The Love-Charm of Bombs (36 page)

In
Pack My Bag
Yorke describes his days spent fishing in Forthampton as amongst the happiest in his life; days that nothing could take away as, before he went to sleep at night, he returned to the river: ‘under the blankets, one's thoughts like pigeons circling down out of the sky back to their dovecot set down where the river, sweeping to the sea, makes another turn like the last those birds make coming out of the evening'. It was these fishing trips that had sustained him at the start of the war, ‘facing a slow death in the shelter they have made our basement into', taking with him these memories ‘like a bar of gold' as the siren went and ‘frightened we begin to forget'. Now he and his ten-year-old son Sebastian could share the experience and they fished every day, catching, as he told Mary, huge eels with heads like greyhounds. There was a great ham on the sideboard, the weather was good and he was sleeping in the bed Mary had been allocated when she visited Forthampton the previous year. But he was missing Mary and wished she was there. In her absence he had discussed her with Sebastian during one of their fishing trips. Sebastian announced that ‘women had men beat' because they had only to threaten to go away and the ‘wretched men were done for'. All women, father and son agreed, were excessively sly. But Mary, Henry suggested, was an exception. ‘Oh Mary,' Sebastian answered. Henry asked if Sebastian thought she was beautiful and his son replied that her face was beautiful but her body was too thin. ‘So now you know darling, now you know,' Henry informed his mistress.

On 14 May Mary Keene gave birth to a daughter she called Alice. Henry wrote to congratulate her. ‘Darling. I'm so very very happy for you that you have got through with it and that it's a girl. I'm sure you'd rather have a girl to be nice to than a boy.' They had spoken on the telephone and he found it extraordinary to hear her voice so soon after she had given birth. The moment that she felt like having visitors he would come round. Alice was registered as the child of Bunny Keene, and Bunny believed himself to be the father. It later transpired in their divorce proceedings that ‘sexual intercourse appears to have continued right up to the time they parted' in 1945 and that it was therefore possible for Bunny to have fathered the child. Mary, who had a more accurate idea of the dates, was always convinced that it was in fact Henry who was the father. For his part Henry accepted sufficient responsibility to agree to pay for the divorce proceedings that she was shortly to begin against Bunny.

Despite the pleasures of the father-son fishing trips, Henry Yorke does not generally seem to have been very moved by fatherhood. At a time when it was unusual for members of his class to have only one child, he never wanted to have more children with Dig, ostensibly because of the considerable extra expense children incurred. After Alice's birth, it became apparent that he had not loved Mary in a way that would make him want her child. The relationship had been passionate and serious, on his side as well as hers. He missed her and was finding life increasingly depressing in her absence, though he also missed the headier excitement of the Blitz. But if Rosamond Lehmann was right that Henry Yorke was at best a ‘disinterested affection giver' then there was only so far that disinterested affection could go. In
Mrs Donald
Mary would berate Louis for failing to be distressed simply because Violet was upset. There is a point at which love requires sympathy to transmute into self-interested empathy, mutual vulnerability and need. These qualities are certainly present in Yorke's novel
Loving
, which Rosamond Lehmann saw as ‘the most compassionate work of one never overtly compassionate', exhibiting ‘a tenderness unusual in this tender and harsh writer'. But this tenderness was starting to evaporate. It turned out that Mary was not ultimately a part of Henry; as a result their child, if Henry did indeed believe Alice was his, could not be a part of him either.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 12

Part IV

Approaching Victory

j
une 1944–
a
ugust 1945

13

‘Droning things, mindlessly making for you'

Hilde Spiel, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, June 1944–January 1945

 

On 4 June 1944 the Allies finally entered Rome. Two days later Londoners awakened to news of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Five miles of sandy beaches were dotted with troops. ‘D-Day has come,' Charles Ritchie wrote in his diary. ‘It had become a hallucination – something like the Second Coming or the End of the World.' ‘D-Day!' Hilde Spiel announced in disbelief. ‘We start the attack of Europe. Frightfully exciting. The BBC bringing it all near.' The assault had been many months in preparation. That spring the Allies had attacked German bridges and communications in Occupied France from the air, as well as continuing to devastate German cities in an attempt to render the Germans incapable of producing war supplies. Now 132,000 troops landed on the beaches, arriving by air and sea.

There was widespread celebration. John Lehmann held a party at his flat in Shepherd Market. Henry Yorke, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis and Rex Warner were among his guests, suspending their separate anxieties to rejoice in a shared wartime moment as they had during the Blitz. Churchill congratulated the troops in Rome for ‘a memorable and glorious event' which rewarded the intense fighting of the last months in Italy. He described the vast operation of the D-Day landings as ‘undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place'. Determined to get to France, Charles Ritchie persuaded his superiors that he should deliver a message of good wishes to the Canadian troops on behalf of the Prime Minister. He went by troopship, accompanying 460 infantrymen – ‘stolid, cheerful English faces', who looked mostly like boys in their teens.

Arriving at the beautiful French beach, which was now overrun with troops, Ritchie became aware that the war was in fact far from won. Although the German defences at the beachheads had been quickly overwhelmed, the advance inland was slow. And in the middle of June it became clear to Londoners that the Germans were going to continue the fight as long as possible. On 14 June, Harold Nicolson announced in his diary that there had been ‘mysterious rocket-planes falling in Kent'. It was all ‘very hush at the moment', but on 16 June the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison revealed that they were pilotless planes. Now, Nicolson could see them clearly, since they were ‘illuminated like little launches at a regatta': ‘They fly slowly and low, and it is a mystery how any of them get through at all. They make a terrific noise like an express train with a curious hidden undertone.' The V-1s (
Vergeltungswaffe Eins
), promised in Germany as ‘Hitler's secret weapons', had arrived.

 

A V-1 flying over London, 1944

 

With the deployment of these new weapons, the landscape of London changed once more. Now that there were no pilots involved, bombs could drop at any time of the day or night. The blue skies that had once ushered in a brief holiday from fear now contained the possibility of danger. And the usual defensive measures were no longer possible. People received very little warning about the approach of these small planes with ominously burning tails and rarely had time to retreat into a shelter. In
The Heat of the Day
Elizabeth Bowen describes the V-1s as ‘droning
things
, mindlessly making for you, thick and fast, day and night', which tear ‘the calico of London, raising obscene dust out of the sullen bottom mind'. Sustained V-1 attacks on London began on the morning of 16 June. Within the first three days of the deployment of V-1s, 499 people were killed. There was almost continual defensive gunfire until 18 June, when a bomb hit the Guard's Chapel attached to the Wellington Barracks and killed 119 members of the congregation. After that the attacks became more isolated and it became evident that this new phase of bombing was more a personal than a collective nightmare, as the destruction tended to affect individuals rather than whole communities.

On the evening of 17 June, Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn dined at the Savoy with Hans Habe, Hilde's first love from her schooldays in Vienna, who was now working as an Instructor in Psychological Warfare for the Americans. They stayed too long.

 

As we came out of Wimbledon station toward midnight, countless aircraft clacked over our heads, a sound like that of a hundred diabolical sewing machines. It was not the bombs, but the shower of metal that rained down from the defensive artillery that made us flee again and again into shop doorways; our journey punctuated by minute-long pauses, we finally traversed the endless Wimbledon Hill Road and the Ridgway as far as The Downs.

 

Hilde, pregnant again, decided it was time to join her daughter in Cambridge. Christine remained with the doctor's family and Hilde moved in nearby as the lodger of a female German scholar. ‘A clever, educated, grumbling old woman . . . I sleep, sleep, sleep.'

Hilde stayed in Cambridge until September, seeing Christine every day and worrying about Peter's safety and fidelity. On 23 June he admitted that he had spent the night with his feisty and beautiful literary agent Juliet O'Hea, who had dined at their house in Wimbledon in February, advising Peter and Hilde on their manuscripts. At the time O'Hea seemed to be one of the few people in London who admired
The Fruits of Prosperity
and she had left Hilde feeling encouraged about the novel's prospects of being published. ‘Life is really absurd,' Hilde observed now. ‘Cried a lot. It's hard to sit here watching him start an affair with her. I'd rather go back to the bombs.'

Pregnant, exiled and insecure about her own literary career, Hilde was jealous of Juliet O'Hea, who had a more assured role in literary London than she did. Juliet was single and childless, and so could be less fearful among the bombs. The affair would flatter Peter by affirming his own sense of belonging in the literary scene and there was a danger that it would also make him see Hilde as a dowdy outsider. But the uncertainty about Peter intensified Hilde's own feelings for him and they had an unusually joyful weekend together in Cambridge. ‘I was incredibly happy. I've hardly ever been so much in love with him,' she wrote in her diary after he had gone. Over the next few weeks she thought of him constantly, worrying about the bombs in London, devastated at the end of each weekend when he left her alone once more. ‘Peter and I have never lived with each other more happily,' she observed at the end of July, though the previous week he had confessed to nearly going to bed with Juliet O'Hea again. ‘If only he's spared!' she begged, warding off both the V-1s and his seductress.

For Graham Greene, the V-1s were particularly disturbing because he had dreamed them into existence. A few months earlier, he dreamt that he woke up in bed and saw a small plane flying across the window with fire coming out of its tail. Although he was working for the government and had heard stories that a secret weapon was about to be unleashed by Hitler, he had no knowledge of the specifics and so was extremely surprised when the first V-1s appeared and he was confronted with exactly the same image he had seen in his dream. A week into the attacks, on 22 June, Greene wrote in his diary that ‘one had thought of the Luftwaffe as defeated, unable to put on a show of this magnitude – there had been nothing like it since the spring of '41'. That Monday he had heard one explode, and from St James's off Piccadilly he had seen a pillar of black rising behind the Academy. ‘I had to put on glasses, the air became so thick with brick dust.' Meanwhile, Dorothy Glover was in Tottenham Court Road during another explosion. Greene reported that the road was in an awful state: ‘windows, doors and frames had been blasted from Torrington Place to Store Street'. The actual demolition was confined to a few slum houses which had been reduced to rubble, painting the buildings in Tottenham Court Road cream-coloured with clear fine dust.

The alarms had become so frequent that Londoners often forgot whether there was one on or not. In
The Heat of the Day
Louie is unable to tell the difference between the siren and the all clear. Graham Greene and Dorothy were now living in a top-floor flat in Gordon Square, which they had rented extremely cheaply because of its vulnerability to attack. During noisy raids, they sometimes hid in the cupboard under the stairs. From here, on 23 June, they could hear a bomb falling in Russell Square. The top floors of their own building sounded as though they were being crunched in a fist, although in fact the only glass to break was several doors away. Occasionally they took a mattress to the semi-basement at the bottom of the house. At other times, they just stayed in bed. Although
The End of the Affair
describes Greene's relationship with Catherine Walston, not Dorothy Glover, the accounts of reckless love-making amid the bombs recall his experiences with Dorothy during this period of the war, transposed from their Bloomsbury flat to Graham's marital home in Clapham Common: