IN THE small California community where I live, there are three schools of thought about flashlights. The largest is the blue-cellophane school, discouraged not at all by recent army pronouncements. ’But they used blue lights in France last time. Why, the night our train came into Paris —’ Next in size comes the adhesive-tape group. If you take strips of adhesive and press them over the head of your flash with only the narrowest crisscross between, what you get is a tiny ball of light not unlike the gleam of a cat’s eye in the dark. Are the Japanese going to start bombing whenever they see a cat? The third school, the one to which I belong, is antiflash altogether. Why, we inquire, go wandering about during blackouts? Dr. Johnson, when conversation failed him, used to sit ‘exploring the magnificent resources of his own mind.’ My school advises exploration. Already, even in these few early blackouts, some of us have discovered in our minds items mislaid years ago. Then there is always the recourse of strolling about out of doors, where stars and moon and pavement make walking safe. Or if some general movement around the house cannot be avoided — well, the blind manage.

There is still a fourth opinion, hardly to be called a school since it is held by only one intrepid old lady. Eighty-four last birthday, she is against flashes too, but against them because she intends to turn off no lights. ‘Giving in to them like that! My dear! When you think of the way they’ve acted —’

More disconcerting than any one old lady, even one Mayflower-descended, are the rugged individualists. They will turn off the electricity, certainly they will, but they will turn it off in their own good season, not on the order of some neighbor dubbed warden. Several black eyes, two police calls, and goodness knows how many ruptured neighborly relations are already chalked up to their account. The newspapers warn the wardens against being ‘brusque and overbearing,’ making no mention of the fact that a bomb is brusque too, and the second in command on our air council (or is he the third?) speaks soothingly of an occasional light doing no harm. It might, he says, even do good, giving the effect of a thinly settled countryside. Possibly, but then — whose light? If anybody’s, why not mine? To my own warden, who happens to be in the family, I quote Lord Acton: ‘All power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ So far, the effect of quotation has not been wholly good.

Kitchens are the favorite blackout rooms. Why so many of us feel, with Pooh, that we shall want a little something during blackouts I don’t know, but feel that way we do. Basements and bathrooms, though easier to convert, are not in the running with kitchens. The élite are laying in fitted beaverboards to cover the windows. A little lower in the social scale comes black canton flannel, and lower still, blankets and couch covers. It is amazing how few substances can be used to shut light in as compared with the many that shut it out. And somewhere a moral is hidden under the fact that the more expensive the substance, the less its present usefulness, Fleecy blankets are worthless; cotton-mixed ones, those rectangles that stretch like sheet lead across your tired body, are the variety now in demand.

Every household has its barrel of sand, most of it arriving wet. In any friend’s oven you discover it drying out by the panful in readiness for those incendiary bombs which, against all exhortations, continue to smack of Orson Welles.

For that matter, all our preparations smack of Orson Welles. Work at them as we may, they are still shrouded in a feeling of theatre.

EDITH RONALD MIRRIELEES