The Love-Charm of Bombs (9 page)

Another entry, more ambitiously headed ‘Fastest on Earth’, records her joy on returning to her parked car to find a leaflet on the windscreen advertising ‘Fastest on earth’. Seeing this as a personal accolade, she is tempted to keep it there as testimony to her car’s prowess. As she rolls through the streets,

the other cars, yes, and even omnibuses, may yield to me and my Morris pride of place in the Hyde Park Corner scuffle, at the Marble Arch roundabout, and dashing up Baker Street.

Driving an ambulance enabled Macaulay to fulfil her ambition to take pride of place on the road. It also gave her the chance to get her hands on the clanging bells that she admired in the fire engines that she also included in
Personal Pleasures
.

But since she first signed up to drive an ambulance, Rose Macaulay’s enthusiasm for speeding had been chastened. The current ill-health of her lover, Gerald O’Donovan, began in June 1939, when Rose and Gerald had a car accident on a motoring holiday in Wales. Swerving to the wrong side of the road as she approached a corner, Rose ran into an oncoming car. Gerald suffered serious head injuries, which were followed by a stroke. For several weeks his chances of life were uncertain. Devastated, Rose informed Jean that ‘if he dies, you won’t be seeing me for some time’.

In fact, Gerald did not die until 1942, but Macaulay never overcame her guilt at hastening his demise. The climax of her final published novel
The Towers of Trebizond
(1956) is a reenactment of her own accident. The first-person heroine Laurie kills her lover Vere by driving recklessly. She rushes self-righteously through a green light, knowing that a bus is charging across its own red light. The accident is not completely her fault, but she apportions the blame unequivocally:

I knew about the surge of rage that had sent me off, the second the lights were with me, to stop the path of that rushing monster . . . I had plenty of time to think about it; no doubt my whole life.

Unlike Gerald O’Donovan, Vere dies instantaneously after the crash. By fast-forwarding the years between crash and death, Macaulay made clear the pattern of cause and effect she perceived as operating between these two events.

The imagined guilt of
The Towers of Trebizond
did have its basis in an experienced reality. For the first few months after the accident, it seemed that the crash would hasten Gerald’s death more immediately than it in fact did. Rose began to mourn with all the intensity of a grieving widow, and to blame herself, not just for the accident, but for the imperfections in his life. In
Trebizond
Laurie immediately condemns herself for coming between Vere and his wife for ten years, observing that ‘he had given me his love, mental and physical, and I had taken it; to that extent, I was a thief’. Rose herself had taken Gerald’s love, mental and physical, for twenty years. Her sense of his impending death, coinciding with the increasing certainty of war, left her desolate. Once war began, it was hard to regain immediate confidence behind the wheel. Driving through London in her ambulance, she relished the empty roads and the speed legitimised by her siren. But she could no longer see herself as invincible.

Arriving in Camden Town, Macaulay found the incident post which the warden had marked with the customary two blue lamps placed on top of each other. She was confronted by the remains of two houses, now reduced to an enormous pile of ruins. Immediately, she was struck by the odour of gas, seeping through the pits and craters in the rubble, and by the unmistakable smell of the explosion itself. According to John Strachey the raw, brutal stench of a bombing incident was not so much a smell as ‘an acute irritation of the nasal passages from the powdered rubble of dissolved houses’. But on top of this there was the acrid overtone left by the HE bomb itself, as well as the ‘mean little stink’ of domestic gas. For Strachey, ‘the whole of the smell was greater than the sum of its parts. It was the smell of violent death itself. It was as if death was a toad that had come and squatted down at the bottom of the bomb craters of London.’

Rescue party at work, autumn 1940

When Macaulay joined the workers at this particular incident, a rescue party was hacking away, trying to free the people trapped inside. Everyone was coughing, and people cried out from under the ruins, calling for help. The street was flooded with water where a main had burst. ‘Dust,’ Macaulay wrote in the
Time and Tide
report, ‘liquefies into slimy mud.’ Meanwhile the bombing went on noisily around her.

Jerry zooms and drones about the sky, still pitching them down with long whistling whooshs and thundering crashes, while the guns bark like great dogs at his heels. The moonless sky, lanced with long, sliding, crossing shafts, is a-flare with golden oranges that pitch and burst and are lost among the stars.

There was nothing Macaulay could do except to wait for the rescue workers to complete the excavation, hoping all the while that no new bomb would fall on the site. The men were busy sawing, hacking, drilling and heaving. She stood by, encouraging the people inside, assuring them that they would be out soon, although she had no idea if this was true or not. Here was her own burying phobia played out, and she was glad to be on her side of the rubble. The cry of ‘My baby. Oh, my poor baby. Oh, my baby. Get us out!’ was heard from underneath the ruins, and Macaulay passed milk to the baby and water to the mother. ‘All right, my dear. We’ll be with you in ten minutes now,’ the rescue workers called out at regular intervals throughout the night as they worked on, carefully dislodging one bit of rubble from another. But it was clear to Macaulay how much they still had to shift before they would reach the baby, who might well not make it through the night. The atmosphere remained convivial, despite the danger. Macaulay was impressed by the rescue workers who were, she reported to her sister the next day, ‘very nice and matey. I like their way of calling every one (including the ambulance women) “mate”.’

The planes continued to drone over their heads. There was a crash as a bomb landed, a few streets away, which made Macaulay and the rescue workers duck their heads involuntarily. The air glowed with new flames. The next bomb could easily wipe them out. One of the workers swore up at the planes and then, alerted by his friend as to the presence of a lady, apologised to Macaulay. ‘Sorry Miss, excuse my language.’ She assured him that she felt the same way herself. Eventually, the first human form emerged from the ruins. It was a seventy-four-year-old woman, ‘gay and loquacious’. She was followed, half an hour later, by her married daughter, who had a grey, smeared, bruised face and vomited into the surrounding dust. ‘Oh my back, my legs, my head. Oh, dear God, my children.’ The woman was reluctant to leave her children and drive away in Macaulay’s ambulance. Macaulay promised her that they would be out soon as well. In fact, they turned out to be dead, their bodies crushed and maimed by the rubble. Two boys of eleven and twelve, two babies of three and one. ‘If only,’ the woman moaned, ‘they didn’t suffer much . . .’

London was free of enemy aircraft by 4 a.m. but fifteen bomber planes returned an hour later, flying in from Dungeness. Then as dawn approached, the final bombers departed. Now the rescue party left, to be replaced by the next crew. ‘Only,’ Macaulay observed, ‘inside the ruins the personnel remains the same.’ It would be ten the next morning before the mother and baby were at last freed from the debris, though thankfully the baby was still alive. Now Macaulay stood on the pavement with a rescue worker, who was drinking a cup of cocoa provided by the mobile canteen. ‘It’s like this every night now,’ he observed. ‘This and fires. How long will people stick it? Where’ll it all end?’

Macaulay helped her patients onto stretchers. The official guidelines instructed ambulance workers to lie the patient on top of a blanket folded sideways to avoid direct contact with the canvas or metal bed portion. ‘This adds to his comfort and keeps him warm, thus reducing shock.’ She followed this advice and then joined her colleague in lifting the stretchers into the ambulance, relieved to have agency again. The hardest part of the night was always the passive waiting, when she was unable to help the rescue workers or to determine the outcome of their efforts. She cleared the dust off the windscreen and drove off, while an ARP warden shone a torch on her wheels to make sure that she did not puncture them on the rubble. Ambulance drivers were supposed to keep to sixteen miles an hour, but most of them ignored the speed limit. Macaulay tended to become more tentative once she had patients in her charge. In
The Towers of Trebizond
she would have no qualms in labelling herself a murderer. She did not want other lives on her conscience as well as O’Donovan’s.

A London ambulance driver with patients, autumn 1940

She deposited her patients at the hospital, where ambulances pulled up at the stretcher entrance. Macaulay was never an enthusiastic hospital visitor. She had experienced her share of hospitals in the First World War, when she signed on as a VAD nurse, despite her extreme squeamishness. According to Jean, this was a foolish choice given that Rose ‘tended to vomit or faint at the sight of blood or the mere mention of horrors’. Macaulay endowed Imogen, one of the heroines of her 1923 novel,
Told by an Idiot
, with her own nursing experience, describing her as ‘an infinitely incapable V.A.D.’ who ‘did everything with remarkable incompetence, and fainted or was sick when her senses and nerves were more displeased than usual by what they encountered, which was often’. She recorded her own revulsion during the First World War through the character of Alix in her 1916 novel
Non-Combatants and Others
. Here Alix is suddenly and violently sick after she hears her shellshocked cousin describe the leg of a friend which he pulled out of the trench, ‘thinking it led on to the entire friend, finding it didn’t’. Her cousin Dorothy, like Jean an efficient and successful nurse, retorts impatiently: ‘You’ll never be any use if you don’t forget
yourself
, Alix. You couldn’t possibly nurse if you were always giving in to your own nerves.’

By the time of the Second World War, Macaulay had overcome her squeamishness enough to deal with her patients. Like nurses, ambulance drivers had to contend with nauseating gore. A Watford-based volunteer later recalled that the duties of an ambulance driver included tying together broken legs at the knees and ankles, and covering exposed intestines with her tin hat to keep infection out and the guts in. But Macaulay was still happier on this side of the entrance to the hospital; more at home in a van than a ward.

Now, having relinquished her patients, she returned to the ambulance station where, after raids, male and female drivers took their turns in their respective decontamination rooms, brushing off the dust that ended up coating their entire bodies, even getting under their tin hats and into their hair. She then went home to bed, relieved to find that her own flat remained intact. Macaulay knew that she was lucky to have survived the night. In the last three weeks of bombing, eight ambulance drivers had been killed and twenty-seven ambulances or adapted cars had been destroyed. And she was always less resilient than the rescue workers. ‘It is all in the night’s work to them,’ she observed to Jean, and ‘perhaps it will be to me sometime, but I am still an amateur at it and it rather gets one down. One wonders all the time how many people are at the moment alive under some ruin, and how much they are suffering in body and mind.’