大象传媒

The attack on Broadcasting House ended before seven on a smiling April morning. Probably the Intelligence Platoon with its core of senior staff were still in the canteen studying the strategies that had defeated us, the enemy and the other half of the 大象传媒 Home Guard, in which I was serving as an auxiliary. My part in the night's battle finished in the dark early hours. I was captured and escorted to the cellar of a bombed house in what had been Langham Street - a bleak anticlimax for me.

We had mustered at 10.30pm in Oxford Circus, a mixed platoon, male staff in battle-dress with military equipment more or less accurate though perhaps out of date. We auxiliaries wore dark blue boiler suits, our tin hats, handsome enamelled badges showing crossed rifles separating the letters W H D - Womens Home Defence. Of course Churchill had raised the status of boiler suits to uniforms, although I dare say his were hand tailored! We carried our civilian gas masks.

On command we had to crawl, yes, crawl in the direction of Broadcasting House, along the pavement of Great Portland Street close to the buildings. Londoners walked past us silently, without a whisper of derision or a snigger of amusement. They took defence exercises very seriously even if they didn't understand what was going on. I don't remember the reason for this approach, but at the time I felt very martial. As prisoners we spent a few tedious hours in our uncomfortable glass house. We had to stay awake in case we were recalled to the fight. No one looked in with information or billycans of tea. I sat on blocks of rubble battling against the insidious cravings for sleep. Someone came to dismiss us at seven - failures - in my case ignorant of what we should have achieved.

I stumbled out of the dark and came to life in glowing light. I decided to walk through Regents Park to my bedsit. There was complete peace in a golden setting. Sunshine was reflected from an extravagence of closely packed daffodils that covered the ground - no sign here of wartime scrimping. I was alone and I sat on a bench by the boating lake to absorb the scene with eyes and an awakening spirit.

A flight of the Park's seagulls took my presence to mean that the usual pieces of bread would be thrown from a paper bag - not a really legal use of rationed food, but the birds mustn't starve. I had no scraps, for I was on my way to eat my rationed breakfast. The gulls did a few lackadaisical turns overhead then wrote me off and flew towards Bedford College.

I slipped into my contemplation of the golden morning with no thoughts of war or military exercises, until I was alerted by the sight of a black limousine being driven slowly along the Outer Circle. Two men in formal suits, wearing black felt hats, left the car and stood motionless staring at the daffodils. They became animated. Even if I'd heard them I wouldn't have understood their speech, but I knew their delight because I was sharing it.

One of them seemed familiar from Press photographs, although his expression in these had the forbidding gravity we all believed characteristic of Soviet citizens. Of course - he was Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador - the real man with the mask removed. I wondered if he had come from a ringside seat at Broadcasting House?

As our ally he had surely been an invited observer of the most ambitious manoeuvre by the 大象传媒 E Company Home Guard, a part of the 5th County of London Battalion, to defend Broadcasting House? This rare capture of an important Russian, off-guard, as an enthusiastic enchanted human-being, made amends for my depressing experience as Home Guard Auxiliary in battle.

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