Bloomsbury's Outsider (39 page)

But at the end of October Bunny knew something that made him fear for the safety of Angelica and Amaryllis if they remained in London. He wrote to Frances and Ralph asking whether his wife and baby could go to stay at Ham Spray, stating that he was unable to discuss the reason behind his request. Thus Bunny inadvertently opened a Pandora's Box. If he could intimate to the Partridges that London was unsafe, should the Partridges tell their London friends? As Frances reflected in her diary, ‘had he the right to hand over this piece of explosive to me, to load me up with gun-powder and then say: Don't go off.'
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It was the kind of ethical dilemma Bunny had hitherto managed to avoid. In the event the reason for Bunny's request evaporated, so Angelica and Amaryllis remained in London. Frances speculated that Bunny knew about the huge air raids inflicted upon Berlin, and probably believed the Germans would retaliate. As he told Richard in September 1943, ‘I get all the information going – so I can discuss nothing'.
³³

In January 1944 Bunny was promoted to Director of Training. With promotion came a large office, a slight salary increase, a secretary, Ann Hopkin, and work until eight o'clock in the evening. ‘I am really trying to put my shoulder to the wheel', he told Tim White.
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The PWE School was opened in February 1944 at Brondesbury in north-west London, the opening having
been delayed for four months by an inter-departmental battle over domestic staff, necessitating the personal intervention of Churchill. Bunny's was an important job, coordinating the training of PWE ‘black' saboteurs involved in working on the ground with members of the resistance in occupied countries.

In January 1944 the Luftwaffe returned to London in what became known as the Little Blitz. As Bunny told Richard, ‘the Luftwaffe resumed the bombing of London with rather more determination than we have known for a long time', adding, ‘the display in the sky was notable'.
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The last serious attack occurred in April, but between times the London Library was hit, losing 20,000 books. Bunny watched the fire service dowse the flames engulfing 27 Brunswick Square, the house in which Richard was born.

The doodlebug or V1 was an even more perfidious threat, which noisily announced its trajectory but silently stopped above its target. To get out of London, Bunny and Angelica moved into an ugly, yellow-brick, castellated, furnished bungalow called Scearnbank, located close to The Cearne. Bunny commuted to London each weekday, but enjoyed being in the countryside, spending his free time raising geese, making marmalade and emptying the earth closet. He and Angelica slept on the roof in the middle of raids, watching the buzz-bombs passing overhead, which Angelica likened to ‘an infernal invention of Dante's, put into action by Leonardo da Vinci'.
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Frances and Ralph were shocked to find great chasms nearby, left by incendiary bombs amid the bluebells. Realising that Scearnbank was beneath the main doodlebug route to the capital, they returned to Gordon Square.

When Groves gave Bunny the complete plan for Overlord, the proposed Normandy landings, Bunny was horrified that ‘anything on which so many lives depended should be read by anyone of so little importance as myself'.
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Mainly he worried lest he should inadvertently blurt out any detail: he was almost paranoid in this respect. On one occasion, in the summer of 1944, Leonard Woolf told Bunny he had heard the Germans had a new secret weapon, a powerful rocket. Bunny's blood ran cold, for the weapon was the V2, a long-range rocket which had yet to be deployed. Leonard recounted that when he casually asked Bunny about the rocket, Bunny's ‘hair and hackles rose upon his head and he told me furiously that I had no right to be in possession of – far less talk of – what was a top secret'.
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Bunny feared that if Leonard spread the story, people would assume that he was the source.

In July Bunny was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an event which seemed like something from another life. He was more excited about the prospect of joining William on leave at Butts Intake. Arriving there with Angelica and Amaryllis in early August, he marvelled at how everything was just as they had left it – a tin of flour hermetically sealed and ‘various forgotten delicacies such as skipper sardines, tinned peas'. As he told Constance, ‘We have forgotten there are such things as sirens, or bombs, or ruined houses & broken glass. In Swaledale all is unchanged.'
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Digging a hole in which to bury the entrails of the rabbits which he had shot, Bunny was seized by a violent cramp which made him feel as though the muscles and tendons were being drawn out of his legs, rather as he had eviscerated the rabbits. In agony and unable to move, Bunny clung helplessly to his spade. He had been intermittently dogged by what he called ‘lumbago' for five or six years. The pain was on the left side, occupying his buttock and when it was particularly bad it ran down the back of his thigh towards his knee. In January 1942 and again in January 1943 Bunny underwent treatment under the orthopaedic physician James Cyriax, a pioneering clinician who recognised the new concept of referred pain.
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After several agonising days in bed where Bunny had to hold his leg into position to reduce the pain, the local doctor was summoned. Despite his ministrations (aspirins), Bunny remained in agony, unable to move. One day Angelica had to go out, leaving ten-month old Amaryllis crawling on the bedroom floor in Bunny's charge. The baby pulled a drawer out of a wash stand and levering her weight upon it, brought the whole thing down on top of herself. Somehow Bunny managed to get out of bed and scoop Amaryllis up, but he screamed more than she did. To compound matters, Bunny's incapacity came at a particularly difficult time for Angelica. Not only was she isolated up a remotely located and steep track several miles from the nearest town, but the cottage made no concessions to twentieth century conveniences, or even to those of the nineteenth century. She had a baby to care for and, following a series of what Bunny described as ‘rash acts', was in the early stages of pregnancy.

Unable to endure the pain, Bunny sent a telegram to Cyriax requesting advice. Concluding that there was a piece of broken cartilage jammed against Bunny's sciatic nerve, Cyriax sent an ambulance. Later, Bunny could reflect on the farcical scene of the ambulance men carrying a screaming man atop a wooden chair down a narrow and almost vertical staircase, but at the time he could only feel the pain. On 1 September Bunny arrived back in Gordon Square. Cyriax confirmed his diagnosis and gave Bunny a stark choice: he could wear a permanent truss, and forgo all those physical activities in which he took pleasure: digging, rowing, diving and chopping wood. Or he could have a difficult and dangerous operation with a 50 per cent success rate. If the operation failed he could end up wheelchair bound and impotent.

Bunny was operated on by Mr Harvey Jackson at Imperial College Hospital on 7 October 1944. William took leave in order to be near his father, and Barbara Bagenal looked after Amaryllis to help an exhausted and very worried Angelica. Bunny was fit – particularly so for a fifty-two-year-old man of his generation. Nevertheless, as the days passed and as his legs remained numb, he worried that he had made the wrong decision. When, a week after the operation, he could wriggle his left toes, it was a good sign. Movement gradually returned to his legs and with a combination of physiotherapy and determination he began to recover strength. Amaryllis had learnt to say “Oh! Dear” because her mother exclaimed it so frequently during Bunny's incapacitation.

‘I could give a whole list of writers […] who are now being squeezed dry like oranges in some official job or other […]. They will come out of the war with nothing to show for their labours and with not even the stored-up experience that the soldier gets in return for his physical suffering.' (George Orwell)
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When Bunny left Butts Intake, he could have had no idea that it would be three months before he would return to his office. When he did eventually return, it was to a different job. He would become an historian and write the official history of the PWE, a role which would take him through to the end of the war and beyond. He had been invited to take on this job by Major General Kenneth Strong, who succeeded Robert Bruce Lockhart as Director-General of PWE although Groves, with his soft spot for Bunny, was probably behind the appointment.

As 1944 came to a close, patriotic red-white-and-blue streamers appeared in the British shops, signalling a new optimism that
war would end and Britain would be the victor. Freedom beckoned and Bunny yearned to return to imaginative writing. As he ruefully commented, ‘One of the tiresome things to which I must accustom myself is that the [end of the] war will not mean for me, a release from the world of
MOST SECRET
&
TOP SECRET
papers & ideas […]. And while I moulder & live & think the whole war over again, my friends will be writing & reading new books, seeing new plays, adapting themselves to live in a new world.'
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In many respects Bunny was lucky to have this job. He would have a guaranteed income, a financial cushion shielding him from competition with all the other writers returning to civilian life. The situation would initially be bleak for writers: the war brought many changes, not least the introduction of paper rationing, which radically reduced publishers' outputs. Several literary magazines had folded, including the
Cornhill
and
Criterion
. It was not just a matter of starting again with a blank page: networks and literary milieus would need to be reconstructed; the framework of publishers, distributors and booksellers re-established.

The Secret History
carried Bunny past VE Day, 8 May 1945, and on into the following year. He had not published a novel for a decade and had latterly spent almost as much of his career not writing novels as he had previously devoted to writing them. Such concerns preoccupied many writers emerging from six years of war, but Bunny worried that he had changed from novelist to jack-of-all-trades: biographer, journalist, critic, editor, propagandist and now historian. Bunny was in danger of becoming forgotten, fading in the wake of a new generation of writers.

One such writer placed Bunny firmly in the past, an emblem of an earlier era. Evelyn Waugh's novel
Brideshead Revisited
was published in the month which saw Victory in Europe declared.
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The narrative concerns the recollections of its protagonist, Charles Ryder, looking back to the 1920s and 1930s from the vantage point of the Second World War. It is not so much a nostalgic yearning for better times than an acknowledgement that war had made even the recent past seem like another age.

In the 1920s, when Waugh's fictional aesthetes Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche were at Oxford, they whiled away their university years in carefree hedonism. Waugh gave them books to read: Roger Fry's
Vision and Design
(1920), Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
(1918), Clive Bell's
Art
(1914), Aldous Huxley's
Antic Hay
(1923) and David Garnett's
Lady into Fox
.
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For Waugh, these books exemplified the excitement of the 1910s and 1920s, a new aesthetic, an invigorating modernity which contrasted with the old-fashioned set-texts his young creations were expected to read. Fry, Strachey, Bell, Huxley and Garnett epitomised the promise of that earlier post-war age: they had each broken with tradition, crafting a new kind of art criticism, art history, biography and literature. But from the vantage point of the Second World War, all this took place in another time, a period locked in Charles Ryder's memory, irrevocably lost, if not forgotten.

Bunny's scrupulous and painstaking research enabled him to present the kind of clear and concise analysis of the PWE that he had brought to the Lawrence
Letters
. In keeping with his
remit, Bunny presented a series of succinct and considered conclusions, suggesting where improvements could have been made. Rigorous and objective, his
Secret History
did not flinch from telling the truth, from chronicling the paralysing inter-departmental conflict of the PWE's early days. Bunny achieved this with irony and humour, throwing into sharp relief the absurdity of the bureaucratic process. In contrast to
War in the Air, The Secret History
is a substantial book. Moreover, it differed from propaganda in that it was addressed to a different audience: future political warriors rather than the contemporary general public. Above all, it is a testament to Bunny's wide-ranging capabilities and intellectual acuity that he could write such an incisive account simultaneously documenting the inspired stratagems of political warfare and the absurd intrigues of political infighting.

On 15 May Angelica gave birth to a second daughter at Gordon Square. Bunny, who could always recognise such things, announced that she had his mouth, Angelica's hands and a Greek nose. The baby was named Catherine Vanessa, but, as with Amaryllis before, her parents changed their minds, re-naming her Henrietta Catherine Vanessa. The name appealed to Duncan, who had a dotty Aunt Henny, but Bunny had really named his daughter after Henrietta Bingham.

Two months after Henrietta's birth, Bunny moved back to Hilton with his new family. He had been away for the best part of five years, although he often longed to return. Even so, he approached the move with ‘A good deal of despair mixed up with all sorts of plans & activities'. Bunny's despair centred on returning to the house he had shared with Ray in what now seemed another life, and to the memories which would doubtless surface. In the event, Bunny was delighted that the ‘natives of Hilton have been obviously
& oddly glad to see me'.
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People stopped to shake his hand, Amaryllis was approved of, Henrietta cooed over. It must have been strange for all those people who had last seen Bunny shortly after Ray's death, to encounter him now with a new wife and two little girls. With great sensitivity Hilton's new chatelaine decided she did not want to change the house from the way Ray had made it, resolving that any changes would be wrought gradually.
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