Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  When Philip was about two years old my Aunt Kalie, who was staying with us, had a serious accident. She fell, fracturing her femur, over one of our treadworn seventeenth-century steps. After an operation, she appeared to make a rapid recovery: but her condition deteriorated, and she needed expert nursing. So she went into a small nursing home, in Callis Street, no more than a quarter of a mile away, where one or the other of us could visit her nearly every day, myself on my bicycle, my mother (whose arthritis was bad by now) driven in our very old car by the gardener, who despised it, because every time he shut the door a window was liable to fall out.

  Andrew was now at Uppingham, Lindsay at a local school. I had become one of the B.B.C. ‘Critics’ (a delightful job), and would, periodically, go to London three days a week, for spells of six weeks at a time. I was able to stay with Charles then, in a guest room at Dolphin Square. I was invited to these ‘Critics’ sessions about three times a year. I was also on the committee of the Book Society, which met monthly and invariably gave me migraine headaches.

  All this my mother hated. It robbed her of me. She was often in pain, and she felt dreadfully the loneliness caused by my absences. She was, like my Aunt Kalie, hypochondriacal. She became afraid of a heart attack, but a cardiogram showed nothing wrong. Her high spirits had gone, and she was in a constant state of depression. Once she had been proud – over-proud – of my career. Now, when my voice came over the radio, she would often pretend to be asleep.

  She would brighten a little when she heard me singing to Philip—

  When father papered the parlour

  You couldn’t see pa for paste—

  or the Nightmare Song, from Iolanthe, in which I had become adept. But such moods would not last. One of the things she did was to ask me frequently whether there was an afterlife. On this I felt insecure: she needed comfort, and I could not give it her. I had not the decency to lie for her sake. I did not know, I said. This is one of my greatest regrets.

  One day she came into my bedroom looking ill. She had violent pains in her left shoulder. This was at first diagnosed as a sort of muscular rheumatism, and she was given morphia. She passed a restless day and a very troubled night: I sat up with her. She kept on saying it was breakfast-time, and trying to get out of bed: and later began those ominous plucking movements at the sheets. I was alone in the house with Lindsay and the baby. Charles was in London, Nanny Page visiting her home in Bedfordshire. I shall never forget that night.

  Next day, however, Amy’s condition seemed greatly improved, and went on being so, though she was still in bed. A week or so later, I had a meeting of the Book Society Committee coming up. I asked her if she would mind going, just for one night, to the nursing-home where Aunt Kalie was. I was very anxious to attend this particular meeting early, as there was a book for which I very much wanted a Choice. I promised Amy that I would be back by the earliest evening train on the same day.

  She made little demur. Indeed, as she got with difficulty into the car, she said, ‘The Transit of Venus.’

  François Mauriac says somewhere, that a person bore imminent death like the brand on a sheep’s back: and that nobody recognised it. Certainly I did not – or did I, and would not look?

  I left her in the nursing-home, sitting with Aunt Kalie and drinking cocoa.

  On the following morning, when I was due to catch the London train, the telephone rang. My mother was very ill. Could I come to Callis Street?

  I knew, of course, that she was dead.

  After seeing her, I had to break the news to my aunt. With her customary kindness, she thought first of the living. Almost the first words she spoke to me were these: ‘You must not let yourself feel guilty.’ This! To me. (Though Aunt Kalie had meant well.) I had left my mother to die alone.

  Her death had been sudden. She had spent a good night, had slept well. In the morning the nurse had asked her what she would like to eat. Grapefruit, perhaps? Amy agreed, Grapefruit would be nice. When the nurse only a little later brought up the breakfast tray, Amy was dead.

  I passed through a period of intense grief and guilt. I can write nothing about that. Amy. I had greatly loved her.

  Possessive, I suppose, she always was, though in my earlier years I was not aware of it. She gave me so many good times, and my friends liked and were amused by her. She had pinched and scraped, and all in good humour. I am quite sure that if osteo-arthritis had not attacked her, things in those later days might have been quite different. But she was getting old, she was frequently lonely, and she was in almost constant pain.

  But what fun she had been! How much I owed her! The songs she had sung in her small, pretty voice! The anecdotes, always enthralling, about her schooldays, her memories of Ellen Terry, her theatrical experiences! I now try to think of her only like that.

  17. Politics and War

  I have written so extensively about the Left Wing in the thirties, in my novel, The Survival of the Fittest, that I can only approach my political life at that time from a very personal angle.

  Believe it or not, to the young the years leading up to the war and the earlier years of the war itself, may have been days of acute anxiety and activity, but they were often fun. Great fun. The problems for the Left were simple: you didn’t like Hitler, nor Mussolini, nor Franco. The extreme complication of political life today for the young, fills me with apprehension. The young whom I know best are making a very good try at tackling it. Their main method being, to find out precisely what the facts are. I am afraid we did not always – or more properly could not – do that. For our children, there may not be so much fun in it.

  I married in 1936. I was a member of the Chelsea Labour Party, member of the Left Book Club and frequently at polemic odds with the Right Wing Trade Union element; we ran, from the shabby party headquarters in The World’s End, a cyclostyled weekly, written mainly by myself, called The Chelsea Democrat. It was rather successful: it was even rumoured that Sir Samuel Hoare’s butler subscribed to it, but this may belie him. The magazine did not fold up through lack of funds – subscriptions just covered costs, but because of editorial exhaustion: I had too many other things to do.

  The trauma of the defeat of the Spanish Republican forces in the Civil War was something beyond which the earlier trauma of Munich almost paled.

  I remember standing in Belgrave Square, when the Republican flag was hauled down, and Franco’s went up. There was a vast crowd. The inevitable band was playing (I believe it played for Mosley’s men as well as for our side) the Hymno del Riego. I could not stop crying: and there were many, men and women alike, in the same condition.

  We were grieving mostly because of a defeat for our cause; but also because we believed that in the coming war – yes, we believed in it, all right – Gibraltar was lost to the Fascists, and thereby the Mediterranean. In this we were wrong. I cannot achieve any love for General Franco (in fact, I have never been to Spain and will not, while he is living) but I am lost in admiration for his shrewdness. For it was not his intention to ‘come in’, but to keep well out. Our political judgment had led us, as it had led many others, astray.

  What deeply distressed me was George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I realise his stature as a writer (though 1984 is on the hysterical side) and that Animal Farm will one day seem a fairy tale for children as remote from politics as the nursery rhyme, Hector Protector. But, when the Republic was in the gravest danger, he was a divisive factor within it. And that, very few of us of the non-Trotskyist Left were able to bear. In such times of crisis, it seems to me, ranks have to be closed, however beastly some in those ranks may be. But, to be fair, nothing could have saved the Spanish Loyalists by that period. Perhaps it isn’t God who is on the side of the big battalions, after all, but Someone Else.

  But then there was the time of struggle against Chamberlain and the ‘Men of Munich’, as they were later to be called, when Chamberlain had succeeded in getting there. This struggle was carried on by large forces in the Trade Unions,
all left-wing parties, and had many allies on the Right: not the least of them Churchill, Eden and Lord Cranborne (later Lord Salisbury). ‘Demos’, as we called them then, and still do, were serious: there was no playing of guitars.

  I remember walking home from a Labour Party meeting the night the Munich Agreement had been announced, with Sibyl Wingate, sister of the famous Orde Wingate of Burma. She was a bleak young woman. She said simply (and correctly), ‘Now war is certain.’

  I have never subscribed to the theory that Neville Chamberlain was either misguided or silly. He wanted, ultimately, a four-power pact between Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, and ourselves. He was an able man, but self-deluded. I believe now, that with all our (left-wing) efforts, to promote a defensive pact with Russia, Hitler might only have been stopped when he made his bid to re-occupy the Rhineland.

  How scornful we all were when the Government sent Mr William Strang, now Lord Strang, a ‘foreign office clerk’ (we weren’t knowledgeable about the Foreign Office hierarchy and I think we conceived of him as a Bob Cratchett, sitting at a dusty high desk on a Dickensian stool) to the U. S. S.R! (Later, in more sophisticated days, I met Lord Strang and found him an accomplished Proustian.) But all was slow, slow, and the newsboys cried disaster in the streets. ‘Only a sallow dawn and newsboys crying war’ as Louis MacNiece put it.

  Munich night I shall not forget. Members of Parliament (with honourable exceptions) and a good many of our own side also – in fact, a majority of the population – behaved like political lunatics. A friend of mine, trying to convince the rejoicing populace in a Lyons’ Corner House, that they were done for, so far as peace was concerned, was hurled roughly and joyously into the street.

  Neil and I joined the Air Raid Wardens. I, I admit, being small, looked ridiculous in my brown boiler-suit and steel helmet. Our post warden was John Freeman, later Ambassador to the United States. We had a Warden’s Post at the World’s End, which was later moved to the basement of 94 Cheyne Walk, within easy distance of that plausible military objective, the Battersea Power Station.

  In both these places, I encountered the Classless Society: it was genuinely classless: I have never met with it since. We waited for yellow messages (preliminary warnings) and drank cup after cup of revolting stewed tea, which left an orange film on the tongue. At intervals, I worked at my novel, Too Dear for my Possessing. With us were Ron, ex-printer, ex-everything, one of the cleverest self-educated men I have ever met; ‘One Arm Harvey’, an ex-sailor, Bob Brent, H., an ex-chef from the Savoy, who presented me with an omelette-pan which I still cherish, and four extremely pretty women.

  That was the period of the ‘phoney war’. Nothing happened: nothing was to happen for a long time. At Cheyne Walk, ‘yellow messages’ became more frequent; and Neil and I were often called out to go down there in the middle of the night. He had the enviable trick of going straight to sleep again on a bench, with his head resting on the rubber rim of his helmet. I never met anyone so utterly without fear: and so it was with him when he was in the jungles of Burma.

  Then, early in the spring of 1940, an event much longed-for, I became pregnant. Realising that no one would want a pregnant warden, and that Neil’s call-up could not be long delayed, I resigned. When I handed in my uniform I felt like Dreyfus, except that I managed to retain the three stripes I had earned for proficiency, a verbal examination on the peculiarities of poison gas. (It always struck me that phosgene, said to smell of hay, would have had a poor chance among the various odours of Chelsea Embankment, though Charles sensibly assured me that a poor chance – of being instantly detected – would be precisely the enemy’s idea.)

  We moved to a bungalow near the river between Staines and Laleham. That bungalow was unremarkable, but it stood in a delightful garden (with red hawthorns, a medlar tree and a small apple orchard) which I found less delightful when I tried to cultivate it myself. I suppose it covered about one-third of an acre.

  The spring and summer of 1940 were golden.

  ‘Mai qui fut sans nuage et juin poignarde, as Aragon wrote.

  France had fallen, the Germans were at the Channel ports, and there seemed to be no reason why we should not lose the war. But no one seemed to believe that we would, even when we were quite alone and likely to remain so. I do not know why Hitler couldn’t have been content simply to starve us out, and only then turn his attention to the U.S.S.R.

  Neil was called up for a period of training on the Norfolk coast. My mother and I were managing to live on her small pension, my writing, and my army allowance. I did all the shopping on my bicycle.

  In September, the bombing of London began. A few bombs came our way, but they were very few: we heard the sirens, heard the bombers overhead, and the noise of the anti-aircraft guns. I cannot stand sudden noise; I sat placidly and incompetently sewing a layette with Quies in my ears, balls of pink wax that softened on insertion. I do not remember being unnerved, except that I once put the sleeves into a smock the wrong way round.

  On most nights, we slept in a horrible cemented garden shelter, three steps down, the walls running with damp, a bench, or bunk, on each side, and beneath that, water to a depth of three inches. My mother and I made ourselves comfortable as best we could, and the Siamese cat (I have always had Siamese cats) came to join us. We would read for a while by candlelight, and later try to sleep. When the all-clear sounded, we would go back into the house, make tea and smoke (I date my really heavy smoking from then) and at last go to sleep.

  My son Andrew was born in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1941. His was an easy birth. There was no question now of going to the shelter: we stayed in our beds. The night preceding his birth was free from raids: not so the following night. I was attended by Dr John Sanctuary, whose grandfather Archdeacon Sanctuary, had been, oddly enough, a personage in that part of Dorset where my father’s family had lived for generations. He was a fine doctor, and a friend.

  I had a nurse for a fortnight, whose name I now forget: but I do recall her fear of men. One night she said to me, ‘To think of all you have had to go through!’ I demurred, pointing out to her that the bearing of my son had not been particularly onerous. She replied, ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant, what you must have been through just to get him!’

  The bombing went on. One night we watched, from our garden, the City burning. It was a beautiful and terrible sight, the sky a vivid rose-colour behind our apple-trees. In the summer, there was a mysterious pause. Everyone speculated as to what it might mean. Then, in June, Hitler invaded Russia. It may seem the height of callousness to my Russian friends, but our first thought was: now we are no longer alone.

  The addition of the U.S.S.R. to the Allies put the B. B.C. in a quandary. They were accustomed, before the 9 o’ clock news, to playing the anthems of all friendly nations, defeated or otherwise. But could they possibly play the Internationale? Heaven forbid. So someone had the idea of playing something called ‘Kutuzov’s March’, which was unknown to anyone, the Russians, I have been told, included. The idea was destined to failure: after a very short while, the B.B. C. gave in, and the Internationale was played with the other anthems. Later of course, the U. S. S.R., fighting a nationalist and patriotic war, invented an anthem of its own: it is in the main a very good tune, though with rather too lengthy a middle section.

  To say much more about my war, after all the books that have been written about other people’s, would be superfluous. Neil went to India and subsequently to Burma. My D-Day daughter Lindsay was born in May 1944, a few days before the V. 1 bombings began. These, I admit, made me afraid: my nerve almost broke at one time. My mother’s, never. By then we had a Morrison shelter, a steel table-like structure designed to take anything but a direct hit. The trouble was that my mother, myself, Andrew, Lindsay and the cat could not all sleep in it together: so Lindsay and I retired to my study beneath the large mahogany sideboard where I myself had been sheltered during the Zeppelin raids of the First World War. It had certainly taken the weight of
most of the ceiling during the ‘Little Blitz’ of February that year. The V.II bombs I did not mind so much, since you could not hear them coming. If you did hear them crash, you had not been hit; if you did not, either they had not been coming at all, or you were dead.

  So I began to go up to London more frequently, to look for houses. In 1945 the Chelsea Council offered us (as old residents) the lease of 6 Cheyne Row, at the rent of £3 a week. We moved there at the beginning of the following year. That house, when I saw it last, had lost its elegant window, and looked squalid. It may look better by now.

  The war. It seems to me the only war in British history – or perhaps any other history – which was worth fighting. I have never doubted that at all. (It is, beyond dispute, a gothic thought that the war in South-East England began and ended with a thunderstorm). Goering, with his customary élan, committed suicide. The remaining German leaders (Hitler and Goebbels dead, Bormann probably) were hanged in a gymnasium by what seems to have been a peculiar bungling (and inexperienced) American sergeant. A settlement was reached, better than Versailles in 1919, but with all the seeds of dissension left to burgeon. But I was still looking forward to a better world and, in our country, a welfare state, which to an extent we did achieve. The thought of a protracted illness in Britain does not carry with it the dread of financial ruin which it does for so many in America. We can still have childen free of charge: and we can die free of charge, too.

  In 1946, Churchill made his celebrated Fulton Speech in Missouri, and I was filled with horror. Was it all to begin again? Were we casting about for a new enemy already? It proved to be the beginning of the Cold War which God help us, we haven’t totally been rid of to this day. I think I hardly realised that Churchill had only brought into the open what had been building up for some time past.