Word: likes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...awful night of August 31, the eve of war, when diplomats were making frantic 59th-minute appeals, a wealthy Londoner telephoned his brother in the South of France. Would the brother and his wife like to use the Londoner's private plane to get home? No, thanks, came the answer. For the brother's wife, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, dislikes airplanes even if they belong to the King of England...
...morning the couple drove (Duchess at the wheel) to Major Metcalfe's grey stone house in Ashdown Forest, about 40 miles south of London. In the car were two paperbound books: Winston Churchill's Step by Step, Dr. Ivan Lajos' Nazis Can't Win. Beaming like newlyweds, they received newspapermen. The Duchess was bright ("looked even better than when she left") in a gold dress, a gold and black checked coat, the Duke proper ("looked several years younger") in gray double-breasted flannels and a maroon-and-white...
Precautions went screwy. To prevent autos from striking them during blackouts, cows and horses were painted with white stripes. Sandbags climbed walls like ivy, till there was such a shortage that some lingerie factories began making them. Instead of sandbags, the lawyers of Gray's Inn protected their windows with heavy legal tomes. A rabbi banned the sounding of Shophar ram's horn on the Jewish New Year for fear the populace would take it for an air-raid signal. Stores sold luminous paint for switches and doorknobs, "gas costumes" guaranteed to resist mustard gas 45 minutes, furniture...
Sports went into the Army with the athletes. Boxing and soccer, popular in 1914-18 with the Tommies, went inter-regimental. The first wartime boxing match, attended by 2,000, was held at the Aldershot training camp. All horseracing fixtures (like the Cesarewitch Stakes, on which millions are gambled annually in the Irish Sweepstakes) were canceled, but the blood stock industry, which unearthed great horses like Gainsborough and Hurry On in World War I, hoped to keep racing horses even without crowds...
Removal of Foreign Minister Bonnet, whose name has been inextricably associated with Munich, to the Justice Ministry was at once a matter for the rejoicing of foreign opponents of appeasement like Sagittarius and for the dismay of French ones like radical Author Louis Aragon (Bells of Basel, Residential Quarter). Red Author Aragon was among the first to be called up, sent to the Front. The French are civilized. Search France in vain for concentration camps full of opposition leaders. These worthies were last week given every consideration, including the privilege of fighting-and dying-for France in front-line trenches...