The Love-Charm of Bombs (38 page)

It is too late now to go back. Mary weeps on the bed, ‘no longer reckoning who she was', waiting for Travis. ‘How are we to live without natures?' she asks him, on his return. ‘We only know inconvenience now, not sorrow.' The source, the sap dried up, or the pulse stopped, before either of them was conceived. She is ‘drained by a dream': ‘I cannot forget the climate of those hours. Or life at that pitch.' Mary's experience resembles Henry Russel's in Bowen's earlier story, ‘Sunday Afternoon'. Once again, Bowen returns a character to Ireland, though this time only in a dream, in order to teach her to find the source, the sap and the pulse lost to her in the deadening air of bombed London. Bowen would always look on her experiences in London during the war as some of the most exciting in her life. But, from the confines of that new, monstrous block of flats, in the savage and austere light of wartime, she dreamed urgently of a world unchanged. In January 1941 Bowen had asked Virginia Woolf if, when her flat was bombed, all the things in it went too? ‘All my life I have said, “Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs” – and what a mistake.' Now her house was almost destroyed, and she clung desperately to an ideal of home which she located in the Irish countryside and in the heightened emotions that were the saving luxury of its more privileged inhabitants.

Despite dreaming of Ireland, Bowen was determined to stick out the remainder of the war close to home. Churchill himself insisted that there was no need for evacuation and that anyone who wanted to leave London must do so at their own expense. And Bowen and many of her acquaintances downplayed the danger of the ‘doodle-bugs'. On 13 August Harold Nicolson reprimanded his sons for their apprehension about the V-1s, maintaining that it was a useless form of attack.

The anxiety it causes to individuals is limited in space and time. In space, because one gets to know the line it is taking and nine times out of ten it is not on one's own line. In time, because the actual moment of personal danger is only a few seconds.

 

Later that week Stephen Spender assured Christopher Isherwood in America that the V-1s were more of a nuisance than anything else. He was frustrated because the windows and ceilings of his top-floor flat had been blown in and he now had to go down to the shelter almost every night, but he was not especially frightened.

Nonetheless, during the summer and autumn of 1944, a large number of Londoners followed the example of the woman in Bowen's ‘Oh, Madam' and retreated to the countryside. Hilde Spiel in Cambridge was receiving frequent reports from Peter about the bombing in Wimbledon. ‘Tonight the doodlers are doing their worst,' he wrote in the middle of August.

 

There is a warning literally every fifteen minutes, and each time, just one comes over. A little while ago one cut out just above the house, or so it seemed, and I heard it swish down. When it exploded I was sure all our windows would go again, but to my surprise found them all intact. There was a huge red glow on the horizon and a mushroom-shaped column of dark smoke rising into it. Quite fantastic, and I would have enjoyed it more if the whole performance hadn't given me a slightly odd sensation in the stomach.

 

Isolated in Cambridge, Hilde continued to worry about Peter's safety and to feel periodically jealous of the fun that he was having in London. On 22 August Peter was involved in another PEN congress, held at the French Institute in South Kensington. That morning a large V-1 had dropped in front of the Institute, destroying much of the neighbourhood, and there was a general feeling that the congress should be abandoned. Peter convinced the rest of the committee to go ahead on the grounds that the neighbourhood was no more dangerous than anywhere else in London and that the organisers were not responsible for the safety of the audience, who were all grown-ups with five years of Blitz experience. He boasted proudly to Hilde that he had rescued the congress, and that although the Institute was badly blitzed, the hall itself had been usable once they pulled down the black-out blinds to cover the broken windows. The speeches had been excellent. E. M. Forster was ‘absolutely brilliant'; all in all it was ‘first-class intellectual entertainment'. For her part Hilde was pleased that Peter had become so integral a member of the PEN committee but she wished that she could have been there too.

While the PEN congress was in session at the French embassy, one of the decisive battles of the Second World War was being fought in Paris. On 14 August the Allies had simultaneously launched Operation Tractable, which entailed a drive into Falaise and a westward thrust towards Paris, and Operation Dragoon, which involved landing 94,000 men on the French Mediterranean coast in a single day. The Falaise drive met with heavy resistance but the troops landing on the coast managed to push nearly twenty miles inland within four hours. In Paris, excited by the news of the landings, the police laid aside their uniforms and joined the Resistance on the streets. The next day, a general strike started, with thousands of employees of the Paris metro, police and postal service demonstrating against the Germans. By 19 August this escalated into full-scale war as the French fought the Germans in the streets, raising a tricolour flag, singing the Marseillaise and setting up barricades as they waited expectantly for the Allies to arrive. On 23 August Peter de Mendelssohn wrote to his wife that the news from Paris had really got him by the throat. He now realised how much he had been longing for this moment throughout the war. It was clear to him that it would only be a matter of weeks before the whole of France was liberated. On 24 August the Free French General Leclerc sent a vanguard of his Second Armoured Division to Paris, entering the city the following morning. At 2.30 p.m. on 25 August the German Commander of Paris surrendered and an hour and a half later General de Gaulle entered the city.

‘Isn't the war going with a swing?' Peter asked Hilde on 24 August. But, as a German, he was starting to feel ambivalent about the news.

 

Tonight's headlines in the paper just take one's breath away. They make your eyes swim and your thoughts reel. I'm no longer able to contemplate the news calmly and objectively. By tonight I think the boys must be in Versailles or very near it. This is the one and only time I wish I could be a Frenchman, for one day – when Leclerc's men enter the capital. But I fear I would choke myself to death. I've been thinking about it all evening. It is an incredible time for all the allies, for all the suppressed and oppressed, for all the exiled and hunted – except, somehow for us. I know this is a bad and treacherous and ungrateful thing to say and even to think. But somehow I just cannot help it. What are we going to get out of it, you and I and the rest of us? Ours is the shabbiest lot of all. What do I inherit from this great moment of triumph and exuberance? The dreadful, grey, hopeless task of going to reform my former countrymen, this band of thieves and murderers and abject criminals.

 

Meanwhile the Russian army had entered Finland, Poland and the Balkans, and Peter had been reading the official Russian account of the discoveries of the concentration camp at Lublin, which the Russians had liberated in July. On 12 August
The Times
had summarised the report of the Russian writer Konstantin Simonov, who visited the camp and found permanent and mobile gas chambers and floors strewn with the passports and identity cards of victims. The article reported that the naked victims in this camp had been packed so tightly in their cells that they died on their feet as the poison gas was pumped in. Apparently the officials used to crack grisly jokes with their victims, a favourite remark being ‘I'll see you in the stove soon.' There were reports, too, that SS men amused themselves by saying to victims coming to their senses after being clubbed, ‘Well, you're in Heaven now. Did you guess there were SS men in Heaven?' Reading these accounts had made Peter de Mendelssohn wish never to see a German again.

 

What an execrable, damnable, accursed lot they are, all of them, the whole lot! Yet there I shall go, back to the old country, and no one to greet with a smile, an open word, no one to love, nothing – not even the sight of their cities, of the playgrounds of my childhood and youth – will make my heart beat faster. Oh, to be a Frenchman and to return home on the high tide of hope and happiness.

 

The war continued to ‘go with a swing'. At one o'clock on 4 September Harold Nicolson heard that the British Second Army had occupied Brussels and that hostilities between Finland and Russia had ceased. Then at 9.30 p.m. he turned on the French news and heard that the British troops had crossed the Dutch border. Since D-Day they had taken 300,000 German prisoners in France alone. The German Army was in utter confusion.

On 10 September, Hilde Spiel returned to London, seven months pregnant, undeterred by her husband's warnings that a new weapon was about to be deployed against them. In the early morning hours after her arrival, they were awakened by ‘the ear-splitting sound of the first rockets landing on London and the echo of their breaking through the stratosphere that followed'. These were the first V-2s, long-range missiles which travelled faster than the speed of sound. They were forty-six feet long and five feet in diameter, and landed with an extremely loud double bang that made people up to ten miles away think they were about to be hit. Hilde and Peter's son Anthony Felix, ‘conceived among bombs, to be born among bombs', appeared at ten in the evening on 14 November. There were two flying-bomb attacks in the area of the London Clinic, where Hilde gave birth, and a rocket landed near enough to shake the walls. ‘Up in my room, in my joy over my child, I took little notice of the V1s and V2s,' Hilde Spiel recalled in her autobiography. ‘As terrible as the rockets were with their double thunder, we learned to adopt a stoic attitude towards them. One could not predict when and where they would land, and neither warning nor defence was possible, so we simply paid no attention to them.'

The British government was determined not to boost German morale by reporting the success of the rockets so they were kept out of the news for almost a month, until details were revealed in the
New York Times
. All this time, the battles in Europe dragged on. In France, the Allies captured Boulogne and Brest in September and then breached the Siegfried Line into Germany on 15 September. On 21 October they took the garrison of Aachen, the first German city to be captured. Belgium was liberated at the start of November and the American army entered Strasbourg on 23 November. In the East, Soviet and Yugoslav forces took Belgrade and then entered East Prussia in late October. But the British were distressed to learn about the fall of Warsaw to the Germans in late September, after a Polish uprising was given insufficient support by Soviet troops. On 5 October Churchill paid tribute to ‘the heroic stand' in Warsaw, lamenting that ‘terrible damage has been inflicted upon this noble city' and promising that the epic of Warsaw would not be forgotten. All in all it was evident that the war would continue for some time, not least because of the resilience of the Japanese in the Far East, a battle front that still seemed remote to most Londoners.

Hilde Spiel spent the winter at home in Wimbledon where, on 1 December, she noted in her diary that she had now lived for five years. ‘Boring and dangerous. Dear god, let me never again experience this.' Lying in bed, she felt angry but also very much in love with Peter, whom she resented for having more fun over the past two years than she had done. And now he was about to go away. Since he had disbanded the Exchange Telegraph a year earlier, Peter had been working for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) as deputy director of the Allied News Pool. On 5 December he was sent to Paris, in British military uniform, leaving Hilde at home with their baby. ‘You should comfort yourself with the knowledge that you have not missed much,' Peter wrote to Hilde, shocked by what he was seeing. ‘Paris is outwardly the same – beautiful, clean, delightful – but inwardly it has changed terribly, not with advantage. Conditions are chaotic. (It is incredibly, bitterly, cold and raining all the time.)' They would have to get used to the fact that Europe was no longer the same as the world they had left behind before the war. Visiting Paris at the start of January, Charles Ritchie found that the heroic arches and spectacular perspectives had become ironic – ‘the backdrop for their humiliation and their bitter unresigned endurance'. Although Peter de Mendelssohn was meant to come back on 18 December, he did not in fact arrive until the 23rd, full of tales of new Sartre plays and of the excitement of the continent. In the meantime there were more rockets, but on 15 December Christine was finally brought back from Cambridge. ‘The baby doesn't interest her,' Hilde reported. She now did her best to ignore the V-2s, wrapping up her son in his pram, leaving him outside the house for fresh air, and taking her daughter shopping. ‘We were all “in God's hands,” whether we believed in him or not.'

During the V-2 attacks, Elizabeth Bowen had remained on the outskirts of Regent's Park and, as soon as she could, she returned home. By October, she and Alan were back in Clarence Terrace. She was, she told her friend Susan Tweedsmuir a few months later, ‘so glad to be reinstated in what again seems a house, that we really have nothing to grumble about'. There may have been no cause for public complaint, but privately Elizabeth was preparing for one of the greatest personal sorrows of the war. Charles Ritchie had been posted back home to Canada. That December, during their final month of living in the same city, Charles bought Elizabeth a necklace for Christmas. It was made, he recorded in his diary, of large white amethysts flecked with mauve lights, alternating with small purple amethysts. He had been planning to buy topazes but fortunately had heard just in time that they were considered unlucky. ‘I wouldn't want to give her an unlucky present – our future looks unlucky enough without that.'