In July 1940 there were fears that the east coast might be invaded, so Sylvia and Valentine moved to Winterton for a few months to be with Ruth. A few weeks later, The Hill House was requisitioned by the Army as an anti-aircraft battery, and Mrs Ackland was obliged to store most of her furniture and effects and take a small house in the village. Thirty years of clutter had to be sorted through, a task made more difficult by Ruth being in charge of it. As Sylvia wrote to Paul Nordoff:
Ruth has no more sense of order than a magpie, and goes trotting and breathing heavily from her bedroom to the potting-shed in order, say, to restore a gimlet she’s found in an old right-foot boot (‘How did it get there? I must have been hanging up a picture’) and leaving a long trail of little booklets on spiritual healing, litanies for the Mothers’ Union, nut-crackers, balls of string, all the God knows whatses which she carries around in a sheaf, and lets fall like affrighted Proserpina, on the smallest movement – and she’s always on the move.33
They vacated The Hill House in the middle of August, expecting to see Ruth back in it after a couple of years. But the house was less of an immediate loss than the landscape, for the dunes which Valentine loved were heavily mined and no one could walk on them, or get down to the sea. Hearing an explosion one day, they looked out and saw a soldier running, holding in his hands the booted end of another soldier’s blown-off leg.
Sylvia and Valentine returned to Frome Vauchurch in November, where in their absence an incendiary bomb had fallen through the spare-room roof. That winter saw the worst period of the blitz, though the immediate threat of invasion had been lifted by the defeat of the German airforce in the Battle of Britain. Mr Weston, the Maiden Newton grocer, began to tire of being harangued for incompetence by his customers and tried to impress on them the difficulty in getting certain supplies from bombed Bristol and Southampton, but, as Sylvia noted, was ‘working in the stiffest clay’. She and Valentine also felt unpopular in the village: ‘I say to Valentine that the billeting officer has probably been assured that we are dangerous fifth columnists. What more likely? We were anti-fascists long before the war. And our neighbours, receiving a strong impression that our views were uncongenial and reprehensible, will now remember their impression rather than our views. Accordingly, they will feel convinced we are, and always have been, black-shirts.’
The war had begun to get its teeth into civilian life. Purchase tax was rising steadily; like many people Sylvia and Valentine had been forced to sell their car – a Vauxhall 6 – because of the prohibitive price of petrol. They began keeping ‘table rabbits’ to counter the food shortages: a male called Joseph and a doe called Mary (later supplanted by a better breeder called Beyond Rubies); but they found it difficult to kill and eat them, and sold off those which didn’t become pets.
One of the Führer’s bombs fell that winter on the London home of Percy Buck (who had been knighted in 1936), destroying all his notes, papers and music and his entire library. It also destroyed the typescript of Psychology for Musicians, a book he had completed at the outset of the war and put aside for later publication. Undaunted by this personal disaster the resourceful Teague, then in his early seventies, set about rewriting the whole book from memory. It is unlikely that Sylvia ever heard of this feat, or the bombing of Buck’s house, until much later, if at all. She had lost touch with him, as with Charles Prentice, who, after leaving Chatto & Windus, had become involved in a debilitating and destructive liaison with his sister-in-law. During the war, Prentice went to Africa to travel, pursued by ‘his gad-fly’34 and was to spend the rest of his life abroad, a tormented and broken man.
One other ghost from her youth had been in Sylvia’s mind, though, and that was Tommy. Sylvia was writing for the New Yorker all through the war; the money was welcome (when it arrived – Sylvia suspected the government of diverting dollar cheques into armaments funds) and she had got into her stride with the form. Occasionally, she turned to autobiographical subject matter for her stories, as with her stories about Tommy, who appears under the name Billy Williams, disburdened of his neuroses and with all his charm about him. For Sylvia this editing of painful episodes ‘Out of my Happy Past’ was a healing process, and one she was to apply liberally to her memories of her mother later on.
Valentine had done some WVS work with Sylvia, driving a mobile canteen round to outlying groups of soldiers, and they also did fire-watching duty together, but new wartime labour laws soon required single women to do more than that, and Valentine, being within the age range obliged to sign on for fulltime work, began an unhappy career as clerk in the offices of the Territorial Army in Dorchester. Although she was a good typist and a meticulous worker, Valentine did not fit in there at all and wilted under the lack of privacy and quiet, the obtrusive pettiness and inefficiency of the office. ‘I’ve been too long free, that’s the truth!’ she wrote in her day-book. ‘I am assured by those who know that it will be much worse before it gets better, and in myself I feel a desperate dread because those words seem to imply that it won’t “get better” until I myself have been purged of the remembrance of what it is like to be free.’35 The only comfort for Valentine was the thought that she had pulled no strings to secure herself more congenial work, as her sister Joan, a successful career woman in London, had suggested. The office provided certain diversions: Valentine liked to watch and listen to the other clerks (and became excited by hearing one say she had just seen a beautiful ‘Bewick’ – in fact the girl had said ‘Buick’); she had plenty of time in which to write letters and read books, but for the most part it was unremittingly dull to have so little to do:
I have never known one could be so spendthrift of time! It goes by like a morning slug over a cabbage leaf … and when it’s gone one realises that it could have been like a dragon-fly on a water-lily leaf: and then, from past experience and future hopes, believes that it COULD have been – perhaps WAS, the dragon-fly. But it is gone and gone forever, and wasted and spent. […] on Dorchester station, one evening, I saw a crate – no, three crates heaped one on another – each one full of carrier-pigeons in little separate compartments. They were all quite still. I saw their bright eyes and thought how, inside every one of their narrow heads and within the minute wicker-work frame of their bones, the most violent compulsion in the world was beating and beating: how their passionate urge to fly, to go to the one place noted and marked in their desires, was throbbing inside them as they stayed there, each separate and each still as leaden birds. Children poked them and people spoke to them but they did not stir. My heart almost broke with desire to open up those boxes and see the cloud that would surge out of them and the lovely rush of their escape.36
Sylvia abhorred the effect which the office day worked on Valentine, but was powerless to change any part of it. There was little chance of Valentine moving to another job, because as an ‘unattached’ woman she could be moved anywhere in the country for factory or munitions work, and neither of them could have borne the separation. So Valentine continued six days a week at the Territorial Army while Sylvia worked two days a week at the WVS and was still able to do some writing in her spare time. In 1940 she had published a collection of stories in America, The Cat’s Cradle Book. The whimsical-sounding title and framework of the book (stories told by mother cats to their kittens) ill-prepare the reader for fifteen remarkable short satires, told in the ruthless pure narrative style of the best fairy stories. The ‘cat’s view’ of human morality was the means by which Sylvia was able to carry on her old joke of defamiliarising the familiar, reversing expectations – a favourite technique in many of her early poems and a technique she returned to, with variations, all her life. It served her well as an ironist and as a moralist. ‘I sometimes think that I am alone in recognising what a moral writer I am,’ she once wrote. ‘I don’t myself, while I am writing, but when I read myself afterwards I see my moral purpose shining out like a bad fish in a dark larder.’37
Two of the stories from The Cat’s Cradle Book appeared in the New Yorker
the same year, but apart from stories, Sylvia had begun some larger projects; one novel (which never got off the ground) about what happened to Hamlet when he was in England, and another about a community of nuns in fourteenth-century East Anglia. This story, written and rewritten slowly and with long interruptions, became her novel The Corner That Held Them and took over six years to finish.
Sylvia followed the events of the war with a keen and knowledgeable eye, but in 1941 she had – and took – the opportunity to be more than simply an armchair strategist, and began an extraordinary career as a lecturer, first for the Workers’ Educational Association, then for the Labour Party and eventually for the forces. The range of subjects she covered was quite phenomenal. To the RASC (the Royal Army Service Corps) she spoke on architecture from neolithic man to Wren, to the ‘Weymouth women’ of the Labour Party she spoke on matriarchy and the role of women from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. To a group of non-commissioned officers she gave a series of talks on the history of the United States, to another army audience she discoursed on the history of Modern Germany and Russia since 1905, subjects obviously pertinent to the war. She spoke about Pepys and Evelyn, about Lenin, about the Crash of 1929, about the Pilgrim Fathers, about the dangers of being bored in wartime; as she wrote to Harold Raymond, ‘you would never believe what a lot of subjects I can talk about […] I haven’t repeated myself yet, though we are getting wilder and wilder. Next time I discourse to them [the RASC] it will be on How Bugles Blow; and I still have theology up my sleeve.’38 Just as her father had used historical precedents to illuminate events of the Great War, Sylvia sought to clarify the issues of the Second War through the teaching of history. ‘I myself think I teach history very well’, she wrote to Elling Aanestad, ‘going on the principle that one can’t make it too much like the Chamber of Horrors and the Musée Grevin.’39 By 1943, when she was giving as many as two lectures a week, she was drawing up a scheme for a book on domestic history, encouraged by her father’s publisher, Blackie’s. The book came to nothing, but it is interesting to see how far she followed in George’s footsteps and to what extent they shared a vocation for prophecy.
In the spring of 1942, when invasion was again thought likely, Sylvia and Valentine were told in confidence that in the event of the Germans landing, their house had been selected as a machine-gun post. Subsequently, they removed their favourite possessions and books and put them into storage. The leader of the Home Guard in Maiden Newton took it upon himself to organise Ladies’ Classes in rifle-shooting and hand-grenade throwing, thinking to prepare a resistance force among the women. Sylvia and Valentine attended these classes regularly; Valentine to help with the instruction, Sylvia to learn. It was a sombre form of education.
It seemed that the longer the war went on, the more hysterical and inefficient the average village became. ‘It is becoming my belief,’ Sylvia wrote to Paul Nordoff, ‘that if our local villages were invaded, nobody would have time to notice the enemy, they would all be too busy taking sides over Mrs Tomkins and Mrs Bumkin.’ Ruth Ackland was a prime example of Mrs Tomkins:
In her ardour for service she has undertaken the charge of so many things that as far as I can reckon she will be essential in five different places at once; and as she attains terrific velocity, fells whatever stands in her path, and is permanently fitted with a screaming device like a German bomb, she will create incalculable havoc amid both defenders and attackers, besides spraining her ankle and getting very much out of breath. I often think that Mrs Ackland is the real reason why Hitler has not yet tried a landing on the East Coast. She thinks so, too.
It is very odd to look at all these poor consequential idiots and remember that war might at any moment make real mincemeat of them. Even under the shadow of death man walketh in a vain shadow.40
By January 1943, Valentine was finding the TA office beyond her powers of endurance and applied to be transferred somewhere quieter. She would have met with little success had not Sylvia manoeuvred at the Civil Defence Unit, with which the WVS shared a building, to get Valentine a job as secretary to the Controller. Valentine was relieved at the change, but felt ashamed of the method which had effected it. Sylvia on the other hand was very pleased with herself; the Civil Defence office was not as chaotic as TA, and of course being in the same building meant that she and Valentine could see each other more regularly.
On the ground floor was the National Salvage depot where clothes, bones (for soil fertiliser) and books were collected, salvage being increasingly important due to the blockade power of Germany’s submarines. Sylvia knew from her lecture circuit that there was a high demand for books among the men based at the local anti-aircraft sites and that the Army Welfare library was ridiculously limited. One soldier had resorted to reading its selection of sentimental Victorian children’s stories. Soon Sylvia and Valentine were sending a steady supply of salvage books to Army Welfare, particularly technical books, which were in high demand. The process of sorting through became quite specialised, a consignment of books in Italian, for example, being sent to an Italian Prisoners’ Camp.
The two women were admirably suited to spotting rare, valuable and interesting books among the piles of volumes condemned to be pulped. In ‘perhaps the only significant result of our war-working careers’41 they built up a stock of books for the Blitzed Libraries scheme, thirteen crates of which went to Exeter after the war, and they bought in a dozen or so rare books, valued independently, giving the proceeds to National Salvage. One rarity which turned up at the depot while Sylvia was there, a portfolio of contemporary drawings of the Indian Mutiny, was sent to the Government of India’s department of archives.
In the winter of 1942–3, the war news became ‘bloodier and bloodier’; Singapore had fallen, the Japanese were in Burma, the British had retreated to India, the Germans were holding on in the six-month battle for Stalingrad and in North Africa the victory at El Alamein had not been followed up by an overall victory. ‘The air is darkened with sins coming home to roost,’ Sylvia wrote of the situation in India and Hong Kong. Her admiration and support (she collected very small amounts locally for Soviet Aid) were still mainly with the USSR: ‘Amid our ignominious news I remember last autumn and how I knew that the defence of USSR was the defence of my deepest concerns: and I know it still: though I would like to think we would be advancing too. Instead of which that damned clever general, Rommel, has retaken Jebadiah.’42
It was a bitterly cold winter. On a morning of twenty degrees of frost Valentine went out to pickaxe artichokes from the vegetable garden, there being nothing else to cook. Paraffin was hard to get, and hard to keep, as pilfering was on the increase, and Sylvia and Valentine began to direct their Sunday leisure towards cone-gathering for fuel. They still celebrated birthdays and anniversaries with pleasure, but the gifts were necessarily less grand and numerous than before. On 14 February 1943, Valentine gave Sylvia ‘a canton enamel box, and snowdrops and daffodils. I gave her a very industrious exceedingly handmade and regrettably tubular Fair Isle scarf.’
In March, Valentine had to move to a new office on the first floor, which had the advantage of being remote and unvisited. Here she got on with what work there was and, as secretary to the Civil Defence controller, led what she considered an oddly domestic life, waking the colonel from his afternoon nap, attending to his opinions, never answering back. Compared with this, WVS was positively vibrant. Sylvia had installed a photograph of Stalin above her desk to counter Mrs Egerton’s Churchill and had developed various ways of defusing women of the Tomkins and Bumkin sort – one was by refusing to answer them until she had lit up a cigarette exaggeratedly slowly. Sylvia had a growing liking for Mrs Egerton, a genteel and unassuming woman. As the two most senior representatives of the WVS, they had to attend a wide variety of events together. One morning in March they were observers at a Civil Defence invasion exercise, which had been organised with a noisy insistence on secrecy:
We hung about after lunch, waiting for ze
ro-hour. The dive-bombers turned out to be low-flying spitfires fitted with screamers. They flew very beautifully, but the screamers seemed a mistake to me. Why advertise? It is the Silent plane which would frighten me. Guns went off: dogs barked. We drove home, visiting Charminster on the way. Java is falling. And so from hour to hour we rot and rot.43
On just another such manoeuvre a month later, the Spitfire fired to the right instead of to the left and killed a group of observing intelligence officers, including a brigadier and the local education officer, whom Valentine knew and admired.
When the WVS were asked to form part of a parade around Dorchester to mark Warship Week in March, Sylvia joined in, much to Valentine’s disapproval. The group was assembled at its starting-point when the members all succumbed to doubt as to the proper fashion in which to carry a ceremonial gas-mask. Should it be to the right or to the left? Over the shoulder or under the arm? Sylvia suggested that they should be worn like swords, ‘but unheard, for they were all undressing’. The parade set off in pouring rain, past an admiral drenched from head to foot, taking the salute from a platform in the High Street.
Perhaps Sylvia’s greatest war effort was in the field of self-control, for she showed remarkable endurance in the face of the ‘consequential idiots’ who would ordinarily have been flayed by her tongue. After one WVS-run blood-donating session, she collapsed into bed ‘singularly tired by smiling so much: sensation enforced by Miss Cl[apcott] saying “Miss Warner is so wonderful. She seems to have a smile for everyone.” ’ The novel which Sylvia was writing at the time – The Corner That Held Them – deals almost exclusively with the behaviour of an enclosed community of women and it seems likely that she used some of her observations of the predominantly female population of wartime Dorchester for her book.
As the war threw Sylvia and Valentine more and more among company not of their choosing it made them both yearn for the leisure in which to cultivate friendships in a civilised way again. One day, when Sylvia was standing in the High Street, waiting to go home after WVS, she saw ‘with unmitigated astonishment, a distinguished woman in Dorchester’. When she looked again, it was Valentine, who had stopped the car when she too caught sight of a distinguished woman and realised it was Sylvia. Later in the year they were both pleasantly surprised by the appearance in the lounge of the King’s Arms, Dorchester, of a tall thin woman of great elegance, who walked in, holding a large onion. Sylvia was in no doubt but that it was Nancy Cunard, with whom she had corresponded over the Spanish War, and introduced herself. They talked about Spain, France and the onion – a valuable possession at that date – and that same evening Miss Cunard and her companion Morris Gilbert were guests for dinner at Frome Vauchurch.
Sylvia Townsend Warner Page 23