The Love-Charm of Bombs (13 page)

Reading Bowen’s novel made Hilde yearn to become more English herself.

Let’s live at Regent’s Park one day, Pumpki, and have thick carpets and aquanine curtains and beautiful flower-vases and an old housekeeper creeping inaudibly up and down the stairs! But seriously the Bowen book is very very lovely and I wish you’d read it some day.

Meanwhile Peter was less beguiled by England, but in his own way was committing to an English literary and historical tradition. ‘I have a fascinating idea for a book,’ he wrote back to his wife, ‘but of course one can’t write it. Namely the history of England and the world during the past three years, starting from the assumption that Edward VIII had not abdicated but married Mrs Simpson and remained King.’ He also wrote to tell her that he was making successful inroads into the London literary scene, enclosing a ‘very charming little letter’ from J. B. Priestley about his own forthcoming novel.

For both Hilde and Peter, entry to literary London was facilitated by the work of English PEN. Before the war started, PEN’s president Margaret Storm Jameson (known to the public as Storm and to friends as Margaret) and secretary Hermon Ould were organising events to bring refugee writers into contact with established English authors in an attempt to make the visitors feel at home. Hilde Spiel later wrote that

what the PEN club did for all of us cannot be sufficiently praised . . . the Germans, the Austrians, the Czechs, then the rest of the refugees from Hitler’s Europe . . . were all taken to the hearts of a succession of motherly women and selfless men, made welcome, and from then on incorporated into the community until they were able to found their own centres for writers in exile . . . In no other country had I encountered such a group of true humanists and tolerant moralists.

She was particularly grateful to Storm Jameson who, at a dinner for Austrian and Czechoslovakian writers at Paganini’s restaurant in February 1939, welcomed the gathered company to their new home:

Some of you are exiles from your own country, but here you are not exiles. You are our friends, you are our brothers. Here, in this room, it is England, and it is also Europe . . . Please be at home here.

Both Hilde and Peter were able to remain members of English PEN, only nominally joining the Austrian and German centres in exile. Both published novels in English within their first couple of years in England, with Hutchinson publishing Spiel’s
Flute and Drums
in 1939. Through PEN Hilde and Peter made a handful of good friends, but of course these were not quite friendships of equals and Hilde was painfully aware of the potential for misunderstandings. Invited to dinner with Peter’s publisher Peter Wait and his wife Dodo, Hilde and Peter took ‘next Saturday’ to mean ‘this Saturday’ and arrived a week early. They were surprised by the lack of other guests, but reassured to be offered drinks. Then, half an hour later, they were told apologetically that they would have to excuse their hosts, who were expected in Kensington soon after eight. Hilde later expressed gratitude to Dodo for helping them over the social faux pas tactfully, rather than pointing it out. It was from Peter and Dodo that Hilde and Peter learnt the basic principles of English life, namely: ‘don’t fuss; don’t ask personal questions; don’t touch the teapot (this was reserved for the hostess); tea in first, milk after; understatement and stiff upper lip’. But there was also something unnatural in the resolutely unspoken nature of English communication, and a patronising element in the controlled superiority. In retrospect Hilde found that

the consideration for foreigners that they showed on this occasion, as they did in all things, was undoubtedly bound up with a certainty, inborn in the British, that nothing else was to be expected from the non-British, with an unshakeable belief – unshaken to this day, even by the loss of an empire – in their self-evident superiority.

Hilde’s sense of herself as an outsider was compounded by the fact that she felt sidelined in suburban Wimbledon, where they had moved from Notting Hill in November 1939, mistakenly thinking that they would be safer from air attack away from the centre. At first Hilde was beguiled by the green calmness of her new surroundings. ‘I am so happy to be here in Wimbledon,’ she wrote in her diary in April 1940. ‘Beautiful trees, the garden charming.’ But in her autobiography she complained that she had spent at least a third of her life in that ‘beautiful, green utterly bourgeois district’ and in all that time they were never invited into a single English household there or involved in the social structure. When they were especially lonely during the Blitz, Hilde and Peter braved the dangers of crossing London and went to visit English friends in Chelsea or Kensington or to see the exiled community of German-speaking émigrés in Hampstead.

Hilde and Peter had moved to Wimbledon partly at the suggestion of their friends the Austrian writer Hans Flesch-Brunningen and his wife Tetta. They had known Flesch since 1937 when he had approached them in the office of
The Times
one day when Hilde was at work with Peter, politely requesting practical advice. After he took his leave with hesitant courtesy, Hilde suggested that Peter should run after him and invite him to dinner. This was the beginning of a close friendship which Peter would later come to regret. Flesch was fifteen years older than them and he initially took the younger couple on as protégés. He dedicated his novel
The Blond Spider
‘to Hilde and Peter in friendship’ in 1939 and gave the name Hilde to the beautiful and almost incestuously beloved sister of the hero of his 1940 novel
Untimely Ulysses
. Although he wrote these novels in English, he found it more difficult than Hilde and Peter did to adapt to his new surroundings and he was always impressed by the energy with which they entered into their new life. At the same time he impressed Hilde with his old-style Viennese dignity and quiet intelligence; when she allowed herself to be homesick it was often to Flesch that she turned.

Flesch was one of the few Austrians or Germans with whom Hilde and Peter were prepared to socialise frequently. Since moving to London they had both been determined to avoid becoming part of the community of exiles, however tempting it seemed. Occasionally they went to the Laterndl club nights on Hampstead’s Finchley Road, where Austrian émigrés sang Viennese folk songs and performed their own poems. Hilde enjoyed the nostalgia but found it dangerous. In a later film script called
Anna and Anna
,
where she juxtaposed her own story with that of an imaginary alter ego who had stayed in Vienna, Spiel made the Anna in London dismiss the exiles at the Laterndl, saying that she does not know ‘whether it makes one happy or unhappy to cling so much to home’, suggesting that it is like living in an evacuated room. ‘We are in England,’ she insists to her émigré friend.

In the 1975 essay about exile, Spiel complained that émigrés often suffered from a ‘
chez nous
syndrome’, moaning continually that everything in London was worse than things were at home and deriding the coldness of the English people and their draughty houses. Her own mother was among these grumblers and Spiel was determined not to join their ranks herself. But she was often aware that she had more in common with the impetuous sensibility of her exiled friends than with the restraint of her English hosts, and she was frequently overcome by longing for home.
She would later describe how, during the raids, whenever she listened to those records of Beethoven and Schubert, the Pfarrplatz in Vienna appeared before her eyes.

A small village square: on the left a farmhouse, where the Eroica symphony was written; another on the right; and in the middle the little church of St. Jakob.

This homesickness was made harder by the fact that she had very little to remind her of her past. Almost all her parents’ possessions had been confiscated in Hamburg during their escape. Among the items lost were most of Spiel’s own library of books, her pictures and photograph albums, Alberto Moravia’s letters and her long-treasured piano arrangements from
Tristan und Isolde
,
which had a thumbmark on the top right corner of each sheet where the page was turned.

‘Exile is an illness,’ Spiel states in the exile essay. ‘An illness of the mind, an illness of the spirit, and even sometimes a physical illness.’ Here she sees the exile as unable to learn to be a good international European. ‘We are rooted where we were born, grew up and learnt to live.’ Most frighteningly, she views the exile as incapable of return, quoting Carl Zuckmayer’s description of exile as the journey without homecoming. According to Zuckmayer, the exile may go back, but the place, when he finds it, is no longer the same one he left. This, for Hilde Spiel, constituted the recurring nightmare of the war. In 1946 she recounted how she had dreamt, again and again, that she was

back in Vienna – an enemy presence in my native land, with English coins in my pocket, English words on my lips, while my mother tongue seemed frozen in my throat. The ghostly streets through which I passed . . . the interiors – antiquated and intimidating with their huge cupboards and tables, whose carved eagles’ heads and lions’ paws frightened me, although they seemed to have come from the contents of my grandparents’ house – they all threatened me with discovery, betrayal, court martial, death.

Nonetheless, when the all clear sounded on the morning of 27 September 1940, Hilde’s relief at having survived another night was strong enough to suspend any wider anxiety about her life as an exile. For as long as daylight lasted, she could stop worrying about Christine and be pleased instead to have another day to live. Soon Hilde would escape the bombs by taking her daughter away to Oxford. Now it was almost time for Peter to leave for work but she herself could sink into a deeper sleep, grateful merely to have a mattress on the bed once more.

See notes on Chapter 4

Part II

The Blitz

September 1940–May 1941

5

‘War, she thought, was sex'

Graham Greene and Henry Yorke, autumn 1940

 

In Henry Yorke's
Caught
,
Prudence, yearning for one lover while evading the embraces of another, ponders the relation between love and death. ‘War, she thought, was sex.' Prudence at once accepts and regrets the allure of the serviceman. ‘This was a time,' the narrator muses, ‘when girls, taken out to night clubs by men in uniform, if he was a pilot she died in his arms that would soon, so she thought, be dead.' Sex, already imbued with the language of surrender, seems to follow naturally from the imminence of death. Guaranteed neither world enough nor time, seduced by danger's erotic charge, girls abandon themselves in a daze of giving. In the darkness of the blackout, each clicking footfall was loaded with mystery. Elizabeth Bowen observed in
The Heat of the Day
that the wartime city night brought out something provocative in the step of even the most modest women. ‘Nature tapped out with the heels on the pavement an illicit semaphore.'

Liberated by the atmosphere of unmarriedness, wartime Londoners fell in love quickly and passionately. For all five of the writers in this book, during the initial autumn of the Blitz death became a real and constant possibility for the first time. The proximity to death brought with it an intense consciousness of being alive that was conducive to sexual passion. This was particularly the case for Graham Greene, who was straightforwardly in love for the first time in his life.

 

Graham and Vivien Greene on their wedding day, 1927

 

In 1927, aged twenty-three, Graham Greene had married Vivien Dayrell-Browning. Two years earlier, infatuated and unsure of himself, he had promised her a ‘monastic marriage'. ‘You'd always keep your ideal of celibacy, and you could help me to keep the same ideal . . . And the whole thing would be an adventure finer than the ordinary marriage.' Graham was lacking in self-knowledge and was too sexually diffident to expect any lovable girl in her right mind to do more than put up with his attentions anyway. Celibacy, in the service of a Catholic ideal (he converted to Catholicism in order to gain Vivien's hand), seemed preferable and achievable. The ideal was short-lived. The Greenes did have enough sex to produce two children, but not much more than that, and Graham turned to prostitutes and occasional mistresses when his commitment to monasticism faltered. Twelve years later, on the day that the Second World War was declared, Graham looked out of the window of his Bloomsbury workroom in Mecklenburgh Square and caught the eye of his landlady's daughter, looking out of the window opposite. Short, square and boisterous, this was Dorothy Glover. By the time of the Blitz, the ‘love-charm' of sirens and bomb-bursts gained its appeal from the presence of Dorothy. As a shelter warden herself, she accompanied Graham on his nightly forays through the raids and shared his bed, defying death by making love as the bombs fell outside.