The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Churchill and others in the Parliament and press went out of their way whenever there was opportunity to remind the people of those old days ‘when we stood alone in this island’, in tones that indicated nostalgia for the moment of exclusive glory, now somewhat unfairly smothered by the avalanche of strange events and strange men who ignorantly seemed to prefer their own achievements and were no longer awed by the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, or even Dunkirk. It was as if in the British mind the Americans were a kind of mass army of robots … an inhuman Goliath who happened now to be on the side of England who was David.3

  By the end of the forties, Britain, though in American eyes ‘socialist’, would be in military and geopolitical terms a satellite of US power. But even in the nineties, many Britons would retain the habit of thinking that Fighter Command and the Cheery Cockney had saved democracy, and that America had entered the war late, to claim the credit unfairly and to reap the benefits. After all, that, virtually, was what Frank Capra had told them …

  As Louis MacNeice showed, it was possible for an Irish person in wartime London, completely committed to beating the Nazis, to see through, or round, the Myth with a vision which detached behaviour from British history as the Myth reconstructed it and which could discover human traits by no means defined by this Moment or Finest Hour, or confined to Londoners Taking It. Elizabeth Bowen was another case in point. Created a Commander of the British Empire in 1948, in due recognition of her loyalty and distinction, she had nevertheless published during the war short stories which presented the current scene in anything but a mythical fashion – though perhaps it should be admitted that her own post-Yeatsian mythology of the Anglo-Irish ‘aristocracy’, to which she belonged, and its great houses is implicated in her cool view of bombed London, concerned as it tends to be with damage to graceful architecture and to the comforts of upper-class civilisation.

  Bowen’s ‘In the Square’ first appeared in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in September 1941. It seems clearly to be set in the July of that year. It is a brilliant evening. A fashionable London square has lost three houses to bombs. ‘The grass was parched in the middle; its shaved surface was paid for by people who had gone … Most of the glassless windows were shuttered or boarded up, but some framed hollow inside dark.’ One house is occupied. Rupert, who has not been here for two years, comes to see Magdela, whose parties he once attended. The door is opened by ‘an unfamiliar person, not a maid’. She studies him ‘with the coldly intimate look … new in women since his return’. This is the former secretary and, we learn, mistress of Magdela’s husband, who has stayed in ‘the north’ since the war started. But we infer, from Magdela’s response to a telephone call, that she herself must have a lover, one reason, perhaps, for her coming back to London during the Blitz.

  At one point Rupert looks at the ‘empty pattern’ of chairs around them and realises that he and she cannot ‘be intimate without many other people in the room’. They stand at the window. The square beneath them has become a resort for lovers. ‘Now the place seems to belong to everyone’, Magdela says. ‘One has nothing except one’s feelings. Sometimes I think I hardly know myself.’ She tells him she is ‘happy’, and, as the story ends, begs him to tell her how things strike him, ‘coming back to everything … Do you think we shall all see a great change?’ Things, of course, have already changed: the square is contestable space, not a fortress of privilege.4

  This story depends completely for its point on the precise time and place of its setting. So does ‘Mysterious Kor’ (1944), set perhaps rather later in wartime London, in which one of three very disparate young people who have been thrown into uncomfortable proximity in a tiny flat escapes into a vision, prompted by the city under brilliant moonlight, of Kor, a dead city, forsaken, uninhabited, perfect, with ‘wide, void, pure streets’. It is the combination of full moon and wartime blackout which makes her imaginings more than trivial, whimsical. In both stories the somewhat helpless individuality of lone people whose lives have been disrupted is associated with scarred, but in certain lights beautiful, London townscapes.5

  Not all of Bowen’s sixteen wartime stories are so dependent on the moment evoked: some involve their pasts ‘catching up’ with people as might have happened in other circumstances. But one remarkable story, ‘Summer Night’, set in Ireland at the time of the Battle of Britain and published in 1941, can be read as commenting on the Myth of 1940 in a surprising, refreshing way. Again, light is important. On a glorious evening, Emma speeds sixty miles through the countryside to her lover’s house. She has told a lie to escape from her sad husband, a major without a war, and her daughters Di and Vivie. The ‘hotel woman’ where Emma stops to make a call looks at a newspaper and says, ‘with a stern and yet voluptuous sigh’, that there is an ‘awful air battle. Destroying each other.’ Meanwhile, Emma’s lover Robinson, a factory manager, has had an unexpected visit from Justin, a Dubliner deprived of his annual European holiday by the war, and Justin’s deaf sister Queenie, who lives in the small town. Justin pretentiously argues with Robinson over the crisis as an intellectual in neutral Ireland sees it, generalising vacuously: ‘We’re confronted by the impossibility of living – unless we can break through to something else.’ On their belated way out, they see Emma, just arrived, pulled up in her car at the gate. Her mood of manic, guilt-haunted excitement breaks down against Robinson’s cool authority and matter-of-factness. Justin, agonised by the realisation that he has been de trop, writes to Robinson pompously, expressing contrition and saying that he will avoid him during the brief remainder of his stay. But the deaf Queenie is happy: Robinson, on this beautiful night, has stirred romance in the good heart of this unmarried, yet beautiful, middle-aged woman …

  Such reductive summary does no justice to a story of Chekhovian richness and subtlety. Of all the elements essential to the structure of its narrative, only Justin’s presence is causally related to the war. A reader wholly ignorant of the events of summer 1940 should be able to ‘understand’ the story as one about human relationships set in peaceful Irish landscape. Yet imagery and implications are enriched if one thinks of the Battle of Britain. Emma drives with the passion for speed of a Spitfire pilot. Her eyebrows are ‘wing-like’ – she has an ‘animal’ nature, like her daughter Vivie, who is naughty in her absence, moving her religious Aunt Fran, who catches her, to thoughts about the war being everywhere: ‘Each moment is everywhere, it holds the war in its crystal; there is no elsewhere, no other place … Emma flying away – and not saying why or where. And to wrap the burning child up did not put out the fire. You cannot look at the sky without seeing the shadow, the men destroying each other. What is the matter tonight – is there a battle?’

  If Emma represents animal pleasure in the speed given by modern technology, Robinson, in his up-to-date ‘electric house’, represents both the practical face of technology and the aura of romance which this moment has given to its apparent masters. Bowen, it seems to me, subtly works on a paradox implicit in the Myth of the Battle of Britain: that the manic abandon of Knights of the Air depends on the skills of engineer, manager and mechanic. Wartime mythologisers found ways (as in Leslie Howard’s First of the Few) of presenting technical men as heroic. But when Emma’s romantic mania confronts Robinson’s calm her ‘adventure’ dies ‘at its root, in the childish part of her mind’. The Battle of Britain, by implication, is an episode in the history of the human imagination’s difficulty in coming to terms with new technology, with electricity and petrol-fuelled rapid travel.6

  Angus Wilson, introducing Bowen’s Collected Stories, begins by stressing her near-uniqueness as a writer who could convey ‘what life in blitzed London was like’, as if a handful of stories in a volume of nearly 800 pages represented her peak of achievement, with her ‘moments of sudden vision just as the bombs themselves exploded London’s surface beauty or squalor to reveal long-forgotton depths beneath’. He links the stories with her post-war novel The Heat of the Day, published in 1949.7
r />   Impressive though much of this novel is, it surely cannot compare, in sustained artistry, with ‘A Summer Night’ or ‘Mysterious Kor’. Bowen has trouble with lower-class characters, cannot approach them except with noblesse oblige, and unfortunately she seems to have believed that in an ambitious war novel she must perforce do so. Thus the story of Stella Rodney – intelligent upper-middle class with Irish connections – intersects with that of Louie, a lower-middling young woman married to a soldier serving in India, who has lost her parents in the bombing of a south-coast town. Louie is not, when it comes to intellectual limitation, as extreme a case as the idiot Benjie in The Sound and the Fury, but at times Bowen’s attempt to create processes of thought and feeling for her character suggest such theoretical calculation as must have underlain Faulkner’s far more powerful creation.

  Under the influence of the sharper Connie, an ARP warden now (it is 1942) underemployed in her job, with whom she shares a flat, Louie discovers newspapers. They give her ‘peace’, we are told, because they tell her what she thinks. She has felt as if the bad war news over the last few months ‘could only in some way have been her own fault’. Now:

  For the paper’s sake, Louie brought herself to put up with any amount of news – the headlines got that over for you in half a second … As far as she could make out, the same communiqués were taken out and used again and again. As against this, how inspiring was the variety of the true stories, which made the war seem human, people like her seem important and life altogether more like it was once. But it was from the articles in the papers that the real build-up, the alimentation came – Louie, after a week or two on the diet, discovered that she had got a point of view, and not only a point of view but the right one. Not only did she bask in warmth and inclusion but every morning and evening she was praised. Even the Russians were apparently not as dissatisfied with her as she had feared; there was Stalingrad going on holding out, but here was she in the forefront of the industrial war drive. As for the Americans now in London, they were stupefied by admiration for her character. Dark and rare were the days when she failed to find on the inside page of her paper an address to or else account of herself. Was she not a worker, a soldier’s lonely wife, a war orphan, a pedestrian, a Londoner, a home and animal-lover, a thinking democrat, a movie-goer, a woman of Britain, a letter-writer, a fuel-saver and a housewife?8

  This is interesting in its anticipation of Louis Althusser’s thoughts about ideology, and amusing in its satire of the propagandist efforts of the wartime press. But it is not convincing as an ‘inward’ account of mental processes, and its near-sarcasm creates problems in relation to the form of the book, which not only begins with Louie, out of her depth at an open-air concert, but ends with her, after D Day, wheeling a pram along a canal path: her baby, though son of a casual lover, not of her husband, Tom, who was killed in action before he could learn of her infidelity, is named ‘Tom’ and represents, however wryly, the future of the People. If Bowen despises (like Evelyn Waugh) the idea of a People’s War, why does she give a lower class ‘war worker’ such salience? And if Louie is meant to represent a patriotic positive, or at least the endurance of the ‘common stock’, why has she, in effect, mocked her?

  A defender of the novelist could argue that Bowen is seeing round the Myth of People’s War: Louie represents nothing but a certain kind of person who happens to be involved in the struggles and temptations of wartime. But the relationship between Stella Rodney and her lover Robert is given the dignity accorded to those in ‘Summer Night’: so modes jar against each other to no useful or amusing effect.

  Two points about the Stella–Robert relationship are of significance to the theme of this book. They met, two years previously, during the Blitz. And Robert, as Stella gradually learns, is a pro-Nazi traitor, whose eventual death, in effect suicidal, spares him from arrest and a bad end.

  Both Stella and Robert are engaged in white-collar ‘war work’ so hush-hush that we have no idea what they actually do. This gives their characters an artistically acceptable insubstantiality: in such wartime circumstances, people cannot be fully known as in more normal years. But Robert’s involvement in the British Expeditionary Force débâcle, in Dunkirk, has left him with a limp and clearly helps to explain his conviction that the Nazis deserve to win. Only contingently, however: ‘I was born wounded; my father’s son. Dunkirk was waiting there in us – what a race! A class without a middle, a race without a country. Unwhole.’ Robert’s ‘class’ is Home County, ‘stockbroker belt’, wealthy, commuting upper-middle. Bowen seems to set, with impressive astringency, the fragility of the public-school-educated Englishmen who conceived themselves to be the vanguard of their race against the more enduring values rooted in Irish life.

  Bowen’s ten pages describing the meeting of Stella and Robert in London in September 1940 have a subtlety and complexity which cannot be brought out here. The heightened feelings of survivors of the Blitz in that autumn are evoked: ‘Never had any season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death.’ Bowen presses home the intensity of the moment with detail after detail: while each yellow leaf on London’s trees ‘blazoned out the idea of the finest hour’, strain was constant: ‘To work or think was to ache … fatigue was the one reality.’ Survivors were haunted by the nightly ‘shoals’ of victims; instinctively realising how little they had known about those now noticed as absent, they moved ‘to break down indifference while there was still time. The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.’ In the context of Stella’s first encounter with Robert, society had ‘become lovable; it had the temperament of the stayers-on in London … This was the new society of one kind of wealth, resilience, living how it liked – people whom the climate of danger suited … The very temper of pleasures lay in their chanciness … to and fro between bars and grills, clubs and each other’s places moved the little shoal through the noisy nights.’

  Bowen’s analysis of ‘morale’ (basically, of upper- and upper-middle-class morale) is brilliantly vivid and convincing: it is easy to relate it to the accounts by American pressmen of their socialising with London’s élite. Her details can be selectively used to enrich the Myth. Taken overall, though, they undermine it. Blitz society is febrile, unsound. The liaison between Stella and Robert is a product of animal attraction in a phase when people are living day-to-day. The Blitz spirit is not one of orderly ‘carrying on’; rather, irrational reflexes determine behaviour. The price which Stella pays for her excitement under bombardment is the ultimate realisation, in the glum middle of the war, that Robert has made her part of a double life.

  British readers and film watchers were predisposed by their taste for detective stories and spy thrillers to enjoy tales about traitors at work in Britain – Bowen’s novel was a best-seller. In a whodunnit a most respectable person would prove to be a calculating murderer. So why shouldn’t the village squire be a fifth columnist? British home propaganda stressed that one shouldn’t trust anyone at all with information which might be useful to the enemy. While in fact Germany had totally failed to create a useful spy network in Britain, everyone believed that such a thing existed: its ubiquitous presence was assumed in Next of Kin, a film directed by Thorold Dickinson at official instigation, which showed the dangers of ‘careless talk’ and enjoyed box-office success.

  Another wartime film which played on public belief that there was an active fifth column was Went the Day Well, directed by Cavalcanti for Ealing Studios and released in 1943. It was loosely based on a short story, ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’, written by Graham Greene, then working for the MoI, and deliberately lodged in Colliers Weekly Magazine, which published it at the end of June 1940: the aim was to counteract American views that the British lacked determination and weren’t really democrats. German parachutists drop on an English village and are thwarted by everyday country folk. (The success of this initial connection with Colliers perhaps help
s to explain why Quentin Reynolds, later, was in turn so successful in getting facilities through the MoI.9)

  Cavalcanti’s film has sixty Germans driving into a Deep English village, Bramley End (idyllic landscape, thirteenth-century church), impersonating ordinary British Tommies. They link up with their fifth columnist ally, none other than Squire Welsford, leading light of the local Home Guard. With his help, the intruders terrorise the village into silence while they set about their nefarious schemes to aid the coming general invasion. Various brave villagers, including the vicar, attempt resistance and meet horrible deaths, but the situation is saved by the enterprise of a naughty little boy, George, who escapes and gets word to the next village. Before help can come from there, the villagers seize arms themselves and begin to pick off Germans. During the final battle, which costs numerous British lives, the treacherous squire is shot by his patriotic mistress, and his manor is largely ruined. No motivation for Welsford’s treachery is spelt out. There are no other traitors among the villagers. The mere fact that he is upper class seems (at the height of a People’s War) to be sufficient, implicit explanation of Welsford’s unique wickedness.

  It is hardly possible to believe that German invasion would have met with such near-uniform sturdy resistance as is suggested in Cavalcanti’s film and, more soberly, in Coward’s Peace In Our Time. The history of the Channel Islands, British territory under German occupation, suggests that timid people, lookers-after-number-one and easy-lifers would have collaborated in considerable numbers, and the undoubted prevalence of anti-Semitism in various British milieux suggests that co-operation with the Final Solution would have been quite amply forthcoming. (Anyone who thinks these remarks to be a libel on the British character is required to prove that almost all Britons would have reacted quite differently from other Europeans in such circumstances.)