The Love-Charm of Bombs (6 page)

A London air-raid shelter, autumn 1940

For Greene, the camaraderie in the warden’s post transposed wartime London onto the comic world of his own stories. This was largely the result of a colleague called Charlie Wix, the ‘heroic raconteur’ of the post, whose chief occupation before the war had been giving evidence in divorce cases. Anecdotes with punchlines like ‘Mr Wix . . . what ’ave you done with the bodies?’ gave Greene entertaining material for his war diary. Later, he realised that his most humorous stories all dated from the Second World War, as though the proximity of death provoked an irresistible urge to laugh. Together, the wardens united in the face of the surprising nervousness of the police, who disappeared from the streets during bad raids, with one mistaking a new heavy gun for a landmine. And Greene found similar material for humour in the shelter at 221 Tottenham Court Road, which was on the edge of his patch and was frequented chiefly by good-natured prostitutes from the bar opposite. ‘Molly Hawthorn,’ he reported in his diary, ‘is a whore and likes it.’ A former pillion girl, she became a prostitute when she discovered ‘that people would actually pay her’. Before the war, she had married, but then her husband was called up and sent to Ireland ‘and back she went to whoring’. Greene had wandered once again into Greeneland.

At 8.30 p.m. on 26 September the sirens in both Bloomsbury and Marylebone began to wail. The main sirens sounded for two minutes: a mournful and ominous howl, gliding slowly up and down between two notes. John Lehmann compared this to the noise of a dog in the extremities of agony. The warning was then taken up by the wardens, who sounded sharp blasts on their whistles, urging local residents to retreat into shelters. Once they had blown their whistles, Bowen and Greene had to visit the shelters in their district, making sure that people were settling for the night and that the paraffin lamps were still working. Now, with the sky lit up by searchlights, pedestrians watched as the battle played itself out high up in the sky, with the planes too far away to hear. The raiding bombers, arriving from the coast, were met by defending fighters, diving and curling, with both leaving white trails across the sky. Gradually the enemy aeroplanes approached the city, as they do in
The Heat of the Day
, ‘dragging, drumming, slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire – nosing, pausing, turning’.

From now on the hum of aircraft overhead was punctuated by the noise of bombs dropping, mingled with the persistent sound of the pelting shells of the ack-ack guns, which were stationed near Bowen in Regent’s Park. In his wartime diary Harold Nicolson, who was currently heading the Ministry of Information, tried to distinguish between the different layers of sound:

There is the distant drumfire of the outer batteries. There is the nearer crum-crum of the Regent’s Park guns. Then there is the drone of aeroplanes and the sharp impertinent notes of some nearer batteries. FF-oopb! they shout. And then in the middle distance there is the rocket sound of the heavy guns in Hyde Park. One gets to love them, these angry London guns. And when they drop into silence, one hears above them, irritating and undeterred, the dentist’s drill of the German aeroplanes, seeming always overhead, appearing always to circle round and round, ready always to drop three bombs, flaming, and then . . . Crump, crump, crump, somewhere.

The first bombs of the night were usually incendiaries: small cylindrical weapons about eighteen inches long with a magnesium alloy exterior and a core of thermite priming composition. These were dropped in clusters and were designed to start fires that would light the way for subsequent planes dropping more powerful high explosive bombs. The incendiaries sounded less threatening than the HEs, clattering down casually like trays of tin cans. But an official civil defence booklet warned the public that it was possible for one aeroplane to carry up to a thousand of these bombs, and that they were particularly potent because the whole of the device was combustible, with the exception of the striker mechanism and the sheet-iron tail fin. The Home Office had calculated that a single German bomber could start up to 150 fires spread over three miles. According to John Strachey incendiaries could be regarded either as harmless toys or as deadly menaces, depending on whether civilians were prepared to put them out with sand buckets and stirrup pumps. Three weeks into the Blitz, ARP wardens had become adept at using their tin hats to extinguish them as soon as they landed in the street and were becoming less dependent on the help of the fire brigade.

Now, the incendiaries punctured the darkness of the blackout, lighting up the ruins which already lined Marylebone and Bloomsbury. Both Bowen and Greene found the ruins eerily beautiful when illuminated at night. Greene frequently passed by the first bombed house he had seen, neatly sliced in half, in Woburn Square. Initially, exposed in cross-section, it had looked like a Swiss chalet: ‘there were a pair of skiing sticks hanging in the attic, and in another room a grand piano cocked one leg over the abyss.’ The kitchen seemed impossibly crowded with furniture until he realised that he had been given a kind of mouse-eye view from behind the stove and the dresser. These were the surreal scenes that would characterise much wartime visual art and that in turn would lead people to view pre-war surrealist art with new eyes. During this period the novelist Inez Holden surveyed Regent’s Park with a surrealist painter friend. There were two or three odd stockings slung over the branches; purple damask draped on a tree; a brand new bowler hat balanced on a twig. Turning to Holden, the painter announced smugly: ‘Of course we were painting this sort of thing years ago, but it has taken some time to get here.’

Since the night of the Woburn Square bombing, fresh gashes had been created in Greene’s district every night. Two days earlier, the YMCA club on Great Russell Street was bombed, killing five people, including a member of the Home Guard. Tonight as the aeroplanes gathered overhead, Greene was waiting expectantly to see any new ruins the bombing might bring.

See notes on Chapter 1

2

10 p.m.: Fire

At 9.30 p.m. Rose Macaulay set out for her 10 p.m. ambulance shift. By now the raid was fully underway. Incendiaries were falling throughout Marylebone and the blacked-out streets were lit up by fire and searchlights. Eighty German aircraft attacked London over the course of the night, flying in over Norfolk, Suffolk and the south coast. Despite the danger of the streets, Macaulay was relieved to leave her flat. During evenings at home, she spent the raids under the dubious protection of her kitchen table. ‘Faith in tables is important,’ she had informed her sister Jean in a letter earlier that week. But her faith was not strong enough to assuage her phobia of being buried under rubble: the result of seeing a succession of houses and blocks of flats reduced to piles of ruins from which the inhabitants could not be extracted in time to live. She would rather brave the explosions from the street, or from the relative safety of the ambulance station dugout.

Rose Macaulay in her flat in Hinde House in 1950

The ambulance station was a half-hour walk from Macaulay’s flat, through the side streets of Marylebone. Lurching along in the darkness, Macaulay presented a frail figure. Always tall, thin and angular, she had become bonier with age and was currently existing chiefly on a diet of tomato juice. But at fifty-nine, she was in fact still stronger than many of her younger colleagues at the ambulance station. As an undergraduate, she had spent her evenings scaling the university roofs, and was surprised when the other turn-of-the-century undergraduates at Somerville College did not wish to do the same. Now, she kept her climbing skills honed by clambering up and down the staff ladders in the stacks at the London Library. Volunteering to drive an ambulance in March 1939, she was unfazed by the regulations, which set the upper age limit at fifty, or by the application form, which asked volunteers to assess their ability to lift a person on a stretcher to the top bunk of an ambulance.

In the spring of 1940 official government decrees had stipulated that any female ambulance drivers over fifty should relinquish their duties, but Macaulay had managed to maintain her post. She had no inclination to rein in her physical courage or to surrender to the conventions of middle age. Nonetheless, close friends had been saddened to see her age visibly over the past year. They ascribed it to the war which, as a vocal pacifist, she had found hard to accept. ‘My God, what a world,’ she wrote to Rosamond Lehmann a week after the declaration of war; ‘I feel still that it is a nightmare and that I will wake – but know it isn’t.’ A few friends, such as Lehmann herself, also attributed Macaulay’s new frailty to the decline in health of Gerald O’Donovan, her secret lover and companion of the past twenty years. ‘He is terribly weak,’ Macaulay reported in the same letter to Lehmann; ‘I don’t think he’ll get well ever.’

Arriving at the ambulance dugout, Macaulay tried out her new prize possession: a blow-up lilo that she had found in Selfridges earlier in the day. This, she told Jean subsequently, was ‘a great stroke of luck’: they had informed her previously that they would not have any more for weeks. She blew it up by mouth and put it ready for use on the floor, although she knew it was unlikely she would get much sleep that night. She then joined the other drivers, awaiting instructions as they listened to the bombs overhead. Earlier in the war, they had been given extra training during the periods of waiting, but on 21 September London County Council had announced that as long as the severe raiding continued it was desirable that ‘any exercise or instruction which would deprive personnel of any opportunity there may be for sleep should be avoided’. Instead they could chat, play games and knit, and Macaulay was cheerful in the company of the other ambulance workers. Away from the ambulance station, she was a literary
grande dame
: the author of over twenty novels, many of them bestsellers, and a familiar, eccentric presence in literary London. Here she could discard that persona and take pleasure in the shared everyday preoccupations of wartime life. ‘I like my ambulance colleagues, male and female,’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf in October. ‘You would too, I think. They teach me to knit, and are not unduly cast down by what they have to see and do.’

Not far from Macaulay, Henry Yorke was also waiting to be called out to a raid at his fire station, Sub-station 345V ‘A’ Division, at 79 Davies Street. Firefighters had the longest shifts of all defence workers; as a full-time auxiliary fireman, Yorke was on duty for forty-eight hours followed by a twenty-four-hour break. This suited him because the time off was long enough to make progress with his writing, which was more prolific than it had ever been despite the long hours of work. He could also go into the office of Pontifex, the family business he was helping his father to run, which specialised in making equipment for breweries and bathrooms. Charming, rich, funny and briefly single now that his wife Dig and six-year-old son Sebastian had been evacuated to the countryside, Yorke spent the evenings of his leave taking girls out to restaurants, bars and nightclubs, impressing them with tales of his heroic exploits. Rosamond Lehmann affectionately described Yorke in this period as

an eccentric, fire-fighting, efficient, pub-and-night-club-haunting monk, voluble, frivolous, ironic, worldly, austerely vowed to the invisible cell which he inhabited and within which a series of intricately designed, elaborately executed, poetic yet realistic war novels were being evolved.