"Each Man to 'is Post"

The heart and mind of Britain may have been across the laden English Channel last week, but Britons did not show it. King and commoners, noble lords, grimy street sweeps went about their usual jobs. To an alien eye the most remarkable thing about Britain in invasion week was its British normality.

On the Thames, there was sculling as usual. At the Royal Horticultural Society's flower show in Westminster, a new iris called "Radiant" aroused much interest in its light apricot and crimson-bronze shadings. London's hordes of strangers in uniform thinned out. Londoners felt that they were at last getting back their own town. It was even possible to get a restaurant table without advance booking.

In the stately House of Lords, peers of the realm huffed & puffed at the Government's bill to provide equal education for all. Ignoring the democracy of death in Normandy, crusty Lord Buckmaster said: "Take a boy in an elementary [public] school and whip him for something he has done and all too often he goes whining to his mother. . . . Take a boy in a public [private] school and flog him, perhaps for something he has not done, and one never hears a word about it." R. W. Sorensen, Labor Member of the House of Commons, announced that he would ask the Minister of Health "if he is aware that in plans of postwar housing no provision appears for the construction of adequate shelter against future bombings."

At the Zoo. On D-day plus one, the Zoological Society's council, which runs the Regent's Park Zoo, decided to build a new elephant house, put the parrots on its upper floor, move the insect collection to the second floor of the new antelope house. At midweek the unruffled London Times continued to devote its front page to want ads. But the "Thunderer" made a big concession to big news, put a tiny headline at the upper right corner of Page One: GREAT ASSAULT GOING WELL.

By invasion week's end, the pubs were full of invasion talk. But people also talked inexhaustibly about the cut in the milk ration, about boiling fowls which were 25 shillings ($5.00) in the black market, virtually unobtainable elsewhere at the controlled price of eight shillings sixpence ($1.70).

Charlie Evans, Cockney dustman, plugged steadily at his job of collecting garbage in Chelsea borough. He worried a bit about his son Charles, his son-in-law George, both in the Royal Navy, both probably somewhere in the Channel. But what got him proper hot was a report that Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted to go to France with the troops./- Said Evans: " 'E knows 'e mustn't go out of the country. 'E's Minister of Defense, and if they tried something 'ere where would we be without 'im? In times like these it's each man to 'is own post."

/- In the House of Commons, Churchill was asked to give assurances that he would not go to France. He ignored the demand, kept silent. This week Allied Headquarters disclosed that the Prime Minister, accompanied by South Africa's Jan Christian Smuts, had visited the Normandy Beachhead.

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