Unmentionable Weather

All leaves of the B. E. F. were canceled. The public was exhorted to "exercise every economy" in the use of fuel. The stores were shy of fresh meat. Water was cut off here & there. "Something" happened to the pipes at Buckingham Palace and it was said that for a whole day His Majesty King George VI had to forego a bath. London suburbanites took hours to get to & from work.

What happened to general transportation was far worse. The "Irish Mail" from Holyhead was announced as "still on its way" 24 hours after the train was due at Waterloo Station. LONDON TRAINS MISSING, SCOTTISH TRAINS LOST screamed newspaper headlines. At Euston Station three trains from the north failed to turn up for more than a day. Two main lines to Scotland did not function for days. Viscount Home, chairman of Great Westtern Railway, and 300 other passengers spent two days and a night in cold, bedless coaches. Up in Scotland 400 travelers were stranded at isolated Crawford, on Beattock Moor, in Lanarkshire. An inn proprietor put them up, rationed her small supply of food, then four days later frantically telephoned an S O S to Glasgow: "We are absolutely starving."

It was the sort of havoc that might well have been created by a first-class shower of Nazi bombs of the type Poland had last September. Actually, it was caused by a Blitzkrieg of the elements. What gave it additional martial atmosphere was that nowadays British weather is a military secret. The censor-fearing London newspapers carried no weather news at all in a spell of such weather as had not been seen in the Isles for 46 years. Hush-hushed was the fact that the British capital was covered with snow, that snowdrifts twelve feet high were piled up on the Dover-Folkestone Road, that the Scottish lochs were frozen solid, that all of Britain shivered. The London Daily Mail gleefully published a cold-wave poem which, it said, had been held up for ten days, finally to be passed with "alterations":

I'm told that the children were flinging round lumps

Of a strange soft white stuff they call. . . .

And folks were foreseeing

A prospect of . . . ;

What that is, of course, I don't know.

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