The Love-Charm of Bombs (21 page)

 

slipping his identity; intently, idly playing with all possibilities, selecting one substitute-identity, then another, to fill out – or scale down – or put a frame round the amorphous semi-transparent mass of low-powered energy that seemed himself.

 

In this elusive, empty state, Rickie is liable, like Henry, to assume roles, and is also easily though transiently moved by others.

 

Any piece of humanity could invade him like a cloud and like a cloud pass through and out of him. Any woman could move him. ‘Anything in skirts.'

 

That spring in 1941 Rosamond could observe Henry being moved by his rota of skirted women but could also see beyond his semi-transparent exterior to a more hidden character that she admired.

The 16 April raid was the first in a series of bad nights. On 18 April Buszards tearoom was destroyed. Spiel could not believe that she had been there for such a peaceful tea only two days earlier. She felt as though it were her own childhood memories that had been dashed into fragments as that ‘old, stuffy, solid place' was obliterated. Trudging around Wimbledon as she attempted to find enough food to feed her family, siphoning off the little energy and enthusiasm she did have to help her parents and daughter, Spiel was finding that it took very little to make her succumb to despair. The tearoom was a symbol at once of the world she had lost (the plush cafés of old Vienna) and of the world she had gained (the solid Edwardian backdrop of Woolf or Bowen's novels). A single bomb had casually destroyed both worlds at once; the flattened tearoom portended the ruins that she knew would greet her when she did finally return home to Austria.

In the meantime the war overseas continued to be depressing. Britain was doing extremely badly in the Battle of the Atlantic, with 412 British, Allied and neutral ships lost at sea between March and May 1941. In April Churchill ordered the British press to stop reporting shipping losses, believing that the news aided the Germans and lowered British morale. At the same time, the British were losing ground in the desert campaign in North Africa because Germany had now sent troops to join the battle. And attempts to thwart the German assault on the Balkans were failing as Turkey had refused to join Britain in defending the region and Hitler had focused his efforts on Yugoslavia. German forces destroyed Belgrade from the air at the start of April and Yugoslavia capitulated on 17 April. This enabled the Germans to surround the Greek army in Albania and Eastern Macedonia, leaving the British fighting a losing battle in Greece. On 21 April the British decided to admit defeat and evacuate Greece.

Harold Nicolson reported that there was ‘a wave of defeatism sweeping the continent'. Among the defeatists was Hilde Spiel, who announced in her diary on 23 April that Greece was as good as conquered. ‘This war is going to last five years, unless we are to lose it. Yes I cannot imagine how we'll ever win.' On 27 April she noted the ‘very sad war news. Good old Winston spoke today on the radio, grim and determined, but somehow less cheering than before.' Certainly, Churchill as always made the best of the situation, insisting that he had returned from a recent tour of bombed cities ‘not only reassured but refreshed' and that it was just where ‘the savage enemy has done its worst' that morale was ‘most high and splendid'. Indeed, he had been encompassed by an exaltation of spirit which lifted mankind into a heavenly realm. He excused the defeat in Greece on the grounds that Britain had never expected to succeed alone and that it was only as a result of the fall of Yugoslavia that the defence of Greece had failed. But it was all very well Churchill finding the bomb damage refreshing for the morale it inspired. As the raids continued, Spiel at least was losing resilience and was longing for the raids to stop, experiencing the nightly tests of endurance as more hellish than heavenly.

 

 

 

See notes on Chapter 7

8

‘So much else is on the way to be lost'

Rose Macaulay, May 1941

 

For Rose Macaulay, this period of the Blitz was even bleaker than it was for Hilde Spiel. During the spring of 1941, she was knocked back by one sorrow after another. In January, her sister Margaret underwent an unsuccessful operation for cancer and returned home in agonising pain from which the doctors refused to release her. When off duty at the ambulance station, Rose made exhausting journeys up and down to Margaret's home in Hampshire. Never comfortable with illness, she found her sister's pain difficult to bear, and was then grief-stricken by Margaret's death in March.

On 28 March Virginia Woolf disappeared, leaving a suicide note for her husband. She was suspected to have drowned herself in the river Ouse. Woolf had suffered from nervous breakdowns throughout her life; this time she believed that she would not recover. For a generation of writers, Woolf's suicide, coming as it did in the middle of the Blitz, brought home the relationship between the public atrocities of war and private suffering. Woolf's decision to drown herself was not in itself a response to war; but her illness was exacerbated by a war which she found overwhelming both in its destruction of her own home and in its more general savagery, brought oppressively into her sitting room on the radio each night. Elizabeth Bowen, who had stayed with the Woolfs in Sussex only a month earlier, wrote to Leonard that as far as she was concerned ‘a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world. She illuminated everything, and one referred the most trivial things to her in one's thoughts.' This was not, like the First World War, a conflict in which everyone in Britain knew someone who had been killed. But it was a war even more barbaric in its methods, even more all-encompassing in its destruction. And if, as seemed perfectly possible in 1941, Britain was to lose, the barbarism would continue seamlessly into post-war life.

In June 1940 Virginia Woolf had recorded debating suicide during an air raid with Kingsley Martin and Rose Macaulay. Both Woolfs had a suicide pact with Stephen Spender in the event of defeat and Macaulay, like Woolf, was on the German black list in Britain. The actuality of Woolf's suicide now took on an eerie inevitability for Macaulay, whose obituary for her friend appeared in the
Spectator
on 11 April. Here she described Woolf's pre-eminent ‘personal charm' and the ‘warm and gleaming' quality of her talk. ‘It amused her to embellish, fantasticate and ironise her friends,' she added, aware that she had been the subject of some scorn herself. In the early days of their acquaintance Woolf, herself a participant in a celibate marriage, had dismissed Macaulay in a letter as ‘a spindle shanked withered virgin'; even once they had become friends Woolf described Macaulay in her diary as ‘a ravaged sensitive old hack'. But Macaulay now forgave Woolf: ‘nothing that she touched stayed dull'. The article ends on a note of anguish: ‘The gap she leaves is unfillable, her loss (and now when so much else is on the way to be lost) intolerable, like the extinguishing of a light.'

Rose Macaulay's sense that ‘so much else is on the way to be lost' betrays her anguish as a lover as well as a friend. Woolf's death, coming so soon after Margaret's, had made her painfully aware of the fragility of the people she loved and of Gerald O'Donovan in particular. He, like Margaret, had been diagnosed with cancer; it was only a matter of time before it took hold. Then on 18 April, the same day that Leonard Woolf identified his wife's battered body, Mary O'Donovan, the youngest of Gerald's children, died of septicaemia at the age of twenty-three after swallowing an open safety pin. This, Rose lamented, was ‘a wretched way to lose someone – much worse than enemy action, which would seem normal'. Grieving with Gerald over his daughter's death, she began to fear the impending death of her lover. The relationship with Gerald was the most important in Rose's life and she now became consumed by dreading the end she knew would come.

 

 

Rose Macaulay (
left
) and Gerald O'Donovan,
c
. 1920

 

Rose Macaulay and Gerald O'Donovan had fallen in love while working together at the Ministry of Information in 1918. He was her boss, heading the Italian section in the Department for Propaganda in Enemy Countries. She was thirty-six and resolutely single; he was forty-six and married. Love, when it came, was unexpected and overwhelming. In her 1918 novel
What Not
, written during the first months of love, Macaulay marvelled at the ‘continual, disturbing, restless, aching want' caused by the proximity of the beloved. Her heroine, also in love with her boss, finds that there is now ‘no peace of mind, none of the old careless light-hearted living and working':

what was it, this extraordinary driving pressure of emotion, this quite disproportionate desire for companionship with, for contact with, one person out of all the world of people and things, which made, while it lasted, all other desires, all other emotions, pale and faint beside it.

 

A former Irish Catholic priest, Gerald O'Donovan had begun his career in 1897 as the second curate at Loughrea, a small town in County Galway, in the west of Ireland. For seven years, he ambitiously attempted to reform a troubled parish, fighting widespread drunkenness with temperance societies, and raising money to encourage the local Celtic revival in the arts. Here O'Donovan worked together with Irish revivalists including Lady Gregory and the painter Jack Yeats, the poet's brother, whom he commissioned to work on motifs for St Brendan's Cathedral at Loughrea. The art was a success but the town remained impoverished; in O'Donovan's 1913 novel
Father Ralph
the eponymous priest sees the ‘muddy red of a stained glass window' as distilled from ‘the blood of the poor'. O'Donovan reproached himself for deflecting the town's limited funds into art rather than into housing or education. The local inhabitants blamed him for enjoying fundraising trips to America and dinners with Lady Gregory too much to be committed to the needs of his parish.

In 1904 O'Donovan left Loughrea, cheered off by much of his parish, but believing himself to be a failure. He spent the next four years wandering between Ireland, America and England, eventually settling in London in 1908. Throughout this time, he was a priest without a parish, but in 1908 he left the priesthood. Two years later he married the twenty-four-year-old Beryl Vershoyle, whom he had met at a house party in County Donegal and proposed to after five days. Beryl described herself in her twenties as ‘gay, young and enthusiastic'. Gerald, recently released from his vow of celibacy, fell for her easily. Beryl remembered Gerald at this time as ‘considerably older, and exceedingly brilliant intellectually', adding that ‘nobody thought me at all up to his standard, which was true, and I was humbly aware of it'.

By the time that Gerald met Rose, he was the progenitor of two children and two novels. At first, he was funded by Beryl's family money. Then, after short spells in the Service Corps and the Ministry of Munitions and a period in publishing, he was posted to the Ministry of Information in late 1917. Rose arrived at the Ministry a few months later and the two fell in love in the spring of 1918, when Beryl was pregnant with Gerald's third child. There is no directly autobiographical account of the start of their relationship, but Rose Macaulay reworked it compulsively in her novels, right up to her death in 1958.

Rose and Gerald first appeared as Kitty Grammont and Nicky Chester in
What Not
, Macaulay's prescient novel of post-war bureaucracy and eugenics, published during the First World War in 1918. Here, true to life, Chester heads a civil service department, though in the novel it is the satirically named Ministry of Brains, a department set up to encourage (and indeed enforce) superior intelligence throughout Britain. He is detached, fiery and impressive; ‘his manners were bad' but ‘he set other people on fire'. Kitty is his intelligent employee; ‘something of the elegant rake, something of the gamin, something of the adventuress, something of the scholar'. She is impressed by Chester's ‘interesting appearance', judging him to be, like Gerald, ‘a brilliant failure' with ‘a queer, violent strength'. And when he smiles, she feels as though ‘someone had flashed a torch on lowering cliffs, and lit them into extraordinary and elf-like beauty'.

Gradually, the two spend time together socially as well as professionally, and Kitty observes that behind the work relationship, ‘so departmental, so friendly, so emptied of sex', there is a ‘relationship quite other and more personal and human' developing rapidly. Then, when Chester says goodnight to her at a house party and holds her hand ‘but as long as all might or so very little longer', she is struck by a look in his eye which sends her up to bed ‘with the staggering perception of the dawning of a new and third relationship . . . something still more simple and human'. ‘One might surmise,' she observes, that ‘he might fall very deeply in love before he knew anything much about it'. She, on the other hand, observes herself carefully, ‘step by step, amused, interested, concerned'. This way, she asserts to herself confidently, ‘is the best; not only do you get more out of the affair so, but you need not allow yourself, or the other party concerned, to be involved more deeply than you think advisable'.