In the country of France, in the region of Provence, in the Department of Var, a black, cold, eerie, stillness enveloped the village of Three Hills.
The occupants of the picturesque, but decaying, old village, had been abed for several hours.
Even the new road, which connected the village to the nearest city and coast in one direction, sweeping the eastern outskirts and then inland to join the motorway in the other, was silent.
It was so quiet, and the darkness so dense that a rodent broke covers and searched the pavement edge of the T junction heart of the village. This was normal for the season, just as it had been earlier, at midday, for old men to pavement sit, gossiping, remembering, and hoping that the monotony of their experience would be broken by the bump of a tourist vehicle coming up the hill, and turning across traffic without knowing that locals continued to take the original right of way.
It was cold enough for everyone to have closed both window and shutter, but on the outside, noise carried from street to street, and area to area.
No one in the old village subsequently reported to having been awoken by the gunshots, and even those living in the quixotic shaped buildings leading up to the landmark summit of the principal hill had been undisturbed by unnatural activity. From the top western slopes, the dwellings overlooked the second hill, and beyond to the unpopulated side of Little Hill from where the shots had come.
Two communities occupied the second hill.
On the lower east and south slopes there was a small post war development of public housing, including prized accommodation for the elderly, overlooking terraced municipal grounds, with safe play for young children, two tennis courts, a kickabout plot, a scatter of shrubs and simple seating.
None of the occupants of this distinctly working class appendage were disturbed by the bangs, but a few souls had stirred, unaware why, in the private, middle class modern properties on the western upper slopes of the hill, bordering the single tarmac road which wound round into the place known locally as Newlands valley.
The dozen homesteads of Newlands had also been created after 1945. In the back to nature climate and prosperity of the sixties, the owner of this fertile, sheltered land, had grasped that idealistic townsfolk would pay well for a comparatively small area of land to build a home, and as a sideline, run a few chickens, and grow vegetables and fruits, including the grape.
All the residents had once been newcomers to the village and were still collectively branded as strange folk for their way out choice of living place rather than any known quirks of behaviour. They were not considered to be villagers and were treated as only slightly better than 'the commuters', and those who owned the holiday lets.
Newlands residents woken by the shots returned to sleep without concern. Any outside playing child's laughter, or cry, a dog's bark, or the bang of a door, could be heard across the valley during the active part of the day. Such was the constant solitude that it was common for casual visitors to lower voices down to whispers once they realised that sound flowed until it bounced back off the surrounding wooded hills.
One resident subsequently told enquirers that he had assumed the cause of the unscheduled awakening had been the backfiring of a car, somewhere, most likely on Little Hill, arriving late, or setting off early. It was an acceptable consequence of the holiday trade located on the hillside farthest away from the village centre.
The only other exit from the valley was a single pot holed track which cut across a wooded plateau before joining the tarmac road created when holiday villas were built on the previously undeveloped Little Hill.
Several woodland tracks branched across the plateau and one of these led to the villa, the Little Paradise. Although secluded and apart, everyone in the village knew the English owner Paul, and that from early spring to late autumn he entertained parties of young women. Once a fortnight he would bring guests to the only hotel for a meal, and unlike those using the holiday homes, or 'the commuters', he used the village stores, and out of season, he employed locals to upkeep the property, and he contributed financially to both church and village developments on a regular basis.
There was genuine shock and disbelief at the subsequent revelations.
On this early autumn, midweek night, all but one of the nine holiday villas, with their individual pools, on the upper South and East slopes of Little Hill were unlet, or empty. Even the secretive, middle aged Parisian couple, with their year round flow of friends and loud late night parties, had made one of their rare returns to the capital. Occupying the villa nearest to Little Paradise they stayed away from the subsequent media interest, returning only to clear possessions before placing the property on the market.
The only people in residence on the slopes of the Hill were an English couple, the Wisdom's, who were having an extended, late summer into autumn holiday, to mark Mr Wisdom's early retirement from a life of behind the scenes public service in a government department, a departure which Mrs Wisdom branded to her children, and her friends, as premature. Privately she contested her husband's explanation that he had been made an offer which could not be refused.
She was a light sleeper. She had sat up startled, expecting Willy to immediately explain why.
`Something on one of the farms` was a response which failed to satisfy Mrs Wisdom's natural but insatiable curiosity.
William Wisdom, Willy to family and friends, and Little Willy to those who were not, had spent many an hour contemplating the rest of his life while pretending to study the assortment of fruit and vegetable growers who filled the coast road plain below Little Hill. It was rare to see something different so concentration on the future would only be broken by noise. Daytime sounds hung in the air, begging to be noticed, but at night they were unwelcome, disturbing his latest fantasy, built up from a close encounter with a bronzed topless creature on an expedition to a blistering beach at the end of Summer.
No person therefore, was subsequently able to express certainty over the number of shots fired, or at the times they occurred.
This was to prove significant, although the Wisdom's were adamant that there had been a single ricocheting crack sometime after they had been first roused. Mrs Wisdom's widely televised interviews, on this point, immediately in France, and then on return home, were crucial to media acceptance of subsequent official reports.
With his seasoned understanding of the way the world worked, Willy considered the event funny peculiar, but his instinct was that both should say nothing in public and make a hasty return to their modest suburban home at Carshalton, in Surrey, and quickly forget a holiday which had proved the saying, 'those the Gods wish to punish, they first grant their secret wishes.'
Virginia, Mrs Wisdom, argued that after fifteen years of Official Secrets Act imposed anonymity, required by his work on civil emergency planning, after his refusal to discuss his activities as a Local Authority Emergency Planning Officer, and before that, during his administration of residential homes for the elderly, she was entitled to a few seconds recognition on the media stage. She would then continue a life that had been greatly defined by her role as a wife and mother, but once the children had become older, she had also developed interests, outside her home, which she shared with a growing circle of friends.
The unexpected retirement of her husband, and his wish for them to move to France, threatened the established pattern of her life, so she had agreed to holiday after taking things over with her daughter, and the younger son, and then borrowed from her eldest, the cash to buy her husband a five year membership at the Surrey Oval with the promise of lifetime membership when he reached sixty, and one of the best season tickets then available at Crystal Palace, both boyhood loves, and ambitions, which he had been unable to satisfy.
Virginia had become engaged, and then married Willy, after going to work as a clerk in her hometown Welfare Department where he had recently been promoted as number two in a small section which ensured that residential homes for the elderly were maintained and supplied with all that was necessary to keep them running. She had been selected in a local authority in-take of school leavers who had sat a minimum of four ordinary level general certificates of education which included English language and Mathematics, and allocated to the Welfare Department after a general induction courses during which they were appraised by the departments with vacancies. Her main role had been to sit at a desk and keep a daily record of everyone resident in the Homes, which she then passed to a colleague who dealt with the financial assessment and payment accounts of the individual residents who were charged on a daily basis. The most important aspect of her work was to check with a Home and with the hospital administration when residents were admitted for treatment as they were not charged during this period. She had other regular tasks, and was required to learn the work of other junior clerks, to cover when they were on holiday or off on any sickness, and it was during one of these dual role situations that she worked for Willy and learnt that his promotion had been unusual for one so young, and that he appeared a popular but quiet member of the social club who acted as scorer for the cricket team and organised the games for the football team as well as being a member of the chess team. She was also impressed that he had a car which he was buying through a loan from the authority, and a running cost allowance, because he had to make visits to the Homes, sometimes with Councillors. It was only after they were married that Willy confided that he had been appointed and promoted because his father not only was a member of the same political party as the controlling political group on the Council, but was in the same Lodge as the Council Leader. Like her husband she had become a member of the Local Government Union, NALGO, but he had also been invited to join AWHA, an association of Welfare and Hospital Administrators and had been told he would have a successful career if he behaved himself.
The promise of a good and secure life, and a home of her own, had attracted Virginia to William, in contrast to the boys who lived on the same estate and attended the same school as everyone else who had failed the 11 plus, but she had been noticed as having scholastic potential and had been streamed to sit for G.C.E's. She had enthusiastically accepted the role of being a mothering housewife when she became pregnant with their eldest son, immediately after their marriage, and had no inclination or need to go to work for money when the children moved from primary to secondary school, then called comprehensives. She had only began to question their relationship and her situation after her husband had been invited to become the local authority's first Emergency Planning officer in 1971 which coincided the amalgamation of the Welfare Department into a Social Services Department. William had become increasingly secretive about his work activities, which included various courses and meetings, especially when he was invited to become advisor to the London Borough's Associations and the Association of Metropolitan Authorities. After failing to bridge the gulf of secrecy he had created she set about developing a separate life, and had no intention of yielding to his open wish to reinvent both their lives by moving to a country whose language she did not speak or wish to do so.
While on returning home British media exploited Mrs Wisdom's meagre knowledge, the French and the mainland Europeans, concentrated on Peter Medeme, or more precisely, Medeme`s dog, whose persistent barking continued until Peter went outside his Newlands home to discover what was upsetting the animal. Whether the owner resembling "Chubby Chops" has been affected by the smoke and flames retching above the Little Hill plateau, or something unrelated, never mattered, because immediately Peter looked up, he acted, and within seconds of his phone call, the village siren summoned households into feverish activity.
Apprehension mingled with excitement among the inhabitants of the old village as many had relatives and friends in areas likely to be affected by any woodland fire.
Squads of civilian volunteers made their way to assembly points outside the Town Hall, in the market square, and to the visitor's car park adjacent to the floodlit boule pitches which were the envy of the Department. At these points they were asked to wait while official services investigated the blaze, and decided if, and how, they would be deployed. After a surprisingly brief period they were advised to return home as the fire only involved the buildings of Little Paradise, and not woodland.
Thus the quick response of Peter Medeme and Chubby Chops made them instant celebrated heroes.
Meanwhile there had been fear rather than panic in the middle hill properties, and in Newlands valley. It had been an exceptionally bad year for fires in the region as the scarred landscape along parts of the A.8 testified so precautionary preliminaries were commenced by those living closest to the woods before the siren sounded the end of the alert. Uninformed agitation best describes the reaction of some of 'the commuters' living on estates on the far side of the Three Hills village, along the new bypass road. They could see nothing, and no one took time to contact and explain the succession of fire, police, medical, media and other less conspicuous public vehicles suddenly coming and going along the highway in the middle of the night. Many were unaware that three intermittent blasts on the siren, repeated twice at night, signalled the potential risk of spreading fire in the neighbourhood and called for a general preparedness, and volunteer assembly.
Although, following what Willy recognised from his national service as a gunshot, he had persuaded his wife to return to bed, the sound of the siren provoked both to partially dress, go downstairs and for Mrs Wisdom to make tea while he went outside to investigate, having under her administration, first smothered all bare skin with anti mosi lotion.
Once on the veranda he could see and hear the blaze soaring over the brow of the hill. Although unaware of the specific meaning of the sirens he made an immediate connection between the gunshots and the fire.
This was the third and final month of what he suspected would become his only prolonged period of living outside the UK. It had not been the adventure he had hoped for. After only two weeks on their own they had been joined in succession by their unmarried eldest son and their daughter, her husband and their child, and the youngest son, his wife, and the twins. It was during the visit of his unmarried son that that the two had one evening discovered the entrance gate to the Little Paradise Villa. Before that William, accompanied by his wife, had walked up the hill, along the main track road and discovered Newlands valley, and subsequently, the road down middle hill which enabled them to return to Little Hill or go on to the village centre. They had seen the offshoot tracks, but although each family group had re-discovered the valley, they had not explored the tracks, one of which led to the Little Paradise.
On the night of the event, on leaving their villa, William had witnessed the passage of both village fire tenders, and then a number of other vehicles. He considered this odd because the quickest way from the village centre to the Newlands valley properties was up middle hill where the road was wide and made up all the way. Perhaps the gunshot and the fire were not connected, but he decided to defer further speculation until he had gained more information.
His first reaction was to summon Ginny to make an overnight pack while he gathered travel documents and currency, and prepared a flask of coffee. Experience, based on countless behind the scenes reports of major civil incidents, had forced him to accept the unpalatable conclusion that in a real emergency, plans and guidance manuals were of little use. You needed the right people who had been trained together over time, and this was rare, and his annual visit to the European Community Conference with a Minister, confirmed that in GB they had remained at the forefront after the attention had rapidly faded with the end of the official Cold War. For William the first unwritten rule of emergency planning, remained 'there will be chaos,' and which will become worse the greater the number of agencies with their separate command or hierarchical structures. The second rule was, 'look after you and yours.'
Just when they were ready to leave the siren sounded again and the passage of vehicles ceased. Willy decided that while his wife should remain ready to leave he would try and find out what was happening, and for once she did not openly question his judgement. Although beforehand Virginia would have grasped at any suggestion to return home, following the visits of her children and grand children, her antennae indicated that something interesting, possibly tragic, had occurred, although she had no sense of what emerged, and she wanted to know what, but because of the feeling of some tragedy, she agreed to stay in without protest.
The occupants of the picturesque, but decaying, old village, had been abed for several hours.
Even the new road, which connected the village to the nearest city and coast in one direction, sweeping the eastern outskirts and then inland to join the motorway in the other, was silent.
It was so quiet, and the darkness so dense that a rodent broke covers and searched the pavement edge of the T junction heart of the village. This was normal for the season, just as it had been earlier, at midday, for old men to pavement sit, gossiping, remembering, and hoping that the monotony of their experience would be broken by the bump of a tourist vehicle coming up the hill, and turning across traffic without knowing that locals continued to take the original right of way.
It was cold enough for everyone to have closed both window and shutter, but on the outside, noise carried from street to street, and area to area.
No one in the old village subsequently reported to having been awoken by the gunshots, and even those living in the quixotic shaped buildings leading up to the landmark summit of the principal hill had been undisturbed by unnatural activity. From the top western slopes, the dwellings overlooked the second hill, and beyond to the unpopulated side of Little Hill from where the shots had come.
Two communities occupied the second hill.
On the lower east and south slopes there was a small post war development of public housing, including prized accommodation for the elderly, overlooking terraced municipal grounds, with safe play for young children, two tennis courts, a kickabout plot, a scatter of shrubs and simple seating.
None of the occupants of this distinctly working class appendage were disturbed by the bangs, but a few souls had stirred, unaware why, in the private, middle class modern properties on the western upper slopes of the hill, bordering the single tarmac road which wound round into the place known locally as Newlands valley.
The dozen homesteads of Newlands had also been created after 1945. In the back to nature climate and prosperity of the sixties, the owner of this fertile, sheltered land, had grasped that idealistic townsfolk would pay well for a comparatively small area of land to build a home, and as a sideline, run a few chickens, and grow vegetables and fruits, including the grape.
All the residents had once been newcomers to the village and were still collectively branded as strange folk for their way out choice of living place rather than any known quirks of behaviour. They were not considered to be villagers and were treated as only slightly better than 'the commuters', and those who owned the holiday lets.
Newlands residents woken by the shots returned to sleep without concern. Any outside playing child's laughter, or cry, a dog's bark, or the bang of a door, could be heard across the valley during the active part of the day. Such was the constant solitude that it was common for casual visitors to lower voices down to whispers once they realised that sound flowed until it bounced back off the surrounding wooded hills.
One resident subsequently told enquirers that he had assumed the cause of the unscheduled awakening had been the backfiring of a car, somewhere, most likely on Little Hill, arriving late, or setting off early. It was an acceptable consequence of the holiday trade located on the hillside farthest away from the village centre.
The only other exit from the valley was a single pot holed track which cut across a wooded plateau before joining the tarmac road created when holiday villas were built on the previously undeveloped Little Hill.
Several woodland tracks branched across the plateau and one of these led to the villa, the Little Paradise. Although secluded and apart, everyone in the village knew the English owner Paul, and that from early spring to late autumn he entertained parties of young women. Once a fortnight he would bring guests to the only hotel for a meal, and unlike those using the holiday homes, or 'the commuters', he used the village stores, and out of season, he employed locals to upkeep the property, and he contributed financially to both church and village developments on a regular basis.
There was genuine shock and disbelief at the subsequent revelations.
On this early autumn, midweek night, all but one of the nine holiday villas, with their individual pools, on the upper South and East slopes of Little Hill were unlet, or empty. Even the secretive, middle aged Parisian couple, with their year round flow of friends and loud late night parties, had made one of their rare returns to the capital. Occupying the villa nearest to Little Paradise they stayed away from the subsequent media interest, returning only to clear possessions before placing the property on the market.
The only people in residence on the slopes of the Hill were an English couple, the Wisdom's, who were having an extended, late summer into autumn holiday, to mark Mr Wisdom's early retirement from a life of behind the scenes public service in a government department, a departure which Mrs Wisdom branded to her children, and her friends, as premature. Privately she contested her husband's explanation that he had been made an offer which could not be refused.
She was a light sleeper. She had sat up startled, expecting Willy to immediately explain why.
`Something on one of the farms` was a response which failed to satisfy Mrs Wisdom's natural but insatiable curiosity.
William Wisdom, Willy to family and friends, and Little Willy to those who were not, had spent many an hour contemplating the rest of his life while pretending to study the assortment of fruit and vegetable growers who filled the coast road plain below Little Hill. It was rare to see something different so concentration on the future would only be broken by noise. Daytime sounds hung in the air, begging to be noticed, but at night they were unwelcome, disturbing his latest fantasy, built up from a close encounter with a bronzed topless creature on an expedition to a blistering beach at the end of Summer.
No person therefore, was subsequently able to express certainty over the number of shots fired, or at the times they occurred.
This was to prove significant, although the Wisdom's were adamant that there had been a single ricocheting crack sometime after they had been first roused. Mrs Wisdom's widely televised interviews, on this point, immediately in France, and then on return home, were crucial to media acceptance of subsequent official reports.
With his seasoned understanding of the way the world worked, Willy considered the event funny peculiar, but his instinct was that both should say nothing in public and make a hasty return to their modest suburban home at Carshalton, in Surrey, and quickly forget a holiday which had proved the saying, 'those the Gods wish to punish, they first grant their secret wishes.'
Virginia, Mrs Wisdom, argued that after fifteen years of Official Secrets Act imposed anonymity, required by his work on civil emergency planning, after his refusal to discuss his activities as a Local Authority Emergency Planning Officer, and before that, during his administration of residential homes for the elderly, she was entitled to a few seconds recognition on the media stage. She would then continue a life that had been greatly defined by her role as a wife and mother, but once the children had become older, she had also developed interests, outside her home, which she shared with a growing circle of friends.
The unexpected retirement of her husband, and his wish for them to move to France, threatened the established pattern of her life, so she had agreed to holiday after taking things over with her daughter, and the younger son, and then borrowed from her eldest, the cash to buy her husband a five year membership at the Surrey Oval with the promise of lifetime membership when he reached sixty, and one of the best season tickets then available at Crystal Palace, both boyhood loves, and ambitions, which he had been unable to satisfy.
Virginia had become engaged, and then married Willy, after going to work as a clerk in her hometown Welfare Department where he had recently been promoted as number two in a small section which ensured that residential homes for the elderly were maintained and supplied with all that was necessary to keep them running. She had been selected in a local authority in-take of school leavers who had sat a minimum of four ordinary level general certificates of education which included English language and Mathematics, and allocated to the Welfare Department after a general induction courses during which they were appraised by the departments with vacancies. Her main role had been to sit at a desk and keep a daily record of everyone resident in the Homes, which she then passed to a colleague who dealt with the financial assessment and payment accounts of the individual residents who were charged on a daily basis. The most important aspect of her work was to check with a Home and with the hospital administration when residents were admitted for treatment as they were not charged during this period. She had other regular tasks, and was required to learn the work of other junior clerks, to cover when they were on holiday or off on any sickness, and it was during one of these dual role situations that she worked for Willy and learnt that his promotion had been unusual for one so young, and that he appeared a popular but quiet member of the social club who acted as scorer for the cricket team and organised the games for the football team as well as being a member of the chess team. She was also impressed that he had a car which he was buying through a loan from the authority, and a running cost allowance, because he had to make visits to the Homes, sometimes with Councillors. It was only after they were married that Willy confided that he had been appointed and promoted because his father not only was a member of the same political party as the controlling political group on the Council, but was in the same Lodge as the Council Leader. Like her husband she had become a member of the Local Government Union, NALGO, but he had also been invited to join AWHA, an association of Welfare and Hospital Administrators and had been told he would have a successful career if he behaved himself.
The promise of a good and secure life, and a home of her own, had attracted Virginia to William, in contrast to the boys who lived on the same estate and attended the same school as everyone else who had failed the 11 plus, but she had been noticed as having scholastic potential and had been streamed to sit for G.C.E's. She had enthusiastically accepted the role of being a mothering housewife when she became pregnant with their eldest son, immediately after their marriage, and had no inclination or need to go to work for money when the children moved from primary to secondary school, then called comprehensives. She had only began to question their relationship and her situation after her husband had been invited to become the local authority's first Emergency Planning officer in 1971 which coincided the amalgamation of the Welfare Department into a Social Services Department. William had become increasingly secretive about his work activities, which included various courses and meetings, especially when he was invited to become advisor to the London Borough's Associations and the Association of Metropolitan Authorities. After failing to bridge the gulf of secrecy he had created she set about developing a separate life, and had no intention of yielding to his open wish to reinvent both their lives by moving to a country whose language she did not speak or wish to do so.
While on returning home British media exploited Mrs Wisdom's meagre knowledge, the French and the mainland Europeans, concentrated on Peter Medeme, or more precisely, Medeme`s dog, whose persistent barking continued until Peter went outside his Newlands home to discover what was upsetting the animal. Whether the owner resembling "Chubby Chops" has been affected by the smoke and flames retching above the Little Hill plateau, or something unrelated, never mattered, because immediately Peter looked up, he acted, and within seconds of his phone call, the village siren summoned households into feverish activity.
Apprehension mingled with excitement among the inhabitants of the old village as many had relatives and friends in areas likely to be affected by any woodland fire.
Squads of civilian volunteers made their way to assembly points outside the Town Hall, in the market square, and to the visitor's car park adjacent to the floodlit boule pitches which were the envy of the Department. At these points they were asked to wait while official services investigated the blaze, and decided if, and how, they would be deployed. After a surprisingly brief period they were advised to return home as the fire only involved the buildings of Little Paradise, and not woodland.
Thus the quick response of Peter Medeme and Chubby Chops made them instant celebrated heroes.
Meanwhile there had been fear rather than panic in the middle hill properties, and in Newlands valley. It had been an exceptionally bad year for fires in the region as the scarred landscape along parts of the A.8 testified so precautionary preliminaries were commenced by those living closest to the woods before the siren sounded the end of the alert. Uninformed agitation best describes the reaction of some of 'the commuters' living on estates on the far side of the Three Hills village, along the new bypass road. They could see nothing, and no one took time to contact and explain the succession of fire, police, medical, media and other less conspicuous public vehicles suddenly coming and going along the highway in the middle of the night. Many were unaware that three intermittent blasts on the siren, repeated twice at night, signalled the potential risk of spreading fire in the neighbourhood and called for a general preparedness, and volunteer assembly.
Although, following what Willy recognised from his national service as a gunshot, he had persuaded his wife to return to bed, the sound of the siren provoked both to partially dress, go downstairs and for Mrs Wisdom to make tea while he went outside to investigate, having under her administration, first smothered all bare skin with anti mosi lotion.
Once on the veranda he could see and hear the blaze soaring over the brow of the hill. Although unaware of the specific meaning of the sirens he made an immediate connection between the gunshots and the fire.
This was the third and final month of what he suspected would become his only prolonged period of living outside the UK. It had not been the adventure he had hoped for. After only two weeks on their own they had been joined in succession by their unmarried eldest son and their daughter, her husband and their child, and the youngest son, his wife, and the twins. It was during the visit of his unmarried son that that the two had one evening discovered the entrance gate to the Little Paradise Villa. Before that William, accompanied by his wife, had walked up the hill, along the main track road and discovered Newlands valley, and subsequently, the road down middle hill which enabled them to return to Little Hill or go on to the village centre. They had seen the offshoot tracks, but although each family group had re-discovered the valley, they had not explored the tracks, one of which led to the Little Paradise.
On the night of the event, on leaving their villa, William had witnessed the passage of both village fire tenders, and then a number of other vehicles. He considered this odd because the quickest way from the village centre to the Newlands valley properties was up middle hill where the road was wide and made up all the way. Perhaps the gunshot and the fire were not connected, but he decided to defer further speculation until he had gained more information.
His first reaction was to summon Ginny to make an overnight pack while he gathered travel documents and currency, and prepared a flask of coffee. Experience, based on countless behind the scenes reports of major civil incidents, had forced him to accept the unpalatable conclusion that in a real emergency, plans and guidance manuals were of little use. You needed the right people who had been trained together over time, and this was rare, and his annual visit to the European Community Conference with a Minister, confirmed that in GB they had remained at the forefront after the attention had rapidly faded with the end of the official Cold War. For William the first unwritten rule of emergency planning, remained 'there will be chaos,' and which will become worse the greater the number of agencies with their separate command or hierarchical structures. The second rule was, 'look after you and yours.'
Just when they were ready to leave the siren sounded again and the passage of vehicles ceased. Willy decided that while his wife should remain ready to leave he would try and find out what was happening, and for once she did not openly question his judgement. Although beforehand Virginia would have grasped at any suggestion to return home, following the visits of her children and grand children, her antennae indicated that something interesting, possibly tragic, had occurred, although she had no sense of what emerged, and she wanted to know what, but because of the feeling of some tragedy, she agreed to stay in without protest.
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