Still, the Clubhouse survived. One imagines members
of the aircraft factory staff drinking pink gin in the yellow
Billiards Room while the bombs raged, carrying on in
the ever-civil, ever stoical way of Britons from, if not
time immemorial, certainly the two centuries previous.
In the pink Ladies' Reading Room sits a gramophone
with a pile of 78 LPs; did it play through the Blitz while
the ladies chatted? Perhaps my imagination is too
informed by the BBC; I do not mean to take lightly
the death toll at Brooklands, nor the British fortitude
which caused that country to rise, phoenix-like, from
the ashes left by the Luftwaffe. But there is an aura
to these rooms that speaks of survival as well as
HYLAND
