The Love-Charm of Bombs (35 page)

The affair by its nature can exist only in the present; ‘they stood eternally in the burning glass of the present moment – no past, no future'. This is the same distortion of time, heightened by the effects of war, that Elizabeth Bowen and her circle found exhilarating. But for Mary or Violet it is disempowering, especially when they are liable to become pregnant and trapped. Violet's future is in the hands of the wife, a woman called Dinah, who is a caricatured version of Dig and is even more present in this affair than Dig was in Henry's. At one point Violet becomes angry with Dinah and asks her ‘Why don't you work instead of talking and moaning?' She then shouts incoherently at Louis, who watches her dispassionately, ‘enjoying her anger, not distressed for her sake', much as Henry, early on, enjoyed goading Mary about
Moll Flanders
.

Dinah is presented as constraining Louis, who is himself portrayed as selfish and weak. Louis wants merely ‘to love what he could see – the perfect beauty of created things', which of course includes young women. He is oppressed by the thought of ‘his family's inalienable right'; interrupted by Dinah he feels her presence like that of a steamroller. Briefly he contemplates leaving Dinah, but he does not have the strength. Instead, he merely sets off for an afternoon with Violet, ‘innocent in a world of innocence'. Louis thinks of his wife ‘left deliciously behind', but then takes Violet back to the house, where they are confronted with Dinah, whose mind they feel ‘like walls which she circled'. Louis feels Violet flow over him like bright light, and flows back ‘as if she was bringing him a wonderful new species of love'. But yet Violet knows that she is merely being flaunted to Dinah ‘as a larger self'. She grabs the poker and stirs the fire, feeling like a ghost in a puppet world, ‘chatting to them gaily while her real self lay struggling, limbs thrashing beneath her' and while Dinah, slow and deliberate, presides with the tea.

Then, with frightening complacency, Louis and Dinah reveal themselves as the unit they were all along. They show Violet photographs of themselves in their youth. ‘Us at your age,' Louis says; ‘our grand friends.' They sit back together, ‘delighted with her, and intensely gay'; she realises that she is merely their creation, ‘their new idea, their new dimension, the new real-life heroine of a romance they were beginning'. Dinah and Louis both gorge themselves on the luxury of Violet's beauty before Louis takes Violet to bed in the room next door. Violet, understandably, feels disengaged from the experience. She rolls to face the wall, feeling that the sex is ‘something he wanted – not she', and that it hardly concerns her. At this point, in what seems to be wish-fulfilment on Mary Keene's part, Louis longs to start something inside Violet ‘so that she could accept him as a man'. ‘Through his child she would love him.' Violet uses this fantasy to imagine a shared future, feeling that she belongs to Louis; ‘that the past was over and the future had come'. If she can live up to the idea he has formed of her then she will figure always in his dreams.

This scene is repeated, with Dinah becoming more closely and more voyeuristically involved in the affair. At one point Violet sits on Louis's lap in front of his wife, looking straight at Dinah and finding that the older woman's admiration gives her greater freedom. Later the lovers tumble onto the floor to have sex as Dinah rises to go to bed. Surrendering to his need, Violet gives herself up to Louis, ‘turning from her own revulsion', concerned to be beautiful and relieved that ‘she must be so in a splendour of extremity on the floor'. But, inevitably, she is discarded. Louis gives her a book of his poems inscribed simply ‘from L to V' and the date, but no love. He then departs abroad with his wife, reminding himself that Violet has no claims and promising merely to send a postcard.

Mrs Donald
is a bitter book, jagged in its anger at all three of the figures in its central love triangle. Mary Keene exonerates herself for her part in this warped
folie à trois
on the grounds that Violet is overpowered by the artistic older man and becomes a helpless automaton. To some extent she absolves Henry, suggesting that Louis is merely weakly drawn to the beautiful, though she also shows him as callous, manipulative and unfeeling. But she does not acquit Dig, whom she portrays as predatory and unnatural. Ill-equipped for simple, sensual pleasure herself, Dinah sits watching while her husband takes his mistress to bed, demonically controlling the lives of both her husband and his mistress.

Apart from the situation with Mary, Henry Yorke's life was complicated in the autumn of 1943 by the aftermath of the publication of
Caught
. Bizarrely, the novel had attracted the attention of the Germans, and a German publisher was proposing to translate and publish it. John Lehmann was keen to allow this but Yorke was unsure. ‘I know there is nothing we can do to prevent the Germans pirating if they want to,' he wrote to Lehmann in December.

 

The difficulty is whether our allowing a German translation is to invite Goebbels to make use of the book. I feel we should get leave from the MOI to send it out of the country. I can't think of anything worse than to have people saying that's the man whose books were used for German propaganda in the last war.

 

Yorke was right to be anxious. Although there are moments of heroism in
Caught
, it is one of the most ambivalent portraits of the civil defence services in the Blitz. The firemen in Yorke's novel make mistakes, stab each other in the back, fail to do their duty in order to avoid jeopardising their pension, and generally put the individual above the collective good. If published in Germany, it was unlikely to be used for anything other than negative propaganda.

While writing to Lehmann, Yorke expressed his distaste for a review of
Caught
by Jack Marlowe which Lehmann had recently published in
New Writing.
Here Marlowe focused on the ambivalence of
Caught
towards the firemen it portrayed, stating that it ‘would not make anyone think the better of the British war-effort', but insisting that the novel did still provide propaganda ‘for the vitality of imaginative literature in England under the most difficult conditions'. Reading the article hurriedly, Yorke complained to Lehmann that Marlowe had failed to engage with his book and was just ‘turning the words out for money.' He ended his letter by wishing his friend a barbed ‘all the best for 1944, though no doubt we should all be better dead'.

It is apparent that the various strains of wartime, work and impending illegitimate fatherhood were telling on Yorke, and ten days later he wrote to apologise to Lehmann.

 

My dear John, I'm sorry for my mad letter and Jack Marlowe, it was written in a moment of desperation in the bloody office when everything was going wrong and I was in a state of unnecessary savagery.

 

Rereading Marlowe's article he had decided that it was in fact complimentary and it was merely ‘persecution mania' that had made him read it as he had. ‘There are times I'm insane and that was one of them,' he admitted.

 

 

While Henry Yorke was suffering from persecution mania, Peter de Mendelssohn followed Rose Macaulay to Lisbon. For the last four years, his news agency, the Exchange Telegraph, had been run out of Portugal. Now, it had been rendered redundant by Reuters and it was his task to disband it. On 21 December he returned home in time for Christmas, happy and well fed, ‘full of stories and presents, like Father Christmas'. Joyfully Hilde and Christine unpacked gifts of bananas, oranges, lemons and silk stockings. Once again, the bright colours of Lisbon could enliven the blacked-out world of wartime London, although Peter himself was pleased to be back in London, where his literary career was going well even if his job prospects were now uncertain. On 9 December he had finally joined the committee of PEN, which had adapted its criteria to incorporate nationalised Europeans.

Random bombing raids continued over Christmas and into January. Hilde Spiel distracted herself from fear by reading Alain-Fournier's escapist novel of idyllic childhood,
The Grand Meaulnes
, which she found ‘one of the loveliest books that there is'. She was also playing Schubert quintets and the Mendelssohn violin concerto on the gramophone. But by 15 January she and Peter were quarrelling and she was exhausted by the bombs; ‘I can't stand it any more,' she wrote in her diary.

On 20 January the RAF dropped over 2,300 tons of bombs over Berlin. The Luftwaffe retaliated the next day with an attack on London and south-east England, setting fire to Westminster Hall. This was nothing like the German raids of the Blitz; most of the remaining German bombers were now deployed in the Mediterranean and Russia. But there were heavy casualties in London for the first time since 1941, so it came as a shock. The following week Rose Macaulay reported to her cousin Jean that it had been a ‘noisy night', suggesting that it might be ‘a start of a noisy season – pre-invasion (our invasion, of course)'. She was waiting anxiously for the war news from the rest of Europe. On 22 January two Allied divisions had landed at Anzio, just south of Rome, and found themselves besieged by the Germans, which meant that the main Allied armies had to change course to relieve the Anzio forces. At the same time the main Allied forces were failing to get through the German Gustav Line on the Garigliano and Rapido rivers. ‘All this Rome landing,' Macaulay complained.

 

Surely there must soon be terrific resistance. It can't go on so smoothly as this. It is horrid to think of all that country being bashed to bits – shelling the Appian Way, the Germans in Frascati, soon the attack on Rome. I suppose we have a very bad few months ahead now.

 

The January bombing of London was the start of what became known as the ‘Little Blitz'. This was indeed a noisy season, largely because of the new anti-aircraft barrages that had been spread throughout London. These contained a device which emitted several hundred rocket projectiles at a time in square formation, with the intention of enclosing the invading German aircraft. William Sansom described the ‘Little Blitz' as the period when nerves in London were at their lowest ebb since the start of the war; a time of bombing when ‘the perverse vivacities and the do-or-die ebullience of the old Blitz were not so evident'.

Wimbledon was bombed again severely on 4 February, but Hilde Spiel tried to ignore the raids and begin a new novel. Her writing was violently interrupted on 19 February when towards 1 a.m. a stick of bombs descended on the old people's home directly opposite, killing twenty-five people. In her autobiography Spiel wrote that she could ‘still hear today the shrill, highpitched screams of the severely injured victims'. Their own small block of apartments withstood the full impact, but the air pressure crushed the inner walls, splintering the wood and shattering the glass. After the first bomb landed, Hilde ran into Christine's bedroom and bent over her daughter.

 

Then came the earth-shaking explosion opposite. The wall at the side of the crib collapsed, falling, thank God, in the other direction. My leg was injured. Peter's upper lip was split; the blood pouring, he ran to the nearest doctor, who stitched the wound without anaesthetic. All the residents of our building sat around together in the entrance hall for a while, until the all clear sounded. Conscious of having escaped danger by a hair's breadth, we found relief in hectic gaiety.

 

During the raid, their cat Ha'penny disappeared. The next morning he returned, carefully picking his way through a sea of broken glass. Meanwhile the apartment had been transformed into a surreal scene. Hilde's new strawberry-red blouse was nailed to the wall by splinters, looking like a scarecrow. A huge reproduction of Van Gogh's nurse holding the ribbons of a baby's cradle was peppered with holes. All the rooms except one were uninhabitable. The bombing, as Graham Greene had noted in the first London Blitz, did not pause to enable people to recover from their private tragedies. Hilde spent the rest of February attempting to make the house inhabitable while they were still subjected to heavy nightly attacks. ‘We had not expected more,' she complained in her diary on 26 February. ‘These are among the most miserable weeks of my life.'

Returning to London at the end of February, Evelyn Waugh found everyone scared of air raids and, ‘in contrast to my own health, very grey and old'. He reported to his wife that the damage to London was negligible but the inhabitants were very frightened. Wiltons restaurant had disappeared and the biographies in the London Library were buried in plaster. At the beginning of March Hilde and Peter decided to evacuate Christine to Cambridge. On 6 March Hilde accompanied her daughter to the house of a doctor and his wife, who were going to look after Christine alongside their own small children. ‘It felt difficult for me to separate from her, but there is no other choice,' Hilde noted stoically. She herself remained in London, where the raids became sporadic after the middle of March.

In April Henry Yorke left London to spend some time in his parents' house, Forthampton Court, in Gloucestershire. This was a journey of escape. Yorke was less preoccupied by the war than many of his contemporaries, but for the past few months the mood of the war had been reflected in his personal life, which was greyer and less hopeful than it had been during the Blitz. In London, it was clear that with Mary the moment of exhilaration had passed, but in Forthampton Henry could rekindle his desire for Mary in the form of languorous longing.