The Love-Charm of Bombs (24 page)

While writing about Milton, Rose had come to identify the seventeenth-century poet with her own lover. Milton too had been a failed revolutionary, not of his age; ‘a superb and monstrous alien' in seventeenth-century England, exhorting vainly for liberty in all things before ‘his cause and his world shattered in ruins about his ears'. Milton's marriage, too, had been unhappy; Milton's wife had been unworthy of him intellectually and disappointing sexually. In her Milton biography Rose Macaulay chastised Milton for failing in the ‘important art of perceiving what a young woman is like behind her pretty face' and described how Milton had blamed his own sexual inexperience for the failures of his marriage. Gerald, too, had been sexually inexperienced when he chose the pretty young Beryl as his bride. And it is Gerald who seems to emerge, understood and accepted, in Rose's description of Milton's marriage in a letter to the medieval scholar Helen Waddell:

 

I wish one of his wives had been of a mental stature he could have had to take into account – it would have been interesting and might have given a different list to Paradise Lost and Eve. I feel his capacities for love were so immense, and never fully (body and mind together) satisfied.

 

Now both Rose and Gerald had found a love that satisfied body and mind together and they were about to lose it. With the lost books she lost the echoes that could have reverberated down the years, keeping going the life they had shared.

Rose spent the first night after the bombing with her sister Jean in Romford, and then busied herself with finding a new place to live. She also had to spend considerable time at the Town Hall on the Marylebone Road, filling in forms to claim compensation for her lost possessions. Ordinary household insurance did not cover war damage, so compensation came from the War Damage Commission, and might take months or even years to arrive. In the meantime Rose's cousin Jean Smith lent her clothes and several of her friends offered her places to stay. However, she wanted to retain her independence, even now, so she took a bed-sittingroom in Manchester Street before moving around the corner to a flat in Hinde Street on 12 June. Just before she moved, Victor and Ruth Gollancz furnished her with a new Oxford Dictionary and Rose wrote effusively to thank them:

 

my darling Dictionary again, in the same vestige and habit as I have always known it – and I was transported to Jerusalem the golden from the dreary limbo where I have been trudging lately . . . I begin to feel I can live again. The O.D. was my Bible, my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure – nothing else serves.

 

Her new flat was small; there was only a bedroom and a sitting room in addition to the kitchen and bathroom. But she only had the furniture that she had inherited from Margaret to fill it with, so she did not mind the lack of space. And her first act on moving in was to put her new Oxford Dictionary on its shelf; her one reminder of the life she had lost.

 

 

Rose Macaulay spent the summer of 1941 clambering around the ruins of her old flat, beginning the compulsive haunting of ruined buildings that would continue for the rest of her life. She was hoping to find books or letters surviving amid the debris, but in fact the only objects to survive were those contained in her old kitchen dresser, which had been sheltered by the roof of the building when it collapsed in the fire. Here she found some glasses and crockery, a jar of marmalade, some tea and an old silver mug.

In September Rose tore herself away from the rubble and attended the International PEN congress in London, which began with a lunch at the Savoy Hotel on Piccadilly and was conducted mainly in the French Institute in South Kensington. This meeting, which brought 470 delegates together to discuss ‘Writers and Freedom', was a brave event to hold at this stage in the war, especially because it involved international speakers travelling from Europe and America. And for most of the audience it offered a moment of hope, showing that literary and political discussion was still possible despite the violence that was tearing their world apart. This was particularly the case for Hilde Spiel, who was pleased to be asked to help with the preparations and to have a chance to get to know Storm Jameson, whom she found ‘very very charming'. Jameson herself began the Congress with a speech insisting that the war was or could be a social revolution and that afterwards the duty of the English writer would be to convince the English that they were responsible for Europe and could not evade this duty out of indifference or modesty. Here at least the fate of England was seen as bound up with the fate of Europe. And later that afternoon a ‘Mr Smith' from Scotland Yard came to talk to Hilde and Peter about being naturalised as British citizens.

On the fourth day of the congress, Peter de Mendelssohn gave a speech on ‘Writers without Language' where he compared two types of exiled writer, those for whom it was impossible to change languages because their identity was bound up with their mother tongue, and those who were able to start writing in the language of their host country. He gave J. B. Priestley as an example of the kind of writer who would be able to change linguistic currency. ‘I am an Englishman', he imagined a hypothetical Priestley saying in Germany, ‘true enough, but I am also a European. Where I am is Europe, and as I happen to be in Germany I declare Germany to be Europe, at least for the time being.' These were of course Peter de Mendelssohn's own sentiments, and both he and Hilde were starting to feel secure in their new British identity. In the world after the war, Peter stated, the émigrés who had changed language (as opposed to the refugees who had merely sought temporary refuge) would help build a great bridge which would span the waters and re-connect the continents and their peoples. He would help Storm Jameson in the task she had set the post-war writer. These were popular sentiments. Hilde reported in her diary that Peter's speech had been well received by the audience.

But Rose Macaulay remained unaffected by these notes of optimism ringing out around her. For her the rows of seated delegates remained less real than the charred ruins of her flat or the gradually atrophying body of the man she loved. Margaret Storm Jameson, meeting Rose on the way out at the end of the day, listened to her friend talking rapidly and watched as her smile flickered and her small head bobbed in a strange simulation of her usual animated state. She felt sad that old age could come upon someone so suddenly. But it was evident to Margaret that age alone could not account for the sad fatigue underlying Rose's show of liveliness. She wondered if Rose was still saddened by the bombing of her flat in May but guessed that her friend was weighed down by a more complex grief. ‘You're very tired,' Margaret observed. Rose moved down a step, paused, and looked back at her friend. ‘Margaret, you don't know what it's like to watch the person you love dying.' Margaret later wrote that she could feel the anguish pricking the ends of her fingers.

In November, Rose Macaulay wrote an article on ‘Losing One's Books' for the
Spectator
.
This opens with brisk, impersonal aloofness and with a characteristically whimsical linguistic aside:

 

It happened to me last May to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called
Blitz
, though why we should use the German for lightning for attacks by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides. Anyway, whatever the thing was called, it destroyed my flat, leaving not a wrack behind, or rather, nothing but wracks.

 

The tone then becomes more emotional, as she describes the charred remains of the wreckage, smelling of mortality, which troubled her with hints of what had been. A page of the Oxford Dictionary telling of hot-beds, hotch-pots, hot cockles, hotes and hotels; a page of Pepys. ‘When the first stunned sickness begins to lift a little, one perceives,' she says, ‘that something must be done about lost books.' When out, she climbed her ruins. When in, she made lists. A list of books she had owned (‘that is the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it'), a list of books that could be replaced, another of books that could not be replaced, another of good riddances. She goes on to list books in each category. Among the irreplaceable books are her Baedekers, which are now hard to find; ‘and anyhow,' she adds curtly, ‘travel is over, like one's books and the rest of civilisation'. The article ends abruptly:

 

One keeps on remembering some odd little book that one had; one can't list them all, and it is best to forget them now that they are ashes.

 

It is clear, though, that Rose Macaulay has not forgotten them. The description of list-making in this article reveals the continued obsessive nature of Rose's grief for her books. Although London was not seriously bombed again until 1944, the war continued horrifically elsewhere. Meanwhile Gerald was probably in the final months of his life. Yet Rose spent her time making lists of books, allowing the two sources of sadness to fuse in her own mind and finding in her lost volumes a way of giving public expression to private grief.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 8

Part III

The Lull

June 1941–May 1944

9

‘You are the ultimate of something'

Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Rose Macaulay, summer 1941–summer 1942

 

The raid of 10 May 1941 which flattened Rose Macaulay's flat was the last attack on so brutal a scale that London would suffer for three years. The summer following the Blitz came as an unreal period of calm after a gruelling nine months of bombing. At first, Londoners waited anxiously for another attack. ‘We are puzzled why, in this lovely weather, the Germans have not seriously attacked us by air,' Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary in June, wondering if they were ‘equipping their machines with some new device, like wirecutters'. Quickly, it became evident that the focus of the German war effort was now on Russia. On 22 June Hitler reneged on the non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Russia was unprepared for the attack and within three weeks of the invasion German forces had penetrated 450 miles into Russian territory. Churchill denounced Hitler on the radio as ‘a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder', who had terrorised Europe into submission and was now carrying on his butchery and desolation by victimising the multitudes of Russia and Asia. But in London the butchery was now experienced at a distance. ‘War moved,' as Elizabeth Bowen observed in
The Heat of the Day
, ‘from the horizon to the map'; daily life could resume again.

Graham Greene found the lull frustrating and longed to escape into a war zone. Even at the height of the Blitz in December 1940 he had told Anthony Powell that he was keen to do Free French propaganda in West Africa from a base in Liberia. His sister Elisabeth, as secretary to the regional head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, popularly known as MI6) in the Middle East, was doing her best to pull strings to get both her brother and Malcolm Muggeridge accepted as overseas agents. Finally, a mysterious ‘Mr Smith' invited Greene to a party that turned out to be part of the vetting process for spies. On 20 August he informed his mother that in two or three months he would be going out to West Africa, supposedly working for the Colonial Office. ‘The pay is very good, and the job interesting,' he told her. Before he could start, the SIS decided Greene should be instilled with some military discipline, so that autumn he attended a four-week training course at Oriel College, Oxford. He reported to John Betjeman that he had been taught how to salute with a little stick under his arm while marching and, without success, to ride a motorcycle. He was also trained in the specific skills befitting an intelligence officer: to assume and inhabit another identity, use surveillance technology and choose and obtain information from local agents.

Most Londoners were more appreciative of the peace than Greene was. As in the phoney war, the calm was unreal. But after eight months of ‘taking it' people felt entitled to a lull, and the impulsive spirit of the Blitz continued into the summer. Waking up from the long months of sleeplessness and fear, Londoners emerged grateful to be alive, and continued to float on the tideless present of war. ‘Everyone has a sort of false armistice feeling,' Hilde Spiel observed in her diary; ‘drinks, paints her finger-nails, makes love to young girls, and says: ce Noel à Paris!'

It was in the summer of 1941 that Elizabeth Bowen began the affair with Charles Ritchie that would heighten her experience of the next four years of war and dominate the rest of her life. ‘Beloved, I can't believe any human being can ever have made another as purely wholly unchangeably and yet increasingly happy as you have made me,' she would write to him four years later, as the Red Army liberated Warsaw. She had been passionately in love before. But now, surrendering herself to the frightening exhilaration of complete vulnerability, she was reconfiguring her sense both of love itself and of herself as a woman who loved. ‘For me, you are the ultimate of something. Till I met you, I did not imagine that such an ultimate could be reached. Now I rest in it, and cannot go beyond.'

Elizabeth and Charles had met at a christening during the brief lull in the London Blitz in February. ‘She says it began when she saw me standing outside the church after the christening,' Charles recorded in his diary that September. He found this hard to believe. ‘It smells to me of literary artifice,' he observed. He was less prepared for love than she was, and was particularly unprepared to fall in love with a woman whom he found on first impressions to be ‘well-dressed middle-aged with the air of being the somewhat worldly wife of a don'. In his diary that evening he indifferently catalogued her ‘narrow intelligent face, watching eyes' and ‘cruel, witty mouth', not suspecting that four months later they would be lovers.