The Love-Charm of Bombs (65 page)

For Barbary, missing her home in France, London is an unfriendly and strange habitat. She can only feel at home in the ruins of the City, finding a retreat in the caves and the wilderness. She enacts the epigraph of the novel, roaming through the ‘weedy wastes' of London. These wanderings are sometimes made alone, but more often Barbary is accompanied by Raoul, Maurice's son from his first marriage, who has also been sent off to stay with relatives in the hope of acquiring some civilised English manners. The two flit alongside ghosts ‘about dust-heaped, gaping rooms'. The ‘gaping shells, the tall towers, the broken windows into which greenery sprawled, the haunted, brittle beauty' evoke the landscape of the French maquis, offering Barbary in particular a ‘spiritual home'. She and Raoul play at home-making, domesticating the caves by accumulating broken possessions. Trapped at a dinner party in her father's house, she escapes into the darkness of the Embankment, and wonders what ‘the ruined waste lands looked like after dark'. She knows that it would be a strange and frightening landscape, but believes that it would still have the familiarity of ‘a place long known', with the ‘clear dark logic of a dream'. Unlike the unshattered streets and squares, the ruins make ‘a lunatic sense': ‘it was the country that one's soul recognised and knew'.

Rose Macaulay, consumed by secret, silent grief for Gerald O'Donovan, sought out landscapes that reflected her internal state of mind. Restless and anguished, she, like Barbary, recognised the shattered landscape of the London ruins as her spiritual home. In
The Towers of Trebizond
, she would find a peace in ruins, consoled by their beauty and longevity. By 1956, Rose's own renewed religious sense enabled her to find in the ruins an intimation of the eternal which mitigated the force of intense individual suffering. This consolation is not yet present in the ruins of
The World My Wilderness
, which act as a more temporary refuge. Here, the haunted, brittle beauty of the desolate streets is juxtaposed onto the charged landscape of Blitz infernos. The flames that ignited Rose's flat and brought on her wrenching knowledge that her lover was about to die become in this novel the tormenting flames of hell.

Roaming the ghostly London ruins, Barbary is unable to escape the past. Macaulay herself would observe in
The Pleasure of Ruins
that the recent ruins wrought by the Second World War were less consoling than older ruins, caused by forgotten battles or merely by neglect. ‘New ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality.' Barbary's helpless anger and guilt find a physical reality in the fires of the Blitz, transformed into the landscape of a Catholic vision of hell. She has had very little exposure to Catholicism. A nominally Anglican childhood was followed by a period of cheerful paganism while living with Helen in France. ‘I can't think,' Helen says, ‘if people want Gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and entertaining companions.' But Barbary is increasingly preoccupied with a Catholic idea of sin. Overweighed with unexpressed guilt about the murder of her stepfather, she regrets that heathens like herself cannot be forgiven because ‘we sin only against people, and the people stay hurt or killed', where if she were a Catholic she could repent and be granted absolution.

However, Catholicism brings with it the possibility of damnation and Barbary frightens Raoul with her obsession with hell. Together, they visit a ruined church where they find fragments of hymn books, torn and charred, which Barbary uses to read the Dies Irae. ‘ “Day of wrath,” she read aloud, “O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophet's warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning!” ' She urges Raoul to repent. ‘You must repent, so that you don't go to hell.' She then goes on to preach in French about hellfire, making such vehement gestures that she falls and bruises her knee. Later, they come back to the church, armed with a portable radio, a Judgment Day painting and a black cat, to stage a full Sunday morning service. The radio plays jazz, Barbary sings self-abasing hymns from her torn hymn book, and Raoul holds the mewing, struggling kitten before the altar as a symbolic sacrificial offering. Both are unsurprised when a priest enters, instructing them to stop the noise, put down the kitten and swing the censer, because he is going to say mass.

Obediently, Barbary and Raoul genuflect while the priest says the creed and then goes on to preach about hell. ‘We are in hell now,' he says, with matter-of-factness comparable to Barbary's own; ‘Fire creeps on me from all sides; I am trapped in the prison of my sins; I cannot get out, there is no rescue possible . . . I cannot move my limbs . . . the flames press on; they will consume my body, but my soul will live on in hell . . . Trapped, trapped, trapped; there's no hope.' Eventually his voice breaks, strangled in his throat, and he shudders to his knees, ‘his face in his scarred hands'. Barbary, crying, experiences a moment of clarity: ‘It was true, then, about hell; there was no deliverance.' This Blitz-inspired vision of imprisonment in hell has confirmed her own.

In
The Pleasure of Ruins
Macaulay goes on to reassure the reader that the Second World War ruins will not continue to smell of fire and mortality for long. ‘Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them.' These are the flowers that Macaulay had catalogued during her wartime scrambles through the City of London.
The World My Wilderness
is set in this moment of transition and the task, for Barbary as for Macaulay herself, is to escape the flames of hellfire and dwell among trees. Macaulay makes this explicit by associating the ruined landscapes with the wasteland of Eliot's 1922 poem, which she quotes throughout the novel. Her own epigraph is followed by an extract from
The Waste Land
, describing bats which ‘Whistled, and beat their wings', ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells' and the ‘empty chapel, only the wind's home', with no windows and a door that swings. Early on, post-war London's ‘broken habitations' are explicitly connected to ‘stony rubbish', and later the narrator describes the maze of little streets; the ‘scarred and haunted green and stone and brambled wilderness' which, lying ‘about the margins of the wrecked world', receives ‘the returned traveller into its dwellings with a wrecked, indifferent calm'.

 

Here, its cliffs and chasms and caves seemed to say, is your home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set; here you find the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the depth of the earth, and that you have known elsewhere. ‘Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess . . .' But you can say, you can guess, that it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch the stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and from nowhere else.

 

Eliot's prophetic poem has taken on an eerie truth in post-war London. Here is the barbarism of war; here is the wrecked world. Eliot is asking if a redemption is possible within the spiritual wasteland of 1922 Europe. He assembles a plethora of texts and brings together opposed religious doctrines in the hope of shoring fragments against ruins and finding roots that clutch. Both Macaulay and Barbary seem to be searching for a similar consolation as they explore the physical ruins. Barbary, finding in them confirmation of hell, fails to locate any secure roots. Detained by the police for stealing, she becomes dangerously ill, and starts to dream about the ruins. In her dreams, she runs down rocky corridors, leaping chasms, squirming into dark caves where she finds the Gestapo waiting for her. She lies among rocks and brambles and is ‘seized, bound, beaten, her arms twisted back, matches lit between her toes'. Always, there is ‘fear and blackness and red pain'. Consumed by excessive guilt, she can no longer find a spiritual home in the ruins. As a result, she is grateful to be packed off back to France, leaving the London wilderness behind. If anyone can comfort Barbary, it is Helen, who offers an earthly version of forgiveness: ‘It mattered between us once; but I don't mean it to matter any more. I don't think you or Raoul deliberately let Maurice be murdered.'

But Macaulay herself, in the guise of the narrator, offers a more redemptive vision of the stony rubbish. As a self-proclaimed ‘Anglo-agnostic', Macaulay had little patience with the Catholic vision of hellfire, and was better placed than Barbary to escape the flames of the Blitz and find the roots that clutch. In November 1949 Macaulay published an article called ‘In the Ruins', entirely comprising descriptions from the as yet unpublished
The World My Wilderness
. With Barbary and Raoul removed from the scene, it becomes evident how much of the novel is based on Macaulay's own clamberings and musings. Most of the description in the article comes straight out of the novel, but Macaulay changes the pronouns so that she is guiding her readers on a journey. ‘Make your way', she commands, where in the novel they ‘made their way'; the cunning of merchants now bumbles ‘about us'. The ‘stony rubbish' passage remains unaltered. At this point in the novel, Macaulay addresses an abstract ‘you', who hovers between the generic son of man and the reader. Gazing abstractly at the ruins, independently of her characters, Macaulay suggests that the post-war ruin climber can, at best, retrieve her own roots in the rubbish. If sufficiently identified with the ruins, ‘the branches of your own being' can begin to grow.

In a post-war article on ‘The First Impact of
The Waste Lan
d
', Macaulay described the ‘sharp sense of recognition' with which she had greeted Eliot's poem.

 

Here was the landscape one knew, had always known, sometimes without knowing it; here were the ruins in the soul, the shadowy dreams that lurked tenebriously in the cellars of consciousness, in the mysterious corridors and arcades of dream, the wilderness that stretches not without but within.

 

The landscape of Eliot's poem was metaphorical; as yet in 1922 the stony waste and the empty chapel had no actual presence in London. Brought to ruin-consciousness by the poem, Macaulay greeted with even sharper recognition the actuality of Eliot's landscape as it started to emerge. The question was how best to find the roots that clutch; how to allow the branches of your own being to take hold.

 

 

The London of
The World My Wilderness
is caught between the forces of civilisation and the primeval power of enjungling nature. Throughout, Helen's elder son Richie attempts to impose a new order of civilisation after the barbarity of war. ‘Slim, elegant and twenty-three', he has returned from soldiering longing for the civility of pre-war life. He disapproves of his mother's sexual freedom and of his sister's uncouth ways; he is unable to tolerate the bomb sites that Barbary and her creator find so compellingly beautiful. The book ends with Richie wandering through the ruins of the city, surveying ‘the horrid waste'. He is sickened by ‘the squalor of ruin', aware ‘of an irremediable barbarism coming up out of the earth', and approves of the excavators who are attempting to reinstate order. But Richie and the excavators are not allowed the final word. Men's will to recover strives against the drifting wilderness, ‘but the wilderness might slip from their hands, from their spades and trowels and measuring rods, slip darkly away from them, seeking the primeval chaos' as the jungle presses in on the city.

For Macaulay, civilisation is a questionable good. She mocks Richie for preferring mulled claret, drunk in decorative rooms lit by tall candles, to fireweed and pink rose-bay; she mocks Barbary's father Sir Gulliver for thinking that he can banish his daughter's anguish by forcing her to dress properly. Personal grief and the post-war shock at destruction and barbarity are not going to be redeemed by the ‘glitter of good talk and good glass'. If redemption is possible it comes in an appreciative contemplation of the aesthetic and spiritual beauty of the ruins; in an understanding that the jungle precedes and succeeds man-made edifices.

The World My Wilderness
holds up the ruins as a potential source of consolation, but does not explain how such consolation will be achieved, or how the ruins of a bombed city can be pleasurable. These are the questions asked in
The Pleasure of Ruins
, which Macaulay began to research in Ireland in July 1949 and which she was planning before finishing
The World My Wilderness
.
‘I am within sight of the end of a novel,' she wrote to David Ley in April 1949;

 

after that I shall tackle a short book I have been asked to write for Contact, on ‘The Pleasures of looking at Ruins'. This will be a pretext for describing ruins all over Britain and Europe and elsewhere, and describing also the acute pleasure they gave our ancestors – the Romantics, the Victorians, and others.

 

‘Others' here might include Macaulay's own generation, those ruin-gogglers of the Second World War, and not least Macaulay herself, who was peculiarly alive to that acute pleasure to be found in the lost splendours of past and present civilisation.