The Love-Charm of Bombs (8 page)

what was going on in that dark head, beneath that sallow skin, under that sleek black hair, behind that straight, stern nose, those deep-set, wild bird eyes and that strange mobile mouth which changed shape and expression according to his thoughts even when he was not speaking.

Yorke appears to have been happiest and most alive when confident in assuming a role. In his twenties, he had enjoyed his time spent as a worker in the factory of his father’s business near Birmingham. Here he could take on the role of the toff made good, discovering ordinary life as a worker among workers. ‘The men, I loved them,’ he stated in an interview which, much to the embarrassment of his parents, he gave to the
Star
in 1929. ‘They are fine fellows, generous, open-hearted, and splendid pals . . . Of course, they knew who I was, but that made no difference.’ In
Pack My Bag
he wrote that his experiences in his father’s factory taught him how little money meant and literature counted, showing him the real satisfaction of making something with his hands. His schoolfriend the novelist Anthony Powell later recalled that Yorke was as happy during his time as a factory worker as he ever knew him to be.

The fire station was providing Yorke once again with the chance for camaraderie with the working classes. He was nicknamed ‘the Honourable’ by the other volunteers, whom he found tended to be domestic servants and hotel staff as well as burglars who had joined up hoping to loot the bombed houses they were saving. But, secure in his role, he at least liked to convince himself that he felt at home with them. And he enjoyed listening to the other firemen talking and gossiping, taking mental notes for the novel that would become
Caught
. ‘The behaviour of my AFS unit gets more and more fascinating,’ he had written to Mary Strickland in July. ‘It will make a good book one day.’ He was learning a new, communal language in which getting the flames down became ‘putting the light out’, the other firemen were known as ‘cock’ and children became ‘nippers’.

In
Caught
Yorke satirises Richard Roe’s sense that he can merge with the firemen around him. Richard is convinced that he has become indistinguishable from the other firemen, at least in appearance.

In his dirt, his tiredness, the way the light hurt his eyes and he could not look, in all these he thought he recognised that he was now a labourer, he thought he had grasped the fact that, from now on, dressed like this, and that was why roadmen called him mate, he was one of the thousand million that toiled and spun.

He announces happily that ‘It brings everyone together, there’s that much to a war.’ But in fact this kind of anonymity is never possible. The narrator makes it clear that Richard merely lets himself ‘drop into what he imagined was their manner of talking’. He goes to great lengths to ingratiate himself with the regular firemen, buying them drinks in the bar, but is never in fact accepted as one of them. Nonetheless, Yorke does portray Richard as content to be caught up in this myth.

According to William Sansom, some integration did inevitably occur among firemen forced to spend such long periods in each other’s company. For Sansom, the effect of the long shifts was to imbue the men with semi-military discipline and to concentrate life more at the station than at home. While waiting for fires the men at most sub-stations went into the local pub together to drink draught ale.

But the night of 26 September came at the end of a busy shift for Westminster firemen. The previous night an HE and an unexploded bomb had fallen at the junction of Denbigh Street and Belgrave Road, and firemen were called in to rescue people trapped in a vault shelter underneath the pavement, where water was dangerously pouring in from a broken mains. They were responsible for attempting to restrict the fire and for pumping water out of the flooded basements. At one stage the firefighters found dead bodies, killed by the bomb, floating in the water. That morning the officer in charge of Westminster stretcher parties had gone to inspect the unexploded bomb at just the moment that it exploded. His head was caught in the blast and he died later that day. Firefighting was turning out to be as dangerous an occupation as Yorke had feared it would be at the start of the war.

After a day of attempting to catch up on sleep at the fire station, Yorke and his crew were now ready for the next batch of incidents. Shortly after 11 p.m. there was a series of explosions between Oxford Street and Mayfair. At 11.21 p.m. the Curzon cinema was hit, with half the stage damaged by fire, heat, smoke and water. But the most notable incident in Westminster on the night of 26 September was the bombing of Old Palace Yard, close to the Houses of Parliament, by an HE at ten minutes after midnight. This was the first time the Parliament had been directly affected by the bombing. The western frontage of the buildings, including the main public entrance, was badly damaged and the tip of the sword on the bronze statue of Richard the Lionheart was bent forward by the blast. Inside the building, doors were broken and ceilings brought down. Some of the glass in Westminster Abbey was blown out by the force of the explosion. Although no one was killed, eleven people sustained injuries from the splintered glass and the plaster falling from the ceiling. After the wardens on the scene had reported the incident, the injured people were treated by nurses from the British Red Cross who were stationed in the building. Firemen from across the borough, including from Yorke’s sub-station, were immediately summoned to the scene.

7 e Houses of Parliament following the 26 September raid

By now, much of London was ablaze. In
Officers and Gentlemen
Evelyn Waugh recalled his visual memories of the Blitz at this time, describing the sky over London as turning a glorious ochre, as though a dozen tropical suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon.

Everywhere the searchlights clustered and hovered, then swept apart; here and there pitchy clouds drifted and billowed; now and then a huge flash momentarily froze the serene fireside glow.

These lighting effects made it easier for the drivers of fire engines to navigate as they drove at full speed to an incident through the blackout, although the glare of the fire was also dangerous in attracting more bombers.

As an auxiliary fireman, Yorke travelled with a trailer pump rather than an ordinary fire engine. These had been produced in vast quantities in the lead-up to war and were light appliances, easily handled by two or three firemen, which could pump 350–500 gallons of water a minute, as opposed to the 900 gallons pumped by regular fire engines. They were towed into action by light vans which carried the hose and other equipment. On the way to the fire, Yorke sat forward on his seat, apprehensively looking out for a bomb, or a crater not marked out with lamps, or for glass that would cut the tyres. Tonight, as always, the AFS were first on the scene of the fire, supervised by the regular members of the Fire Brigade who were stationed at the auxiliary sub-stations. They only called on the regular fire brigade to come and extinguish fires if they were beyond the control of the trailer pumps.

As the firemen set to work to put out the fire at the Houses of Parliament, more bombs continued to fall. Three more HEs landed on the building before one in the morning, and a cluster of incendiaries was then dropped at 1.53 a.m., damaging the gas mains. The firemen did not leave the scene when the bombers reappeared and so they were in serious danger of being hit by the explosion. Once you were the direct target of a bomb you had time to duck but not to get out of the way altogether as it landed. According to the literary ARP warden Barbara Nixon, HE bombs did not so much fall as rush at enormous velocity to the ground, issuing a tearing sound and a whistle as they descended. These bombs consisted of a high explosive mixture contained in a steel case, fitted with a fuse and exploder. They varied from 100 to 2,000 pounds in weight, although most were under 500 pounds. A 1940 air-raid manual described their destructive effects as being twofold. There were the effects of the blast, which was the air pressure created by the explosion, and those of the fragmentation, which was the breaking up of the steel case of the bomb into jagged pieces or splinters. These splinters were about an inch wide and were projected in large numbers in every direction at twice the speed of a rifle bullet.

Yorke and his crew tackled fires by attaching the trailer pump to a street hydrant outside and hauling a rope up the stairs to connect the pump to the fire. If a strong jet of water could be concentrated on the seat of the fire, then the conflagration as a whole could be brought under control, but it was often hard to access the seat of the fire in time to stop it spreading. Yorke always had difficulty hearing over the noise created both by the fire itself and by the pumps, and also found it arduous to breathe. The smoke came in hot waves which made his eyes run and his throat tickle, bringing on a painful cough. He found that the thick, cold smoke of a continuing fire was worse than the hot smoke of a recent explosion:

This gripped by the throat. Until you could break a few windows you were throttled, but if you had a head cold it was miraculously cured. You lost so much mucus by the eyes and nose.

For Yorke, the fighting of fires was at once a practical, communal task and an intensely personal, dreamlike experience. In his short story ‘Mr Jonas’ he describes all his fellow firemen withdrawing into themselves when faced with a fire, as though each ‘had come upon a place foreign to him but which he was aware he had to visit’. The fire became an imaginative landscape which Yorke inhabited as ‘something between living and dying’, caught between hope and fear, ‘betwixt coma and the giving up of living’. In this state he could find the fire itself abstractly beautiful, retreating into a visual experience which seemed to have nothing to do with the actual immediate danger. When faced with a fire in
Caught
, Richard initially sits still before the immensity. The flame is ‘a roaring red gold’, pulsing rose-coloured at the outside edge; ‘the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness’ is ‘for a space a trembling green’. The sheds burning at the docks become

a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.

But caught up in the solitary, imaginative experience of fire, Yorke was then suddenly awakened into the actuality of danger. Yelling and receiving instructions, he experienced the scene once more as real.

See notes on Chapter 2

3

1 a.m.: Rescue

As the fires across London were gradually brought under control, rescue workers and ambulance drivers could attend to the people trapped underneath the debris. Now that the spectacular lighting effects were starting to fade, the human costs of the bombing were becoming more apparent. At one in the morning, Rose Macaulay was dispatched to an incident in Camden Town, where the inhabitants of two fallen houses were buried under ruins. The night of 26 September 1940 was one of Macaulay’s most active on duty as an ambulance driver, and she recounted it three times: immediately afterwards, in a letter to her sister Jean, and two weeks later in an article in
Time and Tide
and in a letter to Virginia Woolf.

The incident was not far from the ambulance station but it was still a hazardous drive. With her headlights dimmed, Macaulay found it difficult to avoid hitting patches of rubble in the street. Describing the Blitz in her 1942
Life Among the English,
she recalled the darkness of these nights, when ‘cars crashed all night into street refugees, pedestrians, and each other’ and dust from pulverised buildings settled on the windscreens.

Macaulay had always been a reckless driver. Indeed, she signed up with the ambulance service in March 1939 partly to put her courageous motoring skills to good use. In a 1935 catalogue of
Personal Pleasures
, Macaulay included three separate entries on the joys of driving. The first, headed ‘Driving a Car’, opens by lyrically extolling speed and the open road:

To propel a car through space, to devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes . . . here is a joy that Phaethon, that bad driver, never knew.