The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  It was dull. We had few letters, the newspapers were censored and to mark Swiss neutrality we had to listen to the communiqués from both sides on the radio. Otherwise nothing happened; it was the “phony war.” Many people said, “You wait, everything will arrange itself” but I knew myself that this was impossible. I studied history. I went for walks with the dogs and also had four refugees at Lausanne who were waiting for their visa numbers and terrified of being interned.

  Travel in Europe was still surprisingly easy. I left for Paris by train on December 4th with a permit to stay two months outside Switzerland. I spent the night with Sylvia and Adrienne and at their apartment saw Walter Benjamin for the last time. I was even able to fly on to England where, apart from a strict blackout, there were few signs that the country was at war.

  It was a gloomy visit because I had to store or dispose of my mother’s possessions. It was the last time that I went inside the London house that then reverted to my brother. I had no idea where he was. The few necessary business arrangements were made through our lawyers. There was a welcome respite when I went to Cornwall for a few days over the New Year but my Swiss re-entry permit was running out and I was not sorry to leave on January 29th, 1940.

  London needed no blackout the evening that I left. A fog had stopped both flying and the buses in the streets. Walter took me to the station by underground, begging me wistfully to give his love to the Grammont. I knew that I should regret the weight but I had added a canvas bag to my suitcase, filled with a few new books. The other passengers in the compartment on the way to Southampton were a boy and girl from the Channel Islands, returning home after the holidays, I often wondered what happened to them afterwards. It had begun to snow by the time that we got to the ship and I went to my bunk at once, suspecting that the trip would be hard. It was rolling when the stewardess woke me up next morning. “Are we nearly in?” I asked. “In! It was much too rough to go out last night, we have only just started. You had better stay where you are.”

  It was a dreadful trip. I had no seasick pills and I spent the next six hours with my head over a bucket. In addition, I knew that I had lost my connections on to Montreux. Being January, it was almost dark when I struggled up on deck in the late afternoon at Le Havre. The scene was extraordinary. About a hundred English girls in uniform were lined up, waiting to disembark. Each carried a large toy, mostly bears but there were also some kangaroos, with blue ribbon bows tied smartly round their plush necks. All that kept beating through my head was “phony war...phony war...” The contrast was too great between the situation as I knew it from my refugees and this make-believe world. Either the women should have been treated as soldiers or they should not have been there in khaki. It was another symptom of the lack of urgency at the time.

  A Cockney in front of me stamped and swung his arms. It was very cold. He also kept looking at his watch. If time permitted, he explained to a friend in terms that I had not heard used in the wildest moment of the twenties, he expected to visit the house of a certain madam on his way to the Paris train. I did not mind. It seemed more honest than the teddy bears. Our turn came to disembark at last. I could not hurry, the canvas bag of books was getting heavier and heavier. We waited in queues for buses. Some took taxis but I had not much French money on me and I wanted it for Paris. The signs over the cafés, the harbor smells and the narrow houses kept reminding me of trips to France in childhood. How seldom the first strong impressions of life are obliterated.

  Most of the passengers went straight into the station restaurant but although I had had nothing all day but a cup of tea, I thought it was more prudent to find a seat on the train. There was an efficient blackout and the platform was very long. I had to put down my two bags every few yards. Suddenly a man picked up my suitcase, it was the little Cockney who had evidently paid a lightning visit to his madam. “We shall never find the train without some light,” he said and produced a tiny torch. He helped me climb up the high steps, installed me in a corner seat and left for the restaurant almost before I had had time to thank him. Just as the train was leaving a group of Englishmen belonging to what we should now call the “Establishment” strode into the compartment and tried to throw me out of my place. There were no reserved seats and I stood up for my rights. If I had shown any weakness, I should have been forced to stand in the bitter cold of a drafty corridor for five or six hours. My Cockney had not spent the hour in Havre in a conventional way but he had been kind. I reflected that as we are told in most of the scriptures of the world, there is more charity to be found among the sinners than the saints.

  It was the middle of the night before we got to Paris. I was able to spend a few hours with Sylvia and Adrienne the next day and to visit Marc Allégret to tell him the details of my mother’s death, he had always been fond of her, before getting a train on to Montreux. There was snow at Kenwin when I returned and a rush both of refugees and English friends to visit me and hear the latest news.

  Spring came, a stork arrived in the neighboring meadow, I worked hard on the history of Vaud. Two of my refugees got their visas and left and I saw more of the English colony, particularly Colonel McPherson and his wife. They had spent thirty years in the wilder parts of India and had fascinating stories to tell of their experiences. He was over seventy and furious that they would not give him a wartime job because of his age.

  There was an idea that I might do some work for the French Ministry of Information. I did not suppose I could get a visa for Paris but the consul promised to help me provided “you are back in Switzerland by April 15th.” I did not realize the significance of his remark at the time.

  France was much gayer than Vaud. I was sent for five days to the Midi and found the same characters on the beaches that had amused us so much in 1938, including an elderly gentleman in shorts and a sunbonnet. I heard a shopkeeper propose a beach suit to a lady, “une blouse d’un rouge géranium exquis, une toute, toute petite ceinture blanche avec des pantalons bleu aériens, pour rendre un hommage délicat aux drapeaux alliés.” Imagine (as I wrote Kenneth) walking about in flags! Half the population of Bath and Torquay seemed to be sitting outside the cafés, grumbling because there were no cakes. It was a respite to be in the sun again but I felt profoundly uneasy nor did there seem any fixed program for the articles that I was supposed to write. I spent two gay hours, however, one afternoon with Norman Douglas who came over from Antibes. In Paris, Adrienne gave a dinner and I saw Jean Prévost for the last time, he joined the Resistance later and was killed. André Chamson was there on leave and Henri Michaux who amused us all by saying that he had become extremely interested in Buddhism in India. He had believed them really to be saints until he happened to say, “Et les anglais?” Then, as he said, looking at me sorrowfully, there was more than an explosion.

  I was also invited to a dinner with some journalists. They were polite but there was no real interest in my articles. I sat quietly listening to the conversation, because of my English accent they often thought I could not understand although I could follow every word easily, when one of them said to his neighbor,

  “I am leaving for my country house next week.”

  “Yes, it is about time,” the other man replied, “and your food?”

  “Oh, stocks enough for three years.”

  He mentioned the name of the village and I found out afterwards that it was in the Unoccupied Zone so that many in Paris must have known the Armistice terms before the campaign began. I did not link it up fully at the time but I had heard enough to make a full report to the English consul on my return. “You know,” he said, “and we know here but will London listen to us? I think the war will last five years.”

  I listened to the fall of France on the radio. Patriotic speeches and the “Marseillaise” were interspersed with messages asking nurses, radio technicians and engineers to report to Bordeaux. In Switzerland we had no illusions. After my experience in Paris I was not intellectually surprised but it was an emotional shock. I suppose
I believed that in a moment of danger France would unite. Unhappily individual courage is not enough in our century of vast battles. It is the steady initial preparation that is needed.

  We heard full reports about the Belgian surrender but hardly a word about Dunkirk or Churchill’s speeches. When that news finally filtered through I sat in the sun on our flat roof and for the first and only time during the war, I felt profoundly sorry for the Germans. If the Elizabethan spirit had come back to us, their ultimate defeat was certain. The Swiss, however, assured me that there would be two wars. First a patched-up peace and afterwards a second conflict.

  The Swiss plan was for their army to retire to prepared positions in the mountains and fight from there if their neutrality were violated. Civilians were to stay in their homes, except for a few technicians. Officials measured the rooms at Kenwin and we were ordered to prepare for refugees. There were no rucksacks nor cycles to be had in the shops. Once a day we were asked on the radio, “Have you got your gas mask, swept your attic, and completed your blackout? Do you know where you air-raid shelter is?” The authorities were more helpful than in England. They issued their orders firmly and sensibly and treated us as adult citizens. Everything in London, I found later, was vague.

  There came the day when the Swiss radio warned us of imminent invasion. All the population was invited to resist. We were to disregard any further broadcasts, soldiers not with the army were to fulfill orders previously given to them, civilians were to make sure that they were equipped with brassards bearing the Federal Colors and then turn hoses of boiling water on the enemy. Men lined the bridges and the railway lines ready to blow them up at a moment’s notice. I was told afterwards that the main bridge at Basel was to have been destroyed after twelve minutes and it went to eight minutes before the order was countermanded.

  Elsie and I got out the hose, we had little fuel so we decided to wait until we knew the Germans had reached our district before we heated the water. We also managed to get hold of some dynamite and arranged it at the entrance. Unfortunately neither of us knew how to detonate it. I cursed the hours I had spent learning German grammar instead of having had an elementary course in explosives.

  Resistance cracked in France, the German army swung westwards and our orders were changed. Let nobody think, however, that Switzerland was like France. I was there, I knew and felt the temper of the people, they would have resisted to the last child. I was afterwards through much of the London blitz but the fear of that attack was much less than the dread of an invading army marching on Vevey. I do not think the English realize what it means. I suppose it goes back to an archaic fear of the desecration of the home.

  Every day during these anxious weeks, Colonel McPherson visited all the Englishwomen who were living alone to encourage them and see that they were not dispirited. He was an elderly man and when I got back to England, I begged that somebody in authority might send him a word of thanks because it would have been easy for the morale of a number of sick and elderly women to crack if it had not been for his help. It would have been possible then to send him such a note but “the Establishment” would not bother. He died, alas, before I returned in 1946.

  It was rumored that all foreigners were to be interned. I burned the papers that had to do with the refugees and most of my other letters and documents. Claudi had puppies the day that Paris fell. The first thing that the vet said to me was, “Don’t worry, Madame, I will look after your dog and I will try to send you a blanket to your camp.”

  I was told semiofficially that I was on the German black list because of my work with the refugees and that I had better try to leave Switzerland. It was impossible. The sun was shining, the lake was at its most beautiful, I had sometimes wanted to die but never less than at that particular moment yet I knew that a neutral nation might not be able to resist German pressure to give up enemy citizens and that I should not be able to hold out against torture. I might disclose valuable names. Yet, believe me, it is not easy to contemplate suicide in cold blood. Drowning was slow, I did not know where to get poison, if I had turned on the gas it might have affected others besides myself. It was not the sages who helped me with their wisdom, it was Petronius. I was a follower of Hannibal, not of Rome, but I reflected that Petronius had probably been ready for death but bored that it had to come to him at just that time. There seemed nothing to do except to jump off a mountain or to open my veins.

  Elsie offered me her identity card and suggested concealing me in a village but I refused. There were too many differences to be learned in a few days and detection and punishment of my helpers would have been inevitable. I was then told that there was a plane going out to Belgrade if I could be ready in six hours with a suitcase and a hundred pounds in money. Again it is not an easy thing to leave one’s home, knowing that it is probable that one will never see it again, and go without friends into the unknown. The marks are still with me, I cannot accept the conventional world, the emphasis upon new curtains, clothes, a set place in life, I know that these are illusions, they do not really exist. I will not say possessions as a whole, there are certain things that are a part of our personality but they have to be things that belong to us, not acquired because “it is done” or for the neighbors. I knew the landscape round me, so different then from what it is now, and the green and white of Vaud, the clouds above the Grammont and the vines, tugged at the mind when I faced having to leave them.

  I went to Geneva. I found that I should have been the only woman and the only person with a non-diplomatic passport in the group and that we should have to travel to England via the Cape. The start was delayed. I was sent back to wait for further instructions. We could not take additional funds out of Switzerland and common sense suggested that a hundred pounds would not be sufficient for such a journey. I had not met any of my fellow travelers but I knew “the Establishment.” At the first opportunity they would “ditch the old trout” and I might be stranded for months in some country where perhaps I could not even speak the language. I rang up the next day and declined the chance.

  The danger persisted and without a qualm of conscience I plunged into the black market for passports. I learned a great deal that I had never suspected and also, I hope, some humility. When people are fighting for their own lives and for those whom they love, the words “law” and “justice” become empty words. I turned down certain papers where I thought detection probable but was about to buy a certain document when help came from an unexpected quarter.

  It is seldom the mighty of this world who come to the rescue in a time of crisis. Years before I had done a service not worth mentioning for a Swiss in a travel agency. I had been able to get through Adrienne a textbook that his son wanted for an examination. He now approached me with the news that a coach was being run from Geneva to Barcelona to take out Swiss export men, South Americans and people with United States visas so that they could reach their destinations from Lisbon. He thought that he could get two seats as I wanted to take Grace with me, a young English student who was the daughter of a friend and who had been put in my charge.

  The August days slipped away. Elsie had bought a little house near Lausanne and prepared to move there because we could not get enough fuel to heat Kenwin. All but one of the puppies were distributed to different homes. The grapes began to change color and one morning the telephone rang. Grace and I could go out on the next coach.

  One cold September morning we assembled soon after six on the quay at Geneva with our permitted baggage, a suitcase apiece and, according to orders, a rucksack with food for three days. We were four in the English group, none of us wanted to leave, it was Cromwell, not Drake, who was driving us home. It was certainly duty and not inclination that had drawn us to this group of forty-four passengers belonging to fifteen different nationalities, to wait for the “road train,” two coaches and a trailer for the luggage. The one thing that we could not do was to sit by the radio and listen if England were to be invaded.

  “Those gr
ay English skies,” somebody said and we shivered in sympathy.

  “Ask me to die for England but do not ask me to live in the British climate,” I murmured my own slogan mournfully. If only the coach would start! The swans on the jade green water that stretched as far as Burier were being very bad for my morale. Yet lots of the passengers were excited and happy; there was a boy from Bern going on a student exchange to Boston, several businessmen discussing the prospects of the next skiing season, a Jewish family bound joyfully for Uruguay and an American girl from the consulate at Vienna, going home for leave and transfer. Above all, there was “Toulouse.”

  “Toulouse” was French but married to a Lausannois. She was going out to fetch her brother who had been released because of wounds from a prisoner-of-war camp. She had the magic papers that so many of us envied, a visa that would allow him to return with her to Vaud for a few weeks of convalescence. She was, as she said, very fortunate, her French relatives had lost everything. We slid back to folk tale as people will on such occasions, if she had a permit she was lucky and we were glad when she was put into our coach between an American student and an Irish priest bound for Trinidad. The front row was Canadian, our row was English, and at the back there were Swiss. A Hungarian diplomat and a number of South Africans were in the forward bus. “It’s like the old coaching days,” one of my neighbors remarked, as we stowed our rucksacks under the seats.

  “There is no turning back now,” another said and I tried not to look or think while we drove the few miles to the frontier. The days when an official had waved us through on our way to lunch at Bilignan were over. The first sacrifice in war was contact with friends and I did not know whether Gertrude and Alice Toklas were still in France. I could only think of the long, friendly house with Basket running up the path and Alice following him with a basket on her arm, as the French counted our money and examined our papers. Then, as we were on a collective visa, officials sealed up the coach door with great formality. We were not supposed to set foot on French soil.