The Love-Charm of Bombs (34 page)

Macaulay was entranced by the beauty of Portugal. In an article on the political situation there called ‘A Happy Neutral', Macaulay praised the Portuguese for their lack of war-consciousness, commending them for preserving their own neutrality and peace. ‘Pleasure in this fact communicates itself through the clear and sunlit air of Lisbon, seeming to heighten the gay, pale colours of the city.' She ended by describing Portugal itself as gloriously neutral: ‘that is its gift from the gods and to Europe; a gift never, one hopes, to be snatched away'. This was an optimistically rose-tinted view; Greene's agents had encountered a more corrupt version of neutrality. But certainly, neutrality was Portugal's gift to Macaulay herself. This 1943 trip began a gradual process of renewal that would continue in peacetime, as she clambered, methodically and urgently, around the ruins of the post-war world.

 

 

Away from neutral Portugal, the war was proceeding dramatically. As a result of the decrypting of the German naval Enigma codes, the Battle of the Atlantic had turned in favour of the Allies. They could now plot German U-boat courses and had increased the number of warships protecting shipping convoys. In the first half of May the British and Americans also achieved a conclusive victory in the Middle East. Tunis fell to the British and Bizerta to the Americans, and by 12 May the Germans and Italians had surrendered. The Allies took 250,000 prisoners, with only 650 men from the Axis armies escaping. ‘We cannot doubt that Stalingrad and Tunisia are the greatest military disasters that have ever befallen Germany in all the wars she has made, and they are many,' Churchill informed the House of Commons in June. That summer saw the fall of Mussolini, who was voted out by the Fascist Grand Council on 24 July. The new Italian leader, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, began negotiations with the Allies for peace and then on 8 September Italy capitulated. Hilde Spiel reported that she was in ‘best spirits' as a result; ‘continent somehow comes nearer'. Meanwhile the Russians were gaining ground in the Soviet Union, recapturing Kharkov at the start of August.

At the same time, Britain was carrying out a series of brutal bombing attacks in Germany, which Spiel was finding difficult to take in. ‘If they shorten the war, they're inevitable,' she wrote in her diary in May 1943, ‘but one shudders at the amount of human suffering.' This major bombing offensive had been in preparation for two years. In a speech to the London County Council in July 1941 Churchill announced that it was time ‘the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homeland and cities something of the torment they have twice in our lifetime let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world'. At the start of 1942 Arthur Harris, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, was told to focus his operations on destroying the morale of the enemy civilian population. Prior to this, British bombers had approached the country singly and a large proportion of them had been successfully intercepted by German fighters, using the efficient German radar system. Now Harris decided to send in streams of several hundred bombers at once, swamping the German defences. The result was the bombing of Lübeck and Rostock in March and April and then the first ‘1000-bomber-raid' on Cologne in May, destroying almost 13,000 buildings. Heavy raids continued into 1943, and were now directed at Italy as well as Germany. A British night raid on Wuppertal on 29 May resulted in a firestorm which engulfed the entire city, killing 2,450 civilians. In June British bombers dropped fifteen thousand tons of bombs on Germany in twenty nights. The German defences were now severely depleted but Hitler refused to release extra aircraft to protect Germany, preferring to meet terror with terror and focus the Luftwaffe's efforts on attacking Britain. On 24 July, British bombers set out to raid Hamburg in the first night of a major mission brutally named Operation Gomorrah. They dropped 2,300 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs in the first few hours, which was as much as the combined tonnage of the five heaviest German raids on London. And they continued to pound Hamburg for three more successive nights, culminating in a final savage attack during the night of 27 July when 2,326 tons of primarily incendiary bombs were dropped within an hour. This created a terrifying firestorm across the city, in the centre of which a hurricane-style wind uprooted trees and asphyxiated people. Eight square miles of Hamburg were burned out, leaving 37,000 German civilians dead; a figure almost equivalent to the total of British civilian deaths for the whole of the Blitz.

Amid the unreal green of springtime Wimbledon, Spiel tried to imagine the German rubble, aware that she had never seen anything like this scale of destruction. As always, she was in an ambivalent position. As someone who had given up everything for the sake of freedom, she had even less sympathy than her British contemporaries for the Germans who had stayed behind. But she was also more painfully aware than most Londoners of the physical reality of the cities that were being destroyed and aware, too, that she and her husband would now have no home to which to return.

Spiel was not alone in her ambivalence about the raids on Germany. In a survey at the start of 1944 only six out of ten Londoners gave ‘unqualified approval' to the British bombing campaign of the previous year. There was also a pacifist campaign against the bombing policy, spearheaded by the Bishop of Chichester and the writer Vera Brittain among others. Rose Macaulay wrote to her cousin Jean in July 1943 complaining about ‘this horrible smashing and bombing', glad to hear about the protests. ‘What kind of a shambles will Europe be after this war?' she asked. ‘And, alas, what hate everywhere.' Like Spiel, Macaulay was finding the news difficult to take in, and finding it hard to focus on ordinary life. She was keeping busy writing her book about Portugal but was feeling extremely weak. Meeting her at a lecture shortly after her return from Portugal, James Lees-Milne observed that ‘she must be an unhappy woman', stating derisively that she had the ‘dried-up look of the unenjoyed'. Certainly, she was grief-stricken and worn out, and continued to feel weak as the summer advanced. ‘At present I feel indescribably exhausted,' she told Jean in August, ‘as if at the bottom of a deep pit, and every movement like a climb up a steep bank. Tired heart, my doctor says . . . It is collapsing, and makes one very lethargic and inclined to despair.' Jean wrote back anxiously and Rose rallied, insisting that she had exaggerated. ‘Heart not “collapsing” (which implies getting worse) but merely “slightly collapsed” – my doctor's expression, and only, I take it, means tired.' It would right itself in time, with rest and dietary improvement.

By September Macaulay was indeed starting to feel restored and on 16 September she had lunch with Graham Greene at Boulestin's in Covent Garden. This was a treat for both of them. Boulestin's was the most expensive as well as one of the most sumptuously decorated restaurants in London; the province of the writer, interior designer and chef Marcel Boulestin, who for the past twenty years had been writing bestselling French cookery books and even appearing on the television, attempting to convert the British to good food. Cecil Beaton once described the restaurant as the prettiest in London; the walls were painted with circus-themed murals, the windows were hung with patterned yellow brocade curtains, and the room was lit by hanging silk balloon lights. Entering the restaurant from the bomb-damaged London streets, Macaulay and Greene settled down amid the cushioning opulence to enjoy rather better food than wartime rationing usually allowed for. It was an appropriate setting in which to talk about Portugal, and Macaulay was delighted to have a chance to discuss the country with an expert. She was also stimulated by Greene's energy; now that he was back in London, he was enjoying the war again, and his high spirits were invigorating.

Greene was now busy running the Portuguese desk at SIS and was also prospering as a writer.
The Ministry of Fear
had been published shortly before Henry Yorke's
Caught
in June. Both books received largely positive reviews and promising sales.
Caught
in particular was praised for its honesty. Stephen Spender, asked to comment on the book as a fellow fireman, found it was ‘too sour and bitter and gossipy' but did think that it was genuine and that anyone who had experienced life in the fire service would agree. Looking back on it, John Lehmann thought that ‘
Caught
mirrored, with something like genius, the compound of tragedy and comedy that was the truth of the war, the heroism that showed itself in spite of an extreme distaste for and distrust of heroics.' Even for people who found the pettiness of the firemen problematic, Yorke was now firmly established as one of Britain's major war writers. Philip Toynbee, reviewing both
Caught
and
The Ministry of Fear
for the
New Statesman
, was relieved to encounter ‘two proper novelists, bravely immune to the general decay' of the English novel. He admired both books for their ‘honesty of purpose and their high measure of achievement' and praised Yorke for converting observed fact into imaginative truth.

One pleasant afternoon in Boulestin's was not enough to distract Rose Macaulay from her distress at the news of events outside Britain. As September advanced and the blackout began to steal more and more of the day, the war was starting to seem endless. This was the fifth autumn of a war which still did not seem likely to come to a decisive end in the near future.

The news was dominated by accounts of the battles in the Mediterranean. After Italy signed an Armistice with the Allies on 8 September, the Germans occupied the country by force. The Anglo-American army landing near Salerno hoped to encounter surrendering Italians but instead met ferocious German counter-attacks. At the same time, Montgomery's Eighth Army was landing further south in Taranto but was blocked by German demolitions and mines. The German forces nearly broke through to the coast on 14 September and although they then went onto the defensive it was evident that the conquest of Italy would be long drawn-out. ‘Poor Rome, and poor Italy,' Rose Macaulay wrote to her cousin Jean in September, ‘with all these tough-guys fighting to the death across her body, when she had hoped to be out of it all! They are fighting among such precious things – Pompeii and Paestum and everything – like bulls in china-shops – no use to hope they are being careful, I am sure they are not.' In fact there was not actually any fighting in Pompeii, but the battles continued all around it. Meanwhile the long-drawn-out battles in eastern Europe were still weighted in favour of the Allies. All this time Stalin was continuing to retain the upper hand against the Germans in Russia, recapturing key communication points in the Ukraine in September and pressing on towards Kiev. On 6 November Stalin entered the Crimea from the Caucasus, declaring that ‘Germany is standing on the edge of a catastrophe!'

 

 

In October 1943 Mary Keene told Henry Yorke that she was two months pregnant and that the child was his. He initially responded with shocked confusion and then wrote her a loving but careful letter, in which he avoided any personal acknowledgement of paternity. ‘Very confused at first then a tremendous illumination with a welter of feelings underlying it.' It would take her away, which was sad, but not, he hoped, for long. And he was sure that the mother-child bond would ‘cement everything into a sort of keep', guarding her from unhappiness. She was too honest for this world, and was often hurt by the fact that other people were not as openly honest as she was. ‘Children at any rate at first are so dead honest that one can trust oneself to them entirely.' They were sacred when they were small, because they were the perpetuation of life. Nothing, of course, made so much day-to-day difference as a child or, for a woman, took up so much time, but hopefully she would not regret it. ‘Being yours I shall love it and I only hope it will not make any fundamental difference to you.'

It is clear in this letter that Henry's involvement with Mary's child was going to be limited. It would be ‘yours' and not ‘ours'; it would take up her time and not his. While hoping that she would not change and would not be taken away, he was already acknowledging that her priorities would alter and their relationship would wane. At this stage, Mary hoped that Henry might leave Dig and marry her. This was misguided, and if she had been more experienced with the upper classes she would probably have expected less. Henry thought it was great fun to be with a former cockney who stole nightdresses, but she was hardly the material for a Mrs Yorke. Anyway, he had no intention of leaving Dig. The child made no difference, if anything hastening the end of the affair.

At this point Dig herself was becoming proprietorially involved in the relationship with Mary. When they were all in London, the younger woman was invited to the family home. Dig and Mary even exchanged letters in which they addressed each other as ‘darling'. Mary accepted the situation but resented the presence of Henry's wife in the affair. She told Matthew that she found Dig ‘miserable', very cross and suspicious, and that he was wrong to think all was well between Dig and Henry. She showed Dig an expensive new dress, implying that Henry had bought it for her. Two years later Mary would write to Matthew that she had been ‘quite dazzled' by meeting Dig, who was looking ‘almost voluptuous' and very beautiful, adding acerbically that she herself ‘should like to do as she does, sit back drinking noting watching and listening while Henry and his various friends play cat and mouse'.

In the 1950s Mary Keene wrote a novel called
Mrs Donald
in which she vented some of her own anger and confusion about her position in the Yorkes' marriage in this period. The central relationship in the novel is between Violet, a young woman of about Mary's age who has several siblings and an abusive mother, and Louis, a poet-painter who seems to be a composite of Louis MacNeice, Henry Yorke and Matthew Smith. Violet is overwhelmed by Louis: both by her love for him and by the force of his personality. Walking to meet him she feels herself entering ‘his great world', becoming ‘blindly caught up in it'. She imagines him, ‘dark and magnetic', drawing her into a dangerous but enticing vortex as she struggles to save herself from drowning. Violet is as beautiful as Mary. She receives, ‘broadside on, the heady impact of admiration from strangers' who watch her openly. Their eyes become pivots as she moves before them in a circle of flame.