Murder on the Home Front by Molly Lefebure

Author:Molly Lefebure
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

War Work

By this time, of course, the authorities had made a spirited attempt to call me up. I had, however, been able to persuade them that I was doing more useful work as Dr. Keith Simpson’s secretary than I would do if I were called into the Women’s Services, or even put in a munitions factory. But at the start of 1944 another attempt was made to get me into uniform. Again I put forward the reasons why I considered I was more useful to the State in my present job than I would be as an ATS, a Wren, or a Waaf, or a factory hand wielding a spanner, and my eloquence this time persuaded the female official at the Labor Exchange that I had really best remain a civilian for the duration.

“After all,” she observed kindly as she closed the interview, “we can’t all expect to have a close-up view of the war. Some of us have to stay put in our ordinary jobs.”

I thought of the stay-at-home view I had already obtained of the war, and it seemed to me to have been quite comprehensive. The Big Blitz in East London, the bodies of scores and scores of air-raid casualties, including some of the victims of the Bethnal Green shelter disaster, several postmortems on spies hanged at Wandsworth prison, and the gradual accumulation during the course of my daily round of innumerable war anecdotes: soldiers returning to shoot unfaithful wives, deserters holding up and killing unfortunates in order to get money from them, timid youths taking cyanide to avoid their call-up, and a hundred and one other stories, combining to give me a broad and vivid picture of life in wartime England.

So when I heard I was to continue in my ordinary job I didn’t feel I was being cheated of any wartime experience. It wasn’t the more orthodox experience I would have obtained in the Services, but it was experience of the war for all that.

And indeed in the first month of the new year a case came along which was peculiarly a “war crime,” one of the first of the cases of that era of wartime crime which was to prove such a tricky period for the police, posing them innumerable new problems and straining their resources to the utmost; the era of a war-swollen, mobile population, troops on the move, deserters on the run, refugees drifting hither and thither, an era of black markets, new rackets, new racketeers, of smuggling and all manner of unlawful “larks,” the whole of that wartime crime wave leading to the postwar wave of spivery and violence, the gunnings and the coshings, and the dismal dark-night exploits of the juvenile gangsters…

It was a cold, gray day in mid-January when we were called to a comfortable, middle-class Surrey suburb. Our destination there was a half-timbered, pseudo-Tudor homestead standing in a tidy, privet-hedged garden. There, in the heavily oak-paneled lounge hall, we found a large party of CID officers, headed by Area Supt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.