The Love-Charm of Bombs (40 page)

But that passion had been memorialised in
Loving
, which had come out in March. Near the end of the month Henry told Mary that all 5,000 copies of
Loving
had been sold five days before publication, and that, given the paper rationing, there was no more paper to print new copies. He was generally gratified by the ensuing reviews, and especially pleased with the praise of friends. ‘Your letters about my books give me the most intense pleasure,' he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann, who had written admiringly after being sent an advance copy, adding that ‘you are one of the very few, the two or three, I will take praise from'.

 

 

The war in Europe was now almost over. ‘Armies monotonously victorious,' Evelyn Waugh observed cynically on 13 April. The previous evening he had been at a party at Cyril Connolly's with Elizabeth Bowen. ‘Gloomy apprehensions of V Day. I hope to escape it.' After encircling the Germans in the Ruhr the American army continued eastwards, crossing the Czechoslovakian border on 19 April. Meanwhile the Russians had begun a final offensive on Berlin and by 22 April the city was held from both sides. Three days later the Americans met the Russians on the Elbe, cutting the German army in half. As well as defeating the Germans, the British and Americans were anxious to contain the Russians, who had already set up Communist governments in Poland and Austria. Hilde Spiel was worried about the situation in Vienna but cared most of all about the resumption of peace. ‘The war hurries rapidly to an end,' she announced jubilantly on 28 April. The next day the German forces in Italy surrendered unconditionally and on 30 April Hitler committed suicide. ‘Hitler reported dead!' Spiel wrote in disbelief on 1 May.

Elizabeth Bowen heard about Hitler's death in Hythe, where she had spent happy summers with her mother as a child. When she had arrived in Kent, the beach was covered in barbed wire and the cheerful seaside villas were deserted. Now she told Charles that the sea front was open again; miles of coils of rusty barbed wire had been snipped away and triumphantly flung back. On 2 May, the commander of German troops in Berlin surrendered to the Allies. Bowen celebrated the peace at the house of her friend Lord Berners in Faringdon in Oxfordshire, where the fountain was turned on for the first time since the war.

 

There was a breathless pause, then a jet of water, at first a little rusty, hesitated up into the air, wobbled, then separated into four curved feathers of water. It was so beautiful and so sublimely symbolic – with the long view, the miles of England, stretching away behind it, that I found myself weeping.

 

She thought a fountain was a better way to celebrate peace than the bonfires that were taking place in villages throughout England, though admittedly it was less democratic. This fountain made her think of the spectacular fountains at Versailles and the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, which soon would no longer be sealed off by war. The world seemed to be opening up once more and Elizabeth hoped that one day soon she and Charles could look at a fountain together, expanding their shared world onto the Continent.

On 8 May Britain celebrated VE Day, rejoicing at the Victory in Europe. The public had been expecting the declaration since early the previous day, when the Germans were informed by their Foreign Minister that the war was over. People waited expectantly with flags, which could be purchased without the usual obligatory ration coupons. Finally, at 7.40 p.m., the BBC interrupted a piano recital with the announcement that the next day would ‘be treated as victory in Europe Day, and will be regarded as a holiday'.

Initially, the news seemed anticlimactic. In the days leading up to the announcement, Elizabeth Bowen described to Charles Ritchie the general atmosphere of paralysis and apprehension in London, with ‘everyone wondering what they ought to
do
'. The declaration on the radio did not actually seem to change anything.

 

I switched off the wireless and said to Alan, ‘Well, the war's over,' and he said, ‘Yes, I know,' and we gave short gloomy satirical laughs, went into the dining-room and sat on the window sill for about an hour, quite unable to rally, he furious because he hadn't made any arrangements about his office, and I furious because I hadn't got any flags. The park looked as dark as a photograph and was quite empty; and I thought, well, I knew one would feel like this.

 

Later in the evening, the sky blazed white, and they laid aside their churlishness and walked out into the streets that Elizabeth had patrolled in total darkness for several long years of war. They found Marylebone Town Hall floodlit. To Elizabeth it looked so much like a building in heaven that she burst into tears.

 

Churchill addressing the VE-day crowds

 

Gradually, London filled with flags. By the following afternoon when Churchill and his ministers assembled on the balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall to announce the end of the war, the city was ready to celebrate. A vast crowd of people gathered at the corner of Whitehall and Parliament Square. ‘God bless you all,' Churchill told them. ‘This is your victory! . . . In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried . . . God bless you all.' Spontaneously, ‘Land of Hope and Glory' swelled up from below. Churchill began to conduct the chorus and was rewarded with a rendition of ‘For he's a jolly good fellow'. Elizabeth Bowen, always a loyal fan of Churchill, joined in the celebrations, which she found impressive and beautiful. ‘On a monster scale,' she wrote to Charles, ‘it was like an experience in love. Everything, physically – beginning and ending with the smell of sweat, so strong and so everywhere that it travelled all through this house by the open windows – was against exultation, and yet it happened.' Walking to Westminster Abbey she found that ‘after a crise (which happened quite early on) of hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyond . . . and became entered by a rather sublime feeling'. But Elizabeth felt out of place on the streets. ‘The intelligentsia', she reported, ‘remained in bed, drank and thought.'

Graham Greene stayed in London to celebrate VE Day with Dorothy. ‘Having watched the blitz through I thought I'd see the peace in London,' he explained to his mother. ‘LOVE AND HAPPY PEACE TO YOU – GREEN' he wrote in a cable to his wife. ‘Your wire
quite
admirable and pie-worthy,' she replied enigmatically. Vivien took their son Francis through Oxford to see the illuminations, gazing at the floodlights, rockets and bonfires – ‘huge leaping pyres'. She had a small party, serving iced coffee and cake to friends. ‘Drawing room looked lovely and I had one window quite up and cushions on the balcony window sill.' But she minded Graham's absence. ‘I so missed you to go about with. Oxford is a good place for such things as the architecture looked so lovely: no street lights, just windows, and coloured lights and firelight.'

Graham and Dorothy went to St James's Park to watch the celebrations. ‘There was precious little to see but some floodlighting,' he told his mother, ‘and still less to eat or drink. Everything very much more decorous than the Jubilee or Berkhamsted in 1918.' In
The End of the Affair
Greene attributes his experiences to Sarah Miles and her husband Henry. ‘It was very quiet beside the floodlit water between the Horse Guards and the palace,' Sarah records in her diary. ‘Nobody shouted or sang or got drunk. People sat on the grass in twos, holding hands. I suppose they were happy because this was peace and there were no more bombs. I said to Henry, “I don't like the peace”.'

Sarah, wanting her lover beside her instead of her husband, wishes that she could begin again but knows that she cannot. Greene himself was accompanied by his lover. However, the love affair with Dorothy had now started to take on the same claustrophobic quality as his marriage. Writing to Vivien in 1948, lamenting his failures as a husband, Graham told his wife that since 1944 he had failed with Dorothy ‘just as completely as at Oxford'. ‘Especially during the last four years, though the strain began much earlier, I have caused her a great deal of misery.' In
The Heart of the Matter
Scobie tells his mistress that it is a mistake to mix up happiness and love. Graham continued to love (and to pity) Dorothy, but she was no longer a straightforward source of happiness.

Returning to Oxford, Graham attempted to pacify Vivien by suggesting they should have a third child. Vivien had always wanted another son, who was to be called Mark, but Graham had been reluctant to have more children in wartime and was not particularly interested in spending time with the children they already had. Vivien later recalled the occasion at the end of the war when Graham suddenly turned to her and said ‘Have Mark'. ‘I felt a sort of outrage,' she said.

 

When he suggested having Mark, I thought to myself, ‘You've had all these women and you live with them and you say you love them and then come back after all these years to me, and expect to pick up everything just as it was,' and I said to him, ‘no, no, nothing like that,' and he said, ‘oh, very well,' quite cheerfully.

 

Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn found VE Day more of a satisfying climax to the war than Greene did. They celebrated the German capitulation itself at the home of Kingsley Martin, the editor of the
New Statesman
. Then on 7 May Peter called Hilde from the Ministry and told her to come immediately into town. They walked down Piccadilly looking at the endless crowds of excited people. The next day, like Bowen and Greene, they joined the thousands of Londoners wandering dizzily through a city whose lights were allowed to flare up again after five and a half years. They were part of the crowd singing ‘For he's a jolly good fellow' up to Churchill on his balcony. Near the end of her life, Spiel looked back on this as the pinnacle of her happiness in London. ‘Never before or after have I experienced such a collective intoxication of happiness, never again such certainty of being at home here and nowhere else.'

The next evening, the government put on a display of searchlights. These were the same flares that had lit up the sky in wartime, but now Londoners could enjoy the lighting effects without worrying about the damage they portended. Walking home at midnight from a dinner party, Elizabeth Bowen watched the searchlights from Grosvenor Square: ‘each one staggered and whirled around the sky, scribbled, darted, and crashed into others'. The tips of the lights met, as though pinpointing an enemy plane, but this evening they seemed to be drunk, collapsing against each other for support; ‘they also managed to look extremely lewd'. Elizabeth walked towards the park and, once she was halfway down Baker Street, the searchlights began to send up vertical pillars of light, so that ‘the whole of the darkness above London became a Gothic cathedral'. They then tipped over, dripping white rain towards the ground. ‘I suppose', Elizabeth wrote to Charles, ‘that everyone, in those two days, found one thing that was in
their
own language, and seemed to be speaking to them, specially. The searchlights were mine. For me they were the music of the occasion.'

In the aftermath of war, Elizabeth Bowen began to take stock. Quickly, she began to look back on the war as an exhilarating period and to find what followed anticlimactic. With the threat of death removed, everyday life became less precious. Without Charles, life had lost its sheen. ‘I would not have missed being in London throughout the war for anything,' she would write in an autobiographical note in 1948; ‘it was the most interesting period of my life. It was interesting to see the quiet old English capital converted into a high-pressure cosmopolitan city.' Now, Elizabeth wrote to thank those who had helped her to live at high pressure. There was Cyril Connolly, who had helped to make the war a positive experience instead of a ‘deteriorating dead loss' by hosting parties with ‘real spirit': ‘I know that many of us owe you a lot, and I do personally.' There was William Plomer, who had been ‘completely incarcerated' in naval intelligence but could not have made ‘less fuss'. Writing to Plomer, she reflected that she was lucky to have had ‘such a good war – if you know what I mean'.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 14

15

‘The days were listless and a flop'

Summer 1945