The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  an eccentric, fire-fighting, efficient, pub-and-night-club-haunting monk, voluble, frivolous, ironic, worldly, austerely vowed to the invisible cell which he inhabited and within which a series of intricately designed, elaborately executed, poetic yet realistic war novels were being evolved.

  Henry Yorke, photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1949

  On duty, both Macaulay and Yorke wore full official uniforms. She had been issued with a peaked cap and a dark blue drill coat, which some ambulance drivers complained was too insubstantial to survive many nights of bombing. Yorke was dressed in a dark blue uniform with silver buttons and red piping. He wore rubber boots and a tin hat and carried an axe and spanner in his blue belt. Auxiliary firemen were only issued with one uniform, and by the end of a shift both Yorke and his clothes were black with soot and soaked through from the water used to put out fires. Despite the excitement of his time off, Yorke found the long shifts draining. For the past two and a half weeks he had been continually busy fighting major fires. And conditions at the fire station itself were not helped by the fact that there had been no gas at the station for several days, which meant that there were no heaters to dry clothes and no hot food. He was also exhausted. ‘Quite well but sleep the great difficulty,’ he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann a week into the raids. Sleeping on duty was very difficult, and off duty Yorke was too busy writing and socialising to catch up on rest. In March 1939 he had told his friend Mary Strickland that his pre-war routine was ‘to work myself silly and then go out . . . about once a week and get blind drunk and talk hard till 4am’. This had not changed, and his leave nights were often even later than his nights on duty.

  Yorke had joined up with the Auxiliary Fire Service in October 1938, wanting to avoid being conscripted into the army so that he could continue his ordinary London life. In 1937 London County Council had established its own air-raid precautions committee, which in March 1938 approved proposals for the recruiting and training of 28,000 auxiliary firemen for the London Fire Brigade, preparing for a war which many already believed to be imminent. Yorke was about the seven-thousandth fireman to sign up and he was subsequently very proud of his low serial number. In order to join he needed a doctor’s certificate confirming, as he put it, that he was ‘not likely to fall down dead running upstairs’ and references suggesting that he was a responsible person and was therefore unlikely to make the most of the looting opportunities provided by fire. Unlike even the police, firemen in uniform were allowed by law to enter any house, which some saw as an invitation to help themselves. Yorke spent the first eight weeks in his new profession being trained in the regular fire station. This was a course that no one failed, because the regular firemen were convinced they would be held responsible for any failures. This did not mean that they felt the need to make the course especially stringent. According to Yorke their teaching consisted chiefly of lectures in how much the regular London Fire Brigade hated the Auxiliary Fire Service. He was then deemed ready to fight fires.

  At this stage Yorke was ambivalent about the war itself, although he could see no obvious alternative. In his 1940 memoir Pack My Bag, begun in July 1939, he described himself as unwilling to fight and yet ‘likely enough to die by fighting for something which, as I am now, for the life of me I cannot understand’. But he wrote to Evelyn Waugh in October 1939 that the dangers of life as a fireman seemed preferable to ‘what seems to be the alternative, domination by Hitler and the Mitfords on top’.

  Firemen being trained before the war

  Initially, Yorke saw his decision to fight fires as a heroic one. Indeed, he later wrote that some of his fellow volunteers had joined up thinking that the AFS was a suicide squad, choosing the most dangerous job of all. As a result, he experienced the declaration of war as a personal death sentence. When he was mobilised on 1 September 1939, Yorke dressed himself in his prickly, still unfamiliar uniform, ‘alone, frightened, sickened, sure of dying’. The autobiographically-inspired hero of Yorke’s 1943 novel Caught is convinced as soon as war begins that death will follow. ‘All that was real to him then was his death in a matter of days.’ Yorke himself told Evelyn Waugh in his October 1939 letter that he could not believe he would survive, suggesting that Waugh should come to London and take a last look at the city itself as it would soon be in ruins. ‘If you did come up then we could get together again for old times sake, just once more.’

  Like Graham Greene, Yorke minded the fact that he had missed the chance to prove himself in the First World War, and, though he dreaded the prospect of imminent death, he now embraced the danger sentimentally. In Pack My Bag he describes his birth in 1905 as ‘three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both’ but not too late for the war which seemed to be coming upon him as he wrote. Hence ‘the need to put down what comes to mind before one is killed’, storing up memories as charms with which to die. ‘We who must die soon, or so it seems to me, should chase our memories back standing, when they are found, enough apart not to be near what they once meant.’

  This was a period when the public, too, saw firemen as heroes. In Caught Yorke writes that at the start of the war the Fire Service came second only to pilots in the eyes of the public. Old ladies gave auxiliary firemen money, aged gentlemen bought them drinks, street cleaners called them ‘mate’ and girls looked back yearningly as they passed by. But after pledging himself, gladiatorially, to an early and heroic death, Yorke was faced merely with the sustained inaction of the phoney war, which he found especially hard. ‘His life in the Fire Brigade sounds undendurable,’ Waugh observed in his diary after meeting Yorke for lunch in November 1939. ‘Fire fighting is a waiting game,’ Yorke wrote in a 1960 account of his time in the fire service. For forty-eight hours, he and the other firemen would wait through day and night, ready all the time to ride out with a pump to civilian fires in under sixty seconds. The focus, now, was on discipline in ordinary tasks, which the auxiliary firemen found unnecessary and demeaning. ‘We come here ready for at least death, and then we get into trouble for not going under our beds,’ Richard complains in Caught. Here Richard is distressed because the regular firemen hate him and because an old lady on a bus has announced that firemen are ‘army dodgers’. In the original typescript of the novel the narrator explains that ‘the Fire Service, now that there had been no raids, was as unpopular with the public as, in the first few days, it had been popular’.

  The Blitz brought Yorke and other auxiliary firemen the chance they needed to prove that they were heroes after all. In his 1955 novel Officers and Gentlemen Evelyn Waugh was playfully dismissive of the activities of his auxiliary firemen friends in the Blitz. The book opens with a fire in a gentlemen’s club in Piccadilly where, amid blazing flames, ‘a group of progressive novelists in fireman’s uniform’ stand on the pavement opposite and squirt a little jet of water into the morning-room. The club’s alcohol store room has been hit by the raid and the gutters outside are running with whisky and brandy, which the firemen apparently consume mid-raid. But in fact, the firemen did put themselves in more danger than Waugh, from his lofty position as a marine, suggests. Before 7 September, four-fifths of the London auxiliaries had not seen a real fire. They were now called upon to deal with conflagrations that in peacetime would have frightened regular firemen. And according to Yorke’s friend William Sansom, who was also an auxiliary fireman in Westminster, it was a particular tradition of London firemen to begin their assault on the fire from within the building rather than from the safer ground outside. Years later Yorke recollected idealistically that the firemen were always brave when together with their crew.

  However frightened, they are hardly ever cowards. Behind them they have the crew, the other men on the appliance. They are like a small pack of hounds, cowards alone they may be but when together ready to take on lions.

  Yorke himself often wanted to retreat into a shelter or lie down flat during raids, but when observed by his colleagues he waited to be hit instead. The danger and bravery were recognis
ed by the public. ‘We’re absolute heroes now to everyone,’ Richard boasts to his sister-in-law in Caught; ‘Soldiers can’t look us in the face, even.’

  Firemen at work, autumn 1940

  A hero at last, Henry Yorke was enjoying the Blitz. He liked learning to use the technical equipment of firefighting, becoming at home with pumps, hoses, ropes, ladders and coupling pipes. His 1960 account of his time in the fire service goes into enthusiastic detail about the Dual Purpose (a wagon comprising a ladder on large wheels, a built-in tank of water with a pump, and a vacuum pump to raise water from a pond), the simple pump appliance and the special ladder, made in Germany, comprising a pump and three tubular ladders telescopically folded but joined together. Yorke’s Blitz stories are filled with technical information. The fire in Caught is fought with pumps ineffectually supplied with water by remote pump operators and hoses which tear under pressure; the release in ‘A Rescue’ is achieved by means of complicated manoeuvring of firemen’s ladders. For years afterwards, Yorke would be drawn to fires he could put out, proud to show off his technical prowess. Describing a 1951 fire in his local pub he informed his readers that they could:

  judge of my delight to hear the old roar in the chimney, and to realise, as I entered the bar at midday, that I was to enjoy the most enviable moment of all to any ex-fireman, a nice little job in someone else’s chimney.

  Now that the firemen were lauded for their bravery one more, Yorke was in great demand. ‘Who are you going out with tonight, darling?’ girls asked each other as they prepared for nights out in the Blitz. ‘Is it someone you’d like to die with?’ In Yorke’s case, it usually was. And he was happy to fall into the role of the endangered hero. Indeed, part of the attraction of the war was that, now it was no longer phoney, it gave him a series of roles to play.

  Yorke seems always to have found an element of role play necessary in assuming a convincing public persona. Descriptions of him by others tend to characterise him as possessing an elusive emptiness. Acquaintances found him charming, lively and fun; as a result, he acquired new friends and mistresses with ease. But closer friends and lovers tended to experience him partly as a lack. Rosamond Lehmann’s description of Yorke as inhabiting an ‘invisible cell’ accurately evoked his ability to keep his inner life private while in company, whether with fellow firemen or with lovers. Henry had told Rosamond at the start of the war that in times such as these ‘the writer, our kind, must sink absolutely down to the bottom and remain anonymous’. In fact, this kind of behaviour was customary for him, so much so that friends and lovers tended in retrospect to wonder whether they actually knew him at all.

  The architectural historian and London gossip James Lees-Milne, who was a friend of Yorke’s in the 1930s, later described him as ‘well read, articulate, but inscrutable. Inclined to be morose.’ Although the two men saw each other frequently, Lees-Milne knew Yorke principally as an upper-class ‘Bright Young Thing’ who worked in the family business. Because Yorke had published his three novels under the pseudonym Henry Green, Lees-Milne did not at this stage even know that his friend was a writer. Indeed, the pseudonym itself was part of the role-playing. Henry Yorke did not want his social persona to be complicated by the novels, and at the same time the enigmatic writerly persona of Henry Green was another role he could assume. For his part Lees-Milne observed in his memoirs that he had never been able to fathom

  what was going on in that dark head, beneath that sallow skin, under that sleek black hair, behind that straight, stern nose, those deep-set, wild bird eyes and that strange mobile mouth which changed shape and expression according to his thoughts even when he was not speaking.

  Yorke appears to have been happiest and most alive when confident in assuming a role. In his twenties, he had enjoyed his time spent as a worker in the factory of his father’s business near Birmingham. Here he could take on the role of the toff made good, discovering ordinary life as a worker among workers. ‘The men, I loved them,’ he stated in an interview which, much to the embarrassment of his parents, he gave to the Star in 1929. ‘They are fine fellows, generous, open-hearted, and splendid pals . . . Of course, they knew who I was, but that made no difference.’ In Pack My Bag he wrote that his experiences in his father’s factory taught him how little money meant and literature counted, showing him the real satisfaction of making something with his hands. His schoolfriend the novelist Anthony Powell later recalled that Yorke was as happy during his time as a factory worker as he ever knew him to be.

  The fire station was providing Yorke once again with the chance for camaraderie with the working classes. He was nicknamed ‘the Honourable’ by the other volunteers, whom he found tended to be domestic servants and hotel staff as well as burglars who had joined up hoping to loot the bombed houses they were saving. But, secure in his role, he at least liked to convince himself that he felt at home with them. And he enjoyed listening to the other firemen talking and gossiping, taking mental notes for the novel that would become Caught. ‘The behaviour of my AFS unit gets more and more fascinating,’ he had written to Mary Strickland in July. ‘It will make a good book one day.’ He was learning a new, communal language in which getting the flames down became ‘putting the light out’, the other firemen were known as ‘cock’ and children became ‘nippers’.

  In Caught Yorke satirises Richard Roe’s sense that he can merge with the firemen around him. Richard is convinced that he has become indistinguishable from the other firemen, at least in appearance.

  In his dirt, his tiredness, the way the light hurt his eyes and he could not look, in all these he thought he recognised that he was now a labourer, he thought he had grasped the fact that, from now on, dressed like this, and that was why roadmen called him mate, he was one of the thousand million that toiled and spun.

  He announces happily that ‘It brings everyone together, there’s that much to a war.’ But in fact this kind of anonymity is never possible. The narrator makes it clear that Richard merely lets himself ‘drop into what he imagined was their manner of talking’. He goes to great lengths to ingratiate himself with the regular firemen, buying them drinks in the bar, but is never in fact accepted as one of them. Nonetheless, Yorke does portray Richard as content to be caught up in this myth.

  According to William Sansom, some integration did inevitably occur among firemen forced to spend such long periods in each other’s company. For Sansom, the effect of the long shifts was to imbue the men with semi-military discipline and to concentrate life more at the station than at home. While waiting for fires the men at most sub-stations went into the local pub together to drink draught ale.

  But the night of 26 September came at the end of a busy shift for Westminster firemen. The previous night an HE and an unexploded bomb had fallen at the junction of Denbigh Street and Belgrave Road, and firemen were called in to rescue people trapped in a vault shelter underneath the pavement, where water was dangerously pouring in from a broken mains. They were responsible for attempting to restrict the fire and for pumping water out of the flooded basements. At one stage the firefighters found dead bodies, killed by the bomb, floating in the water. That morning the officer in charge of Westminster stretcher parties had gone to inspect the unexploded bomb at just the moment that it exploded. His head was caught in the blast and he died later that day. Firefighting was turning out to be as dangerous an occupation as Yorke had feared it would be at the start of the war.

  After a day of attempting to catch up on sleep at the fire station, Yorke and his crew were now ready for the next batch of incidents. Shortly after 11 p.m. there was a series of explosions between Oxford Street and Mayfair. At 11.21 p.m. the Curzon cinema was hit, with half the stage damaged by fire, heat, smoke and water. But the most notable incident in Westminster on the night of 26 September was the bombing of Old Palace Yard, close to the Houses of Parliament, by an HE at ten minutes after midnight. This was the first time the Parliament had been directly affected by the bombing. The western frontage of the
buildings, including the main public entrance, was badly damaged and the tip of the sword on the bronze statue of Richard the Lionheart was bent forward by the blast. Inside the building, doors were broken and ceilings brought down. Some of the glass in Westminster Abbey was blown out by the force of the explosion. Although no one was killed, eleven people sustained injuries from the splintered glass and the plaster falling from the ceiling. After the wardens on the scene had reported the incident, the injured people were treated by nurses from the British Red Cross who were stationed in the building. Firemen from across the borough, including from Yorke’s sub-station, were immediately summoned to the scene.

  7 e Houses of Parliament following the 26 September raid

  By now, much of London was ablaze. In Officers and Gentlemen Evelyn Waugh recalled his visual memories of the Blitz at this time, describing the sky over London as turning a glorious ochre, as though a dozen tropical suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon.

  Everywhere the searchlights clustered and hovered, then swept apart; here and there pitchy clouds drifted and billowed; now and then a huge flash momentarily froze the serene fireside glow.

  These lighting effects made it easier for the drivers of fire engines to navigate as they drove at full speed to an incident through the blackout, although the glare of the fire was also dangerous in attracting more bombers.

  As an auxiliary fireman, Yorke travelled with a trailer pump rather than an ordinary fire engine. These had been produced in vast quantities in the lead-up to war and were light appliances, easily handled by two or three firemen, which could pump 350–500 gallons of water a minute, as opposed to the 900 gallons pumped by regular fire engines. They were towed into action by light vans which carried the hose and other equipment. On the way to the fire, Yorke sat forward on his seat, apprehensively looking out for a bomb, or a crater not marked out with lamps, or for glass that would cut the tyres. Tonight, as always, the AFS were first on the scene of the fire, supervised by the regular members of the Fire Brigade who were stationed at the auxiliary sub-stations. They only called on the regular fire brigade to come and extinguish fires if they were beyond the control of the trailer pumps.