by Lara Feigel
But for her part, Elizabeth exonerated herself for her lack of restraint and wove Charles into her own image of unchanging love. ‘Outside us neither of us when we are together ever seems to look,’ Stella claims to Robert in The Heat of the Day. ‘How much of the “you” or the “me” is, even, outside of the “us”?’ It is too late to ponder the merits of retaining or reinstating the boundaries between them when their consciousnesses have already merged. And that merging is itself inextricable from the war which forms the background of their love. They are ‘the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day’. War itself effects ‘a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that’; and ‘what else’, the narrator asks, ‘is love?’
See notes on Chapter 13
14
‘A collective intoxication of happiness’
January–June 1945
By January 1945 the German army was largely confined within the boundaries of Germany itself, although there was still some fighting in Hungary, Poland, northern Holland, Scandinavia and northern Italy. It was clear that the war would be over within a few months. ‘Let us be of good cheer,’ Churchill told the Commons on 18 January; ‘Military victory may be distant, it will certainly be costly, but it is no longer in doubt.’ On 4 February, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea to decide on the future of post-war Europe. Between them they divided Germany into four zones (France was to have one as well), decided on questions of German reparation and reconstruction, and agreed to cooperate in the planned United Nations organisation. Around them, the war continued, with the Allies doing everything in their power to force the unconditional surrender of Germany. On 13 February Britain and America began three nights of brutal bombing in the German city of Dresden; by 15 February, the resulting firestorm had destroyed fifteen square miles of the city centre. ‘I feel the war may end any week, do you?’ Rose Macaulay wrote to her friend David Ley on 14 February. ‘I mean, the European part of it. There will be horrible celebrations and exultations, which I shan’t like. But what a relief, all the same.’
However, the bombing of London continued into March, and according to William Sansom a new neurosis was developing. People were anxious about being killed by the last bullet. On Sunday 20 March London was hit by its last V-2, which landed just inside Hyde Park by Marble Arch. Lying in bed, late in the morning, Graham Greene heard ‘a huge crash, followed by a terrific rumble and the sound of glass going’, and went to Hyde Park to survey the damage. A week later, the V-2 attacks stopped altogether. The final rocket explosion was heard on 27 March and the last flying-bomb arrived the next morning. The Allies had overrun the launching sites in Holland. ‘It really looks at last as though the war might be over soon,’ Greene wrote to his mother. ‘One feels one won’t have much energy for peace.’
In Europe, the last stray territories were falling to the Allies. Warsaw was conquered by the Russians on 17 January and Budapest in March. On the western front, Britain and America cleared the west bank of the Rhine, capturing Cologne. The British and Americans began simultaneous offensives from the north and south of the Rhine, encircling the remaining 325,000 German troops defending the Ruhr at the start of April. Then amid the triumphant accounts of victories came news of a sadder kind. On 12 April Roosevelt died, aged 63. Churchill now reported that Roosevelt had already been visibly weakening at Yalta:
His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner, had not deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a faraway look in his eyes.
However, the critical state of the President’s health was not known to the general public and his death came as a shock. ‘Early this morning Peter woke me to tell me that Roosevelt had died last night,’ Hilde Spiel wrote in her diary. ‘Dreadful shock.’ She found that everything seemed suddenly overshadowed by Roosevelt’s death.
Vienna is freed, war closing to its end, everything looks well, Peter works a lot and earns a lot of money making a good career as well, and there I sit quite disheartened and disconsolate over Roosevelt. He was the embodiment of integrity and human decency.
Henry Yorke spent the spring of 1945 worrying about the welfare of Mary Keene. He would never quite acknowledge responsibility for her daughter Alice, but he did now join Matthew Smith in trying to find somewhere for Mary to live. While they addressed this question, Mary took Alice to stay with Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. She was pleased to escape both the bombs and Bunny Keene, whom she was now in the process of divorcing.
Henry missed Mary in her absence and was jealous of Dylan Thomas. ‘Darling, darling, I’m so very glad the journey went off all right,’ he wrote after her departure in February. ‘Everything here is horrible. Fog today too.’ The previous day a bomb had gone off above the Yorkes’ house in Trevor Place. His letter ended plaintively:
I can’t sleep.
My new book is no good.
So altogether I’d better stop.
I miss you terribly.
Love from Henry
Mary began by enjoying her stay in Wales. She was missing Henry and, perhaps most of all now, Matthew. ‘I think about you always as I used to think about Henry,’ she had written to Matthew the previous autumn. ‘Oh I adore you my darling like no one else on earth.’ But she liked being with Dylan Thomas. ‘I don’t take Dylan nearly so seriously as you do,’ she told Henry, adding provocatively that the poet had taken her ‘very much under his wing’. For his part Henry filled her in on gossip from the office, complained about the lack of pretty girls and teased her about life in Wales, asking if the innkeeper gave sufficient food to his dogs.
I fear they are ravening for poor little Alice, the little innocent can’t know what a succulent feast she would make, particularly in these years of lean dog biscuits. I have your shriek in my ears as I write this and that must be my comfort for it is all I have.
At the beginning of March, Mary’s peaceful life in Wales was shattered when a neighbour, jealous over reports of Thomas’s flirtation with his wife, entered the cottage with a gun and began to shoot at random. ‘Dearest dearest,’ Mary wrote, reporting the incident to Henry, ‘tears will be falling on this letter before I’m halfway through.’ She described how the flimsy asbestos walls were flecked with machine-gun bullets, doors had been broken in and a madman with a gun in one hand and a hand grenade in the other had generally terrorised them. ‘I feel as weak as a kitten.’ She was overcome with a sense of her own ‘alone-ness and innocence’. She wanted to come back to London but she did not want to be a burden for Henry and Matthew. ‘When in trouble I have the feelings of an institution child, my anxiety is not that I have nowhere to live but that I am a responsibility to my friends.’
Both Henry and Dig wrote back immediately to comfort her. ‘My dearest darling,’ Dig’s letter began, adding that she had missed Mary ‘dreadfully’ and hoped she would come back soon. ‘What a terrible experience you had, I was horrified! You might have been shot. I know I should have dreamt about it every night if I’d been you.’ She then recounted the gossip from London (chiefly that she had seen a lot of Matthew, who had been very nice and very amusing), before observing that Mary’s time in Wales sounded extraordinary and asking provocatively ‘would I have liked it, do you think?’ Henry’s letter was more consistently consoling. ‘My darling darling darling, what a day and what an escape,’ he began. ‘You must have had the most terrible shock, and I only hope you are beginning to get over it now.’ He assured her that he was doing all he could to find her somewhere to live. He and Matthew met almost daily and Henry did all the talking while Matthew sat there saying ‘I know I know I know’. And he promised her that she would never be in real need so long as he and Matthew were alive, adding that ‘little Alice must always be on a bed of roses’. A week later he told her rather heartlessly about a claim he was making with the insurance company for jewellery that had been stolen from Dig. The man at Cartier wa
s going to ‘prepare a “scheme” of a few “pieces” for her, which means I suppose that she will be literally brilliant with diamonds quite soon’.
Mary replied caustically that she was glad to hear about Dig’s jewellery, wondering if he could ‘slip in a bit for me’. She felt terribly separated from him. ‘I don’t dream or dare think of seeing you.’ Her news was of police interrogations (she had informed the policeman that the shooting was worse than anything she had experienced in the Blitz) and of her impending appearance in court. She was losing patience with Dylan, who now seemed to be ‘an extraordinarily abnormal person’, and was spending her days waiting for the post and longing for the city. It is clear from her letters that her expectations of Henry were becoming lower and lower in his absence, and in this respect she was realistic. Henry missed her, but he had moved on and retreated into the safety of his day-to-day life with Dig. Mary later wrote to her daughter Alice: ‘There was a hole there. He only really existed in other people. He was living off the fat of other people and once the fat had gone, he would go.’ This was a statement written in bitterness but it is not dissimilar from opinions expressed by more friendly observers. Henry had been awakened by his wartime experiences into a form of passion he had rarely experienced before. Now it was over and he had indeed gone.
But that passion had been memorialised in Loving, which had come out in March. Near the end of the month Henry told Mary that all 5,000 copies of Loving had been sold five days before publication, and that, given the paper rationing, there was no more paper to print new copies. He was generally gratified by the ensuing reviews, and especially pleased with the praise of friends. ‘Your letters about my books give me the most intense pleasure,’ he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann, who had written admiringly after being sent an advance copy, adding that ‘you are one of the very few, the two or three, I will take praise from’.
The war in Europe was now almost over. ‘Armies monotonously victorious,’ Evelyn Waugh observed cynically on 13 April. The previous evening he had been at a party at Cyril Connolly’s with Elizabeth Bowen. ‘Gloomy apprehensions of V Day. I hope to escape it.’ After encircling the Germans in the Ruhr the American army continued eastwards, crossing the Czechoslovakian border on 19 April. Meanwhile the Russians had begun a final offensive on Berlin and by 22 April the city was held from both sides. Three days later the Americans met the Russians on the Elbe, cutting the German army in half. As well as defeating the Germans, the British and Americans were anxious to contain the Russians, who had already set up Communist governments in Poland and Austria. Hilde Spiel was worried about the situation in Vienna but cared most of all about the resumption of peace. ‘The war hurries rapidly to an end,’ she announced jubilantly on 28 April. The next day the German forces in Italy surrendered unconditionally and on 30 April Hitler committed suicide. ‘Hitler reported dead!’ Spiel wrote in disbelief on 1 May.
Elizabeth Bowen heard about Hitler’s death in Hythe, where she had spent happy summers with her mother as a child. When she had arrived in Kent, the beach was covered in barbed wire and the cheerful seaside villas were deserted. Now she told Charles that the sea front was open again; miles of coils of rusty barbed wire had been snipped away and triumphantly flung back. On 2 May, the commander of German troops in Berlin surrendered to the Allies. Bowen celebrated the peace at the house of her friend Lord Berners in Faringdon in Oxfordshire, where the fountain was turned on for the first time since the war.
There was a breathless pause, then a jet of water, at first a little rusty, hesitated up into the air, wobbled, then separated into four curved feathers of water. It was so beautiful and so sublimely symbolic – with the long view, the miles of England, stretching away behind it, that I found myself weeping.
She thought a fountain was a better way to celebrate peace than the bonfires that were taking place in villages throughout England, though admittedly it was less democratic. This fountain made her think of the spectacular fountains at Versailles and the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, which soon would no longer be sealed off by war. The world seemed to be opening up once more and Elizabeth hoped that one day soon she and Charles could look at a fountain together, expanding their shared world onto the Continent.
On 8 May Britain celebrated VE Day, rejoicing at the Victory in Europe. The public had been expecting the declaration since early the previous day, when the Germans were informed by their Foreign Minister that the war was over. People waited expectantly with flags, which could be purchased without the usual obligatory ration coupons. Finally, at 7.40 p.m., the BBC interrupted a piano recital with the announcement that the next day would ‘be treated as victory in Europe Day, and will be regarded as a holiday’.
Initially, the news seemed anticlimactic. In the days leading up to the announcement, Elizabeth Bowen described to Charles Ritchie the general atmosphere of paralysis and apprehension in London, with ‘everyone wondering what they ought to do’. The declaration on the radio did not actually seem to change anything.
I switched off the wireless and said to Alan, ‘Well, the war’s over,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know,’ and we gave short gloomy satirical laughs, went into the dining-room and sat on the window sill for about an hour, quite unable to rally, he furious because he hadn’t made any arrangements about his office, and I furious because I hadn’t got any flags. The park looked as dark as a photograph and was quite empty; and I thought, well, I knew one would feel like this.
Later in the evening, the sky blazed white, and they laid aside their churlishness and walked out into the streets that Elizabeth had patrolled in total darkness for several long years of war. They found Marylebone Town Hall floodlit. To Elizabeth it looked so much like a building in heaven that she burst into tears.
Churchill addressing the VE-day crowds
Gradually, London filled with flags. By the following afternoon when Churchill and his ministers assembled on the balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall to announce the end of the war, the city was ready to celebrate. A vast crowd of people gathered at the corner of Whitehall and Parliament Square. ‘God bless you all,’ Churchill told them. ‘This is your victory! . . . In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried . . . God bless you all.’ Spontaneously, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ swelled up from below. Churchill began to conduct the chorus and was rewarded with a rendition of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Elizabeth Bowen, always a loyal fan of Churchill, joined in the celebrations, which she found impressive and beautiful. ‘On a monster scale,’ she wrote to Charles, ‘it was like an experience in love. Everything, physically – beginning and ending with the smell of sweat, so strong and so everywhere that it travelled all through this house by the open windows – was against exultation, and yet it happened.’ Walking to Westminster Abbey she found that ‘after a crise (which happened quite early on) of hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyond . . . and became entered by a rather sublime feeling’. But Elizabeth felt out of place on the streets. ‘The intelligentsia’, she reported, ‘remained in bed, drank and thought.’
Graham Greene stayed in London to celebrate VE Day with Dorothy. ‘Having watched the blitz through I thought I’d see the peace in London,’ he explained to his mother. ‘LOVE AND HAPPY PEACE TO YOU – GREEN’ he wrote in a cable to his wife. ‘Your wire quite admirable and pie-worthy,’ she replied enigmatically. Vivien took their son Francis through Oxford to see the illuminations, gazing at the floodlights, rockets and bonfires – ‘huge leaping pyres’. She had a small party, serving iced coffee and cake to friends. ‘Drawing room looked lovely and I had one window quite up and cushions on the balcony window sill.’ But she minded Graham’s absence. ‘I so missed you to go about with. Oxford is a good place for such things as the architecture looked so lovely: no street lights, just windows, and coloured lights and firelight.’
Graham and Dorothy went to St James’s Park to watch the celebrations. ‘There was
precious little to see but some floodlighting,’ he told his mother, ‘and still less to eat or drink. Everything very much more decorous than the Jubilee or Berkhamsted in 1918.’ In The End of the Affair Greene attributes his experiences to Sarah Miles and her husband Henry. ‘It was very quiet beside the floodlit water between the Horse Guards and the palace,’ Sarah records in her diary. ‘Nobody shouted or sang or got drunk. People sat on the grass in twos, holding hands. I suppose they were happy because this was peace and there were no more bombs. I said to Henry, “I don’t like the peace”.’
Sarah, wanting her lover beside her instead of her husband, wishes that she could begin again but knows that she cannot. Greene himself was accompanied by his lover. However, the love affair with Dorothy had now started to take on the same claustrophobic quality as his marriage. Writing to Vivien in 1948, lamenting his failures as a husband, Graham told his wife that since 1944 he had failed with Dorothy ‘just as completely as at Oxford’. ‘Especially during the last four years, though the strain began much earlier, I have caused her a great deal of misery.’ In The Heart of the Matter Scobie tells his mistress that it is a mistake to mix up happiness and love. Graham continued to love (and to pity) Dorothy, but she was no longer a straightforward source of happiness.
Returning to Oxford, Graham attempted to pacify Vivien by suggesting they should have a third child. Vivien had always wanted another son, who was to be called Mark, but Graham had been reluctant to have more children in wartime and was not particularly interested in spending time with the children they already had. Vivien later recalled the occasion at the end of the war when Graham suddenly turned to her and said ‘Have Mark’. ‘I felt a sort of outrage,’ she said.