The Love-Charm of Bombs (14 page)

Just before war was declared, Graham had sent Vivien and the children to live with his parents in their cold, overcrowded house in Crowborough, Sussex, armed with only a few suitcases, a kitten and a canary. In common with many of his friends, Graham hoped eventually to evacuate his family to America or Canada in order to escape an invasion he believed to be imminent. His initial letters to his wife were tender and solicitous. ‘I miss you so much,' he reported to her on 30 August 1939, ‘particularly in the evening, which makes me rather moony and uncommunicative over my pint.' ‘There's one thing you must never doubt at all,' he promised her on 4 September, ‘that you are the only person I have or ever will love.'

By October it had become clear that, at least in the short term, Graham was having a better war than Vivien. ‘Dear love,' he assured her, ‘don't ever think I like this separation. It wouldn't have happened if we'd known how the war was going to turn out.' He promised that if Ribbentrop did not start dropping bombs soon they would revise their whole scheme. Gradually, Graham's letters to Vivien became less naturally loving and Vivien's letters to Graham became more anxiously demanding. In December 1939 Vivien pleaded with Graham to be well for his visit to her on Saturday: ‘(I mean, not pub crawl the night before so you have a tummy ache darling)'. During the early years of their relationship, Graham and Vivien had developed a shared language of love in which kisses were stars, meted out and dropped from a distinctly disembodied sky, and sexual embraces were the cosy nuzzlings of two furry cats. ‘You are a kitten that will never grow up,' Graham had told Vivien in their courtship. Now that the couple were in their thirties, she had grown up but their relationship had not. The adolescent language had come to seem tired, but they had not been able to metamorphose into a new register. Graham continued to sign himself ‘Tyg' and Vivien to wonder how his whiskers were withstanding the gale.

The only moment of sexual longing in Vivien's surviving wartime letters is expressed as a desire to put ‘a lot of stars' on her husband's ‘anxious muzzle'. Waking up in the night in December 1939, she had been brooding ‘rather affectionately by degrees' on ‘Wuff'. If only he had been there, ‘what a responsive cosy cat you'd have had'. ‘Perhaps you woke up feeling sleek and caressed,' she wondered, ‘because I'd been thinking of you.' In fact Vivien later stated that ‘in a physical sense the marriage ended just before war was declared', blaming this on Graham's reluctance to have children in wartime and suggesting that their marriage might have fared very differently if the pill had been in existence. Clearly, Graham did not have the same reticence with Dorothy, which suggests a more entrenched sexual reluctance on one or both sides of the marriage.

In Greene's 1948 novel
The Heart of the Matter
, Scobie has come to hate the pet name his wife has given him but he still continues to use it because ‘it always worked'. ‘Comfort, like the act of sex, developed a routine.' In January 1940 it was to the language of cats that Graham turned when Vivien complained that ‘it is so awful being a schoolgirl after having been a proud housewife for 12 years', wondering if they would ever have their teas together again. ‘Darling darling one, don't feel so sad,' he urged. ‘It won't take any time to get back to normal, and our teas . . . cats can see in the dark, and we'll come creeping along to find each other.' Two weeks later, Vivien wrote to Graham begging to be allowed to come and look after him. ‘You wouldn't see much of me,' she promised. ‘I would banish you to work and only notice you really at tea time. You would have a meal on a tray in your study when you liked.'

But Graham was reluctant to have Vivien in London because she would intrude on his life with Dorothy. By the time that the Blitz started, he and Dorothy were spending every night together in her flat in Gower Mews. Graham pretended to Vivien that he was still living in Clapham, explaining when she failed to catch him on the telephone that in the morning he could not hear the phone when he was shaving, while at night there was always the chance that he was out, or in bed. The Blitz brought an end to the charade, as it was too dangerous to cross London and sleep in Clapham. He now claimed to be living in his workroom and simply popped to Clapham a couple of times a week to check that his marital home was still standing. Most weekends, he visited Vivien and the children, whom he had moved from Crowborough to Oxford in July, when the Battle of Britain made Sussex a target for Nazi aeroplanes. During the week he spent as much time as possible with Dorothy.

Unlike Vivien, who was a goddess to be adored (‘my love, you are a saint' Graham had assured her in 1925), Dorothy was a fellow-adventurer and drinking companion. In later years, Vivien was dismissive of Dorothy, who was ‘square and small' and was quite a lot older than Graham, ‘and looked it'. Malcolm Muggeridge described Dorothy as ‘a person who, on the grounds of attractiveness, was absolutely a non-starter'. But in
The Heart of the Matter
Scobie falls in love with his mistress, Helen, precisely because she is plain. He has no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful, the graceful and the intelligent, all of whom can ‘find their own way'. Instead, it is ‘the face that would never catch the covert look, the face that would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference' that demands his allegiance.

Dorothy's lack of physical vanity made her easy to spend time with. The cartoonist David Low recalled her as ‘happy, small, rather stoutish, not smart but very friendly – she radiated friendliness. She gave you a sense of feeling at home in her company – she had a nice laugh.' Her good humour contrasted with Vivien's anxiety; her bravery contrasted with Vivien's cowardliness. ‘From the first raid,' Greene said later, ‘she was courageous, oh yes, and showed no fear of any kind.' David Low recollected meeting Graham and Dorothy after a raid, when papers from a bombed office were flying all over the street, and watching as the lovers picked up the fragments and read them to each other, roaring with laughter. He also remembered watching the chief warden taking a government official on a tour of the Bloomsbury shelters and coming across Graham and Dorothy entwined in the shadows. ‘Just look at that pair,' said the official in disgust. ‘But,' responded the chief warden, ‘that is Mr Greene, one of our best wardens, and his nice wife.'

Dorothy was thirty-nine, a theatrical designer who in her youth had danced in the chorus of theatrical revues. According to Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham was ‘devoted' and ‘extraordinarily good' to Dorothy. Certainly, he set about helping her with her career, sending a play she had written to his agent. He also authored a series of picture books with illustrations by Dorothy and even managed to get her employed as his secretary at the Ministry of Information. For the first time, Graham was in a relationship that combined physical acceptance with the collaborative partnership of a marriage. Unlike Vivien, Dorothy could accept the seedier side of Graham's sexuality. An enthusiast of cheap lodging houses, Graham took Dorothy to a lodging house in a road opposite Paddington Station on the first night of their affair. He could also take her to nude reviews, although Muggeridge recollected that Greene was careful during the Blitz to make ‘a special act of penitence and other appropriate liturgical preparations in case death came upon him unawares'. On one occasion Muggeridge accompanied Greene to the Windmill Theatre to gaze ‘balefully at the nudes; rather pinched and ravaged in the footlights' glare, yet still bound by law to keep absolutely still'. Muggeridge thought that the spectacle appealed to Greene ‘for its tattiness and seediness' – the guise in which he most liked the Devil's offerings to be presented. Greene explained to his friend how the
cognoscenti
knew just where to sit to get the best view, and how, as the front rows cleared, spectators at the back pressed forward to take their places; ‘wave upon wave, like an attacking army'.

On the night of 18 October, Graham and Vivien's Clapham house was bombed. It was not a heavy night of bombing, but south London was badly hit in the early morning. A pub was demolished near the Greenes' house, leaving forty people trapped. Arriving to check on the house the next morning, Graham was confronted by fire engines stationed outside it. Writing to his mother he reported that he had arrived to collect some belongings at 8.30 a.m. and found a scene of devastation. There had been no fire and no flood and the structure was still standing, but the workshop in the garden was destroyed and the back of the house had been struck by a blast. It was impossible to get beyond the front hall. He was still hoping to save some of his books and Vivien's ornaments but he told his mother that it was ‘rather heartbreaking that so lovely a house that has survived so much should go like that'. Vivien was devastated. Visiting the ruin to rescue some possessions, she walked ‘in tears on the edge of the front room looking down at the deep frightening cavity two floors below and all the rafters and rubble and dirt'.

Graham was distressed to lose some of his books (he did manage to rescue some by making a chute and pushing them down) but he soon found that he was largely relieved by the loss of the house itself. ‘It's sad because it was a pretty house,' he reported to his agent in America, ‘but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree.'

There had been a large mortgage on the house so Graham was rescued from a heavy financial burden. But it was evident to Vivien and to Malcolm Muggeridge that Graham felt released by the loss chiefly because it portended the destruction of his marriage, offering the promise of release from moral responsibility. Looking back on the bombing he wrote that he ‘simply felt relieved that I didn't have to be backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards all day, and lose my lunch every day, whenever there had been a raid and there were raids most days, to see that the thing was there'.

 

 

Henry Yorke, who was more cautious about material wealth than Greene, would have been more distressed if the Yorkes' house in Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge had been bombed. But he was content only to be there one day in three and happy, too, that Dig and Sebastian were safely absent in Herefordshire, where they were staying with Dig's family. Henry had married Adelaide (‘Dig') Biddulph, a distant cousin, in 1929. Initially he had been courting her younger sister Mary (known as ‘Miss'), while his friend the novelist Anthony Powell was in love with Dig (although Powell was aware that he had neither the money nor the status to satisfy her titled parents). ‘To the great scandal of the servants Mary and I spent the night together at Forthampton,' Yorke boasted to Powell in 1928; ‘Her wisdom is terrific.' But he was also involved in exchanging letters with Dig, falling in love by correspondence. In 1928, ‘Miss', perhaps tired of waiting for Henry, became engaged to a guards officer, Monty Lowry-Corry. Henry took Dig to Oxford to meet his undergraduate friends, who were all agreed as to her beauty and general niceness. The following April, he wrote to tell Evelyn Waugh, who had not yet met Dig, that he was getting married. He informed his friend that his future wife hid ‘a stupendous intellect behind an enormous capacity for idleness and an appearance of innocuousness'. Henry and Dig were married in July.

 

Henry and Dig Yorke on their wedding day, 1929

 

Dig herself, though always good-natured, cultured, sociable and polite, was almost as inscrutable as Henry. In a 1960 account of a holiday the couple spent in Ireland at the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938, Yorke gives a brief portrait of the marriage. Walking from one creamy Irish beach to another, the couple are companionable but restrained. ‘We had been married for years, were fond, just did not say much to one another, so stayed comfortably quiet.' Settling on a beach, there is a brief moment of intimacy when they hold hands, but they are interrupted by an ‘aged crone' who undresses and then wanders naked into the sea. Years later, Yorke could still recall enough of the scene to describe the well-preserved, unwrinkled belly of the woman, and the ‘bush of hair black and enormous'. At the time, he reports, the Yorkes themselves ‘did not say a word'. The woman leaves and Dig tells Henry that she would now like her tea. They wander inland, avoiding another naked couple they have seen on the neighbouring beach, and Dig announces to her husband that she is ‘beginning to find Ireland creepy'.

What emerges in this account is a commitment both to the unsaid and to the status quo of the marriage. There is a sense that their companionable silence can continue in the face of any amount of embarrassment or emotional upheaval. In 1939 Yorke wrote in
Pack My Bag
that he saw mutual shyness as ‘the saving grace' in all relationships: ‘the not speaking out, not sharing confidences, the avoidance of intimacy in important things' made living, ‘if you can find friends to play it that way, of so much greater interest even if it does involve a lot of lying'.