by Lara Feigel
As the firemen set to work to put out the fire at the Houses of Parliament, more bombs continued to fall. Three more HEs landed on the building before one in the morning, and a cluster of incendiaries was then dropped at 1.53 a.m., damaging the gas mains. The firemen did not leave the scene when the bombers reappeared and so they were in serious danger of being hit by the explosion. Once you were the direct target of a bomb you had time to duck but not to get out of the way altogether as it landed. According to the literary ARP warden Barbara Nixon, HE bombs did not so much fall as rush at enormous velocity to the ground, issuing a tearing sound and a whistle as they descended. These bombs consisted of a high explosive mixture contained in a steel case, fitted with a fuse and exploder. They varied from 100 to 2,000 pounds in weight, although most were under 500 pounds. A 1940 air-raid manual described their destructive effects as being twofold. There were the effects of the blast, which was the air pressure created by the explosion, and those of the fragmentation, which was the breaking up of the steel case of the bomb into jagged pieces or splinters. These splinters were about an inch wide and were projected in large numbers in every direction at twice the speed of a rifle bullet.
Yorke and his crew tackled fires by attaching the trailer pump to a street hydrant outside and hauling a rope up the stairs to connect the pump to the fire. If a strong jet of water could be concentrated on the seat of the fire, then the conflagration as a whole could be brought under control, but it was often hard to access the seat of the fire in time to stop it spreading. Yorke always had difficulty hearing over the noise created both by the fire itself and by the pumps, and also found it arduous to breathe. The smoke came in hot waves which made his eyes run and his throat tickle, bringing on a painful cough. He found that the thick, cold smoke of a continuing fire was worse than the hot smoke of a recent explosion:
This gripped by the throat. Until you could break a few windows you were throttled, but if you had a head cold it was miraculously cured. You lost so much mucus by the eyes and nose.
For Yorke, the fighting of fires was at once a practical, communal task and an intensely personal, dreamlike experience. In his short story ‘Mr Jonas’ he describes all his fellow firemen withdrawing into themselves when faced with a fire, as though each ‘had come upon a place foreign to him but which he was aware he had to visit’. The fire became an imaginative landscape which Yorke inhabited as ‘something between living and dying’, caught between hope and fear, ‘betwixt coma and the giving up of living’. In this state he could find the fire itself abstractly beautiful, retreating into a visual experience which seemed to have nothing to do with the actual immediate danger. When faced with a fire in Caught, Richard initially sits still before the immensity. The flame is ‘a roaring red gold’, pulsing rose-coloured at the outside edge; ‘the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness’ is ‘for a space a trembling green’. The sheds burning at the docks become
a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.
But caught up in the solitary, imaginative experience of fire, Yorke was then suddenly awakened into the actuality of danger. Yelling and receiving instructions, he experienced the scene once more as real.
See notes on Chapter 2
3
1 a.m.: Rescue
As the fires across London were gradually brought under control, rescue workers and ambulance drivers could attend to the people trapped underneath the debris. Now that the spectacular lighting effects were starting to fade, the human costs of the bombing were becoming more apparent. At one in the morning, Rose Macaulay was dispatched to an incident in Camden Town, where the inhabitants of two fallen houses were buried under ruins. The night of 26 September 1940 was one of Macaulay’s most active on duty as an ambulance driver, and she recounted it three times: immediately afterwards, in a letter to her sister Jean, and two weeks later in an article in Time and Tide and in a letter to Virginia Woolf.
The incident was not far from the ambulance station but it was still a hazardous drive. With her headlights dimmed, Macaulay found it difficult to avoid hitting patches of rubble in the street. Describing the Blitz in her 1942 Life Among the English, she recalled the darkness of these nights, when ‘cars crashed all night into street refugees, pedestrians, and each other’ and dust from pulverised buildings settled on the windscreens.
Macaulay had always been a reckless driver. Indeed, she signed up with the ambulance service in March 1939 partly to put her courageous motoring skills to good use. In a 1935 catalogue of Personal Pleasures, Macaulay included three separate entries on the joys of driving. The first, headed ‘Driving a Car’, opens by lyrically extolling speed and the open road:
To propel a car through space, to devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes . . . here is a joy that Phaethon, that bad driver, never knew.
Another entry, more ambitiously headed ‘Fastest on Earth’, records her joy on returning to her parked car to find a leaflet on the windscreen advertising ‘Fastest on earth’. Seeing this as a personal accolade, she is tempted to keep it there as testimony to her car’s prowess. As she rolls through the streets,
the other cars, yes, and even omnibuses, may yield to me and my Morris pride of place in the Hyde Park Corner scuffle, at the Marble Arch roundabout, and dashing up Baker Street.
Driving an ambulance enabled Macaulay to fulfil her ambition to take pride of place on the road. It also gave her the chance to get her hands on the clanging bells that she admired in the fire engines that she also included in Personal Pleasures.
But since she first signed up to drive an ambulance, Rose Macaulay’s enthusiasm for speeding had been chastened. The current ill-health of her lover, Gerald O’Donovan, began in June 1939, when Rose and Gerald had a car accident on a motoring holiday in Wales. Swerving to the wrong side of the road as she approached a corner, Rose ran into an oncoming car. Gerald suffered serious head injuries, which were followed by a stroke. For several weeks his chances of life were uncertain. Devastated, Rose informed Jean that ‘if he dies, you won’t be seeing me for some time’.
In fact, Gerald did not die until 1942, but Macaulay never overcame her guilt at hastening his demise. The climax of her final published novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956) is a reenactment of her own accident. The first-person heroine Laurie kills her lover Vere by driving recklessly. She rushes self-righteously through a green light, knowing that a bus is charging across its own red light. The accident is not completely her fault, but she apportions the blame unequivocally:
I knew about the surge of rage that had sent me off, the second the lights were with me, to stop the path of that rushing monster . . . I had plenty of time to think about it; no doubt my whole life.
Unlike Gerald O’Donovan, Vere dies instantaneously after the crash. By fast-forwarding the years between crash and death, Macaulay made clear the pattern of cause and effect she perceived as operating between these two events.
The imagined guilt of The Towers of Trebizond did have its basis in an experienced reality. For the first few months after the accident, it seemed that the crash would hasten Gerald’s death more immediately than it in fact did. Rose began to mourn with all the intensity of a grieving widow, and to blame herself, not just for the accident, but for the imperfections in his life. In Trebizond Laurie immediately condemns herself for coming between Vere and his wife for ten years, observing that ‘he had given me his love, mental and physical, and I had taken it; to that extent, I was a thief’. Rose herself had taken Gerald’s love, mental and physical, for twenty years. Her sense of his impending death, coinciding with the increasing certainty of war, left her desolate. Once war began, it was hard to regain immediate confidence behind the wheel. Driving through London in her ambulance, she r
elished the empty roads and the speed legitimised by her siren. But she could no longer see herself as invincible.
Arriving in Camden Town, Macaulay found the incident post which the warden had marked with the customary two blue lamps placed on top of each other. She was confronted by the remains of two houses, now reduced to an enormous pile of ruins. Immediately, she was struck by the odour of gas, seeping through the pits and craters in the rubble, and by the unmistakable smell of the explosion itself. According to John Strachey the raw, brutal stench of a bombing incident was not so much a smell as ‘an acute irritation of the nasal passages from the powdered rubble of dissolved houses’. But on top of this there was the acrid overtone left by the HE bomb itself, as well as the ‘mean little stink’ of domestic gas. For Strachey, ‘the whole of the smell was greater than the sum of its parts. It was the smell of violent death itself. It was as if death was a toad that had come and squatted down at the bottom of the bomb craters of London.’
Rescue party at work, autumn 1940
When Macaulay joined the workers at this particular incident, a rescue party was hacking away, trying to free the people trapped inside. Everyone was coughing, and people cried out from under the ruins, calling for help. The street was flooded with water where a main had burst. ‘Dust,’ Macaulay wrote in the Time and Tide report, ‘liquefies into slimy mud.’ Meanwhile the bombing went on noisily around her.
Jerry zooms and drones about the sky, still pitching them down with long whistling whooshs and thundering crashes, while the guns bark like great dogs at his heels. The moonless sky, lanced with long, sliding, crossing shafts, is a-flare with golden oranges that pitch and burst and are lost among the stars.
There was nothing Macaulay could do except to wait for the rescue workers to complete the excavation, hoping all the while that no new bomb would fall on the site. The men were busy sawing, hacking, drilling and heaving. She stood by, encouraging the people inside, assuring them that they would be out soon, although she had no idea if this was true or not. Here was her own burying phobia played out, and she was glad to be on her side of the rubble. The cry of ‘My baby. Oh, my poor baby. Oh, my baby. Get us out!’ was heard from underneath the ruins, and Macaulay passed milk to the baby and water to the mother. ‘All right, my dear. We’ll be with you in ten minutes now,’ the rescue workers called out at regular intervals throughout the night as they worked on, carefully dislodging one bit of rubble from another. But it was clear to Macaulay how much they still had to shift before they would reach the baby, who might well not make it through the night. The atmosphere remained convivial, despite the danger. Macaulay was impressed by the rescue workers who were, she reported to her sister the next day, ‘very nice and matey. I like their way of calling every one (including the ambulance women) “mate”.’
The planes continued to drone over their heads. There was a crash as a bomb landed, a few streets away, which made Macaulay and the rescue workers duck their heads involuntarily. The air glowed with new flames. The next bomb could easily wipe them out. One of the workers swore up at the planes and then, alerted by his friend as to the presence of a lady, apologised to Macaulay. ‘Sorry Miss, excuse my language.’ She assured him that she felt the same way herself. Eventually, the first human form emerged from the ruins. It was a seventy-four-year-old woman, ‘gay and loquacious’. She was followed, half an hour later, by her married daughter, who had a grey, smeared, bruised face and vomited into the surrounding dust. ‘Oh my back, my legs, my head. Oh, dear God, my children.’ The woman was reluctant to leave her children and drive away in Macaulay’s ambulance. Macaulay promised her that they would be out soon as well. In fact, they turned out to be dead, their bodies crushed and maimed by the rubble. Two boys of eleven and twelve, two babies of three and one. ‘If only,’ the woman moaned, ‘they didn’t suffer much . . .’
London was free of enemy aircraft by 4 a.m. but fifteen bomber planes returned an hour later, flying in from Dungeness. Then as dawn approached, the final bombers departed. Now the rescue party left, to be replaced by the next crew. ‘Only,’ Macaulay observed, ‘inside the ruins the personnel remains the same.’ It would be ten the next morning before the mother and baby were at last freed from the debris, though thankfully the baby was still alive. Now Macaulay stood on the pavement with a rescue worker, who was drinking a cup of cocoa provided by the mobile canteen. ‘It’s like this every night now,’ he observed. ‘This and fires. How long will people stick it? Where’ll it all end?’
Macaulay helped her patients onto stretchers. The official guidelines instructed ambulance workers to lie the patient on top of a blanket folded sideways to avoid direct contact with the canvas or metal bed portion. ‘This adds to his comfort and keeps him warm, thus reducing shock.’ She followed this advice and then joined her colleague in lifting the stretchers into the ambulance, relieved to have agency again. The hardest part of the night was always the passive waiting, when she was unable to help the rescue workers or to determine the outcome of their efforts. She cleared the dust off the windscreen and drove off, while an ARP warden shone a torch on her wheels to make sure that she did not puncture them on the rubble. Ambulance drivers were supposed to keep to sixteen miles an hour, but most of them ignored the speed limit. Macaulay tended to become more tentative once she had patients in her charge. In The Towers of Trebizond she would have no qualms in labelling herself a murderer. She did not want other lives on her conscience as well as O’Donovan’s.
A London ambulance driver with patients, autumn 1940
She deposited her patients at the hospital, where ambulances pulled up at the stretcher entrance. Macaulay was never an enthusiastic hospital visitor. She had experienced her share of hospitals in the First World War, when she signed on as a VAD nurse, despite her extreme squeamishness. According to Jean, this was a foolish choice given that Rose ‘tended to vomit or faint at the sight of blood or the mere mention of horrors’. Macaulay endowed Imogen, one of the heroines of her 1923 novel, Told by an Idiot, with her own nursing experience, describing her as ‘an infinitely incapable V.A.D.’ who ‘did everything with remarkable incompetence, and fainted or was sick when her senses and nerves were more displeased than usual by what they encountered, which was often’. She recorded her own revulsion during the First World War through the character of Alix in her 1916 novel Non-Combatants and Others. Here Alix is suddenly and violently sick after she hears her shellshocked cousin describe the leg of a friend which he pulled out of the trench, ‘thinking it led on to the entire friend, finding it didn’t’. Her cousin Dorothy, like Jean an efficient and successful nurse, retorts impatiently: ‘You’ll never be any use if you don’t forget yourself, Alix. You couldn’t possibly nurse if you were always giving in to your own nerves.’
By the time of the Second World War, Macaulay had overcome her squeamishness enough to deal with her patients. Like nurses, ambulance drivers had to contend with nauseating gore. A Watford-based volunteer later recalled that the duties of an ambulance driver included tying together broken legs at the knees and ankles, and covering exposed intestines with her tin hat to keep infection out and the guts in. But Macaulay was still happier on this side of the entrance to the hospital; more at home in a van than a ward.
Now, having relinquished her patients, she returned to the ambulance station where, after raids, male and female drivers took their turns in their respective decontamination rooms, brushing off the dust that ended up coating their entire bodies, even getting under their tin hats and into their hair. She then went home to bed, relieved to find that her own flat remained intact. Macaulay knew that she was lucky to have survived the night. In the last three weeks of bombing, eight ambulance drivers had been killed and twenty-seven ambulances or adapted cars had been destroyed. And she was always less resilient than the rescue workers. ‘It is all in the night’s work to them,’ she observed to Jean, and ‘perhaps it will be to me sometime, but I am still an amateur at it and it rather gets one down. One wonders
all the time how many people are at the moment alive under some ruin, and how much they are suffering in body and mind.’
Two weeks later, Macaulay published her account of her night in Camden Town in Time and Tide. Here, she did not minimise the misery she had witnessed. The government had instructed newspapers to maintain as optimistic as possible a stance towards the bombing, preventing them from including pictures of corpses or severely wounded bodies. But Macaulay refused to sanitise war. Her report contains moments of cheerfulness – she recounts the rescue worker’s embarrassment that he has sworn at the Germans in front of a lady – but these serve to emphasise the bleakness of the overall situation. She ends the article by juxtaposing the rescue worker complaining that ‘It’s like this every night now’ with the ‘bland voice’ on the radio the next day. ‘There were a few casualties,’ the radio states dismissively, ‘but little material damage appears to have been done.’