Bloomsbury's Outsider (38 page)

Now a civil servant, Bunny needed a uniform appropriate to status. On Savile Row he was fitted for an ‘extremely smart & expensive' dark suit, in which, he declared, he looked ‘as gloriously respectable as a jackdaw in his spring plumage'.
⁹
He couldn't resist adding a black hat and umbrella, the latter, according to Frances Partridge, ‘the best make, perfectly rolled and taken out in all weathers'.
¹⁰
In town he was inclined not only to dress smartly, but with some flair. He liked well-tailored suits and sky blue was a favourite colour.

Through Duncan's connections, Angelica obtained a job working for the Cotton Board based at the National Gallery. Bunny was overjoyed: if they were both working in London they could live together. But there was the problem of where William would go in the school holidays. Bunny wanted to get rid of Alciston and Leonard's flat was too small for them all. For the time being, William would be billeted on Barbara Bagenal, Frances Partridge or Noel Olivier. Angelica could not wait to live with Bunny, telling him ‘my heart is beating twice as fast nearly all the time for thinking of coming back and being with you'. ‘We must never', she added, ‘be separated for so long again.'
¹¹
Leonard generously offered to vacate his flat so that Bunny and Angelica could live there. But Bunny decided to find another and in January 1942 he moved from 159 to 134 Clifford's Inn.

Bunny enjoyed his work at the PWE, but doubted his suitability, the ‘penalty of getting a job in which everyone is picked for
brains'.
¹²
According to the historian Andrew Roberts, the PWE ‘recruited some of the most exceptional, unusual and talented people of any of the nine secret organisations of the Second World War'.
¹³
Established in September 1941, it was largely responsible for coordinating British foreign propaganda and was staffed with writers and journalists who, it was assumed, would be good propagandists because they could write and use their imaginations. Certainly the PWE included some remarkable intellects, Noel Coward, Raymond Mortimer, Freya Stark, E.H. Carr and Richard Crossman among them. But initially it was somewhat chaotic as most recruits were new to propaganda – itself a relatively recent innovation. Recruits were given no formal instruction and were expected to learn on the job.

Moreover, the PWE took some time to find a niche as it had been established by Churchill in the shadow of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and took over some of the SOE's responsibilities. This caused friction between the two organisations, resulting in time-wasting and point-scoring. While it might have been sensible to merge the two organisations, creating a single department, this did not happen. Instead, according to the historian Charles Cruickshank, ‘For the rest of the war the two bodies were forced to live together, suffering all the discomforts of a close union, and enjoying none of the blessings'.
¹⁴

At the outset, the PWE underlings – and there were many of them – were completely unfamiliar with the ‘Whitehall machine,
which consists of a large number of cogs at the lower levels enmeshing with a progressively smaller number of cogs enjoying greater seniority, experience, innate ability, and remuneration'.
¹⁵
As might be anticipated, in an organisation staffed with independent-minded writers, the little cogs often questioned the decisions of the big wheels. Soon after admission, Bunny sensibly proposed that PWE propaganda leaflets should mimic the printing and design current in the countries in which they were to be dropped. This proposal fell on stony ground, but gradually, and under the direction of Robert Bruce Lockhart, the PWE would become a potent force in British propaganda.

The PWE was housed in small and inconvenient quarters on the south side of Berkeley Square. When Bunny and his immediate superior, David Stephens, Secretary to the Executive, were instructed to find other accommodation, Bunny favoured taking over the upper portion of Bush House, above the BBC. Given that the PWE was, in theory, supposed to vet the BBC's foreign-services broadcasts, this seemed a perfectly sensible solution. Both Stephens and Bruce Lockhart supported the move, which took place in early 1942.

Bunny worked extremely hard often until late in the evening, writing propaganda leaflets and items for overseas broadcasts. John Lehmann, the editor of
Penguin New Writing
, bemoaned ‘the steady drain of authors of every sort into the war-machine, either into the Armed Forces, or into jobs which allow them little or no time or opportunity for writing'.
¹⁶
As George Orwell commented while working for the external services of the BBC:
‘To compose a propaganda pamphlet or a radio feature needs just as much work as to write something you believe in, with the difference that the finished product is worthless.'
¹⁷
By ‘worthless', he meant of no lasting value to the author.

In January 1942 Frances Partridge observed that her nephew William Garnett ‘is at the stage when it's as much as life is worth to let any expression cross his face, and he remains silent and impassive until some gust of amusement creates an explosion from within'.
¹⁸
So like his mother in his long silences, William had to adjust to many changes. Not only had he lost Ray and his childhood home, but his great friend and ally, his brother Richard, had gone to the war. Now seventeen, William would soon need to consider which direction to take, a decision made all the tougher by the realisation that the war might continue beyond his eighteenth birthday.

On 7 May Frances and Ralph Partridge were surprised when Bunny telephoned asking if they would come up to London the following day to act as witnesses at his marriage to Angelica. Having hastily purchased presents, they joined William, Bunny and Angelica for lunch at the Ivy before attending the wedding, which took place in the City of London register office, a temporary office, as that in the Guildhall had been destroyed by bombing. Angelica, who looked lovely in a funereal black hat and veil, was twenty-three and Bunny fifty.

There is no evidence that Bunny recalled the flippant remark he made twenty-three years previously about marrying ‘it'. Why would he? It was an entirely private remark intended to amuse Lytton
Strachey. As Bunny said of Lytton, ‘Everything, including his own deep feelings and beliefs, was the subject of constant jokes and gay exaggerations. To take Lytton
au pied de la lettre
is to misunderstand him entirely.'
¹⁹
The same might be said of Bunny in this context.

Maynard Keynes wrote to Bunny, saying he thought he was doing wrong in marrying Angelica. Bunny wondered whether Maynard had been spurred to write the letter by Duncan or Vanessa. He chose not to reply, but later regretted this, as he might have explained that he and Angelica wanted a child. Back at Clifford's Inn after the ceremony, Angelica commented, ‘Now perhaps at last the neighbours will respect me'.
²⁰
Vanessa and Duncan did not attend the wedding, but two days beforehand, Angelica thanked Duncan for a letter which ‘has made me much happier, and I am glad that you see that I am not marrying for superficial motives'.
²¹
Bunny thought Vanessa opposed the marriage because she misguidedly believed that he married Angelica to ‘revenge some imaginary slights received in the past – that I was acting because of some psychological chip on my shoulder'. He did not understand why Vanessa could not perceive what was blindingly obvious: ‘One look at Angelica would have been enough to convince any normal person that it was natural that I should be in love with her and wish to marry her.'
²²

Later that afternoon Bunny and Angelica, together with
William and Richard (who now joined them on his first day of leave) took the train to Northumberland, where they stayed at the Crown Inn, Stannersburn, near Hexham. It was a strange honeymoon, for it encompassed not only Bunny's sons but also a farm which had been bought in memory of Ray. Called Ridley Stokoe, it was located in the hamlet of Tarset, near Hexham. Bunny had purchased it only a few weeks previously for £2,200.

For many years Bunny had benefited from the financial advice of Maynard Keynes and Ralph Partridge, both astute players of the stock market. He was able to buy the farm having sold investments bought on Maynard's advice, though prevailing upon Richard to lend him money to secure a mortgage. Ridley Stokoe comprised three-hundred-and-thirty acres of moor and crag, wild wood and river, fields and a farmhouse. Bunny had not bought it so much to make profit (it was hard land to farm and any profit would go to the tenant farmers), but more because he had a romantic attachment to that craggy, remote countryside, an attachment inherited from Ray. As a girl, she loved walking those wild moors and Bunny thought that Ridley Stokoe would enable Richard and William to share their mother's pleasure. He contemplated burying Ray's ashes there, telling Tim White that she had stayed a little way down river in the same valley and often talked about it.
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Richard and William were immediately captivated by the landscape, and for William it would become an important refuge and focus in years to come. Bunny observed that his younger son was ‘a completely different animal here',
and that Richard, once he had sloughed off the formal carapace of the RAF, was ‘plodding slowly along, good tempered & amused'.
²⁴

Bunny's marriage was made public in an announcement in
The Times
on 11 May, a conventional notice recording that Angelica was the ‘only daughter of Clive Heward Bell & Vanessa Bell'. That particular untruth could not be publicly revised, although Clive, staying with Frances and Ralph, ‘became suddenly unbuttoned, as if released from a vow, and for the first time dropped all pretence that Angelica was his daughter'. He told the Partridges that he was ‘devoted to old Bunny', and according to Frances, gleefully referred back to ‘the days when both Vanessa and Duncan were always telling him what a fascinating character Bunny was'.
²⁵

In the summer of 1942, Bunny became Secretary to an Agricultural Committee overseeing propaganda expressly aimed at peasants in enemy and occupied countries, propaganda intended to cause a reduction in the overall output of food. Bunny was also involved in supplying the BBC with material to broadcast in their ‘Dawn Peasants Programme', a subversive prototype of BBC Radio Four's
Farming Today
. The interdepartmental problems which had dogged the PWE at its inception continued, particularly between the Agricultural Committee of the PWE and the BBC. Bunny was in an especially frustrating position as he was expected to ensure the Agricultural Committee vetted the BBC's scripts, although the latter continually failed to submit them. As Bunny observed, this lack of cooperation could prove disastrous, for instance when ‘tagged on to an item designed
to encourage the sabotage of threshing machinery was the report of the death sentence being inflicted on a Poznan farmhand for agricultural sabotage'.
²⁶
In August, Bunny was sent to the Directorate of Plans to assist the journalist and social reformer Ritchie Calder, who occupied a new post, as Director of Plans and Campaigns. As well as drafting propaganda leaflets, Bunny was involved in writing strategic papers on subjects including Anglo-American Co-operation. With the US now in the war it was important to address how planning and training could be integrated between the two allies.

In early 1943, Bunny and Angelica moved from Clifford's Inn to James and Alix Strachey's London house at 41 Gordon Square, one of many London squares which had sacrificed its handsome railings to the war. Angelica was pregnant, expecting a baby in the autumn. Richard warmly approved of the situation, but as Bunny told Tim White, ‘William more silently regards it as our business'.
²⁷
William had passed the entrance exam to King's College, but contrary to his father's and brother's advice, he was thinking of joining the Navy. As Bunny commented, the silent William ‘would never give a command in a loud voice'.
²⁸
Bunny persuaded him to enrol as a miner, as what would become known as a ‘Bevin Boy' after Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour and National Service. Although Bunny was deeply protective of William, he thought that working with miners would broaden his mind. And so in October 1943 William began work at the Old Louisa pit at Stanley, near Durham, working
seven-and-a-half hour shifts loading coal onto a conveyer. Bunny despatched regular packages of provisions and wrote nearly every day.

On 17 October at 41 Gordon Square, Angelica gave birth to a baby girl weighing eight-and-a-half pounds. ‘What is very interesting', Bunny wrote to Richard, ‘is that the birth of a child, which has been intentionally begotten, & which one has talked about for 9 months,
comes as a surprise
.'
²⁹
The baby was called ‘Virginia', but after a while her parents settled on the name ‘Amaryllis Virginia', giving her the same forename initials as her mother and her great-aunt, Virginia Woolf. A few weeks after the birth, Angelica went down to Charleston, from where she wrote to Bunny: ‘Our life together has been so full: and nobody else has an idea of what we are to each other or how much we have felt together – they do not know what our real life
is
at all.'
³⁰
When Bunny briefly joined her there, he wasn't exactly welcomed into Vanessa's or Duncan's arms, but they became more friendly & agreeable after Amaryllis's birth.

At the PWE Bunny was privy to information which he was not at liberty to impart. Early on he had taken the line that as secrecy wasn't his forte he would make it a policy to say nothing at all outside the office. On one occasion, writing to Richard stationed in Sierra Leone, Bunny tore the letter up as it contained indiscreet remarks. In fact Bunny's correspondence gives only the most superficial information about his work. To Richard, eager for news of the war, he wrote cryptically: ‘I am doing extremely interesting & valuable work – using my imagination in a most concrete manner: visualising the future & building plans on my
visualisation.'
³¹
Frances Partridge was bemused by his generally knowing air.