The Love-Charm of Bombs (5 page)

Greene was right in attributing this feeling to other members of his generation. In his 1938 autobiography, Christopher Isherwood described how ‘we young writers of the middle twenties were all suffering, more or less subconsciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been old enough to take part in the European War’. However, Greene was unusual among writers of his circle in enjoying the danger unequivocally. ‘I can’t help wishing sometimes,’ he had written aged twenty-one to his future wife Vivien, ‘that something would happen to solve all problems once and for all. Something like war with Turkey and Russia and Germany, which would destroy all thought of the future, and leave only a certain present.’ As a teenager, he had staved off boredom and depression by playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun, enjoying the feeling that life contained an infinite number of possibilities until even playing with death became boring. In the 1930s, a restlessness set in, which he later interpreted as a desire to be a spectator of history. He looked forward to war as an entry into history and as a necessary awakening.

Once war was declared, Greene was initially disappointed by the lack of danger. During the summer of 1940, he often spent Saturday nights in Southend, which was an obvious entry point for German planes coming in from the sea. In an October 1940 article entitled ‘At Home’, Greene described the relief he had experienced once the Blitz started. The British, he wrote, had got used to violence so quickly because the violence itself had been expected for so long. Indeed, ‘the world we lived in could not have ended any other way’. The squalor of England in the 1930s – ‘the curious waste lands one sometimes saw from trains . . . the dingy fortune-teller’s on the first-floor above the cheap permanent waves in a Brighton back street,’ the landmarks, indeed, of the ‘Greeneland’ in which he set his own fiction – had called out for violence, like the rooms in a dream where you know that something is about to happen. In 1936, many writers had gone to meet the violence halfway in Spain; less ideological, perhaps less courageous writers such as Greene himself had chosen destinations like Africa where the violence was more moderate.

But, armed with a two-way ticket, these writers had an escape route; according to Greene they were simply tickling their own moral sense. Those journeys were a mere ‘useful rehearsal’ which now helped them to adapt to a strange home, ‘lying on one’s stomach while a bomb whines across’. Now, it was easy to feel at home in London or the other bombed cities because life there was ‘what it ought to be’. Like a cracked cup placed in boiling water, civilisation was breaking up at last.

The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm.

Greene was unhappy when he spent just a few days away from the city during the Blitz; he found safe areas ‘unsavoury’ in their evasion of the general condition of danger. Even the victims failed to evoke his sympathy. He too expected death in his turn and often envied the casualties of the bombing. As a Catholic, he believed that the dead were treated justly and that war could therefore bestow peace.

The innocent will be given their peace, and the unhappy will know more happiness than they have ever dreamt about, and poor muddled people will be given an answer they have to accept.

Unlike many of the writers in his circle, Greene had never advocated pacifism. ‘If war,’ he wrote in the
Spectator
in December 1940, ‘were only as pacifists describe it – violent, unjust, horrible, useless – it would have fallen out of favour long ago.’ For him, the desire for war was a longing both for catharsis and for tribulation. By night, the Second World War provided both.

During the day, Greene was pen-pushing in the Ministry of Information. If it were not for his nights as an ARP warden, he would have been embarrassed to play so small a part in the violence that he saw as the real business of war. At the start of the conflict, Greene wrote to his wife describing the ‘faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts’, dismissing Stephen Spender who had ‘feathered his young nest in the Ministry of Information’, though in fact Spender worked as a schoolteacher before he signed up as a fireman in 1941. Greene himself initially refrained from accepting a desk job. Called for his interview with the Emergency Reserve in the winter of 1939, he was asked what role he envisaged himself undertaking in wartime by officials who clearly expected to hear the word ‘Intelligence’. As the interviewers leaned forward in their chairs, Greene had the impression that they were holding out to him, ‘in the desperation of their boredom, a deck of cards with one card marked’. He helped them by taking the marked card and announcing ‘the Infantry’, asking only for six months to finish
The Power and the Glory
, which was actually already completed.

In fact in April 1940, two months before he was due to be called up into the army, Greene accepted a post at the Ministry of Information. He wanted to stay where he was, with time to write, even if working as a wartime civil servant would be boring. Greene was responsible for looking after the authors’ section and had a tiny office carved out within one of the Ministry’s rambling corridors, incongruously housed within the clean art deco lines of Senate House, normally the province of the University of London. According to Malcolm Muggeridge (now a colleague of Greene’s), there were still intimations of the academic function of the building: ‘scientific formulae scrawled on blackboards, the whiff of chemicals and dead dog-fish in one of the lavatories’. But now, like all Ministry buildings, this one teemed with people, moving about energetically. In a 1940 story called ‘Men at Work’, Greene described the ‘high heartless building with complicated lifts and long passages like those of a liner and lavatories where the water never ran hot and the nail-brushes were chained like Bibles’. The building even had the stuffy smell of the mid-Atlantic, except in the corridors, where the windows were open for fear of blast and he expected to see people wrapped in rugs lying in deckchairs. Here, ‘work was not done for its usefulness but for its own sake – simply as an occupation’. Propaganda, as far as Greene was concerned, was a mere means of passing the time.

Meanwhile, determined to get to the front one way or another, Greene was proposing a scheme for official writers to the Forces, equivalent to the war artists. When Evelyn Waugh visited him at the Ministry of Information in May 1940, Greene tried to persuade Waugh to support the idea, announcing that he himself wanted to become a marine. While trapped in the soulless safety of Senate House, he and Muggeridge entertained themselves by reading the file of letters from writers offering their services to the Ministry and by dreaming up imaginatively ludicrous schemes to throw the enemy off course. Muggeridge later remembered Greene coolly exploring the possibility of throwing stigmata and other miraculous occurrences into the battle for the mind in Latin America.

The excitement and the danger of wartime came at night. When Greene was not on duty as a warden, he would wander around anyway, sometimes with Dorothy Glover and sometimes with Muggeridge, who found that

there was something rather wonderful about London in the Blitz, with no street lights, no traffic and no pedestrians to speak of; just an empty, dark city, torn with great explosions, racked with ack-ack fire, lit with lurid flames, acrid smoke, its air full of the dust of fallen buildings.

Muggeridge observed Greene’s longing on these evenings for a bomb to fall on him.

On nights like 26 September when he was on duty, Greene could legitimately feel that he was actively involved in the war. The autumn of 1940 was an especially satisfying moment for ARP wardens. From the start of the war, official civil defence manuals had insisted on the wardens’ importance, stating that there would be a great need in air raids for ‘persons of courage and personality’ with sound local knowledge to serve as a link between the public and the authorities. But Violet Bonham Carter, President of the Women’s Liberal Federation and a close friend of Winston Churchill, reported in the
Spectator
in November 1940 that during the phoney war wardens like herself had been regarded as ‘a quite unecesssary and rather expensive nuisance’. They appeared to spend their days in basements, listening to gas lectures in the intervals of playing darts, emerging at nightfall only to worry innocent people about their lights or perform strange charades with the traffic. Now that the raids had started, the wardens had their reward for months of training and waiting. ‘We are conscious, as never before in our lives, of fulfilling a definite, direct and essential function.’

Bonham Carter was particularly proud that this new service was self-created and democratic; the wardens’ posts were run by local authorities and staffed by volunteers. As civilians, the wardens were not subject to military discipline and were unfettered by red tape and rigid regulations; ‘in an essentially human task we are allowed to behave like human beings.’ Many of them did not even have uniforms; the only pre-requisite for the job was a tin hat. This kind of war work was especially satisfying for women like Bonham Carter who were determined to play an equivalent role in society to men. John Strachey considered that women who were sharing the danger of the war by engaging in civil defence work were undergoing some of the most satisfying and valuable experiences they had ever been offered. As far as he was concerned, a woman’s life was no higher or more sacred than a man’s, and it was ‘mere cant’ to pretend that it was.

Bowen, like Bonham Carter, was proud that she was risking her life alongside her male counterparts. In a longer draft of ‘London, 1940’ she outlined the liberating effects of war for women, who were no longer having to dress according to the expectations of male society.

Those who don’t like scratchy stockings go bare-legged. You see everywhere the trouser that comforts the ankle, the flat-heeled shoe for long pavement walks.

Both Bowen and Greene appreciated the opportunity the war gave them to become acquainted with their fellow wardens, with Bowen later describing the warden’s post as a fascinating focus of life. ‘We wardens,’ she wrote, ‘were of all types – so different that, but for the war, we would not have met at all. As it was, in spite of periodic rows or arguments on non-raid evenings, most of us became excellent friends.’

Bowen provided a tribute to these wartime friends through the character of Connie in
The Heat of the Day
. As tired as everyone else, Connie may occasionally slumber beside the telephone but she can, at any moment, ‘instantly pop open both eyes and cope’. She also maintains standards, despite the privations of war, clipping on her earrings, even though they hurt, because ‘going on night duty you had all the same to keep up a certain style’.

Working alongside women like Connie, Bowen was coming to believe in this as a democratic ‘People’s War’. In the earlier draft of the ‘London, 1940’ article, she stated that in the previous six months British class-consciousness had faced a severe challenge. The spell of the Old School Tie had lost its power; people walked the streets shabby, with grooming now limited to the effort to clean the brick dust from their faces and hair. Liberated from checking for signs of status, Londoners looked straight into each other’s eyes. All over the place there was an ‘exchange of searching, speechless, intimate looks between strangers’. Indeed, there were no strangers now; everyone was part of a collective community. ‘We have almost stopped talking about Democracy,’ Bowen went on, ‘because, for the first time, we
are
a democracy. We are more, we are almost a commune.’ Now that everyone faced the same risks as their neighbours, they were levelled by danger. ‘All destructions make the same grey mess; rich homes, poor homes, the big store, the one-man shop make the same slipping rubble.’ Identifying herself collectively with ‘the people’, she announced that this ‘
is
the people’s war, for the people’s land, and what we save we rule’.

Although Greene was dismissive of cantish propaganda, he, like Bowen, was sold on the idea of the democratic spirit of wartime London. ‘This is a people’s war,’ he had declared in a review of British newsreels at the end of the first month of the war, suggesting that the American public should learn about the war in Britain through ‘the rough unprepared words of a Mrs Jarvis, of Penge, faced with evacuation, black-outs, a broken home’. He was impressed by the courage of the civilians he saw every night, hurrying to the shelter, making do amid bombed buildings. Reviewing a theatrical revue-satire two months into the Blitz, he commended Edith Evans’s portrait of a hop-picker returning to the fields from her bombed home. The ‘unembittered humour’, the ‘Cockney repetitions that move one like the refrain of a ballad’ and the ‘silly simple smile’ came ‘very close to the heroic truth at which the world is beginning to wonder’.