The Love-Charm of Bombs (20 page)

Greene was on duty at midnight, but when he reported at his post he found that there had not yet been any incidents in his district. At a quarter to two, he had still not been called out to an incident, and he planned to sign off at two thirty. But then the flares came down right where he was standing with two other wardens at the corner of Alfred Place and Tottenham Court Road.

 

White southern light: we cast long shadows and the flares came down from west to east across Charlotte Street. Then a few minutes later, without the warning of a whistle, there was a huge detonation. We only had time to get on our haunches and the shop window showered down on our helmets.

 

Greene ran down Alfred Place towards Gower Street, which was ravaged on both sides. There were women bleeding from cuts on the face standing in the street in dressing gowns, and Greene was told that there was someone hurt on the top floor above RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He ran with two other wardens and a policeman up four littered flights of stairs to find a wounded girl lying on the floor. ‘Bleeding. Stained pyjamas. Her hip hurt. Only room for one man to lift her at a time. Very heavy.' They took it in turns to carry her while the girl, though in pain, apologised to them for her weight. Once they got downstairs a stretcher party came and took her away. Walking along Gower Street, Greene passed one injured civilian after another standing bleeding in doorways, wearing pyjamas which were grey with debris and dust. ‘These were the casualties of glass.'

Returning to the post, Greene discovered that the blackout boards had been blown out of the walls and that there was no one there to tell him what to do. He found the Incident Officer at the corner of Gower Street and Keppel Street and was ordered to the Victoria Club in Malet Street, where 350 sleeping Canadian soldiers had been hit by a parachute mine. ‘What are a warden's duties?' Greene asked in his diary; ‘the lectures no longer seemed clear. Soldiers still coming out in grey blood-smeared pyjamas: pavements littered by glass and some were barefooted.' A soldier appeared and told Greene that there was a man trapped on the stairs. He and the other wardens took a stretcher and went into the building, where they found a twenty-foot drop into what seemed the foundations of the building. It was difficult to think or act amid the confusion of darkness, fire and noise. ‘One wished that things would stop:
this
was our incident, but the guns and bombs just went on.'

Eventually they found a body, although only the head and shoulders were visible. Quiet and slumped, this man had become merely a peaceful part of the rubble. ‘ “'s this him?” “No. He's a goner.” ' But there was another stretcher party working on the stairs and they could not locate the body they were looking for, so they made their way down with the corpse. ‘Perhaps it wasn't a corpse,' Greene wondered in retrospect.

As they carried the body downstairs, Greene found that time went very slowly. The clock-stopping effects of the bombs often permeated the whole night so that civil defence workers lost all sense of time. Now Greene wanted to get out and escape the claustrophobic suspended world. He shouted for stretcher bearers to take over and then helped to light their way out as they carried the body away. While the wardens were making their way outside, another stick of three bombs came whistling down and Greene lay on the pavement with a sailor on top of him. His hand was cut by broken glass so he hurried back to the post to have it dressed. He observed in his diary that a street accident was horrible and random, but the casualties of war were more disturbing because ‘all this belonged to human nature'.

More bombs landed while Greene's hand was being dressed, and he found himself on the floor once again. The windows had blown in. ‘One really thought that this was the end, but it wasn't exactly frightening – one had ceased to believe in the possibility of surviving the night.' He began an Act of Contrition but in fact he was to be disappointed again; as always, he had survived. After attending to two more incidents, Greene called in at the shelter in Gower Mews where Dorothy was acting as shelter warden. He found that she was fairly cheerful but very relieved to see him. A warden had reported sighting Greene in the Victoria Club: ‘I think he was all right. He was covered in blood, but I don't think it was his blood.'

‘Looking back,' Greene wrote in his Blitz notebook, ‘it was the squalor of the night, the purgatorial throng of men and women in dusty torn pyjamas with little blood splashes standing in doorways, which remained. These were disquieting because they supplied images for what one day would happen to oneself.' Two days after the raid, he wrote to his mother that the attack had been the worst yet, although ‘one's first corpse in the Canadian place was not nearly as bad as one expected. It seemed just a bit of the rubble.' It had been disquieting but also exciting. Recreated in his diary, the purgatorial images of thronging crowds in bloody pyjamas seem to provide the material for a fantasy that may be nightmarish but is nonetheless appealing in its visionary intensity. And as always, when the glass was swept away the next morning and he and Dorothy awoke in her flat in Gower Mews, there was the vital sensation of being alive.

The spring of 1941 was the most optimistic point in the war for Greene. Since his house had been bombed in October, he had been consistently cheerful. ‘I've been leading a chequered and rather disreputable life,' he had reported proudly to Anthony Powell in December, taking perverse delight in the ruins: ‘London is extraordinarily pleasant these days with all the new spaces, and the rather Mexican effect of ruined churches.'

In September, he had left the Ministry of Information, when the Director General Frank Pick restructured the department and axed Greene's post. Since then he had been working in the more congenial surroundings of the
Spectator
, where he was the literary editor. Dorothy Glover had remained at the Ministry of Information, where she was responsible for commissioning caricatures and cartoons. The war, Greene told his American agent Mary Pritchett in March, was good ‘for someone like me who has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis'. The only thing bothering him was the loneliness of Vivien in Oxford.

Graham was only visiting Vivien once a month now, and even then he had to stay in bachelor accommodation at the King's Arms pub as there was not enough space for him to share his wife's room at Trinity College, so his visits did little to assuage her need for comfort and normality. ‘Do you ever
really
miss me or am I the termly tea out with relations?' she wrote to Graham at the beginning of April. She was wondering about leaving Trinity to keep house for her brother Pat, but would reconsider this if Graham gave ‘a baffled woof' and came ‘lolloping up bristling'. ‘Make up that big brilliant mind of yours,' she urged him, ‘because you'll turn round and see what you THOUGHT was Pussy purring on the mat was
really
just the white enamel refrigerator turning on and off.' It was hard for her to keep up the hostility for long, though. Soon she was writing again thanking Graham for his tenderness and feeling ‘dreadfully bewildered by everything and very incompetent and unsuccessful'.

Perhaps because she was suspicious about Dorothy, Vivien was keen to join Graham in London, and went as far as offering him an ultimatum. Graham put her off stridently, and even managed to reprimand her for her selfishness. He insisted that it was highly likely that he was going to be killed, and if she were to be killed too it would leave the children to be ‘bandied about among strangers for charity'. Self-indulgently morbid, he informed her that he would rather walk out into the street and be killed by himself than risk this: ‘In the last war anyway people didn't have their wives following them into the trenches.'

Nonetheless, Graham felt guilty that he was enjoying the war so much more than his wife was. ‘She has the thin end of things,' he told Mary Pritchett, asking her to drop Vivien a line if she had time. ‘I have a most interesting and agreeable time in London. It all seems most right and proper.'

Henry Yorke, too, was on duty during the April raids, and he returned during his leave days to Rutland Gate where Rosamond Lehmann was currently staying with him. She had arrived in London in March, broken-hearted now that she was bereft of both husband and lover. The previous November Goronwy Rees had decided to marry a girl called Margie Morris. In a letter to Dig Yorke, he announced that his proposed bride was ‘very young and not at all clever and rather tough and I adore her'. It was not, he said, possible to describe someone you were in love with, so he was not going to try, but he hoped that she and Henry would meet Margie soon and would approve of what they found. ‘I only hope,' he added with apparent ingenuousness,

 

I am as lucky as Henry has been, you and he are the only people I know who are an encouragement to get married. I'm rather alarmed at what I've done, so please write. Also it has caused terrible trouble with Rosamond, who tells me I'm behaving like a lunatic, but there isn't anything else I could or wanted to do. You see how really undependable I am, it rather alarms me but now I feel I shan't have any need to be undependable any more.

 

The example of Henry and Dig seems to have been one that Goronwy wished to follow literally. By February 1941, now married, he was writing to Rosamond suggesting they should resume their relationship and see something of the beauties of Cambridge together. For her part, she was furious, complaining to her friend Dadie Rylands that Goronwy could not ‘suffer
one single pang
, not even uneasiness, over me'. Meanwhile, her children disapproved of her and her husband had finally left her for another woman. By the time she came to London she was inconsolably miserable, ‘rejected and isolated and hoping I'd be killed by a bomb'. Henry invited her to stay and, in the spirit of friendship, attempted to help her pick up the pieces of her life.

Henry himself had also had a difficult few months. In February one of his closest friends, the travel writer Robert Byron, had died when his ship was torpedoed on the way to Persia, where Byron was to report on Russian activities. Henry was grateful for Rosamond's company when, every three days, he appeared from fire-service duty black with soot and joined her for breakfast before disappearing for his day of writing. In the evening he re-emerged and he and Rosamond went out for a drink before he departed to a nightclub with one of the women whom Rosamond later described as ‘his rota of ridiculously young girls'.

Both Rosamond and Henry looked back on this as an important moment in the war. For both, the quiet pleasures of sympathetic friendship were more important and more fulfilling than the love affairs they were engaged in at the time; less self-indulgent, more grown-up and more honest. In June 1943 Rosamond wrote to congratulate Henry on
Caught
and to thank him for

 

your perfect goodness to me at the time when sirens, chaos and death seemed my only companions, and every hour another proof of waste and exile. I thought I was done for. Your figure re-appearing at intervals, so remote yet so friendly, gave me a little focus of re-assurance and stopped the unending pinch under my ribs.

 

The next day Henry wrote to thank her, telling her how much her approval of his writing meant. ‘One writes for about 6 people, of whom you are one, and when you approve one feels justified.' He too often thought back to ‘those days when we sort of shared a life contentedly and with so little fuss' and assured her that if life ever hurt more than usual ‘and begins to tear me in pieces I was only thinking on Thursday (it's true) that I should come straight to you'.

Rosamond paid more public tribute to Henry in the 1954 article in the
TLS
entitled ‘An Absolute Gift', where she described his wartime persona as ‘an eccentric, fire-fighting, efficient, pub-and-night-club haunting monk'. This was ostensibly an article about
Loving
, nine years after its publication, but was actually more of a personal offering of friendship to a man whom she thanked for the ‘life-line flung to a fellow-writer during the years of war' and for providing ‘an example, personally observed, deeply admired and never forgotten, however poorly followed'.

The example was of his own double life as a firefighter and a writer, living according to the self-imposed regime he had prescribed. She had found the example inspiring at a time when, though she does not state it here, she was too distraught to write, but she was most grateful for the lifeline, which ‘had life itself involved in it, the survival of one's instinctive necessary faith in the individual constructive human spirit'. Here she quotes a statement made by Henry in a wartime letter where he told Rosamond that ‘these times are an absolute gift to the writer. Everything is breaking up. A seed can lodge and sprout in any crack or fissure.' This image of regeneration germinating immediately and inevitably out of ruin is defiantly positive, suggesting not so much Graham Greene's delight in destruction as an acceptance of that same destruction as the necessary background to the more joyous and fertile aspects of the war. For Rosamond it showed that Henry himself was ‘perfectly centred in the times, free to settle nowhere, everywhere, at home in ruins, on fruitful terms with rubble, explosions, flames and smokes'.

In this article Lehmann captures Yorke's elusiveness, while thanking him for being present and kind enough to help bind her once more to life. Unusually among his friends, she was allowed to get to know him well enough to see at once the enigmatic empty vessel and the more serious, passionate man exposed in the novels, and she was able to reconcile the two. Jeremy Treglown has suggested that Rosamond Lehmann paid insightful but less sympathetic tribute to Henry Yorke in the character of Rickie in her 1953 novel
The Echoing Grove.
There are external similarities. Married to Madeleine but also in love with her sister Dinah, Rickie wonders whether he has ‘married the wrong sister'. There are also more fundamental parallels, in that Rickie is a character who fades out at will,