The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  Later, Hilde agreed with Peter. In her autobiography she wrote that ‘it would have seemed like desertion . . . to leave the sinking ship while others, less directly concerned in the resistance to Hitler’s tyranny, were risking their necks’. But at the time, she was less prepared to put her principles before her safety, and at first she was devastated that they had missed their chance to escape. ‘I have not much faith in our “luck” left, in our personal luck, I mean, since we’ve missed the chance of going to America,’ she told Peter.

  I really had a sort of mystical belief until then in our future and felt supported simply by the fact that we are such nice and talented people, and that it would be such a waste to let us go down. Well, I’m not so sure now. I don’t believe England is going to win soon enough to let us escape, physically and psychologically.

  Hilde was still wondering about sending Christine to safety alone, perhaps accompanied by Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, who was about to cross the sea in a military convoy protected by British destroyers. Peter, writing to Hilde to describe how this would work, announced that he was 65 per cent for and 35 per cent against the idea, though there was a danger that the ship would either be bombed or would get stuck in the Azores, where it was stopping en route. He wanted Christine to be safe and he wanted Hilde back with him in London, not least because he was finding it exhausting looking after her parents without her.

  We must . . . make a determined effort to get the Spiels a house and to organise our life. I can simply not do it alone. It would be very lovely if Mummi could come back.

  But Hilde’s lack of faith in their own luck made her doubt that God would have any mercy on the boat Christine was sailing on. At the same time, succumbing to a hysteria not dissimilar to her mother’s, she announced that even if Christine was safer in Oxford than on a military convoy on the Atlantic, it would be a safety bought at the price of a lifetime of fascism.

  I know that England will be defeated and therefore I’d rather have my child drowned in the attempt to escape this than suddenly find herself in an England ruled by Mosley and Tyler Kent.

  By the end of October, they had abandoned any thought of sending Christine across the sea alone, and Hilde settled into life in Oxford. Peter was relieved that his wife and daughter were safe. Coming back from a visit to Hilde in Oxford at the end of October he told her that his return to London had convinced him that

  wherever you are – provided it is warm – you will be better off than here. This is no longer a place for women and children. Not that things have become any worse. On the contrary last night was quite harmless, we all slept soundly through everything, but two days away from it make you forget the general picture, and that general picture is nerve-racking and ghastly.

  Both Hilde and Peter were finding moments of escapism in visits to the cinema. In November Hilde saw Waterloo Bridge and sank happily into the world of Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh (‘the only person I know to look heavenly in an old beggar’s hat’). Fed up with ‘the Spiel faces’ in Wimbledon, Peter went to see a new biopic of the actress Lilian Russell. ‘It moved me to tears,’ he told Hilde, ‘although there isn’t really very much to it.’ What had moved him was

  the thing with which I had completely lost touch – you know: human voice, laughter, tears, a little music, someone talking of love – do you understand? In short, feeling, sentiment, human warmth. How one loses these things in this life of ours, in this daily bombing routine. Suddenly you come up against a note of music, a ripple of laughter, a beautiful face, a smile – and it just overwhelms you. How poor we have become through this war. The simplest, human things are suddenly a revelation, forcing tears into your eyes, for no reason at all. It is as if, after a long time, somebody says something nice and warm and personal to you – something you had completely forgotten existed.

  Hilde wrote back, assuring her ‘dearest Pumpi’ that she could understand how he felt.

  It happened to me whenever we heard music or saw a film or read something beautiful, ever since this horror started. It is incredible how little of our life is left. Very often now, in the peaceful countryside, I remember the joys of earlier days, and it seems unbelievable that I should ever have been unhappy in the midst of these wonderful things and adventures.

  Living amid the English restraint of the Carr-Saunders family, she was missing the intensity of life in Vienna. In a short story called ‘Another Planet’ written at this time she describes a true episode that occurred during her stay. Here, evacuated with her daughter to a house on the Thames a couple of miles from Oxford, the narrator is bemused by the formality of her host family. The four children, all younger than twelve, speak with the same decorous, joking expressions as the adults, with any regression into baby-speak frowned upon by their demanding parents. At first the narrator is impressed, if not enraptured, but then one Sunday lunchtime the family meal is interrupted by the arrival of a neighbour, who tells the twelve-year-old son Edmond that his dog, Benjamin, has been run over and gruesomely killed.

  All eyes turn to look at Edmond. The dog has been an object of great tenderness for him; perhaps the sole tenderness he has experienced, brought up in a family that avoids kissing or touching. Edmond, unsurprisingly, starts to cry. But he is ignored by his family. His parents gaze at him sternly and his siblings survey him awkwardly, until his mother interrupts him with a ‘Will you control yourself, Edmond’, and he pulls himself together, continuing to eat his soup. Order has resumed for everyone except the narrator, who loses her self-control and breaks down in tears.

  I cried about Benjamin, about the suppressed feelings of a strange child, and out of homesickness for a country in which one could sob unrestrainedly when a sorrow befell one. I could not repress my tears. I stood up from the table, excused myself, and went up to my tower. No one looked at me, no one uttered a word.

  In ‘Another Planet’ the narrator immediately packs her bags and leaves; her hosts expect no less. The reality was more compromising. Hilde Spiel remained with the Carr-Saunders family for a few more weeks but then at the start of December she and her daughter returned to London. She recorded on 3 December that the Blitz was now ‘only once or twice a week, but then very bad’. There were no bombs over Christmas, and the war news was now focused on north-east Africa, where the British were fighting an offensive battle against the Italians on land. ‘The Greeks are driving the Italians out of Albania,’ Virginia Woolf had reported in her diary on 8 December.

  Perhaps this is the turning point in the war. But it dribbles out in such little drops. One can’t always catch them. The war slowly enacts itself on a great scene: round our little scene.

  Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn with Christine, c. 1941

  The respite in the bombing of London gave people a chance to survey the damage, and Harold Nicolson complained on Christmas Day that the city was beginning to look very drab. ‘Paris is so young and gay that she could stand a little battering. But London is a charwoman among capitals, and when her teeth begin to fall out she looks ill indeed.’ Areas like the City of London and the East End that had been badly bombed were now too much of a mess for maps to be of much use. It was no longer clear where the normal ground level was situated amid the cliffs and slopes of rubble. Throughout London, back gardens were deteriorating into wastelands of weeds and long grass and ‘To Let’ notices were proliferating now that so many former inhabitants had fled to the countryside.

  By January 1941 the British could celebrate the growing success of their troops in Africa, but the bombing of London had begun again. There had been a series of particularly damaging raids between Christmas and New Year (141 people were killed in London on the night of 27 December alone, including fifty in a public shelter in Southwark). On 30 December James Pope-Hennessy and the society photographer and aesthete Cecil Beaton visited the City of London, still in flames from the night before, researching a book called History Under Fire. Beaton recorded clambering among ‘the still smouldering as
hes of this frightful wasteland’ as the icy winds beat around corners and they ran around the glowing mounds of rubble. ‘We could not deny,’ he admitted, ‘a certain ghoulish excitement stimulated us, and our angers and sorrows were mixed with a strange thrill at seeing such a lively destruction – for this desolation is full of vitality. The heavy walls crumble and fall in the most romantic Piranesi forms.’ For Beaton, the Blitz offered a ready-made aesthetic experience which could transcend the human suffering it caused. This was harder for Hilde Spiel, who could never forget the political reality of the war or the human costs of the dropping bombs. But Hilde and Peter too became more reckless. On the evening of 3 January they left Christine with Mimi and Hugo and went to the cinema to see Chaplin’s Great Dictator, although the sirens were already wailing when they set out. Returning to Wimbledon, they had to run up the hill to their flat because there was an air battle playing out around them.

  Still missing home, Spiel began to write a new novel called The Fruits of Prosperity, set in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. This opens with a panoramic sweep of Vienna in 1873, when the Kaiser is planning the future, confident that though the century is old, he himself is young. The focus then shifts to the novel’s hero, Milan Todor, a young Croat who is journeying to Vienna to seek his fortune, leaving behind an idyllic countryside home. Observing Vienna through the eyes of a stranger, Spiel was able to indulge in a lyrical survey of her home town. Milan is at once overwhelmed and bewitched by the colours, smells and sounds of the city; it feels like drinking from a wonderful sea. Leaning against a wall, he briefly remembers home – the scent of early apples, wafted by the breeze to the floor, the husky laugh of the milkmaid in the dim barn – only to dive, overwhelmed, into the new jungle of the town, dazzled by the sunlit glass, sparkling metal and shining walls.

  Like Bowen, writing about Bowen’s Court while living in Regent’s Park, Spiel found it reassuring to write about the lost age and world of her ancestors while the bombs fell around her in wartime Wimbledon. It was a strange book to write in English; Spiel herself felt it to be ‘an impertinence’. In fact it did not find a publisher until she had translated it into German forty years later. But in the meantime it enabled her to bring together her new language with the culture in which she had grown up. And she unified the two worlds still more by including a section where Milan goes to London on a business trip. Expecting English colour and charm, he is hit by the smell of Virginia tobacco, coal and fumes, and is followed into the hall of his Russell Square hotel by a December fog. While in London he enters polite society and is bemused by the customs and titles, thinking that an acquaintance’s first name is ‘Mylord’.

  For Hilde Spiel, despite the excitement of the new book, the year did not begin well. They were bankrupt and had to borrow money again. Hugo was searching desperately for work and he and Mimi were very depressed. Meanwhile the raids continued with increasing violence into January, and were rendered particularly unpleasant by a period of freezing weather. Visiting London from Sussex on 13 January, Virginia Woolf walked along the river, lamenting ‘the desolate ruins of my old squares; gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, like a builder’s yard . . . all that completeness ravished and demolished’. The firemen in particular found the cold gruelling, struggling to unblock the turntables of their engines, which were immobilised by ice, and to climb up icy ladders wearing damp uniforms frozen stiff in the cold. On 24 January the ‘air correspondent’ of the Spectator announced that a new phase of the air war was about to begin, which would be completely different from what had gone before. For the past four months the German Air Force had been carefully husbanding its strength, which had been shattered in the autumn. Only two of the six Air Fleets of the Luftwaffe had been in constant action against Britain throughout the winter. The rest had been kept in the background.

  Now with the approaching return of good weather we must expect more intensive operations. We are better prepared to face them than we have ever been, as well as to carry the war on into Germany. Air operations are likely to overshadow all else this spring.

  The correspondent’s guesses about German policy were accurate. Hitler issued a directive on 6 February stating that immediate efforts would be made

  to intensify the effect of air and sea war, not only to inflict the heaviest possible losses on England, but also to give the impression that an invasion of Britain is planned this year.

  In fact, though, there were fewer raids in February than in previous months because the German bombers were deterred by the cloudy and foggy weather. Just as the raids were easing off, British morale was boosted by the news of continued successes against the Italians in North Africa. By February Britain could free up troops from Africa and offer them to help Greece resist the German-Italian assault on the Balkans, hoping to persuade Yugoslavia and Turkey to join in opposing the Axis powers. On 9 February Churchill triumphantly informed the nation that British affairs had prospered ‘far better than most of us would have ventured to hope’. The success against Italy in the western desert was cause for ‘strong comfort and even rejoicing’. He was grateful to the public in London and other big cities for standing firm in battle despite their lack of military scarlet coats and assured them that ‘in the end, their victory will be greater than far-famed Waterloo’, promising that the attacks would shorten as the days lengthened. Two days later Harold Nicolson announced in his diary that it was universally believed that ‘unless Germany can knock us out within the next three months she has lost the war’.

  However, morale began to decline in March when the heavy raids on Britain were resumed. London was once again a prime target. On 8 March a major London raid resulted in damage to Buckingham Palace and the demolition of the glamorous underground Café de Paris, previously advertised as the safest restaurant in town, where thirty-four people were killed and eighty injured. The destruction was compounded by another major attack the following night, with bombing in twenty-two London boroughs. The situation was becoming increasingly bleak. On 20 March Spiel recorded in her diary that they had experienced ‘the worst attack so far’ the previous night. This had involved the largest number of incendiary bombs (122,292) to be used in any attack on Britain.

  By the end of March, 33,118 civilians had been killed in air raids. However, between 20 March and the middle of April there was a brief lull in the London bombing as attacks became concentrated on the north of England, with major raids in Hull, Bristol, Coventry and Birmingham in particular. The London diarist Anthony Heap expressed wry gratitude to the Germans for spreading the Blitz ‘fairly over the country’ and giving the provinces their due share alongside London. ‘The effect is that we now have time to digest our weekly dose before being served up for with another.’

  Spiel made the most of the respite to enjoy some pleasant distractions from the war. She went to the theatre to see Joyce Grenfell and Peter Ustinov in comic mode on 5 April. Then on 16 April she had tea with her close friend Henrietta Leslie at Buszards tearoom on Oxford Street. This was a bastion of civilised English life. In the windows decorated cakes and buns were piled high; inside guests sat on cushioned chairs and ate sandwiches and scones off tiered cake stands. Twenty-five years earlier, Virginia Woolf had been taken to Buszards by Leonard as a birthday treat during the First World War; as early as the nineteenth century a guide to London had enthused about this ‘emporium of cakes’, describing Buszards as a favourite spot for ladies during the season. Henrietta Leslie herself, a middle-aged Englishwoman who combined feistiness and warmth, fitted in perfectly. Spiel had met Leslie through PEN, and found now that it was as if she was sitting with ‘a piece of good old England, the pre-last war England with its Labour Movement, Fabians and suffragettes. She is a good and kind person and likes us nearly as much as we like her.’

  London during the 16 April raid

  But Spiel’s peaceful tea preceded an especially unpalatable dose of bombing. Graham Greene would always look back on 16 April 1941 as his most dr
amatic night as an ARP warden. The raid, which came simply to be known as ‘the Wednesday’, began at nine in the evening and lasted seven hours. Bloomsbury, Oxford Street, Chelsea and Lambeth were all badly hit, and in a single night there were 2,250 fires, 100,000 homes destroyed and 1,180 people killed. This was destruction on an unprecedented and shocking scale, though soon it would be overshadowed by the level of devastation the British inflicted on Germany. Greene wrote in his diary that it was the worst raid central London had ever experienced, though of course for him there was an anarchic exhilaration to be gained from the destruction which was not there for Spiel. When the sirens started at nine o’clock, Greene was drinking in the Horseshoe pub with Dorothy Glover. They left hurriedly, hoping to find a restaurant still open for dinner. But all the usual places were either full or closed. They finally managed to get served at Czardas in Dean Street, where they sat apprehensively in front of the plate-glass windows. By ten o’clock it was obvious that this was ‘the real blitz’. The restaurant was shaken by bomb bursts. Walking back to Dorothy’s flat in Gower Mews, Graham wished that he had his steel helmet. Dorothy was on duty first and Graham went with her to fire-watch on the roof of a garage, where they saw ‘the flares come slowly floating down, dribbling their flames: they drift like great yellow peonies’.