Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Bunny could not know, in September 1939, that he would spend most of the next six years involved in writing propaganda and that he would have no time to write novels. What he did recognise, with some panic, was that he was ceasing to be a free agent. The boy who detested school and the young man who did not enlist in the Great War was now a middle-aged Air Force man, a tiny cog in the great machinery of war. From the outset, Bunny’s working hours were long and his free-time short. With only Sundays off, it was difficult to get to Hilton or to visit Angelica at Charleston.

  London had undergone rapid transformation. With the introduction of petrol rationing, it was almost devoid of cars; parks were dug up to make allotments; the Oval cricket ground was turned into a POW camp; shelters were springing up everywhere and statues taken down. Eros had flown Piccadilly Circus, the National Gallery was empty of art and soon the city’s sign posts and street names would be removed too. At night London was cloaked in black, lit only by an intermittently benevolent moon.

  Bunny kept up a social life of sorts, dining with H.G. Wells, A.W. Lawrence, Geoffrey Keynes, Francis Meynell and his old flame, Barbara Ker-Seymer. But there was one friend whom Bunny missed: Duncan had been a mainstay in his life for twenty-five years. He was the male friend Bunny loved best. But Duncan could not accept Bunny’s relationship with Angelica. Usually extremely polite, Duncan was so angry with Bunny that in November 1939 he cut him dead when they met by chance at Victoria station.

  Bunny had not been to Hilton since before the fateful holiday in Ireland and wondered whether he would ever live there again. The Herlitschkas finally departed in early October, Herbert sending Bunny a touchingly grateful letter for all he had done. When Bunny returned on 7 October he did so with some trepidation, feeling desperate in the knowledge that Ray’s condition would worsen, and that circumstances dictated that neither he nor the boys could be there to make life more tolerable. He was relieved when Ray’s old friend, Cecily Hey, agreed to act as her paid companion.

  Bunny turned to Geoffrey Keynes, who advised that although he was certain Ray had secondary growths in her brain, she should not be told she had anything more than fainting fits, but must be stopped from driving. Keynes and the distinguished radiologist, Dr N.S. Finzi colluded in telling her all was well. Ray was in a dreadful position, aware that her doctors were not telling the truth, but as she could not discuss her predicament with them, it was as though her illness was a shameful secret.

  With Bunny in London, Ray became progressively fearful, lying awake at night worrying about her fate. She told Bunny, ‘The Horror seems to be beginning’.6 ‘One can’t go on for ever crawling just out of reach like an injured mouse only to be dragged back by the cat’s claw.’7 Now she began to talk of ‘cancer’, although Bunny tried to deflect her from such fears. He sent her an anthology on the subject of ‘Courage’, but Ray commented to Nellie with some bitterness, ‘now I am inclined to lie thinking of cancer on the brain at night I can open my booke [sic] & read how Nurse Cavell died’.8 There was no question, now, of Ray taking a cottage at Melksham. As the weeks passed Hey was joined by Ray’s sisters Judy and Eleanor, the three women taking turns to care for her.

  Bunny’s weekly news sheet had given way to a daily bulletin. Believing he would write more competent bulletins if he had direct experience of the RAF’s work, he decided to witness the work of Coastal Command. In November he was taken by boat from Pembroke Dock to a big Sunderland, a flying boat, in which he and several officers took off at dawn, flying between the Welsh hills into the Western Approaches, where they were under orders to observe a convoy of ships and look out for U-boats. Conditions were particularly rough; the plane kept hitting air pockets and being swept by squalls of rain. Bunny was not alone in being air-sick, but it came as something of a surprise. Later that month he flew again with Coastal Command, this time from Leuchars, near St Andrews in Scotland.

  Meanwhile, Angelica was largely confined to Charleston. When she managed to snatch a whole week with Bunny at Charlotte Street, he wrote to her afterwards: ‘I don’t doubt your love darling’, ‘Your tears are so vivid: the feel & taste of them & I am ashamed you should shed them for me’.9 Angelica’s tears masked a growing confusion regarding her feelings for Bunny. She was not seeing enough of him and could not make up her mind whether or not she remained in love. The cause of Angelica’s confusion was a young German man called Eribert, whom she had met at a book stall on the Charing Cross Road and for whom she felt an attraction. They had barely spoken, but nevertheless, encouraged by Duncan, Angelica invited Eribert to her twenty-first birthday party at Charleston. Bunny felt vulnerable, fearing Angelica would prefer the younger man.

  After the party, Angelica told Bunny that she was ‘immensely relieved when disillusionment came and he turned out to be exactly the wrong sort of person for me, & I could write to you & tell you so’.10 An odd statement: was Angelica in love with the idea of falling in love? With so many young men disappearing into the Forces, did she feel the need to snatch at the opportunity Eribert appeared to offer? Or was she testing the strength of Bunny’s love by causing him jealousy? She succeeded on that count: ‘I quite nauseated myself with my own jealousy’, he told her, ‘an emotion which I loathe.’11

  At the Air Ministry Bunny took turns as weekend Duty Officer, which involved being on duty round the clock, sleeping in a camp bed in the Director of Intelligence’s office. Given Ray’s now rapidly failing health, it was particularly hard on them both that Bunny had to work over Christmas, although the house resounded with happiness when Noel Olivier arrived with her husband Arthur Richards and their children. Bunny bought Ray a shooting stick to rest on while walking in the garden and gave her a magnificent patchwork quilt, which she had made into a dressing gown with a sort of farthingale skirt. It kept her warm and gave the impression that she glided about on wheels.

  Returning to Hilton for four days’ leave on Boxing Day and emerging from a climate of secrecy, Bunny wondered whether Ray’s fears would subside if she were told the truth about her condition. ‘But’, he reasoned, ‘one cannot tell a living creature, clinging to life, that there is no hope.’ On one occasion, trying to reassure Ray, Bunny had to find a pretext to leave the room, unable to control his voice or disguise his emotion. He found himself automatically ordering seed for the garden, a pointless and unbearable exercise. He worried about Richard and William, about what they saw, how they perceived their mother, whether they knew how ill she was. As Bunny told Constance, ‘During the week I have to try to invent lies about our hopeful prospects of the war – that is child’s play to lying when I get home.’12 Ray told him, ‘You must lie to me if necessary but lie well’.13 Preoccupied with Ray, Bunny found it difficult to concentrate on anything. He apologised to Angelica for seeming rather remote, explaining that confronted with Ray’s worsening condition, he felt paralysed. ‘I often cry’, he told her.14

  In January 1940, when the boiler burst at Hilton, Ray became cold and took to bed. She rapidly weakened. A nurse was brought in and Richard built a bird table outside Ray’s window, so she could watch the birds. Bunny could now spend two days a week with Ray, and he exhausted himself staying up with her at night, reading aloud from her favourite detective fiction. Ray did not want to go into hospital and Bunny had no intention of letting this happen. Instead he explained the situation to Groves, who in February granted Bunny compassionate leave.

  ‘Life has settled into the curious routine when extreme illness governs the house’, Bunny told Constance.15 Now he, Hey and Judy took turns to sit with Ray throughout the day and to go to her at night. Bunny found it a comfort to be with her, that they could talk together, although he often broke down in tears, and wished there was more he could do to alleviate her suffering. ‘If only I could have a heart attack’, she told him, ‘and not recover.’16 But with Bunny at Hilton, Ray’s fears began to subside. Now there was a tacit understanding between them that she would not get better, but this unspoken acknowledgement brought h
er more peace. Bunny asked the local doctor to administer morphine and heroin, one for the pain, the other to raise her spirits. Thus made comfortable, Ray was able to bring the family photograph albums up to date, Bunny having hastily taken the most recent films to the chemist to be developed. As Ray declined he observed it was ‘like watching a sandcastle being destroyed by the tide’.17 She was perceptibly thinner and Bunny began to worry about the Easter holidays, believing it would be distressing for the boys to see her in this state, or worse still, if she were to die while they were at home. Ray too had been pondering these questions, and they agreed the boys should stay away.

  Bunny had also taken another important decision: he resigned his commission in the RAF. This was partly for political reasons as Groves had left and Bunny thought his new superior might not be as sympathetic and might recall him prematurely. Mainly Bunny wanted to leave because he could no longer stand manufacturing lies, a realisation underlined by the fact that he and Ray could now speak openly about her health. But there was another reason for his resignation. ‘That I want to be with a Jelly Cat & that the Jelly Cat wants me to resign.’18 ‘Jelly Cat’ was Bunny’s nickname for Angelica.

  Bunny felt very close to Ray, relieved that they could talk about the boys’ futures. She wished Bunny luck and happiness, saying she hoped Hilton would one day be full of children again. When Bunny mentioned William, Ray ‘cried out joyously: “William! There he is! I can see him lifting his head to look at me!” Bunny found the happiness in Ray’s voice heart-rending. He felt utterly miserable, knowing she longed to die, knowing death would bring relief to them both, but wishing she had not had ‘such damned cruel bad luck’.19

  On the evening of Easter Sunday, 24 March, Ray died. Bunny had put her beloved cat on the bed beside her. With one hand stroking the cat, and the other clasped in Bunny’s, Ray died, ‘almost imperceptibly’, ‘a fortunate & peaceful death’.20 As Bunny told Richard and William, she ‘died so gently that the nurse could not be sure when it was’.21 Afterwards, Bunny cried out “Thank God. Oh Thank God”, reflecting it was an odd response, as he did not believe in God.22 He and Ray had been married for nineteen years, the shadow of illness gradually darkening the last eleven. Bunny wrote to Duncan, pouring out his grief to his dearest friend. He said he would no longer live at Hilton, ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t bear the waste: the silly unnecessary cruelty of Ray’s death […]. Ray made this house: was often unhappy in it, but loved all the things which made it what it is. And now all the flowers are coming out: and I am turning out the jars of mincemeat she made last autumn.’23

  Among the letters of condolence was one from Morgan Forster in which he clumsily chirruped about his mother and a friend of hers, both in their eighties. Ray’s body was cremated and on 29 March Bunny went to Ham Spray, collecting the boys from Hungerford station. Frances Partridge found seventeen-year-old Richard ‘self-possessed and talkative’, but William, only fifteen, ‘sunk and hunched in tangible gloom’. Bunny, she noticed, looked exhausted.24 Afterwards, Bunny took Richard and William to The Cearne, where they spent several days with Constance. Then Bunny wrote to Vanessa to ask whether he could come to Charleston, bringing his sons. She obviously acquiesced, as he later wrote to thank her for all her kindness and hospitality. Was Bunny easing Angelica into his sons’ lives? Did he want them to taste the pleasures of Charleston, the house which for many reasons had played an important role in Bunny’s life? Given Duncan’s and Vanessa’s antipathy towards Bunny, it seems astonishing he should have imposed himself upon them. No doubt the visit was intended to demonstrate the possibility of the evolution of another family unit, one which included both Angelica and his sons.

  Returning home towards the end of April, Bunny worried that the boys would feel Ray’s absence. He involved them in sorting through her things, using the opportunity to rekindle memories of the past. They both seemed fine, but Bunny noticed that at bed-time, William returned his kiss and hug, which was unusual. Bunny had never seen Hilton more beautiful, the plum and cherry trees in full blossom. He was considering letting the house, the memories of Ray too painful for him to stay. Every now and then he suddenly remembered her, not the ‘dying despairing creature’ ‘but the woman with whom I came here to live & whom I loved most passionately’.25

  Despite his terrible sadness, Bunny recognised how fortunate he was, because unlike many bereaved, he felt he had a future. ‘Thanks to Angelica I can forget my life & the waste almost as though I were walking out of a tragic matinee into the spring sunshine.’26 He and Angelica planned to stay at Butts Intake when the boys returned to school. Bunny wrote to Vanessa, describing the place, hoping to regain her confidence. But Vanessa and Duncan were both against Angelica’s living with Bunny, were perhaps embarrassed by it, for they wanted as few people to know as possible. They also worried that Angelica would end up a skivvy to Bunny’s sons. Bunny assured Vanessa that Richard was quite capable of mending his own socks. He counselled Angelica to be gentle with her parents: ‘remember they are losing you – and losing you to someone whom everybody would think an ill suited companion, and about whom they have strong feelings of justified resentment’.27 If it seems odd that Bunny should think their resentment justified, as a parent himself, he could at least see the situation from their vantage point.

  At Butts Intake, Angelica hid when the postman called; for propriety’s sake Bunny informed Mrs Appleton, from whom he purchased milk, that Angelica was his secretary. Initially it was like a honeymoon, but even so, Bunny often experienced a numb feeling of unreality. He kept mentally going over and over his life with Ray, and if he allowed himself to feel happy, his happiness was undermined by the burden of the past, a burden made heavier by his sense of guilt. Bunny responded to emotional shock with what he described as ‘photographic sensitiveness to my physical surroundings’, and in Yorkshire he was transfixed by the hawthorn blossom, by nesting birds and everything in nature which seemed ‘rich, warm, sunlit, peaceful’.28

  Such beauty and peace contrasted markedly with what Bunny heard on his wireless. On 4 June the evacuation of Dunkirk was reported, accompanied by Churchill’s celebrated speech, ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds’. Bunny was not idle; he was abridging the Lawrence Letters for a Book Club edition. But that summer of 1940, as the weeks passed and as England lived under the shadow of expected invasion, he regretted having resigned from the Air Ministry and felt removed from the centre of things.

  While Bunny feared Constance would be in the area most likely to be bombed, his mother’s concerns were more prosaic. She asked Bunny outright what he intended to do in the school holidays: ‘You could hardly have the boys with Angelica & you at Butts, could you?’ ‘You must give them time’, she advised, adding, ‘with discretion couldn’t you get them gradually used to feeling Angelica a sort of adopted (and very delightful) sister’.29 At twenty-one, Angelica was only four years Richard’s senior, but given the nature of her relationship with Bunny, Constance’s proposal was untenable. Angelica had anyway remarked to Bunny (when he took the boys to Charleston) that she thought from the way Richard looked at them ‘he guessed or half guessed what relationship we bear to each other’.30

  Bunny and Angelica remained in Yorkshire until the end of July, when the boys broke up from school. He decided his sons’ holiday should be spent at Hilton, but ignoring his mother’s concerns, installed Angelica there. The presence of Noel Olivier and her five children helped deflect attention from Bunny and Angelica and diminished any sense that Angelica was stepping into Ray’s shoes. The arrangement worked surprisingly well, Bunny busying himself bottling plums, Angelica painting, Richard in charge of the little ones and William doing the housework.

  In contrast, Charleston remained firmly antipathetic to the couple. Bunny decided there was no point going there after one stilted afternoon with Maynard Keynes and Morgan Forster in attendance, when Bunny and Angelica had to pretend there was nothing between them, for Duncan’s sak
e. It was extraordinary that such pretence should be necessary at the heart of Bloomsbury, but even Bloomsbury baulked at the Bunny–Angelica–Duncan helix with its inter-generational tangle. The real problem was that the helix was a visible reminder of another well-kept secret: that Angelica was Duncan’s daughter. On one level this was obvious, as Angelica so closely resembled her father. But it wasn’t something openly acknowledged or discussed.

  In July the Germans began aerial attacks on airfields around London and on 24 August dropped their first bombs on central London. When Bunny’s barrel of plum wine blew a bung in the middle of the night he thought it was a bomb. More worryingly, a bomb rocked The Cearne, leaving Constance anxious. Bunny reassured her that only a direct hit could damage such a solid house, but he bought her a helmet to wear in the garden. On Saturday 7 September 1940 the Blitz began. This heavy and concentrated bombardment of London would continue for months. Bombers flew over by day and night, devastating the docks and destroying warehouses and their contents. In the Bloomsbury district, Vanessa’s and Duncan’s Fitzroy Street studio was destroyed as was Bunny’s room on Charlotte Street, which, fortunately, he had emptied only three weeks previously. In Mecklenburgh Square, Virginia’s and Leonard’s flat and Hogarth Press premises were destroyed, while in Regent’s Park, Adrian and Karin Stephen’s house lost its roof to bombs. It had been six months since he left the Air Ministry, and with invasion a real concern, Bunny felt he had been too long away from war work and from London.