The Love-Charm of Bombs (37 page)

 

We had only just lain down on the bed when the raid started. It made no difference . . . the V1s didn't affect us until the act of love was over. I had spent everything I had, and was lying back with my head on her stomach and her taste – as thin and elusive as water – in my mouth, when one of the robots crashed down on to the Common and we could hear the glass breaking further down the south side.

 

In
The End of the Affair
, this moment of bombing becomes the occasion for a tortured contract between Sarah and the God in whom the characters gradually come to believe. By the end of the book there is the suggestion that God is directly involved in the outcome of the bombing. This is also implied in several entries in Greene's diary from the summer of 1944. On 23 June he stated matter-of-factly that the Germans ‘must surely have been having a national day of prayer' to be granted such perfect bombing weather – ‘cloudy and cold and windy'. ‘Six down during the night', he reported on 27 June; ‘another rainy cloudy day – we certainly seem meant to suffer'. ‘An odd thing,' he observed on 2 July, ‘is the personal indignation one feels with God as the appalling weather continues: I lay in bed yesterday morning muttering angrily to myself about it. One thinks of him as a person unjustly taking sides.' The war was transmuting into an apocalyptic battle between right and wrong, presided over by a contrary deity.

By the time of the V-1 attacks, Greene had resigned from the SIS and was working for the Political Intelligence Department (PID) of the Foreign Office, who had promised to send him to France in the event of an invasion. This meant that he was now based in Grosvenor Street, in London. On 30 June Greene heard a big explosion during lunch and, getting back to the office, learnt that it was a bomb in the courtyard of Bush House, the BBC overseas service headquarters where his brother Hugh worked. He reported in his diary that the telephone was off and he did not know when they would receive news of Hugh's whereabouts. Later that afternoon he announced that Bush House had suffered, but the telephone was now working. ‘Hugh is all right, and the bomb seems to have fallen by the Waldorf.' This was one of the worst single attacks of the war. As the dust cleared after the explosion onlookers saw corpses strewn across the pavements and a line of burned-out buses along the side of the road. Forty-eight people were killed.

For Greene, this had been a shattering day. During this period, he seems to have stopped revelling in the destruction for its own sake, instead starting to worry about the danger, perhaps because he was enjoying life too much to desire death. Insead, he kept up his spirits by reminding himself that ‘the moment always exaggerates' – the damage was rarely as bad as it sounded – and observing the resilience of other Londoners. Once, an old woman yelped in terror in the queue at the local butcher and the butcher promptly leapt out from behind the counter and kissed the woman, providing a happy distraction for onlookers. But as the destruction escalated it was hard to forget about it. ‘Had dinner at the Coquille to improve my morale – not very successfully,' Greene reported at the end of the day on 30 June. That night he was kept awake by ‘an endless series of bombs coming over – I counted about 12 explosions: very little sleep'. By 10.20 the next morning the alert was still on. He and Dorothy escaped to the countryside for the day but the bad weather and the heavy raids continued. ‘A bad night with over 40 explosions between 12.45 and 9,' he began his diary entry for 3 July. In the brief intervals of sleep between bombs, he had even dreamed that he was in a raid. Since then, it had poured all day and his secretary had asked if she could take a long lunch hour because her grandmother had suffered from bomb blast; later she heard that her other grandmother was trapped under the debris of her house.

The V-1 bombardment continued into July but by the end of the month only one ‘doodle-bug' in seven penetrated the anti-aircraft and barrage-balloon screens. On 6 July Churchill told the Commons that it would be a mistake to underrate the serious character of this form of attack, but assured them that the Allies were doing their best to destroy the firing-points from which they were launched. He noted that on average the V-1s had killed one person per bomb, which was, he claimed, ‘a wonderful figure'. On 13 July Charles Ritchie announced in his diary that morale had improved: ‘we are getting used to the buzz-bombs and also fewer are coming over. People are beginning to come to life again – to ring up their friends and go to restaurants.' Greene, now released from government duties and working as publishing director at Eyre and Spottiswoode, was still on duty as a warden at night but was usually to be found taking authors for long and drunken lunches by day.

Resilient as always, many Londoners were patching up their homes. Among these was Elizabeth Bowen. Her house in Clarence Terrace had been scathed by two blasts and she and Alan cleared up the damage. In a subsequent account of her life during the war, she recalled that she wrote continuously throughout, interrupted only by the occasional necessity to clean up her house from time to time, when it had been blasted. ‘Nobody', she added, ‘who has not cleaned up a house in which every ceiling has come down and every window has been blown in knows what cleaning-up can be like: glass-dust and plaster from old ceilings are most pervasive.' In 1944 Bowen published an essay called ‘Calico Windows', describing the experience of living in a patched-up house. Her windows filled with opaque creamy calico, she, like many other Londoners, was ‘tied up, sealed up, inside a tense white parcel', embedded within a ‘new, timeless era of calico' in which ‘the old plan for living has been erased'. Going out into the world, she returned to the ‘tense, mild, soporific indoor whiteness', dreamily cut off from the thunder of world events.

Bowen was dismissive of people who gave up too easily. Her story ‘Oh, Madam', written during the 1940 Blitz, portrays the owner of a Regent's Park house as betraying both the house itself and the loyal servant who tries to keep it going when she announces her intention to pack up the house and depart for the countryside. The story is a monologue, addressed by the servant to her mistress. The servant has spent the days since the attack attempting to restore order, although it becomes clear that the house has barely survived. The windows are gone, the ceilings have fallen through, the stairs are covered in plaster. Even the inhabitants are ghosts. The servant is ashen with dust; the mistress goes white with shock. From the start, the servant assumes that her mistress has returned for good and that they will restore the house together. ‘When we just get the windows back in again – why, madam, I'll have the drawing-room fit for you in no time!' She is counting on their shared loyalty to the house, which ‘has been wonderful, madam, really – you really have cause to be proud of it'. ‘Hitler can't beat you and me, madam, can he?' It then transpires that the mistress is intending to leave. The servant is shocked and disillusioned. ‘
But you couldn't ever, not this beautiful house!
' ‘But, madam, this seemed so much your home.'

Bowen was more hardy than the mistress in the story. In
Bowen's Court
she attributed her own wartime courage to her anxiety twenty years earlier, during the Irish Troubles, when her father wrote to her and told her to prepare to see Bowen's Court burned down.

 

I read his letter beside Lake Como, and, looking at the blue water, taught myself to imagine Bowen's Court
in flames. Perhaps that moment disinfected the future: realities of war I have seen since have been frightful; none of them have taken me by surprise.

 

But on 20 July a V-1 landed across the road, blew the house hollow inside and wrecked every room. Charles Ritchie reported in his diary that Elizabeth and Alan had at last decided to move out now that the ceilings were down and the windows were broken and they were lucky to have escaped being killed. There came a point when, like the woman in ‘Oh, Madam', she had to give up, though she, like the servant in the story, was proud of how sturdy her house had been so far. Charles hated the destruction of Clarence Terrace and felt that Elizabeth was without her background; a dignified retreat to Bowen's Court seemed called for.

 

Her nerves have been under a terrible strain. But she is resilient, if she can get away and get some rest she will be all right. And in the midst of it all she is still trying frantically to write her novel.

 

The novel was
The Heat of the Day
, which Elizabeth Bowen had first started planning after her return from Ireland in August 1942. That September she told Charles that she was on the point of beginning ‘a new novel of our Present Discontents'. By November she knew that it would open in Regent's Park. ‘I like to think that the atmosphere of wartime London will be preserved in E's new novel,' Charles wrote in February 1944, ‘and that things we have seen and felt together will be preserved there. Of course what I would like best would be to find a romanticised portrait of myself but I shall be lucky, I daresay, not to be mentioned.'

These wishes were to be granted. Robert was indeed a romanticised portrait of Charles, down to his long, elegant hands, the ‘fairness, not quite pallor' of his skin and the ‘flame-thin blueness' of his eyes. ‘How proud Charles must be,' Rosamond Lehmann wrote to Elizabeth after the book's publication, praising her friend for ‘the unbearable recreation of war and London and our private lives and loss'. ‘You do, you really do, write about love.' Chapter five, which Bowen was writing as the bombs fell around her in 1944, situates Stella and Robert in the suspended present of wartime, exploring the aesthetics of wartime temporality. They meet (unlike Elizabeth and Charles) during a bombing raid, and their first sighting of each other is interrupted by a detonation. Introduced to each other in a bar, they turn to look at each other and at first glance see in each other's faces ‘a flash of promise'. Immediately, Stella finds herself not beginning to study but in the middle of studying Robert. Then she turns to wave goodbye to the friend who has brought her across the room before she and Robert fix their eyes expectantly on each other's lips. At this moment a bomb whistles and lands elsewhere, demolishing the moment.

Always afterwards, both lovers see Stella's gesture of goodbye and the expectant stare as frozen photographs. And the freezing of time seeps into their first months together so that, transfixed in the moment, they seem to stay ‘for ever on the eve of being in love'. This changes one October morning when the stakes of the danger become apparent. For Stella, loving Robert is associated ‘with the icelike tinkle of broken glass being swept among the crisping leaves and with the charred freshness of every morning'. At the start of the Blitz, she is buoyed up by the lightness of loving no particular person now left in London. During the September raids she is ‘awed, exhilarated, cast at the very most into a sort of abstract of compassion'. Then, in October, she wakes to discover that lightness gone. ‘That was the morning when, in the instant before opening her eyes, she saw Robert's face with a despairing hallucinatory clearness.'

As the V-1s fell around her in 1944, Bowen described the sensation of loving against a background of danger. She had never been without ties in London; Alan had been there with her throughout the war. But the specific sensation of waking up uncertain if her lover has survived the night is one she first experienced during the attacks by the V-1s, when the isolated nature of the attacks made it even harder to know if any particular house was safe.

Elizabeth did not retreat to Bowen's Court, and she and Charles continued to meet frequently after she and Alan left Clarence Terrace. On 12 August Charles reported that Elizabeth had moved to a flat belonging to Clarissa Churchill (niece of Winston), ‘high up in a monstrous new block of flats overlooking Regent's Park'. There, gazing out towards the house she had recently evacuated, she was writing a short story called ‘The Happy Autumn Fields'. She told Charles about it excitedly while he lay on the sofa looking out at the sky.

This is a story set in the confines of a bombed house. With calico ‘stretched and tacked over the window', Mary sleeps amid ruins. She has spent the day sorting through her things and has come across photographs of her ancestors wandering through a cornfield in Ireland. The Ireland of the story is the Ireland of Bowen's Court. ‘I was thinking about the fields round here,' Elizabeth would tell Charles, looking back on the story from Ireland in 1945, ‘blonde and crisp with stubble, crisscrossed with belts of bronze-brown beeches.' As in Bowen's article, the calico induces dreams and she has wandered into the consciousness of Sarah, a girl in the photograph, talking to her suitor, Eugene, in the presence of her jealous sister Henrietta.

Mary's own lover Travis intrudes on her sleep, waking her up in order to try to persuade her to leave. ‘In your normal senses you'd never attempt to stay here. There've been alerts, and more than alerts, all day; one more bang anywhere near, which may happen at any moment, could bring the rest of this down.' Mary stares sleepily over his shoulder at the calico window. Travis announces that he has taken a room for her in a hotel and is about to get her a taxi. ‘I can't get into a taxi without waking,' she complains, unwilling to abandon her dream. She is frantic at being delayed in London, while the moment awaits her in the cornfield; it is grotesque to be saddled with Mary's body and lover. Mary persuades Travis to leave her in peace for two hours and returns to her dream, which darkens as the rupture between sisters is completed. ‘It is
you
who are making something terrible happen,' Henrietta is lamenting to Eugene, just when in Mary's London the house rocks, the calico window splits and more ceiling plaster falls. There is the enormous dull sound of the explosion and Mary lies with lips pressed close, scarcely breathing, her eyes shut.