The Love-Charm of Bombs (43 page)

VJ Day itself was experienced fairly universally as an anticlimax. King George VI opened Parliament with a speech proclaiming the nationalisation of the coal mines and of the Bank of England; crowds lined Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. But it was hard to celebrate with the same enthusiasm as in May. In Wimbledon Hilde Spiel was looking after her children on her own once again. At the beginning of August Peter had briefly returned at last, but his visit had been too short for them to resume the usual rhythms of their lives. She was disappointed that he was too caught up in his own adventures and successes to empathise fully with the pain that she had experienced during his absence. And her distress was compounded when she was given a clear indication of their continuing status as exiles. When the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Hilde and Peter were at Kingsley Martin's cottage in Essex. The assembled guests were all deeply stirred by the news of the bomb. Hilde thought of her father, whom the news would have roused to enthusiasm as a scientist, but still horrified as a moral human being. Kingsley Martin announced: ‘This means the end of the war.' Turning to Hilde and Peter, he observed, ‘I expect you will go back to your own country now?' ‘Then we knew,' Hilde later wrote, ‘though we did not admit it to ourselves, that nine years of assimilation into the English world had been in vain.' They had spent much of the war in the company of Kingsley Martin, defying the German bombs together; they had celebrated the first signs of victory with him; and he, more than most British people, was anxious to remember the humanity lurking within every German. But it did not occur to him that nationality could ultimately be anything less than immutable.

By the time of VJ Day, Peter was back in Berlin and Hilde wrote to him describing the celebrations. For her the day began with a domestic crisis. Her domestic help, Mrs Stanhouse, rang at eight in the morning and announced that as it was VJ Day she would not come. ‘I was genuinely angry,' Hilde told Peter, ‘and cried: The Fools!' There was no bread, meat or vegetables in the house. But then Beate, the nanny, went out hunting for food and returned with some rolls, having stood in a bread queue of fifty people, and they all settled down to another great day. ‘One will miss them in time, but at the moment they're just five for a penny.' As it was pouring with rain, she did not hang out the flags, in case they were soaked. Towards lunchtime, the sun came out, spirits rose and Hilde and the children roamed around the town.

 

It was, well, very much like other V-days, but in some ways they hadn't timed it quite so badly after all, what with the Opening of Parliament and this, that and the other. In scorching heat we stood outside Buckingham Palace for an hour and a half, looking at the queer sights . . . soldiers stuck all over with flags leading a snake round and round the square, two nuns in a taxi, and crowds, crowds, crowds.

 

By chance, Hilde lined up exactly where the Cabinet and the House of Commons walked into St Margaret's church for the Thanksgiving service and so she had a clear view of Churchill, Morrison, Attlee and Eden, followed by the other MPs. ‘Churchill wrung my heart,' Hilde wrote, ‘walking with hands clasped at the back, gloomy and solemn like Beethoven, and not stirring to acknowledge the crowd who cheered him more than Attlee.' She found it a curious situation. As far as she was concerned, nobody would have wanted the Conservatives back and everybody liked Attlee, who seemed a modest and decent man. But there was ‘something in Churchill that grips your heart, and you can't resist him personally'. Unlike Elizabeth Bowen, Hilde thought that it was admirable for the country to have voted Labour, ‘against one's sentiment obviously'.

From Germany, Peter did his best to repair their marriage, wondering if he had shown enough sympathy during his visit. ‘My sweet, I was glad and happy to be back home again,' he wrote to Hilde on 9 August.

 

It was good and restful to share your room with you, I loved and enjoyed every minute of it. Now that you've got over the worst of it – without my being able to help you at all – I must tell you how immensely I've admired the fortitude and bravery with which you have mastered this dreadful situation. It gives me the creeps, even now and in retrospect, to think that you were in this fearful mess at the time, all alone. How good you were, my mummili – it's been a packet, and you've carried it all the way. I did not want to speak about it all while I was home, because I wanted to do nothing that might weaken you or revive anything you had already overcome. That is why I was cool and, perhaps reserved even – but that was because I wanted to strengthen and reinforce your own coolness and steadiness so painfully acquired. I think you understand. I knew not how to deal with it all.

 

Just before VJ day, Hilde and Peter's son Anthony was christened. Hilde presided alone in Peter's absence and Hans Flesch-Brunningen was godfather. Remarkably, Juliet O'Hea was godmother, together with their friend Joyce Arrow. Juliet was still attempting to sell Hilde's novel and the two women had been ‘most cordial and polite' with each other on the telephone that February. Hilde was still extremely jealous but had decided that Juliet represented less of a threat to her marriage when contained within the family structure. As godfather, Flesch helped Hilde to organise the event. Increasingly, he was taking on the role of
Hausfreund
, the gentleman friend who was a normal feature of the lives of most women in 1920s Vienna. In Austria at least, this could be compatible with marriage, and as things stood Peter seems to have accepted the other man's role in their lives. Certainly, he did not have much room to complain; he was leaving Hilde to do almost everything for the family alone. At the end of July he relinquished all responsibility for the christening to her.

 

About the christening – I really want to leave this to you. I should have liked, of course, to be present, but I can see that it gets postponed further and further, and after all, as you say, it isn't such a frightfully important occasion and you should perhaps really go ahead without me. I think I'm for it.

 

Hilde sent Peter a description of the event, and he wrote back worried that too much fuss was being made of Anthony and not enough of Christine, given that Hilde had described Christine as looking ‘quite sweet' while Anthony was ‘immensely admired'. ‘Is it possible that my little muffin is being neglected in any way, Mummi?' Peter asked. He felt sorry and apprehensive and was tempted (though not enough to act on it) to rush home and take care of his daughter.

 

She is our first child, and it was for her that we lived through these five terrible years – at least I did – and I will never allow her to suffer the slightest bit of unhappiness because now she is no longer the only one.

 

Anxious, sad and herself feeling neglected, Hilde cannot have seen this as a welcome piece of interference. It was lucky that there were friends like Flesch to make London a less lonely place to be.

For Elizabeth Bowen, VJ Day was merely depressing. ‘You know how I felt about VE Day,' she wrote to Charles.

 

But that sort of thing can't happen twice. The days were listless and a flop, the nights orgiastic and unpleasant. (Violent anti-Yank demonstrations in Piccadilly, etc: a lot of fights all over the West End and people beaten up.) The most enjoyable human touch was that the poor Queen's hat – powder-blue – fell to pieces on her during the return drive from the opening of Parliament, owing to being saturated with rain. The crowd would not permit her to put up an umbrella.

 

As far as Elizabeth was concerned, feeling was exhausted. And there was a pervasive sense of guilt (‘wrong, I think') about the atomic bomb. Elizabeth was relieved to leave London and return once more to the unchanging world of Bowen's Court.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 15

Part V

Surveying the Ruins

1945–9

Post-war Europe 1945–9

 

 

Once the half-hearted excitement of VJ Day had passed, a new era of post-war living began. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke took stock and surveyed the world that remained. All five were disappointed by London in this period. Labour immediately started to put in place the reforms they had promised; the buildings damaged by war were gradually repaired. But after the intensity of wartime life, the post-war period seemed grey and slow. Moments out of time, suspended between past and future, gave way to a continuum in which life was measured once again in years and decades rather than in days and weeks.

Bowen, Greene and Yorke in particular had all had an exciting war, and looked set to have a less exhilarating peace. All three had found a kind of spiritual home in wartime London, seizing each unexpected day and each dangerous, blacked-out night. All three were unusually alive to the imaginative possibilities of the moment, and had appreciated the war's power to contract time and suspend the present, whether in the moment of bombing or in the wider temporal climate created by the uncertain tomorrow. They would never again be able to value the present moment so wholeheartedly.

Macaulay's war had been intense too, but tragic rather than ecstatic in its intensity; if she had dwelt in the present moment, then the moment itself had threatened to engulf her in sorrow and pain. She found the prospect of post-war London as dispiriting as Bowen, Greene and Yorke. However she experienced less of a disjunction between war and peace, embarking instead on a period of gradual recovery.

It was Spiel who learnt to inhabit the post-war present most successfully; Spiel, who had found the war itself miserable and unrelenting, who was able to have a better experience of peace than of war and who found in post-war Vienna the suspended present that the others had found in wartime London.

For all five writers, if intense experience was possible in the post-war world it was to be found outside England. Although for most people in Britain travel was severely restricted at this time, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Spiel all managed to journey to Europe. And if Europe was not always feasible, then Ireland was. Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke all made trips to Ireland in the years following the war, enjoying the relative plenty still possible in a country that had experienced the past six years as merely an ‘Emergency'. This was a period of deciding how and where to live in the post-war world. Journeys outside Britain were voyages of exploration or return, which offered a chance to try out potential destinations and ways of life. They also presented the opportunity to inspect the landscapes left behind by war and to assess how the world had changed.

During the war, Londoners had become acclimatised to the black and white landscape of their city. In wartime at least, the monochrome streets were rendered briefly beautiful by strange lighting effects. Bomb sites glowed yellow, red and pink in the fire and under searchlights; ruins turned familiar landscapes into odd, other-worldly scenes. But now the greyscale city became more monotonous. The gashed holes and crumbling ruins were bleakly depressing rather than dramatically beautiful, except in areas such as the City of London, where plants had begun to sprout amid the still ghostly, empty streets. And the colourless feel was reinforced by the continued austerity. Rationing was tightened in February 1946 to release supplies for the British Zone in Germany; even bread was rationed in May. In the winter of 1946 Britain was hit by dangerously severe cold weather, widespread power cuts, labour strikes and a fuel crisis.

For these five writers, to leave Britain was to be jolted awake by ruins on a less human, more frightening scale in Germany or Austria, or to be rejuvenated by the colours of southern Europe, or soothed by the dreaminess of the Irish coast and countryside. For Bowen, the greyness of London could be forgotten amid the green of Ireland. Here the ruins were older and more romantic; the wistful landscape evoked the grandeur of a past that was being neglected in London, where a new world was insistently being forged. This was Ireland's appeal for the English as well; Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were all relieved to escape to a country where time seemed slower and nature more luxuriantly green. They all enjoyed the continued opulence of Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel and the relative ease and plenty of the Irish countryside. And Macaulay was also more energetically awakened by a trip to the coast of Spain and Portugal, where she swam in one glittering bay after another, rediscovering the sensual pleasures of water and sunlight.

Like Macaulay, Spiel was reawakened by travel, though for her it was the total destruction of Vienna and Berlin that enabled her mental renewal. The very horror of the ruined landscapes ended a period of anaesthetisation, convincing her that the most exhilarating experiences in the post-war world were to be found as a British subject occupying a defeated, desecrated European city. Greene and Bowen were less enamoured of post-war Vienna than Spiel was, but they too were excited by the chance to experience history in occupied Vienna, revolutionary Prague and humiliated Paris. In Europe and in Ireland the intense moment of the war in London that had ended in the spring of 1945 could be recaptured; pockets of time could be hollowed out of these new and strange landscapes.

16

‘The magic Irish light and the soft air'