Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  ‘Our friendship was instantaneous, secure and detached; we exchanged opinions, never confidences,’44 Sylvia wrote. Nancy Cunard was forty-seven when she met Sylvia and Valentine, and had led a colourful, joyless life. She had been notorious in the Twenties for her anti-conventionality, but personal publicity was nothing to her. Her eccentricity, elegance and breeding tended to draw attention away from what was really unusual in her – a capacity for hard work and a predilection for acting on her principles which many fellow-idealists did not share. It was this very practical side of her character which particularly appealed to Sylvia, and her seriousness in the face of a cause. She was devoted to Spain and to France, admired the Soviet Union and had many Communist friends and connections, though she herself had never joined the Party. For Sylvia and Valentine, she brought a breath of Europe with her, and they snuffed it like exiles.

  IV

  Black Out! Shut out the dusk

  The dying looks of day,

  The sunset like a husk

  Whose fruit is shrivelled away

  Shut out the breath of clay

  That clouds the window-pane,

  Murmuring, Look now well upon this light you may

  Or may not see again.

  Black Out! Shut in the glow,

  The fireside looks that dwell

  On books in peaceful row

  And children peaceable.

  Oh hide it, hide it well!

  Lest men should see your light

  And from the darkness march, and from their ranks rebel,

  And end the war tonight.45

  There was no end to the war in sight in the winter of 1943–4, although the Russians had forced the German army back as far as their own border with Poland. The British bombing raids on German cities, begun in the spring of 1943, were destructive rather than effective, but Sylvia welcomed them as a necessary evil. The day on which the first thousand bombers went over to Cologne, she wrote in her diary: ‘God knows I was almost on my knees in thankfulness for the news we had done something. But O the poor bloody army, which is assuming a female role of sheltered domesticity and retirement, broken by bouts of such frightful activity as only women are expected to undertake.’

  Early in 1944, Sylvia was expected to undertake work of ‘national importance – which means they will try to put me into a laundry’46 when the latest set of labour laws extended its reach in her direction. She was given a part-time job as secretary-dispenser to a local doctor, Dr Lander of Evershot, though this gave her less time with the WVS, where she had made herself indispensable. Sylvia resented the system of values behind the new laws, as she wrote in a letter to Nancy Cunard: ‘Being kept by a husband is of national importance enough. But to be femme sole, and self-supporting, that hands you over, no more claim to consideration than a biscuit.’47 Her resentment was greatest, as usual, in the defence of Valentine. In a letter, again to Nancy Cunard, she described Valentine’s situation at work in dramatic terms: ‘What is wrong with Valentine? It is called pyrexia, a state of private fever. What it is really is just what one might expect if you put a poet in an office for three years on end, and ask it to travel in the same train daily, and give it too much to do, and surround it with ugly faces and loud voices and hearts like linoleum.’48 Poets have been known to survive office life, and worse. Sylvia’s anger had fallen on the nearest target, but there were other reasons for Valentine’s almost suicidal depression during the spring of 1944. It was not simply that Valentine had not the leisure in which to write, but that she felt she could not write; subsequently her experiences remained oddly unrealised. For Valentine, seeing something and expressing what she saw were mutually dependent parts of a process of celebration, or more properly, assent – an important word in her vocabulary. Without that, things happened – a hare might pause on the field opposite, a kingfisher open its wings in sunlight – but the moment passed and she did not participate in it.

  In addition to this, Valentine had a number of other worries: her habitual worries about money and health, her concern that she ‘encumbered’ Sylvia in some way and that their love had never completely recovered itself since their unhappy trip to America. Valentine considered her own age to be advanced (in 1944 she was about to be thirty-seven, the age at which Sylvia had fallen in love) and bearing this in mind, it is possible that she found Sylvia’s fifty years quite alarming. In some ways Sylvia was still very young-looking: her hair was predominantly black, and the war had kept her thin. She was as hardy and healthy as ever, but she was fifty. And as a bass note to all the things that troubled Valentine was an awareness of the relative pettiness of them. She was ‘overcome and overwhelmed by shame’49 that in the midst of the war she could be overset by purely personal worries.

  In the late spring, the South Coast area was given over to preparations for the invasion of France. A ban on movements in and out of the area was imposed and non-residents had to leave. The roads were full of lorries and soldiers, the sky full of planes, and Maiden Newton full of the U.S. army. ‘In this accumulation of metal, soldiers seemed intensely fragile, objets de luxe,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘One stared at the craftsmanship of their eyelashes and fingernails, their eyelids like flower-petals.’50 Valentine had a bag packed, ready for emergency evacuation. In it was a complete change of clothes, two pairs of socks, sand-shoes, nails, screws, a composite tool, soap, some food, the means with which to make a fire, tobacco, a pipe, a money-belt including some small bits of gold, four miniatures of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, a pocket chess set, torch, paper, pencils and a small manuscript volume of Sylvia’s poems. What Sylvia packed, if anything, was never recorded, but a local widow revealed to Valentine the contents of her emergency bag: a tin of dog food, a clean handkerchief and the deeds to her house.

  Late in May, a marauding Messerschmidt was being chased towards the coast by a Spitfire and, as was the custom with bombers, jettisoned its remaining load as it fled. As it went over East Chaldon, it dropped a bomb which fell in the garden of Miss Green’s cottage, completely destroying the house. Jimmy and May Pitman got out in time to be injured rather than killed: May had heard the all-clear sound from Dorchester and drummed her family out of their beds on an instinct of danger. Nothing else in the village was damaged, though the remaining bombs fell on Chaldon Down, where the marks can still be seen today.

  Sylvia and Valentine digested the news in sombre silence. The little ‘freehold salt-box’ was inseparably associated with their falling in love, and its destruction seemed portentous as well as shocking. They did not speak about the bombing, nor did they attempt to go and see the damage, purposely avoiding the village for more than five years afterwards. To Theodore Powys the destruction of Miss Green must have seemed the perfect justification for his move inland to Mappowder in 1940. At the very beginning of the war, though, he had felt sufficiently fearless to joke about such an eventuality, saying that any German pilot who dropped a bomb on Chaldon would be dismissed for incompetence.51

  Events in the war were moving fast and on 6 June the Allies landed on the Normandy coast. By 24 August Paris had been liberated and the German army was in retreat. The Russians were pushing across Europe from the east and Sylvia rejoiced to think that her cousin Hilary Machen, then a prisoner of war in southern Germany, might almost be within earshot of the Red Army’s advance. At home, the ‘doodlebugs’, German V1 bombs, and V2S were being lavished on British towns and cities, especially London, and this renewed aggression, combined with a lifting of the residence ban, brought a flood of evacuees into the West Country. The dusty rest centre system, Sylvia’s particular responsibility at the WVS, had to adjust rapidly from being hardly needed at all to being overstretched. They were given twenty-four hours’ notice in which to clean the centres, make up beds and prepare hot meals for the first consignment from the capital, a party of fifty-four women and children.

  Rest centres were intended for housing refugees temporarily, until they could be found places with local families, but in the
event, the process of absorption simply did not take place. According to a report Sylvia made for the WVS records, the Londoners arrived ‘not knowing what they would find, and when they found it, they mistrusted it. They were geared to the terror and excitement of London, and country peace and quiet nauseated them. And they had nothing to do; and so they expected everything to be done for them. The Rest Centre workers found them incomprehensible, uncontrollable, mannerless, dirty and ungrateful.’52 Attitudes hardened quickly on both sides, and there was more antagonism than rest in most of the centres. New parties arrived, and the villages dreaded getting them, with the result that many evacuees had to stay weeks in makeshift accommodation which was all the centres could provide. Sylvia took in two women from the first lot: ‘a big melancholy woman, a little like the searching Demeter, and her eighteen-year-old daughter who has asthma, not improved by stifling in an Anderson. It is so shameful, so disgraceful, that one is expected to choose them, to pick as in a slave-market. I don’t feel as if they could ever forgive me for having chosen.’53 Valentine and Sylvia had rearranged the house for their earlier evacuees, bringing bedroom furniture downstairs to convert the dining-room and thereby retaining some privacy upstairs. Neither of them, naturally enough, relished playing hostess to strangers. Sylvia wrote to Nancy Cunard: ‘I expect it will be hell. The two previous lots, full of virtues, irreproachable, were hell. The first set made the house stink of breast of mutton, […] I’ve forgotten what was wrong with the second lot, nothing I think except that they were here.’54

  Sylvia had been relieved of one duty, and that the most congenial – her dispensing job at Dr Lander’s. This happened after Valentine’s depression, persisting all summer, bore fruit in the form of an acute stomach pain. Sylvia called Dr Lander to the house, where he pronounced her unfit to work and issued a series of weekly certificates to corroborate his diagnosis. He agreed with Sylvia’s opinion that Civil Defence was damaging Valentine’s health and that she should be moved – preferably to his dispensary, where she could work longer hours than Sylvia and act as chauffeur when necessary. After a few weeks, the Controller of Civil Defence became irritated by his secretary’s prolonged sick-leave, fired her, and Valentine took over an elaborated version of Sylvia’s former job in the late summer.

  The job suited Valentine very well. She loved the delicacy and orderliness which dispensing required and she had medicine in her blood, or at the very least, her teeth. All the same, she was slightly wary about taking it on; she was unsure whether or not Sylvia really minded being deposed (Sylvia really did not mind) and being ‘unqualified’ made her feel incapable, and she wrote to Alyse Gregory:

  Sylvia is wonderful at the job; she has some knowledge of plants and drugs and knows their latin names & she has a character that does not doubt itself: when she makes a mistake she does not doubt for a moment but that it is not a mistake, and when she discovers beyond doubt that it is one, she feels no despair. I wish I had that kind of courage but as I have not I must study to endure instead.55

  By the end of 1944 it was clear that the Allies had the upper hand in the war. The Russians were in East Prussia and the Third Army had crossed the German border to the west. By February 1945 the fate of Germany had been planned out by the Allied leaders at Yalta, British and Canadian troops had reached the Rhine and the RAF had carried out its last – and heaviest – raid, this time on Dresden. With an end to the war in sight, reports were only just coming to light of what had been going on for the past six years in the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Six days after the taking of Belsen and Buchenwald by the British army, Valentine made the following entry in her day-book:

  I was fishing. The river went along very smoothly and the fish sprang and splashed; the evening air was full of birds and about to change into being full of bats. It was exceedingly lovely, still and gentle and everywhere pale, blossoming trees, very tall and creamy in the half-light.

  There is no escape from the people dying in the Nazi concentration camps. War Reports, on the BBC, bring stories and accounts which are obviously authentic. And these dead people, these dying people, wander everywhere. Their misery, condemnation, fatal agony spreads over the whole width and length of the stream of life.

  I thought ‘I would gladly lay down my life to help clear this load and scum of suffering away –’ and instantly realised that to lay down a life is the sickness itself. […]

  When I was going to work this fine and lovely April morning I heard the garden thrush singing and I thought immediately: ‘They must have heard thrushes in Buchenwald – how they must have lusted to catch them for food.’56

  The shock of revelations from the camps subdued any spirit of celebration which Sylvia and Valentine might have expected to feel at the news, on 30 April, that Hitler had committed suicide in Berlin. It was clear that this meant, in effect, the end of the war in Europe, although V.E. Day was not proclaimed until 8 May. ‘I was sure we would all collapse, perhaps die of joy,’ Valentine wrote. ‘Instead it feels as if we had all died of fatigue and impacted rage before the joy came … Probably there’ll be photographs of drunken crowds in Piccadilly and reverent crowds in village churches – They won’t be true – they won’t be representative!’57 When peace was finally declared, Valentine wrote, ‘we both felt peculiarly tired and perhaps we were rather particularly polite to each other. I had to work, which was ordinary, but I felt odd and unreal […] And most profoundly, indistinctly gloomy.’58 Violent hostilities continued in the Pacific between the Americans and Japanese and wartime conditions at home persisted unchanged. It was hard to see what had really altered.

  Much was to alter. The atomic clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki dispersed to reveal a new world, profoundly affected by the human and material losses and the scientific advances of the war. There seemed little room for Sylvia and Valentine in it, who felt, quite rightly, that the system of values in which they had grown up and flourished was being rapidly eroded. It seemed that what the war had crystallised in the British character was its bourgeoisness; even the socialist post-war governments and the Welfare State they introduced seemed petty by comparison with the Communist dream. The war lay like a deep trench between Sylvia and Valentine and their salad days, and was unbreachable. Sylvia wrote to Paul Nordoff, early in 1946: ‘No one in wartime can quite escape the illusion that when the war ends things will snap back to where they were and that one will be the same age one was when it began, and able to go on from where one left off. But the temple of Janus has two doors, and the door for war and door for peace are equally marked in plain lettering, No Way Back. And the dead are not more irrevocably dead than the living are irrevocably alive.’59

  V

  On their first visit to London after the end of the war, Valentine and Sylvia were struck by how few elegant people were to be seen and how few hats. London was overflowing with high quality food and they ate the most extravagant meal they had had since 1939, though it lay rather heavily on their consciences, food shortages still being acute in Europe. The two women rejoiced in the sight of St Paul’s still standing, but it was a great shock to see so many familiar places ruined. Inverness Terrace was heavily damaged, later demolished, and a whole side of Mecklenburgh Square, one of Valentine’s old haunts, had been destroyed, ‘completely flattened’, Valentine wrote to Alyse Gregory, ‘smell of smoke and fire still hanging over the streets and pieces of the fixtures of the houses still littering the basements and gutters. Front doors ajar, and stately rooms beyond, with pit-holes down to the earth instead of floors, and small trees and jungles of dying loosestrife grown up almost to the front windows.’60

  Sylvia and Valentine were looking round for a possible new home because their landlady, Mrs West, had begun to talk of re-occupying Frome Vauchurch. Although they did not think it would come to an eviction, because of their rights as tenants, Sylvia and Valentine made contingency plans and got as far as inspecting a house for sale in Edinburgh, an elegant Georgian town-house with a garden slo
ping down to the water of Leith. But despite its elegance and low price, and Sylvia’s love of Scotland and longing for city life again, they decided against it and soon afterwards began negotiations with Mrs West through the Ackland family lawyer to buy Frome Vauchurch. In 1946 the deal was completed, and it was Valentine, not Sylvia, who was the purchaser, using a loan from Ruth of £2,200, repayable at 4½% interest.

  Their joint finances were fairly weak at the time. Valentine had kept on her job as dispenser to Dr Lander’s successor, Edmund Gaster, because she needed the money and Sylvia was not earning very much from the New Yorker because her time was increasingly tied up in writing her long novel about convent life. When rumours reached them that Sylvia was being considered as a possible member of the BBC’s ‘Brains Trust’ panel, ‘Sylvia was at first very grand about it but said, when I said twenty-five pounds! that she would do almost anything for that.’61 Their attitudes to money still differed widely, as a small incident over a bill shows. Valentine had notice from a magazine that they were going to pay her £15 for a short story she had submitted, an enormous stroke of luck in her eyes and a boost to her spirits. At the same time, however, a bill arrived for £31 for repairs to the second-hand car they had bought in 1945, and Valentine was immediately dismal and deflated, her earnings vanished before she had even received them. Sylvia, on the other hand, supposed Valentine would be pleased because her new £15 covered almost half the bill.