The Love-Charm of Bombs (30 page)

Larry Morrow, beguiled by Bowen's aristocratic charm, colluded in the exercise, even granting her a Celtic affinity with the Irish natural world. The colour of her eyes, he said, looked as if it had been scooped from the Irish Sea. In general, he seems to have been struck by just the enchanted timelessness that Bowen herself associated with Ireland. This was Bowen as an ethereal spirit from the Cork countryside, rather than as a professional writer visiting from a war zone. Morrow regretted that the meeting had not occurred two hundred years earlier in the Long Room at Bowen's Court instead of at the Shelbourne Hotel. But Miss Bowen was not long in dispelling his regrets: ‘For she has surrounded herself with an atmosphere so intensely sixteenth- and seventeenth-century that with her one loses all sense of Time.' Quite apart from her immersion in her own family history, she possessed ‘a curious timelessness, that is at once a contempt for Time and a cherished regard for it'. That timelessness was evident in her clothes (‘the floppy hat of dark brown felt, the folds of the biscuit-coloured linen dress'), in her endless cigarette-smoking, and in her Holbein face. ‘If you know your Holbein even tolerably well, you will have seen Elizabeth Bowen many times – in a dozen or so family portraits,' with their ‘flat delicacy of tone' and lines ‘that are not so much painted as etched on the canvas'.

By 15 August the German army was advancing into Stalingrad and Elizabeth Bowen was back in London, dining with Charles Ritchie once again. Here was reality, abruptly cutting into her Irish fairy tale; reality that took the form of the blacked-out ruined streets and the beloved, balding figure of her lover. In
The Heat of the Day
Stella's journey home from Ireland is dominated by a sense of returning to Robert. The train creeps, with ‘the timidity of an intruder', into a London whose built-up density is strongly felt. Her heart misses a beat; her being fills like an empty lock; with a ‘shock of love' she sees Robert's tall turning head. Charles did not meet Elizabeth at the station, but she appeared at his flat, soon after her arrival, armed with flowers. For Charles, she seemed ‘somehow less remarkable' than she had in Ireland – ‘to have “lost height” '. ‘I wonder if the spell is broken or if it just happened to be an off night,' he pondered. ‘All the same my existence has come to life again since she came back.' The Irish had been more gallantly susceptible to Elizabeth's charms. ‘Miss Bowen caught me in her sea-green eye and I sank full fathom five,' Morrow reported to his readers. But Charles, too, was bewitched. ‘What is the spell she has cast over me,' he had asked in the spring. It was a spell that in his more courageous moments he could name as love; and, either way, he could rarely deny its power for long. ‘Spent the day with dearest Elizabeth to whom I owe everything,' he wrote in his diary in September.

 

 

For Henry Yorke, who could escape neither the built-up density of London nor the war itself, this was a depressing period. His love affairs had been curbed by the return of Dig at the end of the Blitz in the summer of 1941. The time he spent in the fire service had once again taken on the tediously expectant quality of the phoney war. Stephen Spender, who joined the fire service in the autumn of 1942, found that in the absence of more serious concerns his superiors paid excessive attention to disciplinary matters such as the untidiness of his hair. ‘It is like their deciding that, after all, Virginia Woolf is not quite suitable to be a washroom attendant,' he complained grandly to T. S. Eliot. Like Yorke, Spender appreciated the camaraderie. ‘It would be true to say that we were like a family,' he observed in his journal that December. But he felt infantalised by his fireman's dungarees which he thought reduced the firemen to ‘a childish-looking uniformity', turning middle-aged men into caricatured adolescents.

Given the lack of fires, Yorke had now been given leave to spend four weeks at a time working at Pontifex, which he found anticlimactic after the excitement of the Blitz. ‘I sit in my swivel chair,' he wrote to Mary Strickland in July 1942, ‘swivelling and biting my nails just as I used to do.' Time spent in the office was helped by the fact that the Yorkes' company was prospering for the first time in several years. They had now adapted their technology to make cordite, used in making shells, as well as machines that produced penicillin. Both were needed by Russia, and by the end of the year Yorke had processed orders that would bring in half a million pounds. But this did little to cheer him up personally and the desultory mood of the time goes into a story called ‘The Lull' which he sent to John Lehmann in October.

This comprises a series of scenes showing firemen engaged in the depressing task of waiting for fires to fight. They sit around in a bar, telling tired and disconnected anecdotes and, whenever a stranger comes in, start reminiscing about their experiences in the 1940 Blitz. Recounting these stories is enough to make them feel that they are living again, ‘if life in a fire station can be called living'. ‘We want another blitz,' the barman remarks at one point. They are, the narrator states, ‘seeking to justify the waiting life they [live] at present, without fires'. This waiting life is compared to the experience of changing fast trains where a traveller on a crowded platform ‘cannot be said to command his destiny'. Even on a day's leave, a well-educated (and clearly autobiographically inspired) fireman called Henry listens helplessly to his female companion reciting Verlaine in the park, sleepy and unsure how to react. Yorke gave the manuscript of the story to Ann Glass and the girl seems to have been modelled on her. She is crisp and direct, informing Henry that he is ‘the worst-read man I've ever met' when he fails to recognise Verlaine. Eventually Henry suggests that they should abandon the park and go to the cinema instead. The girl jumps at the suggestion and they hurry off, ‘arm in arm, to the USA' for an afternoon of escapism. The story ends with a patrolman sitting on the roof convinced that he is in the middle of saving men from a fire. Another fireman announces that if Hitler does not put another Blitz on soon ‘we shall all be crackers'.

John Lehmann was happy with ‘The Lull' and published it in
New Writing
after suggesting just a couple of small changes. But he was less happy with
Caught
, and was trying to persuade Yorke to cut the affair with Hilly from the book. This was when Yorke suggested making the change involving killing off Richard's wife and replacing her with her own sister. ‘I have been thinking over
Caught
,' he wrote to Lehmann in November. ‘Why should Richard Roe be married? Couldn't he be a widower? With a sister in law keeping house for him.' The Hogarth Press's lawyer was anxious about the adultery, but there would be no adultery if Richard was a widower. ‘Tell me what you think. Because I'm afraid Richard's silly thing with Hilly is inevitable and essential to the make-up of the book.'

The compromise was accepted and Yorke spent the next couple of months rather callously killing off Richard's wife. This, on the whole, was simply a question of the occasional insertion or deletion. Part of the oddness of the final text is the bizarrely living quality of the dead woman who haunts Richard's imagination, and this is because in the original writing she was in fact alive. Thus ‘he could not leave his wife alone' becomes ‘he could not, this time, leave his wife's memory alone'. In the final version, as in the typescript, on the morning of Richard's return ‘his wife went with him for a stroll before the car came to the door'; the arm he clutches at above the elbow in the typescript becomes simply ‘the arm, which was not there' in the printed novel. Whole conversations with his wife become, verbatim, conversations with the sister-in-law, with the simple explanation that ‘he had begun talking to her as though she was her dead sister'. This was a somewhat strange thing to be doing while living in the same house as Dig, not least because of the ambiguously incestuous relationship it ends up implying between Richard and his wife's sister, whom people at the fire station assume is actually his wife. The novel in its original form was largely flattering to Dig, but it surely became more problematic now that he had killed her off so easily. Perhaps it was easier to be unsentimental once he was again cohabiting with his wife.

The year ended well for Britain and badly for Henry Yorke. For Britain, the situation at sea was dire, but the war was going far better on land. November 1942 was the worst month of the Battle of the Atlantic, with 117 Merchant Navy vessels sunk in a single month. ‘There is a great advantage, I think, in our not publishing the shipping losses,' Churchill announced to the House of Commons. Apart from the obvious loss of ships and lives, this created a crisis in food and supplies, preventing imports from America. Luckily, this news was overshadowed by the reports of the Allied victories in North Africa. On 4 November, General Bernard Montgomery, now Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Army, won the twelve-day battle of El Alamein, recapturing all the major ports and towns the Allies had previously lost, and then on 13 December he crossed the border into Tripolitania. Churchill congratulated the ‘noble Desert Army' for avenging the previous defeat at Tobruk: ‘Taken by itself, the Battle of Egypt must be regarded as an historic British victory.' Meanwhile on 22 November the Russians had encircled the German army in Stalingrad.

El Alamein was the first British victory and was believed by many to be a turning point in the war. In
The Heat of the Day
it is celebrated even in Ireland, where Stella is told enthusiastically by the Irish servants that ‘Montgomery's through' and that ‘It's the war turning', with the war breaking in on and belying the unreal tranquillity of Stella's visit. But Henry Yorke was drinking too much and was fed up with his work at Pontifex and with editing
Caught
. For Yorke, the war news was now less real than his own daily life, and that daily life itself felt increasingly unreal as well. On Christmas Eve, writing to thank Evelyn Waugh for the launch party for Waugh's new novel
Put Out More Flags
he congratulated his friend on the book, which he saw as ‘the best work you have done, or so it seems to me' and admitted that he had been too drunk to work out how they came to part or how he reached home. ‘Am very depressed, lonely, and overworked,' he added, while thanking Waugh for his book which had cheered him up and made him think ‘everything was real again'.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 10

11

‘Only at night I cry'

Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke, spring 1943

 

In
The Heat of the Day
Bowen describes how ‘1942, still with no Second Front, ran out'. Stella and fellow Londoners experience ‘nothing more than a sort of grinding change of gear for the up-grade' as they start their 1943 calendars. But in fact there was still news coming in from North Africa. The Eighth Army captured Tripoli on 23 January and continued their march towards Tunisia. And sporadic bombing began again in London. On 18 January Hilde Spiel reported the first raids for two years in her diary. ‘First made me very nervous, mostly because of Christine. Second 5am excited me less!' Three days later she complained that the ‘beastly Luftwaffe' had bombed a school in Catford, south London, and killed about forty small children. ‘Heartrending.' Hilde was already feeling hysterical and on edge because she was in the final month of a difficult pregnancy. She had been operated on the previous March, and told to avoid becoming pregnant in the near future. It became clear that she should have heeded this advice when, four months pregnant in September, she suffered a small heart and breathing attack. Now she was waiting anxiously for the baby to come to term.

 

Catford school on the night of the 20 January bombing

 

On 31 January the Germans finally capitulated at Stalingrad after a five-month battle in which 200,000 men were killed. For the Allies, the Russian victory came as a sign that the Third Reich could be defeated after all. Hilde Spiel spent the first few days of February in severe pain while builders crashed around upstairs creating a third bedroom and doctors tried to hurry the baby into the world by dosing her with castor oil. Her parents, who were now living in a small apartment in Notting Hill, hovered in the sitting room; Peter paced around nervously, making things worse. On 8 February Hilde was taken to the London clinic by ambulance, only to find that her labour pains mysteriously ceased. The next day she gave birth to a dead girl she had intended to call Brigid. There had been four hours of contractions, after which the baby came too quickly, swallowed water and could not be revived. Her doctor, a former leading light at the Berlin Charité hospital, was absent at the crucial moment. Distraught, Hilde described the ‘tiny, perfect, absolutely waxen little baby girl . . . quite utterly dead' in her diary. She wondered if the baby had known that Hilde most wanted a boy and therefore ‘did not dare to come into the world'. ‘But I would have loved her,' she protested, ‘after a short disappointment, I would never have made her feel she should have been a boy.'