INTO THE POST-WAR WORLD

The 1945 Mackinac assembly lasted from 1 July to the end of the first week in November. On arrival Buchman was greeted by a large company of teenagers who had come back from a nationwide tour with two plays which they had written and produced. He wanted Artur Rodzinski, who was there with his wife Halina, to meet them, as he realised that they could probably get through to him when no one else could. Rodzinski was reluctant because, as he told everyone there later, he had, in spite of decisions made at the time when Halina and his son had been 'miraculously saved' in childbirth, 'got confused about all four standards'. Two of the youngsters came to invite him to their play. He told them he was unwell. 'Popski, you're all right. We've got your number,' one of them said.

'They were right,' Rodzinski told the assembly next morning. 'They had my number. I was ashamed not to go. The readiness of those youngers to lead a God-guided life, to do without what older people call the spice of life. I had had it, so I admired them. This morning I had clear guidance. My disobedience. God talks to me all the time, but I don't obey. We had a quiet time after breakfast, Frank walked in just as we were finishing. He smiled, and I knew he knew everything which had happened.'1

It was also while the Rodzinskis were at Mackinac that the newly formed Mackinac Singers gave their first performance. Rodzinski's comments encouraged Buchman to make wide use of this chorus, singing its own songs, as part of the growing array of productions and publications being deployed by his team.

Various Allied officers now found that their duties somehow led through Mackinac. One of them was Edward Howell, a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force. After being seriously wounded in Crete, he was imprisoned at Salonika, and, although gravely ill and without the use of either arm, had escaped over the walls and covered the length of Greece on foot. This escape plan had started in hospital when he recalled his brother David's belief that people could be guided by God and experimented with listening. On his return to London, Churchill had had him to dinner to hear about it and he told Churchill how he was guided from point to point, at one stage following a star. 'That was how I escaped from the Boers,' commented the Prime Minister. Howell told his story at Mackinac, where he was meeting Buchman for the first time.*

(* Howell tells his story in Escape to Live (Longmans, 1947, Grosvenor, 1981.)

330