Apparently he imagined that by burying the silver ingots, he could recover them after an invasion had been repelled, or that at least he could evade a post-war capital levy.
艾伦打算把银锭埋到地里，等击退侵略后，再把它们挖出来，而且这至少可以逃避战后的资本征收。
(In 1920, Churchill and the Labour party had both favoured such a policy.) It was an odd idea.
（在1920年，丘吉尔和工党很擅长这种措拖。）这是个古怪的想法，
It was logical enough to be pessimistic about the outcome of the war, but if there had been an invasion,
对战争结果的悲观设想是可以理解的，但如果真的有入侵，
then surely some transatlantic evacuation of code-breakers would have taken place (just as the Poles had escaped to France), in which case he would have been better off with his savings in a form more suitable for transport.
即使是最小规模的入侵，密码专家们也会进行疏散（就像波兰人逃到法国那样），在这种情况下，他应该采取一些便于运输的方式来保护他的积蓄。
He bought two bars, worth about 250 pounds, and wheeled them out in an old pram to some woods near Shenley.
他花了250英镑，买了两块银锭，用一辆破旧的婴儿车，把银锭运到绅利附近的树林里。
One was buried under the forest floor, the other under a bridge in the bed of a stream.
一块埋在树林里，另一块埋在桥下的河床里。
He wrote out instructions for the recovery of the buried treasure and enciphered them.
他写了一份找回银锭的指南，并把它编码成密码。
At one point the clues were stuck in an old benzedrine inhaler and left under another bridge.
有一份指南被装进一个瓶子，埋在另一座桥下。
He liked talking about ingenious schemes for coping with the war, and once proposed to Peter Twinn an alternative plan of buying a suitcase full of razor blades.
艾伦很喜欢讨论应对战争的巧妙计划，有一次他还对彼得·吐温透露了另一个计划——买一箱子剃须刀刀片。
It suggested the curious, but not totally impossible, picture of Alan as a street-corner hawker in a reduced Britain.
这个想法更古怪，想象一下沦陷后的英国，艾伦坐在街角叫卖他的刀片。