It was now almost impossible to sketch anywhere – and absolutely forbidden to make drawings of the bomb-damaged buildings without a Ministry of Works permit. Every drawing had to be passed by them and was stamped by them on the back as having been permitted but not for reproduction. After Rex Whistler had told me to apply for such a permit I did some drawings of the blitzed houses in Chelsea, and I also began a large portrait of Richard. Elliot Hodgkin had married and moved away from the Royal Hospital Road, and I missed seeing him at work. Ethel Walker was in Robin Hood’s Bay. She had twice come to see me and had invited me down there to stay. She had also persuaded me to put her portrait of me down in the basement with the other paintings I had recently bought. She was quite sure, she said, that eventually all the houses near the river would be damaged.
Leon’s visits to London were mostly to argue with the Ministry for which he was working. Artists do not take kindly to red tape – and the camouflage unit were finding themselves entangled with it. He would often come along the Royal Hospital Road and call in at No 33 on the way. It was always a joy to see him; like Rex Whistler he brought some original and absolutely fascinating new idea to everything in which he was interested.
Anne and Cecil were going out together more and more. Anne worked very hard for a firm engaged on war-work, and during the heavy Blitz she had never missed or shirked the perilous journeys to and from the City – nor had she ever showed any sign of fear whatsoever, nor any desire to avoid the firewatching duties for which she had volunteered. She had a great many friends but they had been scattered by the war and she turned more and more to Cecil, who was very attracted to her, Larry told me. At Christmas I had noticed them together several times when I was walking on the Embankment.
On a very cold Sunday in February we had built up a huge fire in the studio because we had guests coming that evening and it was bitterly cold, with a north-east wind. The flames blazed up and it threw out such a comforting heat that, both sleepy after a good lunch, we were dozing when Mrs Freeth came up excitedly saying that she thought the chimney was on fire. We went out into the Royal Hospital Road – there was no doubt about it. Flames were coming from it, and a great ugly belch of smoke was fouling the air. It was a double offence to have a chimney on fire during the war, and when the flames became worse we reluctantly telephoned the Fire Brigade. They arrived promptly in full force with fire engines and pumps and invaded the house. The mess was appalling as they turned their hoses down the chimney from the flat roof where Kathleen and I had tried to make a garden. All the water and soot poured into the studio, great clouds of black smoke belched over the carpets, the chairs, and the walls. The boots of the firemen soaked the stair carpets and the parquet floors before they were satisfied that the fire was out and the danger gone.
They appeared to enjoy it thoroughly – as, indeed, I did too. Afterwards Richard produced some wonderful old port which Mr Ferebee had had in store, and all the firemen sat down with us in the dining-room-cum-bedroom, which was the only place not soaking wet, and sipped port, and told us about some of their Blitz experiences. They were fine men, and the fire engines a gorgeous sight, and neighbours all dropped in to ask if we had had a day-light fire bomb, although there had been no Alert! When they had gone, cheerful and not at all censorious, Mrs Freeth and I set to work to clear up the mess. No matter what period of the war it was I always seemed to be clearing up dirt of some kind. Professor Tonks [formerly Slade Professor at London University] had always described dirty colour as colour in the wrong place – so I suppose dirt could be defined as matter in the wrong place, as was the mess made by firemen’s boots, floods of water, and soot.
We got our local sweep, Tony Smith [he later won the George Cross for bravery during the Blitz], to come and sweep the chimney after this but, as he said, it was a case of locking the door after the horse had flown – the chimney had burnt itself out. Tony was a great character, inclined to be melancholy at times. He was doing splendid work in heavy rescue and was valued for his complete disregard of danger. He chided us for having left the chimney for so long without sweeping and said we were fortunate that it had happened in day-light and not after black-out. ‘You’d have copped it all right then,’ he chuckled. Tony was an extremely skilled sweep and as he never made any mess himself during the operation, the appalling mess which our negligence had cost us amused him very much. Mrs Freeth and I appreciated Tony, but owing to his Civil Defence duties it was not always easy to obtain his services.
It was interesting to notice how completely the Belgian women were under the domination of their husbands. Those women who, in turn, had to do the cooking in the canteen took it as a very serious matter. How serious I didn’t realize until a Sunday morning in February when Mrs Freeth and I were in the kitchen and two of them, Madame R, a very nice woman, and Madame B, the wife of little Monsieur B who was a Civil Servant, came round in great distress. They had decided to make raspberry jelly for the Sunday lunch, and the jelly had not jelled. They had made it the previous evening as they had been told by the ladies who helped them with the menus, but when they had arrived at the canteen this morning there were great bowls of red liquid – and no jelly. The store cupboards were locked up for it was Sunday, the shops shut – what could they do? Madame R, who was extremely conscientious, was in tears. The men would be furious, absolutely furious! They loved their food – and the Sunday lunch was always a special one. What would they do when they found plates of red soup instead of jelly? ‘I know what I’d do,’ said Mrs Freeth, ‘I’d tell them if they didn’t like it they could do the other thing!’
The terror of the poor women amazed us. The Giant, they said, would throw his plate at them as he had twice done already with his food when it hadn’t pleased him. Had we any gelatine? We hadn’t. I debated whether or not I should wake up Mr Ferebee or his pretty wife but it seemed a shame – Sunday was the only one day on which they could sleep late because they both did their share of fire-watching.
We asked Kathleen. She had none either. It was Mrs Freeth who looked through the cupboards and said, ‘We’ve lots of semolina – why not use that to thicken it? Cook it up again with some semolina.’ It sounded revolting, but Mrs Freeth gave them a huge packet and instructions to put the whole lot into the jelly, and stir it well while cooking. Their terror had upset us all – we couldn’t imagine English husbands making such a fuss if a dish went wrong. Next day the two women arrived to thank us for our suggestion. The pudding had apparently been the success of the month’s menus. They had all loved it and had asked to have it again. Both women were in high favour for having created a new dish!
Chapter Nineteen
THERE HAD BEEN almost five weeks’ lull in the bombing and life was becoming more normal. We had time to take a look at ourselves again and to begin to repair some of the ravages. Women went to have their hair permed – perming had fallen off a lot during the Blitz for no one fancied being caught in a raid when fastened securely to the waving machine. In the bright sunshine which heralded spring the clothes which had seen us through some terrible nights had an exhausted, stale look – as had our faces. Older men had been required to register on January 29th – those who were between thirty-seven and forty. The following day Hitler had made a bombastic Sport-Palast speech railing violently against England and asserting his innocence of guilt for the war which he insisted had been thrust upon him. His harsh, boasting voice was almost demented. General Milch, Inspector General of Luftwaffe, broadcasting two days later, was in marked contrast with a serious, quiet warning to the Germans that the British would not be beaten as easily as the Belgians, Poles, and Norwegians. The British, he told them, had proved in 1918 that as a Germanic race, they were ‘fighters like the Germans’. On January 26th Wendell Wilkie had arrived on a visit to Britain in the Yankee Clipper to study war conditions. He was taken round bomb damage all over London and to shelters in the heart of the City, and at the conclusion he said, ‘It was wonderful. Of all the people I talked to
not one was depressed or down-hearted and I talked to dozens of them. I chatted and shook hands with them and did not hear one word of complaint. It was very moving…I am a pretty hard-boiled egg but sometimes I turned my head away overcome with emotion.’ He broadcast to Germany at the end of the German language bulletin, telling them that although he was of pure German descent he loathed and detested aggression and tyranny and that his feelings were shared by the overwhelming majority of his fellow-countrymen of German descent, and that the German Americans rejected and hated the aggression and lust for power of the present German Government.
About this time I received a letter from refugees in an internment camp. Alas, although I had so glibly assured Ruth that concentration camps did not exist in Britain the recent disclosures of Sir Waldron Smithers about conditions at Hyton Camp had shaken me, as it had him and thousands of others. This letter contained the news that the writer and his wife, who had been ruthlessly separated and put into different camps, as had all enemy aliens regardless of whether or not they were refugees or supporters of the present regime in their countries, were now happily united with their children in a camp in the Isle of Wight. All their comments on the camps in which they had been living since their internment had been heavily scored out by the censor.
With the long lull in the Blitz there had been time to go to the theatres. Several of them were open again, and one or two had never closed. The lunch-hour ballet, like the lunch-hour concerts, had taken the fancy of the Londoners – especially the Chelsea ones. Both the Ambassadors and the Arts theatres were running lunch-hour ballet. At the New Theatre the Sadlers Wells were giving magnificent performances – short and cheap. Here I spent wonderful lunch hours watching Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, and Robert Helpmann dancing in a constantly varied programme including The Prospect Before Us, The Wise Virgins, Lac des Cygnes, and Les Rendezvous for the modest price of a stall seat for 1s 6d. At the Arts Prudence Hyman (whose sister worked in our Chelsea canteen), Walter Gore, Harold Turner, Molly Lake, and Helene Wolska delighted us with other ballets, while at the Ambassadors Peggy van Praagh and Sally Gilmour and other talented dancers offered us still further ballet for only 1s a stall.
The spring was coming! And it was a commentary to me on that ‘incalculable and unshakable race, the British’, that The Times could still publish a whole-page photograph of snowdrops or anemones growing wild in our countryside and give up a considerable piece of its now precious paper to a letter on ‘Road Deaths of Toads’. In what other country would you expect to find these included with such wonderful news as the surrender of Benghazi? The splendid advance of our troops in Libya had been absorbing most of our attention for some time, and the names of places hitherto unheard of by many had become household words as their fate swung from one side to the other in the fierce battles for their capture, Bardia, Tobruk, Benghazi, and now Karen, the gateway to Eritrea, was being fought for. Kingdom after kingdom was falling and monarch after monarch seeking refuge in other lands. King Carol had fled Rumania, the Regent Paul had abdicated from Yugoslavia and the young King Peter assumed power – in Greece the fighting was bitter, as it was in Italy and Libya. So bewildering a revolution in history was the endless chain of events, so fluid the state of any country engaged or drawn into the war that it was impossible for us to follow its course – the small amount of censored information released to us put each new calamity or triumph into false perspective. I had a map which Richard gave me on which to follow the course of the war, but its front widened so rapidly that to keep up with it was hopeless; nevertheless our own small bomb incidents tended to assume tremendous importance unless some effort was made to take a wider view.
When I told the Belgians that the RAF had bombed Ostend and that the Navy had bombarded it, reducing the industrial area to a mass of flames, they took it very badly. ‘But the British can’t bomb us – we’re their Allies – we’re not German just because the Germans have occupied us,’ they cried indignantly. They did not believe me until they read it in their own Flemish newspaper.
Whenever there was a lull – even for a few nights – in the Blitz the wardens said that the raid which broke that lull was invariably a terrible one. It was as if Hitler understood that when a thing has to be endured continuously it becomes an accepted everyday fact, whereas when there are gaps it reappears with redoubled horror. Courage, keyed-up, can break when no longer needed, and all the ARP Services were agreed that after a lull everything was twice as hard to bear, while some wardens told me they had to force themselves to take up their dangerous tasks.
While we were having a rest from the Blitz in London the provinces were receiving the Luftwaffe’s attention. My sisters told me that whenever they were being raided they were at least thankful that London was probably having no Alerts and vice versa. We telephoned one another every morning after a heavy Blitz. Each town thought that no other town suffered anything like as much as it did.
Our London holiday from bombs was shattered by a heavy raid on the night of March 8th, a date which became known everywhere as the Café de Paris night. I first heard of the Café de Paris tragedy from my friend Kay Kelly, a lovely actress who had joined the FANYs early on in the war and was now driving Mr Hore Belisha. He had a friend in Tite Street, just round the corner from Cheyne Place, and when Kay drove him there she would come in to the studio for a cup of coffee and a chat. He would then telephone her when he was ready to leave Tire Street. Kay came in on the morning of March 9th and told me that one of her friends had been going to the Café de Paris the previous night but had suddenly had a premonition not to go. The party which she had been asked to join had gone – and three of them were dead. She had brought a beautiful clock for me to keep for her – she could not have it in barracks, and wanted it kept going; it had been given her by Ian Hay, in whose play The Midshipmaid she had been acting just before war broke out. I looked at her now, trim and neat in her FANY uniform, and thought how beautiful she was and how lucky Mr Hore Belisha was to have such a good driver who was also quite ravishing to the eyes!
She had already heard some of the details of the Café de Paris bomb – and when Richard came in that night I heard more. It had been a bad night in Chelsea too, and we had had several bombs, including another UXB in Ranelagh Gardens, and another in Chelsea Bridge Road; others in Sloane Street, Basil Mansions, and the Pimlico area had exploded and we had casualties in the FAP. The most horrible wounds to deal with were caused by glass – and we spent hours picking out minute glass splinters. One of the incentives to wearing thicker footwear was the masses of glass invariably lying in the streets after bombing. Sometimes the houses from which the glass had fallen were some distance from the bomb, while those quite near it had still their glass intact; there was no knowing what blast would do – its effects were extraordinarily varied.
Kay was very shaken over the Café de Paris – she often went there, and so did we. It was said to be absolutely safe because it was fairly deep underground. The details were pretty horrible and the public had seen a good deal more of it than they usually saw of bomb incidents, because apparently the ARP Services had not got there at all quickly, and the dead had all been laid out on the pavements. At the FAP one of the girls knew more – and told us how, when coming out of another café in Coventry Street, she saw the crowd, and the bodies being brought out – there were eighty-four dead.
Afterwards Rockie told us that there was to be an inquiry into the whole business of why the ARP Services had been so long in arriving. Although the ARP was under the local authorities, if there was evidence of negligence or confusion in dealing with incidents the Home Office had the right to intervene and if necessary to put in a Controller of ARP Services. This had already been done in one or two boroughs. But it was easy to criticize; it had been a terrible night – and there had been widespread damage. Sometimes if the Blitz was very noisy it was extremely difficult for the telephonists in the wardens’ posts to get through or to make themselves heard when they
had to report an incident. The very fact that only accredited telephonists could do this, made it even more difficult in a very heavy raid. The Café de Paris story became a classic among the stories of the Blitz for the magnificent behaviour of the guests involved in the horrible nightmare of darkness, death, and destruction which followed the explosion of the bomb right on the dance floor. It also put some people off going to night-clubs and cafés for a time; but not for long – most of them still had the Kismet theory, that if you were going you would go anyhow – wherever you might chance to be.
The war was long, and looked as if it would be longer – the Blitz cast gloom and its grim evidence in ruins which had to be passed continuously made us long for a party – for a bit of fun. ‘Let’s go out!’ we would suddenly decide – and after the long freedom from the sirens we were all getting bolder and bolder about cinemas, theatres, and night-clubs – in all of which we had been earnestly asked not to assemble. The German raids were becoming spasmodic, not continuous now, it was no longer the thing to talk about bombs. Bombs were out! And whenever anyone began a story of what had happened to him or her or their friends in an incident we would sigh, ‘Oh God, not another bomb story!’ so that the Café de Paris incident with its band playing ‘Oh Johnnie, Oh Johnnie, Oh’ when the bomb fell amongst the dancers, came as a distinct shock. A reminder that Hitler had not finished!
In spite of the comparative lull now in the air raids, Germany was boasting that she was preparing her big spring offensive. We had been bombing Berlin intensively and our troops were advancing towards Addis Ababa. The real reason for the German fury was the Lend-Lease Bill which became law on March 11th, Roosevelt stated bluntly that the aim of the USA was all-out aid for the victory of the Allies. Threats of retaliation by the torpedoing of American ships carrying arms were loud and furious, the Volkischer Beobachtung wrote, ‘Germany is now preparing to cause the final defeat of England and determined to have a formidable Day of Judgement not only on Churchill and his followers but on the British nation. We will bring to England a revolution of blood and tears which as a punishment will reduce the British population to degradation and poverty.’
A Chelsea Concerto Page 24