hyde Park were smudged by swollen buds; purple crocuses pushed up in the rain. It was spring in London.

Along the stately crescent of Regent Street the Londoner stepped out briskly without his winter rubbers. He wore his beige raincoat and had his umbrella at the ready, but he swung it; the air was soft and the lengthening days were heady. He forgot to notice that the sidewalks would be wider if the sandbags could be removed, that the skyline was neater before the bombs fell. A car starting up suddenly might make him jump. His children, when they hid in closets and crawled under chairs, informed him pertly that they were playing "shelter." But almost no one said: "You wouldn't know there was a war on."

Oblique Chat. The women of London could not so easily forget. Housewives fretted about paying tenpence for limp lettuce and a shilling for fist-sized cauliflower. They muddied their boots and sprained their elderly tweed skirts poking around in wartime garden plots while they dreamed of home-grown peas and tomatoes, talked about with such annoyingly leisured learnedness in Mr. Middleton's column in the Daily Express. Still, it was pleasant to read about--more pleasant than to chat obliquely about the strange restlessness that spring seemed to have released throughout the nation.

Never before had these well-behaved Londoners seen such a phenomenon as the Black Market. While the Government raged about it (TIME, March 9), the price of garden tools quadrupled. Even the venders in Piccadilly Circus charged two shillings for a bunch of violets that before the war cost threepence--an outrageous sixpence at the most. It was an evil thing that was springing up.

Shot Directly? In the pubs there was wild talk that "blacketeers" should be shot, preferably along with brass hats and Government officials smudged from the disastrous campaigns in Norway, France, Crete and Singapore. The British had always groused--it was their national small talk--but rarely had so many groused so grumpily as they did now. The Communist Party claimed to have doubled its membership (to 40,000) in two months. The Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, told a mass meeting in Liverpool and a tea fight in Park Lane that "this feeling that the Soviet Union is the salvation of the world is growing. I want it to grow more. . . ."

Normally as conservative as they are law-abiding, Britons wondered whether the war were breeding revolution. The old, curry-livered sahibs at the Carlton were certain it was. But nobody paid much attention to them any more. Sir Stafford Cripps's appointment as leader of the House and his trip to India were signs that the old conservatism was passing.

In the months and years ahead Britain's Government might move to the left, or even flirt with dictatorship, for the sake of war efficiency. But nothing could un-British the British. Among other indications, infallible spring, with the inevitable, incurably English bulbs, brought out the inevitable, incurably British rhymesters:

Home Guard Harry cleaned his gun,

Let it off and shot his son,

"My," said Harry, "ain't that good--

It does just like they said it would."

Or:

Coming over in parachutes,

The Huns raped Cousin Flo, the brutes,

"Never mind, Flo," exclaimed her mother,

"One man's very like another."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.