The Love-Charm of Bombs (41 page)

 

For most Londoners, the summer of 1945 was a muted period in which the bright lights of victory faded into a greyer peace. Elizabeth Bowen was pleased to retreat to Ireland at the beginning of June and to enter the languid world of Bowen's Court, with its tempo of ‘slow motion, reflectiveness, ease'. Each time she arrived at the house, she had an uncanny sense of surveying a life that had continued in her absence. On this occasion, she reported to Charles that she would not be surprised when first entering the house if she found ferns growing on the staircase or a mythical animal crouching outside her bedroom door. She was missing Charles, and had embarked on the dual existence that would continue for the rest of her life. Part of her was engaged in the daily routine, entertaining, socialising, visiting the local church. But most of her was in the virtual realm of letters, ensconced in the secret psychic space she shared with Charles. ‘You take with you my real life, my only life,' she had told him in the letter she sent him away with.

Now, Elizabeth was distressed because, owing to slow postal services and Irish censorship, she had not received a letter from him for a month. She had realised that her week ‘really, focuses internally on what you say, how you are and what you tell me you're doing'. In the absence of a new letter she returned to old ones, reading and rereading them until she knew them by heart. Everything else that she read was inflected through him. Enjoying
Antony and Cleopatra
, she demanded that he should read it again, when he had time. It had become crucial to know that her mental experiences were in some way shared. Fortunately Bowen's Court was receptive to the felt sense of absent presences. It had always been a ghostly house, and it was easier to keep Charles's ghost alive here than it was in London, where the flux of new visitors erased the traces of those who had departed. ‘I look round and see the corduroy armchair, near the fire, that you sat in; and can almost see you in it.' Ireland itself was ‘conducive to dreams' and she was ‘making plans, seeing pictures, building castles in the air' around their future. ‘There are such lovely places round here – river valleys, woods, sides of mountains, that you and I never had time to see. I long to wander about them.'

For Hilde Spiel, the euphoria ebbed as the anxieties of everyday life returned. ‘No more danger from the skies, but money problems, food problems, worries about my parents, as before.' Since the beginning of the year, Peter de Mendelssohn had repeatedly disappeared on visits to France, sent by SHAEF. Now, in June, he was sent to Germany to set up contacts with writers and journalists for SHAEF Information Services Control. His time for reforming that ‘band of thieves and murderers and abject criminals' in Germany had come. After Peter left for Berlin, Hilde was alone in witnessing the gradual decline of her father. Throughout the war Hugo Spiel had looked for work, with little success. On 6 April 1941 Hilde noted in her diary that he had gone to a factory in Enfield to find a job as an assembler, but that he did not pass the physical assessment. Two weeks later she reported that he was working with the rubble clearers, which also involved joinery work and repairing windows. ‘He does it all happily.' He continued to clear rubble periodically for the next few years.

At the end of the war Hugo Spiel was briefly given a job as a laboratory supervisor for the Ministry of Supply in Leeds, and then as a director of research. His technique for producing synthetic rubber had attracted attention at last; the renowned scientist J. D. Bernal had taken an interest in him and suggested recommending him for membership of the Royal Society. But then the rubber plantations in the Far East were reclaimed and Hugo was dismissed, becoming unemployed once more. In June 1945 he was clearing rubble again, a fact unsuspected by Hilde, whom he tried to protect from his shabby desperation. When she did find out, she put a stop to the job, but she herself, as always, was short of funds. She was too busy translating Peter's wartime novel
The Hours and the Centuries
for a Swiss publisher
to earn any extra money.

Together Hilde and her father attempted to find a more dignified alternative to rubble-clearing. However, Hilde had little patience with Hugo's attempts to set himself up as a translator, and wrote a letter explaining to him the harsh economic laws of the literary world. In her autobiography she castigated herself for her heartlessness:

 

I would have treated him more gently if I had understood then that his life was over, that exile was killing him as surely as a German concentration camp would have done.

 

In July 1945 Hugo died. Returning exhausted from an abortive search for work, reckless as ever, he ran himself a cold bath. His wife found him dead in the chilly water. Hilde had to borrow money to pay for the cremation. ‘Everything now is being lived already before one has a chance to do it oneself,' she observed in her diary, ‘and all emotions are second hand.'

Hilde's letters to Peter were delayed and it was weeks before he heard about his father-in-law's death. In the meantime he wrote cheerful letters about his escapades in Germany, where he was now temporarily seconded to the Americans as the press officer for their zone. ‘At odd moments I wonder whether it was right for me to come out here and leave you alone,' he wrote from Bad Homburg at the end of June; ‘but the more I think of it the more I feel it was right. These weeks are among the most important in my life.' He felt lucky because he was the right age to realise the full implications of the scenes he was witnessing. ‘I am old enough to be about and really see it all with mine own living eyes, and I'm young enough to understand what it means. Few people do around here, I find.'

Peter became even more jubilant once he began work in Berlin, where he arrived on 7 July. ‘This', he announced to Hilde the day after his arrival, ‘is the crowning adventure of this whole fantastically adventurous business.' He had only been in the town for two days but had ‘lived a life already, or rather relived it', visiting nightclubs, wandering through ruins, elated by the ‘crazy town'. The nightclub he had been to the previous night – ‘wild, noisy, cheap, vulgar' – reminded him of Berlin of the early 1920s.

 

Loud shrill music, megaphones, jazz, loud dresses, fiercely painted and powdered faces, young men who haven't eaten for days in smart suits which are smart only at a distance – all fiercely pretending they are still there, they are alive, trying to drown their despair and misery in this hectic outburst of amusement [amid] a colossal ruin, brown, grey, black ruins, street after street, block after block.

 

There had never been anything like it anywhere. ‘What a story, what an unbelievable story.' It was the most exciting job he had ever had.

At the same time, he needed Hilde's help with the more mundane aspects of life. Could she send a large tin of Normacol (a laxative), toothpaste, a towel, pyjamas, shoes, handkerchiefs and cigarettes? Could she ring up Kingsley Martin and promise Peter's
New Statesman
report? Oh, and could she get on with translating Peter's novel; he wanted to send it off as soon as he returned. A week later he informed her dramatically that Berlin was ‘boiling in sweltering summer heat, and the stench and odour that rises from the canals and river arms of the inner city, still packed with thousands of rotting human bodies, make one really sick'. But he was managing to feel at home in a country mansion in suburban Zehlendorf, where the Allies had set up their headquarters. The chairs and sofas were comfortable, there were large French windows opening out onto the terrace, and there were drinks and American cigarettes on the coffee table. It was a perfect lazy summer evening and the night before he had gone to a party hosted by a forty-year-old German woman wearing a transparent white silk dress with a bunch of roses in her hair. This was a gathering of musicians, singers, theatre and film people, decorated by ‘girls big and small, pretty and very pretty'. Peter drank heavy, sweet red Caucasian wine and talked to old and new acquaintances on the terrace.

‘My darling,' Hilde wrote to her husband,

 

life is so queer, so unbearably ironical that I cannot know what to do, what to say. Today three letters came from Berlin and Hamburg, and it is clear that you had, or perhaps still have, no idea of what has happened. How ghastly it all is. While you went to the German singer's party I walked about here like a ghost, tearless, comforting my mother and aunt, crying noiselessly at night so as not to wake up my mother who slept in the same room.

 

She was perplexed by their disparity: ‘This is clearly the moment in my life when I would have needed you most, when you, on the other hand, need me least. How is that possible?' She was also distressed by the ease with which he seemed to have settled into communicating with that band of murderers and traitors he had once so high-mindedly derided. ‘Much of what you describe disgusts me,' she told him. ‘You know how tolerant I am, how ready to compromise, how unwilling to hate.' But she found it intolerable that he could just forget ‘so much suffering and torment, the dark years, all the martyrdom, hunger, annihilation'.

And the dark years were also their own. For years she had given Christine a goodnight kiss without knowing whether the next morning she would find her alive or torn in pieces. Now she looked at helpless émigrés of her parents' generation and the furrowed faces of ordinary people on the Underground and found, bitterly, that something in her resisted these fraternisations over Caucasian wine. Since the Allies had liberated the concentration camp at Belsen on 15 April it had become even harder for many people in Britain to tolerate the Germans. On 19 April Richard Dimbleby broadcast a report about his first impressions of the camp, describing the day he had visited it as the most horrible of his life.

 

I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom . . . Some of the poor starved creatures . . . looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all.

 

That summer the British public could see newsreels at the cinema showing film footage of the atrocities.

Peter did not receive Hilde's letter until later in the month, so he continued to write to her triumphantly about his exploits in Berlin. On 17 July he reported that he had been entrusted with the task of preparing the publication of the first and probably only American-licensed German newspaper in Berlin. He was extremely excited.

 

This is the crowning event, and I'm immensely happy that the long and not always easy road has led me thus far. Beyond accomplishing this I have no ambition in this field, and after accomplishing it, I shall gladly return home and cultivate my literary garden.

 

He begged Hilde not to be angry with him for not coming home any earlier, adding:

 

I don't want to write a lot of stuff about how much I long to be home and how I miss you all. That is so completely understood that I don't have to make a lot of words about it. I want to come home and stay at home, with you and the children . . . But I must first complete this job . . . Please Mummili, let me do it and don't feel angry and frustrated about it.

 

Meanwhile he was still waiting for the Normacol. Perhaps she had not yet received his letter?

On 21 July Peter finally did get a letter from Hilde, berating him for not writing, but he had still not received the critical letters about her father. He told her crossly that he had written conscientiously, from wherever he was, approximately three times a week. ‘I'm quite innocent,' he added. Hilde had said that she would like to hear a little more about how much he was missing her, failing simply to take it as read, but Peter did not have much patience with her demands.

 

To answer your letter quickly . . . I think we have evolved a very good system of letter writing, in that we limited the formalities (which are understood, namely how are you, I'm well) to a minimum, and write with extreme egocentrism (does that word exist? I wonder). You just rattle off all the news and views you have, and I rattle off mine, and we just assume that we love each other and all the rest. I think this is very good.

 

He did at least thank her more fully for translating his novel, which she had now finished.

 

You've done well, my Mummi, it was a big job, and doing it on the side along with all your other chores can't have been easy. I'm very, very grateful, and very happy that you also enjoyed it.

 

This rather patronising gratitude was not enough to console Hilde for her serious money worries or her grief at her father's death. But there was nothing that she could do except to wait for her earlier letters to arrive.

 

 

All this time London was preparing for the election on 29 July, in which Churchill's Conservative party was vying for power against the Labour party, led by Clement Attlee. Labour was promising Britain the social reforms that politicians on both sides had often claimed they were fighting for during the war. In December 1942 the economist and civil servant William Beveridge had published the popular Beveridge Report, setting out proposals in health care that would form the basis of a welfare state. Churchill responded cautiously at the time, reluctant to make promises that he would not be able to fulfil. Since then some progress had been made – notably R. A. Butler's August 1944 Education Act, which created a tripartite system of education – but there was still a long way to go and the Conservative government under Churchill seemed unlikely to commit to a full course of social reform.